pibaker

Japan is not a surveillance society.

UK is not a high trust society. If anything the most trusting British people are likely found in places with the least surveillance.

This is like saying "I fully expect visiting that neighborhood to have the chance of getting mugged." A true statement and an incredibly sad one.

Correct. Conscription in Russia largely happens to rural people, ethnic minorities and convicts. Russia is the way it is because a large enough number of ethnic Russian middle class urbanites don't give a fuck about anything, and Putin knows the moment he starts drafting them he turns them into anti war activists.

When i think about being indie, I think about the era when personal websites were not meant to be money business and the common sense on the internet was to adopt a pseudonym and never tell anyone where you live.

Having a CV seems antithetical to the entire idea of indieness.

I feel some uneasiness when I go to a website branded as "indieweb," and see a link to the author's CV prominently on the page. Sometimes you also see a professional taken headshot of the author or an enthusiastic description of his work history at prestigious institutions. And it's always a professionally made blog. You know the drill.

It feels like walking into a brightly lit clothing store in a fancy mall and seeing the anarchy symbol on all items. Look closer and you'll see an almost four digit price tag.

Few people host their websites as hidden services because it's just asking too much from anyone who uses your site.

Imagine you are in a conversation with a stranger. You want to show him your personal website. Consider the following two sentences. Which has the highest probability of actually helping him getting on your website?

"Go to myfirstnamelastname.com. Yeah, it's spelled with a K."

"Go to $FIFTYSIXRANDOMCHRACTERS.onion. Oh you need to use the onion browser. Let me help you install it on your phone. Can't find the service? Oh my bad it's actually $FIFTYSIXRANDOMCHARACTERS.onion. There you go."

None of the things you listed are free of middlemen. Record companies were the OG villains of the music industry. Livenation has a monopoly over event venues.

Sometimes you can't just outrun the bad guys. You have to fight them head on.

> You can only cram so many houses into a place like San Franciso

Well, yeah, a human can only run so fast, but San Francisco is not even trying to run — it's barely crawling. Go to the sunset district, or Bayview, or any neighborhood in the western or southern half of the city and you will see nothing but rows after rows of single family homes — and yes, the car is a part of the family. Replace it with something like new york's west village and you will more than double its density.

> There actually is a ton of affordable housing in the US, but it's mostly in areas that people in influential industries like tech and media tend to sneer at

Yeah, just tell everyone to move to somewhere in the rust belt where the only job opening is in public sector health care that may or may not get cut by the current administration, that will help.

Telegram and Session are never secure by any means. Honestly I'd consider both of them to be intelligence and law enforcement honeypots given how aggressively they marketed themselves as the "secure" option and how little they actually deliver.

I would trust WhatsApp before I trust telegram.

The voluntary adoption of modern tech products says otherwise. People aren't forced to wear Apple Watches, order food through doordash, look up things on ChatGPT, ride Waymos etc. And yet everything I listed above is very popular.

Population wide revealed preferences speak volumes despite what loud critics who appointed themselves as the people's ambassadors may say.

A regime can only be as oppressive as the people following its orders. There are only so many protestors you can order your army to kill until your troops realize they are killing their own friends and family, at that point they either desert or turn their guns against you. This puts a check on what even the most evil tyrants can do. Not a perfect one, for sure, but still better than nothing.

Technology changes this by reducing the human involvement needed in killing. The Nazi gas chambers were a historical example — it turned out mowing down innocent civilians with machine guns was too mentally taxing for even devoted Nazis, so they invented a bloodless industrialized process where they can kill with greater efficiency while also sheltering the killer from the immediate effects of his actions. A win win for the Nazis, not so much for its victims.

Autonomous weapons are dangerous for this exact reason. They bypass individual moral decisions entirely. They are the perfect "just following orders" machine. They allow a small concentration of powerful people to impose force upon the populace without ever having to fear their own soldiers. It tips the balance of power massively in favor of those already powerful.

Except people have been doing obnoxious shit to feel better about themselves since forever ago. Look two hundred years back and you will see European men duelling each other over the most random stuffs. If anything, I'd say I am seeing less modded cars and hearing less bikes with more decibels than jet engines than I did 20 years ago.

I feel like you just grasping to any social phenomenon to try to insert your own agenda.

What's going on with all the open proselytizing on HN these days? I don't remember seeing them five years ago but now in every thread about personal struggles there is someone trying to convert people. Always to the same religion, too.

Edit: some people have replied saying why religion is helpful. Ok. But that doesn't answer my question of why is it showing up so much on HN lately.

> So this was a 4-5% increase in costs

…spread over an entire country.

I can't find anything breakdown in the article. But from what I have heard, you either live somewhere with a high concentration of new data centers and see a massive price increase of as much as 50%, or more likely you don't see any increase at all.

You are mixing things up. Just pricing your product based on demand does not necessarily make you a scalper. It's the fact that you are not the producer of the good itself that makes you one.

To use the real estate example, there is a difference between a developer selling a house it built, and an investor selling a house that he bought when it was cheaper.

Do we actually have any measurements of if AI helps you learn something better?

