3,448 karma · joined May 23, 2020
I also like the flexibility of a system like this. You don't have to completely refuse contributions from people who aren't whitelisted, but since the general admission queue is much longer and full of slop, it makes sense to give known good actors a shortcut to being given your attention.
When Flock decides to track people's activities, they're "following the law" and "open to reasonable debate," but when people decide they want to track Flock's activities right back, that makes them terrorists.
Okay: Just how long would you permit someone to follow you around with a camera, recording everything you do?
The thing about a stranger watching you in public is that eventually you go somewhere else, and they can't watch you anymore. A surveillance organization like Flock, however, is waiting for you wherever you go. In this sense they're much more like a stalker following you around than a stranger who happens to see you.
This analogy bears out in practice: Cops have used Flock data to stalk their exes.¹
[1]: https://www.kwch.com/2022/10/31/kechi-police-lieutenant-arre...
There's a balance to be struck here, but Go is stingy, so you don't get things like error traces and automatic destructors and const semantics even when they would make Go a much simpler language to use.
1. UI is terrible. Paragraphs are extremely far apart, and most paragraphs are 1 short sentence (e.g. "I glare."). On mobile, I can only see a few words at a time, and desktop's not much better.
2. Story is so bad that it's not even amusing.
for i, p := 0, (*int)(nil); p == nil; fmt.Println(p == &i) {
p = &i
}
Are you actually aware of any breakages this change has caused?
1. A nullable SQL string is idiomatically expressed as sql.NullString{String: "my string", Valid: true}. If you forget to initialize `Valid`, it silently sets itself to false and your string is null. I feel like the right solution for this is sum types, but Go says you only need interfaces (and then of course it doesn't use them for stuff like this). And Go doesn't have named arguments, so convention for big functions is to pass a big struct with fields for all the arguments. If you omit a field, it gets zero-intialized, which is nice if you want the default to be zero, but otherwise you can't really have a default value, because there's no way to tell if a given zero was explicit or implicit. And there's no way to ensure that every field gets filled in. I get what they're trying to do with zero values, but it makes the whole type system feel a little bit squishy.
2. I want immutability semantics. Good immutability. Go doesn't even have bad immutability. If you're disciplined, whatever, but people aren't, and I've seen a lot of Go turn into big nasty mutable mudballs.
Again, I'm not saying our relationship with smartphones is healthy. I'm saying addiction is a specific thing, and this isn't it. Getting strung out on heroin is not anything like using your phone too much.
And it's not like you're "wasting your time" by properly paying attention to ten minutes of atmospheric scene-setting in a two-hour movie. You've set aside two hours already. Make the most of them.
It's not a question of moral virtue. There's no moral virtue in cooking with spices, either. Watching a movie at 2x may make it worse, but it's not immoral.
> That's unhelpful black-and-white thinking.
Unhelpful to what? What's the goal here? Simply getting to the end of the movie? They put middles in movies for a reason—they're a load-bearing part of the experience. Why sit through a warped & incomplete version of a mediocre movie when you could just turn it off & watch the complete version of something consistently good? Of course, if you're fast-forwarding through pieces of everything, this doesn't work, but that's a red flag in and of itself, and it should prompt you to ask yourself why you can't sit through a whole movie. Do they all have unacceptably slow pacing? Or is there a problem with your expectations?
I should point out, also, that I don't mean this in a black-and-white sense. I'm not saying that fast-forwarding through one scene one time is some sort of mark against you. But if you find yourself doing this consistently, how can you be sure that the problem isn't on your end? The point of holding yourself to standards isn't finger-wagging; it's to provide an objective lens to view yourself through. How would you know if you did have a problem with your attention span, if not by monitoring yourself for the coping strategies which a person with a low attention span would use?
Yeah, well, they were wrong and I'm right.
> You sound like those people who think Battleship Potemkin is the greatest movie of all time.
100% critic & 86% user approval on Rotten Tomatoes, 97/100 on Metacritic. Universally acclaimed, massively influential. Have you considered that Battleship Potemkin might just be a good movie? Have you tried watching it?
When I read the post you're replying to, my first thought was, "sure, some movies are boring. But I bet they're talking about stuff like Pluribus, not actual boring movies."
Pluribus has no filler. Sure: the plot moves slowly, the cinematography is artsy and sedate, and it's all very character-driven. So what? It's beautiful. You may as well go to an art gallery and say the story moves too slow. Look at the stuff on the screen. Take it in. You don't have to like it, but maybe don't assume that Vince Gilligan is wasting your time with filler to make a quick buck. Consider that you might be holding it wrong.
> Your analysis is extremely simplistic.
It's extremely general, is what. That's by necessity; we're not talking about any particular movie. Broadly speaking, if it's worth watching the end of a movie, it's probably worth watching the whole thing.
> Nobody ever said anything about it being painful or uncomfortable
"Suffering through boredom" was how you phrased it.
I do think people spend too much time on social media, but it's not helpful to frame this by analogy to something it simply is not. Bad habits are bad in their own right. We don't need to appropriate medical language to discuss them, and doing so is misleading. You can actually just stop using Instagram Reels. It's nothing like heroin. It's a bad habit, and you can just turn it off.
No, I'm sorry, I do think this is an attention span issue. You say there's no virtue in suffering through boredom, but a few minutes of scene-setting should not feel painful.
