drzaiusapelord

Thanks for the original link! I find it so hard to read text with animated gifs right below them. I literally had to scroll the gifs off the screen to read the test. Its just too distracting and there's no stop animation option on twitter. Its just incredible how this world is made for people who have high levels of on-demand focus and there's no care for us who don't have that skill or neurotypicality.

How could I possibly convince you of the empathy for animals you've never developed? This is like asking someone to prove a theorem to someone who has never studied math or science.

I expressed my opinion. I fully accept I cannot ever change an adult mind, especially in a venue like this and over such a complicated subject and one that the status quo prefers not discuss (animal rights, animal welfare, meat industry, dairy industry, pet trade, pet mental illness, pet inbreeding, pet breeding in general, and general animal suffering by humans) because so much of near every society is built on killing, eating, exploiting, and imprisoning animals for our pleasure. Its not the most pressing issue, but when I see dog owners fighting over cat owner over dead birds or whatever, I do like to point out that there's a major forest for the trees problem here.

And yes its futile on some level. A bit like being against cigarettes 60 years ago, or being again racism during segregation, or being against slavery at the founding of this country, etc. Collectively, we're not here yet for this, but I hope someday we are. I see so much hopeful things in regards to animal welfare in gen-z and younger millenials that I really do think change is on the horizon, maybe in 20-30 years we'll see pet ownership like we'll see the meat industry, or the crocodile purse industry, etc.

I remember PETA being mocked for decades for pointing out how "all american" and "family friendly" and "humane" places like Oceanworld/Seaworld/whatever with their captive whales were, but Joe Beer Drinker "hates bleeding heart liberals" Netflix Watcher saw Blackfish almost 10 years ago and more importantly, so did his children, and the narrative slowly changed over the years as those children became college students, and workers, and leaders, and took the voice from the older generation and said "no, this is inhumane." Its not futile to point this out. Its not rude to say that people like you are on the wrong side of history. Its okay to get downvoted the same way HN 1955 would downvote me for saying cigarettes were unhealthy and cause diseases and kill people. We're not there yet, especially in a conservative leaning forum like this one.

In other words, hello from the future, we won't look kindly on the status quo you fought so hard to preserve.

If they're feral there's not a lot we can do. We can capture them and fix them so they don't reproduce but they can't be homed and killing them would be evil.

Outdoor cats are a bit more complex but its also cruel to lock up an animal all day in a home. They need stimulation and exercise.

The real fix is to ban pet ownership. No one likes to talk about that because so many of us need pets for emotional stability and companionship, but pretty much all pet ownership is unethical. Birds getting killed really is the tip of the iceberg, as in, its the most visible part of this problem, but so much more lies below it, supporting it and creating this situation.

I love animals and don't eat them, nor do I keep them as pets. I fully believe this is the right way to go in life. People attacking this type of pet owner vs that type of pet owner are missing the forest for the trees here, and I suspect getting a nice ego boost over being the "better" animal jailer. Logically, emotionally, and ethically, pet ownership simply cannot be made humane, good for pets, or good for wildlife. The only fix is to get rid of pet culture entirely.

"our" is not the royal we here, this person refers to themselves with a plural sounding pronoun for identity reasons. They are not making a statement about ergonomics generally even though of course I can see how that can be confusing.

There's nothing really hard on healthy people when we use touchscreens, but this person clarifies they are disabled so this sounds like an edge case for them because if you're disabled in some ways, a nice fat keyboard is just going to be a lot more gentle on your hands and fingers than the tiny thumb keyboards of mobile devices.

Yep and if the IP-warriors had their way there would be no Halo, no Everquest/Wow, etc. Its just incredible how these people back the most corrupt corporation's laziest IP theft claims and jump to defend them and mock everyone else as a "rip off."

Heck, even your example of Warfcraft wouldn't have happened because by the pro-IP crowd's standards, it would have been a "rip-off" of Dune II.

