howaboutnope

It's an alternative to Discourse though, e.g. it's a SPA. Nothing I see in the description entices me in the least... and phpBB and others are still being developed, and still rock.

> people are paid not by the value of their work, but by their scarcity

So the less people there are who own the majority of the wealth on the planet, the more that is justified?

So their value is what, exactly? Scarcity by itself doesn't mean anything. There are diseases that are extremely rare, that doesn't make it more desirable to have them.

The rent seeking, wealth-siphoning people do need the people who build the stuff they live off. That's not true the other way around. You don't have to replace Tim Cook, you just have to get rid of him.

(edit: I don't mean Tim Cook personally, it's not intended as criticism of that particular person; but the amount of wealth such people (not to mention the people where the ratio is WAY more off) bind destroys so much productivity in the people that have to struggle as a result, that they would provide more value to the world and the people in it by not existing, than by anything they did or could possibly do)

> Applications that check and validate things automatically, even if it's hard and expensive.

Then you still need to be competent enough to to assess that this is the case. You can't judge code doing something correctly automatically if you don't even know what that thing is and can't do it yourself.

But it is not designed, period. It just is. It has no purpose, no goal, no intent -- which is good, too, since the final destination of any and all of it might the heat death of the universe.

I think it's the result of some people being more and more cut off and alienated from themselves and life around them, so that's why they view it as "just other piece of technology". It says everything about them and nothing about life.

> Sometimes the worst thing you can do is give people exactly what they ask for.

Alan Moore said this in the context of poetry, but with the caveat that everybody is sometimes part of "the" audience, and that every fully fledged human adult should sometimes be "the" artist, I think he has a hugely important point:

> It’s not the job of the artist to give the audience what the audience wants. If the audience knew what they needed, then they wouldn’t be the audience. They would be the artists. It is the job of artists to give the audience what they need.

> My biggest shock was how much "PR" was generated on Reddit

And the winner ist: viggity

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28237827

> Humans are complex. None of us (or at least, very very few of us) are fully internally consistent.

More importantly, humans are different. Some are heads and shoulders above others morally or in other ways, and judge them accordingly.

> There exists in our society a widespread fear of judging that has nothing whatever to do with the biblical "Judge not, that ye be not judged," and if this fear speaks in terms of "casting the first stone," it takes this word in vain. For behind the unwillingness to judge lurks the suspicion that no one is a free agent, and hence the doubt that anyone is responsible or could be expected to answer for what he has done. The moment moral issues are raised, even in passing, he who raises them will be confronted with this frightful lack of self-confidence and hence of pride, and also with a kind of mock-modesty that in saying, Who am I to judge? actually means We're all alike, equally bad, and those who try, or pretend that they try, to remain halfway decent are either saints or hypocrites, and in either case should leave us alone.

-- Hannah Arendt, "Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship"

> why not recognise people for doing great things?

In this case, because they can't be called "great things" without diminishing human greatness and actually greats -- they're just product, often in the service of selfish, banal, mediocre ends. Certainly with Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook. None of their luminaries can even tie the laces of people who can tie the laces of great people. So why can't the money be enough, why do we need to fawn over people, too?

Yeah, Microsoft wanting to replace the Internet with MSN, or AOL, Facebook, Twitter and app stores are just so much more impressive. Every time it's the corporate vision that made mediocre boring bureaucrat things or hippie open source toys truly awesome.

Also, does anyone remember how boring and useless the web was before mobile devices opened the flood gates? We didn't even have proper mobs then, and walls of text wherever you turned.

But this isn't smoke, this is a photo of smoke. And as I said, the raging fires all of us can see in plain view go mostly unchecked. Where there is a photo of smoke, there may be fire, but where there is obviously a huge blazing fire, there surely is fire.

Well, it's been profitable so far, so of course it's going to get milked for as long as possible.

https://inequality.org/great-divide/updates-billionaire-pand...

Alternatively, someone could realize that existing CSAM that's so widespread it's in the database basically equals water under the bridge, whereas creating CSAM that isn't in the DB requires to harm more children.

Poverty and power imbalance is what harms children the most, by far. But we can't tackle that without stepping on the toes of greed, so we do circus instead.

> deploy censorship [..] but freedom of speech is generally protected

Can you elaborate a little? I understand and agree with your overarching point but this bit threw me.

Downvoting isn't for disagreement, replies are.

At any rate, the idea that companies with people who would collude in such a major way don't have any employees willing to manipulating discourse on a site like HN... that doesn't even pass the smell test, there is no way that this is the case.

This site should have all votes and flags by all accounts made public. No more guessing, no more squirming.

> Frightening people man. Bush tried to buy votes towards the end of the election. Goes around, you know, selling weapons to everyone, getting that military industrial complex vote happening for him. Sold 160 fighter jets to Korea and then 240 tanks to Kuwait and then goes around making speeches why he should be Commander-in-Chief because, “We still live in a dangerous world.”

