talkingtab

I started reading Byte when I had no way to understand what it was talking about. There were technical terms that I simply had no reference for. What the heck is an assembler?

I suppose it was an example of immersion language learning because after devouring the magazine for months it started making sense. I knew it was about something I wanted to know.

I also have used DO for years, and was very happy with the quality of their service. Until I found the alternative prices. Not as easy to use, but much better performance for much lower prices.

The introduction lost me. To quote: "Japan’s vast railway network", but it does not address the mouse in the room. Japan is approximately the size of California with a population density that is three times that of California. I would argue that a comparison of rail systems without addressing those critical issues may be interesting but isn't really informative. The issues are complex.

Anyone interested in creating a CommunityEmailAlliance. Like dkim but with blocks on corporate email systems that allow spamming?

The substantial issue is not "unconstitutional" or "revenue", but instead "corporate protectionism". The elephant in the room.

There are certainly concerns about home distillation. The question is whether We address those concerns uniformly or whether protections of "tax revenue" is really protection for corporate interests.

We live in a time of toxic corporatism. Not all corporations are toxic, but those who prioritize their interest over the common good are indeed toxic. Everyone has the right to use nicotine and smoke cigarettes. You can buy them - if old enough - anywhere. But the use of cigarettes is toxic. As are vapes. But some corporations believe that their wealth is worth all the early deaths and health costs that a lifetime of smoking brings.

It is the behavior of these corporations that is the issue here. Those who take the Friedman Doctrine to toxic extreme. The courts have promoted these greedoconomy by enacting United vs FEC and other anti-democratic policies. In contravention of their duty.

Corporate interest have become so powerful that we have become a corpocracy rather than a democracy.

Jeff Bezos has "Democracy dies in the dark" as the motto of the Washington Post. Democracy dies with the Friedman Doctrine and United vs FEC. Thanks Jeff and to all of the other corporate overlords.

Personally, I am guessing it is the other way around. Not first killer app, but first a parallel networking stack, etc.

The idea that anyone is too firmly entrenched is always true. Until it is not. We are not still using horses, nor casting bronze tools. Nor do most ships sail. We (mostly) don't burn coal anymore. It would have been utterly insane to imagine replacing any of those entrenched technologies. That is the "follower" syndrome.

The context for a new kind of internet is very different now, than when the internet started. That changed context provides an opening for new ways to do things.

A crucial and hard piece is that it has to be paid for. As much as you need a parallel networking stack you need a parallel business model. Yes, the current one is too firmly entrenched, etc.

fork it. Fork the internet. How about that? We have this stupid system built on people paying to target us. Is that "the" internet or is it just one internet, and not a very good one. This is supposed to be a place for hackers. So fork the internet.

Our collective learned helplessness in the face of being bombarded with advertising, propaganda and outright lies is just astonishing to me. Not an article about fighting back, or doing anything, just the resignation of a follower.

This. Spinning up Postgresql is easy once you know how. Just as SQLITE3 is easy once you know how. But I can find no benefit from not just learning postgres the first time around.

This "drift" is not a drift at all, nor is it new. There are many names for this such as cargo cult and think-by-numbers (like paint by numbers), ant mills. It is recipes. And many, many common recipes demonstrate a wide spread lack of understanding.

This kind of follow-the-leader kind of "thinking" is probably a requirement. The amount of expertise it would require to understand and decide about things in our daily life is overwhelming. Do you fix your own car, decide each day how to travel, get food and understand how all that works? No.

So what is the problem? The problem is that if you follow the leader and the leader has an agenda that differs from your agenda. Do you really think that with Jeff Bezos being a (the?) major investor in Washington Post has anything to do with Democraccy? You know as in the WAPO slogan "Democracy dies in the Dark".

Does Jeff have an agenda that differs from yours? Yes. NYT? Yes. Hacker news? Yes. Google? Yes. We now live in a world so filled with propaganda that it makes no difference whether something is AI. We all "follow". Or not.

The concept is good. It is in the right direction.

I think it needs to not have a dependence on github. This is a microsoft thing, and at best it means this will become another way for a corporation to make money from people.

Speaking of money, it needs to be paid for. (The github part is free from Microsloth and so is NOT free). So how do you pay for this? Micropayments.

So we need a system of micropayments. Then we need it to provide a way to help people economically. These are not barriers, because this is hacker news, instead this is an accurate understanding of more of the problem.

People keep talking about a collaborative internet without using the term. But to be clear we are talking about a fundamentally different kind of internet. That we can build.

It is the corporate internet - the one by the corporation, for the corporation that is dead. Or at least everything in it is dead. The death blow is AI, but it was almost there anyway.

The good news is that the community internet - for the community, by the community - is just starting.

What is a community internet? The internet is layered protocols. UDP, ICMP, TCP, HTTP, HTTPS etc. The community internet is just a new layer of protocols. Coming soon.

I initially read this as "I want to experience aloneness, how do I do it". I read it that way because to me, being alone is an incredibly wonderful and useful experience. You can know things when you are alone that you cannot otherwise know. Like your true size in the universe. There is nothing like being alone at night, outside, when the temperature is 20 without anything or anyone around you.

