tomc1985

It takes a lot more than lots of people saying "I enjoyed that" to make a great film.

Giving people what they want as a primary objective is the fast-track to mediocrity. "Good is the enemy of great," as they say.

I think they are trying to roll back the quantitative easing (aka unleashing the money printers) that staved off a massive recession right when covid lockdowns began.

The fed blames current inflation rates (the highest they've been since the 70s) on all the extra money that is floating around. It is thought that the weird bull market we saw through the end of 2021 was a result of money having nowhere else to go... so when interest rates get raised suddenly other investment vehicles (like bonds) look more lucrative and that money leaves the stock market.

At this time, that would be a complete 180 as the Fed's messaging all year has been about how they will be raising rates, even if it means sacrificing markets. On an accelerated timeline, no less, compared to what they had floated in January.

I don't see how some HTML and a bunch of serverless code is going to fix the problem of instagram constantly indulging me in vanity and emotionally manipulative bullshit. The only thing it will do is lock me into a cycle of maintenance and updating all the the mercy of whatever this free tier is and the API that it connects to.

And neither is building my own solution going to change anything. That is my point. You can't innovate your way out of people polluting the commons for their own selfish bullshit, because even if you do they will just pile on once it becomes big enough and ruin that too.

Also, fuck serverless. Like hell I'm going to let my stuff exist at the pleasure of some corpo that can change its mind at any time. Own your code.

Yes, let's remedy the problem by throwing in another solution in an already crowded marketplace. Burning thousands of hours grinding away at something that most likely won't take.

Hollywood has thousands if not millions of people literally "writing their own script". 99% of them won't get anywhere with it, wasting time and years of their life on a fruitless endeavor. Those are shit odds, and I don't see why society in general would be any different.

Don't let survivor bias cloud your judgement.

Much better to simply rip profits off the scalps of this contemptible society and revel in its few pleasures with a tribe of likeminded discontents. We can all watch the world burn together, and bitch about how much better life would be if regular folks didn't suck so much.

My point is that a casual "just change your feed settings," answer, which signals an implicit approval for a shitty status quo, doesn't work.

What I want is for people to change. For society to stop navel-gazing. For people to get over themselves. It's idealistic, for sure. But I am an idealist.

And for the record, those ads are going to show you more obnoxiously smiley faces, but this time they're hawking some bullshit product on top of it. So unless you can make the ads go away, whatever you set your feed to won't matter.

With ads every other or third post or so, you don't get nearly as much control over your feed as you think.

> Just follow the accounts you like, mute the ones you don't but 'need' to follow (friends, etc.)

If I had a penny for every time someone here casually drops such milquetoast advice (that DOESNT WORK), I'd be rich.

Funny, I thought this was Hacker News, not Reuters.

What are facts, in this day and age, anyway? I guess 'objective reality' doesn't quite have the same ring to it.

Why can't it be about sharing cool photos you took?

People need to stop pointing the camera at themselves. The world is so much more beautiful.

> I get the innovator mentality of sweeping away the old but there seems to be a fine line between innovation and ignorance.

I think that this is the "innovator mentality" insofar that, as a group, we tend to idolize/cargo cult innovation as if it was always a good thing. As the pile of things that I miss grows much faster than the things that I feel that I've gained I have come to think of "innovation" as a force for destruction, rent-seeking, and greed, just as much as it can be a force for improvement.

As you say, in many cases things are the way they are because reasons. And some snot-nosed wanterpreneur is just as likely to degrade the situation as they are to improve it.

Funny, I hated the color scheme back in the day. It reminded me of Fischer-Price children's toys.

My very first customization was to always set it to the silver theme.

I looooooove this feature of the MX Master mice, but I went through 2 of them in two years. They do not seem particularly well-built.

Yeah I have been looking them over and they seem very interesting. Have not tried them yet.

Would love for there to be One True Way(tm) without the framework question.

Oh god, Backbone. I absolutely hated that framework. It didn't even seem to do anything, it seemed like I had to implement all of the logic myself. Except I had to do it their way, for some reason, and practically nothing made sense. (I haven't touched it in years, though, so my memory is probably distorting my experience)

I like the idea of React, just not what it has turned into. The amount of tooling that it has created to do things that should be simple (but aren't because of the runtime and/or the programmer), and the gymnastics it goes through so that people can have their precious (often unnecessary) SPAs, is ridiculous. That, and JSX continues to be an abomination that shits all over separation of concerns so that smoothbrains don't hurt themselves trying to reason over it.

