UweSchmidt

Damn, even the top performers are jaded and checking out. Someone has to keep believing, no?

I think he'll make it.

Not only does it look like Twitter will survive (if the mass-migration to another platform hasn't happened yet, when will it? If the site runs stable after the initial shock, why would it run less stable later?), it just might make Musk more powerful than we could ever imagine. Contrasting with other social media founders/owners he isn't shy to use the platform as a very personal thing, to actively shape the discussion and to pick and fight fights. The potential power he could potentially wield makes the purchase, as well as possibly running Twitter as a loss, worth it.

How does R2R relate to privacy violations during repair? Apple repair techs can snoop on user data more (i.e. pressure users to hand over admin pw, as reported in this thread) as long as we can't easily swap a MacBook hard disc ourselves.

Ah yes, the factory recovery disks, such a low point in computing. I remember it not working when needed (and if it did, it would wipe the machine), having to use Windows XP/7 CD-Roms from older computers to fix my installation. Microsoft handing out Windows 10 for free and OEM keys being available for 10€ on Ebay ended this weird time when Microsoft had piracy-anxiety even though Windows came preinstalled on new computers, while at the same time the hype around the Apple's MacBooks was at an all-time high.

We had class warfare before, and collectivistic action (i.e. unions, strikes) was a logical and (somewhat?) successful solution to improve quality of life. Individualism as the underlying trend prevents those classic solutions and therefore individualistic solutions have to be found: Instead of just collectively asking for x% more salary, society tediously defines and articulates new instances of discrimination (which are ultimately violations on the individual level). Fixing various internal injustices leads to friction and is probably mostly a wealth transfer from different tiers of middle and lower classes. The powers that be therefore applaud and encourage individualism and thus further strenghten this trend.

American individualism has existed for a long time, but trends continue and accelerate. Recent trends to increase individualism:

- Influencers, streamers introduced and established 1-n relationships in society, somewhat replacing more organic 1-1 connections. People start mapping classic relationship-type emotions on what Onlyfans gives them.

- High quality smart phone cameras brought the selfie, the concept of frequently broadcasting a high quality picture of myself, rather than a more natural slice of life moment, picture of a group doing something, relying on another person to be available and willing to take a photo.

- continuing decline of newspapers and other general-audience media, replaced by chose-your-own-bubble media

- online dating becoming widespread, making people more selective, less patient to deal with random encounters; more random rejection, ghosting.

- the pandemic

- homeoffice

The fundamental force behind this is individualism. Every single technological innovation has made it easier for the individual to function better alone. Every societal change has emphasized the individual right over the (real or perceived) benefit of the collective. This trend seems to accelerate and absolutely nothing that is happening in western society even remotely suggests a possible turnaround.

You can take action, like get a new hobby that is just an okay activity but the people are great. Work on becoming a kick-ass friend yourself and cook for people and all that good stuff. But you'll do all that against massive societal forces. A few decades back you'd join one of the few organizations or clubs that happened in your area, and instantly be in a reliable community (if you adapt a little - let's ignore all the downsides for a moment). Friends would hook you up with a partner who's as nerdy as you. When I was young random strangers had regularly great conversations on trains. A city street was a village, you knew everyone.

That is not coming back anytime soon.

The ability to work 8 honest, focussed hours a day is a special skill that needs to be acquired and cultivated. Many people never learned this and are doing ok in their careers. This includes many in that middle management layer that would have to enforce, or at least recognize and reward those productive 8 hours from employees in the first place.

It used to be different, and I started my worklife in a large, old-school company and experienced many departments working in a very structured way, people sitting at their desks working steadily througout the day, with a clearly defined scope and not under a huge amout of pressure but ultimately under a boss' supervision.

Work has changed, incentives have changed, and what do you do with that 8-hour-work superpower? Finish all the tickets from the board, revealing how slow everyone else is? End up with the truly unsolvable and unrewarding work? Try to take initiative and fix things the analyst hasn't specified, liaison with other teams until your boss tells you to stop? Learn job specific tech on the job but feel awkward watching a video series or setting up sample projects on the work machine?

