seneca

I don't want to ignore anything. The H1B fee changes were a half-measure that didn't go nearly far enough.

That's the classic example of a loaded question.

> I'm curious how you think we could have avoided our current fascist leadership?

"Have you stopped beating your wife?"

> Punching people who think you and your friends should be killed just for existing is a form of self-defense.

This is such an incredibly radicalized and detached from reality statement. It's genuinely scary that there are people who think this way.

Interesting article. The color is nice on the Pro, but could definitely use some improvement.

That aside, the Remarkable Paper Pro is one of the biggest deltas I have ever seen between hardware and software quality. The hardware feels and looks great. I was pretty excited when I unboxed it by it. That all disappeared rapidly as I started using it. Their entire user experience is terrible, and just shockingly unuseful. I don't understand who it's designed for, because it doesn't seem to do anything well.

This is one of those topics where everyone is going to insert their personal bête noire as the cause. "Tech, the economy, culture, immigrants, loss of religion, corruption, polarization, capitalism, socialism!". I actually really like threads like this, since it's a good way to get a pulse on what the different discontentment topics are at any given time.

I totally agreed with you, right up until the last paragraph. Reddit is among the worst communities on the internet.

You aren't wrong. There is no real use for this for most people. It's a silly toy that somehow caught the AI hype cycle.

The thing is, that's totally fine! It's ok for things to be silly toys that aren't very efficient. People are enjoying it, and people are interacting with opensource software. Those are good things.

I do think that eventually this model will be something useful, and this is a great source of experimentation.

> How's the $100K H1B fee that was announced to distract from the Trump Gold Card announcement [0] going? The HN hive mind said it would bring back the jobs and those of us who warned [1][2] it would incentivize offshoring were hounded.

Yep, offshoring needs to be heavily penalized as well.

> ChatGPT has become a safety-critical system.

It's really really not. "Safety-critical system" has a meaning, and a chat bot doesn't qualify. Treating the whole world as if it needs to be wrapped in bubble-wrap is extremely unhealthy and it generally just used as an excuse for creeping authoritarianism.

It feels like OpenAI is moving into the extraction phase far too soon. They are making their product less appealing to end users with ads and aggressive user-data gathering (which is what this really is). Usually you have to be very secure in your position as a market segment owner before you start with the anti-consumer moves, but they are rapidly losing market share, and they have essentially no moat. Is the goal just to speed-run an IPO before they lose their position?

Yeah, this is all far far too invasive. The goal is obviously to gather as much data on you as possible under whatever pretense users are most likely to accept. "Think of the children", as always. This will then be used to sell advertising to you, or outright sell it to data brokers.

New boss, same as the old boss.

> The problem with "let the parents decide" is that if all other kids in the neighborhood have phones and are on social media then unless you want your kid to grow up with no friends you don't have a choice but to let your kid also use social media.

Sorry, no, this is just abdicating your responsibility as a parent. "It's hard" isn't an excuse for throwing your hands up and handing your responsibility over to the state.

I genuinely don't understand how anyone can think it's anything other than governments trying to destroy online anonymity. "Think of the children" is a cliche for a reason.

> I appreciate you clarifying your intent

Absolutely, happy to. And likewise! I'm sorry if what I said came off as judgemental or insulting. Not at all the intent, I assumed the motivation was nothing but kindness.

> I can assure you that there was nothing performative or hollow about my comment. OP said something that resonated with me, and so I shared my story in an attempt to bridge and find commonalities.

Sorry, I didn't mean to say at all that what you're doing was somehow performative. By saying it feels "hollow", I mean that when you are on the receiving end of an action like this it often feels hollow because you have no relationship with the person. They are skipping several steps in the relationship development process from zero to "I want to engage with you on something that is deep and painful".

This may be totally fine for some people, but to me (and apparently to the person I was responding to) when it happens I feel like I am becoming some sort of symbolic prop to the person. It's uncomfortable. It doesn't feel like a human interaction at all.

My intention wasn't to cast doubt on your motivations, just to tell publicdebates that I understand the feeling he was describing.

> it's entirely coming from you and your experiences, and nothing to do with me and my own personality except for the one thing we have somewhat in common, means that your comment is to me merely a representation of you and what you stand for. Which is great and beautiful, but it doesn't cross the bridge of being a meaningful comment on my end.

Man, well said. People who "over engage" are doing it out of a sense of kindness, but you're right that it feels hollow and is really just about them.

I think the solution to this is basically what you're doing. Build small connections via whatever engagement mechanism you can and let them organically grow into meaningful ones. Jumping from zero to pretending you have a meaningful connection is exactly why those gestures feel hollow. There is no shortcut, it takes time.

