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That's insightful though I wasn't pitching that so much as humour being just part of life and removing/excluding it distorts discourse. I've heard many fascinating accounts of how sensitivity to humour indicates the "health" of a society, and when it vanishes that is prelude to conflict, even war.

Yes, I think us Brits defused many of our internal tensions as a mult-cultural AND classist society in the 70s and 80s with the transition from vaudeville racism to new-wave "alternative comedy". It didn't change the status-quo but it did move the dial toward more progressive ideas.

I do think HN is an odd place in it's intolerance of humour, and I don't see that "high bar" because TBH it's the lowborw geeky "knob-gags" that make the grade here in my observation. I think it's actually the old struggle of poets and philosophers (see Republic 2, 3, 5 [0]) is at play. HN adapts to filtering what it can't process. It's a bit like that AI brain in Blake's Seven that Villa causes to explode by feeding it riddles. I'm noticing even this "meta" talk about humour is being downvoted (and I hope those doing so are getting a good ironic laugh from that) :)

[0] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/plato-rhetoric/

True, but do you (HN readers) look on transgression only with nostalgia? What would be usefully transgressive today? Much subversive humour is Socratic in just asking (pointing out) hard questions.

In that vein, TBH I find it hard to square a post celebrating famous British humour on a site where any humour, whether good or in poor taste, is mercilessly punished by downvoting and faux outrage. I'm not calling hypocrisy, just pointing to an odd juxtaposition of values.

Do y'all delight in things the Python team said precicely because you wouldn't tolerate it or have the personal sense of security to say it today?

I like your ideas and suspect we're far more on the same page than not.

Nonetheless I compare what we call "capitalism" to chameleon music artists like David Bowie (no disrespect intended to that wonderful artist), who change radically with time, constantly shapeshifting and reinventing. Our grandfather's "capitalism" is unrecognisable from its namesake today.

People often level the accusation against communism that "it has never actually been tried in practice", and I think the same is also true of capitalism. Maybe in the years before just before 1929.

Anyway, what I see today is not a recognisable ideology. It's just a bunch of criminals getting away with it and an effectively lawless USA.

All of that. A couple more thoughts. As a project it brings together energy to a task/configuration: namely that of making sure all those disparate command-line tools or bits of lib code are brought together for the specific purpose of serving file translations from some spot in a transactional fashion. So that's some value.

Why on the front page? That question might also have a non-technical answer. What's going on in news and events? Who's been setting up file translators and then "Dude I have over 4,000 soundfiles, pictures, address-books..." ... "Whoah? Like. howdy manage that one?" ... "People just submitted it. Zuck fucks"

I see the problem not as VC money, but the ridiculous idea of the optimised one-size mass-marketable product. The myth of "what people want" (which is art entirely pulled out of the air of marketing, public opinion, focus groups in the 1980s) goes against the impetus that consumer digital technology originally emerged from... namely that the microprocessor revolution replaced giant fixed-function pieces of iron with agile, modular, user-definable, technology. We've gone full circle on that. We're back to a world where 5 giant monopolies make stuff offering two choices; take it or leave it. Life happens at the margins, and the only thing in the middle of the road, is roadkill.

Hey you seem rattled by that. I'm just humorously, and therefore much more kindly pointing out something that could sound cruel if put plainly; that you have a naive and distorted understanding of human relations and offer really, really bad advice. But you seem stuck on appeasing tyranny, so good luck with that. It never worked. I'll be in my mom's basement if you need me :)

We're talking about two views of "capitalism". I think you're talking about the kind in textbooks on economics and Marxism etc. I'm talking about the lawless, insane festival of destruction and human misery we see today. To my mind, it is a an absence; the absence of law and reason.

Bad guys change their IP addresses and make up domain names a lot. No shit. You need a name for that? Whose in charge here?

> capitalism was never reviewed or updated according to new science about anthropology, sociology, and economics?

If taking a human-science view, then one interesting take on capitalism is that it isn't a thing at all. It's the absence of a thing. It's a positive freedom. There can be no "science" of capitalism.

It allows the direction of excess human psychological energy. It is the absence of regulation of anti-social criminal behaviours, by creating an allowable "grey area" between moral and wicked behaviours - what so many business people like to call "amoral". But that same energy is innovative, creative - the destruction of what is old and weak is part of any finite-sized system. The need to destroy, dominate and exploit is strong in a significant percent of the population. Any decent study of criminology is continuous with "business".

William James, in The Moral Equivalent of War [0] suggested that we coped with this in the past by having every few generations of males kill each other in wars - and of course implied that it's mainly a gendered issue. During frontier times, as the European settlers conquered America and other lands, there was ample "space" for exploitation as that energy was directed against "nature" (and the indigenous folks who were considered part of "nature" as opposed to "civilisation"). Now we've run out of space. The only target left for that energy is each other.

Social-"ism" etc are projects to try controlling that nature by reducing "individualism" (and insecurity-based consumerism is an obvious first target). It's major fault is that the anti-social criminals tend be want to be the ones doing the controlling - just wearing the mask of civility and preaching the primacy of "the group".

