normalnorm

You forgot to include some more details from the Wikipedia article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malware) from where you borrowed your definition:

> A wide variety of types of malware exist, including computer viruses, worms, Trojan horses, ransomware, spyware, adware, rogue software, and scareware.

It specifically mentions spyware, so let's take a look at that definition:

"Spyware is a type of malware that aims to gather information about a person or organization, without their knowledge, and send such information to hack another entity without the consumer's consent."

Premium experience comes at a cost because it is expensive to produce. You need good materials, you need to hire the best people, you need to take your time, etc. And you need to be free from cheap "feature factory" thinking.

The above has nothing to do with Apple's cut on other people's work. That is just exploitation and is unrelated to increasing the quality of the experience for users. On the contrary, it makes life harder for developers wanting to bet on quality and instead encourages shovleware and deception. And this is exactly the outcome one sees.

The app store experience is what is antithetical to Apple. There is nothing premium about it.

> Your manager is not your enemy. Your manager making a joke is not kicking you down, he's trying to breed camaraderie.

This is getting strangely personal. If you are joking, well done on the subtlety!

It is more or less universally recognized that jokes are only funny if they are punching upwards. Someone in a position of power making jokes about using that power against someone with less power is more akin to bullying.

One of the victims is in love / obsessed with the other, and this is a misguided attempt to stay in touch and have something unique in common.

> I think the only way Amazon or Google ever start to stagnate is if a similar fate befalls them.

Google has been stagnating for more than one decade. What have they created since 2010 that is even remotely interesting, let alone in the interest of society?

And Amazon is Rube Goldberg machine of human suffering. Who cares?

> There's a tendency among hardcore europhiles to blame the nasty british for all questioning of the European ideal, as though if it weren't for perfidious albion Europe would be of one mind.

Perhaps, but that was not what I said at all. What I said is that the UK always chose to not participate in the project, and that the project went on without it. Now, with Brexit, the UK government is openly hostile towards the EU. This is just a fact. Another fact is that the EU was able to maintain a united political front when faced with Brexit (which posed -- and was meant to pose -- an existential threat to the EU). So the reports of EU's death may be premature, as the cliché goes...

> This completely ignores both the deep euroscepticism felt by many people across the EU

Well, I haven't. On the contrary, I said that it is a very hard and incomplete project, and that it was considered impossible by a lot of people every step of the way. I also mentioned that it is among the younger generations that a European identity is growing. Not established, but growing.

> and also ignores that other countries have differing opinions to France and Germany too

Well, I ignored none of that. You just assumed it.

What I think is undeniable is that there are vested interests in the collapse of the EU. The EU is composed of many small countries, that could be much more easily pushed around if not acting as bloc. Naturally, those who would indeed like to push Europe around dislike the EU. With the stance of the current US administration and of the post-Brexit UK government, it just so happens that in the current year of 2020, a lot of people with such vested interests write in English.

How do you figure that?

The EU is an economic and political union. It might not be complete or perfect, but integration has been happening decade by decade. We now have a single currency, a unified supreme court, a single charter of citizen rights, freedom of movement and a single market. A lot of younger people feel European, there is such a thing as an European identity. Each one of these things was considered impossible at a certain point. It is a slow and hard process but it is happening.

I find that the English-speaking media is particularly keen on repeating the mantra that "the EU is collapsing". I've witnessed this all my life. It became more intense now with Brexit, but the UK was not ever a real member. It opted out and demanded exceptions for everything. Unfortunately, the EU had to be built around the UK, not with it. There was also a shift in attitude with the current administration in the US, which sees the EU as an adversary instead of as a friend. So I would take anything I read in English about the EU with a pinch of salt...

Because "Artificial Intelligence" is a label forever applied to the effort of replicating some human cognitive ability on machines. A well-known lament goes something like: "once it's possible, it's no longer AI".

Business is about exploiting what exists. This is why the buzzword is "innovation", not "invention". Incremental improvements, not qualitative jumps. So nothing will ever be really considered "Artificial Intelligence" once it is boring enough for business.

Scheduling algorithms are incredibly useful for business. There was a time when this was considered AI, but that was the time when they didn't work well enough to be useful.

> "Quickly" using the JavaScript tooling is somewhat akin to watching one or two episodes of the 6th Game of Thrones season without watching anything else. You really need to watch season 1-5 to understand what's going on.

