Willish42

#2 seems like a ludicrous misalignment / conflict of interest. Why would I as a taxpayer/voter want CO2 emissions to decrease if I'm essentially getting a monthly bonus for their existence?

Regarding #1:

> You lost a lot of time and energy dealing with issues like: Using vim; copying files back and forth with scp; losing the network connection; the college shared machine is slow and yucky.

Sometimes struggling with the tools you don't like and ending up at the ones you do build "character" and some familiarity with struggling with the unfamiliar. Those can be formative even if they're not "efficient" towards finishing an assignment as soon as possible. I think there's a balance to strike here, and as others have noted, some people _like_ vim and SCP, so which setup is "right" is subjective and requires a bit of struggling (albeit ideally time-boxed / within reason) to find it.

That said, I would've _killed_ to have this much help getting started as a novice programmer. I *love* how much effort and care this person puts into helping their kid(s) manage the whirlwind of early CS and university.

While this is practically the best-case scenario for enforcing RTO (generous severance if you answer "no" and plenty of time to plan and get relocation support for "yes"), I can't help but feel like this is yet another instance of extroverted people who end up in management and leadership positions judging the importance of in-person collaboration for other people at the company's jobs based on their impression of how important it is for their jobs.

As a SWE who does IC and planning / TL design work, I find it immensely easier to work from home. I don't have to find a meeting room, I have one stable multi-monitor setup that I'm comfortable with for running and participating in meetings, and I can make myself available for "emergencies" early and late in the day without having to work my commute around that.

The leaders making this decision at Roblox have generous compensation packages (even for tech), and can likely afford to buy a new house every single year based on how much they earn. The reality for a rank-and-file SWE trying to secure housing in the Bay Area, especially near San Mateo, is much more precarious. No joke, if these companies offered to factor in a cost-of-living adjustment to compensation based on rent rates in the area surrounding the office, I'd go back in a heartbeat, but I spent enough time as a new grad commuting 90 minutes each way saving less than 10% of my paycheck after rent and basic living expenses, to where I would literally quit SWE work before being forced back to my company's HQ.

Mind you, certain economic classes of young individuals will have safety nets from their family and the support they need to not worry as much about finances. This will have a deliberate effect on the types of backgrounds that will become predominant among employees -- likely, folks already in the bay area who went to nearby top-tier schools and have upbringings that primed them for such a life one way or another. My experience thus far is that our remote teams at my job tend to be more diverse and the new-grad experience is less economically precarious because you have the choice of living where you want to. Caretakers and people with kids also suffer disproportionately with RTO vs. those younger or with less family duties, and this affects the population of employees drastically too.

As important as in-person collaboration is for mentoring, brainstorming, and culture, I feel like there's probably a way to create space for that without bringing everybody back to the HCOL areas where leadership tends to already own personal and commercial real-estate (potential conflict of interest, though this varies by company/leader in terms of the size of the assets).

I think the writing is on the wall though and probably every major tech firm will slowly creep back from "hybrid" to "well, 3 is the minimum" (see: flair bit from office space https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7SNEdjftno), to having the real "team players" be the ones who can afford to come in 5 days a week. This was probably inevitable but I find it vastly disappointing.

upvotes and downvotes help, and I'd argue HN does a good enough job at preventing new accounts from being able to do disproportionate damage (discouraging bots, astroterfing, etc.)

Another thing is user friendliness and maximizing engagement. Whatever Facebook did around 2015 or so to make everything bloated, animated reactions, and slower seemed to make things more user-friendly for a subset of less technical users, such that people who can't fact-check obviously fake articles and spam posts are enabled and incentivized to post as much as possible, and adding algorithms on top of that to maximize "engagement" make these things inevitable.

Twitter's chronological got turned off as the default at some point for a similar algorithmic "for you" page that I think has also made things worse for their platforms.

No idea about Quora, but eventually for ad-supported sites you start maximizing for time on the site and getting people to look at ads, rather than "quality" in the content on your social media site.

IMO, clock accuracy is less important for 3D games than it was for the handful of games that made me prefer the Analogue Pocket (Mother 3 for critical hits, etc.)

I imagine they will be hard-pressed to garner a ton of interest over existing solutions, but if the controller is unparalleled and the CRT filters are really good, who knows.

I also really hope they build support for microphone emulation. I'd love to play https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hey_You,_Pikachu! again without having to secure the special hardware that came with it (have it lying around somewhere but it has not stood well to the test of time...)

Pretty much. "Lawyers as a Service" for any AI related copyright claims.

I also find it interesting that generative AI for images seems missing? I wonder if this is intentionally selective. Also possible I'm misunderstanding where Imagen etc. lives in the listed products

"doubling down" indeed...

One possible interpretation of events is that he was ousted not for the initial proposal and backlash but precisely for how he backtracked after the fact -- perhaps the board gave a clear mandate and Riccitiello was unable to successfully change pricing structure to match financial expectations. That would explain the replacement.

Things aren't looking great for Unity right now...

