621 karma · joined September 22, 2023
What they usually mean is "nobody can find my interesting hobby projects and I can't find theirs." And that definitely tracks. As a person who poured a lot of energy into completely free, non-commercial educational content, it grinds my gears that there are 2-3 pages of derivative blogspam peppered with affiliate links - and increasingly, LLM-generated drivel - ahead of me.
What I think we get wrong is demanding that others fix it for us, though. Yeah, it's the cool part of the internet, but it's a commercially insignificant one. What the article is trying to do - pick a specific practical solution and lead by example - is probably better. Even if it's a rehash of what we tried in the pre-Google days.
Having to be unconditionally nice to computers is extremely creepy in part because it conditions us to be submissive - or else.
For a long time, the US government genuinely feared that ham radio would be used for espionage. It had listening stations across the nation to monitor all communications. It flat out shut down the entire service (!) during WWII. And it came up with the idea that you have to communicate in the open, and that no form of obfuscation or encryption is permissible.
And then hams came up with this roundabout explanation that actually, it's good that you can't have privacy. No matter that it holds back a hobby that is by all usage metrics dying, and that there are many countries where encryption is allowed and doesn't lead to any terrible outcomes.
Privacy is useful in hobby uses. Maybe you want to talk to your spouse without a nosy neighbor listening. Maybe you want to periodically beacon your GPS location without the whole world knowing. There are so many cool things you can do, and there is spectrum that is... quite frankly, largely dead right now, and if you don't encourage new uses, it will be reclaimed by the government.
I'm not saying this to convince you should trust this study. But I think it's important to recognize it's absolutely happening everywhere, not just in the industries we don't like. Most of the research we read was paid for, and an overwhelming majority of it reaches the conclusion that aligns with the views of the researchers or of whoever is footing the bill.
But the most important point is, you don't get that money now, and maybe never. The most likely scenario where you get that kind of a payday is if they go public and if the pre-IPO pie-in-the-sky valuation holds for a good while.
It might. But it's far more of a gamble than your FAANG stock.
It's not even something you can control as a parent. My kid, 16 years old, walks to school on his own - but he's always back right after classes. And it's not that he's an outcast. That's just how they roll in the SF Bay Area. Other kids go home too, or they are shuttled by their parents to some organized after-school activities.
And look, I'm not arguing that this is a better solution. But I think it makes sense to attack the strongest version of that argument, not the weakest one.
I get that it looks cool and makes old games more aesthetically pleasing. But the reality is that we liked these visuals back then because we had much lower standards, not because CRTs had some magical properties that made the games look awesome.
This is sort of what happened with welfare too. For a long time, we depended on private charities to take care of the less fortunate. We decided the system sucked, so we established a government-operated safety net. But in this reality, it can be worse if you slip through the cracks of government programs. People around you by and large no longer think it's their duty to help.
Anyway, I wouldn't write it off as extremism. It's just we need to pick an option and stick to it. In a "nanny-state" world, you can't decide that you're not going to regulate food safety anymore and hope that the market will sort it out.
I think this makes it immune to the patterns described in the article, although there are other ways for such communities to die. The decline of Slashdot is a cautionary tale.
Meanwhile, antique phones, typewriters, cameras, and so on are popular enough that people make replicas: https://www.ebay.com/itm/266280860021
Most of these are commonly shortened and then you're back in the danger zone, but then, at least you have the option of reverting to the long form without jumping through any legal hoops.
Stuff like that doesn't bother me at all, but I bumped into quite a few immigrants who had strong preferences one way or the other.
Do you want the same spelling? That's easy, but the pronunciation is quite often completely different. A good example is Jules in French vs English. In this scenario, you're effectively going by two differently-pronounced names in all face-to-face interactions, not that different from the folks from China or India who are adopting "Westernized" names abroad. The only perk is that you might not have to spell it out over the phone.
Do you want the same pronunciation? This is also fairly easy in many languages, but the spelling is likely to differ. An example of this might be Hannah versus Hana (English / Czech). This option makes verbal communications easy, but may confuse people who are trying to read your name out loud or to write it down - so any interactions with customer service are going to be mildly annoying.
Do you want both? For most languages, the list will be extremely short, perhaps half a dozen names such as "Anna". If you don't fall in love in one of these options, tough luck.
There is also a softer version of this goal: have a name that isn't native in the second language, but that is easy to spell and pronounce. For most people, this is probably the best compromise. It lets you keep your national identity, doesn't limit your choices too much, and minimizes friction.
There are obsolete electronics that would be a lot harder to sell, for example CRT TVs - but phones are basically free money.
On the flip side, if you can explain it away as "they just don't get it and I do," it's a lot easier to act. And the thing is, sometimes, you get good results. Sometimes, the old way of doing business is just a matter of inertia, and the justifications used by others turn out to be bad.
But about just as often, you end up reinventing the wheel or re-learning the lessons that others learned before.
I have friends in all the big tech companies and I don't think any of them is fundamentally better. They all have their idiosyncrasies, they all have good teams and terrible ones, they all have a ton of red tape.
I think the main problem is that they built their reputation by claiming they invented a new way of doing business and a new way of treating their employees. They were supposed to be the antidote to the corporate culture at Microsoft, IBM, Sun, and whatnot. But ultimately, they converged on pretty much the same.
For the next 1-2 months, you can probably keep making excuses. If your manager is paying close attention to new hires, they might object. But many managers are overstretched. Between office politics, planning, and all the ongoing "problem cases," they might simply not have enough cycles to watch your output real close.