I disagree. In both cases, you really only need one or two episodes to know that the story is not going anywhere. It will only get more complicated and convoluted without ever rewarding you, you will realize that no thought was ever put into it, and you will only stay for the ride because of sunk costs.

Right. Is this the situation you imagined when you started?

I understand that.

My point is that too much attention is given to what corporations think or prefer. In the US, citizens enjoy almost complete personal freedom in principle but most of their lives are highly restricted in practice. This is, in part, because of a subservient attitude towards corporations.

Keep worrying so much about how to bend yourselves backwards to accommodate the employers, and one day you will find it impossible to stand up straight again. But hey, to each their own I guess.

Who cares about the preferences of the corporations? Are you a slave?

> This post is not about politics

This is a strange disclaimer. This post is absolutely about politics, and there is nothing wrong with that. Politics is not some dirty word. Politics is about the ideas, values and decisions that govern society. I understand what the author means, politics as in "Trump this, Biden that". Accepting this reductive version of what "politics" means is detrimental to us all. We have been conditioned by click-bait media to not being able to have a civilized discussion about the things that matter the most.

> we the technologists blah blah blah

"We the technologists" have no agency whatsoever. "We the technologists" are just middle class workers who will mostly do what it takes to secure employment, hoping to get a promotion as to be able to buy more toys.

The open web existed as a niche. It did not survive contact with the general public nor with corporate interests. This is because of a more general state of affairs, that has everything to do with politics and nothing to do with technology.

Well said.

I believe this to be the fundamental realization that would change the world for the better, if enough people had it. So many of the ills of the world can be traced back to childhood trauma and mediocre education.

I think we have been going through a few decades where mainstream parenting values have been mostly narcissistic. Parents seeing their children as indebted to them is both the norm and an abomination. I have some hope that more and more people are seeing things as you do.

> I'm just easily triggered with language :P

Me too! It makes me irrationally angry when people regurgitate linguistic clichés. I was already mad with:

"python does not have a go-like concurrency story"

when it would be enough (and 1000x less cringe) to say:

"python does not have go-like concurrency"

I think these mindless clichés make language really ugly and dysfunctional, and even worse they are thought-stoppers, because they make the reader/listener feel like something smart is being said, because they recognize the "in-group" lingo. In my experience, people get really offended when you point this out. It's kind of an HN taboo to discuss this. Which is also interesting in itself.

Going forward we should pay more attention to our communication use cases. Btw: I wonder if we can stack several of these clichés. For example: "leverage" + "use case" = "leverage case".

It's a war of attrition, let's not be simplistic.

> How is Amazon overriding the sovereign decisions of a democratic republic in this case?

They are not, but they are aiming at leveraging their near-monopoly status to create public outrage against the decision. What else would motivate their decisions to forego profit on the allowed product categories? I am assuming we are all intelligent adults here, no need to spell out everything...

You can say what you want about Amazon, but they always take the long-term view when it comes to profits.

Not really. Businesses that sell essential goods (the ones allowed by the court order) are still operating. The others would too, if they could. They don't have the deep pockets that Amazon has to try and override the sovereign decisions of a democratic republic.

> The court gave a short deadline for meeting an ambiguous target

Everyone in the world is trying to meet an ambiguous target. You know what happened to all the small businesses in my neighborhood? They are closed until further notice.

Amazon employs an underclass (warehouse workers) that we all expect to risk their lives for our comfort. French court said: "non". Good for them.

I love computers since I can remember, and started learning to code when I was still in basic school. This lead me to think that the tech industry was the obvious career for me. During my time in the industry, I felt miserable. I would say that the main reasons for that were:

* Meaninglessness. Most of the projects are simply not necessary, they do not help society in anyway, they just exist to make someone else wealthy.

* Tedium. The intellectual challenges aren't there after a while. There are countless intellectual challenges in the field of computing / computer science, but they are usually precisely the ones that industry has no interest on.

* Micromanagement. "Agile" and similar management practices (yes, I know, you're not doing it right, blah blah blah) are downright humiliating and infantilizing. Almost no other highly skilled professional has to tolerate such level of intrusion on their day-to-day activities. I love deep thinking and creative expression. The modern corporate setting prevents this by design.

* Open-spaces. See above.

