I’d much rather pay a monthly fee to get the services I want.
I understand that Google and Facebook have gone too far down this path, and they will say such a service is not as profitable, but ultimately their business model seems unsustainable. People search for the truth, and while you can sell anybody anything, the truth will prevail.
Now that it’s a mechanism of commerce it’s attracted the worst of the worst who have no ethics. Ethics courses will be taught in response to bad actors, not in anticipation of.
I’m aware the cats out of the bag and all of the high paid engineers need to make a living somehow. I just don’t think it’s about the consumer anymore, if it ever was. It will get worse before it gets better and I’m checking out.
I’m an older engineer and going to school for HVAC/R. I plan to do it on the side and eventually start a business. I’m pulling the rip cord.
One thing I will say about the blue collar world: they’re better about ego management. Many young engineers I meet are highly paid and treated well, sometimes rarely disagreed with. I can’t help but think that fosters some bad habits.
I see computers and the internet as an extension of ourselves, and so they still allow us to communicate with whoever and whatever we want. I’m so glad this community exists and we can express that.
The worst part should already be over, you just joined hn. I’m also all about good will, fun, and generally good intent. And if you do something cool but it’s costing you something, let me know how I can chip in.
World leaders and CEOs go to bed every night just like us, they speak, poop, and reproduce at the same rate as everyone else. Corporations and governments are nothing more than contracts to benefit those very same people, us. Even though there’s not an equal benefit to everyone involved.
If those contracts fail, and our freedom and liberty is at risk like you say, we ought to renegotiate. It seems, if you listen carefully, that’s what the world is currently choosing to do.
It’s still possible to disconnect. It’s still possible to choose what you see or say, and it’s still possible to focus your energy on something you believe in. As long as you’re not tired of that, I‘m optimistic.
It's our job as techies to add that option, and make it easy.
The main catalyst for the internet was the fear of nuclear war, as exemplified in this influential RAND paper from 1960 [0], which led to the investment in ARPANET. I'm not disputing good will and good intent, but I don't think fun had much to do with it.
[0] http://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/papers/2008/P1995....
There was a beautiful sweet spot between the earliest ISPs around 1990, and the end of fun once the effects of the mid 90s ending of NSF's ban on commercial activity fully kicked in. Probably late 90s/millennium as the first dot com boom turned into full on idiotic bubble.
TLDR: Get the HVAC skills, then go into PLC work.
Edited: 3rd sentence for context.
Any suggestions? How about programming software? Readily available?
I recently picked up a Asco 300 w/comms module for my standby gen, DSE800 to control the engine, and a Siemens 9610 for consumption analysis.
I’m working on controls for load shedding now. I put shunt trip breakers on my water heater and it’ll kick off when on standby since I don’t have enough power, as per NEC.
I’m also working on a modulating valve controlled by the temp delta of my tankless water heater. Sometimes it can’t keep up and I’d rather slow down flow for a shower instead of letting it throw an error, resetting, and annoying people in the shower.
If you go down the rabbit hole, check out Tridium, aka Niagara AX. Most(all?) of the big controls platforms are built on the Niagara framework.
Also, maybe contact contractors of Johnson Controls, Carrier Controls, Novar Controls, etc for more pertinent info.
As an example every single Amazon or web product or service search results in dozens to thousands of irrelevant, shoddy and worthless products and services that are far closer to an outright scam than something to use. That's without considering the vast array of true scams and fakes.
A web without ads would have a chance of being useful once again, rather than every single click being an opportunity to part me from more money. Perhaps with suitable heavy regulation we could have the best of both worlds, more like newspaper advertising of old. Just "enough" non-invasive, non-tracking, non-JS ads to provide information on new services and products, but with enough demands of honesty, escrow good behaviour deposits, or whatever constraints you can conceive to keep all advertisers well behaved.
This is fine. People should make web pages because they have something to say, not because they want to make money. Since the advertisers can stop supporting a site, they effectively become the arbiters of right and wrong on the internet. Anything paid for by ads is inherently worse and less trustworthy than independent creations and platforms because they must necessarily be advertiser-friendly.
Right now I can't think of any ad-supported site that I critically need. It could all go away and my web experience would probably be better for it.
Even if I did, let me clarify something. When I go to amazon.com and start looking for pens, I don't really consider the product listings to be ads at that point, even though each is obviously advertising a product. The listing is the content I am there for. If I go to a company's website to learn about their products, they are clearly advertising their own (first party) products. I'm fine with that.
