NeutralCrane

99.9% of small businesses do little to no advertising. I can’t recall seeing an ad for a single one of the small businesses I am a customer of. 99.9% of ads I get are for megacorporations and national brands.

Maybe low traction is a good thing. We don’t need social media to be an all consuming addictive mega platform.

Paying someone for promoting your product or message. I don’t think it’s all that complicated. Talking about your own product on the internet is fine. Paying to promote your message wouldn’t be. TikTok and Reddit and Instagram aren’t trying to keep people endlessly scrolling because they are free-speech fanatics. It entirely comes down to “more time in app = more revenue”. Take away that monetization method and you take away the single incentive that has driven virtually every dark pattern that has developed in social media in the last two decades.

Can you think of a singe freedom you enjoy that isn’t in one way or another supported by some form of regulation?

Show HN isn’t advertising in the sense they are addressing: paying a website for space to promote something. There’s no payment taking place with Show HN. If no payment can be made, websites have to find another revenue model besides advertising, and don’t have an incentive to keep users addicted and endlessly consuming.

Are directors frauds because they aren’t the ones doing the acting? Is there no joy in being an architect because they aren’t the one assembling the building at the construction site? Is there no value in product engineering because they aren’t fabricating the products in the factory?

It’s fine to find enjoyment in the actual programming part of software engineering. It’s stupid to assume that is the only aspect of software engineering that is valuable or that is enjoyable for others.

A population decrease is not a stable population

It may not be a reaction to the article itself but to the many comments in this thread and others that fall under that category.

I actually like the analogy but for the opposite reason. Cars have become the most efficient way to travel for most industrial purposes. And yet enormous numbers of people still walk, run, ride bikes, or even horses, often for reasons entirely separate from financial gain.

Between the internet, or more generally computers, or even more generally electricity, are we not already?

Is it? I’ve seen AI hallucinations, but they seem to be increasingly rare these days.

Much of the AI antipathy reminds me of Wikipedia in the early-mid 2000s. I remember feeling amazed with it, but also remember a lot of ranting by skeptics about how anyone could put anything on there, and therefore it was unreliable, not to be used, and doomed to fail.

20 years later and everyone understands that Wikipedia may have its shortcomings, and yet it is still the most impressive, useful advancement in human knowledge transfer in a generation.

> The original roll out of Healthcare.gov is a counterpoint.

Healthcare.gov was primarily developed by private contractor firms, not government employees.

> And even if you did work in pub sec, if you were good, why would you want to work for the government when you can get paid a lot more working in the private sector and consulting for the government?

Some people are motivated by factors other than pay, a concept that seems to be foreign to many FAANG corporate mercenaries.

As someone who has lived in public transportation heavy cities, and currently lives in a flyover American city where we all drive everywhere, I strongly disagree. I live in a very popular commuter suburb of a larger American city, and the commute is about 30 minutes in the best case scenario. If you are in rush hour, or there is an accident (and there inevitably is), it pushes 45-60.

But the bigger point is that even for a similar amount of time, driving is far less convenient than public transportation. Cars demand your full attention. Public transportation does not. I can sleep on the bus or train. I can read. I can work. In the car my options are limited to music/podcasts/audiobooks. Cars are extremely expensive. They are expensive to buy, expensive to maintain, and expensive to insure. Cars are deadly. Driving is the single riskiest thing people do with regularity, by a large margin. Cars are less efficient and have more externalities. They require more space for roads and parking, they produce more pollution, in terms of both greenhouse gasses and noise. They are also possibly the single biggest factor in the obesity crisis. Part of the reason America is among the fattest countries in the world is because a trip to anywhere requires driving there, where in many other countries people walk or ride their bike to many places the need to go to.

It’s very hard to live in a place with proper, functional urban design and public transportation, and walk away preferring car-centric culture.

In my experience I’ve come to realize there is a segment of the population who is against any kind of change at all, of any kind. Even if they have complaints, if action is taken to address that complaint, they will complain about the action.

The internet is as arguably as revolutionary as paper. And while LLMs haven’t proven to be an internet-level revolutionary technology (yet), they are closer to that than the PalmPilot.

The point is that it’s equally dumb to base comparisons on the arbitrary measure of state lines. Of course California produces more than Iowa, it has significantly more area. Lump a couple more Midwestern states in with Iowa to be a more comparably sized region, and California is no longer the top producer or the nations food.

And it’s even dumber to assess the importance to the nations food supply based on dollar values. California makes a lot of money off of almonds and avocados, which are high priced luxury foods. Of course it will have high revenues attached to it. That doesn’t make it more important to the nation’s food supply than states that produce the staple foods of wheat, corn, beans, chicken, and beef.

They are both predicated on the concept of ownership of ideas. The reason IP law seems reasonable and cultural appropriation doesn’t is simply a matter of conditioning, not because one is inherently less nonsensical than the other.

> Not to mention that when it comes to art, I'd rather consume something that someone deemed important and interesting enough to dedicate skill and time to.

As would I, and we are welcome to. That doesn’t mean alternatives must be eliminated.

I agree with you that the ultimate issue is the surrounding capitalist system. But that means solutions need to address the actual problem, the system, and not the symptom, the technology.

Or it’s that there is a class of people (“creatives”) who have allowed themselves to become convinced that the idea of private ownership of ideas isn’t completely dystopian and anti-human, because their personal income is reliant on it.

The “theft of ideas” is itself an absurd notion. The true tragedy of AI is that in response people are reflexively embracing the dystopian concepts of IP and copyright, rather than merely tolerating it like in years past.

The entire concept of IP is the true farce. The real tragedy is how brainwashed our society has become into not just accepting it, but outright supporting it. I’ve been blown away to see how the advent of AI has transformed so many into IP and copyright law cheerleaders.

This is a lot of purple prose that ultimately doesn’t say anything of substance.

I don’t think that has anything to do with not being able to buy a house or have a child. TCG cards are the perfect mixture of consumerism and gambling, and Gen Z has been submerged in both for the entirety of their lives

California leads in the value of goods sold, because it produces a lot of relatively expensive agricultural products like almonds, avocados, tomatoes, etc. Additionally, it’s a larger state, so it naturally will inflate the totals. If you look at food staples, and at the amount produced by square mile, the Midwest is definitely the main food producer of the US.

The “Photos” section mistakenly links to the “Notes” section. For such an angry rant about how AI is degrading software quality, you would think you would be able to configure a static blog properly.

It’s not just the processed foods. It’s the sedentary lifestyle. US cities are so car centric that actually getting a minimal baseline of healthy activity requires working into one’s schedule. When I lived in Japan, everything is so walkable/bikable that it makes a significant difference in the base activity level of average individual. I imagine Europe is similar.

They already are. Playing nice and hoping the other side will come to their senses and return to normalcy doesn’t make sense when they’ve already shown you they will try to destroy you regardless.

Trump did win the popular vote with a plurality at 49.8% to Harris’s 48.3%.

The concept of IP law only really started to be a thing a couple hundred years ago, and the vast majority of IP law has been created in the last century. Human societies have been large and complex without the concept of IP law most of their history.

I’m not sure the statement “being extroverted is more positive for society as a whole than being introverted” is true.