apatters

I find it interesting that the discussion about this feature is only about design/interaction principles.

I mean, maybe this is right and a merged search/URL bar is the best call from a design standpoint. I don't mind having one.

But do you really think that's why Google implemented a feature in Chrome that sends more people to Google?

It was, I'm sure, a revenue decision first and foremost, and Google is probably delighted when people identify it as something else.

The same logic applies just as well for any browser vendor who makes money off of search partners.

We need to get away from the idea of "the Science" altogether because it's an incomplete abstraction and prone to corruption.

What is valuable are specific principles like dedeuctive reasoning and the scientific method, upon which we've built our greatest achievements as a species.

Trusting "the Science" without understanding what that really means is basically just another form of religion, complete with its own priesthood and people who demand that whatever the priests say must be taken on faith because it's moral and good.

Philosophers have observed that this blind belief in "the Science" is actually worse than belief in religion. Because while religion roots its authority in the divine (which either doesn't exist or chooses not to get directly involved), the church of Science roots its authority in men. Men declare a truth and a morality based on what they claim to be scientific, then go on to commit atrocities they rationalize from it. The greatest mass murderers in history were atheists like Stalin and Mao. They were the little gods of their own secular personality cults and they committed genocide on a scale that had never before been seen.

I am an owner/founder who has experienced similar anxieties and the answer was cognitive behavioral therapy and drugs, both managed by a good therapist.

The CBT can effect long term changes in your thinking and behavior, and temper your anxieties permanently.

The drugs can make the anxieties disappear temporarily and immediately and are best used infrequently in situations where the price of impaired performance is high. (Many doctors overprescribe them imo.)

It took several years of slow progress but probably 75% of my anxieties are gone. I don't overwork myself, I don't worry about things unless it benefits me to do so, and I rarely miss out on a good night's sleep.

You can change.

At the end of this piece you say we are much more like Elves than we used to be, but that's not really true. Elvish magic works the way it does because in classical/Tolkien-esque fantasy, the natural world is friendly to elves: they live forever, they're immune to disease, they heal quickly from injuries, they bound effortlessly across treetops or walk over snow banks, etc. They develop a symbiotic relationship with nature because it's kind to them.

Nature isn't kind to humans. Sure, we've acquired many of these elvish capabilities: we can live longer if we use fire to scare away hungry bears, we can heal faster if we have some bandages or build a hospital, we can travel fast if we sit in a vehicle. But our relationship is fundamentally with our technology, not with nature. We've developed a symbiotic relationship with technology. Nature is still a deadly Other.

So unless we someday genetically engineer ourselves to be more elf-like and resilient out in the forest, I don't think we'll ever adopt an Elvish outlook. We fundamentally improve ourselves via that which we create, and defend ourselves from the hostile environment which existed before us. In fantasy everyone's made by a benevolent creator, in reality we've evolved under the rule of survival of the fittest. The elves didn't dominate their environment because they didn't need to.

(PS: In Tolkien, there actually is someone who's out of harmony with the natural order from day one, and has to go engineer his own world as a response. Complete with orcs and trolls and enormous fortresses that keep nature out. He's known as Morgoth and when they finally catch up with him they throw him in eternal jail!)

Kudos on the ONI reference :)

We do business with countries where we disagree with their government all the time. The difference with China is that they have so much market power they can alter norms of free expression in our country with that power, and they're very proactive about doing so. If we want to preserve our way of life yeah absolutely we can boycott, sanction, apply tariffs or whatever until they stop doing this. There is already a gradual migration away from Chinese suppliers because of it.

Because if you don't you'll end up with fewer businesses, which will concentrate wealth, which has documented negative effects on society.

My thinking has always been that of all the possible interventions to reduce viral spread, something like making people wear masks while grocery shopping has almost no negative side effects. Whereas closing the grocery store altogether has major negative side effects, like lost jobs and people not being able to buy groceries.

So I think the evidential bar for requiring masks should be pretty low (unless it is a special case, like making people wear masks when they're exercising likely has larger negative side effects). Who cares if it may not do much? The cost of doing it is so low.

Whereas the evidential bar for policies that do more collateral damage ought to be higher.

