Saved

I started writing because I was jobless and needed to turn my life around. I was an over-saturated news consumer with nothing to show for it.

Desperate for a solution, I started writing online. At the time, I was nameless and stuck on the sidelines because I didn’t have the gumption to share my ideas. I experienced a cocktail of searing emotions — envy, inspiration, fear, curiosity, rage, hope, hopelessness, excitement, and self-loathing. But with each article, things got a little better. For the first time in my life, I made use of the information I consumed. The friends I made shared my obsession with ideas. As I published, I realized that everything I wrote was a magnet to attract opportunities that felt like magic in the moment, such as a $20,000 grant from Tyler Cowen’s Emergent Ventures program and a podcast interview with Neil deGrasse Tyson, arguably the world’s most famous scientist.

becoming an online writer has shown me that I can succeed by bringing out more of myself

Mixed in with seeing Disney movies, at age 10, she discovered John Cassavetes’ Minnie And Moskowitz and thought, “To see that and to say, ‘What’s this world out there and how do I fit in it?’ that to me is the most important part of filmmaking and being in films.

the police are at wits’ end. It all speaks to the desperate need for a statewide mental health system, funded with help from the feds. The problem is just too big for San Francisco to solve on its own.

I kept looking for that one thing that defined me as a creative: you know, that thing that all designers seek. I felt the pressure of needing to have an aesthetic style or skill to stand out as a creative. I wish more people talked about how we don’t have to be pigeonholed, that we can just let the idea dictate the media.

I realized AR requires a combination of disciplines if you want to go beyond “awe.” Knowing how to make 3-D models is not enough. While I used publication design tools to organize information, I didn’t realize how much wayfinding would come into play. In the end, AR requires design for real physical spaces that go beyond a screen. Rules on viewing distance and material design, among other things, became important. Moreover, we experience AR through our mobile phones or glasses—both are experientially different. Having knowledge of interface design helped me navigate that.

York points to a 1946 U.S. Supreme Court decision, Marsh v. Alabama, which held that private entities can become sufficiently large and public to require them to be subject to the same Constitutional constraints as government entities. Though York says this ruling has “not as of this writing been applied to the quasi-public spaces of the internet”

even if YouTube were treated as an extension of government due to its size and required to retain every non-criminal video uploaded to its service, it would make as much of a political statement elsewhere, if not more. In France and Germany, it — like any other company — must comply with laws that require the removal of hate speech, laws which in the U.S. would be unconstitutional

Several European countries have banned Google Analytics because it is impossible for their citizens to be protected against surveillance by American intelligence agencies.

TikTok has downplayed the seriousness of its platform by framing it as an entertainment venue. As with other platforms, disinformation on TikTok spreads and multiplies. These factors may have an effect on how people vote. But the sudden alarm over yet-unproved allegations of algorithmic meddling in TikTok to boost Chinese interests is laughable to those of us who have been at the mercy of American-created algorithms despite living elsewhere. American state actors have also taken advantage of the popularity of social networks in ways not dissimilar from political adversaries.

what York notes is how aligned platforms are with the biases of upper-class white Americans; not coincidentally, the boards and executive teams of these companies are dominated by people matching that description.

It should not be so easy to point to similarities in egregious behaviour; corruption of legal processes should not be so common. I worry that regulators in China and the U.S. will spend so much time negotiating which of them gets to treat the internet as their domain while the rest of us get steamrolled by policies that maximize their self-preferencing.

to ensure a clear set of values projected into the world. One way to achieve that is to prefer protocols over platforms.

Yes, the country’s light touch approach to regulation and generous support of its tech industry has brought the world many of its most popular products and services. But it should not be assumed that we must rely on these companies built in the context of middle- and upper-class America.

In fact, more people are technologists than ever before, insofar as a “technologist” can be defined as someone inventing, implementing or repurposing technology. In particular, the personal computer has allowed anyone to live in the unbounded wilderness of the internet as they please. Anyone can build highly specific corners of cyberspace and quickly invent digital tools, changing their own and others’ technological realities. “Technologist” is a common identity that many different people occupy, and anyone can occupy. Yet the public perceptions of a “technologist” still constitute a very narrow image.

A technologist makes reason out of the messiness of the world, leverages their understanding to envision a different reality, and builds a pathway to make their vision happen. All three of these endeavors—to try to understand the world, to imagine something different, and to build something that fulfills that vision—are deeply human.

Humans are continually distilling and organizing reality into representations and models—to varying degrees of accuracy and implicitness—that we can understand and navigate. Our intelligence involves making models of all aspects of our realities: models of the climate, models of each other’s minds, models of fluid dynamics.

We are an unprecedentedly self-augmenting species, with a fundamental drive to organize, imagine, construct and exercise our will in the world. And we can measure our technological success on the basis of how much they increase our humanity. What we need is a vision for that humanity, and to enact this vision. What do we, humans, want to become?

