Where Do We Draw The Line Between Pragmatism And Paranoia?

... always these commercials ...
How do these brainwash-tools know what we are interested in ...... 😁

You don't have to be interested. They know how to make you interested. 🤩
 
You don't have to be interested. They know how to make you interested. 🤩
they failed in waking up my interest ,
I actually wanted to buy only a beard trimmer & Anti-lice-shampoo .
But they may have known that I still have to buy something more to get it delivered for free right away the same day.
Their AI-engine tracked that I searched for something but don't need anything and that I`m
desperately searching for useless products,
so they sent me a link to a useless product only because the price of the product
matches what I need to get my shampoo "free" same day ...
So, O.K., I will buy all the shite just to stop my beard itching ...
everybody is lucky now: Win/Win , I cannot wait to receive my products..
I want it all and I want it NOW !
Me first , gimme gimme all the shite immediately or I'm going crazy 😂
 
I'm off browsing online stores for some tight womans underwear just to improve my online experience. Looking at ads for stuff I already have, and therefore want no more, is boooring. Better look at ads that please my eyes.
 
I'm off browsing online stores for some tight womans underwear just to improve my online experience. Looking at ads for stuff I already have, and therefore want no more, is boooring. Better look at ads that please my eyes.
to give a more sensful answer than my last :
yes, absolutely true, Crivens,the web is boring and burns us out if we use it without self-control...
e.g. I`m quite sure, you knew what I will answer in my last post ...
we hear ourselves speaking , most of the time we know what will follow, e.g. in Linux-threads here bla bla ...
I quit all social media years ago. for the price that I earn less money but to save my self control...
I`m only here for technical discussions, it`s a nice thing to help others and learn from discussions... but now I hear myself speaking to myself, that`s the moment to do this :


( for at least a time)&( what doesn`t mean I`m away from FreeBSD-programming)..


great experience in this forum with you all,
much more civilized than elsewhere & with some high quality technical discussions .., thanks .. and bye
 
the web is boring and burns us out
Since I've sold my company and have more time on my hands, I've noticed even more now how pointless and worthless most posts, articles and web sites are. In the past, I didn't have time to think about them and sometimes thought that this is how things are because I saw 50 headlines about it today but didn't read the article. I've always known reddit was a total waste of human excrement but I notice now that it doesn't even rise to that quality level. Hacker News is almost as bad. Stack Overflow is starting to circle the toilet. And the TV "news"! OMG!!

I don't watch television news but my wife lets it drone on while she eats breakfast. I sit here and drink my coffee but I can hear it in the background. All TV news is nowadays is bitch bitch bitch!! EVERY single story some "news" anchor has a story bitching about someone or some company or some product and almost all of them are not newsworthy at all! The morning shows are the worst cause they're nothing but product placement, endorsement and advertising.

Then they spend the rest of their time talking about some movie celebrity or what their fellow "news" person did over the weekend. Immediately followed by more bitching about someone or some thing!

And I used to work in that business! I now have a niece-in-law who's also a "news" producer and she's as bad at the product endorsement crap as they come!

I apologize for the language. I am one who does not curse in public or even among friends and family but it's the only word I can use to describe it all.
 
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I don't watch television news but my wife lets it drone on while she eats breakfast. I sit here and drink my coffee but I can hear it in the background. All TV news is nowadays is bitch bitch bitch!! EVERY single story some "news" anchor has a story bitching about someone or some company or some product and almost all of them are not newsworthy at all! The morning shows are the worst cause they're nothing but product placement, endorsement and advertising.

That cracks me up, I know ~exactly~ how you feel. My wife does the same thing, lets the awful TV network news drone on, drives me nuts. Sometimes I'll bark at her to put something else on, but most of the time I just tolerate it to keep the peace. The content is just unbelievable in how mindless and trivial it is. They hardly ever talk about anything truly important and when they do it's just a bit piece with no follow up. I'm old enough to see how the face of journalism has changed and it's sad.
 
Since I've sold my company and have more time on my hands, I've noticed even more now how pointless and worthless most posts, articles and web sites are. In the past, I didn't have time to think about them and sometimes thought that this is how things are because I saw 50 headlines about it today but didn't read the article. I've always known reddit was a total waste of human excrement but I notice now that it doesn't even rise to that quality level. Hacker News is almost as bad. Stack Overflow is starting to circle the toilet. And the TV "news"! OMG!!

I didn't dare to put it that way - I'm twisted between it being my own fault to not find good quality input or not achieve to trigger satisfying conversation - because otherwise the conclusion might be that half mankind has gone nuts. So what is actually happening??
I remember the Internet of the late 80s/early 90s, when I was totally blown away by the input from people who were quite above my perception - computer stuff being only a part of it; the intellectual, science, philosophical ideas were just as mind-blowing. Where has that gone, where are the people with a clue now?
They hardly ever talk about anything truly important and when they do it's just a bit piece with no follow up.

