non_aligned

I'm not here to defend the US, but here's one way to look at it: the death toll of alcohol abuse is much higher, so how can one conceivably defend a society that allows its consumption? Almost everywhere in the West, the answer is basically "we like it, we like the freedom of being able to drink, and it's an acceptable price if tens of thousands of people die".

It's essentially the same thing, except unique to the US. I'm not saying it's good or bad, but your exasperation is essentially the same as my exasperation, as a non-drinker, that I or my children can be randomly killed by someone driving under the influence - and everyone is somehow kinda OK with that.

I think there are two factors that helped Google. First, the search engine landscape back then was absolutely abysmal. I'm sure someone will chime in saying that it's abysmal today as well, but the reality is that 99%+ of consumer searches get good results today. And that's simply because the nature of search has changed: we have billions of people using the internet, and they overwhelmingly just search for products to buy, local restaurants that offer takeout, or for familiar pop content to watch or listen to. And there's some SEO spam there, but also pretty fierce quality assurance by search engines.

Second, the internet was different: when all nerds declared that Google is good, that was CNN-grade newsworthy (and CNN used to matter a lot more back then), simply because the internet seemed kinda important, but there was no other authority on the topic. Today, that's not the case. If you need someone to opine on the internet on air, you invite some political pundit or a business analyst.

So no, I don't think you can repeat the success of Google the same way. It was a product of its time.

The difference is that you can, quite successfully, keep "cheating" with an LLM while at a job. And people do, not just in lower-importance roles, but at law offices, etc.

I work in tech and I see this more and more every day. By "cheating", I mean deciding that you don't want to do the thinking or even spot-check the result; you just ask an LLM to vibe-write a design doc, send it out, and have others point out issues if they care.

TikTok is the most prominent one, for a number of reasons, but other platforms that pioneered or copied the format also reached considerable prominence. Instagram Reels, Snapchat Stories, etc. And tellingly, when YouTube wanted to compete, they needed to build an experience quite separate from the rest of the site. There is a qualitative difference in how people perceive and consume this type of content. It's not just "vertical YouTube".

Of course each one of these platforms was backed by VC or stock market money, but that's the nature of the industry. Over the years, VCs ended up throwing a lot of money at Google and YouTube killers and that didn't get them anywhere, so that in itself isn't the winning formula.

I honestly don't think this shows in the data. As a software engineer, I really want to believe it, but I think we're prone to confusing well-being with productivity. We feel better about the work, but if you try to quantify it in any imaginable way, it's not there. Not in launch velocity, not in the number of pull requests, not the number of design docs created, bugs fixed, etc...

Of course, all of these metrics are individually goofy, but in aggregate, they give you some approximation of productivity.

> What was unique about YouTube is YouTube did not have to pay for content. People made acceptable quality content and uploaded it to YouTube for free.

They still do. The vast majority of YT content is not monetized by creators, often not even eligible for it in the first place. Further, some big-ticket content creators hedge their bets, uploading to backup platforms, trying to shift to Patreon, etc.

The main thing is that viewers only ever go to YouTube, a learned habit. This is where they listen to music, where they get their news, where the algorithm suggests them related videos, where they can search for tutorials and reviews for gear, etc.

But TikTok shows that you can disrupt that simply by offering a video format that is different in some way and thus not gated by the same muscle memory.

Yeah, there's this whole YouTube genre of fairly unassuming farms showing off millions of dollars in the latest and greatest John Deere equipment and coming up with rationalizations about how it's going to pay for itself very soon.

But the bottom line is that there are fat years and lean years in agriculture, but if it gets really bad for a sufficient number of farmers, the government bails you out because the alternative - no food - is recognized as worse.

I've seen this from both sides, and I think there's about the same amount of bad-faith arguments on both sides. Now, line workers have less power here than the execs, so I'm inclined to side with the former group, but... the whole thing is a bit of a mess.

You can essentially divide IC employees into three categories. First, those who are about as productive from home as they are from the office, but are on average happier working remotely (no commute, etc). That's probably circa 80%. Second, those who are well-intentioned but fall behind over time, because they are less proactive about maintaining soft skills - communications, cross-functional relationship management, etc. That's the bulk of the rest. And third, there are people who actively exploit the situation in ways that the company is going to have an allergic reaction work (outsource their work to a dude in India, half-ass three jobs at competing companies, etc). That's typically <1%, but it's obviously a weird / scary new thing.

