seneca

I'm not sure this is all that unpopular of an opinion anymore. Government schools have been in decline for decades, and a lot of people were exposed to the truth of just how dysfunctional they had become during covid lock downs. Perhaps before that more people still believed in the noble myth of public education, but I, at least, have seen more and more people agreeing with the sentiment you put forward, minus the statement about keeping teens out of the job market.

While I agree with you about rising authoritarianism, I'm confused what this has to do with nationalism. Chat Control is being created by the EU, a supranational organization. If anything, this sort of transnational authoritarianism is a bigger threat, and likely to promote nationalist backlash.

> I think is best described in defence (now WAR) spending

Yes, certainly. Security is actually the point "minimal state" (Nozick) crowd agree we need, which is why I pointed to them as opposed to the Von Mises hard liners. I see your point about the argument against this being harmful.

> I do agree that preppers are hardly the most destructive people out there, however their entirely individualistic attitudes do hold a parallel with those who think robbing the commons is ok.

Sure, I think I see the point you're making. I disagree with it partly, but it's a quibble and not really the point we're discussing, I think.

> I feel like part of the abstract of a more model citizen is accepting that sometimes society will do things that you don't necessarily agree with.

Yes, this is the heart of Social Contract theory. We agree we're going to give up some amount of control of our own lives and freedom in exchange for greater security and prosperity. Maybe that's a good lens to look at the original delineation we painted through. First-order opponents are violating that core Social Contract agreement by looting the commons. Second-order opponents adhere to the SC, but disagree with how we proceed within the agreement.

I think you hit on it quite well with you statement about stealing public money in your parallel comment, which I generalized to simply "plundering the commons for personal gain". I have no idea why people would downvote the argument, but I think discussing that is generally frowned upon on HN.

> I agree that its technically a position but while that venn diagram may well include people who believe in charitable giving and local community organization its those who do not believe in those things (which I would argue constitute the majority of that position) who are the problem here.

I agree with your broader point. A hair to split is that I tend to see those "you leave me alone, I leave you alone" types as sort of side-line sitters. They're a neutral party who genuinely want to mostly opt out for one reason or another. I don't think that taking a stance of them either being with us or against us is healthy when there are so many genuinely destructive people.

> Even so, the idea that everyone gets to choose themselves what the issues are, belies a lack of unity and community that is close to what I'm trying to define. To respect society, one must give up an aspect of control.

Interesting. I'm curious what you mean here, as this could point a lot of different directions. Are you saying that you don't think individualism is healthy in general?

Do you mean that broad disunity and lack of alignment on societal values is dangerous? If so, I totally agree with that and wonder how it can be squared with modern multi-cultural pluralistic society. I don't, personally, believe in enforcing ideological conformity, but struggle to see how a society that doesn't believe in shared underlying mores can coordinate itself and have shared purpose.

> I think the bigger problem definitely are those who think stealing public money is ok to do.

No disagreement, and I think that's a good starting point. Those plundering the commons for personal gain are pretty clearly first-order opponents.

Yeah, it's unfortunate. I disagree with this portion of the point he's making, but I don't see why people would treat it as not being valuable to the conversation at hand. I think it actually highlights the point of disagreement really well.

I think this is a great example of a second-order disagreement.

How about people who genuinely believe in a minimal state? They often believe in charitable giving and local community organization, in my experience. Maximal civil society vs maximal government. A good example of this type is people who believe in the ideas laid out in Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia. Even the more hard line Von Mises types are close to this. There are disgruntled people who are just asocial in that camp, like any other, but they are over emphasized by opponents just like every political group.

It would be very hard to argue that Nozick wasn't someone concerned with advancing society. The difference for that type is just a strong disagreement about how to do so. Painting them as first-order opponents is a mistake, I think.

That's probably a healthy way to see things. Ideally all people that are actively working to create or improve should be on the same "side" against those that are destructive. The second order conflict then becomes what the rules are, and how we guide that side. That is, I think, where most of the factionalism historically plays out. It does feel like we're regressing to fighting that first order conflict more often now though.

In reality, it may be more complicated than that though. Most people don't see themselves as destructive, they just have a very different view of what the right rules are and what ought to be done to progress things. That can appear destructive from the outside.

> Anonymity is not a prerequisite to freedom of speech.

