cyberdrunk

Plenty of older people are not on the Internet and are not isolated from society. They tend to have richer real-life social networks though.

> I work on anti-DRM techniques for a living.

Who's paying for anti-DRM work?

> If you're rich, buying expensive shit is probably the most beneficial thing you can do for society.

That's not true. You can go and pay people a 50 million dollars to make a yacht for you. Or you can pay that 50 million to other group of people to build housing for the poor. In both cases, it provides jobs and puts food on the table of the people you employed. But, the yacht is just a toy for you, while housing will be life-changing for hundreds of families.

I wouldn't say that there's no reason, but it's just very unhealthy for democracy.

> Chuck Feeney Is Now Officially Broke

He's not broke, he still has two million dollars (in a very advanced age). I wish I was that broke.

See Richard Geldreich's Twitter (@richgel999). He has a lot to say about that (when he says "flat-structured tech company", he means Valve).

> It looks like the cyberpunk version of GTA

I'm affraid so. It looks like every NPC you meet is a primitive asshole, who just make me angry. I don't get why people would want to spend time in a game like that.

> The highest impact things an individual can do, roughly in order are: Don't have children. Don't own a car. Don't fly internationally. Don't eat meat. Don't eat dairy. Don't eat imported food.

Living in a small and well-insulated flat should also make a sizeable impact.

Try switching to Wayland.

> Social aspects in the sense of that we nowadays use them for cars only. Back in the days people traded on streets, had cafes and social interactions. Kids could play football and learn how to cycle.

I still see some of that in my dense city with car traffic. Obviously, this now happens on the sidewalk and not on the street itself. The major difference is kids not playing on the more major streets.

> This is not a problem of houses built that way since the were built pre-car times to allow max light into apartments

Not the case in most of Europe IMO. The apartment buildings were built along very narrow streets to either fit inside perimeter of city walls or (later) because real estate was expensive. Due to narrowness of roads, these apartments are not very well lit and are depressing (you can't see the sky through the window, only the building across the street). Here in Poland, it basically wasn't until central urban planning by communists until we had cities which are livable, car or no car. This is reflected in real estate pries, where apartments in the old, historic buildings can be cheaper (despite often being right in the city centers) than in the (much denser) soviet conglomerates.

> Then came a time we handed over streets to parking spots and some folks driving at 50km/h and faster. Social aspects have been gone.

Even cars at 30 km/h make plenty of noise (when accelerating to that speed). I'm not sure what you mean by "social aspects" of streets?

Many/most flats in those cute old European cities have windows directly over a street. You can have cars making noise and pollution literally within 5-10 meters of your window. This is bad for physical and mental health.

Soviet-style housing planning is a good middle ground. There, most flats can enjoy silence (you only hear cars that belong to your neighbors and no passer-bys) and still the districts are planned for walkability and public transport.

Media, including the Internet. It just presents a warped view of reality.

You can at least try discussing real valuations of various securities (aka fundamental analysis). Then, whenever current market insanity brings the price below the real valuation, you buy. Fundamental analysis looks like full time work though.

If it only were possible to tell the general impact of our actions... Maybe my vanilla open source commits will, down the road, enable Skynet. Or maybe they'll help finding a cure for cancer. Or maybe they'll have no major impact at all. There's no way of determining that.

True. These jobs also have very real drawbacks, but there are certainly some people for whom the drawbacks are not that bad (better than coding 40h/week).

Probably, although maybe you can get a job in such shop as a software guy first and learn the ropes there.

Anyway, my bigger point is, if you hate focusing in front of the computer, then software engineering is not a career for you and you need to retrain for something else. But, it's very uncertain if you'll like that other thing. So, maybe it's best to just accept the drawbacks of the current career, as other careers might not be better.

If you hate sitting in front of a computer, you might retrain to be a hardware engineer (e.g. in robotics, aerospace etc.). They can sometimes spend a lot of the time building prototypes or testing the physical component in a lab (of course, there's plenty of hardware jobs where you just spend the whole day in front of a CAD, but you can filter them out during your job search). Unfortunately, this will still require a lot of focus. So, if you're tired with having to be focused all the time, then I'm afraid you need to either get used to it or stop working office jobs entirely (or maybe try to go part-time in software?).

I'm an architect. During the pandemic, I'm still stuck 8 hours behind my laptop, just doing calls, presentations etc.

You don't need domestic billionaires though, foreign ones can do as well. For example, there are trillions of petrodollars that go through City/Wall Street and fund various initiatives around the world.

As reported in the link, median net worth of a white family is $171k. Which is just about enough to buy a median house... Meaning, that the median white family has a house they live in and little else. That's certainly not a position from which you can influence anything.

Most white people have very little money and even less power.

Yes. We ingest all that data onto central Hadoop, where data science team can access all of it in an uniform way. This solves the physical access problem.

Unfortunately, the DQ and meaning of data are harder to solve. They require essentially caretaking of the datasets done by the data owners (cannot be done by a centralized unit). My organization is currently undergoing a transition, where it will be a responsibility of the data owner to maintain the metadata of his/her dataset and also to measure the data quality, but implementing it across the whole org is a journey that will take a long time.

> If you want a weirder launching off point, watch koyaanisqatsi and look up Philip Glass who made the soundtrack - that's an interesting avenue, albeit not very mainstream.

Omg that film is absolutely amazing (maybe the best thing I've seen in the past 10 years) and easily half of the effect is the music.

For epic scores you can't also go wrong with "Requiem for a Dream"...

In my company, the biggest issue is finding the right data sets in company's vast data landscape, figuring out the exact definition/meaning of each column etc. Then, it's dealing with the data quality issues. Then, it's getting access to it and setting up an ingestion job for the data to be copied to some common storage (e.g. Hadoop). At the very end, it's the actual data science. I suspect a lot of the PhDs we hire start drinking before they reach the data science stage :)

> 2120: The environment is all full of poisonous gasses from the people of 2020. Each house needs its own air purifier to make the outdoor air safe to breathe.

That's the case in much of the world already... I live in area where there's tons of smog in the colder months and consider installing a system for bringing in filtered air from the outside, so that I won't have to open windows for the 6+ months smog period.

> 100%, not the 70%

Are these real numbers on the markup of e-delivery companies or just examples?

This book has rather mixed reputation among the art professionals. It's attractive to beginners because it allows you to fairly quickly become a human camera/xerox machine - you will be able to exactly copy what you see. However, it does nothing for your drawing from imagination skills, incl. making even minor modifications in the copied image. So, it's a great book if you want to just copy. However, if you want to create, you need much richer skills.

Fun is more than nightclubs. Where I live, I have fun just by walking the streets, admiring the varied and pretty architecture (granted, I live in Poland), seeing the various characters which walk the streets, eating/having snacks at the many food outlets available etc. In a rural setting, you exchange all that for easy access to a lot of nature.

Yes, from I've read it's definitely the issue of soil. The island was completely deforested a long time ago and the unprotected soil has completely eroded since then (the same thing also happened in Scotland and Sicily ?). There are some recent initiatives to reforest Iceland, but it will understandably take many decades to repair the damage.