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It’s not too much of a wish to break up these massive fraudulent companies that serve no one except scammers and ad agencies pushing products that are broken by design.

They should be broken up and shut down no matter what will be “shifting” as a result (whatever that is supposed to mean)

The brightest minds of our generation are working on making us click more ads — its dangerous and an unimaginable waste.

Why the hell was this flagged? It’s an excellent and funny read that finally makes an original point regarding the decay of academia and great outlook how digital media and LLMs will and have changed literature culture.

How the hell was this gem flagged @dang? One of the best things I read on HN and I almost missed it…

I commuted once per month by train (meaning I took the train once per month to work in office for a week) and it was fine - most of the time wifi works and it’s reasonably comfortable. It’s kinda bad if wifi doesn’t work and the train is super full.

Doing that twice every day would also be torture, spending 8 hours in the train daily. I can’t fathom what would a human compel to do this.

Damn and I thought I was the only one who had this genius idea…

Which means?

Strange as hell. No job is worth this - I would rather cleaning toilets in some shithole than spend all my time commuting

Interesting, which ones would be notably good in your opinion?

To be fair we don’t have many fast food pizza chains in my country, it’s mostly dominos and a few small ones (with abysmal online order experience)

Dominos has the best checkout experience I ever experienced online. Nothing can beat it IMO, at least nothing I came across.

Now they only sell (arguable mid) pizza, but when I order there it’s delightful (to use an overused 2023 marketing buzzword)

As someone who worked a long time in service (not in America, in the anecdotally much more socially cold Germany) I was friendly and welcoming to all customers (unless I had a really bad day for some reason, so about 95% of the time) and I always meant it.

It just makes your work much more fun and time pass faster than being sullen and distanced. It hs nothing to do with my wages being on the line, I literally had zero obligation to be nice to customers. But every once in a while I had a pleasant interaction and that made it worth the effort.

I would bet it’s the same for your crockery clerks. That kind of work is very boring and repetitive and social interaction is the only respite you get from it. Just something to keep in mind when you are feeling cynical about them greeting you friendly and so on.

I agree that growing equality is a problem but the farmers are far from poor. In fact they had rising profits for the last decade or so.

There is some interesting data here - by the way data from 8025 yearly reports by farmers, so I think we can assume this is accurate: https://www.situationsbericht.de/5/52-buchfuehrungsergebniss...

See this graphic especially: https://magazin.diemayrei.de/storage/media/situ/46722.jpeg

The only ones who had sinking profits are the winegrowers. Wheat producers increased 27%, cattle too, all the while help by the state fell by 10%.

So I’m pretty much over the poor farmers protesting in Germany - of course the growing inequality __overall__ is a huge problem.

The problem is more corrupt politicians, a more and more unhinged “free market” and just the dystopian hellscape that capitalism is becoming. Of course cutting social services and benefits for 30 years+ straight will have some effect on the general population. Thank Schröder and the SPD for starting this and Merkel and the CDU for decades of inaction until it was too late and there was no more room for action. Now we will have a far right government next election cycle and the best plan they can come up with is to peddle the same lies that the AFD is spouting: that immigration is to blame for growing problems - when in reality immigration is the one thing that props up this failing system.

1. Discourse. Might be different for others but I had 0 time to manage the deployment, and upgrades took a lot of time.

2. I used https://www.linen.dev/ but I think there are others. It turn Slack conversations in a searchable static site.

3. Developer community for an open source software product.

Fair enough it was a couple of years ago when I last evaluated it.

But in our case the server would be public, so yes anyone can raid it because there are no barriers for entry. Not saying this is not possible with Slack but it never happened and I have been part of multiple discord communities where it did happen.

Due to our community being public email addresses are exposed, at least last time I checked I could easily get a list of all the emails from registered users. This is in theory also possible with Slack but not as easily automated. Maybe discord improved this since.

The permission system is extensive but also complex - I have no time to learn the system and configure it correctly.

Discord is great for streamers and gaming communities - IMO it’s not a good fit for companies to build their communities on.

Of course everyone has different priorities. What might be right for us, might not be for your case.

I still stand by my comment that the Discord business model is shady - how can you provide voice chat, CDN for files, and everything else for free? I don’t think that their premium services can pay for that.

Slack was the alternative. We use a service that creates a static page from all Slack conversations so this way we have a searchable index and can work around the messages disappearing due to the free plan. There are other limitations but it works well enough for a community of about 4-5000.

Not in my experience. We spent a nontrivial amount of time on running and maintaining our discourse instance - dev time that is very costly as a small company. Might be different at Posthog level of investment of course. That was about three years ago, so maybe running discourse is much easier now.

