Mainan_Tagonist

I happen to work in this industry, and just a word for those that compare this with an Apple Watch or a Casio, this Vacheron-Constantin will likely be around 200 years from now, it will still be a testimony of the refinement and engineering of a fine craft that few can achieve, a highly valued item with specialist technicians marvelling on the talent of its builders, just as is the case today with 200 year old timepieces.

you'll be very lucky if your Casio can last as long. Your mass commoditised Apple watch will likely be worthless.

Personaly, I like the IWC on my wrist as much as I like my Casio G-Shock, both are wonderful in their own way.

The Apple watch on my wife's wrist is a fine computer i guess, but at some point, it will have the same "quaint charm" as the IBM Thinkpad she owned 23 years ago.

This reminds me of a early chapter in Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson, where Shaftoe gets to meet Enoch (Red) Root.

The evolution of Ars Technica into what it has become today is much of the reason why I'd much rather read HN.

More often than not, the technical discussions here flies way above my head, but at least (except for the political ones), i do not feel like everything has to be turned into a "Black vs White, Good vs Evil, Smart vs Stupid" destruction of the counter-arguing party's arguments, and I usually learn something valuable along the way.

VLC - VideoLan

https://github.com/orgs/videolan/people

As i recollect, GnuPG was also a one man band for some time.

It mobilises a number of resources to patch up a wounded/sick soldier.

There is a myth that the 5.56 round was designed to wound and not to kill (contrary to the 7.62 round the soviet side used) as it would make war costly in a very visible manner.

I guess the idea that inducing "Sepsis by poop" follows the same line of thinking.

some would, obviously, but only those that really wanted to, just as some end up buying cigarettes or alcohol.

But that would be a fraction of what it is now

The term "Too Big To Fail" is probably inappropriate here (was it ever appropriate actually? banks should have been allowed to fail in 2008), indeed Facebook may well be replaced at some point (is Gen Z even on Facebook?), and AI might well replace Google's killer product: its search engine.

This said, I tend to agree with you, the power law exists and has to be maintained by big tech to control the content because a captive audience is soooo profitable.

Same feeling here, I loved the early internet, it played a huge part in who i am actually! This said, this is not the early internet anymore, where content was mechanically regulated by a sort of egalitarian rule. Social Media applies a power law to content, so that 80% of the viewers are aware of the 20% that's available and human nature being what it is, lowest common denominator content gets pushed to the forefront.

Hence all the attention seekers on FacebInstaTok...

This is further compounded by the pervert effects generated by these platforms one of them being the mimetism and the general wolfpack behaviour that can surge out of the madness of crowds. Online Bullying is real.

My kids (11 and 14) are stuck on feature phones for now and i'd like, as much as possible to keep them off smartphones and their constant Notifications for the foreseeable future, until they are not kids.

It's a commonly repeated trope, yet more often than not such concern being voiced was almost immediately followed by a period of severe decline for the commentator's civilization.

Aristotle saw the end of Athenian democracy and the rise of the Alexander the great, and the following Hellenistic period of mediterranean disorder. Horace was hardly the only one to discuss roman decline, look for Suetonius, Juvenal or Petrone for other examples of same era romans lamenting the decline of Rome.

As for Huxley, it is interesting that much of what is pointed out in this short commentary echoes Ortega y Gasset on the "Revolution of the Masses", Oswald Spengler also comes to mind.

Human history is that of the rise and decline of civilisations, we may well have already been on a downward slope for the past 100 years.

a little Off-Topic but if you ever get to visit Geneva, there is a permanent exhibition at CERN to show how the LHC work and what is the organization around it to collect information, keep it running... etc... it is rather kid friendly too.

Indeed, i used to work for ANA, and my colleagues used to bring this up fromt time to time, with assorted creepy anecdotes. This disaster somehow struck a nerve in the Japanese psyche.

There were even novels written on this topic with a boarding pass for flight 123 included as a bookmark.

As long as it doesn't remind us all of the ill fated JL123 flight...

"~1999, you would have had Pentium III @ ~500 MHz max in a laptop, likely less. Pentium M wouldn't release for several more years."

and, Boy, did i waste cycles on enabling every eye candy possible on Linux/BSD on the only 150 Mhz Pentium pro with 32Mb of ram i could afford in 2001-2002...

