5,211 karma · joined February 1, 2016
I forsee, and hope for, some pushback against the increasingly egregious abuse of our info in the name of selling us ever more crap. I'm quite glad I've joined little online up to my real name, though google have probably figured too much out.
Unfortunately doing that in today's world would render them unelectable.
Emissions regs are the best our defective system can do, hence slow changes. That even those aren't being honoured makes it a big thing.
Of course many would rather see them start with fraudulent banking than fraudulent car makers.
[0] http://www.economist.com/blogs/dailychart/2010/11/drugs_caus...
I was getting far too jaded and cynical about the constant reinvention of the wheel that was never better, just different. Along with the ever increasing crap masquerading as the next must have with added lock-in. We have far too much stuff and need to make less. The dissonance had me feeling part of the problem not the solution.
I'm less wealthy, but the dot com bust taught me to be frugal (or starve). But I'm spending a lot less too. I'm orders of magnitude happier and satisfied. I feel like I'm doing something substantive and feel good about what I do. I have more options and interesting choices in how the second career develops than I expected. I feel fitter and healthier, and I get to see daylight rather more!
The idea of side project or two to keep my tech neurons active appeals, and after 3 years or so out, appeals rather more. If it makes some extra £ so much the better.
Overall probably the best thing I've ever done.
There's gardens, stables, barns, and a number of outbuildings and estate houses for staff in older times. They still have some tenants and lettings, managed by the estate. The lettings are maintained by local firms usually. Then there's all the amenities associated with being open to the public, putting on various events. There's a charitable trust, but I work for the estate company.
I like the informality of it compared to the large company feel of say the National Trust (national preservation charity) who are more defined with roles. Of course they have hundreds of properties, thousands of staff along with countless volunteers.
They try and use my project and IT abilities when they can too, though I try and discourage them. :) I'm tempted to focus on blacksmithing as it's so interesting, satisfying and just a little magic to watch the guy work. Much to learn if I follow through on that.
I looked around at many things, including car and motorcycle restoration, steam trains (lots of volunteers, few jobs!), and more current things like environment and alternative energy. Many either needed me to go back to uni, or have assorted bits of paper and experience first rather than able to learn as I go.
Like with HN I prefer speed and simple for a text medium over watching it assemble load on demand JPGs like we're on dialup. :)
May as well just use Chrome at this point, rather than Chrome Lite.
My driver was the rant that easily followed on from the above. :) Basically wanting something more substantive, less ephemeral, more tactile. I ended up in restoration. I'm enjoying it hugely and the things I'm doing will have life of many decades, perhaps sometimes centuries.
The surprise was, even after 3 years, discovering there's still more satisfaction in physical tiredness and manual activity at the end of the day than just mental. I'd already experienced this in car restoration and various projects but assumed much was from hobby and novelty interest.
A new client that isn't quite so neglected would be very welcome.
I have somewhere around 12 FM radios, ranging in price from £10 to £lots and 40 years old or newer. They all still work and often give LW and SW too.
In the UK at least DAB is mp2 and an excuse to put out thousands of channels at horrible bit rates. Like down to 64k streams. OK for a noisy car, terrble for at home or headphones.
They all work and put out sound in sync (nb except the new denon micro system that for some reason must be using digital stage in processing fm meaning the sound comes .5s later). I often leave the radio on in several rooms when moving around, so this is especially annoying.
They degrade in poor signal "nicer" than DAB and remain listenable longer. FM has infinitely better coverage across the country.
For the battery powered ones they're at least an order or two of magnitude better battery life. DAB is horrific for portables.
> fairly confident ... I would be able to keep myself among the 85% that remains employed.
For my whole career upto the dot com bust in 01 I'd have confidently agreed. After 2.5 years struggling to get work and seeing the same with skilled friends I realised how much was down to luck. By the time I got work again many opinions had changed. I still have much of the frugality.
Certainly I knew of US people having issue, and I was surprised to read recently on HN [1] someone widely known having a very similar experience.
Not sure about laws - I don't think so, it seemed to affect everything. Definitely not unions though. Unions and IT is rare, though there are some union members in govt, or old industries.
For many reasons - multi device support, convenience, data harvesting, lock in. Performance isn't something we generally get now everything becomes network constrained rather than CPU or IO.
So yeah it's being fixed because it has to be, because it's a terrible experience in comparison. I don't deny that often the convenience far outweighs the loss of performance and latency.
You can't avoid the fact it's heavily skewed the market against those needing native power on the desktop. If you're doing things that need that, the last 5 years have been rather underwhelming progress wise.
Sure doesn't align with the experience I had or any of my tech friends had in the UK in the post-Y2K bust. The only person I know who did "just fine" had, through sheer luck, joined a huge corporate 6 months before bust. Yes there was a lot of incompetent garbage that got cleared out too. Some were laughably bad. But for decent folks...
The contract market effectively disappeared for 2-4yrs+. (Good luck going back to perm). A friend who was CTO of a "best place to work.." SME watched them shrink from ~180 people to 10 or so. When he exited he was on 1/3 the rate.
Then there was the friend, who was a truly excellent developer, who had his home repossessed as he had effectively zero income for 3+ years. He got out of IT completely in the end. Another buddy, who was a little older, took early retirement and his wife went full time (non-IT). Or another friend who disappeared at home repossession, never heard of since.
Then there was the after effects of all the ex seniors, contractors and CTO chasing everything they could do right down to junior roles just to pay the bills.
Quite a few ended up tiding over in something far beneath them on half or less salary. Many took a 5-15 year hit on career taking years to get back to similar seniority (often pay never recovered). There was perhaps 5 years of take abnything you can get and keep your head down. Hirers only look at the previous role and rate for "dev" that was you surviving, not the ones before of CTO and years of lead. Ex-contractors or ex-founders are often frowned on.