As a general public, we can collectively hold technologists to a higher ethical standard, as their work has important human consequences for us all. We must begin to think of them as doing deeply human work, intervening in our present realities and forging our futures. Choosing how best to model the world, impressing their will on it, and us. We must insist that they understand their role as augmenting and modifying humanity, and are responsible for the implications. Collective societal expectations are powerful; if we don’t, they won’t.

By improving home charging for urban apartment dwellers and prioritizing vehicles with smaller batteries, rather than road-trip-enabling charging stations and big batteries, we could maximize the miles we can affordably electrify. In an era of battery scarcity, we could have two 150-mile E.V.s for the battery capacity in every 300-mile E.V. Or, using the same 300-mile E.V. battery, you could have six plug-in hybrids with 50 miles of electric range for daily driving and a gasoline engine for those rarer road trips or many, many more e-bikes.

Rather than holding E.V. adoption hostage to our ability to make batteries match internal combustion in every way, government policy should focus on the cases where E.V.s have advantages that internal combustion will never match: waking up every morning with a full “tank” sufficient for daily commuting and errands.

Why costs are so high: The simplest answer is that schools have had little incentive to control costs, particularly when abundant student loans — both public and private — can make tuition rates appear more affordable than they really are.Moreover, some schools are motivated to spend on high-ticket items like new construction, because that can attract wealthier students (including from overseas) who don't request financial aid. In the end, however, those costs often get passed down to everyone.This is a systemic issue, which explains why most politicians have preferred to play along the easier margins.

There are possible solutions that have been circulating among education experts, not all of which rely on taxpayer largesse like making public college free for lower-income students.One would be to limit loans tied to education at schools that have a demonstrated history of onerous student debt burdens. In other words, if most of a school's students aren't receiving the sort of education that allows them to pay off their loans, cut it off at the source.This could include a gainful employment rule focused on career programs, which is favored by the Biden administration but languishing in Congress.Another would be to deny federal research grants to schools whose tuition rates increase at an unacceptably high level. This would be particularly impactful at large public and private universities.The federal government also could consider revoking the tax-exempt status of schools that exceed tuition inflation limits, although that likely would face court challenges.

The whole public-facing system of college admissions—in which admissions decisions are based on rigorous academic standards and financial aid is supposedly provided to those who are most academically and financially deserving—is an elaborate stage play meant to flatter privileged families and the reputations of colleges themselves. The real system, hidden behind the scenery, is much closer to the mechanics of pure capitalism, driven by an industry of for-profit consultants and relentlessly focused on the institutional bottom line.

A spokesman from Clark University, which tried to entice Ethan with a “$68,000 Robert Goddard Achievement Scholarship,” told me that the school “does not rely on an enrollment management consultant.” Instead, they said, it “occasionally” hires “outside analytical support” that does “not tell us how much aid to offer any student or group of students” but does “crunch large volumes of data in a timely manner that we then use to assess our progress toward our enrollment goals and estimate/project our total aid expenditure through that enrollment cycle.”

So, not an enrollment management consultant. Just, you know, a consultant that helps them manage enrollment.

As DiFeliciantonio wrote: “Wealthy families are more able and less willing to pay for college while the poorer families are more willing and less able.” In other words, parents of means who themselves have finished college are often sophisticated consumers of higher education and are able to drive a hard bargain, whereas lower-income, less-educated parents feel an enormous obligation to help their children move farther up the socioeconomic ladder and blindly trust that colleges have their best financial interests at heart. So colleges obey the algorithm and offer more financial aid to the Ethans than to the Ashleys, one of many problems identified in a recent Brookings Institution report.

Ashley submitted financial aid forms with information about her family’s modest income because everyone and everything about the process told her college aid is based on how much money you need, or deserve. She had no idea that information could be used against her. In May, New York University offered her admission if she would agree to delay enrollment until spring 2023—when, maybe not coincidentally, her good-but-not-stellar academic record would not count in the rankings data NYU submits to U.S. News & World Report. Their price? $79,070. Their aid offer? $0, take it or leave it, with 96 hours to respond.

as the countless individual stories that compose the nation’s $1.7 trillion student loan crisis show, many families make different choices. They are drawn in by a combination of optimism, blind faith, and familial obligation, and end up with debts they cannot repay. Colleges know this will happen.

Nobody is really judging your worthiness for financial aid. College is just another service with a price.

That laptop has a full-sized keyboard and a beautiful 13-inch display. Maybe a 14-inch display with really small bezels. A smaller display is too small for most people’s taste (and may necessitate a slightly cramped keyboard); a larger display makes for too big and heavy a device for everyperson needs. The battery lasts all day despite active use and screen brightness being set to “plenty bright”. It has no fan because fan noise is abhorrent, but needs no fan because it’s equipped with chips that run more than fast enough without an active cooling system. The machine itself is physically durable and visually attractive. It has at least two high-speed modern I/O ports and a MagSafe port for charging. It doesn’t bother with legacy I/O ports, except, perhaps, a headphone jack, because that’s the only legacy port most people really will use. It only offers SSD storage. It runs just fine with the base amount of memory, but can be configured with up to two or three times more RAM, because more RAM is always better.3 This new M2 MacBook Air is that machine.

