GreenWatermelon

`s` is a replace command, so parent is saying "substitute 'anymore' with 'ever' "

I can't reply to the parent any more because it's flagged, so I'll reply to you, because I need to get this out.

Overtime I gave him so much benefit of the doubt, and steelmanned his arguments because I really respected him as a Software Engineer and I aligned with him on his views in technology... But that blog post was the last straw. It's clear-as-day racism. No room for misinterpretation.

I was willing to overlook his remarks about DEI, Trump, Kirk, etc.... because there were nuggets of truth and genuine pain points.. but it turns out he was a racist, white supremacists all along. Sigh...

Windows. Windows removed the task bar positioning feature in Windows 11.

And then people wonder why China is antagonistic towards the west.

I don't think that has changed? Everyone would still complain about someone Talking loudly in a public library or a movie theater.

In case you're genuinely confused, the reason for Anubis and similar tools is that AI-training-data-scraping crawlers are assholes, and strangle the living shit out of any webserver they touch, like a cloud of starving locusts descending upon a wheat field.

i.e. it's DDoS protection.

There isn't a hint of bad faith in the Parent's comment, it's just a sarcastic tongue-in-cheek way to say that it's not really cool to poison the fuck out of ourselves just because x material is kinda nice for y.

And horns. I fuckin hate horns. I swear car horn noises reach into the far ends if the universe, you can't escape them.

Imagine a world in which Internet Explorer is the only browser around. That's what would happen without government intervention.

Regulations are literally the only thing slowing down the corporate dystopian future.

Without regulations (which are laws) Dominant companies would just send gangsters to break up rival businesses. They still do that today, but through different strategies e.g. price dumping, where they operate at a loss in order to squash competition, then proceed to hike up prices and extort as much value as possible.

> the companies that died because acquiring them was too much of a hassle

So it was a shitty non-viable business

> the companies that died or never got funded / started because the investors couldn't see and exit path

More shitty non-viable business. Creating a company only to sell it and screw over your customers is evil.

Maybe those founders should try to make real businesses, instead of playing glorified rollette.

> the companies that got acquired piecemeal (Windsurf, Inflection), leaving the early employees with NOTHING simply to avoid the ire of anti-trust hawks at the FTC

Plain-old loop hole exploitation. Simple anit-competetive stealth aquihire that isn't called so. My conclusion is that the market needs more regulations.

Does your ideal market only contain 5 or mega-corps that control every aspect of our lives?

This argument does not resonate with me.

I'm in my mid 20s, far from being a grumpt old man, and I used to frequent Facebook back in the early 2010s (remember all those games?)

What became clear is how the landscape is filled to the brim with scammers and grifters. These newer applications of technology are akin to cigarettes, or heroin, or opium. They're designed to inflict misfortune for profit.

Years ago my parents would chastise me for spending too much time othe computer/phone, now I'm the one begging them to uninstall those garbage applications from their phones.

Around me, more older people than younger ones are susceptible to lies and scams perpetrated by LLMs.

The younger generation around me (kids 10 to 17 yo) are falling for the same traps I fell for when I was their age, and people my age are stil falling for: addictive online games with scummy lootboxes (especially Fifa) and gacha games.

I believe there are more than enough studies detailing the extreme negative consequences of Instagram and/or tiktok usage, so much that we don't question that anymore, and treat it like ye olde tobacco addiction. It's addicting and fucks up your health but here yo stay.

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One of the greatest companies, Valve, is privately owned.

I also respect 37signals, which isn't publicly owned.

Those are the two companies that crop in my head when I think "Good company"

Forever, until our cursed profession gets an official licensing body like other real Engineering professions. A Civil Enginnee can't sign on a prototype bridge design that then gets built and opened to the public, because any problem means potential jail time and possibly loss of licence.

There should be legal consequences for treating people's data with reckless abandon. It's normal for restaurants to be inspected. Commercial apps should also be inspected by independent bodies and fines must be paid if serious negligence is found. Imagine finding out that your favorite restaurant had a rat infestation on their storage room for a year.

And of someone gets food poisoning because the restaurant used expired ingredients, it gets heavily fined and possibly shuttered. This should also happen with software. If your root AWS user key is leaked in your frontend, your service deserves to be shuttered.

> green flags should we look at as hits that "this company is different"?

The only possible green flag os "Did not ipo"

I think "natural" here would refer to genuine project rrquirequirements that will translte directly to value to customers e.g. customers demand x features in y time and we don't have enough manpower to handle it. This is natural, it's business survival.

Contrast with the Unnatural cause of "manager just wants a promotion at any cost" which, in a sense, is akin to Embezzlement. The manager worsens business prospects and contributes to organizational rot for their personal gain.

I don't think hiAndrewQuinn was implying that they'd do so, rather, they (appropriately) assume that a for-profit would try to loophole their way out of any obligation, so they wanted to know how exactly the employees were protected.

You gave the perfect description of an LLM.

Pre-industrial English and German economies did not rely on enslavement of the population, so the fact US economy was built on enslavement just means its elites were rotten to the core since the very beginning,

The fact that rich people get richer is exactly the goal of the US' economic system, not an accident. Despite the abolition of slavery, the US remains extremely hostile to the poor. its lower-than-livable wages forcing its people to be more miserable than medieval surfs.

