isleepinahammock

When did you stop dreaming of the future?

Doesn’t even need a technical solution. Could just be some law that in order to sell a vehicle:

• A company has to maintain any cloud support for at least 20 years.

• They have to put up a bond that will allow such services to continue even if they go belly up before those 20 years are through.

• All vehicle features where cloud connections are not essential to their function must be operable without any cloud connection. So it’s fine if after 20 years you can’t pull the contacts from your google account to display on the car’s screen, or if GPS map updates no longer work. But the door locks or seat heaters better not be cloud connected.

Here’s my proposal to bring more whimsy to the world:

Let’s legalize piracy on the high seas…but only if the pirates use 17th century-level ships, tools, equipment, and weapons. It will still be legal for other ships to defend themselves, and they can use modern stuff. So no guarantee the historical reenacting pirates will survive. But in the off chance they do, they can keep whatever booty they plunder, and do so legally. Their ships will be too small and fragile to be a threat to big vessels like cargo ships. But it sure would make the lives of billionaire yacht owners more interesting…

“But this isn’t the 17th century. Billionaire yachts are not Spanish galleons laden with gold!” You shout!

But no worry, historically, pirates often took more than valuable cargo. They often seized entire vessels…

What you’re describing sounds like positive nihilism. Nihilism need not be a bad thing. At least as I understand it:

One can say, “all life is pointless, nothing matters, why do anything?” - negative nihilism

Another can say, “all life is pointless, nothing matters, why NOT do anything?” - positive nihilism

I would say positive nihilism describes my personal philosophy to an extent. I tell people that I don’t so much feel the universe is pointless, but a complete absurdity. The universe is mad, so embrace the madness! Mostly this just involves building less of a fear of judgment. What could you ever do that is sillier than the very world around you?

No. The technology itself is the problem. Tablets and laptops are not suited for ordinary classroom instruction. I don’t care if they’re delivered by a billion dollar private equity firm or a ragtag FOSS project.

www.tandfonline.com/doi/…/0020739X.2025.2584340

All this talk of FOSS is just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

The problem is the loss of embodied and kinesthetic learning. Pencil and paper is fundamentally superior at teaching students, as they have to engage far more areas of the brain than they do if passively engaging with a tablet.

I have a background in education. I’ve had a unique career that’s gone back and forth between engineering and education. I hold graduate degrees in both. I say this only as prologue.

I propose an eInk-based tablet device with both keyboard and stylus input which has network and (very) limited internet access that acts as both a textbook library, note taking device, and can be used to both receive and submit homework

While I agree with most of what you wrote, this part sticks out to me. I think the missing piece in your analysis is the human element, human neurology. The literature that’s been coming out in the years since devices were widely deployed has been pretty damning. It’s not just that the devices are distraction machines, though they certainly are that. It is that they are fundamentally, neurologically inferior methods of educating a student. It is not simply that computers are distraction engines. You can put two learners in completely distraction free environments, and ask one to learn on a tablet, and one with pencil and paper. Even with no distractions at all, the paper will be far superior.

We are physical embodied beings. A lot of tech folks like to think of themselves as some sort of disembodied soul piloting a meat robot, but that isn’t remotely how humans actually work. The body is just as much part of learning as the mind. Your mind is part of your body; and your body heavily influences your mind. Even your gut bacteria have an immense impact on your thought processes. Learning is not a passive process of absorbing information like a sponge. It requires active practice and synthesis, and the more modalities that experience occurs in, the better.

Here is how a traditional lecture works:

1. The teacher speaks orally and writes key notes and diagrams on the board.
2. The students watch, hear, and participate in the discussion.
3. They continually process the lesson and detect the key points.
4. They process the key points and summarize them mentally.
5. They write the key points on paper notes, requiring coordination of the logical, auditory, visual, and motor portions of the brain.
6. They must do this in real time if they want any permanent record of the contents of the lesson.

Here is how an electronic lecture works:

1. Because it’s delivered by powerpoints, there’s no constraint on the amount of content. Instructors cram too much in the slides for students to ever hope to manually copy during a lecture.
2. Students can’t keep up, so they reasonably ask for instructors to post their slides in advance, so students can "follow along."
3. Students watch a lecture with their laptop screen up, passively watching, never needing to write or process anything as they "already have all the notes."
4. If a teacher uses powerpoints of reasonable length, students will still expect slides to be given them in advance, as that’s what they’re used to in other classes. Even if you can hold firm on this, students will still have woefully underdeveloped note-taking skills, as those skills have been allowed to wither from years of powerpoint instruction.

