Hacker News Reader

aynggon Kodak Is Hiring Film Technicians: ‘We Cannot Keep Up with Demand’

Commercially, film probably shines in larger formats since digital basically only goes up to 645 format which is on the smaller end of medium format and those cameras cost upwards of 50k and most digital cameras use the same sensor technology compared to differences in film stocks. Otherwise it is more of a hobbyist/ artistic choice.

aynggon I spent $3k on a Samsung Smart TV and all I got were ads and unwanted content

Because the vast majority of people aren't tech savvy enough to care about ads and tracking, ads and tracking everywhere is normalized.

aynggon Diablo 2, Diablo 4, and Single Player: An open letter to Blizzard

This. The video game industry has grown by such huge amounts over the past 10-15 years that fans of old franchises are a small minority of the total demographic developers want and need to justify pumping the budgets they do into games now. Most of the new market consumers are fine with microtransactions, season passes, cosmetics, loot boxes and other types of monetization and gameplay that is way more profitable. If you sell a game d2 fans want, you are making serious monetization concessions to appeal to a tiny sliver of the overall userbase of the next diablo so it doesn't make sense.

When a game like Genshin Impact does 1 billion in revenue every 6 months it is only a matter of time before the rest of the market moves in that direction.

aynggon Silent crisis of soaring excess deaths in Britain is only tip of the iceberg

It is more nuanced than that. The issue is that a lot of western societies are falling into debt traps because of a lot of social and economic factors which are already straining these systems to the point that they cant keep up, and the conservative strategy (in my good faith interpretation) regarding this is reducing the cost of programs that they consider to be bloated. This can be interpreted as running it into the ground as the bloat is often in bureaucracy which can easily pass the buck to actual service providers which then suffer from lack of funding. In contrast a more liberal solution would likely involve increasing spending then trying to recover that through additional taxes, which conservatives would say doesn't solve the cost problem but rather exacerbates it since bloat remains and is paid for by more debt or taxes. Of course this is just a general simplification of the conflict.

Clearly the solution is probably somewhere in between, but political polarization has simply pushed people to their party lines and entrenched their positions such that no real progress can happen while things continue to fall apart.

aynggon American Cities with the Highest Increase in Homicide Rates

I think it is a multivariable thing, especially when you are looking at different municipalities and their respective crime policies. A lot of the places that top the list have had rising homicide rates over the past decade from a low around 2010-2015, with the national rate reaching a local low in 2014 before climbing from there. To me it could suggest that populations were coping (poorly) for a while before the pandemic broke the camels back so to speak.

aynggon American Cities with the Highest Increase in Homicide Rates

I would think that there are other environmental stressors that have influenced the behavior first, specifically the economic stagnation of the middle and working classes, combined with things like the opioid epidemic, income and housing insecurity with everything further exacerbated by the pandemic, social isolation, economic and supply chain constraints and now record inflation, all within the last decade and with minimal support systems available, along with the rise of divisive populist politics permeating everything and social media pushing people into echo chambers that radicalize their opinions even further.

A lot of people are probably beyond stressed and stretched way past their tolerance point by now.

aynggon As an artist I am concerned about AI image generation

A lot of art created now, especially for film/ media, already goes through a similar process that AI just automates and accelerates. Several big concept artists I have met have lamented on the fact that many artists in the industry basically churn compositions out through mashing references they gather on google images or asset stores, not to mention just straight photobashing, which has made a lot of the concepts produced fairly derivative and homogenized since everything is just referencing what google images serves or assets that everyone else uses.