So, no, the industrial revolution did not bring prosperity, what brought prosperity was the blood shed by common men daring to keep a portion of the fruits of their labour. The history of unionization on the US and the plight of miners clearly shows how much prosperity was brought by technological innovation.

I'm looking less at Nations and more at the people in those nations. The richest country on earth, the one with the highest number of billionaires, is unable to put roofs over its citizens' heads, unable to provide them with food stability, and its health care is the laughing stock of the entire developed world. Hell I live in a shit 3rd world country and our healthcare is still miles better than the US. THIS to me is undeniable proof that technological advancement != Prosperity for people.

Unindustrialized nations fared worse due to the industrialized ones coming for their resources. I doubt farmer John on Yorkshire gave a shit about what the UK was doing in south Africa or india. Similarly for Farmer Louis in Leon, or Hans in Stutgart. It's all elite dick-measuring contests with the common man as the only loser.

> outsourcing all the economic benefits to China

Hell the US already outsourced all vital indiatries to China without banning shit. My main point is that the common man will not see any benefit from such technological advancement, since the major problem is who's holding the stocks. AI is just another measure of wealth concentration.

> deprive society of greater prosperity for the benefit of a small minority.

This already exactly the case. AI won't bring jackshit to anyone except those who're already sitting on too much wealth than any human should deserve.

At best, AI will slightly increase average global misery by virtue of producing too much garbage that pollutes the digital landscape.

The industrial revolution didn't bring prosperity to anyone except the capital owners, who forced their employees (physical force) to work many long hours, in gruesome environment, for pathetic wages.

When the Society's Elites promise something, the common man must be wary, those elites didn't reach their spots by being kind.

Well, for one thing, they aren't backed by billion-dollat corporations hell-bent on shoving them down the throat of every man, woman, child, infant, and pet they can reach.

in which case you just have a failed state. Just like Drug lords run Mexico, VC and investors run the US, and citizens suffer in both cases.

> state run businesses of old communist regimes, how wasteful they were, how mismanaged they were, how they produced stuff nobody wanted

I'm increasingly convinced that this is pure western capitalist propaganda. From what I observed in the 8 or so years I've been an adult, Western Capitalist economies (especially US) are much more bloated and wasteful. Nothing demonstrated this more clearly than Crypto/Web3 Hype-Bubble.

Google has enough cash to squash any competitors. For now, the only remotely hopeful viable alternative is the creator-owned Nebula.

Smartphones are pure consumption machines, in this regard they are more Cocaine than Caffeine. They brought pleasure at an extreme cost. Their worst crime, imo, os the destruction of human relationships brought about by "social" media.

Just a grain? I say take it with a gargantuan Train loaded with salt on all cars. An entire salt mine's worth. Markets, and CEOs, are downright insane, and they are the only ones who stand to profit from this situation, and have everything to gain.

It'll always be on case by case basis. My mother sending me an awe-inducing picture on WhatsApp? Yeah she probably found it on Facebook, and it's likely it's fake.

In this website's case, I trust the author did enough due diligence to ensure to the best of his abilities that no AI pictures end up on his site. Looking at the submission page (0) he takes submissions by email, and requests the "name of the wildlife sanctuary and the photographer (if known)" which signals he isn't just putting random pictures from the internet.

Text forgeties existed wver since words were written down, and Text has existed for millennia. We had to deal with possible lies and forgeries the entire time.

Photo and Video are very recent inventions, so it was about time they got the same forgery treatment. Now we will have to rely on the same signals of trust as we had before.

0: https://owlsintowels.org/submit/

Reading this made my blood boil up a little

> In labor circles, “chickenization” refers to exploitative working arrangements that resemble the plight of the American poultry farmer. The U.S. poultry industry has been taken over by three monopolistic packers, who have divided the nation up into exclusive territories, so that each chicken farmer has only one buyer for their birds.

> Farmers are “independent small businesspeople” who nominally run their own operations, but because all their products must be sold through a single poultry processor, that processor is able to exercise enormous control over the operation. The processor tells the farmer which birds to raise, as well as what the birds are to be fed, how much, and on what schedule. The processor tells the farmer how to build their coops and when the lights are to go on and off. The processor tells the farmer which vets to use, and tells the vets which medicines to prescribe.

> The processor tells the farmer everything…except how much they’ll be able to sell their birds for. That is determined unilaterally when the farmer brings their birds to market, and the payout is titrated to the cent, to represent exactly enough money for the farmer to buy birds and feed and vet services through the processor’s preferred suppliers, and to service the debts on the coops and light and land, but not one penny more.

This amount of scumminess is mind boggling.

I guess we will have to rely on extra-net signals: Meta clues from the real world.

For example, the website creator doesn't seem to be looking for profit, nor did they add much oin terms of personal info that would point to him looking for internet clout.

The FAQ page comes across as genuine and, as another commenter put it, whimsical.

It's also all self hosted, and on a unique domain, while mass-content-farmera prefer prefer the zombified audiences of Tiktok and Facebook.

All those signals combine into a high probability of everything on the site being genuine.