"Instead, we built a brutalist efficient system where most expression is limited to setting your background."

Common people being creative was MySpace, remember the eyesore?

Just being sarcastic, i think the "Ugly" web of early HTML was actually wonderful, and we should encourage people to go back to it, but let's not delude ourselves too much, FaceStagram will always win the appeal of the masses.

True enough, though if Trinity could jump between skyscrapers and run against a wall before disarming 5 machine gun totting henchmen, i imagine she could have enabled transparency in her Xterm in Enlightenment.

But in more general terms, the representation of computer interfaces, with avatars walking rigidly in 3d pastel coloured surroundings (as presented in a variety of examples, my favorite being the corporate network in the TV Series Profit) sort of fizzled out post 2000, when everybody got to owning a desktop and laptop and realised that the internet was just text in fact, and 3D environments were not so easy to navigate (remember Second-Life).

That is, of course, if your online life did not involve being an elf in World of Warcraft, or something.

This is a nice website, with an interesting purpose. Though i suppose reviewing sci-Fi movies notions of interfaces will soon clash with the dryness of reality.

The 90's were wild in that sense, you could imagine that the internet superhighway would be a superhighway you could literally drive on with your Avatar, and countless movies and tv-series presented things thus.

The noughties were way more grounded in reality, even the Matrix had Trinity hacking into a server using a OpenSSH exploit on a black and white terminal.

deserve?

No one deserves suffering...

your comment is in bad faith, no point discussing this any further with you...

Humm, I have a feeling part of the story is missing here, even though i can relate as i was myself a minimum wage worker in the hospitality industry in Britain for a while (back in 1999, my annual wage was something like 8500 pounds). Long odd hours, not so pleasant interfacing with customers, 7 people sharing a flat in London, so broke at the end of the month that walking from Mayfair to Canada Water was reality because no money for public transport....

Yet, as a foreigner, I (We, as a matter of fact, since all my friends and colleagues were either german, italian, spanish, chinese...) had no real social safety net to rely on. We couldn't go back to our family (500 miles away) with our tail between our legs in case we really fucked up.

Something isn't clear in this writer's account of the reason of her living in poverty, whether it is a story of mental illness, child abuse... things i witnessed years later when i bought a flat in Barking (poor white area of greater London) and this i feel would need to be clarified for me to be able to accept the conclusion that "poverty is largely accidental", especially coming from someone quite so articulate.

Thanks for pointing this out, his book title Diplomacy was very enlightening.

One thing of note in the spew of bile aimed at Kissinger in the HN comment thread is that it appears to emanate from people who were children or not even born during the cold war, and who seem to base their opinion on the comments of rock n' roll stars, cooks, leftist journalists/activists (sometimes turned neocon in their later life, surprise!).

I lament the decline of comment quality on HN whenever a somewhat controversial figure is brought up. It's almost as bad as Ars Technica in those cases, and closely resembles the what comes out of the comment section of the worst right wing news cloaca.

I'll order biography by Niall Ferguson in the meantime.

The cloud isn't free though, neither is shopping on amazon. Private Email (protonmail) starts at... 4 dollars a month... In light of this, are "technoserfs" who use and pay for the cloud (on not so cheap mobile phone, mind you) really the victims? Or are they just regular people who rate certain things as higher priority than others, and it is that hierarchy that displeases Mr Varoufakis so much.

For the rest of your point, everything (class, affluence, age, technology, etc...) changes social interaction, all the time, always.

Now, that's the technofeudalism Varoufakis should talk about.

yes, and this large part of the population does not therefore have the means to become a technoserf.

The same old rant, over and over... Communistic rethoric is unable to evolve, it merelly reproduces the same criticism over time, pinpointing the same flaws just changing the target.

Ho, and punching Hayek, 30 years after his death, is really beneath contempt.

Technofeudalism is something you can choose to be a part of or not. You can (and should) pay for email, news and other services and you may or may not choose the cloud, most do not by the way.

So really, who is Varoufakis talking about?

Hummm, i still prefered my Ti-book, to be honest, and would be very happy for a modern version of it.

And The Watchmen long before that

Well, for the soviet equivalent to James Bond, look no further than Vsevolod Vladimirovich Vladimirov, better known as Max Von Stierlitz.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stierlitz