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Yes exactly! This is a much better description than I was able to come up with.

I don't think there's much to be learned from SA in this context. It existed during a different time of the internet, when cultural capital and honestly just raw power were allocated differently.

It existed into the "modern" era of rage engagement, influencers, clickbait etc, but I would consider its "flourishing" to have ended well before that.

No not really. If you put them in a list of features and compare them it seems pretty close, they have most of the same stuff. But if you actually learn and use both the android one is much worse.

I didn't catch if she said she was completely blind or not. She may be able to make out some shape or color distinctions and is using that as a navigational aid.

I have a friend who is blind but keeps their phone on max brightness for this reason. Very little comes through but they still find it helpful.

People are sometimes kind of down on that approach in software, considering it sloppy. Especially in comparison to other engineering disciplines it just looks kinda bad sure.

But really I'm pretty sure if for example civil engineers could build a bridge in an hour and load it up consequence-free they'd do it too.

The fact that we do it isn't bad at all, but yeah it's easy to not realize when you've exited the realm of consequence-free testing.

No dude they are not the same. PUA stuff came out of a deeply misogynist internet subculture with close ties and many overlaps with far right activists, "red pill" violence, and ethnonationalism.

Plus it's just inherently manipulative and gross. I know no one on HN likes to hear a value judgement but seriously go take a look. And I'm sure someone will jump in with like "but it's not manipulation just acknowledging reality/it's empowering for shy nerds/whatever" and ok sure sure sure but no.

Well the first two at least. I'm describing my beliefs. They are also shared by a lot of people; y'all wouldn't have to yell about free speech so much if this view was unpopular.

I admit that I also enjoy riling up first amendment fundamentalists but it isn't my main goal and these are my sincerely held beliefs so I don't think really qualifies as trolling.

Correct!

No the second embeds two important differences from the first: that this is new (it's as old as writing at least) and that it's bad (a value judgement you can fall on either side of).

This apparent contradiction is just a moderately clever way of using an ambiguity in the word.

If "deplatforming" is taken to mean "depriving people of an easy means to find and communicate to an audience" it can be an effective technique depending on context, alternative communication channels, etc.

If "deplatforming" is taken to mean "a novel social ill based on depriving people of their right to communicate" then yeah it's a myth.

Why not? Can you explain what "the issue itself" is in a way completely divorced from the people who have devoted themselves to _making_ it the issue?

Even if you can I don't see the value honestly.

No, you're embedding a bunch of viewpoints in this comment as facts when there is absolutely room for disagreement.

For example I think "rural people's best hope of finally not being an afterthought" is massive government infrastructure projects that don't factor in profitability. Note that I am not trying to _have_ this discussion here, just pointing out that it's a valid disagreement.

And the author of that tweet it seems considers this a loss of an ancient and fundamental shared planetary resource. I think anger is an understandable, even appropriate reaction to that perception!

The point is to get people to talk about it and maybe also not just accept the neoliberal consensus about the role of technology and infrastructure and their externalities. Seems to have succeeded by that measure.

There is plenty of substance here but you're using the author's anger and profanity as an excuse to not engage with it.

> The only reason it hasn't is that the telecom companies have bought out the government.

I don't think this is true really. There's been a really big shift in the last 50-ish years and at least in the US there seems to be a general consensus that projects of this nature are no longer the domain of the government.

I mean the telecom thing is a factor sure but I don't think you'd see that level of investment in infrastructure for anything else at this point either.

No it doesn't you can fully engage with the complexity and ALSO blame him for it. I do for example.

We expect "better" from democracies largely because they have more sophisticated and effective ways to defang troubling journalists.

You don't really need to murder or imprison them when you can just make it so no one trusts them or they can't find an audience.

That said I do think Belarus fucked up here evaluating by their own best interests. Having an open dictatorship in Europe has always made a lot of people uncomfortable but was tolerated as long as they didn't draw too much attention to it or do any scary shit to outsiders.

Here they kinda did both. Would not surprise me if this ends up being a huge problem for them long-term.

I mean spread awareness but that's pretty much every job. I've done a lot of kinds of work in my life but this is pretty much the easiest. At least we're paid well and respected. All the other kinds of work were just as hard under as much or more pressure and also for poverty wages. I'll stick with this one lol.

