UweSchmidt

"The Kung Fu Panda movies focus on moving away from the tradition of Confucianism and moving towards the Daoism ideas of doing what feels natural."

I haven't watched the movies, but it seems Panda-Daoism happens to conform to Hollywood's western individualist thought and therefore predictably "wins". I'd love to watch or read something that lets the Confucianist be the deeper truth, for a change. Do you happen to know of anything?

I suspect there are is quite a bit of wisdom in there worth exploring, and wouldn't mind to be confronted with a stronger dose of "different" once in a while.

I've always assumed it was the last two centuries that confronted individuals with the most change - cars, telephones, the internet transformed the lives of people like never before, while further in the past it was just steady farming with some wars and diseases sprinkled in, right?

Reading between the lines of the history books seems to show that not only the amplitude of change (from good to bad and vice versa) must have been greater in the past; the cultural change of new rulers, new religions, unvoluntary migration must have hit harder than the mild confusion people had with exciting new tech in the recent years.

Looking for an exact phrase (with "quotes") and limiting search to a specific site (maybe assisted by UI) is not difficult for the "avg internet users". It was possible to find just the most obscure and surprising information with a good search, and Google had the SEO spammers and content clowns beat for many years.

Now people use "site:reddit.com" to limit the results to a space that is moderated by humans and not completely commercialized.

The loss of Old Google might be worse for humanity than the burning of the Library of Alexandria.

On the other hand in 1990 the smartphone was no necessity to take part in normal society, so the 500$ and monthly data fee is an additional cost weighing on people, if wages and the price for a bag of potatoes remained equal. It's complicated. (Predictably the bias is to downplay inflation, to allow "printing" more money.)

I hope I'm not misreading your comment but it sounds a little to casual, no? An invasion by sea would probably be a lot more brutal than what's happening in the Ukraine, with a lot more civilian and military casualties, and of course a much bigger impact on the world economy. And of course, countries succeeding with territorial expansions would set a really bad precedent for the 21st century.

We should hope to sit out difficult geopolitical situations as long as possible. The world will probably be a lot different in 20 and 50 years. In Germany we had 40 years of separation and cold war and then suddenly - happy reunification!

The articles you cited could do a better job putting the real numbers front and center and present the real, and anticipated (if Bitcoin takes off) ecological impact on the planet. The coindesk article in particular cites really alarming claims about energy usage but doesn't do any real math to disprove it, and only vaguely hints at possible mitigating arguments. Appeals to emotion, citing ideal visions of Satoshi and using "domestic tumble dryers" (newsweek) as comparisons for energy usage further weaken the point these articles should be making.

It's not possible to go back though, so I wouldn't want to dwell on the past too much. There is probably a really good reason why everything is run by companies, why we have Discord instead of connecting with a variety of clients to an open protocoll. Probably because it's too difficult to make everything run smooth everywhere, so you need a team, so you need monetization. People like the reach and impact they can have on Twitter and Youtube, it's just so much louder than a little, undiscovered self-hosted blog could ever be, so what's the point?

Maybe tech will eventually be commodizided enough to give key infrastructure applications back to the "people". Or maybe the cloud providers will control it all? We'll see.

What's the "early promise of the internet" to you?

The Venture Capitalists and startuppers that made HN like the internet to be Free enough that new businesses and services can thrive, and Open Source for the accessible and reusable building blocks for their projects, but clearly like commercialization and being the middleman, like in the good old offline days. The headache of moderating their platforms feels more urgent than thinking about Freedom of Speech.

The early internet, to me, was the promise to remove those middlemen and have us directly connect, and, while using mostly free and low-overhead websites or services, contribute back. I expected real estate classifieds posted in an open format to open databases by now, and the job description of "real estate agent" retired.

When I think if "upholding" anything I might think of Slashdot clearly preaching Open Source and the Evils of Microsoft. Naive by today's standards but hey, it kept the old ethos alive for a little longer.

Edit: No doubt many other excellent values were upheld by HN and the moderators, so thanks for that!