I remember when the tech community fought overly broad IP claims and patents, now its just pro-IP shills left and right. Its incredible how far we've fallen.

The pro-IP crowd has officially become self-parody if you guys are passing that around as a "copy."

I do this with my child. Shrug, I just buy more amazon rechargables and while it feels expensive its still a fraction of what buying non-rechargables cost over time.

The only exception is his collection of lightsabres. Its like 3 AAA per and he and he has 6 or 7 of them, maybe more. So for those I bought a pack of alkalines and forgot about them. I needed batteries and just bought them from CVS because I was in a hurry.

Amazon lists the EBL 20 pack of AAA batteries for $22. This is about $8 more than the alkaline pack I bought. Now I regret not just spending a little extra for rechargables because those alkalines will drain and leak sooner than later. Or the lightsabre will break then the batteries can go back into rotation.

NORAD: There's no way our anti-missile and anti-air would hit one of our planes by mistake. We're a professional military!

FAA: Iran had a professional military too. And the Soviets and Russians too, and its happened there.

NORAD: Fuck you.

FAA: We're grounding to keep people safe, the military industrial complex is out of control, dangerous, and a threat to American well being.

I side with the FAA. Military systems are extremely dangerous around civilians and the kool-aid the military drinks in terms of their effectiveness and safety doesn't often mesh with reality. The military runs killing machines and when those machines are active its best to get people out of the way. There are no safe killing machines.

This is it. Look at how often this happens, recently in Iran and before that in Ukraine. Anti-missile and anti-air systems are extremely dangerous and reckless machines. Civilian flights get blown up all the time and being extra cautious makes a lot of sense.

I had debilitating long covid for 18 months and honestly I thought it was going to be for a lifetime, especially when I read so many success stories of others getting over it after 3-6 months and reading online wisdom about it pretty much being CFS. I'm not sure what my body did but I'm thankful it healed itself and I now live in fear Omicron, which if caught might set off another 18 months for me. My brain is not nearly where it used to be and my body tires out very easily, but the bad brain fog, intense irritability, and incredible fatigue episodes are gone and I'm thankful. I don't think people realize how common this is and what it can do to you. The only reason I still have a job is because I was able to hide this because of work from home and some creative solutions on my part and a checked-out, mostly apathetic supervisor. I think I slept 1-3 hours of the workday everyday and maybe could have enough mood, focus, and energy to be productive for a window of maybe 60-90 minutes a day.

I hope you recover soon.

I'm just not seeing your pangloss-like explanation in the real world. Gates' words are very carefully crafted. He's not being vulnerable, he's being a leader and that means engaging in the Machiavellian action of manipulation and dishonesty to get the outcome he wants. Nathan knows he's being yelled at without being yelled at, its face-saving for both of them. This is saying "Why the fuck are you sleeping on Java, your future here depends on fixing the Java problem and telling me how you're going to do it," without saying that.

That's what I was trying to point out in my original comment. The "nice" and "hurt" leader is a common ploy and it gets results.

I think the CEO playing as toddler has a ego stroking element to it and probably why this strategy is preferred over others. I tend to see C-levels in two groups, the alpha-male no-BS type and then the emotional manipulator type. I think both are ego pleasing (and probably both get similiar results), because the alpha gets the validation of his toughness and the manipulator gets the validation of his cleverness.

I think the latter is probably more pleasing for most personality types. You can still come off as the "nice guy" in polite company, even though you're being very demanding. Think how much warmer people like Sundar Pichai come off as compared to someone like Larry Ellison.

I also think there's a salesmanship aspect here. Its easier recruiting if you sell your company culture as a "nice" place led by a "nice" leadership. I think its a harder see to say "Look we're assholes here but the job and pay is good."

