This is one of the things that I like about BlueSky. The only algorithmic feed I use is one that highlights quiet posters (https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:vpkhqolt662uhesyj6nxm7ys/fe...). I’ll go to the main feed once in a while, but the “discover” feed is one I ended up unpinning entirely.
Conspiracies are wonderfully self-reinforcing: anything that doesn’t support the conspiracy is clearly the work of the conspirators hiding their existence.
The problem is that does happen in real life. Intelligence services and organised crime work actively to hide their tracks. As do corrupt officials and some of the military.
We live in a society where corruption is rife and ordinary people are largely excluded from most major institutions ... That is the atmosphere that breeds these things.
My favorite way to cut apart those two is to ask: How many people need to keep a secret, how long and how perfectly would they need to succeed, and what motive do they have to do a good job?
That's a fair question, but we do live in a surprisingly secretive society. I think that shifted over a lot during the Cold War period. It became acceptable to hide large sections of public spending from the public.
We also live in a corrupt society and occasionally that emerges as a scandal.
Certain secrets are kept better than others. Now and then real conspiracies do become public knowledge like the Tuskegee Experiment or Scientology's infiltration of parts of the US government.
Yesterday, my daughter asked me if it was “a round earth day or a flat earth day” thanks to my habit of providing outlandish explanations for things, often contradicting myself in the course of a single conversation in the process (they’ve come to enjoy trying to poke holes in some absurd explanation I’ve come up with).
That seems like a good game to play with your children. If it teaches them to regard any dubious statement skeptically and use critical thinking to figure out how likely it is to be true, that's a valuable life skill.
This was the first book that I picked out to buy for myself as a child (I remember pestering my parents for it at the Kroch’s and Brentano’s on Lake Street in Oak Park back in the 70s). I read it over and over and thanks to that, when I later came to stories like the Hebrews wandering the desert in Exodus, it was hard to put the von Däniken nonsense out of my mind.
Psychologists have there own version of this (which managed to achieve a sort of respectability) in Julian Jaynes’s The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind which has the same sort of furtive/animistic fallacies are put forth to justify a questionable conclusion.
Hey, Julian Jaynes! Haven't heard that name in a while. I remember that book fondly, compelling story telling. IMO Richard Dawkins said it best, it's either fucking nuts or fucking genius, no in between.
As a high school student I didn’t have the money to buy a 6502 assembler and I used to write my assembly code out in long hand on graph paper, hand-assemble it and type in the hex in the monitor.
The “loose” standards of HTML led to some really awful things happening in the early web. I remember seeing, e.g.,
<large><li></large> item text
to get a bigger bullet on a list item which worked fine in Netscape but broke other browsers (and since I was on OS/2 at the time, it was an issue for me).
Really, in 2025 people should just write XHTML and better yet, shouldn’t be generating HTML by hand at all except for borderline cases not handled by their tools.
Unfortunately XHTML5 doesn't exist and if you try to force the issue, you have to re-declare all of the non-numeric HTML entities in your own DTD (I abandoned the idea here). I'd love to use XHTML, its just not viable anymore.
As for generating all HTML, that's simply not possible given the current state (of open-source at least) WYSIWYG HTML editors.
I stopped using entities once we had UTF-8. I suppose there’s a case for the occasional < > but beyond that, I have no problem typing “‘—’” or üçě when I need to.
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