samlevine

That's my childhood you're making fun of! ;)

I wish more games look terrible in a 1995 kind of a way. Mostly for the sake of nostalgia, I loved playing crappy shareware games and terrible demos from floppy/CD magazines when I was a kid.

The space program was dual-use for getting better at making ICBMs, and we desperately wanted to keep up with the Soviets in our capacity to eliminate all human life on the planet.

It's great that we did something amazing in the process, but that kind of political will came from a very specific arms race.

I feel like being r-x to the world is fairly extroverted.

If my email provider decides to stop delivering my email because the person emailing me is a crank I'm going to get another email provider. Because they're a platform for email, not a publisher of email.

I don't want a YouTube that is a publisher because at that point it ceases being my tube and starts being their tube. This defeats what makes YouTube so special.

This isn't the right question. Cars help the police to move much more quickly than they could on foot, for example, and properly used can be part of a system that values justice and human rights.

A better question might be: "given how accurate this facial recognition system is, what if anything in addition to a match should be required for an officer to detain someone matched by it?".

I don't have an answer for this one. This tech is new, and complex, and hard. We'll likely abuse it before we figure out how to properly balance human rights and protecting the public.

My understanding is that the French offered to build out HSR along I-5 between SF and LA during the Great Recession and California said they could do a better job for less money.

> When did America stop doing 'hard' things?

Basically the 70s. We never really recovered, even if the economy did.

China has a lot of retail politics, it's just in the context of a single-party system.

They're able to do a lot of things quickly, but principal–agent problems remain and there is a ton of corruption. Local party cadres are under a ton of pressure and frequently use overly large carrots and sticks to get stuff done.

This isn't very efficient.

You don't need to be super efficient when you're a developing country, but China is solidly middle-income. The things you need to do to go from 0 to 1 will eventually hurt you, and from their slowing GDP growth it's clear that it's already doing that.

Be yourself. Unless you're an asshole, then figure out how to not be an asshole, then be yourself.

For reasonably complex documents PDF/A is a pretty good choice for long-term archival:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDF/A

That said, the comparison I was trying to make was the pre webapp web to the current web. We have AOL today, just not one big company running it. It will mostly be lost because it's not legal to save it.

The future will know us through scraped videos from Youtube before it was taken down suddenly and without warning in the mid 21st century due to corporate politics and/or the takeover of the government in DC by descendants of the house of Habsburg.

You're using a web app now.

Is this bad for the long term preservation of knowledge? Sure. But it's the world we made.

This mostly just means that Lyft did a good job in pricing their IPO to get the most money they could from it.

They're not stifling innovation. Their successes have had massive spillover effects helping other companies to innovate. The Golden Goose is still laying eggs.

This isn't Standard Oil. It's not Ma Bell. When they stop innovating and start extracting rents we can have a reasonable conversation about breaking them up.

There's zero net benefit in breaking up large companies that are driving innovation and improving consumer experiences.

If you don't like the economic result, redistribute some of the growth. Walmart doesn't deserve to be saved by splitting up Amazon if they can't compete.

It isn't in Tokyo and other Japanese cities.

Which don't exactly have laissez-faire approaches to folks renting out their properties, but the larger issue is that Japanese cities are just generally better about building enough housing to meet demand compared with most American and Canadian cities.

I use it to follow and post news, as well as what academics are interested in posting/sharing.

Microblogging is great, and Twitter remains the least worst solution for this.

Threats of violence already violate Gab's ToS:

"Users are prohibited from calling for the acts of violence against others, promoting or engaging in self-harm, and/or acts of cruelty, threatening language or behaviour that clearly, directly and incontrovertibly infringes on the safety of another user or individual(s)."

https://gab.ai/about/guidelines

New Chinese (non-STEM) grads have it worse, amazingly enough.

The central government demanded more graduates at any cost, threw money at the problem and they ended up with corruption, very expensive facilities and many times more graduates with questionable skills in subjects that mostly aren't yet in demand.

It won't be annoying, because the other person is going to want to have an AI screen their phone calls and the two systems can just figure out the most likely time the humans want to hang out and then get them to confirm.

Employing an AI to be your personal assistant is at least as moral as employing a human to be your personal assistant. Perhaps more, given the very limited lifespan humans have.

If employers valued the labor of remote workers as much as local workers, we wouldn't be having this conversation. Tech isn't a monopsony.

They'd all be competing for the same national pool of workers, and anyone that wanted to use cost of living as an adjustment for their offer would find that another company would beat them by offering the market rate for the fungible labor.

There isn't a great answer for this. Building housing in the places where tech companies have big offices helps, but a lot of folks don't want to live in cities or move halfway across the country.

Ad-supported websites are about as pure of an example of revealed preference as you can get. Advertisers target eyeballs that spend money, and the sites that capture the attention of said eyeballs get ad revenue.

The golden age of journalism, pre-web, was based on price signals being divorced from content because of classifieds propping up everything else.

We have been given the web that we want. It has been found wanting, because we ourselves are wanting.

IANAL, but my non-expert understanding is that exercising editorial control (as opposed to just having site standards and censoring content that violates them) makes websites liable for content infringement.

> The phrase "affordable housing" has come to mean "cheap housing for poor people."

From a policy perspective, "affordable housing" refers to programs which through some incentive or another, get developers to rent some units at below market rates to people at certain income thresholds. They usually go away (for a specific building) after 10-15 years.

This is confusing, because sometimes it really is cheap housing for poor people and other times it's nice, very expensive but below market rate housing for middle class people.

The other problem, as mentioned in the OP, is that as you start trying to shift cost for more units you end up with higher overall prices. Thus making the market rate higher, and making it harder to get developers to make the same concessions they did before for future development.

The entire West could do this, and in 10 years time either the Russians or the Chinese would have filled the gap.

So then you've got a bunch of authoritarian regimes that are censoring the Internet, and the stability (perceived or otherwise) they've got is dependent on countries who don't care about human rights.

Giving easy soft power to the Russians and Chinese isn't ideal.

In the context of real estate, what the remaining potential buyers are willing to pay after Bill Gates spends ten million on a hundred thousand dollar property.

Climate change is an existential threat. This is the language of someone who takes this seriously.

Serverless is the new hotness.

The labor market is tight, near full employment. In very constrained locations (like SF) wages for kitchen staff have gone up significantly. Other places it's just hard to find people to do the job for what the market will bear.

We're reaching the point where we seriously need to think about assisting internal migration in the country, but before that can kick in we'll end up with a recession to fight off inflation.

It's hard to make something you don't like.

For example, Ready Player One focused on movies in large part because Spielberg really loves movies. You can tell they move him, whereas the video game parts are largely gags.

> What really is unnerving about this?

It reminds the middle-class strivers that "MAKE MONEY FA$T!" isn't that far from themselves, despite all their scrambling efforts.