Because it is one thing to feel like you have learned something and another thing to have actually learned it well enough to put it in use. There are so many YouTube tutorials on all kinds of subject that will make you feel like an expert in the field after watching, and then you start doing the thing they have supposedly taught you and you can't remember a darn thing, because your "learning" was only ever skin deep and never meaningfully tested or reinforced.

The Roblox experience also includes a huge existing player base who may come and play your game without having to install anything new on their machines. I'd say this social factor actually matters a lot for Roblox where many if not most games are multiplayer.

The only thing close is minecraft, which from what I heard already has similar restrictions on in game chat, plus other shady maneuvers from Microsoft.

None of the engines you mentioned are nearly as approachable as roblox when it comes to making a 3D game with little programming or art skills.

Don't get me wrong. I agree roblox is a very shady operation, but that does not erase the fact that their platform is unmatched when it comes to letting kids make games.

There is nothing Porkbun or any other registrar can do if Montenegro decides to suspend the domain, which seems to be what actually happened.

> the political system in the UK not working very well

"Joke candidate making a serious attempt at practically unseating a probably corrupt party leader through democratic voting process" is infinitely better than what happens on the other side of the Atlantic. Or as I would call it "vote for one of the two presidential candidates who can't form a coherent sentence. Except your vote doesn't matter because your state is deep red or blue. And your congressional vote doesn't matter either because you are gerrymandered. But your congressional vote not mattering doesn't matter anyway because the congress has given up governing."

Shortwave radio had a reputation for hosting political nut jobs before the internet existed. So are podcasts.

At least transit users don't get road rage.

It's less like HOA and more like sharia law if I remember his background correct.

When I learned that this website is by the same people who gave us AI 2027, I immediately thought about the Wikipedia page on doomsday predictions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dates_predicted_for_ap...

Notice the many times when a prediction failed and the so called prophet would come back in a few years and give you a new date. And they would tell you, well, this time it's real.

I do find it ironic that many of the AI predictions are coming from the self titled "rationalists." It seems like building your identity around being rational and immune to psychological pitfalls is a good way to ensure that you don't even notice that you have walked straight into the one psychological trap every cult has employed since time immemorial.

> Gaming is getting too expensive

If you buy a new game every month or every week, sure.

But that is not representative of all gamers. Here's a survey that shows only 15% of American gamers buy one or more games a month. Not only that, half of the gamers buy less two games a year on average.

https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:bhqrrxt7yyfpwguioa7rwa7x/po...

I can't find the number of PS5 games sold per console. But I did find the number for Nintendo switch — roughly ten games sold per switch, on a console almost ten years old. Maybe PlayStation gamers are different, but Nintendo gamers are definitely not buying games frequently on average.

https://www.nintendo.co.jp/ir/en/finance/hard_soft/index.htm...

I find it hard to believe that a $15 price increase on a purchase you make twice a year is going to be the dealbreaker for most people. If anything it is likely lagging behind price increases in other leisure items like dining out and alcohol.

But then again, internet discourse over gaming is dominated by devoted gamers who are in that 15% so we hear their argument over and over again, instead of the silent majority of gamers who don't buy anything beyond their yearly call of duty or FIFA or battlefield instalment.

Well, because most recent AAA titles would be miserable to play on a handheld.

Are you willing to show us your work history and let hackers news judge every single feature you have implemented in your career in exchange for money?

> I now learn he's donated significant chunks of money to them.

Biting the hand that feeds you might make you an asshole. But sometimes you have to be an asshole to uphold standards and principles. I don't think Linus or Jobs would be known to produce such important technology if they don't care enough about their works to act crudely to people they consider substandard.

We can disagree with Andrew's standards of course. But saying he should not attack someone just because he took money from him is a weak criticism.

> If any of those people were politically connected

Connection works both ways. You can be your superior's lapdog on Monday and jailed for being so cordial that he thinks you are trying to take over his position — I mean, taking bribes — by Wednesday.

Given how this man stayed out of trouble for 30 straight years before finally being apprehended, I feel this could be exactly what happened. He probably had some political leverage to keep the prosecutors looking the other way. And the moment he lost his leverage — maybe his superiors changed their minds about him, maybe he stepped on the toes of someone, who knows — they went after him.

Anyone who think this demonstrates the CCP's epicbacon commitment to anti corruption needs to ask themselves how did this man take so much bribe over 30 years and is only sentenced now.

Is he dumb? Surely he is smart enough to know he committed a capital crime and yet he kept doing it. Perhaps he only kept doing it because he believed he could somehow get away with it? Perhaps he saw others pull off the same stunt? Or perhaps he had the political capital to keep himself out of trouble and is now facing justice because he rubbed someone higher up the wrong way?

Is the prosecution dumb? 300 million is no small money are they really so incompetent that over the course of 30 years they could not find anything wrong with this guy? Perhaps they had a reason to keep him around? Perhaps he had them in his pocket? Perhaps he had the connection to fuck up anyone who dares investigating him? Perhaps they never meant to care about corruption anyway and only went after him because someone somewhere issued an order and they are just charging him for corruption because the true reason is less convenient?

China has invested a lot in whitewashing its public image these days. Every young left leaning westerner is salivating at the idea of a Chinese century because they somehow convinced themselves that the Chinese has the solution to everything that went wrong in the west. It's sad to see it spreading even to this website.

> You can’t buy your way out if you do something

Not with money.