Yes, some movies are boring, but those are bad movies. Turn them off. Good movies are made by skilled directors who know better than to stick a big boring part in the middle. Taste is subjective, of course, but the middle & the end get made by the same person. If the middle isn't enjoyable, the end probably won't be either; by the same token, if you consistently need to skip through the middle parts of movies with great endings, you're probably skipping good stuff which you might enjoy if you had a greater tolerance for slower, more atmospheric cinema. It might seem like sitting through the slow parts of a movie would make the experience of watching it worse, but I've found that resisting my urge to pull out my phone during slow bits has made me enjoy movies more.
Habitually, I spend a lot of time with headphones on, listening to podcasts and videos and such. I find that if I do too much of this, though, it starts to get me down. Often the best thing for my mood is to take off my headphones and just sit with my thoughts for a while. I know what you mean by "suffering through boredom," but it doesn't need to be painful to sit & do nothing for a bit. Once you get used to it, it stops feeling so uncomfortable.
Instead of "walking the aisles of Barnes & Noble," I wonder if the author of this piece has tried looking up actual sales figures? Yes, people do buy books. Mostly fiction. More than a billion books are sold per year in the US. Sales of books have been steady & mostly rising over the past two decades. Romance is the most popular fiction genre, but not by huge margin. Thrillers are the runner-up, then science fiction, then fantasy.
It's really not promising that this article opens with flagrant conjecture.
> The average ancient historian led troops […] The average modern historian passed a few tests
The average ancient historian just made stuff up sometimes. A guy like Plutarch writes with a massive slant, and because the average ancient historian was one of maybe 5 guys, he's often all we've got. The average modern historian, by contrast, does the actual rigorous scholarship required to get concrete information out of historical sources. I'm no historian, and I have little exposure to historiography, but even I can tell this is a ridiculous way to look at history.
> Contrast Xenophon with Mary Beard, who studied at Cambridge and now teaches at Cambridge.
Sure, let's. What will we discuss? The quality of her scholarship? Inaccuracies in her work?
> She holds the same opinions as everyone else at Cambridge. She’s remarked before that, “I actually can’t understand what it would be to be a woman without being a feminist.” This seems like a peculiar failing for an ancient historian.
Clearly that was too much to hope for. We're discussing "wokeness" or whatever. I don't see what it has to do with her body of work. Anyway, she's obviously saying she can't understand contemporary women who are not feminists, but maybe that flew over the author's head.
> I don’t know if she’s ever talked publicly about religion or democracy or climate change or immigration, but I could tell you exactly what she thinks about these things anyway. So why would you bother reading what she thinks about Rome?
Because she knows more about Rome than I do, obviously. She's a historian, not a political pundit. Anyway, I thought reading books for entertainment was "ridiculous," but here you are, reading about Rome. That's entertainment. It's okay—I like Rome too. You don't have to pretend like you're reading about the second Punic war to "cultivate wisdom." You can admit you enjoy it.
> There are hundreds of people with just as much experience of the human condition as Xenophon who have written great books throughout the millennia […] Bernal Díaz del Castillo was a conquistador who wrote about conquering the Aztec Empire. […] Have you read all of these? If not, why would you even consider picking up another book written by another Cambridge professor?
Right, but those aren't historians. Those are memoirists, and their accounts of their own lives are not reliable. Bernal Díaz del Castillo the conquistador was not a neutral observer of the Aztec Empire.
Gee, if only there were some rigorous, academic discipline where experts (perhaps Cambridge professors) sifted through primary sources to discover the truth…
> you can’t find [people with "unique experiences and perspectives"] by traveling around the world. The world is too hyperconnected now, and everyone is converging to the same opinions.
Go downtown and sit next to the first person you see begging on the street. I guarantee they've had experiences which would astonish you, and you won't even have travelled outside the city limits. Honestly, some people are so quick to assume they know everything.
The key difference with LLMs is that React was written very intentionally by smart engineers who provided a wealth of documentation to help people who need to peek under the hood of their framwork. If your LLM has written something you don't understand, though, chances are nobody does, and there's nowhere you can turn to.
If (as Peter Naur famously argued) programming is theory building, then an abstraction like a framework lets you borrow someone else's theory. You skip developing an understanding of the underlying code and hope that you'll either never need to touch the underlying code or that, if you do, you can internalize the required theory later, as needed. LLM-generated code has no theory; you either need to supervise it closely enough to impose your own, or treat it as disposable.
If you weren't even "clever enough" to write the program yourself (or, more precisely, if you never cultivated a sufficiently deep knowledge of the tools & domain you were working with), how do you expect to fix it when things go wrong? Chatbots can do a lot, but they're ultimately just bots, and they get stuck & give up in ways that professionals cannot afford to. You do still need to develop domain knowledge and "get stronger" to keep pace with your product.
Big codebases decay and become difficult to work with very easily. In the hands-off vibe-coded projects I've seen, that rate of decay was extremely accelerated. I think it will prove easy for people to get over their skis with coding agents in the long run.
It's true that this solution doesn't work for private posts and DMs, but the n in O(n^2) is much smaller there, so I don't think it's as much of an issue for personal data servers to communicate directly in those cases.
Yeah, but I'm not. It's spam. And the people whose messages I do want to see are overwhelmingly not going to pay $20 to show it to me.
This is a system that selects exclusively for advertisements. Nobody would want this.
In fact, judging by the Exodus of non-scammers, only scammers will pay to send you their messages—which makes sense, since they're the ones who expect to turn a profit.