9rx

If the tech workers wanted those things they could make it so, but they already could have made those things so already and didn't so...

No doubt kids will choose social media over cleaning their room. Would they choose social media over going outside to play, if society still allowed them to do that?

The "boob tube", so given the derogatory nickname due to the perception of much the same idea you present, may not have been able to take the warping engagement to the same extreme, but during its prime also didn't really capture the youth attention because the youth had better things to do, like disappear into the woods until nightfall. TV use has always been dominated by older people who, through things like failing health, have lost the ability to do anything better.

True addiction or not, it is worth noting that addiction doesn't happen overnight. One needs repeated exposure to develop the necessary neural pathways. This is why addiction shows up much more commonly in obviously tough environments. People use a device as an escape from their situation, which feeds the mechanisms necessary to develop an addiction. Social media is most certainly engineered to tick the "this is enjoyable" box, but that alone isn't enough to develop a problem. There needs to be something that sees someone want to use social media above all else on a regular basis and, as you point out, it is very likely that much more than 10% of the population don't actually find social media to be all that enjoyable; just more enjoyable than taking out the trash.

So, maybe we can reframe this as: All this work to continue to keep up not wanting to see kids without a metaphorical helicopter constantly over their heads as a result of an imagined boogieman that was invented in the past? Seems like a horribly misaligned effort.

How does your union keep people focused on the job? Or is it simply that the union self-selects those who are already focused on job-related matters and wouldn't end up in the slump anyway?

Is it? Only around 10% of the population will develop an addiction (of any kind). About the same rate as the population who live chronic sedentary lifestyles, which comes with equally (or maybe even worse) health and social consequences. Where is the regulation that forces you to prove you are of a certain age to sit on the couch?

This seems like a lot of effort for something that impacts such a relatively small group of people — a group of people (in size) that we otherwise don't normally care about one bit. 10% of the population is marginalized time and time again. What's special about this particular case?

And maybe that's a healthy way to think about it. That it doesn't matter if kids find it easy to work around. There is no child who hasn't been able to get their hands on alcohol when they want it, but perhaps the infinitesimally small amount of friction leaves many to second guess their choices? Then again, from what I see out there, just rationally explaining why alcohol might have negative consequences is enough to see that second guessing. Alcohol consumption amongst the youth has completely plummeted now that we no longer treat it as some magical taboo thing and finally started talking honestly about it. The same pattern has been observed over and over in other things with undesirable consequences for children.

When we started producing more than basic things like food that are heavily dependent on the environment. In the knowledge-based economy, the only thing that meaningfully stops you from producing continually is you collapsing from exhaustion. However, even if you never got tired, you can still only produce so much per second, if you will, which caps your total productivity. That is the human limit; probably a fundamental one.

Only a tiny, tiny fraction of the population have to wait on crops growing now in order to offer that line of productivity. And of them, like myself, we can now do other productive things while we're waiting. I, for one, work in the tech industry when I'm not farming. Today, 96% of farmers in the USA are productive off of the farm in at least some capacity. Whereas, historically, farmers were busy trying to survive when they weren't being productive on the farm. Many a day were spent in the bush chopping wood so that they didn't freeze in the winter, for example. Interestingly, idle farmers staring to produce salable things during that cold winter downtime is when we first started seeing early signs of human productivity gains over the stagnant agricultural baseline.

Productivity can keep increasing beyond the human limit, but we have achieved that by introducing more and more non-human workers. Humans are already at the very top of their game, at least as we know it. 17th century farmers probably thought they were also as productive as humanly possible, so who knows what the future holds, but for now we have no idea how to make humans even more productive than they already are. We don't have any more obvious "winter downtimes" to expand into. Hence why the measure of human productivity is no longer increasing.

This was recognized a long time ago. It was the basis of the "go to college to make more money" script you may be familiar with if you are old enough to remember. It was well understood way back then that relying on human productivity gains had reached a dead end. The thinking was that colleges would enable people to move away from labor and into leveraging automation, where productivity is effectively unbounded, with college research labs having played and still playing a pivotal role in that, but somehow along the way that got twisted into "go to college to get a job", so here we are... Now people spend god knows how much money to go to college to get the same job, at the same pay, that they would have gotten anyway. Which is pretty hilarious, but also sad.

Maybe there is a new frontier where humans can start to become more productive again. Some say that is AI, but that remains to be seen. For now, we've hit our known limit. There is no longer anything outside of human control, like waiting for a crop to grow, that limits our human productivity. The only limiting us is ourselves, and it may be a fundamental limit.

Human productivity to wages have kept pace with each other, though, so there is nothing to suggest anything has changed for the human. It is not like the robots are seeking promotions (yet).

That's what PDF is for. CSS is for documents, but namely documents for screens, and on screens you want consistency with all the things on that same screen.

> there’s a load of templates (and frameworks) on the internet if you want a standard set of components.

But not a great way to use them. You can make anything work when you have low-level primitives, so it is not a case that it cannot be done, but that's missing the forest for the trees. You can also program a computer by flipping toggle switches, yet we developed better tools (e.g. programming languages) because sometimes its nice to have more comfortable abstractions.