If we cannot change human nature we must find a new outlet for that energy. Space exploration as a new frontier always looked good, but in reality it's something we are unlikely to achieve before self-destructing the technological civilisation needed to support it.

That leaves little else but a kind of cultural revolution. The pharmaceutically catalysed version of that in the 1960s is worth studying to see where and why it went wrong. See Huxley.

Any realistic systematic change would need to address this "problem" of the individual ego, creating some new focus that is the "moral equivalent" of war.

[0] http://public-library.uk/ebooks/65/5.pdf

"Solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short". That was the life Thomas Hobbes argued against in 1651 [0] and to which US America has such a nostalgia for.

[0] https://philosophy.tamucc.edu/texts/hobbes-leviathan-chapter...

Recently I've encountered a growing, serious group of people (particularly in smaller business) who are seeking out, restoring and using pre-2000 hardware for security reasons. Of course it starts as a joke; "Oh I wish I just had a 1980s computer not connected to the internet - those never had security problems". Now the penny has dropped for smart people who are not just saying "Oh it was more secure in the 1990s", but a practical, airgapped machine for working in text only and transferring files by RS232 using gopher or whatever makes a lot of sense. Many are instant on, are built well and have great keyboards. Good choices are BBC/Acorn, Atari, Amiga etc. Some of it is nostalgia, Some of it is driven by practical concerns.

Roger Penrose was right.

Getting famous and having a cult following isn't always the best thing for an author. Not for their works. Rand wrote one good book [0]. Actually really got to me. Probably not one you think of. "We The Living", a pretty bleak account of collectivisation and the exodus from communism. A shocking, semi-autobiographical account of watching the world you love and know torn up. I think it might be more apropos Americans today than any of the "objectivism" stuff. All her later work I read in my 30s seemed lacking. But that first one really had an impact, not quite Solzhenitsyn or Kafka, but a hard hit with a similar interior. That book really defines her I think.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_The_Living

> wants it nnormalized

A psychological device of "blutkit" (blood cement). For example; young Nazi SS officers were recruited via a ritual attrocity like participation in a massacre. After that "we're all in this together" sealed loyalty through a mix of guilt and fear.

The race is on for the Trump administration to elicit the most unforgivable and insane actions in order to sinter those participants into a "death pact".

EDIT: spotted recently posted [0] (Also of course C.R Browning's Ordinary Men [1]) both underline the point that you don't need to recruit intrinsically corrupted people - you can make them,

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43583425

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_R._Browning

The Amazon rainforest has evolved for at least 55 million years. It is likely home to millions of compounds of potential medicinal value. In just 50 years 100 million hectares, 390 billion individual trees 16,000 visible species and (estimated unknown) >100,000 types of non-visible fungi, bacterium, microbes etc, have been destroyed. It's why I found this wide-eyed statement in TFA particularly cringe:

  The discovery shows that "there is terrifically interesting stuff
  hiding in plain sight".

Most simply this all boils down to two entirely incompatible models of a university. One institution produces thinkers who can innovate and lead. The other is a training camp that produces docile workers for the oligarchs. Regardless of allowing students free speech on campus universities have been heading toward the latter for three decades. It's a little late to be preaching courage thirty years after selling-out the core tenets of pedagogy. There is so much more to this than just "Trump". The fascists in power now are the result of 30 years of moral cowardice.

Didn't rachelbytheebay post recently that her blog was being swamped? I've heard that from a few self-hosting bloggers now. And Wikipedia has recently said more than half of traffic is noe bots. ARe you claiming this isn't a real problem?

Absolutely, yes! A protocol should not be tied to client details. Where did "User Agent" strings even come from?

The subject is deadly serious, and I only wish I could amplify it more. The abdication of reason and responsibility to machines is desperately dumb and no good will come of it.

Maybe what I'm getting at is this [0] poem of Taylor Mali. Somehow we all lost our nerve to challenge really, really bad things, wrapping up messages in tentative language. Sometimes that's a genuine attempt at balance, or honesty. But often these days I feel an author is trying too hard to distance themself from ... from themself.

It's a a silly bugbear, I know.

[0] https://taylormali.com/poems/totally-like-whatever-you-know/

> blame here are solely the ones employing these fingerprinting techniques,

Sure. And it's a tragedy. But when you look at the bot situation and the sheer magnitude of resource abuse out there, you have to see it from the other side.

FWIW the conversation mentioned above, we acknowledged that and moved on to talk about behavioural fingerprinting and why it makes sense not to focus on the browser/agent alone but what gets done with it.

> This isn’t a rant against AI. I use it daily

It is, but it adds disingenuous apologetic.

Not wishing to pick on this particular author, or even this particular topic, but it follows a clear pattern that you can find everywhere in tech journalism:

  Some really bad thing X is happening. Everyone knows X is happening.
  There is evidence X is happening, But I am *not* arguing against X
  because that would brand me a Luddite/outsider/naysayer.... and we
  all know a LOT of money and influence (including my own salary)
  rests on nobody talking about X.