I couldn't disagree more. The vast majority of papers the founders of the US published to argue against tyrannical government were written anonymously.

> Broken lives of people harassed by anonymous trolls on social media are the dark side of anonymity.

This is a cliche "think of the children" argument. Stripping away anonymity is a gargantuan problem, and enables authoritarian regimes to punish dissent. Trolls are a very minor problem comparatively.

> Freedom must be accompanied by responsibility and accountability.

This is essentially saying "freedom needs to come with punishments and restrictions when you do things I don't like". It's an oxymoron. The responsibilities a free populace have are moral and civil, they aren't about giving away anonymity to governments.

Sure, and that is more my own clunky paraphrasing than anything the article states. Iterating and testing to find a fit for customers is the business/product side of software. How you execute on those iterations is engineering.

Exactly the comment I came to make after reading this article. The article is basically claiming that "trying different things until something works" is what takes time, but the actual act of "trying things" requires development time. I can't see how someone can think about this topic this long, which the author clearly has, and come to this conclusion.

Perhaps I've just misunderstood the point, but it seems like a nonsensical argument.

It feels a bit unreasonable to me. Anthropic is arguably comparable to Google's Gemini program. Is Gemini 10% of Alphabet's value? If so, how much of that is because of its ability to consume and interact with things like YouTube and Workspaces?

I could see two or three percent, but this seems like a pretty big stretch. Then again, I'm not a VC.

That genuinely feels like satire. I guess the beauty of good satire is that it borders on reality. The Juicero of the AI era.

It's not just offshoring now though. It's offshoring plus hundreds of thousands of H-1b holders being brought onshore. Entire departments at major tech companies in US offices are populated by foreign labor. As far as I'm aware that's unprecedented, and it's very different from the offshoring cycle.

And a better source article.

I've always seen it as "Actually Indians", but yeah. That's a lot of what is destroying the US tech job market. It happened to blue collar work in the 90s and early 2000s, now it's our turn.

This study feels pretty weak. Software as a occupation is collapsing, but it's not due to AI. Articles and "studies" like this are just a smoke screen to keep your eye off the ball.

Perhaps some kind of Mandela effect, but I would have adamantly sworn I remember newgrounds shutting down.

My friends and I spent many hours playing games on NG and screwing around with flash. Feels like a completely different world at this point. Glad they're still around, and I love that they're running events like this to remember the good old days.

I totally disagree. "If A is associated with B, and B is associated with C, and C causes D, then A is responsible for D" is tortured logic.

Famine in the modern world is almost entirely caused by dysfunctional governments and/or armed conflicts. Engineers have basically nothing to do with either of those.

This sort of "there are bad things in the world, therefore focusing on anything else is bad" thinking is generally misguided.

Sure, no contest on that. They still don't need my phone number.

Is there a way to sign up for Claude code that doesn't involve verifying a phone number with Anthropic? They don't even accept Google Voice numbers.

Maybe I'm out of touch, but I'm not handing out my phone number to sign up for random SaaS tools.

Hasn't stack overflow been in steady decline for years? How can they justify the huge increase in hardware cost that going to a cloud provider brings? I suppose it makes it easier to rapidly scale down your footprint to meet lower demand.

The only problem with this is that there are so few billionaires. Wealth is good. We should celebrate it, and focus on making more of it, not on resenting the people who have already done so.

I have never seen an airplane anywhere near as filthy as nearly every subway I've been on.

It's not just speed. Public transportation entails being closed in a small space with a completely uncontrolled group of the general public. When normal people think public transportation they aren't considering how well driving scales, they think cell phones blasting music out loud, homeless people, conversations on speaker phone, and random acts of violence.

Until that is fixed, people are going to prefer private transportation.

That makes a lot of sense. May I ask, why "limiting music"? Was it just a specific type of music, or did music in general have a negative effect?

I'm curious how you would feel about your local library carrying The Turner Diaries, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, or The Camp of the Saints? What percentage of the local population would have to want those books for you to believe the library should serve them?

Are there any books that a public community library should not be willing to carry?

Classic under promise and over deliver.

I'm glad they got it out quickly.

Smothering one of the only prosperous industries in the country so we can feed evermore to our bloated reckless spendthrift government isn't noble.