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I'm directing my criticism specifically on the technological advancement which is devoid of communal spirit, not on all technological advancement categorically.

Crediting human achievement to technological advancement is a mistake in my opinion. Technological advancement is not inherently good or bad. Communal spirit is what determines whether technology yields positive or negative outcomes. That's the real ingredient behind everything humans have achieved throughout history.

Sadly techno-optimism has become a prevailing mindset in today's world where people and institutions don't want to take responsibility for the consequences of their actions because of belief that as-yet-unknown technological advancement will bail us out in the future, even when there's no evidence that it will even be physically possible.

But what I said is that your view is a sad one, not an incorrect one. The truth is, technological advancement may truly end up being the defining characteristic of humanity. After all, when we think about extinct species, we tend to associate them most strongly with what made them extinct. Just as we associate the dinosaurs most strongly with a meteor, maybe an outside observer will some day associate humanity most strongly with the technology that sent us out in a blaze of glory.

What a sad view of humanity to think that our one defining characteristic should be pursuit of technology rather than the ability to intelligently collaborate and thereby form communities with a shared purpose.

I can assure you that the success of human survival throughout the history of our species has had far more to do with community and resourcefulness than with technological advancement. In fact it should be clear by now technological advancement devoid of communal spirit will be the very thing that brings an untimely end to our entire species. Our technology is destroying the climate we depend on and depleting the soil that we need for growing food, to say nothing of the nuclear bombs that could wipe us out with the wrong individuals in positions of power.

If they ever go public then yes, enshittification is guaranteed. As long as they remain a privately held company, there's a chance they can hold the enshittification at bay.

Google is an enormous company which operates flatter than you'd expect for an organization of its size. It's entirely possible that someone from Google was involved in organizing this (i.e. booking the venue) without having buy-in from leadership. Once leadership became aware after being asked about it, they may have shut the whole thing down because they knew the optics would be bad.

How exactly is an individual supposed to determine which cops will be good and which will abuse their power?

Just as we can't make a general statement that all cops are definitely bad, you can't make a general statement that all cops in any particular country or town will be good.

From a basic risk management viewpoint, it doesn't make sense for anyone to accept the risk that any given cop won't abuse their position, even if we were willing to accept that very few would actually do so.

Cops have an extremely privileged status in society and the amount of damage that a bad one can do to an individual - on purpose or even by accident - is incalculable, including setting up an innocent person for capital punishment as we're seeing unfold in Missouri right now.

People just don't want to believe that China can win at capitalism because it undermines all their internal narratives around the innovation power of liberalism. I say this as someone who does not personally like China and its authoritarianism.

The fact of the matter is with a population of nearly 1.5 billion people, you're statistically guaranteed to have enormous pools of talent to draw on. Even a relatively modest per capita investment in education, focused on key objectives and funneled into the portion of the talent pool that they've managed to identify, will be able to yield massive innovation.

A lot of people will suffer under this authoritarianism. The people from these talent pools will be exploited and burnt out at a young age. This is already happening in China. But as a nation, it will be able to position itself extremely well technologically and economically, and this is a reality the rest of the world needs to be prepared to deal with.

PG&E was literally the villain in the real life Erin Brockovich story.

Nothing is ever better in every conceivable way than the current state of the art.

Probabilistically, sure, but it's not impossible that there has been some piece of knowledge or understanding that's been missing, and that massive breakthroughs are possible once the process is figured out.

I think a fair modern example is LED light bulbs. They are better in every conceivable way than incandescent or fluorescent lightbulbs: they last longer, use less energy, shine brighter, use less toxic materials, and are easy to mass produce. But there were several decades where much of the industry believed that LEDs would never be very useful as a light source because we could only produce red and green, and it was generally believed that a blue LED would be impossible to produce.

Then one guy decided it would be his life mission to invent the blue LED, and the sonuvabitch did it. Now LEDs are the only sensible thing to use to produce light.

It's always possible for this kind of breakthrough to happen, especially in material science where the complexity of how molecules interplay is nearly incomprehensible.

I think the point is that Republicans detest the idea of being weird no matter what, so they would rage at the suggestion of being a good weird anyway. To them "good weird" is an oxymoron, even though they are actually very weird and not in any kind of good way.

I don't doubt that in this case it's both silly and unacceptable that their driver was having this catastrophic failure, and it was probably caused by systemic failure at the company, likely driven by hubris and/or cost-cutting measures.

Although I wouldn't take it as a given that the system should be allowed to continue if the anti-virus doesn't load properly more generally.

For an enterprise business system, it's entirely plausible that if a crucial anti-virus driver can't load properly then the system itself may be compromised by malware, or at the very least the system may be unacceptably vulnerable to malware if it's allowed to finish booting. At that point the risk of harm that may come from allowing the system to continue booting could outweigh the cost of demanding manual intervention.

In this specific case, given the scale and fallout of the failure, it probably would've been preferable to let the system continue booting to a point where it could receive a new update, but all I'm saying is that I'm not surprised more generally that an OS just goes ahead and treats an anti-virus driver failure at BSOD worthy.

When talking about the driver level, you can't always just proceed to the next thing when an error happens.

Imagine if you went in for open heart surgery but the doctor forgot to put in the new valve while he was in there. He can't just stitch you up and tell you to get on with it, you'll be bleeding away inside.

In this specific case we're talking about security for business devices and critical infrastructure. If a security driver is compromised, in a lot of cases it may legitimately be better for the computer to not run at all, because a security compromise could mean it's open season for hackers on your sensitive device. We've seen hospitals held random, we've seen customer data swiped from major businesses. A day of downtime is arguably better than those outcomes.

The real answer here is crowdstrike needs a more reliable CI/CD pipeline. A failure of this magnitude is inexcusable and represents a major systemic failure in their development process. But the OS crashing as a result of that systemic failure may actually be the most reasonable desirable outcome compared to any other possible outcome.

Thanks for your candid views on this.

To be clear, our interest in subsistence farming is not intended to do anything to solve the problems we're facing as a society. It's an attempt to figure out how we might try to survive locally after the global supply chains collapse. We're particularly researching what crops might be viable in a landscape that has been reshaped by the changing climate. Additionally we're studying everything we can about community organizing and systems of self-governance that promote collaboration over individual greed.

This might all sound defeatist to someone like yourself who is still committed to fighting the good fight, but we see it as a contingency plan that our community's ability to survive may depend on in the future.