randomsearch

Thanks, that really helped. Perhaps a good framing for life and episodes within it too.

Graduates also have the advantage that they’re relatively cheap to hire.

Be wary of taking a job with a tool maker. They can be hit hardest, eventually.

I know you’re being facetious, but actually any form of exercise is a great example of Bruce Lee being correct!

This is really very impressive. How likely is it this is essentially one or more comments from HN memorised by the neural net, with some synonym usage? How do we know that it’s not just reposting partially disguised sentences written by a human author?

100 times this. There’s very little sign of AGI, but nuclear weapons exist, can definitely destroy the planet already, are designed to, have nearly done so in the past, and we’re at the most dangerous point in decades.

Except they accidentally did a real-world experiment and we discovered that people needed to be consoled and not confronted too suddenly with the inevitable

If people said that, they wouldn’t know anything about (conceptual) art. If you’d walked into an art school, they would have said “no, that’s automated illustration generation.” Which is what you’d get today. It’s amazing that HN thinks DALL-E is somehow an artist. This happens because most posters on the topic don’t seem to understand what art is. It’s not illustration or decoration. “Good art” is not a painting that looks particularly realistic or dramatic or colourful etc.

There are artists in my family and I’ve worked with a bunch of artists myself, but you only need a cursory understanding of art to know DALL-E is automated illustration.

I think DALL-E is amazing, absolutely amazing, but it is not creating art in the sense that an artist does. If you think it does, you’re probably confusing artists with illustrators.

This confuses conceptual art with the process of creating a silkscreen (or spot painting, etc).

That can’t possibly be true, right? GDP plummeted and employment is high, so productivity can’t have increased…

Reality is the public couldn’t handle the facts.

When scientists in the U.K. started talking about herd immunity - the only way out of a pandemic - people went nuts and they quickly had to stop using the term and start reassuring more than informing.

Average pandemic is about four years, not much has changed. They just had to keep people going at the time.

This really confuses me too.

When I work in pomodoros I can take short breaks every 30 mins and they seem to help - precisely due to the stepping back and rethinking you mentioned.

Other people have commented to me how context switching is not so hard for them.

I think there is a “deep flow” state, but it’s not actually so productive - you just feel focused and do a lot of work, but it might not actually be in the most efficient direction.

So I feel there’s this trade off between “flow” and “managing yourself”. I guess hackers of repute just flow so much they compensate for their lack of self management.

Yes, you just nailed it. It’s the cognitive dissonance. “That doesn’t make any sense, huh” leads to getting annoyed when the world seems to disagree with something that you just can’t figure out any other way.

> but I never have more than a single version deployed on my device

Sure, but another user might have another version installed. That might be because their package manager is behind the latest release, for example.

Self-hosting means it's still FOSS and you don't need them if you really want to have your own install.

SaaS deployment means it's easier to maintain for the majority who don't care.

I think this is the most convincing benefit, the uncommon skills.

I think working in a remote team that I thought were as effective as an in-person team would convince me.

Lots of points, but the most obvious one is with SaaS you can deploy a single version of software, which makes it orders off magnitude less difficult to maintain.

No, I don’t think so.

HN is not constantly measuring your behaviour and trying to feed you more addictive and outrageous content.

HN does not advertise your karma to others as a measure of self esteem.

HN does not make money from advertising.

HN is not like social media in the ways that matter when discussing how damaging social media is.

I agree. Not sure remote is just as productive though, especially over the long term.

Bit of a late reply but fyi - the Russians have been using cell networks to communicate military orders, which is perhaps the piece of the puzzle you were missing.

What are the benefits for the employer?

Some people speculate whether the rise of SaaS is a response to FOSS, which made it difficult to monetise software development. I’ve certainly begun to question my previous automatic assumption that FOSS is a good thing in the long term.

The good news for FOSS is that hosting costs just keep getting cheaper, so providing free SaaS is increasingly feasible.

There’s also the “third way” of FOSS with a hosted option available. Wordpress is a good example of that. If deploying such projects on the cloud eventually becomes trivial, then you could imagine a FOSS desktop in the future might have a cloud component (or be entirely remotely hosted). That might sound odd, but consider you still need to buy hardware to run your FOSS on, so renting that hardware instead isn’t a great leap.

Google docs is also reportedly terrible for working with sizeable documents.

That appears to be a disingenuous argument.

Firstly, traditional news media’s intrusion is not as severe or wide ranging. To give one example, the surge in teenage mental health problems that Facebook and Instagram in particular seem likely to have caused.

Second, there is a very large qualitative difference between social media and traditional media. Social media is monitoring your every action, and adapting to it, and creates a tight feedback loop where you are manipulated into staying engaged and consuming more adverts. That personalised real-time feedback loop, based on giant datasets that are very invasive, is incomparable to traditional media.

Finally, the extent of attention capture by social media cannot be compared to traditional media. This can be observed by simply taking a walk down the high street and seeing how many people are staring at their phones. Traditional media do use apps as a medium, but there aren’t many people who would seriously argue that most of those glued to their screens are likely to be reading an online newspaper and not looking at Instagram, Twitter, or TikTok.

The only doubt I have is whether Zuckerberg actually believes what’s he saying, in order to have a clean conscience, or whether it’s a cynical argument used to reassure his staff.

I'm super sceptical of such articles. The hardest part of software development is knowing what to build, and that requires a highly skilled product manager. The latter is a full time job for even small projects with a handful of devs.

All productivity tools require some “farming” or “gardening”, that is tending to regularly to maintain them.

Every morning I burn through my emails. then run through my calendar, then my todo lists, then make a plan for the day. You have to keep revisiting and updating.

Speculation but: there will be a huge amount of institutional inertia around this. It sure suits a large number of Google employees that "paying for a service" will fail.

Newspapers, tv, and music, are counter-examples to the assertion that people won't pay for things - even when they've previously been free.

Google's main product focus now should be Cloud, the ad debate is long-term done.

Usually the military doesn't target infrastructure they'll need themselves.

I've seen various Ukranian sources mention Starlink as a useful comms tool.

> I've never seen a hot reload that worked fast enough to not be annoying.

Then you, my friend, have never used Vite.

There are 14 billion tether in circulation, don’t they need enough to back it?