MSFT_Edging

> but how many of those are needed?

It might be some weird nostalgia talking, but I really feel like we hit the optimal digitization somewhere in the 2000s(not to say it was perfect). Important things were digitized and automated, but with paper in hand still. Medical records, purchases, flights, etc. Things that really could use it.

But we all still spoke to each other, went places, and you had to be a big nerd to spend all your time on a screen.

I've been thinking a lot about the reduced rate of return automation has been seeing. Robots are cool and all, but most of what we're getting out of computers nowadays are SaaS business that beg the question "why and to what end?". It's all just grinding for a piece of fat in the grand fat-cutting optimization of life.

None of this is really improving anything, we're not spending money on society-level improvements, those typically just come as a side effect of some other advancement that has taken a core sample out of society for a bit of profit.

Just yesterday I got a fully LLM reply from a coworker about an issue.

I've never been the biggest hobbyist programmer. My hobby programming was a means to an end for the actual hobby project I wanted to use. I'm more of a "maker" than any one kind of engineer. That being said, it was still fun at times and those personal projects literally got me jobs and allowed me to bypass live programming tests because I was able to show I knew how to program as I explained every design decision.

LLMs sorta fucked me over. My strongest skills aren't raw programming knowledge or fact regurgitation. Personal projects were how I showed potential employers my actual end-to-end problem solving. The projects were never polished, they didn't have every error condition formally handled in a logging framework. But they organized ideas into data and made things happen.

All that is worthless now unless employers want to see my pre-war steel collection on old repos. I'm defeated. Using agents for personal projects feels like playing a game with all the cheat codes turned on. It stops being a game, it's pointless. Me telling the machine to make something doesn't prove anything.

I still want to remain housed into my senior years and this tech has possibly kicked that out from under me.

You're actually a Luddite and pro-kidnapper if you're against the baton upgrades. Think of the kids for the love of god! /s

Marketplace is a far worse replacement for Craigslist in the North American market.

It hides what you're searching for, ignores your distance filters, and fills your results with items that are essentially ebay cross-listings. The pictures are extremely compressed so you're unable to validate the item from pictures before reaching out.

The only benefit is many people already have a facebook account, but now I'm unable to delete my facebook account because marketplace is the predominant classified sales channel in most areas. It was a EEE style effort to collect more data on people.

The past few years there have been persistent spam campaigns against Craigslist in various areas of the for-sale classifieds. It wouldn't surprise me if meta was behind it.

Groups are in a similar vein. They've put a log-in barrier on various communities, lowering the barrier to entry tech-wise, but forcing people into their ecosystem when forums have existed for years.

These are bad services. They gain traction due to facebook's other malicious actions.

In a just world, meta wouldn't exist like this. I fail to see any benefit in a company like this. I can't think of a single useful product or advancement they've made besides creating the page that makes grandma go insane and young people everywhere to hate themselves.

They're pointedly worse than most other social media. Even twitter doesn't really pretend they're anything but a place to say slurs now that "comedy is legal".

Meta feels so much more nefarious due to how 99% of their business is quiet deals with data brokers and ad buyers, and they just smile and nod as if they make anything positive at all. It feels like a company that makes most of it's money selling heroin, but they have a cute storefront so they get a pass.

> Why bother defending them about this specific issue though?

Because it doesn't matter, it's a nonsensical complaint to wait 10 whole seconds for your game program to start, in the wake of literally all the other shit it offers. Even if they sped it up, it still doesn't matter.

Epic launcher starting faster doesn't matter because they don't do anything that would make me want to open the epic launcher.

I "defend" valve because they're seemingly the only company that cares about the end-user linux experience.

Rocket league used to have a Linux build, then epic decided to kill that off entirely.

I recently bought the steam frame. It's years past when I would have wanted this VR headset the most, but half the reason I bought it was to support Valve's R&D with Linux desktop support, arm JIT translation, etc.

People bitch and moan about "voting with your wallet", then you have a company that tons of people continually vote with their wallet for, then people complain about others defending the one company that doesn't seem to want to screw their userbase over.

Sure Steam has some blind spots for the very sweaty semi-pro gamer. I don't care about virtual stickers and little treats. I care that all my games run on my Linux desktop after years of devs not giving a shit and other companies being openly hostile.

Valves competitors suck. Their VR competitor is Meta which in a just world would not exist as an organization. Their gaming marketplace competitor is Epic, which produces the character-slop extraction shooter and a launcher that gets more annoying to use every time I open it.

