someguy7250

(Edit: @chrisan I am soft-banned from replying to you. The reply button is gone. Yes I know I should be open to new options. But I have suffered silently for years and everyone only hated me for my own ideas. So you have to excuse me when the flood gate opens. None of these have anything to do with you. I wish I could have said it back then to the people who actually shunned me)

(Edit: @HN, just delete my account. I am done with programming career. I will change the password shortly and never log back in)

If anything I'm concerned about future developers.

If we don't understand how things work under the hood, and future generations are discouraged even more from understanding them,

And if AIs can program and code for us,

Eventually one day we will forget how to program, how to fix low level coding errors, and how to fix a broken Linux kernel.

What happens then?

Yes it sounds like the slippery slope fallacy. But we have been slipping towards this direction for too long, even before AIs became a thing.

Here is an example where I would have had a better day if I simply didn't show my skills to anyone

https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=37308823

Sure. I'm the elitist, the coder who can't keep his job for longer than 2 years because he doesn't have any soft skill.

At the moment I am literally considering quitting (my second job), working at a phone repair shop instead of programming, exactly because people at work prefer your kind of coders than enthusiasts like me.

Thank you for convincing me. I will become a phone repair technician instead. Have fun with your amazing programming career. You will do great. (This is the sarcastaball moment for me. Seriously I'm not even being sarcastic. You will do great)

> guaranteed to be faster

That's good for you. I still prefer to just write `pbpaste | base64 -d` into my terminal.

Sorry for wanting to solve problems in a different way

Honestly when I accepted that clever code is bad code, my passion for coding died and now I just want to coast until I get fired and then go work at a phone repair shop

I think when I picked my major, I never understood what software engineering is, or even what engineering is. Honestly I shouldn't be complaining. So many people have it worse.

Coding would still be fun if it weren't a job, where we bend tech backwards to please the users (instead of teaching users to do the right thing)

I think it's sadder that developers would rather use an app rather than learning the proper command line for basic things like decoding base64

Many people living in these countries, know what's going on. They silently support the violent levels of censorship because they think our government is just as bad and often hypocritical (even though the US is objectively better in most reasonable cases)

IMO, the disagreement between the two political parties doesn't just cause domestic polarization, it also delays foreign progress towards democracy. People get jaded internationally from it. I'm hoping we can either have more parties or just help the two parties make up.

All I can say is.. Garbage collection, and memory management ("recycling"), are hard, lol.

That's good. And I am biased. I personally liked American and Japanese culture better anyways.

Growing up in China, everyone I knew keeps telling me our culture is fake, reconstructed from a pile of burning books and detached from both history and modern life, at least ever since Cultural Revolution.

But frankly every country is having a cultural crisis today. I just want to preserve some things more. And yes I know that is biased.

Yeah you are right that people are applying the wrong laws and expecting results. Ideally we would consider creating new laws. But it is hard to explain why a company's control over its own platform can be harmful especially if competition exists.

IMO the reason is that both customers and small creators end up losing in this scheme. They end up purchasing/making products often not for creativity or joy, but for necessity and FOMO. And yet these products are planned obsolescence. So even if this isn't a monopoly, it is exploitative.

I'm not sure whether the US can/should make a law against exploiting customers. But people should at least talk more about this weird tech environment we are in.

Lol it's funny to summarize this discussion as: "we don't want to make a (seemingly) positive change because too many people rely on us to live in their 'backwards' ways".

If everyone can band together and generate N fake clicks for every 1 real click, And provide N wrong Captcha answers for every correct answer,

Then we might just be able to send a message to advertisers and those "data anal-lysts"

Question is: Will I be held liable for randomly clicking on things? What if I use a bot instead? (Maybe that's why the author eventually abandoned this project)

> NEVER paste code you don't understand into the development console

Tech companies have long achieved security by simply locking people out of choices that they shouldn't make.

I'm suspecting that Google will soon lock people out of Chrome's developer tools unless they can prove they are a developer (with a certificate that's tied to the website they are debugging)

My point is book burning can cause backlash. Therefore so can deletionism.