Note that there is a difference between "an ad" and advertising. Characteristic of ads is that they are not the content you're there for. The real content is independent of "an ad", and you could block or remove ads and the real content would not suffer. Characteristic of ads is that they are not the topic of the site/content/video you're reading/watching (they might relate to the same subject matter, but they are not the topic). Also characteristic of ads is that they're advertising third party products/services, which again have little to do with the actual content.
If you removed a company's products from their own website, or the products from amazon's listing, then you'd be removing the content I'm specifically after. Does not fill my criteria for "an ad."
Now as to how this pertains to HN: HN was specifically created for startup-related links. So if they're advertising startup jobs here, they are very much posting the kind of content users would come here for. That would be actual content, not ads. Also, like a company advertising their own products on their own website, I think it is quite appropriate for YC to advertise companies they've funded here.
People can afford to fund good online services at the level of google search (for example), but they can’t afford to make google wildly profitable.
That’s fine with me, it’s just VC culture and SV that has a problem with it.
I expect the goal of people advocating for less advertising is to stop giving them that money on a going-forward basis.
Search ought to be a replacement. Imagine a site that makes a snapshot of other sites and then anyone can type a search request in it and follow the relevant link. That would replace ads since you get your clients for free. Just build the best electronic marketplace and everyone will visit it by themselves.
This worked to some extent and then stopped because people have what they think themselves they need, and the “commercial” part means someone pushing unnecessary crap down their throats. Losing that part is fine for everyone except these wandering commivoyagers.
Subscriptions do not work for most content makers because the content they make is consumed out of boredom instead of need.
The problem is all the associated crapware, bloat, intrusion, bandwidth hogging, end-user hostility to point of abuse, dark patterns, intentional misdirection, A/B-test-optimised serendipitous confusion, SEO game-theory shenanigans, and ABOVE ALL the industrial scale stalking.
I've linked this piece a couple of times in the past three months: https://bostik.iki.fi/aivoituksia/random/no-stalking.html
Hell, I remember back in 2005 when I held a university course on basics of information security. The class laughed when I noted that observing everything a person does is called stalking when done by an individual, but as soon as its done by a large corporation indiscriminately and at scale, it's data-mining.
In the eyes of the law, only one of them is criminal.
In the same way we could say the cholera virus is not by itself a problem - it is the associated symptoms that are the problem.
I can still recall the bad vibes when Google announced their acquisition of DoubleClick. In the early days their search advertising had been non-intrusive, text-only, rendered server side, and visually out of the way. Banner ads were introduced only some time later. (That was already a step in the wrong direction, IMO.) DC, on the other hand, was known as an invasive bad actor who shoveled unwanted crapware to browsers and had already earned the reputation of an online stalker. In fact, ad blockers had existed long before Google got into serving them. Privoxy, anyone?
All the hazards I listed are direct causes of adtech's surveillance business model, and the neverending quest to remember every possible piece of information available on the end-users. I'm not sure comparison with cholera is the most accurate one. (It's a bacteria, after all.) Malaria, a parasite, might be a better fit for this purpose. The symptoms are what makes either one dangerous, but instead of trying to eradicate just one type of a problem, we would do better to purge the environment from what makes the organisms' existence and breeding possible in the first place.
ß: Honest question. What do you call an ecosystem comprised entirely of parasites?
Although, shockingly enough, one of the sites I regularly visit (ars technica) saw the light and greatly reduced their subscription price like 2 years ago. And earned my subscription as a result.
I'd pay for a couple more sites if they dropped the coffee fallacy.
People search for whatever confirms their worldview.[1]
> while you can sell anybody anything, the truth will prevail.
Those ideas are at odds. If you “can sell anybody anything”, you can also sell them a lie. That keeps happening, so I see no basis for the argument that “the truth will prevail”.
How is that possible if you never visit the same sites? That idea appears to favor the big players.
I think ISPs are fine services, they can host and serve websites like they’ve always done. I pay for my service, you pay for yours, we can connect, it balances out.
If you decide to do something that adds value for the both of us, I can chip in to help you cover your costs.
One thing very valuable to me is a search engine. You promise to index all sites you can find on the internet, but you need funds to buy disks and servers. I think you’d do a great job, and I’ll pay you a monthly fee to keep giving me access to your wealth of information.
It so works out that the more people you can serve, the more income you’ll have to become a bigger player. Nothing wrong with that, just as there used to be nothing wrong with Google’s search.
It’s when they asked not the searchers but the advertisers to pay them that things went awry.
You could help them get to know themselves better, or find what they like by asking for information that they’re comfortable divulging.
Just please don’t combine those two products in one, for the love of god!
I do agree, but if you're unscrupulous enough you can still get rich before such a business model eventually folds.