This is not something you will experience when being alone, locked in a room or a building. Or surrounded by people. You need to be in the wild, in nature. Do it.

In those moments of being alone you learn something that allows you to be more alive. More deeply in the world. And a way to give you a context for not being alone.

So my first suggestion is to go someplace where you are completely alone and on your own for a while. Out in nature.

People can be the most wonderful creatures on earth. And the worst. There is a pretty good way to find them at their best, and it is hilarious. Go on a quest.

What is a quest? It is not an intellectual thing, it is a thing of the heart. It does not have to be a great thing, but it does have to be one that matters to you - you have to care about it.

For example, you might decide to spend the night outside, alone in the winter. Do not read a book about this. Start asking people. Tell them why you are going on your quest and ask them if they know anyone who can help you learn how.

Now the secret to a successful quest is to follow it. If someone says Joe and Josie know, then go ask Joe and Josie. And of course you are honor bound to actually do the quest. People are utterly wonderful about helping someone, so ask for help.

Finally, write. Get a fountain pen and a notebook (or cheat and get a ballpoint pen). Sit down. Set a timer for one hour and write. The goal is to write sentences continuously for one hour. It matters not what you write. If you want (and can actually do it) you can write the same one over and over, but it has to be some sentence - no matter how broken.

We all get stuck in the past. The cure for the past is the future, the new. You have open doors in front. One or more of those has better things than anything in your past. So go there.

The definitive reasons why you should NOT buy these products.

1. While the hardware and performance are amazing, the user interface is the opposite. Imagine buying a luxury car with amazing performance only to find that simply opening the door is a royal pain, each and every time.

2. Apple will downgrade the usability over time. A year from now, or two, Apple will downgrade your user experience. Imagine that in your luxury car you can see out the windshield, but the dealer insists that you install a new upgrade with a heads-up-display that cannot be turned off.

3. Apple will degrade the performance of your system over time by constantly introducing more features which require better hardware. Your sleek and fast computer will eventually become unusably slow.

4. Apple profits from preventing you from using the computer you own with other software, for example Linux. When your computer cannot run Mac OS (see #3) above or you get sick of the "features" (see #1 and #2 above), you will not be able to do so. The reason for this is if you could try Linux, there is is a strong possibility you will see just how user unfriendly Mac OS is and never go back.

5. You care about the environmental impact of your purchasing decisions. You understand that because you are not able to upgrade the hardware and operating system, your purchase is very likely to end up in a landfill.

Apple has created a social system - the company which causes this. Perhaps it could be called "The Next Big Thing" syndrome. In the past this worked for Apple. Unfortunately creating the "Next Big Thing" requires a creative process they collectively do not understand and are not able to instantiate. They could adopt another strategy, but doing so would be an admission that they do not have a clue. So instead they follow a cargo-cult system of enacting the side trappings without understanding the functionality.

Personally my guess is the core of the problem is their contempt for the users. The willingness to act directly against the best interest of the users, as this article points out so well, is bewildering. You just have to wonder that a company so large, with so much money and so many resources can be so utterly dysfunctional.

The iPhone, the iPod, the early Macs all demonstrated a profound understanding and care for users. And now? Contempt.

Oh well.

My pet theory is that:

1. many people use Letsencrypt for website certificates

2. letsencrypt recently stopped automatically sending "It is time to renew your certificate" emails.

3. People (like me) got used to those emails and did not set up their own reminders.

4. The certificates expire and the owner (again like me) does not notice for several days.

The top comment (right now) is saying this cannot be done. That is wrong. It is exactly the same as those people who said "We cannot build an internet because of [insert infinity of issues]". The one we are using for this discussion.

We live in a time where people somehow think they cannot make bread without a $400 (USD) bread making machine. We suffer from learned helplessness, paint-by-number syndrome, follow-the-leader syndrome, and cargo-cult thinking. We use recipes instead of developing skills.

Implementing "a web we own" is a hard and difficult problem. The poster is correct that ISP's are a problem. But if this learned helplessness is the top comment on "HACKER" News then there is something seriously wrong with how HN works.

This is NOT about the commenters. This is about a system of interaction - comments on HN - that seems to promote anything but hacking.

My apologies for the "rant" nature of this post, but there is a point here that I believe is worth stating. Or you know, just unfollow me, vote me down, and I probably misspelld some words along the way.

1. Put a note in robots.txt that says

"By accessing this file more than one time per second you agree to pay a fee of $0.1 per access plus an additional $0.1 for each previous access each day. This fee will be charged on a per access basis."

2. Run a program that logs the number for Facebook requests and prints a summary and bill.

2. Then get a stamp, envelope and write out a bill for the first day, call it a demand for payment and send it to:

Facebook, Inc. Attn: Security Department/Custodian of Records 1601 S. California Avenue Palo Alto, CA 94304 U.S.A.

You can optionally send this registered mail, where someone has to sign for it.

Corporations such as FaceBook are used to getting their way in court because they can afford lawyers and you cannot. So they have gotten lazy and do not worry about what is fair or legal.