Anything can be overcome, humans can do anything (get out of poverty, convert to healthy living, run marathons, stop smoking....) yet the majority (of a huge sample size of humans) is stuck in their way, held down by environmental conditions and, if you will, by limits in the human condition or whatever. If it could be fixed by telling people to "try harder" they would have by now, no?

The answer is to alleviate the environmental conditions. You have mentioned in another post that you have benefitted from food stamps for a while (did I understand that right?), allowing you to eat healthy; other people need that and maybe a little additional help with food, housing and clothing (all of it basic human rights anyway and relatively cheap to provide for in a modern society) to reduce the pressure and higher order effects of not having that safety net.

Very creative and a fun way to interact with SD. I would encourage you to explore this idea further, as interest in SD might grow and people want to engage with the topic in an accessible way. I like the idea of hard-limiting play (1 quizz per day) but a small backlog of previous pictures could be nice to explore a little.

The past is a different country, and anything that happened before your grandfather was born happened in a different culture altogether. The people who lived in your general geographic area ages ago are not your people, and it's useless to try and set the record straight for them.

thanks

Just curious, how did you find OP's Flickr profile? HN profile is empty.

Are you personally acquainted? Or do people routinely run 3rd party intelligence tools to connect online profiles?

Giving weapons to Ukraine is unrelated to all other previous conflicts and needs to be analyzed in isolation. On the other hand, if weapon deliveries are found to be the correct move, future underdogs in invasions could receive a similar aid.

But were you blocked for this opinion or just "shat on"? If you get censored then I'm not sure what the point of an alternative social platform is. We need to talk these issues through somewhere.

In what capacity do you "run email servers"? Do you "keep an eye" on other people's email?

"Musk" and "failed to deliver" in one sentence without negative qualifier?

Regardless of what he claimed in those public brainstorming sessions, and what opinions he communicates, business-wise the man has accomplished more than probably any human in history. Without him internet payments would have come later, and we probably wouldn't really have electric cars, vertically landing rockets and saffordable global satellite internet. The nerve to take on any of these fields and build innovative companies on that level boggles the mind.

I mean I might be missing someone. We have many whose life's work was to build one innovative major business. Some built a conglomerates, but usually on existing technologies.

I think people are writing him off a little early with regards to Twitter. Turning it around and making it work according to his will and possibly leveraging it for something even bigger isn't too unlikely.

Without copyright people can make even more things. Bring out your own Mickey Mouse - Star Wars crossover, NSFW!

Imagine the entire corpus of human creation, free to be remixed and extended. For now we hope they make a good sequel, someday...

It's technology putting people out of work.

We care a lot about Copilot, we care somewhat about artists, we care little about manual workers, and less so if they are in another country.

I wouldn't go for the cheapest price, I'd go to some established place in your jurisdiction with a wider product range and size, that targets small businesses. You have a chance to get some useful hotline, and things can be 'integrated' and are more likely to work, i.e. host your website - book the domain example.com - book a managed nextcloud and have it be at cloud.example.com etc.

Their email service is likely to have some credibility from the global anti-spam force. They probably have the budget for best practices and reasonable security. As you mention .de domains: The online legal text generators for Impressum/Datenschutzerklärung are likely to have the correct text fragments to use for larger vendors. Overall they just have to uphold some level of reputation I hope.

Example: ionos.de

Worth noting that that round knob, where it exists, has lost a lot of functionality:

1. Setting volume to 0 will pause the recording, even though I sometimes want to silently forward through some unwanted parts (intros or ads in podcasts).

2. These knobs are also infinity knobs, I liked to have fixed start and end position with an indicator how loud it's going to be when I switch on. That last part has been taken over by software and probably can't be done reliably any more.

3. On the leftmost, zero position that round knob was also used to switch a radio on or off. It is very convenient to have a single movement to switch music on, and with the same movement adjust the volume, or to lower the volume and while doing so, maybe decide to switch it all off entirely.

There are some complex problems out there, but the vast majority of requirements are rather trivial, no? Heavy websites that don't do much, but with enough javascript to harm usability seem to be an issue HN readers agree on. Opening a car glove box is another simple problem that now has complex solutions (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lRB0gbYO3fE). Isn't it weird how those things come about? It can't possibly be incompetence, nor would it be outright evil.