Their relationship is so interesting to me because it ties to the old "child" monarch vs his steely-eyed advisors. Long story short, its emotional manipulation to come at someone from a position of power and complain about "worry" and "losing sleep." In fiction and history we see these childish kings acting out with their advisors sort of calming them down as this stereotype of how wrong monarchy is, but instead its a valid and intentional leadership strategy: to emotionally manipulate your underlings by seeming hurt and needing of help. Gates played up this coddling attitude because it gets him the results he wants with minimum effort. Nathan recognized this signal and wrote out the logical part of the brain to counter Gates' emotional side. He coddled the child king. This is his job.

The C-levels in my life do this all the time. I've been manipulated many times like this. I think its linked to the habits of being a low-empathic personality. Its run of the mill manipulation which is what powers offices and sales all over the world. I imagine it gets results more often than not but its a bit pathetic looking and an acknowledgment human beings aren't logical animals, but primarily emotional and even the most hardened tech CEO is essentially playing emotional games with their staff, constantly. Its just so brazen and obvious when you see it like this. Especially when Gates is supposed to be the anti-Jobs, and this hard-nosed programmer not a diva, but surprise, surprise its diva behavior top to bottom in the C-suites, because diva-ism works.

This is such an insightful observation. I think to the critical thinker its clear capitalism doesn't allow dissent past a certain point. Sure, you can be an altruist in small way that don't threaten the status quo like giving to charity or volunteering, but when you go against the under-pinnings of our system, namely intellectual property laws, then you're going to be defeated. We also saw this with Lawrence Lessig who is now an entirely unknown person but before was a Kardashian-level celeb on the internet due to his criticisms of copyright and patents.

So there's no place for a smart and motivated altruist in capitalism, because capitalism's oppression is what this person will fight and capitalism is usually the better fighter.

Smart altruists do become evil to be successful because of this, think of how many left-leaning idealistic early silicon valley types and their ethos was entirely shed to become, functionally, the same as any MBA or Chicago school economist and now, not capitalism's critic, but its driver and the wielder of the hammer that crushes people like Swartz or Lessig. Let's remember Steve Jobs, who is beloved and seen bizarrely as a "hippie" threatened Blackberry with his questionable patent portfolio over email because of "poaching." Poaching in this context being people leave jobs for better ones, but Steve felt a feudal-like ownership of his workers and used the corrupt mechanisms of capitalism to control them and suppress wages.

I'm sure there are other examples, but 'hippie turned ruthless capitalist' is pretty much the story of the boomer generation, who quickly figured out that they can get defeated by the system on some level, or they themselves become the oppressors. They chose to become the oppressors. The same is true of millennial idealism when its thrown out the window when you have an IPO looming, Facebook being the most obvious millennial led company that is about as evil as you can be for a webpage and app.

The problem with right-leaning entrepreneurship spaces like HN is that there's no class consciousness and no real capitalism critiques. So Swatz was killed by the "government" not the capitalism that government serves. Or like this article says he was a depressed immature weirdo, so this was unavoidable. Neither of that is true. He became a valid threat to capitalism and the hammer fell on him. If not via this prosecutor (who enforces laws written by the oligarchy) then by something else (see Jobs using civil suits as a defacto government himself). He could have been sued for damages for all the PDFs he "stole," for example, if the wealthy couldn't wield the DOJ to their liking.

I can't think of any high profile idealists, IP critics, or capitalist critics in online spaces today. The system took down Lessig, Swatz, Doctorow, etc pretty easily. Swatz, of course is dead, but the others are now marginalized characters no one cares about and copyright and patent reform an entirely dead political horse. Instead the pendulum has shifted to an outright worship of billionaires, to the point of putting one in the presidency and filling the cabinet with them, on top of questionable Elon and Bezos worship, which seemingly gets stronger by the day.

No one seems to talk about this, but the late 90s and early 2000's financial and IP idealism was entirely crushed by the system. Today's smart altruists saw this and I imagine they are going to pick the Steve Jobs path, not the Swartz path going forward. They don't want to get destroyed either.

