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it seems like a lot of your problem here is being caught off guard that pre-sliced bread, which has been modified so that it does not go stale as it otherwise would, is a processed food. try buying bread from a bakery that goes stale. after recalibrating that expectation maybe this will make more sense overall?

Right. It's like the argument that the 2 party system is an intentional brake on democracy, so we have to legislate reforms into being... with the permission of the 2 party system that determines whether legislation gets passed? The clear logical extension of the argument is that reform on the terms in which we have these problems is ultimately not very workable.

Coding is pretty straightforwardly a craft - something that is done for use value but allows for artistic expression and a convergence of form and function. It isn't art.

However, I disagree that aiming to get enjoyment out of a coding job is necessarily a mistake. But it does often have to be weighed against competing factors like ease of getting a job and pay.

I guess this is probably why I can't log into league of legends atm.

This comment is perfectly alienated from nature. Yes, significant seasonal and regional variation in diet is a worthwhile tradeoff for eating much more nutritious, tastier, cheaper, and more environmentally sustainable food than we have now. No, it does not mean we would have to eat like feudal peasants.

I don't think it makes any sense to try to hold people responsible for keeping the economy running hot as individuals on top of being rational self-interested actors.

why are we operating national, natural monopoly services on a for-profit basis that fundamentally incentivizes this in the first place (rhetorical). Amazon deserves to be taken into democratic public ownership for nominal compensation.

wow, what fraction of websites leak data I want to look at? should I be poking at every non-tech-giant site I go to?

glad we sorted this out conclusively and I can be sure I'm not an imposter forever now. wait a minute..

This article starts to get at an interesting controversy about the definition of value. Is the value of a project equal to the amount of labor time it saves over previously used methods? Or is it equal to the amount of labor time it took to create the project? I think most software devs would intuitively pick the former, and that is what the article sides with and also what the market awards to innovations in the short term, but I think there is merit to the latter and people should at least consider it. The article presents an apparent contradiction (the author's side project was coded in a few hours and has arguably had more of a positive impact than their entire day job career's output) but that contradiction is resolved by the latter definition of value, the labor theory of value.

The labor theory of value explanation for this is straightforward. In general, LTV asserts that the value output of some work approximates the amount of work that ordinarily has to go into it, or more precisely, of the socially necessary labor time going into that work (ie, the time it would take an average worker to do it without slacking off). This is because if you wanted that work done and didn't care how it got done, the socially necessary labor time would be the real cost of doing it yourself or paying someone else to support themselves while they do it (before various market dynamics and other distorting factors - it is an idealized model). I.e., in an assembly line, the cost of a part is the cost of raw materials + the cost of the labor added to them. This seems straightforward for assembly line work, but is a little less intuitive when the actual work is about making other people's work more efficient, which a lot of software dev falls into. But if someone simply said to themselves "I need the functionality of mammoth.js", the core idea still applies - of being able to replace the worker, hire a generic software dev, and get comparable work (or at least, good enough work), for a similarly low amount of value. Another way to think of it is that mammoth.js might save a lot of people a lot of time, but getting some version of mammoth.js implemented is probably historically inevitable and has a fixed and much smaller cost to actually do.

How does this resolve the contradiction in the article? Well, mwilliamson's day job career labor output might possibly have saved less time of other people's work than mammoth.js. But their day job career labor output probably couldn't have been replaced in any way but by a similarly large amount of time and effort from other developer(s). Meanwhile, mammoth.js could be reimplemented in a similarly small amount of time by someone else, maybe taking a couple of tries to get it right. If mammoth.js hadn't been written at the time it was, maybe that would have happened.

This isn't to discount ingenuity or insight going into this side project, or the usefulness of something like mammoth.js being in the right place and time. But I think it is a more precise way to think about how much value and what kinds are being added to the world by larger or smaller amounts of effort. In other words, devs shouldn't feel bad about having worked hard on stuff that is less neatly labor-saving than a small widget, as long as that hard work turned out to be useful.

dumb comment. this isn't "tankie" it's basic labor theory of value.

no, class (in the marxist sense, everything else is meaningless cultural signifiers) is not about "upper" or "lower", it's about either getting paid for wage labor, ie being working class, or getting paid for other people's use of property you own, ie being capitalist class. this is extremely basic and is the fundamental divide under capitalism.

Bezos' profits on the basis of how much work his employees do, minus how much he pays them. that's what class is. it's pretty hard to deny it exists.

political and class ambivalence is also a way to spin things. which the original comment itself did. this is a navel-gazing, meaningless criticism. if you disagree substantively you should just say so.

> While pseudoscience is particularly prone to causal fallacies and cherry-picking of data, the most common fallacy in obscurantist pseudophilosophy is equivocation. This fallacy exploits ambiguities in certain key terms, where plausible but trivial claims lend apparent credibility to interesting but controversial ones. When challenged, the obscurantist will typically retreat to the safe house provided by the trivial interpretation of his claims, only to reoccupy the controversial ground once the critic has left the scene.