It's the other way 'round. We're all good at tacitly accepting broken processes if it benefits us but will quickly fix things if opportune.

Another alternative: https://tineye.com

Yes, it was magical and unbounded, but it didn't represent reality at all. You couldn't really 'share', nothing went viral, nothing had societal impact. Culture was formed by mass media, reality formed by real life interactions and connections in public spaces; the "streets" were important.

I still remember this unconscious 'reaching out' to strangers in public (now all in their little bubbles, on their phones). I still kind of find myself expecting to meet some of the online figures in real life, to ground their wild claims of importance and glamour in my physical reality (which will never happen). With these experiences, making the internet small again might be possible.

Not so for this generation: The internet can only be big. That one bad tweet is reality, right there on the phone on the nightstand, always-on. There is no way to switch it off, to walk away, to go 'outside'. To find meaning, purpose, answers they have to go out and sift through it all. To find peace, that place needs to be sanitized. Sorry, those "weird little creations" will have to go...

They could approach the intermediate services that are usually used to access the blockchain. Moxie had his NFT removed by one of the market places and gone it was from the wallet, gone for all practical purposes.

https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html

Having to archive environments and toolchains along with backups is unpleasant.

What is the plan: when decryption fails (and before you identified that it's a versioning issue with openssl, in your case) you'd reinstall an old linux to a random computer and work from there? How many config files and settings are even involved in your backup process and how can you be sure you haven't missed anything?

I hope there are dependency-free solutions for this - a winzip-encrypted .zip file that asks for a password should work everywhere even in the future?

Market mechanisms attract people from poorer countries to do the work for cheap, depressing the wages in the relevant sectors.

Employers, and people in jobs that are currently safe benefit from that (cheap food, cheap construction, cheap service) and therefore "hold beliefs" over how things should be, or why society strangely just doesn't seem willing to pay more...

The "insatiable desire" for low skilled workers is coming from corporate interests to keep wages low and workers unorganized. We now have a precarious underclass working with no job security and little integration in society, right here in Germany where we had extremely strong worker rights just a few decades ago. Many regular jobs that used to be steady and good to raise a family with are now low paid and temporary. Super convenient and "win-win" for the 'haves' so we look away, as we want a human on a bike to bring us our burrito. If you look closer you see the guy getting 13€ for cleaning the nasty meat factory floors, laid off periodically to skirt labour laws.

This also means that poorer countries in the EU can't be competitive through price as we have our own low-cost sector. Lose-lose really.

We are also on the verge of many automation breakthroughs that will make many low skilled jobs obsolete, and at the same time huge challenges that can only solved by highly skilled people.

I'm changing that to: Propaganda works and there is little defense.

Pictures, voices, narratives, emotions directly create memories; connections between neurons are created or strenghtened - you can switch on your "anti virus" but the machine is hacked on the "hardware" level.

Propaganda probably still works even if you're aware what's going on.

There might have been some improvements in this area but I still haven't seen any (male) IT guy in a movie who is not portrayed as some kind of weirdo and relegated to the side. Even female nerds are at the very best assisting the hero.

TV lawyers and doctors however get to hold jargon-filled monologues and be in lead roles.

/rant

By who though? Facebook?

Fact checking can certainly only be done in a transparent process with democratic legitimization.

Anyway the idea to take on the responsibility for fact-checking seems kinda awful if I were a corporation I'd try to hand that over to someone else, there is going to be a lot of trouble in that area in the future.

Not the right place to debate further but it seems this topic seems to be underdiscussed or I present my points not well enough. Certainly my goal is neither to earn money in horizons of days, nor to have arbitrage opportunities at all. All of that is nonsense and would assume the legitimacy of people who sit in front of computer screens looking at stock charts. Value creating is a long term endeavour and so should be investing.

If we let go of the mentality to "dump VW after the scandal before someone else" we find ourselves with bad news about VW and new conclusions about a good value for the stock and people buying and selling accordingly after all have ready their morning paper. A small Tobin tax or other technical measures can prevent unethical actors from taking the banana out of your shopping cart and pricing it within nanoseconds.

