sporkydistance

For the past 30 years, cars have been "good enough". This idea that one manufacturer is "vastly" better than another is nonsense. All care manufacturers are vastly better today than they were in the 1980's. This is largely due to regulations. When left to their own devices, auto manufacturers put bigger fins on cars to outsell each other; but under the pressure of government regulations we literally get safe, more efficient cars. But to claim EU should import US because they are somehow "better" is laughable from a technology perspective. US auto manufacturers are just adding bells and whistles (keyfobs? use a fucking KEY. giant touchscreens replacing consoles? NOBODY likes or wants them).

So weird. RFK is now in charge of this stuff for humans, and is anti-vax, but apparently our gov't thinks vaccines are fine for chickens.

On the one hand, I disagree with her, because I believe that 99.99% of people with purse string control are dumb a/f, and that "real work" will happen in the cloud of VC/Politician-stroking. That's the way it works. (And how much money did earlier scientists pump from kings in order to study transmutation?)

On the other hand, I agree with her, and it would be great if this didn't have to happen.

Should I be a purist or a realist?

I can't tell.

Probably Proud Boys, Patriot Prayer, or some other new fascist militia.

I would make fun of this as a PE event, but when I graduated high-school (US) we were still wearing parachute pants and break dancing to the Fat Boys. So I'll refrain from throwing stones. Each generation has their own precious cringe.

When I was at Intel in the late 90's, early 2000's, one CPU project decided it was going to use it exclusively. It was agonizing: slow, terrible UI, buggy, missing a lot of features. I never tried it again, did it get better? It's tragic that there is no competition in this space (rip Lotus).

I tried blogging in the mid-2000's about drones. I was documenting my experience building drone flight controllers (mind you I was using Cortex-M3 cores and early 3-axis IMUs) and had published schematics and source code.

About 5 years later my site had been forgotten, and a company in the UK offered me US$10,000 for use of my schematics and source code.

I was floored. I did ZERO advertising. I was blogging because honestly: I wanted intellectual validation because everyone I admired was blogging and I wanted people to think I was smart, too (I had even joined MENSA that year). I had serious FOMO/esteem problems in my 30's.

Fortunately--somehow--Google connected me with this company through simple search. The company went under, but I got my check for real. My friend at the time was mad at me for not asking 10x that, but so what?

Before ~2010 I stopped blogging and took all my stuff down because I really don't like being known or exposed publicly (I'm still very hard to find on google because someone more famous than me with my name is a top hit!), and I outgrew the FOMO. It doesn't seem to matter anymore because I'm so old: at my level the contacts I developed over three decades matter more than blogs. But it was pretty cool to get an email out of the blue with money attached!

Sorry, I was refering to Hacker News, not all social media. My question was unclear.

1. HN is centralized, but not for-profit.

2. HN does not drive engagement, AFAIK

3. HN is not surveillance capitalism.

You haven't demonstrated how Usenet differs from HN, but since my question had a typo and omitted HN, I can see how that is confusing.

Ah, thanks. That's a good answer. I was coming at it from the discussion angle only. However, both Usenet and HN don't allow you to friend people, like other social media. I see I accidentally dropped the term HN, which makes my question unclear. I still don't see spiritual difference between HN and Usenet when framed around your response, though.

I really would like to know what exactly you consider a "clear difference" between how Usenet and differ conceptually (e.g., ignoring the GUI, the # of users, and mechanics, [e.g., usenet updates diffused around the globe because we didn't have cloud servers]).

Please back that statement up with some facts.

We're literally socializing right now. We're a special interest group meeting to communicate about special interests. The opposite of socialization is isolation. If you hadn't posted, you wouldn't be socializing, but here we are, socializing.

Isn't this something that marginalized groups have had to deal with since their existence? I mean, there's a reason why in the US black men die at higher rates from heart disease and stress-related illnesses. Is this getting attention now because white people are feeling it? I grew up in the 70's, and the hatred toward gays that erupted in the 80's due to Reagan was impossible to explain to someone born in 2000 who grew up seeing gay people everwhere. Not saying it doesn't need attention, but I think we could probably turned to marginalized groups for tips! (RIP my karma.)

Why do you exclude HN from your list? It is literally social media, but with the dial turned down a little. Yet, you don't have to dig to deeply to see flamewars, outrage, and trolling. I mean, look at many of the garbage comments in this very thread that are on par with /.,xchan.

Comparing dragons to 3d internet chat rooms is kinda funny.

Arthurian dragons have largely been the same beasts for, oh, 1000 years.

3d internet chat rooms in Snow Crash have been tried and are ... lame.

I appreciate you thinking critically, but your arguments aren't very strong.

Also, I'm not gatekeeping, I suggesting why a person might not have liked something. There's a concept called "novelty", meaning "newness". The first time you encounter something it is exciting. If you spent the first 15 years of your life using an iPhone, then read an Asimov novel that introduced satellites, you'd be like "So what?" See? When Asimove wrote about satellite communication, IT DIDN'T EXIST yet. But when you read his book, it was old-hat to you, so you probably might not like his books.

That's all I'm saying. I'm not trying to tell you how to enjoy things. Chill dude, you'll live longer.

the "weirdos" had no problem humiliating anyone who tried to skate with them that they deemed a "poser".

please actually read my comment next time.