Thermals are where people seem spooked. People are just so scarred from their experience with x86-based laptops (Apple’s or otherwise) over the last decade or so, as Intel lost the performance-per-watt plot, that they just can’t bring themselves to believe that a thin, high-performance, long-lasting, cool-running laptop with no fan (or, in Apple’s parlance, no “active cooling system”) is possible, let alone available at consumer-level prices. I’m here to reassure you: the new M2 MacBook Air is thin, high-performance, long-lasting, cool-running, and has no fan.

Basically, there are millions of people whose computing needs would be more than met by the MacBook Air but who feel like they probably need a slightly thicker laptop with a fan on the inside and the word “Pro” stamped on the outside2 because their current ostensibly pro-level laptop — which may well be a MacBook Pro from Apple with Intel inside — struggles under the load of their daily work. It runs hot, the fans scream, and the battery doesn’t last long enough. Switching to this new thinner fan-less MacBook Air from a thicker MacBook Pro that makes frequent, clearly audible, use of its fan sounds like a downgrade. But for the overwhelming majority of Intel-based MacBook Pro users, it’s not. Switching to the new M2 MacBook Air would be the biggest upgrade in their computing lives.

The aforementioned “sounds too good to be true” incredulity is, I think, why the 13-inch M2 MacBook Pro exists. It’s why the M1 version of the 13-inch MacBook Pro sold well (second only to the MacBook Air) and why the new M2 version will continue to sell well. I expect it to remain the second-best selling Mac that Apple makes and yet, technically, it’s a machine almost no one should buy. But they do buy it, and like it, because they think they need it. It’s like people who think they want a big pickup truck or SUV yet never once use them for anything more than a smaller vehicle can handle. They just want it, because it feels like what they need, even though it isn’t in a practical sense.

I’ve also seen a lot of users on Twitter asking “who is Horizon Worlds for?” And it’s a good question. I have an Oculus. Meta’s core metaverse platform, the thing that ostensively will be replacing Facebook soon as Meta’s main online portal, the central OS for the company’s VR world, is too boring for children, too complicated for old people, too time-consuming for anyone raising a family, and, though, it might eventually be good enough to function as some kind of inescapable cyberhell for white collar workers to have endless meetings inside of, at the moment it's hard to imagine a real use case for it. Except for one. I’ve come to conclusion that Meta’s metaversal aspirations are just a cold and cynical bet on a future where we just can’t go outside anymore. Meta’s big plan is to spend the next few years cobbling together something with enough baseline functionality that we can all migrate to it during the next pandemic. That’s the only explanation for the absolutely deranged amount of misplaced optimism Meta has about this stuff. This is a company who has decided they can make a lot of money off a catastrophic future by forcing us into their genital-free off-brand-Pixar panopticon and mining us for data while we Farmville ourselves to death.

Every aspect of interacting with the various institutions that monitored and managed my kids—ACS, the foster care agency, Medicaid clinics—produced new data streams. Diagnoses, whether an appointment was rescheduled, notes on the kids’ appearance and behavior, and my perceived compliance with the clinician’s directives were gathered and circulated through a series of state and municipal data warehouses. And this data was being used as input by machine learning models automating service allocation or claiming to predict the likelihood of child abuse.

The dominant narrative about child welfare is that it is a benevolent system that cares for the most vulnerable. The way data is correlated and named reflects this assumption. But this process of meaning making is highly subjective and contingent. Similar to the term “artificial intelligence,” the altruistic veneer of “child welfare system” is highly effective marketing rather than a description of a concrete set of functions with a mission gone awry.

Child welfare is actually family policing. What AFST presents as the objective determinations of a de-biased system operating above the lowly prejudices of human caseworkers are just technical translations of long-standing convictions about Black pathology. Further, the process of data extraction and analysis produce truths that justify the broader child welfare apparatus of which it is a part.

As the scholar Dorothy Roberts explains in her 2022 book Torn Apart, an astonishing 53 percent of all Black families in the United States have been investigated by family policing agencies.

The kids were contractually the property of New York State and I was just an instrument through which they could supervise their property. In fact, foster parents are the only category of parents legally obligated to open the door to a police officer or a child protective services agent without a warrant. When a foster parent “opens their home” to go through the set of legal processes to become certified to take a foster child, their entire household is subject to policing and surveillance.

Not a single one was surprised about the false allegations. What they were uniformly shocked about was that the kids hadn’t been snatched up. While what happened to us might seem shocking to middle-class readers, for family policing it is the weather. (Black theorist Christina Sharpe describes antiblackness as climate.)

Again, this is just another example of the U.S.’ harmful obsession with megamergers, consolidation, purposeless (outside of stock fluffing) deal making, and growth for growth’s sake. All of these deals make perfect sense to the executives, lawyers, and accounting magicians exploiting them for tax breaks and various financial benefits, but that doesn’t make this whole saga any less preposterously pointless.