The other "competitors" if you can even call them that, are microsoft who has basically deleted a dozen game studios in the last year via moneyball, and other game companies like EA and Ubisoft who routinely delete purchased games and tell the users to go suck it.

Valve is basically the only company out there who is resisting the constant urge to make everything shitty to increase investor profits. They stay private and everyone loves what they do with that power. I'm sure a ton of fail-son PE bros are dying for the chance to buy out valve and turn everything it's ever done to absolute dogshit. We'd be getting half-life 3, 4, 5, 6, mobile, etc and they'd all be shit.

For years there was a strong segment of HN commenters who would come on and declare a moral imperative for not using ad blockers and looking at every ad you could in order to support a website.

One must wonder how many were genuine vs an influence op.

Wasn't the US firing on fishing vessels in the Gulf of Mexico, then double tapping, THEN sharing the videos and bragging earlier this year?

Edit: Someone replied with the party line, but there's little proof these were ever "cartel boats". The whole event seems to be violent jangling keys for the base via blatant war crimes.

https://www.cfr.org/articles/unclaimed-boat-strikes-in-ecuad...

You quoted the "trend has recently flipped" but the graph showing the total numbers show right wing violence is still by far the majority, and the 2025 datapoint was incomplete.

> My too-online left friends worship Luigi IRL

And? When you see systemic/societal killing regularly, are we supposed to clutch pearls when one very very rich and powerful guy dies?

> got in over their heads on a protest action

Yeah, two small groups that weren't connected were all made an example of.

> Someone left-aligned

Total conjecture.

The weather underground accidentally killed more of their own than they did in their actual bombings. They went after property. Right wing terror goes after soft targets like kids and worshipers.

Does any of this actually address what I said that rightwing terror groups are going completely unbothered?

We still have White Nationalists in khakis and masks rolling up in rented trucks to harass people based on race and creed.

One group threatens property damage, the other people damage.

One of them is considered a terrorist org.

The weak point of journalism has always been the larger-tier patrons. Can't report negative things if money-man says "no".

The advertising industry at large is at fault for our degradation in journalism.

Advertising needs clicks and eyes, the providers produce highly targeted profile algorithms to ensure maximum clicks and eyes, which degrades the information conveyed into the smallest, most enraging snippets possible. Those rise to the top as the most profitable ways to convey information, and continues the cycle, further destroying news that doesn't profit in this ecosystem.

Killing most forms of advertising across the board would of course basically destroy these large tech companies that rely on them. But the same companies have completely derailed society with their "services". We'd be better off without them.

Of course this would likely hurt "GDP" and "The Economy", but that would just mean we have an unproductive economy primarily inflated by a pointless circle of advertisement.

I'm not in a field where leetcode is the deciding factor but there's similar gamified focuses. The idea being you can pick out self-motivated autodidacts with those kinds of challenges/experience in the challenges, then fill in the connective tissue later.

This was just one example of a capable intern who was tripped up by file types.

I keep a print out of "The Machine Stops" on my bookshelf. It was hugely impactful.

Not OP but similar type of brain here. Certain types of abstractions make me uncomfortable, the worst being "trust me bro" type web framework abstractions where there isn't a direct link between A and B, just a contract definition that says "A and B will integrate... somehow".

When an API says it takes something, I need to know the exact form of that "thing". Saying "you can give it this object" doesn't suit me because where are the edge cases, where are the interactions, how can I know for sure I'm giving it what it needs. The docs never tell you where to find the object def, then you spend 3 hours diving into the source code to understand it's just a two item struct or something.

LLMs introduced an explosion of complexity, suddenly code bases sprout out of nowhere, and there's no point in following all the different datapaths through because the guy who loves testing out the latest claude will just change everything in a few days anyway.

With low level programming, nearly everything is just raw data, aligned to meaning. I like to tell juniors confused about file types, that file types are a social construct, they're just a bag of bytes with some structure. Same thing applies with low level programming. You know what a byte is, you know the endianness, the signedness, you can feel comfort in knowing you're not missing anything, and then you build up from there seeing each block build upon the previous.

He's saying he likes to pay a $2500 HOA fee to keep the poors away. It doesn't matter where it goes, as long as it filters out undesirables.

Yeah because it's ran by the State Department. Propaganda is propaganda.

Only difference is some people are proud to be duped by one and horrified by the other.

