alright_scowl

> fsociety remarked (quite correctly) that there are a large number of people who constantly feel the need to denigrate Macs

And in response I remarked (very accurately) that there's an even larger number of people who constantly feel the need to always gush over anything Mac. This very thread is full of such examples.

> "That's not true. I have a Mac, and I don't like it very much."

Misrepresenting much? I said it's an okay laptop. Gets the job done.

> You said they were ridiculously overpriced, which implies that no reasonable person could look at one and think it was worth buying.

That's true. I can get other okay laptops for perhaps half the price. But they won't be as sexy as Apples. They certainly don't have fanboys taking offense at someone saying they are just okay.

> You came into a subthread

I was the one that started the subthread, by daring to say that the M1 I use has a speaker as bad as any other laptop I used. Oh the horror.

Except, you're proving mine.

In a thread full of people gushing on Mac speakers, me saying it's an okay but overpriced machine is considered "hating for the sake of hating"

I wouldn't describe the speakers on the M1 I use as amazing. It's more or less as bad as the speakers of previous laptops I used.

I mean, it is a speaker. Good enough for simple sound feedback on most applications. Music on it sounds bad.

Except they don't? I hate the speaker sound on the Mac I use for work.

Unless "so good" in the title means "not as awful as other shitty laptop speakers", but even that is a poor statement, when the text in the link makes only mentions some vaguely interesting technical musings, without comparing it to anything else.

The way the title is written makes it sound just like any other inane data point of people gushing over Macs.

Made me spit my coffee.

Have my upvote, you glorious bastard.

Agreed. And I say that when my role is "building software systems"

People with different roles in an organization will have different perspectives and goals. Ultimately the software system being built will have to be a compromise of those perspectives and goals.

Everyone has "skin in the game" to a degree, even if they don't "carry a pager".

> People are so skeptic and negative about humans nowadays.

Any positivity I might sometimes happen to feel about humanity quickly proves to be misguided as soon I read what other humans have to say on the internet.

Just go to Twitter, Reddit, or some comments section on YouTube, and you'll quickly come out hating the species too.

> Europe has nothing.

The company that develops Stable Diffusion is German.

I find it as impressive as ChatGPT.

> when the companies funding the research and launching the products realize that the tools are an existential threat to their profits.

Ahh, like Kodak when they were the first to create digital cameras, a good 10 years ahead of the competition, and decided to shelf it because it would eat the nice profits of their film business?

This strategy always works wonders :)

I would actually like if the big tech companies didn't invest in AI to keep their profits. They would eventually be swallowed by other companies that didn't.

> We survived nukes because they were heavily controlled and their spread contained

Much to the opposite. We survived nukes because many countries have them.

If only one country had them, I presume it would be a lot more trigger happy, knowing its opponents wouldn't retaliate.

That's exactly how I've been using it. Absolutely amazing stuff. Saves me hours of combing stuff through the internet while coding, so I can focus in the actual problems I need to work on.

> But in some cases there just might me a connection between concepts we haven't seen before that have merit to generate a truly new idea.

But it's important to notice that a language model cannot reason to synthesize new information by making this connection. It can only connect two ideas if those ideas were already connected in the training data. To put in another way - ChatGPT is a new powerful way to organize existing information.

And that's not to be dismissive. Natural Language Processing is a hard problem, and ChatGPT gracefully parses through and generates natural language, giving out mostly correct answers at the same time. But the quality of information it gives improves with my skill to ask it good questions. Not different from a internet search engine that gives you better answers if you now how to make better search queries.

> If you do the math that doesn't always work out.

I disagree. But it depends on how less the remote companies pay. Are we talking about 80% of the salary of a RTO company? 60%? 30%?

The close it gets, the better the math works out for remote companies. Moving away from metropolitan areas incurs in a huge decrease of expenses, and a huge increase in quality of life. But of course, it depends on the salary you'd make working remote.

Smaller salary to be able to live in much cheaper cities where your general quality of life will also be massively improved?

Sounds like a win-win to me. Especially considering that the decrease in cost of living probably far surpasses de decrease in salary.

> If your wealth and well-being is tied to the puppy crushing machine

Let's crush some puppies m'boy.

Them bills, they keep coming.

This is the right answer.

I think the startup scene is mostly a huge grift. Companies that don't make any sense being propped up by VC money until they find and exit (typically an IPO) and are left to crash and burn. I avoid working for startups like I avoid the plague.

But I like that the grift exists. They inject money into the industry, being indirectly responsible for my salary being much higher than I ever expected.

I hope the startup grift and the advertisement fueled maelstrom keeps going until it's time for me to retire, god bless them.

I think the basic assumption is "you need help, and we are willing to help you".

I guess it all comes down to what "life coaching" means in this context. If we are talking about some sort of social assistants that will understand what ails the people in need and help them find a way around their issues (e.g.: navigate state bureaucracy, acquiring some basic qualification, find help with rehabilitation, etc) I see no downside.

Instead of seeing this as patronizing, I actually see it as quite humane.

> It helps that in the Netherlands, poverty is typically unnecessary. There is (almost) guaranteed livable income for everyone independent of employment, due to our strong social security system.

I lived in multiple countries, including the Netherlands.

Living there substantially changed how I view subjects such as taxation and social security. Taxes were high, but the benefits a strong social security brings to the place are great.

Not saying that there's no waste, things that could be improved, etc. But in comparison to the other places I lived, the Dutch were way ahead of the curve.

> There are not that many parties to vote for and people vote for the party they dislike least

This is democracy at its finest.

How exactly is it just "barely" democratic?

> There are many concerns about giving a centralized authority more power

> Also, since the EU is a vassal of Pax Americana

So the problem is giving a centralized authority (EU) more power. At the same time the EU is a vassal of the US (Pax America, which is a fairly ridiculous notion in and of itself).

I can only conclude from the horrible word salad you gave me that individual member states without the EU would also be vassals of the US, which is itself a centralized power. So the EU existence, following your logic, is inconsequential.

Your thoughts were mildly entertaining to parse through. Sorry for not giving credence to your thoughts beyond mere entertainment however.

Are you implying I gave up freedoms to state/bureaucracy?

Which freedoms did I give up, exactly?

Funny, do they? I don't participate in threads about the US and its policies, so I wouldn't be able to tell.

Forgive me for not taking their opinion about an economic block that they don't seem to understand and that their country doesn't belong to very seriously.

I think the benefits far outweigh the downsides. To be frank, I think a big chunk of its problems is that it is not integrated enough.

Then again, my perspective is from someone not originally from Europe, that chose to migrate here and declined job offers from the US even though I would receive considerably more money had I accepted. I have zero regrets, by the way.

So take my opinion as one without the social nuance from someone born here.

You're right, they will never grow out of it.

> If you want to be a game developer, are you really going to be happy writing business crud apps with the majority of your working energy

You may not be happy doing that, but you will also not be sad, especially if your financial situation makes life tolerable.

On the other hand, you will certainly be unhappy if you were always poorly paid for your skills and were abused and exploited by your employers due to making an effort to be working in something you are passionate about.

In the world we live in, pursuing a passion job is reserved for people that come from families that already sorted their financial situation for them.

Where I live (also in the EU), I noticed a slowdown in recruiting starting on mid-December. While I usually receive at least 2 messages from recruiters per week, I received only 2 messages in almost 2 months.

However, last week things seem to be heating up again.

The odd part is that these bad takes seem to typically come from people that don't even live the EU, and don't understand how it works.

They just don't like that it exists.

But that has been a part of the game ever since the first entries.

"Nuclear Gandhi" being the prime example.