high_5

I had the intuition, but I really had to take a look at Wikipedia to confirm - yes, Americans are "special":

> A lactation room is a private space where a nursing mother can use a breast pump. The development is mostly confined to the United States, which is unique among developed countries in providing minimal maternity leave. Historian Jill Lepore argues that the "non-bathroom lactation room" and breast pumps generally are driven by corporate need for workers rather than mothers' wishes or babies' needs.

In my country a mother is on maternity leave for a whole year. Problem (mostly) solved.

Yeah it's really frustrating for me to look at it because of such appearance.

The investor hype in AI reminds me of the bitcoin hype around 2017. There is some real, promising tech, some real show- and usecases, but still ... Something's already off before it even started.

Been there, done that. It's already hard to scale those two apps beyond your immediate circles and people won't just stop using WhatsApp or Viber or whatnot. But then try to convince your friends that they have to convince their friends. Friendships are not a pyramid scheme.

Mostly not a lack of will but much more local and urgent priorities than figuring out SSH and PGP, like jobs and chores for example.

> Those tools and techniques should cease to be arcane nice-to-haves for nerds: we must get more non-technical people onboard.

I'm having a feeling that the OP either had a lot of luck at persuading and educating non-techie people or hasn't yet had many such encounters with the general population.

It's not unrealistic in technological but sociological terms.

It doesn't have to be so radical. Just have a lean (social network apps free) smart phone with only essential notifications on (e.g. family and friends via messaging apps).

Current consumer capitalism and the societies (+politics) that depend on it have painted themselves in a corner. Man cannot keep up with it. There are interesting times ahead of us.

The more autonomous cars will be on the road, the more people will be struck by them. News at 11.

Before the real compounding begins, the AI bubble must burst.

Then again when did just throwing more money at the problem solve more problems? There could be other bottlenecks that the foundation felt are not solvable by money alone.

Good point. In a sense, foundations have to appear much more interesting than they are nowadays. Developing an OS kernel or a web server isn't appealing to newcomers, so I guess there should be alternative pathways to that. There should still be alignment in behaviour to the identity the entity claims to be. Or we just could have the Whatever Foundation. So, are these other projects in any way related to the development of Linux kernel or not?

Devops got stunted or intermingled with the great migration to the Cloud. It could be practiced on any level of infrastructure, but the discourse currents of the Cloud were too strong.

Because our own human nature works against us in this case. Electronic medium acts as a (intimate) safe space because it's your own device where you share your mind, usually at an intimate safety of your home (or at least most of the time a familiar location). There just isn't that slightly unbearable feeling of 10000 pairs of eyes staring at you attentively for every word you write before you hit 'send' button.

Both 1 and 2 provide good layout for important and meaningful, but not intimate discussions. Most social conversations are not necessarily obliged towards a resolution of a problem as in these two cases. In intimate discussions it's most of the time good enough to be heard.

The article from the link does not provide any evidence to support the statement "The Company however is russian". Does anyone else have any info on this accusation?

> Meanwhile, time-spent-centric business models mean that games are not competing with just games (like they once used to), but with other entertainment propositions for the limited 24 hours of the day.

Interesting. Theoretical "(number of people) x 24h/day" is the max limit for attention economy. Has it already hit the ceiling?

But it is meaningful. The websites are being interfaced with pretty much timeless clients - people. We interact with the world with our body and process it with our brain. The world has the same physics laws all around the world, so it's consistent. The virtual world is becoming anything but that. At least public services should become more consistent and change more slowly upon the most necessary changes.

This is a discussion about governmental sites. I don't use them because I want to but because I have to. So, current fashion and appeal are second to usability. There are some fundamental laws and limitations on how people process the presented information and that SHOULD be taken into account in designing a public service. Ideally, there is an interest in both parties (state and citizen) that their interaction is correct in order to fulfill their obligations and ensure their rights.

Also many of the interactions with governmental digital services happen only once a year. I've been in helpdesk supporting people on a webapp with an obnoxious interface that they had to use 3 to 4 times a year to fulfill their project report in order to get paid for their project work. The UX was so out of the conventions that people hated it with passion and I had to help the laggards to use the application.

Interesting quotes, considering that our latest and greatest achievemnets in the AI field are based on "attention is all you need" transformers. Yet it seems that in a way we're so close, yet so far from replicating the full human attention in a machine. Maybe precisely because it can't be transformed into a a purely objective/measurable/scientific category.

> Surprised the getfirefox.com domain from the ad still works!

This domain is still in my muscle-memory from the Windows days. Just used it yesterday for my wifes laptop reinstall, and I was surprised too it still works.

> Even something like Java had a decade of relatively inactivity, and now there are actual, relevant changes.

The key phrase for new tech is _relevant changes_. Much of the "innovation" in software is either NIH syndrome or ideological nuances that address 5% of the problem space. Or simply forgetting or not researching that people fought this problem ages ago. I know that this is HN but most ICT engineers I meet don't care a lot about the history of how we got here in the first place. Just about their puzzle here and know and latest and greatest toolkit.

> I got to tell ya, one of the blissful things about using a Chromebook is that they don't pull this shit at all.

Yet.

That's what was lurking on the other end of demolished Chesterton's fence. And now it's coming back slowly like a tide that no dam of enlightenment can hold it. That's why I'm more worried of people antropomorphizing the existing GPTs than the potential coming of AGI.

> IT is generally a major expense - both on their bottom lines, and in the amount of time & grief they have to spend learning & deciding about and fighting with computer sh*t.

Certainly! Yet, just when people muscle memorized Office 2003 by 2007, Microsoft pulled the rug and introduced Ribbon. And people still use .doc insted of .docx for loads of stuff!

> The full impact of this incident is much larger than we Initially understood it to be. We believe this event will have long lasting implications on our trust of the cloud and the core components that support it, above all, the identity layer which is the basic fabric of everything we do in cloud. We must learn from it and improve.

How about not putting everything in the cloud for starters. And I think the whole problem is not even the cloud. It's the broken capitalistic economy that in the and always begets monopolies or at least a cartel of a few big companies. Because for the long tail of small businesses it does not make sense to use products and services from the big guys. So, giving more power to the market winners ends up in too-big-to-fail companies. Yet, these big companies only have to make one mistake, one slip up, and the target surface is just too big. It's not a question if, but when such incidents will happen. Only federated services are the answer for the long term survival of society, sacrificing a part of convenience.

1. It's harder to build trust than to demolish it. Judging from the timeline, it would take about 2 decades like the 90s to rebuild the three sharp declines.

2. One could identify the sharp declines with significant events (Covid lockdown 2020, War on Terror campaign from 2003, but I fail to see what occured in the late 80s)

3. Still, there is an overall decline and I would look at the hierarchy of trust that exists in a society. Institutions are abstractions of different aspects of the living communities. But since individualism is rampant in our way of life, the whole chain of trust starts to slowly crumble.

So much for implementing UBI then.

Since the system appears to be dynamic to certain extent (beyond training) this will be a permanent problem. The feedback that large/public GPT systems are given and retrained upon will cause ups and downs, depending on the mood of the society. But I believe this entanglement of people dependent on LLMs and vice versa will go pear shaped until full Idiocracy scenario is reached. As George Carlin supposedly said "never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups".