Time Bandits. Because of that move my childhood was plagued with nightmares about little people from out of time invading my room in the middle of the night.
That’s what I do, use uBlock Origin to filter the pop-up. Then most site disable scrolling and that can usually be countered by finding the “overflow: hidden;” and turning it into “overflow: visible;” (you can also use uBlock Origin to inject “overflow: visible !important;” into the page for it to stay persistent.
I have two that have stuck with me most my adult life-- and I find that they apply frequently.
I often wonder whether we do not rest our hopes too much upon constitutions, upon laws and upon courts. These are false hopes; believe me, these are false hopes. Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it. While it lies there it needs no constitution, no law, no court to save it. And what is this liberty which must lie in the hearts of men and women? It is not the ruthless, the unbridled will; it is not freedom to do as one likes. That is the denial of liberty, and leads straight to its overthrow. A society in which men recognize no check upon their freedom soon becomes a society where freedom is the possession of only a savage few; as we have learned to our sorrow.
-- Judge Learned Hand, The Spirit of Liberty Speech, 1944
I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:
Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.
It's funny because lately I have been applying that quote to people being terrified of "AI". (I hate that we use that word to describe stuff like LLMs, but that's another topic.)
There are countless points in history where a technological advance has rendered some human labor less or no longer needed. There's nothing to be done about it; that's how progress works-- it's why we're not mostly farmers anymore.
The solution to technology rendering human labor less or no longer needed is for society to divorce the need to work from living a comfortable life. It's certainly not to try and hold back or eliminate the technology solely to protect human labor.
But don’t you feel like this is the one that we’ve been warned about a lot? I’m not concerned about losing my job; I’m worried about being killed by M3gan.
This is not a famous thing, it’s just that I’ve heard someone at a past workplace say this.
“Doing the same thing that got you here into this position will not make you successful in it, it may not even be enough for you to keep it.”
To be clear, he wasn’t saying it to me or anyone, he said it to himself as a life lesson he learned going through promotions and changing companies. The point was to stay humble and don’t expect your past accomplishments to get you through future challenges.
I was like 17 or so and had a temp job as a housepainter for a couple weeks, and I was sinking time and energy into doing an excellent job and being really efficient with paint and ... kind of missing the forest for the trees. I was putting unnecessary care & excellence into a back wall and the wall was taking longer to prep than the whole-house job could afford. One of the old guys on site pulled me aside me and, in the eloquent terms above, pointed out that ... the real goal here is paint on the wall. We're doing a good job because we take pride in our work, but the outcome is significantly more important than the journey to everyone else. Doing a "good job" can't wind up as an obstacle to the job itself.
I was always a details person and perfectionist, and that one clear lesson about taking a step back from the details of a task to double-check what the actual goal is ... has always stuck with me.
Damn I should have gotten you to paint our house. Our painter just did a half assed job and started yelling at me when I pointed out lines that weren’t straight or paint splatters from the accent wall on the white wall. He also used the wrong gloss of paint in places and created these shiny patches throughout the house.
And I have to look at this every day until I decide to repaint again. Just a bit more care and effort on his part would have prevented me from being mildly annoyed every day for the next however many years.
(I ended up painting over the glossy stuff myself)
I’m in the medical field, so there’s a lot of shit I’ve seen at the hospital, but I would say the real craziest thing I ever saw happened when I was in my early 20s. I moved back in with my parents for a time after I had to give up my first apartment. My parents have always had a bit of an unhealthy relationship, they fight like it’s their job. My childhood bedroom is always next to the kitchen and front room where they would fight, so I heard a lot of it and sadly just got used to it after so many years, though listening to it constantly as a child formed some core memories in there somewhere.
When I was there in my 20s I would mostly hang out in the separate garage, it helps me to feel like I still kind of had my own space. I worked graves, and would maintain my schedule on my days off, playing video games through the night. One night my dad came out randomly and was in an absolute state, telling me my mom had said “maybe divorce” and a couple other things. We talked at length and I thought I had helped him calm down. He left and I was up for a few more hours. I passed him sleeping in his truck on my way into the house to go to bed, it was weird but I didn’t think much of it at the time. Just figured he needed to sleep it off. I had only been asleep a couple hours, when my mom came running, panic screaming into my room at the top of her lungs. She woke me up shaking and yelling that my dad was going to kill himself right now in the garage, that he had the gun and that he said he was going to shoot himself in the face if she tried to stop him. At that moment I saw him passing my room on his way outside. With only a couple hours of sleep ruining my capacity for reasoning my adrenaline went straight from 0 to full blast. I had discovered the nature of their disagreement the night before talking to my dad, so my mouth just ran away before I could think. I sprinted into the hall and caught him by the shoulder , then immediately started shouting all kinds of heinous shit at them about how they were both being “dumb fucks, stupid fucking idiots, immature as fuck” I don’t remember the exact words but you get the gist. These are two very religious people who never would have accepted hearing the slightest profanity out of me in regular circumstances, not even the word “god” or the word “hell” (mormons). So yeah, neither of them said anything they both just stood there crying or stunned and listened to me tell them what big fucking morons they were and how immature they were acting, this went on for at least 15 solid minutes, easily the most cathartic thing that has ever happened to me in my entire life, bar none. At the end they were both just kind of stunned, we had it pretty well resolved and they were both calm and I went back to sleep, a testament to just how tired I was in that moment. The three of us have never talked about it again, I think because it all just got resolved right there somehow. Nothing like it has ever happened with them again according to my sister who still lives with them
@zinklog "History loves repeat itself" With Covid , Wars and even daily life you see this so so many times. On big or little scales but this is a almost mantra to me " History is spiral it always comes back to point x" Sometimes it's scary because you know exactly what happened and what happening now can happen again...
Im not wild about this because to often I see folks use something like it to imply something we face now is no big deal due to a false analogy. Like covid with spanish flu. I.E. - I don't need to mask or vaccinate because we got through the spanish flu. Not taking into account its not as bad because of vaccines but without them it is actually a worse disease and that pictures clearly show folks used masks for the spanish flu. Its not just that but with climate change implying it just seems like the end like the cold war but they are completely different issues with different possibilities for solutions.
@HubertManne@zinklog And that it's fine, we all have a=our own Mantras that we listen too or Superstitions you can also say. What most important that you yourself mentioned, that people used to do something and now they are complacent. If you compare how Japan, Europe and USA handled Covid you can see that something you have to learn and repeat and some things you have to do even if your society is pushing against it. Yeah tell someone to wear a mask when they cough!
Im an obsessive masker now. Its not covid per se its just that by 2022 I realized I had not been sick since 2019 and prior to that I had something on average once a year (I was actually overdue for something when the lockdowns hit) and it was not uncommon to be sick even twice a year. Its 2023 now and I am still on the streak and im convinced its because of masking. I don't know how long I can keep the streak but imma gonna try.
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