Until AWS fixes this the best thing to do is just use their service as little as possible. There are plenty of other cloud providers out there these days which don't employ this hostile practice.

I closed an AWS account for this reason just a few days ago, we hadn't used it for a while but there was no clear way to remove our credit card so it felt like a risk just to have it open, what if a developer logs in to mess around and accidentally flips some switch that smacks us with a charge of a couple grand... unlikely, sure, but the fact that it's even possible is terrible system design. Better to just nuke the account and move on to other cloud providers that don't make it harder for me to sleep at night.

What Spotify is trying to do is called a roll-up. This is a well tread business tactic favored by aspiring monopolists and the strategy is simple: acquire most of the distribution in the space, then jack up the price. (In the podcast world, "distribution" equates to "listeners" and price equates to "Spotify's subscription and ad revenue.")

The harm caused to both consumers and producers by a roll-up is well-documented. The legality is questionable but US regulators have been asleep on the job for decades.

Fortunately Americans are starting to wake up.

Matt Stoller did a piece on this last year: https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/will-spotify-ruin-podcast...

There are too many things for a central planning committee to stockpile them all, sure. But if incentives are correct then private actors will spring up and stockpile them for you. What we have today is a supply chain that's been fine-tuned in large part by (de-)regulation for efficient, brittle, globalized JIT inventory but it wasn't always that way. One line of thinking goes, if the lion's share of the gains from the current framework will just go to a couple of globomegacorps anyway, why don't we shake things up.

I like how the meditation cultists were happy to downvote this but couldn't actually formulate a response. Proves my point.

People are usually attracted to various meditative practices because they want to change the way their brain works. There is a large degree of overlap between traditional meditation and psychotherapies based on mindfulness and CBT.

The efficacy of these therapies is grounded in a strong and growing body of research (this includes research into their risks). Why not dispense with the woo and approach healing the mind like we do the rest of the body?

Here's an overview of the state of mindfulness therapies, I think it's a much more valuable read than Harper's quasi-clickbaity scare piece: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5353527/

The silos that individual contributors perceive tend to disintegrate as you move up the chain. If you're the GM of some product at a FAANG that has exposure to the legal industry, what you often find is there are tons of great developers you can hire internally, but not many people who have expertise in that vertical and can also be dangerous around the code. If a lawyer with a CS degree and a bit of coding background wanted to cross over and join your dev org you'd probably be happy to open whatever doors they need.

Absolutely, he probably would not be the right hire to squeeze an extra 0.1% of performance out of Google search, but on any team which has to understand the needs of the legal industry (plenty of these at FAANG and non-FAANG companies) he could find himself in a senior role very quickly.

Copyright violations would continue to be illegal. I am not proposing that they be legalized (though copyright law could use several reforms as well). I am proposing that for instance Google ought to be required to license Widevine to anyone who wants to build an implementation for it.

Because Widevine is so widespread and acts as a gatekeeper for content (for example Netflix), if Google doesn't bless your platform with Widevine support you're essentially dead as a consumer media platform.

Google should not have this kind of power because competition is good.

I think the trick is to start viewing the problem through the lens of anti-trust/pro-competition law. Something like mandating compulsory licensing of DRM technologies so that the DRM manufacturer and Hollywood studios don't get to be kingmakers in the browser or operating systems markets.

IANAL but seems to me like laws along the lines of "you can reverse engineer DRM without being arrested" and "the patent holder/whatever of the DRM cannot deny you a license to use this without a good reason" seem like the right direction to me. Then the linux distros or anyone else can go off and build/integrate the DRM to the extent that they wish.

> I think empathy and caring are natural consequences of that type of displacement from individual satisfaction or understanding and a desire to better understand the world naturally leads to more empathy.

Makes sense, it's impossible to feel empathy for someone who you're not aware of. To use one of Wallace's examples if you don't consider the circumstances of the "fat, dead-eyed screaming lady" (or don't even notice she's there) you won't have any empathy for her. So in effect mindfulness increases your net empathy (which starts at more or less zero in infancy, I think in developmental psychology they say babies start developing self awareness at around 2, and awareness of others at around 3).

This was a great read but I found the end of the speech to be a letdown. He does a good job of introducing his core idea:

> The really significant education ... isn’t really about the capacity to think, but rather about the choice of what to think about.