> Thanks to you, you fucker! What are you doing? Last week Kuwaitis had nothing but rocks!

> They’re arming the fucking world man.

-- Bill Hicks

> The net effect of this language system was not to keep these people ignorant of what they were doing, but to prevent them from equating it with their old, "normal" knowledge of murder and lies. Eichmann's great susceptibility to catch words and stock phrases, combined with his incapacity for ordinary speech, made him, of course, an ideal subject for "language rules."

-- Hannah Arendt, "Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil"

> When confronted with situations for which such routine procedures did not exist, he [Eichmann] was helpless, and his cliché-ridden language produced on the stand, as it had evidently done in his official life, a kind of macabre comedy. Clichés, stock phrases, adherence to conventional, standardized codes of expression and conduct have the socially recognized function of protecting us against reality, that is, against the claim on our thinking attention that all events and facts make by virtue of their existence.

-- Hannah Arendt, "Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil"

Keep this in the back of your head when you hear some SV gurus speak, and see what you can notice.

Being aware of that or caring about that is not required for using antivaxxers as an excuse for anything related to Covid. It's not like nurses and doctors have been complaining for decades and were ignored out of greed, affecting lives negatively in untold numbers... no, if only everybody was vaccinated against this one disease, everything would be fine. It's just 5 minutes of hate, people patting each other on the back while using the absent as scapegoat.

> work is asking much more, not physically but in terms of behaviors and beliefs

> Our main way of relating ourselves to others is like things relate themselves to things on the market. We want to exchange our own personality, or as one says sometimes, our "personality package", for something. Now, this is not so true for the manual workers. The manual worker does not have to sell his personality. He doesn't have to sell his smile. But what you might call the "symbolpushers" , that is to say, all the people who deal with figures, with paper, with men, who manipulate - to use a better, or nicer, word - manipulate men and signs and words, all those today have not only to sell their service but in the bargain they're to sell their personality, more or less. There are exceptions.

-- Erich Fromm, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cu-7UDT0Xe4&t=94s

Well, for one, this happened: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25474372

> From out there on the Moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, ‘Look at that, you son of a bitch.’

-- Edgar Mitchell

> More profoundly, though, Agre wrote in the paper that the mass collection of data would change and simplify human behavior to make it easier to quantify. That has happened on a scale few people could have imagined, as social media and other online networks have corralled human interactions into easily quantifiable metrics, such as being friends or not, liking or not, a follower or someone who is followed.

As Hannah Arendt wrote in 1968 (!)

> From a philosophical viewpoint, the danger inherent in the new reality of mankind seems to be that this unity, based on the technical means of communication and violence, destroys all national traditions and buries the authentic origins of all human existence. This destructive process can even be considered a necessary prerequisite for ultimate understanding between men of all cultures, civilizations, races, and nations. Its result would be a shallowness that would transform man, as we have known him in five thousand years of recorded history, beyond recognition. It would be more than mere superficiality; it would be as though the whole dimension of depth, without which human thought, even on the mere level of technical invention, could not exist, would simply disappear. This leveling down would be much more radical than the leveling to the lowest common denominator; it would ultimately arrive at a denominator of which we have hardly any notion today.

> As long as one conceives of truth as separate and distinct from its expression, as something which by itself is uncommunicative and neither communicates itself to reason nor appeals to "existential" experience, it is almost impossible not to believe that this destructive process will inevitably be triggered off by the sheer automatism of technology which made the world one and, in a sense, united mankind. It looks as though the historical pasts of the nations, in their utter diversity and disparity, in their confusing variety and bewildering strangeness for each other, are nothing but obstacles on the road to a horridly shallow unity. This, of course, is a delusion; if the dimension of depth out of which modern science and technology have developed ever were destroyed, the probability is that the new unity of mankind could not even technically survive. Everything then seems to depend upon the possibility of bringing the national pasts, in their original disparateness, into communication with each other as the only way to catch up with the global system of communication which covers the surface of the earth.

-- Hannah Arendt, "Men in Dark Times"

But for anything non-trivial, that app that does everything person A needs doesn't do what person B needs, and vice versa. It mostly does what person C needs, who is a whiteboard made subset of the most used features and doesn't match anyone.

It's not just UNIX-like flexibility, it's human uniqueness, and the uniqueness of the tasks they perform and the ideas they have. It's also the difference between owning and knowing how to use a tool, versus renting someone to do it for you who might help you today, but could rob or hurt you tomorrow.

Just consider how we spend decades to teach new humans to read and write as well as they can learn it, versus just giving them a bunch of emoticons to signal when they're hungry or sleepy or bored. Because we expect them to become full peers, and architects of their world, responsible for the next generation, not just consumers picking options others prepared for them. And we don't care if they want that, because we know what they don't know, yet. We base our judgement on the information we have, not the information they lack.

Making an exception for computer literacy just because it is hard (as if language and reading and writing aren't until you get used to them) set us on a terrible path.