Exactly. And if in a discussion you bring something up that is controversial, and that would need further elaboration and probably some thinkling about consequences, the response is roaring silence. Response is happening on the level of "like" and "me too", and where that doesn't work, there is none.

There is a new movie about the moon landing, and a review was titled "the time when we still dared to dream". There are many things wrong with that - first of all, we now celebrate a movie about the time when we still did achieve something. That in itself is already horrifying. And then, the title of the review turns it all around, it interchanges dream (i.e. movie, storytelling, etc.) and reality.
So I commented, that I really could understand the no-moonlanding-conspriracists, because, looking at today's ongoings, nobody could believe we ever made it to the moon. Imagine what happened: people started to bitch and consider me a conspiracist.
 
I remember the Internet of the late 80s/early 90s, when I was totally blown away by the input from people who were quite above my perception - computer stuff being only a part of it; the intellectual, science, philosophical ideas were just as mind-blowing. Where has that gone, where are the people with a clue now?

I remember a similar time in the early to late 80s when running a FidoNet Bulletin Board System - the thing was, you needed a certain level of intelligence to get online then and the majority of the echomail conferences had content that reflected that. It lasted into the early Internet days, but alas, not for long.
 
I was around then too. Difference is the internet is a much bigger pond now than it was then. It's mostly noise now, but there's places you can find to spend your time where smart people are having intelligent discussions. This is one of those places. There's others out there.
 
You are not the only one in the game of implementing things deemed unnecessary.
MS, Google, Apple, Facebook, Oracle, FOSS community of devs, programmers, coders and power users implement things that some deem unnecessary, yet some others can't live without :)

"People with autism may be severely impaired in some respects but normal, or even superior, in other."
If that's the case, according to Wikipedia's AI, then all of us have some form of Autism;)
Hehe. :3 Yeah, someday, somewhere, my work will be quoted. To quote a Splash Text in Minecraft... XD Or at least that's how I think it went. :> Also, You may be right about that. I think there's a Meme on the Internet that showed a FreeBSD user as someone with Autism. :D Also, my hair is red. :) Maybe that's partly why I like FreeBSD so much. ;) I'm typing this on it now! :)
 
The trouble began much earlier. The basic truth is: we can be manipulated. (That thing with the "unconscious".) We are doing and thinking a lot of things, and we do not really know why - or we think we know why but what we think is wrong. Just look at morals and/or sexuality, and you will find lots of such matters.
There were always people who knew this, and there were always so-called schools to train and learn to know oneself. (One of the newer ones is psychoanalysis, an older one is buddhism.) But very few people pursued that issue, very few people actually bothered themself to the pursuit of "temet nosce", know thyself.

Then there was the Era of the "Aufklärung", when we declared "reason" as the proper way to view the world and started to do deliberate nature science, and did away with magical thinking, did away with unproved beliefs. And especially many computer people are strongly rooted in that kind of world-view.
The problem with this is that the whole unconscious still exists and does shape our thinking, much more than we would admit and a lot more than reason could ever do. Everybody doing some stock jobbing knows this: one tries to adhere to ratio, but actually one is much more driven by fear and greed.
So the whole idea of "reason" is in itself just an unproven belief, and in fact it does not work.
Whereas the old magical viewpoint, the religious and ritual stuff, had a strong relation to the way our unconsicous works, and could -if done properly- at least deliver some human values and ethics.

But with reason there are no real ethics at all. So if Google says, we collect data because we want to help the people choose the products they actually like, then that is a reasonable viewpoint.
You would need a somehow ethical viewpoint in order to argue why it is not good to reduce people to mere functions of consumption, where part of that function can easily be taken away and moved into the cloud.

I am not troubled about privacy. But today I got a questionnaire from PayPal, and they asked on which online shops I did buy things. Very well. But then they mentioned a couple of other online shops and asked why I didn't by at these also, and how they should improve the "shopping experience" in order to make me buy there.
And this is what troubles me: they seem to think that "shopping" is a pursuit, an engagement, an amusement, an end in itself! Hell no! I buy things when I need them, and I buy the things I need: the act of buying is a means to some other end.
So, if the commonsense now is that the means of existence is shopping, then something is very very wrong, and privacy is one of the least worrysome aspects of it.
Very true. I am into Mysticism, but I also like Technology. :) It's just so polarizing these days... You're either this or that. You can't be spiritual AND be into a Science at the same time. And yeah, all your other points were spot on. :)
 
I try to follow this phrase when someone approaches me to try and sell me something. "If I wanted it, I would be searching for it." But often you may not be aware such a product exists. So I might listen to see what he's pushing but he has to grab my interest in the first few seconds. Otherwise I have no problem just saying I'm not interested, turn and walk away in mid-sentence.
I don't know... I would give them the time of day. But maybe I just have too much time on my hands... :)
 
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