Even fine artists have likely had their practice influenced by the whims of what the algorithms on major social media outlets are willing to favor in order to get engagement. It kind of feels like many creatives have been incentivized into becoming slaves to these processes, which has in turn made them seem replaceable with AI.

aynggon The state of South Africa, 28ish years post-apartheid

That is true, though I feel like the issue has overlap in the emergence of public relations and the paradigm shift in advertising (from qualitative appeals to emotional appeals) over the 20th century. Basically it is a lot harder to accurately judge if someone can do something, but in modern politics that doesn't matter because emotional appeals are much more successful at capturing an audience. So the business ceo is just an archetype that appeals to an idea, and doesn't have much of a qualitative value outside of that. An example would be Carly Fiorina who ran in 2016 as the candidate with business acumen from her time as CEO with HP, when in reality her tenure at HP painted a different story.

aynggon The state of South Africa, 28ish years post-apartheid

I think some of it has to do with the idea that skills that reward "revolutionaries" are not analogous to skills needed to run the state after they assume control. Those that are able to consolidate power have an advantage in capturing power in a vacuum, but all that means is that they have the political skills to know how to consolidate power, it has no bearing on their ability to run the a nation. The guy who catches the golden goose is just good at catching geese, it doesn't say anything about his ability to care for it afterwards. An issue is that elections filter based on the ability of the former and not the later.

It is sort of similar in how many nation building projects of the west have failed in recent times, because the people put into positions of power, weren't in power before for a reason which is usually tied to their incompetence.

aynggon TSMC killed 450mm wafers for fear of Intel, Samsung

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0s5TO9h6fco

This video was recently published that talked about going from 200 to 300mm wafers, and there is some further discussion in the comments about the transition as well as going to 450.

aynggon Diablo Immortal brought $100M to developers in less than two months

Big gaming companies learned quite a few years ago via various microtransaction practices that the market has expanded so rapidly that the gamers that complain about these things are a minority that can basically be ignored now since the vast majority of players basically only started playing after insidious monetization practices have been normalized so it doesn't feel wrong to them. Why cater to old users who would only spend 60$ on a game and complain when you can just cater to all the new users who love to spend money on microtransactions by making the geek equivalent to Madden or Fifa and print money?

aynggon TikTok and the Fall of the Social-Media Giants

Influencers are just the byproduct of social media platforms commoditizing interaction as means of driving growth and engagement, since just keeping up to date with your friends doesn't drive much engagement. Once you add metrics for engagement like likes, retweets or whatever, it is only natural that interactions become gamified once you put these incentive structures into how the system functions.

aynggon House Democrats to propose ban on lawmaker stock trading – report

I have heard that same argument elsewhere too, it would also explain why it took a populist outsider like Trump to break through that system while someone like Bernie on the other side couldn't.

aynggon You're not the only one whos confused about the economy. Experts are baffled too

Since the financialization of the economy in the 70-80s, the economy has bifurcated between "productive" parts which ate well off debt and globalization, and the rest that has had to deal with the fallout of de-industrialization and shift towards a service economy with lower paying, lower skill jobs that are less secure overall.

Politicians have just kept digging us deeper into the hole because while it is not sustainable there is no turning back without major social upheaval and massive uncertainty.

aynggon Celsius acknowledges $1.2B hole in balance sheet

Celsius got huge deposits based on unsustainable yield guarantees (17% I think), they took that crypto and used it as collateral on defi protocols, then took the loans they got and gave it to funds like 3ac, who made money on leveraged carry trades that eventually worked up to Luna which was offering an absurd 20% apy through anchor which was completely unsustainable but basically kept afloat by Luna itself dumping money into it.

Everyone could see they were running out of money which would eventually cause them to blow up, which caused people to eventually jump ship, which caused Luna to implode because it was fundamentally flawed but people were either too greedy or didn't do their due diligence to avoid it, which caused all of their assets to vaporize as they tried to defend their stablecoin peg. With 3ac insolvent, nobody that lent to them could get their capital back, which meant they could no longer repay their defi loans which caused them to be liquidated as prices dropped and they couldn't post additional collateral. With their funds locked or liquidated, they had nothing to return to depositors who wanted their stuff back.

