salt-thrower

In other words, relying purely on profit motives for beneficial innovation is a dead end.

I'm sure the data that FB and Google are delivering is far more expensive than rendering HTML would be. I am skeptical that server side rendering was a big enough bottleneck for them for that to be their primary motivation. I'm also skeptical that SPA frameworks would have been widely adopted by developers all over the world if they were just some conspiratorial plot by tech companies to save on CPU cycles.

This reads like a Reddit comment. Let's try to be better than that here.

Personally, I've subscribed to several RSS feeds for local/state news outlets in my area. That helps me stay more in touch with local stuff. Then I just do a quick scan of AP News for international stuff.

I did software dev at a marketing firm for about a year, and it was pretty soul sucking, so I know what you mean. I won't work at one again unless it's literally my only option.

Yeah, Fextralife saved my ass multiple times while working through the dark souls series. It's a shame that type of community resource isn't more popular.

To play the devil's advocate, if the US were to allow Ukraine to enter NATO, that would be just as "aggressive" from Russia's point of view as Russia projecting its influence further into Eastern Europe would be from a US perspective.

Also, the US always has a lot to gain through war, or even the threats thereof. Even though no war has been declared, loads of expensive military equipment has been sold and shipped to the front lines just because of this saber-rattling exercise. The revolving door between the boards of Raytheon and Lockheed, lobbyist groups, and the cabinets of elected politicians means someone in a position of power always stands to gain from keeping the arms trade rolling.

The corporate media has always played lackey to those interests, and this time is no different. That can be true AND the fact that Russia is behaving aggressively can also be true at the same time.

Source on that last bit? How close to reality did that plan really get?

I think that's an overly harsh take. I've fallen prey to the pattern the author describes many times, and I inevitably end up making updates like that because I feel bad that work isn't getting done, which fuels a procrastination doom loop of anxiety and avoidance until I rip the bandaid off and hustle to make up the missing work.

It sounds like you've never experienced this, and that's great for you, but don't discount what the author is saying. It rings uncannily true to me, and it sucks when it happens.

I think that's part of the (dark) joke - "freedom" being the reason that the United States always gives before destabilizing a region and propping up corrupt dictators or puppet democracies which are anything but "free."

Same here. I joined FB when I was 13 (over a decade ago) - I had no clue what I was signing up for.

Consent during a sex act and consent to an image that you created continuing to exist after you knowingly release it into the wild are two different things. (Not including revenge porn or other nonconsensual recordings, obviously).

An actor who performs in an embarrassingly bad movie might wish they could refuse to let their work be used after the fact, but they already signed away their right to retract their work.

An OnlyFans model is also the creator of the content though, so they might have more leverage depending on OF's legal terms. If they still own the rights to all media they create and distribute through OF, then they could petition for removal based on DMCA or something (I'm not a lawyer but it sounds plausible).

Morally, I hope FB can help regretful adult models remove content of themselves if they don't want it to exist anymore. But practically, that will be very difficult to guarantee.

Morally, it would make sense for content creators (the creator and owner of an image, say an Onlyfans model who took a selfie) to be able to flag a picture for removal if they decide they don't want it to be shared anymore.

Technologically that would be very difficult to implement and guarantee, but I'd imagine they would rule in favor of the creator in that case.

I don't think a user should be banned or penalized for sharing said image since they may be unaware the model is trying to retract it. But no reason not to try respecting the creator's wishes.

Tons of people and organizations have been building blockchain-based solutions for [vague use case] since like 2010. Announcing that someone is building something on top of the bitcoin protocol is like saying someone is building the next wave of Machine Learning, Big Data, or other [tech buzzword]. I'll believe it when it proves itself in real life, not as a thought experiment or speculation casino.

They aren't beggars. They're a well-respected software foundation. Being a nonprofit doesn't mean you're forced to beg for money from every source imaginable.

If this move was done out of desperation, then they're dead in the water as an organization. More likely, some tone-deaf middle management team thought it would be a good "trendy" outreach initiative.

> Can't blame Mozilla for openly scraping the bottom of the barrel with their marketing.

Yes I can. It makes them look cheap and corny, and weakens their credibility.

> Dogecoin IS a meme and has/had a multi-billion dollar cap

Sure, for about a month, a year ago. It's old news. Anyone still "HODLing" Doge is just a speculator who missed the last wave and is desperately hoping it'll come back so they can sell out.

Point is, Mozilla is wasting their time by marketing to that crowd. Scraping the bottom of the barrel is a bad look.