When the backlash happens, it's often already too late. But people are aware something was gone, that's why there is a backlash.

I know this because it happened in the past with the Cultural Revolution. Not saying it will happen in the same way here.

Maybe the only backlash we'll ever get is against my stupid comments. Lol.

Yes but book burning had backlash, too. And frankly if we are really that stupid then we didn't deserve tech and culture in the first place. Might as well delete wikipedia. Let people forget everything, then evolution will take over. /s

Frankly I say we let them delete all public backups of internet culture. Eventually there would be a backlash when this goes too far.

Lots of games, websites and TV shows would be gone. Let them.

Don't make local backups either. Or at least encrypt the backups and make sure they will be lost when we die.

*Let DRM and Copyright become the modern equivalent of book burning.*

Let people forget. Let it be the government's problem to preserve knowledge and history. And let it decide when the cost is higher than whatever benefits we get from strict authoritarian levels of Copyright protections

Wow! This might just be what I've been hoping for, since 2020.

What I hoped for was more of a generic backend for multiplayer games.

But this is even better. It looks like a next-gen bittorrent which natively supports operations?

How did the EU support something like this without worrying about misuse?

It would be fun to build something like a Blender plugin that allows people to cooperate on free 3D models and animations. But it's also unclear whether anyone would be legally liable when something goes wrong.

(Edit: It sounds like we want to avoid legal issues by having everyone run their own local instances. I like that feeling of hosting our own servers. But something just feels odd. Since when are we allowed to be so open? What's the catch?)

Yup that's a better idea.

Hopefully one day we will be advanced enough to start transforming the desert. It's not an easy task and I don't know enough about science or economics to say it's definitely feasible. It's just a hope.

And if people would hope for that then they would be willing to improve existing small towns too.

I don't like this trend that we all move to major cities and compete for scraps of lands and housing.

True. I am not asking people to just accept anything though.

If you want growth, have at it. When my phone completely breaks, I would love to get a better hardware with more features.

People don't really like each other enough to work for a positive future. And yet they all want to live in a populous city with amazing opportunities/infrastructure/environment/etc

That's the problem.

If technology is so advanced and if solar panels are getting cheaper, why aren't we building new cities in the desert? (Or, why aren't we bringing new techs to small towns that already exist?)

If everyone is so tired of planned obsolescence and not owning their devices, why aren't we making new industries based on sustainable, repairable, open source phones?

There could be whole new towns running an economy on producing sustainable hardwares and then selling the repair parts. It wouldn't be a lot of money. But if everything we use is repairable and sustainable, we wouldn't need a lot of money.

Maybe I am just silly to hope for such a future?

Plot twist: The replies were written by an AI

(Edit: Disclaimer: This is my personal opinion and is based on information before 2015)

China is good at controlling public opinions like this. I grew up in a "third line" city and we were always told if we don't have good grades, we end up having to clean the streets. But we were also told there is "social safety" for medicine.

In reality, you need a job and need to pay a monthly fee for "social safety". And in reality, people with low grades can end up in gangs or prison. Only the obedient type can get a hard labor job.

Many of these lucky ones would sleep where they work or stay with families or sleep at "migrant worker hotel/camps". It's not a life anyone would want to live.

In terms of quality of health care, even though all workers pay into "social safety", most cannot be seen by good doctors. For surgeries, they often had to travel to bigger cities and pay out of pocket. And " social safety" mostly covers visits to clinics (baiscally a consultation at a third world version of your Walgreen pharmacy counter).

I know people tend to hate the USA but it's not worse than China.

And then there are people like me, I only have hard skills and not enough soft skills. People end up not trusting me because they find out I'm hiding skills. And I end up not using them, and not even trying to convince people what's the right thing to do

IMO, the meat of this paper is in section 4.3 and 4.4.

And I cannot say for sure, but the formal proof of 4.4 basically summarizes the same points pointed out in 4.3.

