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__jamboon I love programming but I hate the programming industry

in 1950 in the book "the human use of human beings", the famous mathematician Norbert Weiner pointed out your exact sentiment. Complaining that instead of solving problems, or doing anything new or interesting, people were using these "computing machines" to increase the efficiency of the parts of the capitalist machine that caused the problems in the first place.

Nobody listened, and nothing has changed.

__jamboon Ask HN: Could we just re-invent original Google?

I think this calls for a government funded national un-enshittification Laboratory to study the social dynamics of enshittification and develop hygiene practices. Work must be done quickly before enshittification research becomes enshittified!

__jamboon Ask HN: Could we just re-invent original Google?

Nah this tech will poison the web. People don't know what it is and take it too seriously.

__jamboon Ask HN: Could we just re-invent original Google?

I think the problem is then you eventually get SEOification. I suppose you can just reset every now and again. Maybe like give a training program to get SEO people real jobs.

__jamboon Growing number of apps help automate pro-Israel activism online

> Hollywood has.. hard power

Um, what??

__jamboon Lessons from a never-ending personal project

This is a clearly false collection of arbitrary useless and arrogant opinions. See any famous reclusive intellectual or writer for counterexamples.

__jamboon AI and Mass Spying

Because this is so depressing I am going to try think of positive aspects:

The flip side to this is the government had power because these activities required enormous resources. Perhaps it will go the other direction, if there is less of a moat other players can enter. Eg all it takes to make a state is a bunch of cheap drones and the latest government bot according to your philosophy.

Maybe it means government will massively shrink in personelle? Maybe we can have a completely open source ai government/legal system. Lawyers kind of suck ethically anyway, so maybe it would be better? With low barrier to entry, we can rapidly prototype such governments and trial them on smaller populations like iceland. Such utopias will be so good everyone will move there.

They still have to have physical prisons, if everyone is in prison this will be silly, but I suppose they can fine everyone, not so different from lowering wages which they already do.

__jamboon AI and Mass Spying

Great idea.

__jamboon OpenAI's board has fired Sam Altman

Sam's sad face in the NYT article is pretty priceless.

__jamboon Privacy washing: Google claims to support privacy while lobbying against it

"...Google and tech industry allies responded with a massive lobbying campaign... convince lawmakers banning targeted ads would hurt the global economy. The gambit worked, and the draft law no longer threatens Google’s advertising."

Lol, sounds like Google and the tech industry used targeted advertising to prevent a ban on targeted advertising.

__jamboon When no one can afford to live in America anymore

agreed lol

__jamboon Timo Noko – The Professional Hobo (2016)

But few to none can survive across the breadth of environments humans can with the aid of sometimes highly advanced clothing.

__jamboon Ask HN: Any freelancers here? I need burnout advice

super cool idea! thankyou

__jamboon Ask HN: Any freelancers here? I need burnout advice

>Well run software companies with tidy, well architected software need far fewer devs than the ones with nasty bloat and a lot of legacy problems

this is a good point I can relate with!

__jamboon Ask HN: Any freelancers here? I need burnout advice

> you can work that manual labor job and still have mental energy afterwards to work on your SaaS. It's much harder doing mental tech work after already doing mentally taxing work at your job.

this is exactly what I was thinking. Thank for the validation, I'm glad someone else has this experience. Also I do a lot of debugging subconsciously, so taking other tech work is just a lot.

__jamboon Ask HN: Gmail alternative for the lazy activist?

proton has an easy transfer process that I just did. They have to give the govt details they have in case of legal issues like squatting or whatever some bureaucrat makes up, but they can only see your devices and whatever you give them, not the content.

Idk about your style preferences though.

Edit: Hm, https://www.fsf.org/resources/webmail-systems this link below seems to say proton has javascript vulnerability...

__jamboon Scientists beam solar power to Earth from space for first time ever

What is the advantage of microwaves over sunlight? Seems like it would be better to just make better solar panels, sunlight is already pretty high-wattage.

__jamboon Ask HN: How do you cope mentally through all the hype

Good luck!

Maybe you can sell "how to leave tech and become a carpenter" videos once chatgpt takes all the jobs. You can probably just use chatgpt to generate the videos, but probably not cut the wood.

__jamboon Ask HN: How do you cope mentally through all the hype

are you becoming a farmer or a carpenter.

__jamboon Ask HN: How do you cope mentally through all the hype

bahah love it.

__jamboon Ask HN: How do you cope mentally through all the hype

Yeah, lol, the OOP thing is a bit dated. Maybe I should have said blockchain.

__jamboon A Survey of Worldwide Censorship Techniques

what are "legal levels"?

__jamboon That plum job listing may just be a ghost

Can I see the list?!

Great that you can do this.

__jamboon Half of Americans now believe that news organizations deliberately mislead them

This is very old news. The encyclopaedia Britannica article on the subject says a good propagandist knows the mainstream news are untrusted, and will target their audience through receptive channels, like influencing family or social groups.

https://www.britannica.com/topic/propaganda/Media-of-propaga...

__jamboon Yahoo will lay off 20% of staff, or 1600 people

This is probably part of the BDSM role-play among certain executives.

__jamboon Yahoo will lay off 20% of staff, or 1600 people

I agree, there's a very weird media focus on layoffs right now, without broader context (number of hires, number of companies, number of unemployed, number of people in the workforce etc).

__jamboon Ask HN: Laid off folks, are you getting hired?

Haha, are you suggesting all products eventually break and we resort to solving problems with small hand-crafted turing machines made of sticks?

__jamboon CIA Involvement in Twitter

What about Hacker news?

__jamboon CIA Involvement in Twitter

I agree with you about the formatting it's pretty bad.

__jamboon CIA Involvement in Twitter

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2022/12/twitter-and-the-cia-...

Re-posting comment from above because it was good, (not mine).

" The perfect unison of the mainstream news in response is itself an interesting news story. They say it is not newsworthy, and smear the journalists who say it is. How does this unanimous pronouncement of an absurdity arise? What a perfect model of the Herman-Chomsky propaganda model. A few outsider journos point at a monstrous 1984-like mass mind-control operation and all the insider journos nervously cough and change the subject. Hm. "