Easier to make fun of crypto because at least oil has obvious real-world utility, and (unfortunately) still props up our economy. Crypto is like a sideshow. It's also a hot new topic which makes it fun to argue about.

That's not to defend Big Oil or its shills. That industry should've been hamstrung years ago like the poison market it is. But it might be why HN gets extra riled up about crypto while letting other things slide.

If he left out "fuck you and fuck this," the rest of the tweet is still incendiary enough to send the message without the edginess. Might have come across better that way.

Regardless, it's sad to watch Mozilla debase themselves, not only by supporting crypto at this stage of the game, but with cringeworthy meme language like "HODL." That was funny for about a week during the Gamestop fiasco; a year later it's another "how do you do, fellow kids" moment.

The only catch is it doesn't have intuitive pronunciation. "Pip gee?"

Why not just "Planet-Incinerating Grifter," or PIG. Then it also applies to Big Oil executives :)

I needed to read this. I grew up on dark motivation and physically cringed at the idea of being motivated by happiness and positivity (I was quite an edgy teenager as I'm sure you can guess!)

Now in my late 20's, the pandemic plus all the years of accumulated negative energy seem to have broken the camel's back. I burned out hard over the last two years and I've had trouble picking up the pieces. But the motivational techniques you mentioned ring quite differently now than when I was younger and I think that's the path I'll want to pursue from here on out. Appreciate the thoughts.

And another relevant question, is it actually happening more or are we just noticing it more and calling attention to it?

The concept of a hermit is very, very old. Some percentage of humans have always opted out of communal culture for a more isolated experience. Whether that percentage is rising, by how much, and why, is tough to analyze.

Also, the "why" of that question is ripe culture war fodder, which makes any discussion difficult.

He has a youtube channel so he probably does need to impress people.

It's been really sad to grow up and watch the cool techie optimism of the 2000's internet get sucked dry by profit motives and left to rot. The change has occurred pretty much entirely within my adult lifetime (I'm only 27 and I still remember when Google was the cool new thing on the internet).

It went from "search engines and the web will usher in a new era of wisdom and democracy" to "useful content is dying at the hands of monetization schemes, and also the internet will be the death of liberal democracy, woe unto us all" in about 15 years.

How is that "literal nanny state?" We're talking about removing a home assistant's ability to tell you to do something lethally stupid. Basic consumer safety measures are a staple of a healthy society; just because a device is in your home doesn't exempt it from the government setting safety standards for it. If anything, the opposite is true.

Though on your last point we agree. Throwing the thing out the window is the best solution overall.

I for one wouldn't assume that "Alexa, give me a challenge to do" would be pulling from the open, uncensored internet. I would assume that Amazon had some kind of curation method that would remove the possibility of Alexa telling you to do something lethally stupid.

Further, what Alexa did is actually even worse than just reading from the open internet, because it only took the "challenge" part and stripped away the context about how dangerous it is.

This is akin to something like, "Alexa, tell me about civil rights" and it quoting Stormfront or some other hate site's take on race, without any other context about what it's reading from.

I recall the NYT being a mouthpiece for Bush administration propaganda leading up to the Iraq war. It later came out that they squashed articles which would have cast a critical light on the claim that Iraq had WMD capabilities, in favor of beating the war drum.

Obviously no media outlet is perfect, but yes, corporate media is subject to the influence of monied interests almost by definition. That said, with how easy it is to run ads and hire influencer shills for whatever agenda, social media seems even more malleable if you're willing to spend money. Or, put another way, the financial barrier for creating propaganda is far lower on Facebook than in traditional media.

I like the idea of having different degrees of "death by coconut."

1st degree: you were struck and killed by a falling coconut. 2nd degree: you shot and killed yourself trying to open a coconut with a gun. 3rd degree: someone else got hit in the head with a coconut but lived, albeit with severe brain trauma. Years later, they suffer from intense CTE and go on a murder/suicide rampage and kill you... but the coconut kinda started it.

An IQ test is just another form of standardized test, isn't it?

That's awful, and probably the most egregious example I've heard of a cargo cult gone wrong. The longer I'm in this field the more disappointed I am by the influence that trendy groupthink has. I know no field is immune to it, but it seems more pervasive in software.

You bring up an excellent point. As of now, it is impossible for me to run my company's backend ecosystem on my machine locally. What we do could easily be done by one simple monolith, but our eng. lead is obsessed with overengineered microservice architecture, so nobody can actually develop locally. Everything on the backend is done by a bunch of lambdas behind an API gateway.

I got so burnt out developing in that environment that I asked to become a pure frontend dev so that I wouldn't have to deal with it anymore.