Largely agree with this analysis, however your claim about nvidia:

> There is no way the nVidia monopoly will last more than another two years tops.

I feel as if I've heard paraphrases of this sentiment for at least the last ~6 years. Is there a reason you think nvidia's monopoly is decreasing or will decrease? They have quite the lead in terms of market share for discrete GPUs AFAICT (https://www.tomshardware.com/news/gpu-market-healthy-and-vib...). Even if costs go down etc., there are market dynamics at play here that I'm not convinced this industry will get disrupted anytime soon. The only major competitors in innovation for this space are Apple, Intel, and AMD, with Apple being the only one with manufacturing improvements, and that's a walled garden with very low market share for desktop computing.

Because using space that could be permanently lived in by somebody to instead seek profits as a luxury vacation rental, along with bad housing and tax policies in CA, is exactly the reason we have so many homeless.

1. Too many homeless people

2. Keep making luxury condos and rent them out on AirBnB, while NIMBYs continue to veto affordable higher-density housing developments

3. Blame local government and say it's their problem to fix

4. Get more homeless people

5. Return to step 1

I totally agree about folks needing to pay rent, and that this is a bad situation for the landlord. I do find the slant in defending homeowners' side of things in a place with as much homelessness as LA to be an ... interesting editorial choice.

He played stupid games and won stupid prizes, and even admits further down in the article that the lawsuit is a "principled stance" rather than anything he truly can't resolve through some kind of agreement with the tenant.

As sad as this news makes me for the preservation of eShop stuff, the modding community tends to rally around Nintendo products and I have pretty high faith that things will be preserved one way or another by the awesome work of modders and the emulation community.

It's a sad state of affairs for copyright law, but generally by the time Nintendo shuts down "official" access to content for a console generation, rom files are readily available from a few google searches and a relatively well-thought-out and simple modding process for the hardware.

There are many first party nintendo games and remakes that still haven't made it to newer consoles like the Switch yet. Hopefully Nintendo comes up with better backwards compatibility in the future for current Switch titles, but assuming they won't as they often don't, piracy and emulation tend to fill in the gaps pretty well in my experience.

> Chomsky explained that he was not only referring to the fact that Russia is fighting in Ukraine in a more humane way than the US in Iraq: "I am not only referring to this, it is obvious." UN inspectors had to be withdrawn as soon as the invasion of Iraq began, he says, "because the attack was so severe and extreme ... This is the American and British style of war." Chomsky adds: “Let's look at the victims. I only know the official numbers… the official UN numbers are about 8,000 civilian casualties [in Ukraine]. How many civilian casualties were there when the US and Britain invaded Iraq?”

The implications here are clear what he meant. Everything else in that headline is spin. This feels exaggerated IMO

I remember reading this when it came out, but couldn't remember the name and was too scared to type "articles about imminent death and our limited time with loved ones" into a search bar.

I've since lost my parents in my 20s, significantly earlier than expected, but found this weirdly comforting on a second read realizing that most of our quality time had indeed been in the first two decades of my life, regardless of what happened. It definitely makes me think about working to stay close / become closer with loved ones I have left.

Thanks for sharing this. Life's short and I admire your effort to live closer with your brother. Congrats on your "experiment" :)

These are both exactly what I had in mind. DITF was specifically something I'd definitely read about but couldn't remember the name for. Also think this reply correctly identifies that anchoring bias is the underlying more generic version of this effect / tactic.

Thanks!

Edit: Specifically, reading through https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negotiation#Tactics, I believe both the "Highball/Low-ball or Ambit claim" and "Anchoring" sections describe the phenomena I was thinking of.

I wish I had a large enough Twitter following to make a public claim about this before Unity "went back" on the first version of the recently-announced pricing changes, but I was nearly certain this was an intentional move to make the "Update on our update" second version more palatable.

There's probably a wiki link somewhere to the Proper Noun PR phenomenon in business school for this strategy, but the "terrible plan then less terrible plan but still worse than before the initial terrible plan" strategy seems like essentially a confirmation Unity is not to be trusted for small developers. It's sad to lose a great dev community but it sounds like BUG is making the right call here.

I've been wondering for some time if business success for in-person companies is based on leadership's "better" control of the workforce vs. employees actually being more productive in the office.

Are there strong success stories for remote-first tech firms that operated this way before the pandemic?

The best-case situation from the employee side, IMO, is to have maximum flexibility, where folks can work from home as needed but have a desk available if they want to work in the office regularly, with regular "offsites" where people meet face to face. Yet every company seems convinced that "hybrid" where larger tech companies conveniently get to keep their real estate holdings (AMZN, GOOG, etc.) is the better bet.

In the case of Grindr and Zoom, I can't believe they're requiring RTO. If it truly seems "unsustainable" to companies Grindr's size, then probably every tech company is doomed to forced RTO. Granted, Grindr's case might be more related to unionization efforts (https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/12/business/grindr-rto-union...) than actually deciding on required RTO for its own sake.

