alex_c

Are you seriously suggesting that office jobs cannot be abusive and harmful to workers? Or that office workers cannot suffer long term damage to their health (physical and/or mental) due to their working conditions?

>I suspect there are benefits to having the monarchy as head of state

Genuinely curious what those would be?

I think it's far from the most urgent issue our country is facing right now, but most of my objections to the monarchy would be moral or philosophical.

For one, in moral terms there is a lot of... let's say "historical baggage" that comes with the monarchy. For another, I don't think a hereditary system of governance is compatible with modern Canadian society (or at least what we would like to think it should be).

Not something that keeps me up at night, I don't think it will be removed any time soon mostly due to inertia, but I would definitely not be opposed to removing it.

Paper notebook(s). It's always open on my desk, next to my mousepad. I only have to move my hand a few inches from my mouse to pick up the pen and start writing.

Everything goes in there, in chronological order. In the morning I write the date at the top of a page, check my calendar, email, and Slack, and jot down some to-dos for the day.

After that anything goes - meeting notes, brainstorming, quick research, etc. It's not terribly organized or fancy - it doesn't need to be. I just write things down in the order they come up during the day.

Anything that needs to be shared or collaborated with others goes into a Google Doc or some digital form, I take a bit of time to convert my quick notes to something meaningful that will make sense to someone else.

I very rarely need to reference notes older than a couple of weeks. If I do, it usually doesn't take that long to find based on rough date - I have a stack with my old notebooks in a drawer.

I also use BBEdit with a million unsaved documents (well, 175 right now). I use it more as a scratch pad than actual note taking - drafting a longer message or email, manipulating some text I'm moving around, and so on. Nothing that needs to be persisted for long.

For what it's worth I have 150 hours played already on a pretty old system - i5-3570K, 16GB RAM, 1070Ti. I have no idea what framerate I'm getting but I don't remember being bothered by the game's performance even once.

I suspect performance issues are uneven and affect some systems a lot more than others. I also suspect a lot of it comes down to expectations, I'm perfectly happy with my experience but others might consider it "unplayable"!

Edit: I also play offline usually, that might be a factor as well.

I'm not the op and this is the first time I've seen someone else use the term, but I've used it too. Aspirationally - small and impossible to kill. While a unicorn's goal might be growth at all costs (with associated high chance of failure), our goal is to survive anything that might get thrown our way.

In school?

I don’t think so.

We’ve had atrocities and violence throughout history. Usually in the context of war, but not always. Usually localized, but sometimes large scale. Sometimes condemned and opposed by the rest of society (whether it is a village, country, or continent), sometimes hushed and hidden away, sometimes openly supported.

The impulses and thoughts behind it have always been there, but limited and moderated by geography, time, and social norms.

Now for the first time(?), those limits are starting to blur out and disappear on a global scale. And the impulses and thoughts are visible in their raw form.

This is who we are.

So imagine a world where telepathy exists, and everyone can hear everyone else's thoughts. And there are no filters. With enough effort you learn to only "hear" thoughts in a certain range, but you can't filter out or block thoughts at will. And no one is able, or willing, to filter their own thoughts. They're just out there for everyone to hear. And they can be aimed at specific targets.

Imagine the cross-section of thoughts you would hear all the time. Most of it mundane - work, family, food, shopping, day to day life. Some stand out through the noise - strong emotions like love, lust, happiness, pain, hatred. Some beautiful, some terrifying, some outright vile. A true cross-section of humankind's deepest thoughts.

Now imagine the loudest ones start finding others like them, and start to aggregate and cluster - mentally, not physically. Feeding and amplifying each other and getting louder and bigger. And they start to look outward, and find the thoughts they hate, and feed on those. There are no physical restrictions, no limits on distance or speed, just thoughts bouncing around and searching and filtering each other.

And imagine that once groups hit a critical mass, they also start to gather physically. And it's no longer just thoughts, but physical actions, encouraged by the entire group.

Of course - the Internet is not telepathy, there are filters, and not everyone participates. But it's the closest we've come to it as a species so far. And this is who we are...

The Internet Hate Machine is both targeted and somewhat randomized. Statistics don't help when you are the target.

How would you begin to gather statistics and estimate risk for something like this, for example?

When the video from the Proud Boys’ founder made its way into my Google alerts, I didn’t know who he was at first. I was so distracted by the strangeness of someone making a takedown video about me that I didn’t think to look into who was actually behind it.

...