I found this to be a very helpful description of a specific kind of sloppy argumentation I have seen a lot of (usually about politics) in the last few years. It seems like it's made worse by anonymous online group arguments - one person will make one trivially true claim, another person will make a farther-reaching, incorrect claim and say it is proven by the first, a third person will defend a critique of any bad claims by just defending the first trivially true one, and bad ideas thrive in the space between all these people.

> The irony.

That's just a sentence that isn't afraid of using long words, they're all pretty precisely, neatly used IMO. Not ironic at all. This would be a mouthful to say or understand out loud but it seems like normal writing to me.

Completely agreed. Honestly, I despise the superficially objective and neutral concern troll approach to this. I can't see this article as anything but a dishonest way to say: "what if someone used private communications to do something bad? let's get rid of private communications". Except it doesn't own up to the fact that that's ultimate what it's proposing. It stops at fearmongering.

Also, I commented this above, but there's a different way to solve the problems of polarization and radicalism. It involves solving people's material problems, and the US has been slowly getting worse at this and decaying for a while now. Instead, the political establishment is doubling down on surveillance, the silencing of dissent off of any platform with reach, and ultimately physical repression, through the increased funding and militarization of police.

Right now this is claimed to be targeted at the far right.. but it doesn't take a genius to compare the police reaction to BLM vs the capitol riot to see where it is going.

It's clear that some people have done some bad things, and they used the internet (mostly facebook but whatever) to communicate.

There are 2 approaches to fixing this.

1 is to undercut the roots of radicalism and polarization. I would say to do that by radically redistributing wealth and democratizing government. Yes, the capitol stormers mostly weren't poor, but Trumpism is in large part a reaction of horror by small business owners at being squeezed by monopolies, and what popular support they have would evaporate if the government fixed things instead of being run as the public relations firm and personal military of all the large companies put together.

2 is to instead double down on physical repression (by funding police) and digital repression of dissenting viewpoints by abolishing any right to privacy. This seems to be the direction we're heading. It already happened in large part under the last few presidents but Signal is obviously in the crosshairs.

I'm not mad at you. But I am frustrated that this obviously bad approach has support - of not dealing with root causes and material problems, but committing to suppression of beliefs on both the right and left that are obviously a reaction to those root causes.

I'd switch to firefox but it is noticeably slower loading facebook and twitter, the sites I go to most often, and I trust it only like 25% more than chrome. :/

Amazon exists to increase shareholder profits. The reviews are not exempt from that. They exist to encourage customers to buy things and to increase sales volume. When Amazon was up and coming against a lot of other competitors it was relatively more important that reviews provide a good signal for customers. Now that they are more hegemonic, that is less important relative to facilitating increased sale volume, and there is also more incentive for sellers to fake them.

Everyone's incentives are cleanly aligned for the short-medium term, except for those of consumers and workers.

ah man. good luck having long-term political success with this attitude. this is the sort of insanely condescending attitude that is partially responsible for the rise of right wing demagoguery.

The question I posed, with 2 very clear answers, is: should property rights or human rights be supreme? I know what I would say in the common case of a poor person being evicted.

It's a pretty crazy thing. An interesting question for libertarians is where did private property originate? Like, taking libertarian assumptions, once you own it, hypothetically you can expand your property profitably. But how did the first resources and land, which before private property were all used more or less collectively, become privately owned?

The resolute defenders of property rights would argue that this infringes on the rights of those who already own the things including virtually all land.

But there are other issues with this like the massive, inescapable trend towards centralization of ownership under capitalism.

Yeah, it turns out that property rights come into conflict with human rights a lot, and this is why property rights should not be fundamental.

The people in responses saying owners "should" be able to do anything with stuff they own - well, the owners of property certainly think so. What about the majority of the population? I expect people's opinions about this will change rapidly, in a radical left direction, when the COVID eviction and foreclosure wave hits the US.

The US especially is an oligarchy and for-profit US tech companies dominate the tech industry. Those same companies are atrociously anti-user and notorious for selling data etc, so people don't trust them and I don't think there is broad awareness that there could be a decent software solution. And also we could just use paper.

I think I might have managed to prevent mine from updating so far. Does anyone have an easy to follow guide to blocking it from internet access?

unfortunately what those shareholders want is the highest possible overall profit extraction from the areas they operate at any cost, which is anti-social and bad.

Well that policy is terrible. It doesn't matter if it is in line with one or another bureaucratic policy, it's still censorship.

Oh cool, you're in the Seattle area? I moved away from there this summer.

> I'm really uncomfortable with the notion of backseat drivers

I assume this is referring to her being accountable to Socialist Alternative? I understand why this sometimes seems weird to people. But it's impossible get anywhere as a politician without a base of support. Kshama is open about who hers is. Corporate Democrats (and Republicans of course) are not, and tend to surprise people after the fact with their governance when they refuse to, for instance, tax the rich, or hedge on the question indefinitely. I think Kshama's ability to campaign for things and then consistently fight for them after getting elected is closely related to having SA, to not just do necessarily collective political analysis, but also do the work of mass campaigns. By contrast, traditional politicians also offload a lot of political work, but to an array of personally appointed policymakers, lobbyists, private-company executives, and others; while SA is democratically run, the corporate lobbying groups are only accountable to capital. I don't think there is a sustainable path in between these two options.