This isn't about automation separated from the world it is used in, this is about automation speeding up inequality that isn't just growing, but accelerating -- and the predictable outcome that those who exploit and don't share with people when they still kinda need them, will certainly not share once they no longer need them for anything whatsoever, and can kill them in vast numbers trivially. If it was already occasionally possible to get soldiers to do it, how much more so owithout pesky humans and their consciences getting in the way.

> But few would wish to go back.

What does that even mean? I would love to "go back" and deal with things by not just letting the masses starve while people in costumes play god and smell their own farts, which is exactly what they do today. I would LOVE to see see that space exploration and awesome inter-species music festivals we might have in 2021 if the last few millenia hadn't been such pathetic ass.

Let's see if people will also shallowly dismiss Stephen Hawking saying the exact same thing you just said.

> If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality.

-- Stephen Hawking, https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/3nyn5i/science_ama...

> If we forget, no other forgetting will ever happen. Everything will be remembered. Everything you read, all through life, everything you listened to, everything you watched, everything you searched for.

-- Eben Moglen, https://benjamin.sonntag.fr/en/2012/moglen-at-republica-free...

> I find a lot of talk about it tends to boil down to "kids these days" dismissiveness

These platforms are the products of megacorps, using incredibly sophisticated technology. Just contrast even a single CPU, versus, say, kids using their language faculties and markers to be funny or naughty, or using a bunch of stuff they found outside to invent a game. And then think of how many CPU and other things are involved in the pipeline. Kids being kids is as far from it as it could be.

During the peak of the outrage about and the being in denial about Elsagate, there were plenty of people actually saying "these videos probably are this way because AI generated them based on the things toddlers like". People getting stabbed, raped, kids in trunks and crying over being separated from their family, endless body horror -- all brushed aside with "meh, they like that".

Pointing to good content that one could pay attention to instead is a bit like saying "ignore the spam email from the Nigerian prince, you obviously aren't in the target demographic for it [let the people who are fend for themselves]". That's what people did with content literally aimed at children who couldn't even speak, why wouldn't they do it for teenagers, and of course for adults. This doesn't affect me, so it doesn't get shown to me, so it's fine.

And while online mobs are certainly not a TikTok specialty, just to counter the general fluffy happy picture that so many comments here are painting based on things being fine for themselves:

https://www.fluentlyforward.com/home4/my-experience-being-ca...

> But let me tell you, reading a hate comment about yourself that’s relatively true (I mean hey, I do have thin lips) said by 1 person stings at a level 1 on the pain chart. But reading hate comments about yourself that aren’t true, and are said by tens of thousands of people is….well, it’s a physical feeling. That’s the only way I can describe it.

And then there is this: https://theintercept.com/2020/03/16/tiktok-app-moderators-us...

They weakly claim to no longer use these rules, without saying what rules they use instead. I would bet you that certain political topics are hard filtered though, and some things being censored while fluff being tailored to be addictive is a net negative effect in my books. It's not exclusive to TikTok, but that doesn't absolve it, just like TikTok doesn't absolve others.

Oh, that's nothing. There's also things like "if this $optical_illusion moves, you have $disorder", or people faking DID and showing off their "alters".

Actions, in this case what someone uses their time on and fills their mind with, aren't in a place, they're in place of the other actions one could have taken. And hey, one could say literacy also "had its place" when the church ruled over the illiterate in medieval times, so that itself isn't much of a consolation.

As the article says:

"The strength of such an argument depends on whether the small step really is likely to lead to the effect."

> It is true that a computer, for example, can be used for good or evil. It is true that a helicopter can be used as a gunship and it can also be used to rescue people from a mountain pass. And if the question arises of how a specific device is going to be used, in what I call an abstract ideal society, then one might very well say one cannot know. But we live in a concrete society, [and] with concrete social and historical circumstances and political realities in this society, it is perfectly obvious that when something like a computer is invented, then it is going to be adopted will be for military purposes. It follows from the concrete realities in which we live, it does not follow from pure logic. But we're not living in an abstract society, we're living in the society in which we in fact live. If you look at the enormous fruits of human genius that mankind has developed in the last 50 years, atomic energy and rocketry and flying to the moon and coherent light, and it goes on and on and on -- and then it turns out that every one of these triumphs is used primarily in military terms. So it is not reasonable for a scientist or technologist to insist that he or she does not know -- or cannot know -- how it is going to be used.

-- Joseph Weizenbaum, http://tech.mit.edu/V105/N16/weisen.16n.html

To pretend it's inherently unknowable right up to the point until it's "too late" is kinda getting old.

> If people could understand what computing was about, the iPhone would not be a bad thing. But because people don’t understand what computing is about, they think they have it in the iPhone, and that illusion is as bad as the illusion that Guitar Hero is the same as a real guitar.

-- Alan Kay, https://www.fastcompany.com/40435064/what-alan-kay-thinks-ab...