AnIdiotOnTheNet

I don't think I can agree with this take.

> He assembled the top talent to produce the best products that pushed our experience with technology forward.

Assembling top talent is something a lot of people could do, what made Jobs special is that he did that while still actually giving a shit about the quality of the product his company produced. "Oh, he just" is less a way of dismissing jobs than it is a way of saying "hey assholes, you could be more like Jobs if you just actually gave a fuck".

You underestimate the amount of urban men who have been marketed into believing that owning giant truck they don't need will make them more manly.

On the one hand, I feel like most people just do a job because, like me, they have to so they can have food, shelter, and medical care and it has nothing to do with their passions because only a privileged few ever get to align those things.

On the other hand, if someone tells me they work in marketing I instantly know that they are completely untrustworthy and only value enriching themselves at huge cost to society.

On the gripping hand, I don't really like meeting new people anyway, largely because of tedious bullshit conversational maneuvering wherein someone is trying to suss out how best to sell me something, get something from me, or if I'm open to participating in their echo chamber bullshit.

Empiricism is only one of the tools that can be brought to bear on our understanding of reality. Clearly it is not complete on its own, since its reliance on objective measure leaves things like consciousness (that is, the philosophical experience of being) completely outside of its purview. Even professional scientists well versed in their craft engage in unempirical thought in their quest to understand.

There are alternative hypotheses like Eternal Inflation, and Blackhole Cosmology. Mathematical Universe hypothesis would have our existence merely be one expression of consistent mathematical laws, all possible variations of which exist in a level 4 multiverse. Or we could just be a Boltzmann Brain that only imagines it is a universe that started with a big bang and real physics are markedly different.

It is worth keeping in mind that reality is under no obligation to make any kind of sense to us.

Nobody wants to start because of how easy it is to be taken advantage of, and we live in a world that favors the predators. We watch trust get taken advantage of every day.

> You may be surprised how well people respond, if you just start. Be the person who takes it deep. If you initiate, most people will be happy to follow and soon you’ll be surrounded by deep connections.

My experience is different. They either only want shallow and brief connection (which I can't really blame them for given the above), or the only kind of trust relationship they want is the one where you trust them and they can take advantage of you, or sell you something, or push some ideology on you. Actual connection with people who just want to be human is exceptionally rare from what I can tell.

Some day people who only ever took econ 101 and decided that they therefore understand completely how a complex set of interrelated systems work will realize that they're suffering from Dunning-Kruger effect, but apparently it won't be today.

Not at all. It is very common for businesses to buy up domains like this and redirect them to themselves so other people can't use them.

This is just the broken window fallacy.

Creators can still get paid for their work through Patreon if people find it valuable.

Personally, I think copyright itself is a completely unnecessary concept in the information age.

The original idea was to promote creative works by authors by providing a limited term right to be the sole publisher of a work. This was important in the days where it actually cost money to publish and distribute things, as it ensured you wouldn't eat the cost of that only to have someone else make all the money by doing it cheaper.

Thing is, it doesn't cost money to publish and distribute anything anymore. I think the large number of free and fan works that exist are proof enough that creativity need not be incentivized by money, and to the extent that we want to monetarily reward works we find meaningful, there are mechanisms like Patreon or Github sponsorship to do that.

Will the production quality suffer without large corporations spending ludicrous amounts of money? Yeah, probably. But I don't see how that's something worthy of preserving for all the bullshit that copyright inflicts on our culture.

That's completely normal. Rocketry and especially parabolas feature prominently as themes in the book, and the structure of the narrative itself is part of that. The beginning is chaotic, and I think even the fact that many readers will give up on it or require several attempts to get a successful launch, as it were, is intended.

Gravity's Rainbow was supposed hard for me to read I thought COVID might have permanently damaged my brain. The whole work has this meandering dream-like quality that only achieves some semblance of a normal narratove for a few moments in the middle (the tip of the parabola I suppose). I would read several paragraphs and wonder how the hell we'd got to wherever we were, because it didn't seem related to where we were a page ago and I couldn't even remember what happened in between. I sometimes feel asleep mere sentences into a reading session. It took me nearly a year to work through.

It is a fascinating work though, full of nuances and themes and connections everywhere you look. I probably only caught about a tenth of them. In that way it makes sense that Jonathan Blow referenced Gravity's Rainbow when talking about The Witness.

Perhaps there is some confusion because I used "overprovision" when the appropriate term here is "overcommit", but Windows manages to work fine without unix-style overcommit. I suspect most OSs in history do not use unix's style of overcommit.

> What makes the approach uniquely unsuitable for memory management?

The fact that something like OOM killer even needs to exist. Killing random processes to free up memory you blindly promised but couldn't deliver is not a reasonable way to do things.

Edit: https://lwn.net/Articles/627725/

We live in a society that worships wealth because it uses wealth as its sole metric for basically everything. Intelligence, success, worthiness, importance, etc.

Those on HN are, if anything, more prone to this than elsewhere because of the original startup culture orientation. I will not be surprised if a significant portion of HNer's start cargo-culting by learning French.

Can a modern distro really be used without over provisioning? Because the last time I tried it either the DE or display server hard locked immediately and I had to reboot the system.