Source: someone who is older and witnessed all this in real time and is heartbroken over how everything turned out

Sanctions and a million other things. Its not "let them commit crime against us" or nuclear war. There's middle ground of course.

If you think they didn't have slang in the 19th century then you are mistaken. You can't compare academic writing to slang and pretend society has devolved. We live in a time where people who would be locked out of the publication process for "reasons" can now write books. Where literacy is the highest ever. Where more books get published than ever. The incredible progress in publishing should be praised, not disingenuously mocked.

I can find a competent plumber trivially. Hiring white collar jobs are much harder, especially specialized tech work.

I think the anti-college popularity ties directly to the incredible cost of it in the USA, not that its necessarily a bad thing.

>humblebragging that you're an unrecognized genius

and this is why this article is popular. Everyone has to deal with looking foolish or telling a doctor they know their body better than them. I think playing it up this way and in this format really sells this idea of being this underappreciated genius in a sea of stupid people, which unfortunately a lot of people relate to, instead of attacking the social and systemic issues this person is actually experiencing. For example, poorly trained and non-empathic nurses or mask disinformation early during covid. Obviously these things are strongly liked to ruthless for-profit healthcare and how the right has politicized covid.

Most of the examples are bizarre. The air filter thing makes no sense. Its extremely rare to develop asthma in your own home because of being near wildfires. So there's no evidence his filters did anything. Also most of these are just being over-sensitive at not looking 100% competent all the time. Being bad or silly at videogames at first? That's a universal experience! Being right at work while others are wrong or lazy sometimes! That too. Doing the right thing when no one else is? That's universal too!

And like you said, they don't list the times they made a big seemingly merit-based action but ended up just being wrong.

This person just sounds socially maladjusted and probably suffers from a certain level of social anxiety. If they think acting normally is constantly making them look stupid, there there's something going on with them mentally that isn't healthy. Worse, it may reveal how they see others who aren't competent in the moment, which is really unfair to them. Does this person see us as stupid when we do everyday things? I suspect they do.

So the real take away here isn't "btw aren't we all geniuses if we're like this," I think he was aiming for intentionally or not, but a lesson on being tolerant of others who may not seem competent in the moment.

Lastly, this obsession with who is and isn't stupid is really unhealthy. I see it in a lot of tech people, and its just an ugly form of toxic masculinity. These people will mock sports people for being traditionally over-competitive, but don't see it in themselves when they do it in regards to smarts.

Its a sign of the times. There's a lot of people, especially on the right, whose only experience with "news" is actually editorialized media. There's a "groupthink" and tribal element here too. This person wants to push their anti-Google bias views as fact, when in reality if you dig down into this dispute there's no clear villain.

"unreasonable" would then be editorializing, then it wouldnt be a news article but an opinion piece.

Because understanding how viruses spread is a solved art. None of this is "unknown."

You won't often catch covid from stray particles but from the person breathing next to you, which these filters can't help. This study was in a hospital where everyone is wearing serious PPE, so its a super edge case to get rid of covid in the air because the main use case of catching covid has been handle by plain old PPE.

This doesn't have sweeping applicability. It won't stop covid among the general population. Its for maybe hospitals that are on super covid lockdown that want a little more protection for their most vulnerable patients.

We get rid of covid through mass vaccination like any other virus. There's no shortcuts for those who refuse masks and vaccines.

I would like to know how much pollution was created for that vanity url.

Oculus customers were only able to play offline games during this time. Which I find concerning. I don't mind that FB employee badges didn't work because what would they do at their desks anyway and all exit doors have bypasses anyway so they can, and were, open, just rank and file employees couldn't access some spaces. Some of those spaces are secure and "fail closed" by design. Yes, its inconvenient but unlocking all the doors to potential terrorists or workplace shooters if the internet connection gets snipped isn't what you want in an office.