Practically every article on the negative effects of smartphones or social media printed in the past 20 years starts with the same chirpy disavowal of the authors actual message. Something like;

"Smartphones and social media are an essential part of modern life today... but"

That always sounds like those people who say "I'm not a racist, but..."

Sure, we get it, there's a lot of money and powerful people riding on "AI". Why water down your message of genuine concern?

An "accelerating situation". Jay Forrester [0] spoke about system dynamics and how, if you focus on rate of change (at different orders) you see distinct linear or non-linear situations.

If systems are linear, then if they go wrong you can correct them. When systems exhibit non-linear (accelerating) behaviours... watch out. Tech always had a non-linear growth (Moore). I suspect tech is entering a new non-linear phase, going south, as many accumulating factors come into play.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jay_Wright_Forrester

When I spoke to these guys [0] we touched on those quirks and foibles that make a signature (including TCP stack stuff beyond control of any userspace app).

I love this curl, but I worry that if a component takes on the role of deception in order to "keep up" it accumulates a legacy of hard to maintain "compatibility" baggage.

Ideally it should just say... "hey I'm curl, let me in"

The problem of course lies with a server that is picky about dress codes, and that problem in turn is caused by crooks sneaking in disguise, so it's rather a circular chicken and egg thing.

[0] https://cybershow.uk/episodes.php?id=39

All great reasons and so true.

I kinda stopped monitoring web-stats because sometimes we pour effort into an article or episode that gets depressingly low views, while others - of dubious quality - soar in the ratings. It's that random "injustice" which feels wrong :)

Yet as TFA says, once you factor out any goals of influence, writing is an amazing process for research and idea formation in itself. Cybershow has become a yardstick of how prescient our coverage is and a growing catalogue of pieces that trace the trajectory of tech in the past few years.

I think it takes a couple of years and more than a hundred or so pieces for that value to come into view. So if you just started blogging/podcasting, give it time.

That's an interesting take. When the environmentally unsustainable and so far unprofitable "AI" gold-rush collapses the world will be left with thousands of "models" kicking about, with widespread ability to run locally. If LLMs do ever provide any genuine utility these will be replicated at near zero cost across the globe. Then we'll see the boot switch to the other foot, more of what you predict.... a vicious and disgracefully hypocritical attempt to contain and erase that data to stop anybody obtaining any value from it. At that point the corporations will be magically all for safety and copyright again!

You're right that a "European Cloud" has been a 'dream' for a long time. But I don't see the reasons you cite (regulation) as a cause of impediment.

And you slightly mis-parsed my words. A migration of cloud services from US providers isn't the same as to a "European Cloud". Canada, Australia, India, Vietnam, South Africa... there's a whole world of nominally friendly and economically viable suppliers out there. What matters is moving from Microsoft, AWS, Google and other services that cannot be considered "safe" any longer.

I notice from your profile you're an AWS disciple. You must know AWS want to build a "Euro Sovereign" division? Not that I think it will be successful, but look at which way the wind is blowing.

There's always good news and a silver lining. We've been saying for years that BigTech is the cybersecurity threat. Working toward European cloud migration has been like pulling teeth as so many companies felt locked-in to insecure US products. In just two months Trump has done more to motivate abandonment of Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Meta products than any hackers or criminals in the past 25 years.

I was feeling a lot of Erich Fromm there. Same spirit: insanity is a sane reaction to an insane society. We are all, well, well past that point today. Change will come. The easy way. Or the hard way.

I think that's why it's all the more important that trademarks do not get so casually lumped-in with the ridiculous catch-all term "intellectual property".

(agreeing with you here and suggesting that people who work with consumer protection marks should distance themselves from the term "IP" entirely)

> prominent intellectual property law professors

These guys are part of the problem IMHO. Having studied some law at university and then reading all of Lawrence Lessig's works when he dissected IP law 20 years ago for the Creative Commons project, I was left with the distinct feeling that "IP law" is ugly, unfair, arbitrary, ineffective, crippling to the mind, and devastating to progress and the economy.

I now strongly agree with the likes of Richard Stallman that "intellectual property" is a grotesque and bankrupt mess that should be avoided if you want to have any semblance of a mature conversation.

Actually, people training AI have a point. New technologies expose the silliness of bad ideas we've clung to for three centuries. And the only way forward is to hugely reform or repeal most of IP law for EVERYONE.

The truth is that long before the Statute of Anne "copyright" has its roots in censorship and political control. We used to burn the printers of "seditious works" on pyres of their own books in St James' square in London.

Much of "IP law" still functions the same today but hidden behind a cover story about "protecting creators".

I now mentally substitute the phrases "intellectual property" with "coercive control of information" (CCI).

CCI gets to the nub of power relations instead of pretending we have nice IP "laws" that are applied uniformly. In reality copyright, patents and trademarks have become tools of censorship and denial for those with money, and they do almost nothing to protect individual creators. Things like the DMCA are simply monstrous. If we can't reform and enforce it to actually protect creators it's time to scrap the whole rotten show in my opinion.