cgrealy

By “abortion”, I don’t mean the act itself, more the attitude and specifically voting preferences of others.

Regardless of your stance on this, how others think and vote will affect other people.

For example, I am pro-choice. I believe people should have a right to access abortion if necessary. I don’t need to change someone’s mind if they don’t personally want to support abortion, but I do need to change their mind if they want to vote for people who will restrict that right.

See also: climate change.

There are many areas where you can and should agree to disagree and there will always be middle ground compromises in the details, but some issues really are black and white. Either you believe other people should have access to abortion or you don’t.

Also, and I hope this is obvious, the point is not whether you think abortion is right or wrong, it’s that other people’s decisions can affect you or your family or the world in general.

People seek to change the minds of others because their opinions (and subsequent actions) often affect the people themselves.

A simple example of this would be abortion.

> A very tiny percentage of PC gamers have the kind of rigs you are envisioning.

I'm not talking about the people buying i7s and 4090s. 100% agree they are a tiny minority. I'm talking about the same modest setups you are.

Even a 1060 (or it's modern equivalent) with an i3 and a 24 inch 1080p panel is more expensive than a PS5/Xbox. And I think it's becoming increasing rare for a family to have a desktop pc unless it's for gaming.

Hard to say.

There are all kinds of factors at play here, none of which I have any concrete data on.

First up, there are probably way more console users than pc users. However, a percentage (not a majority, but certainly significant) of those would be kids whose parents buy them one or two games a year.

OTOH, PC gamers tend to have more disposable income (based on the fact that they have at least a pretty decent PC). Plus, steam sales come up all the time and lots of PC gamers have massive libraries of games they bought cheap and never played.

All of these (sometimes conflicting) factors make it hard to tell who spends more.

I would have said the same a few years ago, but my experience has drastically changed.

My family has a whatsapp chat (yes, Facebook, but could easily be Signal) where all the child photos, news sharing, etc happens.

Of my friend group, almost no one actually posts on Facebook anymore. Looking at the feed now, it's: - the one guy that actually does post the occasional rant - gaming group post - someone is going to an event - skeptics group post - event I'm going to posted an update and then a bunch of updates from companies or organisations I follow

Are you looking at it as someone doing business with them or as an end user?

I agree that if you're an app developer, you cannot ignore Apple, but as an end user many people can (and do) completely ignore Apple, Facebook and Paypal.

Google can be avoided, but it's significantly more work to do so.

> I suspect HN comments are not very representative of reality

You're correct about that, but not in the way you think. This site actually tends to lean more libertarian than most people in the real world.

Governments do have rules about the look of buildings. There are zoning regulations about commercial vs residential properties. Many places around the world will require that your building conforms to the character of the local environment.

Never said it was. History was (and continues to be) littered with terrible law.

If you want to argue that government shouldn't regulate billboards, fine, that's a valid argument. But the general principle of governments setting rules over private property is pretty well established, I would have thought.

> There's the obvious idea that governments shouldn't be involved in telling people what they can do on private property

The government literally tells people what to do on private property all the time. See zoning rules, smoking bans in restaurants, alcohol sales to minors, food safety laws, animal cruelty... the list is almost endless. I can't even fathom the kind of thinking that suggests that laws end on a property boundary.

> Are we going to have a whole system of definitions of what is billboard

Yes. It's not that hard. We encode complex things in regulations all the time.

> With physical content, at least you retain the control.

To an extent, yes. Practically, you have control. Legally, you have still purchased a licence to view that content on that media in limited scenarios.

You can't (legally) copy it, or display it in public (for free or money).

>4k Blu-Rays' bitrates are around 128 Mb/s. For comparison, Netflix tops out around 17 Mb/s.

Surely, this is just a current business decision of Netflix. As internet speeds increase, the bit rate is almost inevitably going to catch up (most likely if Netlix et al decide to charge a premium for it!)

The issue with resale of digital content is that there is no discernible difference between new and used.

Why would anyone ever pay full price for a "new" game if there were "second hand" copies that were completely identical to a new version available for less?

I don't care about EA or Activision losing out on that 10th private jet, but second hand sales would absolutely hurt small creators doing great work.

Food laws are about safety, not taste.

>> Organized developer: >> Find clean plate and utensils. If there are no clean plates and utensils, then wash some. Then eat putting the food on the plate, using the utensils. Then wash your dish and utensils when you are done

And in almost every organisation I've worked for, someone outside engineering (or frequently inside) will complain about wasting time on clean plates when there are perfectly good scraps of food in the bin.

Do you have any evidence of that?

Anecdotally, that's not true of people I know (and even less so for people not in tech), but anecdotes are not particularly useful.

I've built that kind of setup (HTPC, bluetooth kbm, etc) before and now I have a smart TV, and I definitely like it for all the reasons listed.

But it's also not unreasonable to want a smart TV that doesn't plaster the UI with ads.

You could pick up a soundbar that works with hdmi arc. No sub, works with tv volume, and better sound than tv speakers.

I'm honestly a bit surprised whenever I hear someone talk about the speakers on a TV.

Surely most people (especially for anyone who is dropping decent money on an OLED) are running external speakers?

I have an LG GX and there are no ads on the input switch screen.

It's not just the money. I bought a new LG OLED last year. I didn't care that it had integrated Netflix, YouTube, whatever because I had a chromecast.

But the experience of using the integrated apps is just better. It all just works out of the box, there are basically no ads (some "recommended content", but it's pretty unobtrusive) and I don't need to use my phone or worry about why youtube or netflix have randomly decided not to see the chromecast.

Get an LG. Picture quality is just as good, and bugger all ads.

I will never buy anything from Samsung ever again.

I have an LG TV with WebOS. It's connected to the internet and I use it to watch Netflix, Prime, etc.

There's a "recommended" strip on the home page that shows various movies/tv shows from streaming services, and that's pretty much it as far as ads go.

> Good people leads don't lead people whose jobs they can't do.

That just doesn't work. I don't need to know how you achieved something to know I want it done. Unless you expect every people lead to have all the skills of all their reports, so each level becomes exponentially more impossible to achieve.

The Peter Principle is explicitly about the risks of someone being promoted into a role they can’t do because they were good at a role they could do.

People should be made people leads because they are good people leads, not because they are good ICs.

Absolutely agree that a background in technology is important! I’m talking about the idea that someone who started as a dev many years ago is going to be able to write code in a current environment with the same level of skill as someone who does this everyday.

Being "technical" is a full time job. The idea that anyone "above" you should be able to do your job is not only ridiculous, it's insulting to the engineers.

The CTO should be able to have an informed and intelligent conversation about technical issues at a high level, but expecting them to be able to write code is not realistic.

I wonder if age matters.

School and high school are the formative years of your life where you are essentially building who you will be as a person. College is generally your first taste of independence.

Do people who go to college as mature students have the same dreams?

My other favourite tactic is block booking my own time. When I was doing more dev, I'd quite happily block 4 hours out of my calendar to do some coding, and if you're booking a meeting during that time, the world better be exploding.

There is a middle ground between being homeless on a beach* and deciding to work 4 hours on a Saturday just to get stuff done.

My point is that the reason I can take this attitude now is that I have spent 25 years getting to the point where I am paid well and I can negotiate my time so that I don't have to work evenings and weekends.

* if I was going to be homeless, living on a Mexican beach sounds like a pretty good option.