This is no different than Chatgpt picking up a RadioFree* think piece in the grand scheme.

Same way you weave together yarn. The individual fibers bind together with weaving and friction and form a longer chain.

you can tell by the way it is

Didn't the anthrax from the scares post 9/11 trace back to Fort Detrick?

> I never understood the racist or xenophobic accusations

Here's the setting, 1000s are dying in hospitals every day. People know very little about how to protect themselves. The first country that was really hit locked everything down hard to reduce transmission.

Regardless of how you feel, separation and isolation is sure fire to prevent grandma dies via drowning in her own mucus.

But preventing deaths is anti-freedom. We can't prevent the deaths, but we can find someone to blame.

So we blame China because our own public health facilities cannot keep up with the actual virus. It's a human right to infect as many people as possible. It's a human right to have a 7th grade reading level while also telling doctors to "do their research".

Vaccines and quarantine have been selected as a culture war target. It's all over facebook now. Minions are telling your mother only dumb people get vaccines.

Since you can't be mad at a force of nature, you create conspiracies that the dastardly Chinese have released a virus while simultaneously moving mountains to prevent the spread within China.

The smart thing would be to follow the moves of the supposed evil country that wanted to kill americans, by doing what they do to protect their own citizens. Not today commies, they're both at fault for creating a virus, and any attempt at not dying is communism.

The Aristocrats.

Chill out there, heritage foundation

What was the "freedom convoy" dissenting from?

Vaccine mandates, for a virus that was doing multiple 9/11's daily, by a bunch of guys who sit in their trucks all day.

Change your diaper, dude.

It was a loud handful of guys, not a broad swath of vaguely republican types getting debanked.

> Falling victim to de-banking alone

This is especially ironic given how many Trump supporters had "de-banking" as their main issue.

IIRC most of them were "debanked" due to crypto fraud or other financial crimes.

This might sound dramatic but you have it a bit backwards.

You can call back to Major General Smedly Butler and his "War is a racket".

WWII got the US out of the remnants of the great depression. The massive industrial push for both our equipment and the lend-lease model was a massive infusion into our economy. It was so huge, that it never really stopped. Our economic model and system was sick, and the military industrial complex(dramatic but apt term) was a large-scale make-work endeavor that would double as an expression of global power and propaganda both home and abroad.

One could take this and begin to see that conflict may be instigated for the sake of the MIC. Al Qaeda wasn't in Iraq, but it didn't stop us from invading, making up claims of WMDs that couldn't be substantiated, then destabilizing the region. The power vacuums then create later conflicts, for more military machinery to be built for.

The HMMV was continued to be sent to the middle east long after we all acknowledged they were death traps for soldiers. Same thing for certain tanks, they kept making them to keep people employed.

The big thing now, is the propaganda worked too well, and we became too focused on giving as much taxpayer dollars to lockheed and raytheon as we could.

We didn't win Afghanistan, Iraq left ISIS in it's wake. But the point wasn't to win, it was to brutalize(externally facing propaganda) and sell weapons. Since the purpose of conflict was so extremely warped to enable the MIC, winning didn't matter, and our ability to win corroded greatly. We won WWII because of our logistics. Those logistics have broken down as we deindustrialized and moved to more and more expensive "smart weapons". Those smart weapons made promises of warfare so advanced, you only need a handful. So we pay millions per missile. Then we use them all up defending against dumb weapons, and we lack the capacity to make more.

Our military is in effect a paper tiger. The real threat of the US military is mass civilian casualty. If we can't take them out with drones, land invasion would be a catastrophe, and then actual WMDs would be deployed to save face. Nuclear genocide is the US military's only real remaining card, as we've devoured the propaganda and rested on our grandparent's laurels while losing sight of what earned the respect.

I saw that in Rome 13 years ago. Three road workers pulling up some bricks to access a utility. One guy in the hole, two guys outside the hole, one with a tallboy beer, at 930.

I'm sure it comes with a lot of problems but there's something to be said about a relaxed society.

Gen Z still parties and socializes, but their parties are constantly recorded and posted on social media. There's much higher stakes to getting wasted and making a fool out of yourself in the panopticon.

I have a 12 year old Acer C720 that while obviously doesn't run chromeos anymore, it's still useful as a super durable 12'' linux machine.(thankfully it's intel based)

It road around in a backpack while cycling around campus, survived multiple bike spills, knocked off tables half a dozen times.

Really sad we can't get something like this anymore.