Speaking as someone who had to maintain a Discourse instance for two years: It’s mature and proven but still a lot of work to maintain. We went away from Discourse because it was not a reasonable use of time and not trivial - so you needed someone with dev skills to take care of it.

Discord is much harder to manage, has many security risks, kids raiding your server, exposes emails from every user easily, and has a very shady business model.

I would never use it for something professional/business related.

We did I this before at my company but running, maintaining and keeping the forum up to date turned into a lot of work over time - so we switched it off and went back to Slack.

Sure messages disappear on the free plan, but there are ways around that.

Oh yea, I would love to be wrong- and if I can’t change my mind about something then I am as good as dead.

I believe we will sooner solve the electricity problem with renewables though.

Agree that a vast majority of the jobs will be automated fairly soon - just not those pesky jobs that really need to be done and no one wants to do - like cooking, cleaning, childcare, taking care of sick people. Sure we will have some more nifty appliances that make it easier maybe, but I want (most of) that stuff fully automated, at least the cleaning part!

Anyway a beer sounds good right about now and we will just have to wait and see how it plays out I guess

Everything just gets worse as you age. Sure, my dad said it too back then, but he just didn't get how the world moved on and improved. This time around though it's real, everything gets more stupid and dumb and I hate it.

I guess you wanted to say forgettable, but just to expand on that:

I recently read the book and I couldn’t even remember the character now and had to look up who was meant. Maybe that is more a testament to how bad I am at remembering stuff I read in books than how important the character is but there you go.

Working on yourself / mental health is not working on nothing - it’s probably the most important, hardest and rewarding work you can do apart from recreational work. Recreational work is all the work that is required for everything to function but that doesn’t produce anything- think of cooking, cleaning, childcare, elderly care etc. - you know all the work that traditionally is/was “women’s work”

I have come to value “productive work” much less than recreational. We have enough stuff already to last a dozen lifetimes.

Just think that the brightest minds of our generation are working on making people click more ads. And then be thankful that you are not in the same boat and OK with not being productive at all.

While this is pretty cool I believe generalist robots will not have a fraction of the skills an average human has , at least not within a realistically foreseeable timeframe, let’s say within this century.

IMO a much more desirable route would be to build a number of specialist robots that do all the things humans really don’t want to do. Even that seems really hard to do - at least I haven’t seen a robot that is able to vacuum a house really well. I saw some versions at friends places but they were more like gimmicks - took really long to setup, basically nothing was allowed to be on the floor, generic rectangular room setup required and they didn’t last more than two years or so. I think all of them went back to vacuuming themselves or employing a human to do it (the second option is vastly more efficient than the robot and much cheaper too) Maybe I am missing something, but a really versatile, robust, and cheap vacuuming robot would be an actual improvement to life quality for a lot of people. The research is very interesting though of course and much better this than no research in that direction at all.

How does locking away most of the knowledge, research and learning materials in the private vaults of a few publishing houses for their personal profit promote the progress of science I wonder?

Even scientists are tired of the predatory and rent seeking behaviour of the publishers they have fallen prey to and are looking for any way out.

This is not promoting progress this is the opposite of it

How does it protect a small artist against a large corporation profiting off their work?

I don’t even have the means to start litigation, let alone see it through.

It only protects those who are already moneyed and/or famous enough to negatively impact a large corporation’s reputation - and even in those cases it’s mostly for the benefit of the lawyers and bureaucrats who make a living off it.

I would argue it is a very good thing. Most “bad” things historically have been created by those clamouring for progress and justice.

Like Bukowski said

those who preach peace do not have peace

beware the preachers

beware the knowers

beware those who are always reading books

I would extend it as

those who preach justice are not just

those who preach rationality are not rational

those who preach correctness are not right

And those who preach progress are against change

/edited for readability

That kind of was my point as well. If you are a good author, sure you can probably write a book faster with AI - maybe even faster than without using it.

But this fantasy of “people will just dump a prompt into GPT and it will produce a masterpiece (or at least something that a reasonably big audience perceives as good)” is just that: a fantasy.

I am open to change my mind of course once I see a good story written mostly or completely by AI. Sure “good” is subjective but I think no one can argue that the stories produced by AI today are good by any measure - at best they are a passable mimicry of a story that already existed.

Show me a great story that was written just by AI and I believe it (a story written by a good writer using AI as a tool to accelerate doesn’t count)

Enshittification?

People get weirdly upset about that kind of stuff so it would not surprise me tbh. Too many bored people with too much time on their hands and deeply invested in some kind of “culture war”

I wouldn’t say the sources are 100% authoritative but in my experience the answers are basically what the sources say - haven’t experienced hallucinations on phind after months of daily use. Depending on the case it is still good to confirm with the source.

I love that it gives you a good summary of the source and links to it. It’s my replacement for trad search engines now.