But then at the end of the speech he seems to undermine it by telling us what we should think about, namely that we should be highly empathetic and self-sacrificing:

> The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.

Wait, why should we be living a life of perpetual self sacrifice? He hasn't built the case for this. But he says it's the real freedom. So which is really his core point: the freedom to choose your perspective, or the virtue of self-sacrifice?

Imho he makes a good argument in favor of choosing a non-default (if you adhere exclusively to self-interest, you'll be miserable because everyone's your enemy).

But he doesn't defend the latter proposition (commitment to self-sacrifice), and if we accept it as dogma it will conflict with the first. I guess an example of when self-sacrifice goes too far is Stockholm Syndrome, where a victim empathizes with their abuser and accepts the abuse.

Beyond this conflict I wonder whether the question of how to live should be viewed as a binary like he seems to have presented it (live for yourself, or live for others). It is a complex and open-ended question. Reducing it to a one or the other choice fails to represent that complexity.

Also I know this question commits an ad hominem fallacy, but it's hard not to ask it: should we be listening to a guy who committed suicide about how to live well?

Oh come on, there is no definition of middle class anywhere that includes someone with $29M in liquid assets.

My direct experience with Twitter is I have one dude's account bookmarked and I check it almost daily because he's a great source of local news. I have a profile but I haven't logged in or used it for a long time. My experience is fine.

There sure seem to be a lot of people, though, who have the cesspool experience I mentioned. It's great that you and I don't have this experience with Twitter. It's also anecdotal and not really relevant to my comment which was about people who aren't you and me.

This is great. It fills the same role as Twitter, but people's posts disappear after a few seconds, making it better than Twitter.

I'm serious here. Twitter's a cesspool filled with people venting about random crap. So is Ventscape. We all need to vent sometimes, there's nothing inherently wrong with that. But the problem with Twitter is that it preserves and amplifies your venting until the end of time, which is the absolute worst thing to do with venting.

Similar to the advice that when you're angry at someone you should write them an email, pour it all out and then delete that email instead of sending it.

Sometimes we need to get stuff off of our chest but the insanity of the modern world is that once we do, it's archived and mined and maybe even used against us 15 years later.

Ventscape solves that problem (conditional on its privacy and data retention policies I suppose...)

Come on, this is counterfactual hyperbole. In actual feudalism, if you disagreed with the king he could arbitrarily kill you or jail you.

Sure, corporations are lame and if you work for one you're a cog in a machine, I agree it can suck. But it's crazy to suggest that this somehow invalidates democracy.

The first job of a functioning government is to establish a monopoly on violence and prevent it from being used against the people. Sure there are times when modern democratic governments fail at this but they do a pretty good job of making sure that Jeff Bezos can't literally murder his lowly serfs when they get out of line. He can take their jobs but he can't take their lives and that's a far cry from how things worked in the Inquisition.

When you make spurious claims like implying that we don't live in a democracy, you're dishonouring the millions of people throughout history who wrested power away from the kings and warlords of the past, bit by bit, and built a system which at least places a few limits on its most powerful members.

They're pretty unique, the Wikipedia article has a good summary under "Developers and Funding":

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signal_(software)

Initially funded by a $50M loan from the co-founder of Whatsapp. In addition to consulting contracts they have received millions in grants and donations from Mark Shuttleworth, Radio Free Asia, the Freedom of the Press Foundation and others.

If they comply fully with the GPL then this could be a great new linux distro! If they don't then I will avoid it.

> Americans still have the highest economic mobility in the world.

This part stopped being true at some point in the 21st century. The slowly shrinking disconnect between reality and this belief is imo the most powerful political force of our day.

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

https://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/05/us/harder-for-americans-t...

Mastering lockdowns certainly does not guarantee that everyone gets to go back to the pub. Once you end the lockdown the spread just starts again and you're back at square one.

The WHO has been clear in their recommendation since the beginning. Building effective test/trace/isolate capacity is how you control the spread of Covid. Is there a limited and brief role for lockdowns, business closures, forced stay at home etc., yes in extreme circumstances. Long term no.

I am just paraphrasing the WHO here, and of course anyone is free to disagree with them, but they're hardly known as a paragon of right wing populism.

https://mobile.twitter.com/who/status/1316020010540625920?la...