Even after your manager is fed up, it takes time to fire you. In part to avoid legal risks, HR typically wants to see a written plan first, giving you about three months to prove yourself. If you do nothing, that's usually the end of the road. But if you lift a finger and earn a passing grade, the timer essentially restarts. In fact, you're now your manager's success story, and they might be reluctant to admit they were wrong.
And that's on average teams. If you end up on a dysfunctional team or on a project in turmoil, you might not even have to pretend. There's just no one who is close enough to your role and still cares about the result.
And as others note, he has hobbies and moderately successful side projects outside this envelope.
There was never a constraint on x86 that you had to fit any real functionality into a single disk sector. All the bootsector code ever did was setting up the registers and calling BIOS to load more data from disk - and the only reason you had this done in stages was so that BIOS wouldn't have to know the particulars of your OS, such as where to find the kernel or what address to put it at.
For what it's worth, the pre-boot BIOS environment was always quite featured, offering text and VGA graphics, disk and keyboard handling, and so forth. In fact, when you look at something like MS-DOS, it was actually the BIOS-side code that was doing a lot of the heavy lifting. MS-DOS was halfway between a shell and a "real" OS as it is understood today.
Nowadays, with UEFI, we essentially decided to make the initial code executed by the CPU an operating system in itself, with filesystem support and so forth - and the notion of a 512 byte first-stage bootloader is largely gone.
There's worthwhile research coming out of IBM once in a blue moon, but by and large, they seem to be chasing PR trends.
If you want better service, there are two ways. One is to be an ultra high net worth individual. But the threshold for that is pretty high - from what I recall, real private banking nowadays starts around $5M to 10M in assets with a single institution. The term "millionaire" doesn't mean as much as it did in the 1990s.
The other option is to go with a small local bank or a credit union. If you're in a CU with 10,000 members, it's a lot easier to resolve problems or discuss unique circumstances.
https://www.adp.com/resources/articles-and-insights/articles...
This looks like an attempt to reduce that second part without touching the first, right? So effectively an administrative action to reduce the R&D tax credit passed by the Congress a while back?
First, statistically speaking, you might only have a couple of years between statutory retirement age and some sort of an "old-age" illness that will diminish your ability to pursue hobbies, travel, and so on. All the stuff you've been putting off for later... you might not be able to do, and you will regret that.
Retirement savings will allow you to retire earlier, and they will allow you to maintain higher "velocity" after - because many of these things we're putting off do cost money to pursue.
Just as importantly, though, savings buy you peace of mind. You're no longer as stressed about day-to-day challenges, like conflicts at work, an uncertain economic outlook, or a leaky roof.
Plus, on a typical tech salary, you can certainly hit 1-2 million in retirement savings in today's money, and there are investment vehicles that offset inflation with relatively modest risk.
> 2. Social Security is less than a decade from insolvency,
People have been saying this for the past four decades. But even if it does go insolvent, do you expect government retirement benefits to suddenly become a lot more comfortable than they currently are?
> 3. Saving for retirement is a luxury reserved for the folks who don’t live paycheck to paycheck. For those who do, would their savings even be enough to matter?
If you live paycheck-to-paycheck, you can't save, by definition. The question is whether you need to live paycheck-to-paycheck. For most people on HN, the answer is a resounding "no."
> 4. Most pensions and retirement savings accounts use the stock market to beat inflation. Maybe it’s just me, but I am extremely bearish on the stock market for the next four decades.
You don't need to "beat" inflation. You just need to match it. People invest into risky stocks because they want their savings to grow faster than inflation, but you certainly don't have to. You can buy corporate or municipal bonds, you can bet on commodities, you can buy real estate, you can go for collectibles, you can buy gold bars if you want to. You can invest in a friend's business.
Finally, the whole talk of "the market" is a distraction. Unless you're buying index funds, you can choose specific companies that you're not bearish on. They might not beat market returns in a good year, but if your goal is to have confidence in your choices, it's a sound plan.
If you want to design boards with curved traces, paying several hundred bucks for DipTrace is almost certainly a better route.
The DC-DC module also seems like a sensible choice for hand assembly. These things cost about a buck or two these days.
This board is clearly meant to display the electronic components in plain view and be easy to solder at home.
Plus, while it's definitely the case that with sustained interest, old data tends to linger around... the moment the interest wanes, it's gone. I've been on the internet for a while and there are so many hobby sites, forums, and software projects from the early days that are simply gone for good (and not on archive.org).
Of course, GPT-4 can be molded into an editing-centric companion, but I bet Grammarly is already working on that, and they might end up paying OpenAI for the technology.
Brand recognition means that it's a lot easier for Grammarly to build that product than for a random third party to break through.
It's a game of cat and mouse in the sense that you can build LLMs specifically optimized for evading the current crop of detectors, but in my testing, they work pretty darn well in the general case. While they might not reliably pick on all LLM text, and while there's sometimes a couple of words in human-generated writing that causes them to output a low but non-zero probability of LLM content, they do not rate human-generated text as "99% AI". Especially not across multiple writing samples.
The most likely story here, I suspect, is that the person leaned on LLMs for commissioned writing and is now trying to save face. The secrecy of the models works both ways, right? And frankly - how often do you see people in HN, or people who do commissioned writing, admit in private that they're using ChatGPT? It's cropping up all over the place.
Note that I'm not commenting on the ethics, fairness, or transparency of tools like that. I'm just saying they work far better than you might be suspecting.