What's scary is that my gaming machine can't be used because of some weird obsession with centralizing oculus through facebook. As a customer that's inexcusable but now imagine a developer who hosts her own servers for her game and her customers can't get to it. Facebook is only providing middle-man authentication, its not even hosting these games. If they were hosted by FB it would be fine, but they aren't and what we're suffering under is FB being the gatekeeper to the rest of the internet. That is a scary prospect.

I also question why we all think its acceptable to have these incredible BGP outages every 3-6 months. We built our digital world on the equivalent of ever changing spinning plates and manage it in the most cost-efficient way possible. Maybe the alternative would been worse, but its crazy to me as to what we consider normal and acceptable in capitalist culture.

I'm already seeing /r/oculus say its no different than Valve's scheduled maintenance windows, which is obviously false. Its incredible what rationalizations we'll accept instead of questioning the status quo of capitalist culture and our giant corporations that rule so much of our lives.

I think a lot of 90s and early 2000's idealist movements have been disbanded or migrated to smaller groups that are equally unable to change things. I remember when copyright reform was the biggest thing with Lessig and that's entirely dead. Douglass Rushkoff went from famous intellectual to nobody. Cory Doctorow also entirely ignored now. I think a lot of these people realized that if they can't fix politics then they can't enact their agenda. If your nation state and electorate works against your ideals then you'll eventually fail. You have to fix the electorate first and that took a big step backwards by watching social media turn into conspiracy right-wing media and radicalize tens of millions of americans towards sociopathic, pro-death, anti-prosperity, pro-faith, and anti-intellectual views. None of which lead to utopia, but to further corruption and victimization.

I also think these people were relatively young and now have families and mortgages and retirement accounts to pay for and the wind was taken out of their ideological sails when they realized the system will punish them if they don't assimilate into the status quo. Many cypherpunks just write code for big companies and writers have moved onto chasing literary fads to make rent. Its either that or be thrown them into poverty. The system you want to reform has built-in anti-reform mechanisms and your needed paycheck, especially tied to your health insurance, is one of those mechanisms. This is also why so many famous reformers were either old-money types or had ideologically aligned patrons to fund them. These grassroots groups don't often have that so they fail.

Successful peaceful reform movements are actually shadow-funded and shadow-politicked for by the elites. Elites against other elites and using people like this for their own ends. Elites won't sign on to anything that potentially hurts their wealth or power, which all these idealistic reform movements would do. Short of a popular uprising and violent revolution, we can expect the same lack of progress on utopian thinking in the future because utopia is attainable, its just the resources that's needed for it are controlled by people who don't want to give them up.

To overthrow the Taliban means destroying them. They only retreated. You declared victory foolishly way too early. You didn't realize this was a decades struggle and, of course, lost that conflict.

You also lost Iraq considering you killed 200,000 innocent men, women, and children, setup a terrible government, and a military that conceded so much, ISIS took over large parts of the country and neighboring countries. You had to start yet another war to clean up and now are just awaiting the next ISIS-like event because you destabilized an entire region.

These wars were total and utter disasters and crimes against humanity. Stop defending them.

War was give a chance and the North won, with of course China threatening to move in on the action as well as the Soviet Union. UN forces continuing to fight in that region over the long debunked "domino theory" would have led to WWWIII, perhaps even a nuclear holocaust for what? Some peninsula? Same with Vietnam which the US lost? Its not worth it.

Revising that was decades later would have been political impossible, ethically evil, and set off the same China/SU hostility chain that leads to WWIII.

We are constantly giving war a chance. The problem is we rarely give peace a chance. Imagine if instead of blowing up children and women in Afghanistan for two decades we asked the Taliban to the parliamentary table and built a government with them? They'd be the most powerful party, but it would have saved tens of thousands of innocent civilians lives and literally everything would be better off today there. but instead we listened to people like you, fought a foolish war, put in a "democracy" that, of course, failed within weeks. The same way it would have in NK, assuming a second NK conflict wouldn't lead to WWIII, which it most likely would.