* Idealism. I was so excited about the possibilities that the Internet opened for humanity. Now we have ad-tech and horrible exploitation of "gig-economy", warehouse workers and the like. This is definitely not what I have in mind when I started.

* Conformism. The tech industry is extremely conformist. Monetary consideration always wins. Deference to power always wins. "Hacker" used to mean something completely different. Almost opposite to the current definition.

I realized that what I always loved about computing was the endless creative and intellectual possibilities allowed by the medium. This is more or less the opposite of what the industry values, despite what they might advertise endlessly. There is nothing cool about it. It is stale and anti-intellectual.

I don't need a lot of money to be happy. You probably don't either. Time on this earth is the most valuable thing we have, and I would rather spend it waiting tables than enduring one more stand-up meeting.

I think creative nerds are the life-blood of the industry, but they tend to be shy and not assertive, so they have their life controlled by the "business types". I honestly believe that if the nerds told them to fuck off and started spending their time working on things they think are relevant, the world would become much better quickly. This won't happen, I know.

> It looks like you need to find someone who can help make your post feel more professional - perhaps Ask HN for help or just directly email one of the clued up people here that are open to cold emails (patio11?).

It would probably have the opposite effect. This way it looks like a probably serious scientist wrote an idea that is probably worth considering on his personal website / blog.

If you give the site the "Hacker News treatment", I suspect that it will immediately look like "somebody with funding is trying to sell me on an idea for some reason". This stuff might work for naive consumers, but naive consumers don't matter here. I am sure that this post is already being shared among experts, and they are the ones who need to decide if this idea has merit or not. Throwing marketing bs at them will probably just hurt the cause.

> Modern medicine, with the way hospitals and health insurance are run, do not and cannot address, for economic reasons, a pretty important aspect, albeit subjective, which is well-being.

The "economic reasons" are just the preferences of the rich & powerful. Resources could be allocated in other ways. It is just that those that call the shots are not interested. In the US, they also managed to convince a large part of the population to act against its own interests.

I dream of an economic system that serves human beings instead of the numerical abstractions behind which the rich and powerful hide their extreme selfishness.

What are the consequences? Have you ever experienced them yourself?

Scientific theories are not "proven", that is not how science works. All theories are always and forever open to falsification. The scientific attitude is one of eternal doubt. "Proof" is something that only exists in the realm of pure math.

How do you "slowly lift it"?

Thanks, but I'll stay with Email 1.0 for as long as I can. It is one of the last remaining corners of the internet that is not infested with all the human-hostile behaviors you call "features".

Centralized walled garden, bound to fail, or worse, acquired by some super-evil corp at any moment ("our wonderful journey"), packed with emojis, real-time information on who is looking at what worse than the Stasi and loss of control of your timeline is what EVERYONE ELSE ALREADY PEDDLES. These things are part of the problem, not part of the solution. For fuck's sake, leave email alone.

The pie chart is fine. They can be bad when one wants to compare several similar categories, but they are fine when used to compare a part to a whole. Also it has a hole in the middle, which mitigates the problem of visual angle comparison.

It's not good to blindly follow rules, just because it's fashionable to say a certain thing. Especially in the fields of data visualization and user experience, which are mostly pseudoscience bullshit anyway...

This has been the mainstream position for most of those 50 years. Working on the "foundations of physics", which is what you call "arguing" was considered disreputable and career-destroying for a long time. Read, for example, "Something Deeply Hidden" by Sean Caroll for more about this.

A lot of really really smart people tried to solve this by experimenting more. It didn't work. It's time for philosophy again, and in my view, also to accept that the weirdness is not going away. Nature doesn't care about what we find weird or not.

> First, there's no "no pandemic" case. Not anymore.

I am not saying that the analysis is correct, but information that is disclosed now has no bearing on an explanation of the actions of actors in the past.

> Last but not least, the whole framing is extremely simplistic and follows the "politicians are evil" reddit-like logic.

Politicians are people who happen to really care about being reelected. If you have any contact with them, you will realize that this is the ulterior motive of all of their actions. In a sense, as it should be. Being our democratic-elected representatives, it seems reasonable to me that they behave as slaves to the preferences of those who elected them. Like everything else, this creates a bunch of perverse incentives. You would have to be very naive to overlook these things, and imagine that powerful politicians will no put reelection above all things. The ones that didn't did not get reelected, and are not powerful politicians.