To be charitable you could say they weren't outright scamming people, but anyone with a nose should have smelled the enormous stench of death coming from the entire thing.

aynggon Crypto-assets and decentralized finance through a financial stability lens

Instead of being dismissive, could you then explain what is the comparison being made then? I illustrated how they are not very similar but you haven't really given any additional context on what should then be compared.

aynggon Why isn't the internet more fun and weird? (2019)

Basically every "community" that has some emphasis on a voting/ like system. So yeah Reddit and most of the large social media communities like Tiktok, Twitter and so on. Even HN probably has similar effects although they aren't as pronounced.

aynggon Crypto Winter, or Crypto Ice Age?

Articles like this all read the same way. Sure he can frame his student as some kind of expert, but clearly if she is referencing youtube videos about price action in crypto she doesn't really have an understanding worth framing your criticism around. For all of these articles, it feels everyone's idea of crypto does not extend beyond dunking on stuff dumb retail meme traders (who have no idea what is going on) say on twitter instead of the people actually building the technology. I'm not even an expert but even I can see the way everyone approaches it in such poor faith is like building a caricature of what they think crypto is to justify their feelings towards it.

aynggon Ask HN: Is it possible to get an 18-year-old to spend less time on the computer?

One thing to add, some people use the internet as a surrogate social group in lieu of one in real life. Especially now, I have heard from many people how it is difficult to maintain social relationships in real life, especially outside of the context of work or school. Online communities can emulate this to some degree with a very low barrier of entry, which could be a reason why someone spends that much time online.

aynggon Crypto-assets and decentralized finance through a financial stability lens

It is well known, but it is not well understood, especially by those who use it as a comparison for crypto. The popular narrative is akin to a sensationalized tale which is contested by modern research on the subject. There is a misconception of the scope and effect of it, when in reality it was localized to a small number of wealthy merchants engaging in speculation on luxury goods with minimal economic damage overall as opposed to the popular narrative that it was a society wide mania which caused financial ruin for many. Basically the only thing they have in common is that they occurred in wealthy societies.

aynggon Former Japan PM Shinzo Abe Unconscious After Shooting; Man in Custody

From the alleged pictures I saw, the gun kind of looks handmade.

aynggon Why isn't the internet more fun and weird? (2019)

The internet has changed from communities of interest to communities of people who commoditize social interaction within those interests. On the surface they seem fairly close to actual communities but they incentivize different things which changes how the community operates and personally I think they don't provide many of the healthy benefits of communities while cultivating some pretty unhealthy behavior loops.

aynggon Diablo Immortal is bringing in over $1M a day in microtransactions

I think it is split into two groups, the small percent of whales that contribute a huge percent of the revenue, and a larger minority of users who consider spending money on the game as an expense like going out for drinks or other entertainment. The majority of users just exist to make a game popular as a means to entice whales who will spend money.

We are sort of in a transition period where only more veteran gamers experienced the norm of having fixed cost games, whereas now microtransaction based monetization are normalized.

aynggon How Well Are European Sanctions Against Russia Working?

Their initial campaign was to blitz the entire country and was shown to be overly ambitious. Since then it appears they have scaled back and changed their strategy towards securing the eastern portion of Ukraine, which is what is happening now and has been fairly successful.

Essentially none of the news outlets have provided good coverage on what is happening, because if they did it would reveal how poorly the western powers navigated this, and how much of a disaster this entire thing has been for Europe, irrespective of its effect on Russia.

aynggon Basement Fertility

I'm not sure if it is the case that there is a commitment to nuclear family structure as it seems things are trending even further towards the atomized scale with more single parent households and many people delaying marriage and a family or even going child free.

I can't speak for elsewhere, but American society seems to incentivize against the factors that allow for high fertility. I think it is also apparent in Asia with the Sampo/ Satori generation phenomenon in Korea and Japan respectively.

aynggon The fall of Reddit: Why it’s quickly declining into chaos

I think there are 2 major problems at play.

First, I have no idea what Reddit the company has been doing since basically every addition to the site in over a decade has been garbage and has made the site worse to use. The site is basically unusable without the old.reddit.com style, their media hosting is worse than imgur or any of the other alternatives, their app and mobile experience is worse than any number of free alternatives, and besides that I don't know what else the have done except gamify posts with their awards system.

