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fiala__

253 karma · joined July 22, 2015

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fiala__··on We mourn our craft
Also, it’s always six months from now, because otherwise you could just point at the hundred ways they’re wrong right now. It’s nothing but the ol’ dotcom “trust me, bro” kind of marketing.
fiala__··on JavaScript Temporal is coming
> We only have complile to JS languages now. Those that still writes in vanilla JS are like those who still build apps in assembly langauge.

I strongly disagree, it's never been easier and more pleasant to write modern JS without transpilers. I've only rarely had to reach for a framework or transpiler in the last few years.

fiala__··on Cheaper to rent in Barcelona and commute to London (2013)
While in Barcelona rents have been skyrocketing, largely due to British and other "expats" moving in:

https://www.ft.com/content/d82f2c93-ab1b-46c7-b25f-ba768b813...

fiala__··on Ambulance hits cyclist, rushes him to hospital, then sticks him with $1,800 bill
The point is, in most of Europe it’s the richer folks that foot the bill for the poorer ones. That’s a system based on solidarity - you contribute to our collective ability to treat our sick and injured, according to your financial means.

EDIT: at least that’s how it’s supposed to work in theory. Of course the richest people don’t foot the bill for anyone but themselves.

fiala__··on Trump wins presidency for second time
Very well said. I think what you speak of sounds a lot like degrowth and/or idealised socialism. Unfortunately, I don't see either of those ever becoming viable policy in our world. The only times we've managed to even remotely approach such policy is after terrible, long wars. Other than that, the big man promising you shiny stuff has always won.
fiala__··on Building a Game with the Real Engine
this is neat! Diorama-based games are really underrated IMO. I'm currently attempting to do something related, building a game on top of Google Street View, with 3D audio and objects embedded in the panorama.
fiala__··on My experiences with Automattic: Part 3
Astro pretty much does exactly this.
fiala__··on A Georgist's Guerilla Gardening Guide
Private property is whatever we collectively decide it is. We can only build infrastructure such as railways and highways because we collectively decided those are okay to build on private property. We can do the same with anything we consider essential for the common good.
fiala__··on The Knowledge Economy Is Over. Welcome to the Allocation Economy
> once I made that connection, I started to see summarizing everywhere

One of the most powerful (and dangerous) aspects of dogma is the tendency of its followers to promote it to a universal pattern.

I, for one, am horrified at the prospect of a future where any kind of non-managerial labour is viewed as "summarising" and automated out of our collective skillset. GPT output may often be equivalent to human writing/thinking as a commodity, but human writing & thinking is not a commodity in its essence.

To me this is not the end of knowledge economy. This is a metastasis of the same capitalist disease that attacked the traditional crafts sector more than 100 years ago, attempting to replace it with a mix of industrially exploited labour in the Global North, colonial/slave labour in the Global South, and eventually mechanisation + automation. This brought about fantastic levels of productivity and wealth, along with insane amounts of pollution, the climate crisis and growing inequality. In sectors such as fashion the market is flooded with low-quality goods with a lifetime of a few months, which has led to astronomical amounts of waste.

The difference with AI is, now the Western creative middle class is affected, and due to the shadowy nature of the industry, it is not yet completely clear who is getting exploited (though we are starting to find out[1]). The good thing is, traditional crafts have not disappeared, in fact, their products are increasingly more prized and appreciated. I firmly believe generative AI's onslaught can also be withstood, and a better world is still possible - one where artisan labour, attention and connectedness prevail over whatever hellish future generative AI would create.

(side note: IMO high-quality code is much, much more than a StackOverflow summary)

[1] https://time.com/6247678/openai-chatgpt-kenya-workers/

fiala__··on Web FM synthesizer made with HTML5
Nice one! At BBC R&D we built a similar declarative library for React https://github.com/bbc/r-audio
fiala__··on I made a website for lonely people, and got >100 people to log their locations
sites like meetup.com or reddit can be great for that sort of thing
fiala__··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (January 2023)
Hey there! I understand it can be frustrating to go through so many interview stages. For us it's important there’s enough time dedicated for both sides to get to know each other. Indeed, the process might be lengthy, but there's always the possibility to combine some of the steps. We're also keen to find folks who would stay long-term, so it matters to us that all the questions and perspectives are covered from both sides.

If you do end up applying, please do let us know you'd prefer to combine some interview steps and we'll see what we can do :)

fiala__··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (January 2023)
Ecosia | Frontend Engineer | ONSITE (Berlin) and REMOTE | Full-time/Part-time

Ecosia, the search engine that plants trees, is one of the world's largest social businesses and the first B Corporation in Germany. As part of our mission to cultivate a more environmentally, socially, and economically sustainable world, we are planting and protecting forests by enabling people to channel their everyday actions into environmental good.