Why not? Apple, for example, had billions upon billions of dollars in cash. Think about that: That means they gave billions upon billions of dollars worth of stuff to people and never got back anything in return. And there is no sign that they ever plan to get anything in return. They are already quite happy to give their stuff away for free.

And why wouldn't they? When you give people stuff for free, they put you on a pedestal and treat you like a king. Those who lead Apple get to do things and get away with things you and I can only dream of. That's the appeal of still doing it even though you don't get any economic return. Social return is what actually starts to matter once your basic needs are met.

But then CSS came along and threw out the baby with the bathwater, returning us back to the bare primitives, forcing entities to redo all that work again. Except this time CSS didn't offer a good mechanism to wrap up that hard work in a nice API bow, so everyone ended up getting pushed into having to redo that same hard work every time they started a new project, leading to a bunch of poor, inconsistent, and often downright wacky implementations.

To be fair, the problem isn't CSS per se, it is just that it is much too low-level for all but the small number of entities focused on the aforementioned hard problems and browsers failed to offer anything higher-level for the rest of us. Javascript has tried taking on a stand-in role for the lack of the higher-level abstraction being natively offered by the browser, but that comes with its own limitations so it isn't always a viable choice, not to mention that having to resort to using a full programming environment completely defeats the purpose of having CSS.

CSS gets all the hate because it is more often than not the wrong tool for the job but the only tool available at hand.

The current business goals around the use of AI is essentially the startup model: Throw shit into the wind to see if it sticks. Acceleration of the business goal means throwing more shit into the wind. Isn't that the same thing as quantity?

But also, statistically, the richer you are, the fewer children you have. Why do you think those who are seemingly in the best position to be optimistic about the future are those most pessimistic about it? It is quite counterintuitive on the surface. Is it because the rich feel they have nowhere else to go, whereas those who are poor can still envision becoming rich themselves someday, giving them hope about a brighter future?

Regardless of the exact mechanics, the human state is self-correcting. Being rich is unsustainable without a lot of people around you. When births decline too much, those who are rich will become poor, and thus will start producing more children again. Humans will not echo horses based on this.

Those who were formally workers? Remember, money is debt. It is an IOU that, sometime in the future, allows you to receive something of value (e.g. food, shelter, etc.) that was previously owed to you.

Profit occurs when you give more than you receive. That's okay in the short term because you still might exercise calling the debt over the a slightly longer timeline. However, when a business is continually profitable year after year, decade after decade, they are no longer receiving any direct value in exchange for the good/service they gave away. In other words, they start giving the good/service away for free.

It might seem counterintuitive at first that anyone would give something away for free, but I noted "direct value" above because there is also an indirect value to consider: Social influence. The stakeholders in businesses that show continual, large profits become admired by the people and get put on a pedestal. In that, they start to get to do things other people can't (see Epstein files, for example). So if the workers were automated away, not much would change. Those who have the goods and services still wanted will still want to buy, if you will, the social influence from the population at large.

Of course, the flaw in thinking that jobs will be automated away is that those who seek social influence also want a social setting, so they will employ people simply to keep them around as friends. Most jobs in today's economy are already just that. For what "real" jobs still remain nowadays, if automation automates them away the people will simply transition into "friend" work.

From what I see out there "being beholden to the boss" is the social aspect people like most. It is what gives the work purpose; knowing that you are pleasing someone else.

Some are quite capable of being their own boss, but the people who can actually sustain that long term seem few and far between. It seems that it becomes easy to spiral into a pit of depression when there is no clear feedback in the value being created. Having to regularly deal with another person is not always desirable but having to regularly deal with another person also forces the feedback loop to occur.

Based on what? Sure, the one guy managed to hack up the first version of C, but it took a complete rewrite and some major changes to become what we would actually recognize as C. Not exactly indicative of someone who knows what he is doing. And everything in Go was copied straight from Winterbottom's work.

What do you mean in a roundabout way? It says that quite explicitly.

> But this belies the fact that the workers had to grow more skilled to operate and maintain those machines.

No they didn't. What is a capital owner going to do if the labor didn't become more skilled? Just shut everything down and take the ball home? Ha ha. No. Not a chance in hell. This is the silliest thing I've read all day.

> They took on additional costs in education that are not being compensated.

One wonders why. When they said "go to college to make more money" they were clearly talking about using college research labs to develop capital. Exactly so that you become the one deploying robots, not selling your labor. That is where the "more money" comes from. How people — traditionally smart people, even — got it into their head that meant go to college to get a low paying job, the same job they would have gotten anyway, boggles the mind. I suppose smarts don't transcend into every subject.

What is there to excuse? Your quote confirms that they simply don't know what they're doing as was already established. Not that anyone should expect them to. They're just regular average humans, same as every other random Joe you encounter while walking down the street, who all equally have their own failings and shortcomings. Why HN is constantly trying to put these particular people on a pedestal, I'll never know. Jealously that regular bumbling idiots just like them accidentally stumbled into creating something popular (for some definition of popular), perhaps?

But who is to say that dynamic evaluation isn't the special case?