Hacker News Reader

futuraperditaon Big Tech May Have Fielded a New Weapon Against the Small Internet: AI

Agree. I like the smol web's indie ideals but any threat they think technically advanced and arcane tooling is to a normie on an iPhone is almost a delusion of grandeur. The "old internet" that runs the Indie Web / Smol Web ideas is not the target market anymore.

Gemini. Because it's your digital twin.

That's all that needed to go through the marketing person's head to get you to that being its name.

futuraperditaon Crystal 1.16.0

I love this language but have never found a production use case for it, versus just using something less obscure like Go. It's the Ruby we wish we had in the 10s.

futuraperditaon An Overwhelmingly Negative and Demoralizing Force

> But what of novelty, craft, innovation?

I would argue that a plurality, if not the majority, of business needs for software engineers do not need more than a single person with those skills. Better yet, there is already some executive that is extremely confident that they embody all three.

futuraperditaon I stopped using AI code editors

I'd argue it's a hell many other people see daily, and we've been privileged to have the space to care about craft. Corporations have never cared about the craft. The business is paying me to make, and the moment they can get my level of quality and expertise from someone much cheaper, or a machine itself, I'm gone. That dystopia has always been present and we just haven't had to stare it down as much as some other industries have.

futuraperditaon Tailscale Enterprise Plan 9 Support

https://github.com/tailscale/tailscale/issues/5794#issuecomm...

perhaps it is a joke, but a realized one.

futuraperditaon Apple has locked me in the same cage Microsoft's built for Windows 10 users

ChromeOS balances the different paradigms reasonably well with Crostini and the ability to run Linux-based applications with native hardware virtualization. Solves for every power-user case you can't get from Android or the browser.

futuraperditaon Apple has locked me in the same cage Microsoft's built for Windows 10 users

I bought the iPad Pro 11 (M4) on its release day and did the same thing you did: throwing out what I knew to adjust to new paradigms. I regret its purchase. It is still fundamentally a device that cannot handle code-based workflows, although it's OK for some media creation.

For software development, the canonical advice consists of excuses that rely on a "Pro" device to be a thin client. Remoting out to a workstation somewhere else defeats the purpose of having an M4 in the tablet itself. I can't even run a VM with native virtualization. A Chromebook with Crostini offers more functionality in this regard.

You are also a consumer in another way: iOS revenue models are optimized for rent-seeking, whereas that is only partially true for macOS - even for Apple itself. As an example, I use Logic on the Mac and I pay for it once - Logic for iPad is subscription based.

I don't hate the idea of the iPad overall - I have an iPad mini I use to read and mark up papers, and it's great for that.

futuraperditaon Shopify lays off team supporting Black, Indigenous and women entrepreneurs

Why must we hold true that this is simply posturing to appease the populist whims of a current American administration?

If we believe corporations are rationally working toward their own profit goals, the idea that they've become overt Trump activists seems like an emotional interpretation. We either need to maintain the concept of corporate amorality or decide everything, including an insensitive invisible hand, has somehow become pro-Trump.

I think there are other logical premises for and against DEI if you strip corporations of this veneer of social responsibility:

1. DEI was only ever a PR exercise, to score higher in ESG-related investments or to attract talent;

2. DEI provided them with a positive image to downstream customers;

3. DEI provided new hiring channels when conventional ones were failing HR departments during a constrained hiring market.

It seems that DEI has become a cost center, and that cost is greater than the negative PR cost they're taking by getting rid of it.

The above benefits may no longer hold true, but I'd also suspect that some of these companies are worried about retaliatory action of the new DOJ interpreting DEI initiatives as a discriminatory thus illegal hiring practice. Litigation against the federal government is expensive. Being shut out of a labor market also is.

Shopify may be a Canadian company, but one that also hires globally remote and the USA is a huge source of that talent.

futuraperditaon US government struggles to rehire nuclear safety staff it laid off days ago

I believed this at the beginning of the Ukraine war and went to read Dugin's philosophy to get a sense of where this was all headed. I believe that the Dugin-centric view of Russian _realpolitik_ is an intellectual meme moreso than an accurate view of reality.

Dugin's thought is being used as a rosetta stone in Kremlinology, but I believe that _Foundations of Geopolitics_ has been coöpted as an intellectual veil for a bare Russian imperialism. There is not a lot of evidence that Russia is trying to enact actual Duginist political thinking (which is a specific kind of ethnocentrism highly influenced by Heidegger; he outlines it in _The Fourth Political Theory_). It's being used in a way not dissimilar to Marx being co-opted as a means to domination in Leninism.

We are looking for a more complex answer to a simple problem, which is that an authoritarian leader obsessed with dominance wants to expand that sphere of power where he feels wronged. It doesn't have to be intellectual.

futuraperditaon We are destroying software

I think a lot of software engineers have been in denial that we have been working in factories as a lot of the ZIRP-era technical structures were constructed in such a way to make it seem like we were part of guilds. The average company cares about craft only insomuch as it feeds enough product reliability and productivity.

That illusion has been lifted a little harshly for a lot of people over the past year or so. I still enjoy software-as-craft but I don't hold any false belief that my day job does.