"Skaters skate not gatekeep people"

That's the overstatement of the century. In group / out group always has gatekeepers by definition.

Not sure where you grew up, but I sold skateboards at a bike & ski store for a while in the early 80's and skaters were absolute dicks about their self-enforced hierarchy. Skater culture claims to be inclusive but holy fuck that's a lie if you accidentally buy equipment just a tiny bit above your skill level.

I got to see this first hand: as the point of retail sale for their replacement parts, they confided in me because they needed to buy things from me, so they would tell me who the posers were and rip on them mercilessly. Just like any other ingroup.

Hanes 3 packs at Target. $17.99.

Let's look at the reply:

"It's not just commodification. If you were a punk in the 80s with a green mohawk, you might find it cute to put one on your kid in the 2000s. I have long hair, my son has long hair. This isn't a commodification of a culture, it's me, like every parent ever, using my culture to inform how I raise my kids. What am I going to do? Not dress and present my kid how I want to and how I identify?"

He is literally defending his decisions to "dress and present" his kid against my comment about commodification, as if I'm attacking his decisions. He didn't even understand my point: in the 1970's you would have been ostracized (or arrested) for having a green mohawk. In the 2010's, kindergarten teachers ooh-and-ahh over it.

That's the DIRECT result of the commodification: it became mainstream because people spend decades diffusing it into normality. He totally missed the point, and then got defensive.

Actually, in the context of today's internet discourse, the reply is defensively invoking both the "appropriation" and "not-all-men" tone in the same reply. Impressive.

Yes! That's my one good use! :)

Seriously, that's all I got.

Here's one good use: I looked into leaving the US to become a citizen elsewhere. I have about $15MM in my retirement. I would have to pay a penalty on my taxes for early withdrawal, and be taxed when I renounce my citizenship. In theory I could cash everything out, buy a huge amount of BTC, move to another country (within a week, or quickly!!), and then cash it out in their currency. Of course, all sorts of alarm bells would go off if a normal schmoe like me tried to move that much money out of my investment account, because I'm not rich enough to break finance laws like people worth 10x, 100x or 1,000x more than me can do without going to jail. And I'd be terrified that the other country would OOPS my deposit like in the film Blow with Johnny Depp.

Selling a speculative investment for a necessity screams: "I don't understand personal finance."

If legal tender #2 went up 115% in 4 years I would feel like a jackass for spending it in 2021 because I would have doubled my money if I saved it.

Do you see the absurdity?

Why would anyone spend a single BTC/sat. if they know it could be worth 10x more in a few weeks/years?

Nothing says stability like a "currency" that swings +/-1000% in value.

GDPR is one of the best pieces of legislation to come out of the EU this century.

It is the utter bane if "move fast and break things", and I'm so glad to have it.

I will never understand the submissive disposition of Americans to billionaires who sell them out. They are all about being rugged Cow Boys while smashing systems that foster their own well-being. It's like their pathology to be independent makes them shoot at their own feet. Utterly baffling.

If you were punk you wouldn't give a fuck what I think and wouldn't have wasted your breath on me getting defensive.

Just sayin'.

Yo rocky, watch me pull a massacre outta my pants...

aaaaa-gaaaain????

Steve Albini captured this perfectly in an essay to The Baffler called "Commodify your Dissent". I highly recommend it, as it described the commodification of subculture that started in the 80's and really swallowed everything in the 1990's (in the USA at least);

Here's the book:

https://store.thebaffler.com/products/commodify-your-dissent

One of his examples is that music and clothing companies realized there was a market for things like T-Shirts with Anarchy symbols on them. This stuff didn't exist at scale in the 1970's, you needed to know someone with a silk screen, or live in a city like Chicago or San Fran that had the first wave of non-conformists. But 30 years later you could walk into a mall and come out looking like you had a personality even though you just bought it.

What's really funny, watch "Dogtown and Z-boys", a movie about the rise of skateboarding with lots of footage from the 1970's. The first "tricks" they do will make you say, "What? Where's the trick? He just bounced on his board", and then compare it with today's batshit insane achievements. Skateboarding was peak commodified in the late 1980's (Thrasher magazine helped) early 1990's, but in the 1960's it was ... a simpler time and the outcasts looked like normal kids having fun compared to today.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogtown_and_Z-Boys

You can see how something goes from a "weird kid activity" to "every kid does it".

Like green mohawks on toddlers in the early 2000's. Edgy in 1970's, preschool in 2010.

Man, I'm showing my age. :|

I think with books like Neuromancer it is a matter of "when" you read it.

If you read it today, it seems trite, like Snow Crash. If you read Neuromancer in 1984, it was mind-blowing. Same thing with Snow Crash in 1992. These books were decades ahead of their time.

Neuromancer is more like PKDick, in that they are adult-themed books more about personal problems with sci-fi on the side, and it is actually part one of a number of book with the same character (e.g., Count Zero). That can be boring to someone expecting lots of "pew-pew-pew I hacked the mainframe". Snow Crash also didn't really age well in terms of dorkiness (cyberdogs breaking the sound barrier, nukes attached to a biker-thugs brain, gangs in cyberspace ?!?!?, etc.), but at the time we were all floored by the new concepts.