The second problem is how communities on Reddit and the internet as a whole are structured, incentivized and evolve. So many of these communities are unable to check themselves (which generally requires very good moderation), and with incentive structures like upvotes and awards, posting is gamified where people post things they think others will approve of and will reward, which causes communities to become monocultures as everyone else just leaves, is downvoted into oblivion or just banned from the subreddit. These communities basically become filled with people who have the same opinions and circlejerk about them in ways that affirm their opinions and disparage ones that oppose them, causing them to slowly become detached from reality. It creates a community of people who basically become unable to discuss things with people who don't share the same opinions, which then carries over to interactions outside of those monocultures. Lots of these people just dont have the ability to even talk to others with differing viewpoints now.

The best communities and best conversations I have had online have been those that offer a lot of off topic discussions within interest based communities. Support group/ identity based communities need very strong moderation because they are much more susceptible to "radicalization" if that is the correct term.

aynggon Australia’s secret propaganda unit

It seems to me that when you have the ability to decide what is shown and how it is shown or framed, it is pretty easy from there to get people to fall into their respective positions and have them propagate and reinforce the narrative themselves. Like how social media relies on user generated content, I wouldn't be surprised if modern propaganda efforts are so successful because they get those that are propagandized to reinforce the narrative and its framing, like people making their own thought prisons. Even opposition nowadays is content in working within the established framework of narratives instead of questioning its validity.

aynggon Federal Reserve raises rates by 0.75%

I'm not sure what you are arguing, I'm just saying both Tech and Finance are winners in the current globalized economy. I am just talking about how policy happens, and finance and big tech will come out of this fine or at least better than the general public, they are hoarding cash right now and retail is left bagholding all the way down like always and will be affected more by inflation and other knock on effects.

aynggon Federal Reserve raises rates by 0.75%

It largely doesn't matter what the vast population of citizens wants, the various interest groups lobbied for their own things that all contributed what is going on. Regular citizens wanted policies that had consequential effects too, like housing, student loans and stimulus for example.

Finance was not a glamorous, high paid profession like Wall Street depicted before liberalization, it has only become what it is now after that, that is the change I am talking about. Most of the things that blew up either massively increased productivity or was adjacent to the financialization of the economy and benefited from the uneven expansion of the money supply via the Cantillion effect.

aynggon Federal Reserve raises rates by 0.75%

Productivity has risen, but it isn't a tide tide that raises all boats. Look at what has boomed since the 70s, finance and tech. Finance because markets were liberalized and the economy financialized. They are at the junction where capital gets allocated in the economy, so they are able to take rents on all the capital that flows through them. The more money moving around the more they slurp up. Tech is where the lions share of productivity was created. All of the huge tech companies are able to leverage the internet to reach a market way larger than any physical store could before. A software development team is automating the workflow that would have gone to physical store employees running a Sears or whatever, a company manufactures a machine that does the work of 5 people 10 times faster, etc. That is why they get paid so much.

Meanwhile the rest of the economy de-industrialized, manufacturing jobs became more scarce because technology increased productivity, whatever was too labor cost intensive went overseas, and whatever jobs couldn't be offshored, retail and service jobs, aren't capable of having the same productivity gains as what was happening in tech. There are pretty hard limits to what restaurant staff, or retail employees, or other regular jobs can do to become more productive. That is why their wages are stagnant, the only reason those jobs exist is because they can't be exported, in some places they even import foreign workers to do those jobs to keep wages low. This is why unions fell out of favor, labor has no leverage anymore since their jobs can just be exported, or they cant but they are low skill jobs so employers can just churn people or grab import immigrants to do it because employees are nothing more than cogs in a machine that Amazon hasn't figured out how to automate yet.

Keep in mind that this is all by design, capital was liberalized, economies globalized, college loans guaranteed, nimbys limiting development in real estate and energy, these were all policies that people wanted and politicians enacted, whether or not they were fully aware of the second order consequences which are why things feel so messed up now.