I took a closer look at the video. It had 24,000 views already. Some of the commenters were talking about the city I lived in. I was alone in my house, sitting in front of my computer, thinking, Oh no. Maybe this isn’t a funny story. Maybe this is a scary story.

>The founders, employees, investors all get their liquidity on day one (and even with vesting schedules on tokens, VCs have been selling their interest in their un-vested stakes). There's no incentive to build a business. The only incentive that exists is to pump the token at all costs. Your only incentive is to build a "community" and "enthusiasm" and spend your entire budget on marketing. Anything you spend building a business is a complete waste and sets you at a disadvantage relative to your peers.

Makes me think of Star Citizen. I will admit I don't follow it very closely, but the cynical view seems to be they've found a very successful business model of hyping up new features and crowdfunding by selling in-game ships while the game is eternally in development, rather than building and selling a finished game.

I scanned through it, and one thing that jumped out is the Google Trends graph for "Myocarditis". Is it really "curious" that more people are searching for that term, given all the media coverage? How many people even heard the term "myocarditis" before 2021?

This is beyond useless as any kind of supporting evidence for the point the author is trying to make. Mixed in with Twitter anecdotes and random YouTube videos, it's just noise making it that much harder to critically evaluate the argument.

The term "Gish gallop" comes to mind.

Microsoft's "looming problem" seems to be the $130B+ in cash they're sitting on, and finding something to spend it on?

I will admit it took me an embarrassingly long time to learn this lesson and become disciplined enough to do it.

But it really is better for everyone involved, clients don't like late or unpredictable invoices either!

Yeah, it's about setting and managing expectations. Small favours can help build relationships, discounts can help close a deal, and so on. Less relevant for larger clients, but may be necessary when working with smaller clients.

Writing it down can be the difference between the client thinking "I understand what you did there is a one-off favour and I appreciate it", versus the client taking it for granted as something normal and always expecting it in the future at no cost / discounted cost.

Spot on. Only thing I would add is

11. Invoice frequently, on schedule, like clockwork. Drop anyone who doesn't pay on time.

12. If you are doing them any "favours" for any reason (discounts, work you might do but don't charge for), put it on the invoice.

>My other sensibilities include not putting two spaces at sentence end (among other things this shows that you’re most probably 40+)

That's a silly generalization. I'm only 39.

The meaning is clear, and kudos to Twitter for defining it well. But if you think through the usual meanings of the word "artificial" and apply it to this situation, you end up with some amusing conclusions.

Definition of artificial

  1 : humanly contrived (see contrive sense 1b) often on a natural model : man-made 
  // an artificial limb 
  // artificial diamonds
  2a : having existence in legal, economic, or political theory
  b : caused or produced by a human and especially social or political agency 
  // an artificial price advantage 
  // Within these companies, qualified women run into artificial barriers that prevent them from advancing to top positions in management.— James J. Kilpatrick
  3a : lacking in natural or spontaneous quality 
  // an artificial smile 
  // an artificial excitement
  b : imitation, sham 
  // artificial flavor
  4 : based on differential morphological characters not necessarily indicative of natural relationships 
  // an artificial key for plant identification
  5 obsolete : artful, cunning

Definition 1 doesn't apply: Twitter is an artificial construct to start with.

Definition 2 doesn't apply, or if it does it's a bit of a stretch.

Definition 3 clearly applies. So, "lacking in natural or spontaneous quality".

So, what "amplification" activities on Twitter have a natural or spontaneous quality? Intentional clickbait or flamebait? Using tools to schedule posts in advance to maximize engagement? Jumping on trending hashtags? Paying a person to manage a Twitter account for you? Setting up a bot to automatically post articles from a website? All of these are allowed and can be used to amplify information, but none sound "natural" or "spontaneous" to me.

The meaning is clear and Twitter's rules are (IMO) very reasonable, but there is definitely something euphemistic about the phrase. The literal phrase would be "disallowed amplification", because the only real criteria for what is considered "artificial" are Twitter's own rules for what is allowed and what is not.

As opposed to using Twitter to "naturally" amplify information, just like our forefathers did out in the wild back when we were still in touch with nature and Twitter didn't contain any pesticides or plastic :)

>It can't, it just answers with snippets extracted from websites it deems relevant, and often the answer is flat out wrong or irrelevant.

I recently searched the name of a YouTuber I was watching, the top "People also ask" suggestion was "Is [name of youtuber] married?"

I didn't particularly care but clicked out of curiosity. It expanded to show a snippet from an old (1980s) NY Times article about a completely different person getting married long before this particular person was even born.