This is a fundamental problem with the technology. Again, we’re embodied creatures. Writing with a pen and paper is more of a full body experience than using a touch screen can ever be. Tech loves to “remove friction,” but friction is the only way you ever actually learn anything.

We need to get the computers out of regular classroom instruction entirely. I’m perfectly fine with computers in a lab or library where students take computer-intensive courses (like programming or CAD), but there should be zero electronic devices employed in the lessons of core academic subjects such as mathematics, language, the sciences, and social sciences.

Honestly that wouldn’t be a bad idea. Even if few people ever code themselves, learning a little logic is good for anyone.

The problem is the tech companies didn’t actually deliver on the promise. We didn’t hand kids devices that encouraged tinkering and discovery. We handed them locked-down iPads suitable only for content consumption, not knowledge creation.

It often is the technology itself though. Or at least “the technology” defined in any way that’s relevant here.

No one is proposing that we remove every computer from school buildings. The mistake appears to be the “one laptop per child” policies that made laptops and tablets essential to school instruction. Crucially, these devices could ever be justified because they also took the place of the students’ books. Their books are on these devices. They don’t have physical books anymore.

I am explaining how the law works and the assumptions behind it. The law assumes that if you were embarrassed about your dick pics, that you would delete those before the officer is right about to search you.

The law isn’t that stupid.

That’s not really how the law works. You’re not making a comparable analogy. You sitting at home or in a hotel room is legally not remotely the same as when you’re being actively searched by a federal agent.

This is more like if the a police officer is about to do a pat-down search of someone, and they reach into their pocket, grab something, and rapidly swallow it.

You can destroy your property in normal circumstances whenever you please. If you delete a file in the privacy of your own home, odds are you’re not doing so for the purposes of evading law enforcement. However, if you do it literally seconds before law enforcement is about to get a hold of it, it’s pretty unambiguous that you’re trying to destroy evidence.

That’s the crucial difference here legally. Plausible deniability does not exist when you’re destroying something because a police search is imminent.

Your country’s leaders are almost certainly just as enthusiastic about AI. The wealthy and powerful are the only international class.

It’s a slimy business tactic that applies the anchoring effect.

You’re shopping internet plans. You see a plan that seems like a good deal to you and meets your needs. The price listed in bold text on the website is $50/month. If you look closely, there’s a little asterisk referencing tiny text at the bottom of the page that simply says something like “plus additional fees.”

So you feel it’s a good deal, so you move forward. You enter all your personal info, everything needed to set things up. Then you get to checkout…and the price has increased to $70/month, inflated by a bunch of bogus fees.

You would think this wouldn’t make a difference in your decision-making, but it does. It actually changes what the average person is willing to pay. Among the reasons:

Anchoring: When you’re shopping, you’ve already subconsciously decided the plan is a good deal at $50. Then you put in the time investment to set up the account. When they spring the fees on you, your mind is in a state where it really doesn’t want to reconsider things. You’ve already finished the price comparison portion of the task! So even though you can see the price increase, the plan still subconsciously feels like it’s $50/month.

Anti-Competitive Behavior: these fees make cost comparisons much more difficult. The only way to see all the fees that your account will be charged is to go through most of the account sign-up process. You can’t just quickly pull up the websites of various ISPS and quickly compare their plans/rates.

Let’s be honest though. This policy was a chicken-shitted rule only a liberal could love. Should we ban ISPs from tacking on extra fees and simply charging the sticker price? No, instead let’s just require them to disclose it in the fine print!

The wealthy want you to vote with your wallet, as there is nothing they fear more than “one man, one vote.”

That’s why if you want to support artists, you can buy the shit locked down files so they get the artist gets paid, and then just never use them. Pay for them but get your actual files from piracy.

True, but irrelevant. Why would they care at all about the terms of a license? Again, they’ll happily engage in outright mass torrenting. Their legal theory is that using works to train LLMs is simply fair use. The ebook sellers may disagree, but it won’t stop them.

Why would they scan that stuff though? That kind of mass market (human made) slop is easily available in digital form. We know the AI companies have engaged in mass digital piracy, including running massive torrenting operations. So if a digital copy exists, they probably already have it. And even if they have to buy it, purchasing an ebook is a lot cheaper than buying a physical one, shipping it, paying someone to scan it, etc.

I would think the old, the out-of-print, the rare, and never-before digitized are the only things worth buying and physically scanning in 2026. Everything else has already been scanned or was born digital-native.