We're looking for a FE-focused engineer for our Core Search team. We love accessibility, performance and clean design. We primarily use Vue and have a solid design system. A search engine is a funky and interesting thing to work on, I've been really enjoying the challenge!

Do get in touch, questions are more than welcome

EDIT: oops, link: https://jobs.lever.co/ecosia/76cd0d2a-f79b-4560-9222-388e20b...

fiala__··on Next, Nest, Nuxt Nust?
thank you, I've recently been searching for an alternative to Nuxt that isn't a heavy black box, so this looks very interesting!
fiala__··on No code reviews by default
It's definitely part of the problem and a big reason why software engineering is in the state it's in. To me it always seemed almost like a religion. I wish we took more from the stereotype of traditional engineering, where standards, thorough testing and reliability trump satisfying some trust fund kid founder's impatient demands.
fiala__··on Brave Search beta
this is to do with the philosophy of Cliqz (who developed what's now Brave Search) - if you can't find the results on the first page, you'll probably be better off changing the search term than paginating. I have no idea how reasonable that is though.
fiala__··on Playboy Interview: Steve Jobs (1985)
Do they really? I'm not sure I agree, these days we have things like Arduino and Raspberry Pi which have been a huge success, and I'd argue they attract a much wider range of children than middle-class white boys who just happened to grow up near innovation centres.
fiala__··on Boris Johnson uses search terms in interviews to hide negative articles?
"A Well-trained Idiot" describes the British Etonian elite so concisely I think it should become a technical term. Well done.
fiala__··on WeWork’s Adam Neumann Steps Down as CEO
I find in tech, being skeptical by default is usually a good thing - perhaps not if you're an entrepreneur, but certainly if you're a developer or engineer.
fiala__··on Windows 11 could run on Linux
> a better desktop experience

I think that's debatable at best. Of course the experience is better because you don't get in-system ads, forceful cloud integration, and all the bad stuff that comes with Microsoft.

But my personal experience of Ubuntu is a constant struggle against randomly occurring bugs, inexplicable performance drops, crashes, and bad design. It's still worth it because it's Ubuntu, but I wouldn't celebrate the UX too much.

Out of the box, Windows is orders of magnitude easier to use for non-technical users.

fiala__··on Libra White Paper
Anyone who still has doubts about the extent of Facebook's undemocratic power is clearly about to be fully convinced.
fiala__··on Libra White Paper
Yeah, that bit is bonkers. A huge privately-owned tech corporation talking about 'public good'. We truly are entering the era of global corporate despotism.
fiala__··on The Success of Nonviolent Civil Resistance
Literally the first sentence of the video description:

> Between 1900-2006, campaigns of nonviolent civil resistance were twice as successful as violent campaigns.

You're just saying "No." without providing anything more than an opinion and some anecdotal evidence. You're absolutely right that under many oppressive regimes like China pretty much any kind of protest beside outright civil war is suppressed, but that doesn't defeat the point of the article.

Also, saying things like

> dirty communist pokes his finger ...

really doesn't help you here.

fiala__··on Can we all stop using Medium now?
The problem with YouTube specifically, is that while blog posts are easy to host on pretty much anything that has a CPU, self-hosting videos at scale is essentially impossible. So while Medium only added a marginal amount of convenience for your average blogger, YouTube straight up enabled the kind of content it hosts.
fiala__··on The Geography of the Room
someone definitely needs to write that article
fiala__··on Whitespace killed an enterprise app
I tried the new interface, and even after a couple of minutes I still couldn't find where my saved posts were. Went straight back to `old.`
fiala__··on Schools in England Introduce a New Subject: Mindfulness
They're probably also the kind of person who tells depressed people to "cheer up, life's not all that bad after all!"
fiala__··on Schools in England Introduce a New Subject: Mindfulness
If you've never seen a depressed child then I beg you to pay attention. Children have incredibly complex, fascinating and perceptive minds, they aren't just happy food processing automata until they reach puberty.

It's exactly this kind of reductionism which leads parents to ignore their children's psychological needs, which leads to schools having to take action.

fiala__··on Schools in England Introduce a New Subject: Mindfulness
I'm no mental health expert but isn't mindfulness a proven method for improving one's mental health?

Schools can't fix dysfunctional families. All they can do is give kids some tools to cope with such challenges. Even if it doesn't help a particular child, why would it be wrong to at least try?

fiala__··on Schools in England Introduce a New Subject: Mindfulness
> Children have no problems with happiness or well-being.

Have you ever met a child IRL?

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