It's a risk, that doesn't mean taking it is foolish.

And I don't think many people would advocate _always_ being maximally vulnerable in all contexts come on.

Use your judgement but mine is that most people around me are too risk-averse in this.

Yeah learning things is so fun, and also so is just having a bunch of weird skills you're competent or at least knowledgeable at.

I won't post my list of accumulated learnings because it's about as good a personal identifier as my SSN. But it's similarly scattered as yours and I love them all even the ones I haven't used in years.

It's really become the way I orient my life. What bizarre or useful thing I'll get into next is always the big question now.

Yeah that's what they're saying I think. Programming outside works helps your programming inside work sure. But for many (most?), programming ability isn't the limiting factor on how effective you are as a _developer_ at work.

There's definitely a bit of a pattern to this in music as with nearly everything.

Players within the established tradition "take it seriously" which is on one hand respect for tradition and on the other impedes full integration of new techniques and sounds.

Newer less established genres are more playful/experimental, and what works for them can eventually get accepted by the older forms and rolled in.

I kinda mentioned this in another comment in here but it's very visible in the relationships between jazz and hip hop right now. Contemporary jazz uses a lot of techniques and sound profiles that were developed in trap music of all things.

Or just look at what contemporary jazz is like this decade. Absolutely whole-hearted embrace of pop and hip hop production techniques, sampling, DAW-dependent live performances, thicc 808s etc.

Live music performance techniques have even to some extent begun to emulate some sounds that are artifacts of digital production like sidechaining.

What's really cool to me is again a lot of this stuff came from music traditions we (tech bros) tend to dismiss (pop, hip hop, even ccm lol) but have become important parts of "serious" music.

Yeah you're right. I guess a style guide or a usage guide would be a prescriptivist dictionary?

I'd always heard "prescriptivist dictionary" is a thing that exists but now that I'm thinking about it I'm kind of doubting it.

There actually is an argument in there I just trusted people to be able to see it through the joke.

Should have known better.

I don't think you understand. The mere fact that it COULD potentially be used by anyone is a defense against all complaints. Because democracy. Like a magic charm you see. No I have never read any theory or heard the phrase "material conditions" why do you ask.

I'm exaggerating but I fucking swear this is the level of sophistication we get from actual crypto fiends in here.

Honestly it's grim but the social power of the group that uses it.

If you speak a prestige dialect your patterns are "rules" and if you don't your patterns are "errors." But in both cases it has nothing to do with the language per se, just social and political relationships.

I'm curious to see how this goes for you because in my experience this site is HARDCORE prescriptivist almost like it's a religion it's a bit scary sometimes.

I mean true but this is like pointing out that no one plays baseball with a golf club. One is ubiquitous because it's useful and the other isn't.

Prescriptive dictionaries do exist but they're mostly used by specialists to understand specific usages within a time-limited context like "what did 'gay' mean in 1920s california" etc.

Similarly there might possibly be some training reason to try to hit a baseball with a golf club. But if that applies to you you're probably aware of it.

A good bit of my work is in php codebases from that era and uh... yeah kinda.

Generally at that time (and for a few years after) you still see a huge influence from C programming constraints in php.

Lot of extremely terse abbreviated variables and explicit looping. And for some fucking reason the pervasive believe that variable names need to be at most either 3 or 6 characters long. (Yes I know the reason it's still bad)

So yeah painful as it is to admit that is well above average expressiveness and readability for php of its era.

Yeah my "niche" right now is consulting for companies that are high revenue but built out their platforms during lean times where they were focused on growth over stability, reliability, or security. "Legacy code" I guess though it's a little more varied than that might imply.

Basically the only two technologies I touch these days are rails and php. I'm not filtering out other tech stacks, these two are just absolutely dominant for this type of company.

No I'm not getting into this. I've done this so, so many times and there's no value for anyone.

You, or someone else, will move the goalposts, or find some hyper specific counterexample and claim it disproves the entire thing. Or claim that the poor aren't poor enough, or someone else somewhere has it worse so their misery can't be real.

It's based on my experiences and there's no bibliography for my life. I explained the experiences and why I think they're relevant. If it doesn't work for you then it doesn't.

From experience in similar conversations I expect this to be taken as a refusal to argue in good faith. The thing is though I don't want to argue. I said what I said and I stand by it. I have nothing to add.