I miss the days when jQuery reigned supreme, and all the tenderfoot magpie developers didn't yet have the twinkle of React in their eyes

I think GP is referring to the obnoxious type-A personalities that dominate management where everything has to be the best (or at least be presented as such) and virtuous (hah!) competition weeds out the weak. They like to see themselves as moneymaking stablemasters cultivating fine workhorses for their shareholders.

I personally had a manager refer to me as an athlete on a big-league sports team (I was a software developer), and it was incredibly off-putting. I don't like athletes, I don't like sports or athletics, and I don't like zero-sum bullshit at work. If I didn't like the guy otherwise he would have been one of the wankers GP is referring to.

That doesn't seem like anything house rules and code reviews can't fix.

"No fancy YAML bullshit allowed" aaaaaaaand done.

OK Zoomer. OF COURSE you're going to deny the generalization and blame the accuser. That's generational warfare 101.

Doesn't make their thoughts any less valid.

There are clear differences between the Facebook demo and the Tiktok demo. I am not smart enough to be able to articulate them but they are there.

The problem with paying to not see ads is that now you have made yourself known as a juicier target for advertising -- they know you have enough money to buy frivolous things like a 'no ads' experience. Which makes them want to advertise to you even more.

Examples: cable TV, Hulu, soon Netflix?

I actually had one of those cards! The only games I could get it to work with were Half-Life, glQuake, and Jedi Knight, and the bilinear texture filtering had some odd artifacting IIRC

"Framurary" is kind of fun. Though lamework also describes my experience with it

And my point is that over the last 20 years or so, I found myself spending a lot of time wishing there was more cyberpunk content out there.

Also I'm pretty sure Star Wars and Star Trek were as big, if not bigger.

Yes, The Matrix had a huge impact -- I was there for it. But that was as much about the revolution in VFX and cool shots than it was about having a cyberpunk setting. Besides, all of the followups (save for the Animatrix) have been duds.

CP2077 came to be because CDPR likes to take unknown franchises and elevate them to greatness; this is true for both The Witcher polish novels and the Cyberpunk TTRPG. While I think the demand for cyberpunk is certainly there, as evidenced by the folks' enthusiastic support for CP2077, I would not consider cyberpunk to be the dominant force in sci-fi. (The lukewarm reception for both the modern Blade Runner remake and the new Matrix confirm this opinion for me) I would suggest you consider your thoughts in a wider context.

> two most inflential sci fi movies of all time

Can you qualify this statement a bit more? I don't really agree here. The Matrix doesn't even appear in this list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-grossing_films and the numbers here aren't worthy of the kind of praise you're heaping on it: https://www.the-numbers.com/movies/franchise/Matrix#tab=summ...

It wasn't even the highest grossing film the year it came out, as it was eclipsed by Star Wars: Episode 1.

Why not give the user a login then they can access their content indefinitely?

Time limited codes fucking suck.

They were practically the only cyberpunk movies with any significant impact. And what have we had over all these years on the gaming front? CP2077? Deus Ex? Shadowrun? And a handful of indie games? Sure there were a bunch... in the 90s.

So... one big cyberpunk movie every 10 years? Games every few?

Marvel, fantasy, all that other pop culture garbage sees new movies on a seemingly monthly cadence.

Don't get me wrong, I absolutely adore cyberpunk as a genre and warning and seethe at watching the optimistic yuppies drag 'punk' through the mud with their 'rebellion against negativity' garbage. But cyberpunk is not a popular genre.

My former employer, a large lumbering fortune 500 trying to play in the agile pool, made extensive use of those specific features...

So that people can look as ridiculous as possible, it would seem

Yeah this article seems to have a really poor understanding of 'cyberpunk' and it's motivations.

He also calls an underground, generally unpopular aesthetic "tired". Cue my eyes rolling to the back of my head so hard they snap connecting nerves...

I've always thought it was pronounced like 'techniques' and at first thought the author was talking about the turntable/hi-fi brand

If their project is said product, then yes; because they are, in a way, architecting the final deliverable. And that recognition goes up the chain, in an increasingly diluted form, until it reaches the top.

Nowhere does my post indicate that I think I'm the "sole reason" the company makes any money. We are all just cogs in the machine. But, as with anyone who makes the product, we are a huge part of the reason the company is in business and it would be nice if management would stop looking down at us. Maybe they should be looking up to us instead. (And if you disagree, read into the tone of the article.... "techies"??? Ideas for paying us less?)

Not to discount other departments like marketing or operations -- they are important too. But they don't make the product, they are more numerous, and more interchangeable.