The supply-and-demand maximalism is a holdover from anticommunist thinking and ignores market distortions like Zillow's real estate buying.

Anyone who buys organically is buying after the HFT firms have made their buying decisions on the entirety of the market, it's not possible to "wait a day or two". The deal will be incrementally worse as these firms extract value, your price will be the one that all of these firms deemed "meh".

It's like walking into a grocery store and the banana you really want it 1$ and you'll buy. Because that's the price that highly sophisticated middlemen between the store and you have determined to be good.

The liquidity argument is abstract and unquantifyable enough to be used as a fig leaf for the industry. Real investors who are in it for fundamental values, dividends or strategy don't need to sell in a nanosecond. Now that you can sell in a nanosecond your deal is bad, as in the moment you hear of the Volkswagen scandal all the trading algorithms are done with their work already.

They are not replacing "needed traders", i.e. people that used to execute trades required by real people or companies, like "buy some Apple stock". These firms are playing their very own game in the markets, ultimately extracing money from the economy, with the supposed public benefit of "creating liquidity" (not needed for real investors who can very well wait a day or two before closing a deal) while actually distorting the markets and obscuring the real value).

Adding a new transaction in a new block (e.g. for a house sale transaction) is different from undoing software issues (log4j, the "DAO hack" on Ethereum). The former is problematic due to the oracle problem, the latter invalidates the concept of the blockchain entirely; it means I could lose the house because a mining/staking majority, or a vocal group on the Ethereum subreddit agreed to "fix" something on the existing blockchain. That such a sacrilegious thing was allowed to happen is evidence that no one cares except to get rich through the coins they got early (or launched themselves).

(Of course there are many more ways I could lose a house that's ledgered on a blockchain, one thing I missed earlier: The impossibility for an individual to operationally secure the secrets for the crypto scheme against theft or loss.)

This defeats the core idea of having something immutable, that no one can mess with. If you can agree to roll out a new version, why not do it with regular software?

The "Networks behind them" are also worthless, if you mean blockchain.

Consider the oracle problem, the fact that running Hello World requires mining a block, that software contains errors and cannot be patched on the blockchain, the curious absence of real world applications of blockchain after all those years, and the inevitable precedence of the Law in the real world that makes any "the code is the law" ideas moot...

A complicated, hard to understand scheme like blockchain is just the right thing to keep the crypto hype going and to attract more of that money that is looking for investment opportunities in this world of overvalued assets and low-interest rates.

FAQs are a relic from the old days when websites dealt with obscure topics, provided a lot of value for free with no monetization goal and didn't owe the random visitor anything.

These days it's worth looking into why certain questions are asked "frequently" and if the information can be strutured better in the first place. I also suspect no one is really asking much these days, people just bounce.

Definitively going to get my booster shot lol.

Thanks! It's great practice to look for your own fault first before finding it in others.

I noticed how deep in bullshit territory Western society is when talking to people from former communist Eastern Germany (until maybe the early 2000s), a place where self-promotion wasn't a thing, where nothing could be gained by bullshitting.

People would just plain state a realistic state of their affairs, like that they're unemployed, whereas I thought "dude you just moved here 2 weeks ago and you'll find work in no time, don't put yourself down like that". It was really eye-opening how much self-promotion is going on even among the most humble people.

We have to assume that Google devs see these crappy spammy code websites too on a daily basis, right? What's up with the incredibly strong programmer culture over there, gone already after 20 years? You'd think someone would take these weak search results personally...

You can go to your boss for a feedback meeting, establish that everyone is happy with your work. Then, don't frame it as a problem, just take some time to describe your work process, and how it is not 8 hours of typing, but also some lateral thinking, research, and say you wonder how if it may be a bad look. You can calibrate the expectations for your future work in this meeting. Your boss is probably happy you didn't call for that meeting to quit or complain about a workplace incident or whatever and will assure you that you should proceed as you outlined.

Work is a psychologicall rich topic, related to self-worth and livelihood. The work situation could be problematic and you might sense something happening behind the scenes. Trust your feeling.