Remember when you say go to war, you're asking the West to murder hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children. America is happy to do that and calls its "democracy" but they are simply crimes against humanity writ large. The war on terror has at least 380,000 innocent civilians killed. Stop killing people. Stop making war the default goto. Give peace chance. Its not your job to be the world police or tell China or NK what to do. You're just a bloodthirsty keyboard commando who wants to contribute to crimes against humanity. If I was you I'd reflect on what you've written today and think about why you're carrying water for the mass murder and human rights violation machine we call the US military.

I'm not sure if this comparison really works at all. Virgin risks real human lives every flight. Guy risks maybe a little weight gain for his fans. Shows aren't rocket launches and have little in common.

Guy plays a sort of reality tv fictional persona which is a vamped up version of his own personality. His show is entertainment and not a documentary. Of course, he's not driving through the continental USA constantly to get to restaurants. He's a normal middle-aged man who needs rest and vacation and time off. He sleeps in decent hotels with his staff and they fly to their next destination. Workers deserve, at least, basic amenities and asking people to live a real life cartoony character is a bit silly. He's not hotrodding around everywhere (which would be risky to him and put a lot of miles on a classic car). His production is probably two dozen people. Its a business and should be respected as one from a worker's perspective. All 'reality' tv shows are heavily scripted. This shouldn't be a surprise to anyone.

50k is really amateur numbers. 50k people have probably already read you comment. Charli Damelio's last post was her eating a bag of Takis for 20 seconds and it got 15 MILLION views. We're just not seeing those numbers in marginalized communities on tiktok but we do see queer creators with top-tier numbers on youtube, facebook, insta, etc. Where's the trans Charli or the obese Charli or the anti-capitalist Charli?

Secondly, you're cherry picking examples. First you can't see how much more exposure these people would have had. Secondly, you're probably not in a country where these people would be invisible to you.

Cherry-picking model minorities isn't helping your case at all. I'm not seeing anything too upsetting to the status quo here or to anything that might threaten tiktok economically. Those voices certainly aren't going to be heard as much. This is like cherry picking popular books, movies, and posters in China and saying, "So where's all the censorship then?" Survivorship bias is at work here, you're only really seeing the survivors.

Its incredible that tiktok literally has admitted to this:

https://www.dazeddigital.com/science-tech/article/50444/1/ti...

Yet somehow the popular HN response is alt-right denial and dismissal of anything that remotely sounds "SJW" to them. Literally after The Intercept and Netzpolitik broke these stories to the public. Its not even in the realm of "wow are they doing this?" As much as it is in the realm of "How much of this are they doing and how much do we not know?"

“TikTok users posting videos with these hashtags are given the impression their posts are just as searchable as posts by other users, but in fact they aren’t,” the report said. “In practice, most of these hashtags are categorised in TikTok’s code in the same way that terrorist groups, illicit substances, and swear words are treated on the platform.”

Its incredible to me that the oppression could not be more obvious, yet bigoted attitudes guarantee that some people will refuse to believe even what tiktok says. The fact that this company is grouping terrorists with queer and disabled people is completely and utterly inexcusable.

Also encouraging vaccinations isn't "propaganda" but sane and safe health policy.

Blue Origin isn't that expensive, at least by nation state standards. Its just if there's no political will for a space program then there will be no space program. Space is a money blackhole for the most part so there's no big incentive to start one especially when governments are busy, ideally, fighting poverty, enforcing law, regulating capitalism, and protecting workers. The USA didn't have its own human rated launch vehicle for years and it wasn't a big deal. Space isn't a compelling target for good reasons and the midcentury space-race was little more than showing off ICBM capabilities between two nations who wanted to murder each other.

I'm glad we've moved to a peaceful and private-public model with BO and SpaceX but its not like every country is failing everyday at getting rockets off the ground. They just don't care that much and know they can buy rocket rides from other nations, the same as buying medicine or arms from them. It just makes a lot more sense to buy space-related services from others than start your own for almost all nations.