My grandfather is/was an electrician for over 60 years. Worked on very important projects in New York City. This rubbed off on me growing up. I spent much of my childhood taking things apart, figuring out how they worked, and putting them back together how I liked. I’ve been working on both hardware and software since I was 11. Had the privilege to study CS formally in high school, and Computer Engineering in university.

Good timing mostly got me into farming, especially since interest rates fell to the floor during the pandemic. Had enough to buy the acreage I wanted, and the wife was interested in helping out. We grow a variety of things now, and not just plants. For example we sell Honey, Soaps, Walnuts, and Mushrooms. It can be hard on the body to be so active all the time, but it is more satisfying than a monitor staring back at you at 3am because of some small incident.

I continue to tinker, and assist startups in my spare time, I can’t imagine I will ever stop programming.

Might be one of the few times a Lemmy post related to me.

I have owned a farm for four years, and do engineering for fun. AMA

You could say this exact same thing about any invention.

“But why would anyone want to speak into a wire? There’s literally no point.”

“Are you seriously going to wrap your food in plastic? There’s literally no point.”

“Who will want to type on a phone without any buttons? There’s literally no point.”

“Nobody is going to want to eat meat grown in a lab. There’s literally no point.”

Not everything needs to be built with a use in mind, and even if it has a small user base at first, needs change over time. For all we know this is visionary and ahead of its time, but we don’t know it yet.

As I’ve explained elsewhere, this is just what popped into my mind.

Many scenarios exist where you view content you did not intend on viewing.

For example, have you ever been Rick Rolled?

You’re reading too much into my comment.

I am a software engineer, and am always thinking of user experiences in my day job. This is simply the scenario that popped into my mind, but many do exist.

Besides hacking, phishing scams, and pranks. Users trick others all the time into viewing content they didn’t mean to view.

My concern isn’t so much that this can happen at all, but rather that if views were public, how it’d be trivial to write software that auto bans users based on those views. Without great moderation tools, and petitioning it wouldn’t scale well.

I was just providing a scenario that came to mind. I am sure many exist outside the one I described.

Nobody has mentioned crime, so I am not sure where that came from. Accountability can come in many forms, and often on the internet users will be banned or excluded based on their direct actions. However, if views were public, it would be trivial to setup a bot to autoban users from communities before they even join, based solely on what they’ve seen.

If post views are public that’s a fairly poor implementation on the developers part. I’m sure it will change over time.

E.g. someone using your account to view illegal content in a community you are not a member of, and you being held accountable.

This is common enough for me, that I feel the english language needs a good new word to describe it.

I asked ChatGPT what word it would use to describe this experience, and here is what it came up with.

Certainly! I propose the word “lexidaze” (pronounced lex-ih-daze) to describe the feeling you’ve described. Here’s the definition and usage example:

Word: Lexidaze

Part of Speech: Verb

Definition: The act of reading a book while being completely absorbed in the words, but failing to comprehend or process their meaning, resulting in a disorienting feeling of confusion about the plot. Example: As I delved deeper into the novel, I became so engrossed in the sentences that I started to lexidaze, losing track of the storyline and finding myself perplexed by the events unfolding before me.

I hope this newly created word captures the essence of the experience you were looking to describe! Let me know if there’s anything else I can assist you with.