I suspect it's a subconscious process where we like to build a framework that appeals to us, where we get to be 'senior' and shape the world the way it is convenient for us. The antidote is a clear commitment to simplicity, to meditate over Picasso's Bull and apply that to our work.

Professionals in every domain like to maintain a certain level of difficulty to keep amateurs out. The tools of a trade can never be too easy, the tax code can never be simplified, legal writing and procedure has to be opaque etc. as professionals subconsciously reject job security threating ideas.

This sabotage is subtle: A wide variety of technical decisions can be made at any time, with complex trade-offs, bounded by what the majority of developers is willing and able to handle. As we move our servers to the cloud to make our lives easier and get admins fired, the exact right level of complexity shows up in AWS and Azure to enable stable and well-paid cloud expert jobs. For that difficulty-goldilocks-zone, Visual Basic was too easy, and things like functional programming are too hard.

People who are successful in a system count on its continuation (and often won't invest in a few hundred $/€ worth of emergency food, water, heat and light), people who are not successful in a system count it's failure (and do real, or ceremonial 'prepping', telling themselves and others that they will be relatively more successful when the inevitable disaster strikes).

The discussion centers around copyright for now, but it seems those code-generating (and art-generating) AIs are just starting out and have a lot of room to grow. If future versions are just magical, our current ideas of programming will be obsolete, regardless copyright considerations.

Maybe we are a little too short sighted and defensive while facing our industrial revolution in the form of the AI revolution, which is coming for our jobs, or at least for the way we are used to do our jobs.

Those pesky copyright violations could be manually 'fixed', or, Microsoft could go and prove with their data that programmers are all just reinventing the wheel and are actually reimplementing the most basic stuff over and over. Meanwhile, they might be correlating live data from Azure and git histories from many projects, and have Copilot refactor your project based on load. Unthinkable?

Hello Neoclassical Economics: Humans are rational actors in an ideal market, in which supply and demand is rationalizing out anything bad.

Is that really the world we live in? Have you met rational humans? Are we living in ideal markets?

Truth is, bad situations of all sorts are springing up and remaining in place long-term. A closer look at each individual issue (as done in this thread) reveals complex factors that need to be adressed. Using a simplistic model from economics to ignore any and all ethics (term used loosely for any attempt to do what's right) is not valid imo.

As usual, systems allow for the few people who really care to opt-out, preventing backlash but not impeding the system's function.

I see no reason to outright dismiss Sokrates' analysis, nor the professor's, who is giving quantifyable data (deteriorating grades, grade inflation) and mentioning plausible issues (deteriorationg attention spans).

The world is constantly changing and influencing each upcoming generation, for the better or worse, and Sokrates considered this issue important enough to discuss.

If trash was expensive and cover the true externalities, we might more long-lasting products that are easy to disassemble, repair and recycle.

Maybe it's the general crappiness, the planned obsolescence in everything that makes us hold on to all sorts of "spare parts". Back in the day when producing items was hard, a wardrobe would be handed down through multiple generations. Hoarding wasn't feasible but also not necessary.

This is true for almost anything, for example bicycle tail lights:

https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Da...

There is an immense variety in the 10-20$ range, with very little brand recognition or true transparency on quality or attributes. It is likely that new iterations repeat previous mistakes or regress.

What we need is to find a robust, simple, sustainable, long-lasting, repairable optimum that is truly environmental friendly and is produced ethically, and then, as you suggest, focus human ingenuity on something else. This will not happen in the current economic system, but will require some kind of intervention or crisis.

One measure for code quality should be the effort to make a minor change to code, or to fix a simple, common bug.

Can a developer who is familiar with the code, effortless make a change in an area where change was expected at the beginning?

Assuming a typical, minor bug that turns out to originate from the usual suspect places in the code (database query, logical error, incomplete implementation of a requirement, off-by-one/calculation error). Is it usually easy to narrow things down, and to spot the error?

That means the lead architect should regularly try implementing minor features or fix minor bugs and/or pair up with colleagues who do, and draw conclusions about the code accordingly.