Further complicating this picture is the fact that line managers are not perfect either; there is an "out of sight, out of mind" aspect to it, and if a WFH worker is underperforming, it will on average take longer to address the problem, which has some ripple effects.

And on some level, the exec perspective is that the intangible gains in the happiness of the 80% that was previously willing to work for you in the office is not worth the horrors on the bottom end. So there is something resembling a credible argument for RTO.

At the same time, there is a degree of lazy thinking / bad faith on the exec side because the problems can be solved in other ways. You can retrain managers, you can improve performance management, you can monitor for certain types of grift, and you can accept some degree of added risk. In fact, you probably should if it keeps your top performers happier. But the overwhelming preference is for the easy choice of RTO.

The simplest way to answer this is to ask "whose dream?".

We have billions of data points conclusively showing that users don't care about nerd fantasies. No one cares if it's decentralized or not, if it's open source or not, if it's patent-encumbered or not. Maybe there are good philosophical reasons why people should care, but they don't.

So you can keep digging your hole, or you can build products that are simply good and happen to embrace your philosophy without that getting in the way of usability.

In this particular case, the dream the article is talking to was tainted even for the nerd audiences because of the sleaziness of a lot of what was happening under the banner of web 3.0.

> But doing so would not only increase the costs dramatically (by a multiple) it would give money to many parents who didn’t need it for child care.

And while no-strings-attached payouts appeal to rational geeks, they usually lead to public perception problems. If you give a voucher for childcare to a parent struggling with addiction or a gambling habit, they will probably send the kid to childcare. If you give them cash, they probably won't.

It's a minority that might not be worth fixating on from a rational policy-making point of view, you bet it's the minority that will be in the headlines. Selfishly, I'd like cash in lieu of all the convoluted, conditional benefits that are available to me. But I know why policymakers won't let me have it.

> I'm amazed that the article doesn't discuss the end of ZIRP.

I'm not sure this particular phenomenon can be explained this way. For example, antiques auctions are doing quite well, with prices rising quite briskly year after year. There's still plenty of money chasing the kinds of long-term investments you can hold in your hand, put on a shelf, and show to your friends.

Jewelry sales are doing fine too.

There are other reasons why going to a fancy gallery in London to buy some decor for your mansion just isn't as enticing as it used to be a decade or two decades ago.

Collecting big-ticket art is a weird hobby in that it's very passive. For most collectibles, you're supposed to go to garage sales, scout eBay, walk around with a metal detector, or even dumpster-dive. And if you find something unfamiliar, you form a hypothesis, do research, share your findings... and maybe get other folks excited about your find. It's all very make-your-own-adventure.

For mainstream "rich person" art, all of this is outsourced. Curators discover the artist, promote the work, and set the price. Glossy trade journals tells you what the artwork means and how to talk about it to others in a way that's more erudite than any thoughts you can form on your own. Your function, really, is just to show up with money and then hang the piece.

The limit of a process at infinity is not necessarily subject to the same constraints as the outcome you're seeing after a finite number of steps. The assumption you're making here is intuitive, but it bites students in the butt every now and then.

Most simply, after "infinitely many" steps, the "arbitrarily close" in your mental model becomes "infinitely close", and in real numbers, "infinitely close" is the same as "equal to", because you don't have infinitesimals.

It's the same reason why we can construct irrational or transcendental numbers as a limit of an infinite series of rational numbers.

I really want to believe, but if I had a penny for every time that analog, optical, ternary, clockless, or other radically non-standard computing paradigms were supposed to revolutionize the industry... I'd have a nice pile of pennies.

Electronic signaling is just so marvelously easy to scale that the right path was clear pretty much from day one. We don't have that path for other operating principles right now. As for synchronous operation, binary signaling, and so forth, they're once again just scaling tools that let us crank out designs with billions of transistors without hand-crafting every piece or making the abstractions more leaky than they already are.

> most people are boring

Nah. Unless your benchmark is "interesting to every person on the planet", in which case, sure. But then, I'd say that following celebrity and politician gossip is far less productive than following the life of my family, friends, and relatives.

Almost every person is interesting to several dozen other people. Exceptions happen, but are relatively rare.

You're correct on the other count: writing takes effort. Not writing to make things interesting, just... writing in general. If you want to summarize your day, it's gonna cost you 30 minutes of brain work. If you want to post to your Instagram reel, Snapchat, or whatever, just point your phone at your surroundings and hold the record button down for 10 seconds or so.

20+ years isn't exactly "recently" in internet time.