See above. The Vox article made this seem like logic around the hypothesis is more faulty than it probably is, given other replies.

I understand my meaning might've confused HN commenters but I genuinely feel that the intent of my words in the initial comment is intuitive, and don't have time or bandwidth to argue about the semantics. I am sorry for the confusion. I obviously can't definitively prove it is faulty, and was merely trying (likely incorrectly so) to summarize the believed veracity of the hypothesis.

Not sure if above had France and the US flipped or not, but this is all I could find for US: https://www.howtogeek.com/138969/why-watching-dvds-on-linux-... (from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VLC_media_player#References > [17])

TL;DR yes, presumably decss stuff

I had meant that despite the statistical correlation being objective and strong, the logic behind a causal link was faulty.

That might not be the case though (?), see https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2018/02/an-updated-le... from the other reply

Thanks, this is way more thorough than the links I was able to find / select from a quick search at the time.

If anything, I think I've accidentally experienced a lesser case of [Cunningham's Law](https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Cunningham%27s_Law), where the veracity of the hypothesis is arguably pretty clear-cut and I just lacked the evidence, and the internet is obliged to correct/help in that regard!

This feels like a good time to bring up the lead-crime hypothesis (flaws and all). For those who don't know, there's a strong (if faulty) correlation between lead levels in preschool children and crime rates: https://www.vox.com/2016/1/14/17991876/crime-drop-murder-lea...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead%E2%80%93crime_hypothesis

Regardless of what you think about the hypothesis, the growth and crunch in lead levels during the last many decades is astounding and probably still has many bad effects on IQ and related factors, at least in the US

After dealing with a terminal illness in my family quite recently, I really have adopted the philosophy that sometimes, it's better not to know... I wonder what the practically immeasurable realized influence of contemplating one's life expectancy is on their actual life expectancy.

I'm going to take a walk outside today and try to think less about dark things.

One has to think the ROI for any financial investment in someone <25 YO towards things like education pays off more than similarly-sized investments later in life.

Regardless of whether the parent can support that tuition cost or the kid has to take on loans themselves, it should be up to the individual whether they take on that risk irrespective of the parent's financial situation, which is I think where this heavily-downvoted reply was going.

As somebody who's education was way less supported than the rest of my family, who came out with a better job than all of those others in spite of that, there's a decent chance your kid will resent being "held back" by such a choice for a very long time if you give them trade school as their only option in life.

Lots of people find ways to be successful in the arts by eventually finding something cross-disciplinary, and with the direction most non-white-collar jobs in the US are heading I wouldn't bet my kid's life on trade school. What made sense as a sentiment on Mike Rowe's "Dirty Jobs" 10+ years ago doesn't quite hold up as well today, and those projects were funded by the Koch brothers and the whole "trade school is just as good" thing should be taken with a mountain of salt. I'd love to see more data proving trade school proves better today, especially for young adults with educational backgrounds and access to learning and job opportunities whose parents are in the economic class to be browsing HN

> Their main intent is to destroy third party apps that no longer aid the company’s business goals. But they’re also trying to make a few million bucks a year licensing access to data, particularly on the back of AI training. It’s wrong.

This seems backwards to me. It's obviously a move to try (and likely fail, assuming screen scraping works well enough) getting in on the AI money train by charging for Reddit's data being used to train LLMs. I don't think Appolo and other 3P clients are the target of this API change, even if the results of it are anti-competitive and should be stopped regardless of intent.

Thank you for saving me some clicks to figure out who this guy is. I was a bit skeptical about how sensationalized the article is relative to the substantive content of his sources

Probably a dumb question, but wouldn't Reddit be very easy to scrape instead of using an API at these prices? I assume the various LLMs' datasets are based on web scraping similar to Google for content that doesn't have a public API.

Also, it seems to me that Reddit could gain some goodwill here by supporting the flagship competing client apps with a lower rate while still charging a higher price for those trying to leverage its data for ML, similar to how Google provides much of the funding for Mozilla despite being a competing browser.

I was curious about this too, and would expect this to be somewhere like kaggle. There's some good results in https://www.kaggle.com/search?q=reddit+date%3A90+datasetSize..., e.g. https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/noahpersaud/reddit-submissio..., but nothing larger / more holistic or that includes comments AFAICT.

Seeing lots of mentions here in the comments about increased serving costs but the nature of the message sounds more like the community itself has fallen apart / lost people due to covid and war. I can't imagine the effort it must've taken to keep this site running for so long given the amount of traffic, especially during the hellish last few years.

I'm sad to see them go but I support their desire to spend time and energy/resources on something else after all they've done

> Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.

The comparisons selected here seem off to me.

No mention of climate change? It's a more recent and concrete problem with more hard science (spanning decades) than our current understanding and presumed speculative risk of AI, which governments have also failed spectacularly at curtailing.

The pandemic was similarly mishandled and was not solved with regulation of any sort.

Nuclear war is an arguably apt comparison but happens to have become prioritized by militarization of nuclear resources and research which ... doesn't seem like a good goal here?