Having this ridiculous setting as the default has basically ensured that we can never turn it off because developers expect things to work this way. They have no idea what to do if malloc errors on them. They like being able to make 1TB allocs without worrying about the consequences and just letting the kernel shoot processes in the head randomly when it all goes south. Hell, the last time this came up many swore that there was literally nothing a programmer could do in the event of OOM. Learned helplessness.

It's a goddamned mess and like many of Linux's goddamned messes not only are we still dealing with it in 2023, but every effort to do anything about it faces angry ranty backlash.

Anyone at Microsoft with integrity left a long time ago. All that are left are those willing to implement stuff like this because it pays the bills and don't really care enough about users to even bother with malicious compliance.

It's why Windows 10 will be my last Windows.

Largely what Windows advertises is Microsoft stuff.

Ubuntu copies a lot of terrible ideas from Microsoft and this is just another one.

> Given the age of the workaround it will never be fixed

Man, there are so many of these. Not just in FOSS but software in general. What makes it annoying in FOSS is the fact that developers would rather rewrite everything in rust than fix many-years-old issues, even when someone has submitted a patch.

No, most software is straight-up pessimized. Computers are so ridiculously fast nowadays that optimization really is unnecessary in most cases, but developers have somehow managed to make such poor decisions when building software that the result is slow anyway.

Compare: Computer game from 1995 to computer game from 2023, to chat client from 1995 to chat client in 2023.

One of these demonstrates many orders of magnitude improvement consistent with the improvements in the hardware, and it isn't the chat client.

> Being afraid to have small talk with people isn’t introversion, it’s a mental problem.

It's a societal problem. Too many people invade our attention constantly to try and sell us something, whether that be a product or service, a fad, or political bullshit. We have necessarily become defensive about people invading our attention uninvited.

> Oof, that's a damning statement. Is there evidence this is a real thing?

Depends on what you mean by evidence. Several HNers claiming to be or have been Microsoft employees attest to the designers at least using Macs. To my knowledge no one has ever stepped forward to contradict them.

Frankly, give where Windows has gone under Nadella, I think he'd just rather the Desktop OS die off as a concept.

But a C64 already fits that criteria and costs a lot less than $500. The FPGA that runs the video, the SD card controller, and probably a few other things are more powerful than the entire rest of the device and certainly not understandable the way a C64 was. The philosophy behind it feels incoherent. He talks about some future version being as little as $50, but my understanding from other videos is that that version will lack features and probably all be running on FPGA or something anyway.

Why not just emulate the entire thing on an FPGA from the start and pretend it is simple? Or skip the FPGA and use whatever computer the user already has?

Suffice it to say I just don't get it except as some kind of artistic expression, where even then I think it fails to have coherent vision.

The problem isn't putting people out of work, that's the whole point of technology. The problem is that the gains are concentrated into the hands of those who own capital instead of distributed across the society of people who actually did the fucking work to make this level of progress possible.

We could be working far fewer hours, we could have higher pay, but neither are realized because we can't shake off the goddamned aristocrats and neo feudalists.

So this sort of thing never really made much sense to me, because you could emulate this entire thing on a raspberry pi for significantly less than $500. Can anyone who is enthusiastic about this explain the appeal?

> For example in movie adaptations of known franchises changes are made just for change sake so that the writers can show off how smart they are.

That's hilarious considering how bad the average writer seems to be these days.

Honestly I don't think Microsoft cares about Windows, or to the extent they do care they'd rather people not use a Desktop computer at all. Almost every decision since Windows 8 has been to the determent of the user experience on Windows, and it is getting difficult to believe that is accidental at this point.

Well yes, of course. What else would you expect? Art has to find an audience large enough to support it or it fails. Same as it ever was.

The great thing about game dev is that you have low barriers to entry and the entire internet is a potential audience.

> This is not true. A monopoly can also be held accountable by the shareholders. A monopoly can also be held accountable by the market. Ask any cable company, for example.

The monopolies in question are utility monopolies, none of these apply except the shareholder control, the holding accountable of which is equivalent to holding the company itself accountable.

> A monopoly can also be held accountable by new entrants to the market, ask any ISP that refuses to run lines to rural areas.

Considering the state of rural internet access in the US, that doesn't seem to be supporting your argument at all. And when ISPs have local monopolies their service is measurably much more expensive and worse than when there is competition, and also measurably worse that municipally run connectivity, which they fight tooth and nail.

> From a strictly academic sense, this is true, but requires an election to achieve, and I've already gone over how those are captured by the very corporations governments are supposed to hold accountable.

As I said, even given this the situation with the government alone running things is only as bad as it is with the monopoly middleman while remaining potentially easier to change.

....it doesn't require examples, it is simple logic.

I assert that:

1) A monopoly can only be held accountable by the government.

2) The government can only be held accountable by the people.

Therefore, if the people wish to hold the operators of a utility accountable then having a monopoly control that utility is only introducing an extra, unnecessary, layer.

As far as I can tell, you make no claim that contradicts 1 or 2. You are, at best, saying that in practice having a monopoly run things is no worse than having the government do it directly. Feel free to correct my assessment.

And yet the upstream developers themselves never incorporated the change, it was entirely because an unnecessary third party middle man made unnecessary changes.