And while early 2000s might be pushing it, in the 1990s, it was most certainly normal for people to put their home phone numbers in Usenet signatures. The internet was initially just this small subculture thing for nerds, generally not on the radar of anyone not wishing you well. Your employer wasn't there. Your parents weren't there. Your stalker wasn't there. Your insurer and your bank and your local PD weren't there.

And I hate to say this, but the privacy dystopia we now live in is largely of our own doing. We had a bunch of really naive ideas about how information wants to be free. It made for a couple of wonderful years, but then allowed bad actors to abuse every single bit of it. And the bad actors weren't exactly external: the companies were founded and staffed by techies who now lament the status quo.

> Writing unit tests where needed makes you more productive in the long run.

Debatable? It has positive effects for organizations and for the society, but from a selfish point of view, you gain relatively little from writing tests. In your own code, a test might save you debugging time once in a blue moon, but the gains are almost certainly offset by the considerable effort of writing a comprehensive suite of tests in the first place.

Again, it's prudent to have tests for more altruistic reasons, but individual productivity probably ain't it.

> Writing in modern languages makes you more productive.

With two big caveats. First, for every successful modern language that actually makes you more productive, there's 20 that make waves on HN but turn out to be duds. So some reluctance is rational. Otherwise, you end up wasting time learning dead-end languages over and over again.

Second, it's perfectly reasonable to say that Rust or whatever makes an average programmer more productive, but it won't necessarily make a programmer with 30 years of C++ experience more productive. This is simply because it will take them a long time to unlearn old habits and reach the same level of mastery in the new thing.

My point is, you can view these through the prism of rational thinking, not stubbornness. In a corporate setting, the interests of the many might override the preferences of the few. But if you're an open-source developer and don't want to use $new_thing, I don't think we have the moral high ground to force you.

This is fantastic, although the statement about the intended audience cracked me up a bit: "intended for a general audience including ... anyone interested in a concise intro/overview of QM. Prerequisites: linear algebra, calculus, ..."

The PDF is essentially higher math with QM-related narrative interspersed here and there. Even if you're a STEM graduate, I found that these skills atrophy pretty quickly if you're not using them day-to-day in your work. Scientists often vastly overestimate how conversant their readers are with "obvious" prerequisites such as vector calculus.

And you can often tell on HN, because you have a thread where two mathematicians chat with each other, and then everyone else is just relating anecdotes about quantum mechanics.

I think that the culture of a given forum plays a huge role.

There are some places where commenting is meaningful because you're a part of some closely-knit, stable community, and you can actually make a dent - actually influence people who matter to you. I know that we geeks are supposed to hate Facebook, but local neighborhood / hobby groups on FB are actually a good example of that.

There are places where it can be meaningful because you're helping others, even if they're complete strangers. This is Stack Exchange, small hobby subreddits, etc - although these communities sometimes devolve into hazing and gatekeeping, at which point, it's just putting others down to feel better about oneself.

But then, there are communities where you comment... just to comment. To scream into the void about politics or whatever. And it's easy to get totally hooked on that, but it accomplishes nothing in the long haul.

HN is an interesting mix of all this. A local group to some, a nerd interest forum for others, and a gatekeeping / venting venue for a minority.

This is not a fine, it's a settlement to recompense authors.

More broadly, I think that's a goofy argument. The books were "freely available" too. Just because something is out there, doesn't necessarily mean you can use it however you want, and that's the crux of the debate.

I'm gonna say one thing. If you agree that something was unfairly taken from book authors, then the same thing was taken from people publishing on the web, and on a larger scale.

Book authors may see some settlement checks down the line. So might newspapers and other parties that can organize and throw enough $$$ at the problem. But I'll eat my hat if your average blogger ever sees a single cent.

You're joking, but that's actually a good pitch. There was a significant legal issue hanging over their heads, with some risk of a potentially business-ending judgment down the line. This makes it go away, which makes the company a safer, more valuable investment. Both in absolute terms and compared to peers who didn't settle.

Or, were there any statues of Lenin on the way... but I think it also shows your age. A person born in 2000 is already 25 years old.

And the data for the two decades before that should be tossed out because of the global housing crisis, the sovereign debt crisis, and all the reverberations from that.

And the data for the two decades before that obviously needs to be tossed out because of the one-off nature of the dot-com boom, the dot-com crash, 9/11, and so on.

And before that... point is, you don't get clean data in economics. There's always something big going on, there are no double-blind trials to run, etc. It's called the dismal science for a reason. But that doesn't make it useless.