That was for the folks at the decent end of the bell curve. The types that were always learning.
Pretty sure in 6 years Jobs would have picked up some new trends, details and directions. Pretty sure we'd not be stuck in some infinte repeat loop. Thinner. Groundhog Day. Repeat.
They need to relearn and engage in user discovery and questioning until they realise what niches they occupy and their use cases and needs.
I doubt Apple's former lead would ever have put out a Mac that needs a dongle to connect to iPhone but not Android. I doubt he'd have killed Apple monitors as an iMac sat next to a black LG is just so damn ugly. iOS, MacOS and current hardware shows, oh so clearly, that once notorious sense of detail and overall direction is long gone.
As is, their idealised user is envisioning all the wrong gimmicky things and missing most of the details. They're trying to play "what would Steve do?" but not being him they can't play that game well.
Why? UK is comprised of countries with their own legislatures (with devolved and varying powers). England doesn't. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have parliaments, and their own politicians so need an entry. They all elect MPs to the Westminster UK parliament as well. Just as all these areas elect EU MEPs too.
CGP Grey explains UK: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNu8XDBSn10
When I submit my project to Show HN it'll be to have the stupid obvious things, or gaping security FU, I've missed ripped to shreds. That's the point to my mind. Same if I were showing it to /r/programming. They're my sanity check before pushing for users.
Hopefully I've already got a good idea of the market before I do that. If I want positive outlook, perhaps equally unrealistic or wrong, I'd submit to whatever non-technical reddit suits the service.
Does anyone submit MVP to HN in the expectation of glowing praise or predictions of success?
e.g. I still don't like Quora, and rarely even visit, especially after the sign-in to view more change.
It's much nicer about disambiguation than google, and can be incredibly helpful. e.g. Search for Zen - you get a wide selection of possibles in probable order. Sadly there's far too many missing. Crowdsourcing needed.
It's horrible at localisation. eg set Filter by region to UK and search any global multinational. Chances are the UK site is WAY down the list and the .com and US options hard at top. on google UK the local branch is always first.
There's too many instant answers that presume a US only view of the world.
The instant answers when they have adequate data and ! searches are brilliant.
Lyric and video searches are orders of magnitude better than Google.
Maybe 5% of searches go to Google as I'm not quickly finding what I need.
The implications and other uses and data transfers are not talked, or often known about. Just like when you look into food production or global supply chains you find many inconvenient truths there too. As age is so often correlated with cynicism it's probable that many tech applicants (to FB or anywhere) are simply not adequately cynical yet. There's quite a few cases of high profile techies suddenly and surprisingly (well according to reportage anyway :) becoming rather anti.
btw I thought The Circle far too gentle, and simplistic, about the criticism.
Perhaps it's the "cynical Brit" perspective as I felt very much the same about Black Mirror after arrival at Netflix.
Research seeems to indicate a global prevalence of around 5-10%, settling around 7.8%. So those areas, and there are some, diagnosing >10% are overdoing it. Until we have blood or genetic tests it's too reliant on self-reporting. Even so, many still struggle to get diagnosed or are suspected of just seeking recreational amphetamines.
If it does turn out to be 7%, that's over 22.5m in the US, 4.5m in the UK. It's doubtful all would need or want prescription as not everyone is affected similarly.
I wouldn't have hesitated to push for diganosis if I'd recognised it in my own children (It's strongly determined by heredity).
> currently allow prescription of extraordinarily strong methamphetamine to children
As someone adult diagnosed ADHD and taking "extrordinarily strong amphetamine" from my 40s I'd like to point out they do not affect ADHD sufferers in the same way as neuro typicals. They're used at tiny dosages compared to using recreationally. I would not wish children with the condition to have my hugely damaged teen years because of horribly misinformed popular rhetoric about amphetamines. Using meth is the last resort option when other forms haven't worked.
That popular rhetoric meant I spent an additional 10 years before gaining effective treatment. I had to read and interpret actual papers to get past the media bullshit and gain an informed opinion.
I doubt you can even imagine how much I wish I had been taking "extraordinarily strong", ie correctly dosed, amphetamines from my earliest years. I will add that I'm not in favour of use for weight - many other tactics can work there.
Do you use the term "extrordinarily strong" when you mean "correct dosage" or speaking of paracetamol? Paracetamol is the cause of many deaths unlike amphetamines. Now add the liver damage.
BBC reports study "better than other outlets" (according to OP), later reports study is flawed.
BBC's organisation ensures better oversight and correction mechanisms compared to most websites.
The "astonishing" delay at correction is proved by showing a fairly neutral BBC search "study suggests" result amongst all the other results claiming proof or certainty.
Yes! We could replace those flawed and lobbied against restrictions with advice. The market would be free once again to innovate.
Bayer could once again offer Heroin as an addiction free drug. We could get long missed radium cures and snake oil. They could be free to advertise to their heart's content. They can tell us cigarettes are good for us.
The companies can be trusted to have our health at heart. They can spend adequately on SEO to ensure their messages are dominant. Silly government warnings and or indivduals having problems with side effects or Heroin forum posts can sensibly be lost in the far reaches of search.
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Seriously? I can't think of anything more stupid, even though the system is horribly flawed.
Want to go back to food adulteration, and poisons sold as cures? Endless advertorials pushing pointless product? We have an entire vitamins and supplements industry that's pointless (and problematic) for most people.
Go read the history of those regulations and restrictions. I don't want the pre-drug and food adulteration acts world back, thank you very much. How is this the highest voted post?
Recycled changes the numbers too if you don't need to bleach it back to white. Though you've a load of ink and finishers to deal with. At least paper is regularly recycled.
So I think we're in agreement that we don't know!