Most of these are not inherently mathematical problems but a social one.

> Verifying sentience is a fuzzy concept. While they can be bound together momentarily as we see in [66 ], the binding is very easily decoupled.The verified user might choose to sell off their uniqueness identifier at time period 𝑡 + 1 if the verification which binds sentience with uniqueness ends at 𝑡.

Basically, people can sell identities

----

What really concerns me though, is how much and how often this paper discusses DRM, or in their own words, a "trust anchor"

> With the assumed threat model in our case, the lack of inherent trust in the user only compounds the unreliability of the model without any trust anchor.

> Assuming a proof of location is for a mobile device, rather than a particular human being, then associating the proof of uniqueness obtained under such a condition, i.e., without the involvement of a trust anchor, is unreliable.

I know that the authors aren't directly calling for more centralized trust. But given recent development at Google, we all know how the readers would think

> "consent extraction"... can only be used when the device passcode is known or not set.

I doubt it'll be used like that.

Does a legitimate user really need this? Apple already backs most local data (basically photos) to cloud anyways.

Frankly I was wishing for a jailbreak. Haven't used iPhones in years because rooting is hard, and no custom ROMs to provide future updates. (Btw custom Read Only Memory is such a weird oxymoron lol)

I know. But I don't know where to start reading if I want to learn more about what's really going on

> Now we have companies like John Deere that use computers to lock out their own customers from fixing their own tractors. We have car companies charging to unlock heated seats and extra acceleration. Printers that lie to you about how much ink they have left, and brick themselves if you try to use cheaper unofficial ink. Etc.

Exactly! I believe this issue is becoming a very political one because some companies even lock people out of developer tools with a paywall. And when we are forbidding people from learning that they are being suppressed, very bad things happen.

I learnt programming by rooting my phone and then installing a compiler. Android 12 almost killed it alongwith Termux. Are you telling me that if I was born today, I'll simply give up? (Edit: To answer this quesiton myself, No. Today's kids are probably installing customized apk/ipa instead of rooting. Frida is also interesting. But if history repeats itself, even these tools will be banned (self signing dev packages, and using ptrace as a modding tool). And that affects more than just kids..)

Honestly companies have too much control through DRM and copyright. The public needs a way to fight back. If the laws were to be changed, I hope that companies are not immune from lawsuits through TOS, and I hope to see a few class-action lawsuits causing a company to lose some of its copyrights to the public domain.

I don't really know where it went wrong with the real theories. But, when I imagine quantized gravity in my head, I don't imagine having a carrier particle (graviton).

Rather, it feels like gravity is special and the chunks of spacetime themselves are carrying information about the gravitational field.

My imagination is odd because it's based on how I would write a distributed game server. (It doesn't make sense to simulate gravity pairs between every single pair of particles. This isn't just slow, it doesn't scale if the universe expands. But it makes sense to precalculate gravity field as a chunked map and then update one chunk at a time.) (You can ask the same about light/EM but light hits only some of the things and can cause complex local interactions at the scale of electron orbits. When gravity changes, it's very macroscopic instead. So I wanted to treat them differently)

When I learnt programming as a hobby, before I went to college, before my jobs,

I was hoping the future is that we build highly specialized, and customizable tools through open source code, not too small that they are just another programming language, and not too large that they cannot be connected to each other to create more values.

And I was hoping we'd stop joining big companies, and instead open up local consulting firms to help people configure existing open source components for their specific needs. And the work (the configurations) should be done once per project and never reused.

Yeah. This is all just basically me talking nonsense. I'm not educated enough and further discussions would only yield nonsense.

(But if you are curious, the idea is that space is divided into chunks. Crossing chunks or propogating EM/gravitational fields through a chunk causes a delay, which means the particle's inertial frame loses time. And even if particles are traveling at infinite speed inside a chunk, that delay causes an effective speed limit. That's the speed of light. Similarly, there could be other ideas that also "backport" the entire spacetime theory onto quantum.)