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Posted by swah 1 day ago

I wish people were more public(borretti.me)
134 points | 108 commentspage 3
ursAxZA 1 day ago|
I still love the era when everything online was text-based.
tim333 1 day ago||
I think an answer is maybe to have multiple identities on the web. Like I've got real name stuff on Facebook and Linkedin and some anonymous accounts too. You keep the real name stuff safe for work and your mum seeing.
llmslave2 1 day ago||
A lot of people are talking about the downsides and I get it - for me it's about authenticity. I think it's really lacking in today's world, and if you don't feel comfortable sharing on the internet (which is fair!) at least do it irl. We need more real human connection and people being themselves!
metalman 5 hours ago||
Public is that which happens once, in real time,and most importantly derives it's content from spontainious colaberations of humans.Speaking and acting to the moment. Everything else, the all of all, is a spin off from this.
hellouruguay 1 day ago||
Until someone evil uses all that to investigate you or do something against you...
SXX 1 day ago|
You dont even need anyone evil . Might be just dumb and misinformed by AI news slop that people of your kind are evil, dangerous, etc. Whoever you are.
zephen 1 day ago||
> I read in private, build in private, learn in private. And the problem with that is self-doubt and arbitrariness.

Certainly if you do it in public, you don't have doubt yourself. Everyone else will do it for you.

beloch 1 day ago||
"And beyond my selfish curiosity there’s also the Fedorovist ancestor simulation angle: if you die and are not cryopreserved, how else are you going to make it to the other side of the intelligence explosion? Every tweet, blog post, Git commit, journal entry, keystroke, mouse click, every one of these things is a tomographic cut of the mind that created it."

---------

Historians pour over this sort of stuff. If a historically interesting figure wrote a letter to their neighbour to complain about a noisy dog, it's been carefully preserved and obsessively analyzed. Historians want to get inside their subjects' heads and figure out what they were thinking when they did that big, important thing, and every scrap of remaining written material helps.

We live in a period that is going to be real tough on historians studying it. Over the last few decades, physical correspondence (i.e. letters, etc.) has mostly died out. A lot of people still journal, but on their computer. Will that folder of old journal entries be found by whoever inherits your house full of junk or will it be tossed? A dead-tree diary is pretty easy to recognize for what it is. A computer's contents are comparatively easy to overlook.

Most people who have lived over the last few decades have had multiple email addresses that, at first, they eagerly used for personal interactions and then, over time, more and more only for professional/commercial correspondence. At the same time, people started writing for fun and passion under anonymous pseudonyms in a variety of online forums. Some remain online and still operating. Some have been curated and remain online. Some are archived. Some are just gone. Then came social media and texting. A huge proportion of people's most intimate interactions are in texts now, but for how much longer? We seem to be on a novelty treadmill when it comes to personal interaction mediums. Yesterday's source of joy is today's chore.

Imagine that you do something really significant in a decade or so, and some historian a hundred years from now is trying to figure out why you did it. Getting access to as much of your written output as remains and correctly associating the anonymous stuff with you is going to be a tough problem. How much of what is online today will remains? How much of it will be possible to associate with you, and not a pseudonym? Even if they speak your native tongue, they'll have to learn how to interpret your slang and texting shorthand. This sounds almost impossible today, but what kind of tools might they have in a century?

My suspicion is that history is going to remain remarkably unchanged in a very specific way: For some historical figures we'll have mountains of material. Others, despite their importance, will be complete enigmas.

foxheadman 1 day ago|
> Even if they speak your native tongue, they'll have to learn how to interpret your slang and texting shorthand. This sounds almost impossible today, but what kind of tools might they have in a century?

That doesn't sound impossible. Perhaps LLMs can already do this.

neilv 1 day ago||
We're in an environment in which a handful of billionaire techbros (and aspiring ones) have simply taken most of the world's copyrighted material, and are using it to destroy the livelihoods of people who create it.

Why give them more stuff to steal for free?

(HN techbros are slow on feeling the pain of the greed and corruption, partly because we can temporarily ride the coattails of the exploiters. And partly because we don't have field-wide strong tradition of ethics and integrity, unlike some disciplines that are objecting fiercely to plagiarism and shoddy quality. But eventually HN will feel the livelihood impact, and many AI slop poems will be written about not speaking up when some earlier groups got wronged.)

Offlines 20 hours ago||
Reading is as much engagement as writing if not more.
ai_critic 1 day ago|
We have systematically dismantled by popular consensus the safety of liberalism and belief in a marketplace of ideas.

There is no advantage to being "more public" when it's all to common to get hit by marauding bands of idealists and trolls of all atripes. Nobody rewards you for having nuanced opinions on things like immigration publicly, nor trans rights, nor even something as banal as programming language choice.

We've now lived through a full pendulum cycle where public writing that was insufficiently woke was punished via internet lynch mobs and state pressure, and now we are seeing the exact same thing with insufficiently reactionary ideas invoking...internet lynch mobs and state pressure.

So, no, I don't think I will be more public, and I'll be unsurprised--if sad--when other rational actors do similarly.

There's no reason to be public, because people have made it clear that they'd rather support a system that attacks that than protects it.

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