Sounds like you're making those initial connections with your signs, which I think is great.

> Our lopsided emphasis on individualism

This reads like that pattern where people assign blame for all issues to whatever thing they happen to not like. The US is the least individualistic it has ever been, but there was much more community and less loneliness in the past. That make it pretty obvious that the issue here isn't "individualism".

Nice, I'll have to give that a shot. I often use Claude for exactly that.

I hope this makes a big jump forward for them. I used to be a heavy Codex user, but it has just been so much worse than Claude Code both in UX and in actual results that I've completely given up on it. Anthropic needs a real competitor to keep them motivated and they just don't have one right now, so I'd really like to see OpenAI get back in the game.

> A weaver who knows how to use an automated weaving machine produces 3 times as much cloth as one who doesn't, so why don't they get paid 3 times as much?

An automatic weaving machine, operated by a capable operator, produces 3 times as much as a manual weaver. The productivity increase is the machine, not the operator. That's my entire point.

The owner of the machine reaps the surplus, not its operator.

> This is the problem of the decoupling of productivity and wages. It started happening at precisely the moment the gold standard was ended - weird.

You'll get no argument from me about the ills caused by the financialization of the economy, but I don't think that's what's going on here.

> Except in technology where the gains come from my personal investment in skills.

Not really. That's essentially a weaver learning to use the new automated weaving machine. That is what you do to remain qualified for the job. Now, if you were a framework or key system creator, building the underlying platforms that get adopted throughout the industry, I would agree. But just learning to use the tooling the the industry creates isn't that different, other than the rate of change you have to keep up with.

> If I'm creating 3 times as much value as my equivalent in 1970, why aren't I getting paid 3 times as much inflation-adjusted money, hmm?

Because that increase in productivity comes almost entirely from technology owned by your employer.

To look at it in a contrived example, let's take textiles. There is a textile factory employing weavers who weave fabric by hand, and the factory owners buys a new automated weaving machine that makes the weavers each 3 times more productive. The maker of the machine created the technology, and is paid for it, the owner of the factory made the investment to bring the technology, and profits from it.

This is basically exactly what has happened to modern productivity.

> Giving young kids iPads so they’ll be quiet is a normalized form of neglect.

I'd say it's closer to outright abuse. One of the better things you can do is a parent is seek out a community where this sort of thing is frowned upon. It's much harder to control when those around you think it's ok. I wish that were easier for people to find.

> It's just a market reaching equilibrium. It's always weird how employees are forever to be expected to be at the mercy of market forces much greater than they are, while employers have to be shielded from them.

It's not a market, at all. It's only possible because of federal law that prevents a business from firing employees for unionizing. If it were a market, the business would have to choose to keep unionzed workers voluntarily. The fact that they don't means it's more like the business being held hostage.

The equivalent would be employees being required by law to stay at a company they don't want to work for. Essentially indentured servitude.

>Why is union-related collective ruin anathema, but elite-driven ruin is seen as an acceptable price to pay? Enron, the Great Recession, etc.

What are you talking about? Multiple people were convicted over the Enron scandal, including some serious prison terms.

> And its cold comfort to us all to basically say "let's all agree to slavery so nobody loses their jobs".

Comparing software development jobs in the modern United States to slavery is quite fanciful.

That's not at all what the statement I replied to says in context.

hellojesus said "There is always the chance that the collective action discounts the impact to the business too heavily and ends up driving the company under, making the outcomes worse for everyone."

popalchemist said "If the company's existence depends on the unfair exploitation of its staff, its foreclosure is inevitable and justified"

That response is implying that the only way the business could go under due to unionization is because the business was formerly exploiting its staff. It's not just pro-union, it's outright zealotry that ignores reality.

> If the company's existence depends on the unfair exploitation of its staff, its foreclosure is inevitable and justified, and that is simply the price everyone involved must pay to maintain equilibrium.

Claiming that all non-union companies are inherently operating via "unfair exploitation of its staff" is ridiculous. It's entirely possible for a labor union to go too far and drive a company to become noncompetitive.

These sort of canned answers are empty claptrap and not really fit for an honest discussion.

> It's very unfortunate. As a parent, I feel like it requires regulation at the national level because I can't win against Meta (FB, Insta), Google (Youtube), Snapchat and TikTok.

Sorry, but this just isn't the case. I have children very much in the target age here, and they only have a passing understand of what social media even is due to us explaining how unhealthy it is to them.

It's unfortunate you feel incapable of achieving the same, but abdicating your responsibility as a parent to the state isn't the answer.