Google AI using other companies' content to provide wrong answers to questions I didn't even ask... That says it all.

I'm positive this is usually due to convention, not a conscious design decision. In other words: websites give 20/50/100 row pagination options because other websites give 20/50/100 row pagination options.

There is no meaningful implementation difference between providing 20/50/100 options and 20/50/100/500 options, with 20 as the default in either case.

I would be very surprised if this decision is even discussed for more than 1 minute on most projects, let alone if any user research is done. But I'm happy to be proved wrong!

This change is very upsetting. Ever since becoming a parent, I've been baffled by a mystery.

I noticed that - unlike most other popular content - children's videos on YouTube almost always have roughly a 2:1 like to dislike ratio no matter what channel or type of content. Why? Where do all the dislikes come from?

Is it from kids mashing touch screens at random? Parents taking what small revenge they can at being subjected to the same songs on repeat thousands of times? Some shady underground power struggle between kids' content creators sabotaging each other?

I always assumed I would eventually find an answer, but now if dislike counts are going away I am unlikely to ever find out. I will probably have to carry this unanswered mystery with me for the rest of my life.

Thanks, YouTube.

Enjoy? Not particularly, but isn't that just reality? There's always a bigger fish.

In-game I had no illusions about personally competing or winning given that those games are purely pay-to-win, as I said I just enjoyed watching the server dynamics and the drama. I felt I got enough value out of, say, the $100 spread out over a few months until I got bored with the game.

Well... I don't really know anymore. I'm with you on the ethics of gambling mechanics. But I'm less certain about the predatory part than I used to be.

I spent some time a few years ago playing some of the multiplayer "strategy" mobile games (FF, GoT, etc). I only ever sunk about $100 into any of them, the fun part for me was the politics and the intrigue on each server and that was roughly the ticket to entry. Got to know some of the whales a little - people who drop $5K-$10K+ on the game without a second thought. No real life names, just some conversations here and there. One was a VC, another a race car driver, lots of people from Kuwait for some reason...

My point is that I'm having trouble applying the "predatory" label when it's high net worth individuals throwing around sums that are ridiculous to me but trivial to them. I probably spend way more on some of my hobbies as a percentage of my income than they do on these games.

Now lower down on the scale, the people spending $100, $200, $500 on these games... that's where I get more uncomfortable.

Do you mean in terms of protection, or side effects?

In terms of long term protection, I don't think we really know yet.

In terms of long term side effects - do we know of any past vaccines with notable side effects that only became known after 12+ months? Genuine question.

>Between October 2020 and the end of June 2021, Facebook and Instagram users had submitted around 524,000 cases to the Board. [...] Facebook also submitted 35 cases.

>In total, the Board selected 21 cases to review and ultimately proceeded with 17 of these. By the end of June, the Board had decided 11 cases – overturning Facebook’s decision eight times and upholding it three times.

>On average it took 74 days to decide and implement these cases.

Wow.

>Facebook failed to provide crucial details about its "Cross-Check" program that reportedly shielded millions of VIP users from the social media platform's normal content moderation rules, according to the company's oversight board.

>Facebook told the oversight board that the program applied only "to a small number of decisions," which the company subsequently acknowledged was misleading

Indeed. Millions of users is a tiny fraction of Facebook's total user count, so in terms of absolute numbers it is probably a relatively small number of content.

But in terms of reach and influence, I would expect the VIP users to have by far a disproportionately large share. I would also expect them to be the most likely to post content that would end up in front of an oversight board. But of course, they are also the ones most able to raise a stink if Facebook moderates their content...

On a side note - does HN feel more "downvotey" lately?

I feel like I'm seeing more comments that are grayed out but seem perfectly civil and reasonable. Often they're back in the black soon after, but I'm sure the time period when they're greyed out influences the discussion. Of course, I don't have any way to measure this.

I wonder if some of the thresholds need to be tweaked.

This change was noticed and discussed in June, when Apple (quietly) added a clause to the App Store guidelines. We notified our clients back then.

Details were very vague at the time and now we know when it will actually start being enforced, but overall it’s more like half a year notice.

Agreed… and it’s too late to fix it now.

Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/927/

Sort of... They are used at scale to share and ingest data between services, for things like recommendations, etc. But it is messy, a lot of the ontology is more or less the same but every company/database does things slightly differently.

Most of the difficulties are with matching artists and content across different databases, which is a separate issue. The ontology itself is tangential, but one example where it's important (even if it's not a fully / cleanly solved problem).