They have been putting out publications which say this since, if memory serves, March (or maybe even earlier).

If a policy is impossible for a given country to carry out, doesn't that suggest that maybe they shouldn't try? I think most people would agree that Prohibition should have delivered several public benefits in theory, but in practice it was beyond the ability of the government to enforce, and a bad policy.

Let's not forget that these mrNPIs have side effects - over 200 million people globally have been thrown into extreme poverty by them, increased deaths of despair, decimation of small business and resulting wealth concentration, etc.

There is a segment of society which believes that obviously mrNPIs are in everyone's best interest, but given that the side effects are well documented and very negative I think the burden of proof should be on the pro lockdown camp to explain why mrNPIs are the best policy intervention. The WHO recommends them only in extreme circumstances. They aren't popular with the public. Surely it's reasonable to consider alternatives (such as improving adherence to WHO recommendations) instead of invoking the alt right bogeyman and shutting down discussion as some are so quick to do.

I think the article goes the wrong direction as well, but for different reasons. We should look to the field of modern psychology for answers about our emotions, not philosophy. We understand the brain a lot better now than we did in Aristotle's time.

Anger's neurological function is to motivate action. It originates in the unconscious parts of the brain, and like all emotions it can arise involuntarily. It sounds like your girlfriend was putting her anger to use in a way that it's neurologically well adapted for (though absolutely in an immoral and unhealthy way).

Most individuals possess some degree of ability to consciously regulate their emotions (brain damage reduces this ability, many other factors like genetics or past trauma can too). So after you experience anger you can influence what you do next.

Modern psychology generally recognizes that like most emotions, anger has value but how you process it is key. Rationally examining the roots of your anger can defuse or redirect it and is the principle behind cognitive behavioral therapy and similar modern therapies.

Repression isn't a healthy way of handling anger, it only builds up, becomes internalized, and resurfaces later in ways that are harder to understand. I think it's better to express your anger (there are limitations of course, we don't get a free pass to run around punching people, but venting to a friend is healthy).

In my opinion as someone who buried his anger for 20 years, the key to handling it is to understand where it really comes from, and then harness the energy it generates to act in a way which addresses the root cause. To use the article's example of theft, if you get really angry because someone stole from you, maybe your emotion originates from a history of financial distress. If so then you may be able to change your actions, channel that energy into building financial security, and not experience this distress in the future. Anger in this situation becomes a force for clarity, good and purpose because you acknowledged, channelled and examined it. I think as a society we're in a place where we allow ourselves to be angry all the time, but couch it in superficial righteousness instead doing the uncomfortable processing work and owning our own role in it.

> 1. It's usually not actually helpful to signal that you are desperate and lonely and your life is in the toilet. Once in a great while, someone will be truly wonderful to you because you did that but it's usually counterproductive.

> 3. Signaling desperation attracts predators far more often than it attracts real friends.

Yep, these are excellent and hugely valuable life lessons. There is a real and common tendency among humans to react to negativity by either running away or moving in for the kill.

On the surface this is a depressing realization, as you get older you come to understand that nobody really gives a fuck (maybe a handful of people do if you're lucky, but I'm convinced that many don't even know how to care about someone else). Most relationships are only skin deep.

However it's also a powerful revelation, it gives you a tool for understanding people and that tool can change your life. If you suspect someone may be involved with you simply to take advantage (emotionally, financially, sexually, socially, whatever), you can start asking them for things.

The ones that care will give you what you ask for. The ones that don't will disappear almost immediately (which is one hell of a moment of clarity when you've known them for years).

When you feel a relationship is one-sided and you ask the other person (nicely) to do something which will even out the score, the result is always a win. If they value the relationship you get what you want and the relationship is reaffirmed. If they don't then a toxic relationship ends and you can go focus on the healthy ones.

This tool is so powerful that it's really on you to be fair and strike a balance. Once you start using it you'll find it's surprisingly easy to overuse, there are a lot of people who have problems with saying no. There are no rules but I try to strike a 50/50 balance of give and take even when the other person says they're happy. Aside from your innate sense of fairness the only other real check on your ability to use other people is your reputation (that's an enormous one over time, though).