So take them to court when you have a legitimate legal issue. The courts are there to provide redress when you are aggrieved. Right? Use the courts. You can file a small claims action easily. Just make sure you have 1) a legitimate case, 2) evidence 3) have sent them a demand for payment.

Somehow the fundamentals of places like linkedin, gmail, google, facebook, etc have eluded people.

1. they are selling you as a target.

2. some people, governments, groups, whatever are willing to pay a lot of money to obtain information about you.

3. why would someone pay good money to target you unless they were going to profit from doing so. are they stupid? no.

4. where does that profit come from? If some one is willing to pay $100 to target you, how are they going to recoup that money?

5. From you.

There is simply no other way this can have worked for this long without this being true.

It is a long causal change, so it is fair to ask whether there is any empirical evidence. If this is true we would expect to see ...? Well how about prices going up? Well how about in general people are less able to afford housing, food, cars, etc.

I'm speculating here, but perhaps it is predictability. There is a common time warp fantasy about being able to go back and guess the future. You go back and bet on a sports game. If I can predict what you are going to do then I can place much more profitable bets.

Do the corporations that participate in this scheme provide mutual economic benefit? Do they contribute to the common wealth or are they parasitical?

No one likes to think they have parasites. But we all do these days.

Absolutely. If you weren't there for it, watch this. If you really want to understand AI, here it is. Hilarious. "Nobody ever got fired for AI".

The fundamental issue is that our public school system turned into a training ground to serve corporations. To teach us all to be followers. Raise you hand. Sit still all day. Now there are fewer and fewer corporate jobs so that purpose is outmoded. Why train every American young person to be a drone when there is no need for drones?

Why do we still have schools then? Why do people still fund these outmoded institutions? Because now both parents need to work in order to earn enough live. As a result schools (junior and high) are simply glorified day care or prisons. And yes they serve some purpose and do some good for some, maybe even many people. But for many of our young they simply instill unproductive ideas and behaviors.

If we are interested in our children having good productive lives, our high school are for many kids of zero value or negative value.

We do not need more followers/drones. We need doers.

A science fair can be one of the few opportunities a young person has to do, as opposed to follow. Lets enhance that and provide more.

The point about trust and respect is a good insight. Especially in the context of our current internet. A friend once said to me "trust is the one thing you can't get on then internet". So how would one bring that trust to the internet?

And the insight about meetings brought back memories of some horrendous meetings. At software companies. OMG. But very funny very long after the fact. Good points all. Trust, respect, reputation.

It does not matter if a hypothesis is discredited if it helps you build an effective model that works. If you use a discredited hypothesis to make bread and make a great tasting and edible bread, then the hypothesis has value. Even if it is "wrong". Because it works.

Here are some question for you: can you think of any things you cannot think of in your language? Hints. Beethoven, Van Gogh, 7. Can a democracy evolve from FaceBook? What kind of political system can evolve from FaceBook? Is there a language for Democracies? The important thing is not the answer, but the thinking.

When we think about communities we need an effective model of what they are and how they operate.

What then is an effective model for a community? In "Twitter And Teargas", Zeynep Tufecki argued that the community afforded by Twitter was unable to effect long term, substantial change and therefore Arab Spring is now a footnote. Twitter affords flash mobs.

That concept - affordance - provides a hint for a model of communities. The obvious question to a hacker is "what kind of social system would afford long term substantial change?".

Another insight is that the afforded mechanisms determine the community. This is really a restatement of the Sapir-Whorf hyptothesis. From "your language determines what you can think" to "your social mechanisms determine your community". Roughly.

Another insight (corollary?) for Sapir-Whorf is that your language prevents you from thinking some things. So one could try to understand what "following" as a social mechanism prevents prevents?

Out of this kind of analysis emerges a different take on communities all together. For the hacker in us, John Holland's "Hidden Order" provides a generalized model that can be used to at least create a pseudo model for creating a simulation of the community mechanism.

Although John Holland talks about Complex Adaptive Systems, I personally find "Gestalt" a less cumbersome and effective term. A gestalt is something greater than the sum of it's parts and that can only be true(ish) when the parts interact. So entities + rules + message bus => Gestalt. For ants this is {ants + ant behavior + pheromone trails } => ant colonies. One could conjecture that for humans this could be {people + behavior + money } => economies. Or more cynically => corporations.

The complexity and emergent behavior of the {rules + message/bus part} part is probably best revealed by Wolfram's "A New Kind of Science".

This is an incredibly important talking for our time. What is the most effective way to get rid of ants? To destroy their ability to use a pheromone trail. Perhaps we could just put advertising in it?

[edit: forgot the Wolfram reference. Apologies to SW for missing this wonderful work.]

I'm beginning to suspect HN also needs such a bill. Maybe it is not AI content, but so many prominent posts on HN feel like advertising. Perhaps that is the good thing about AI is that it decreases the trust level. Or is that really a good thing?

[Edit: spelling sigh]

Yimby vs Nimby is yet another divisive jingoism - simply putting tags on things and then using them as if significant.

The situation is more complex. The forces about housing right now are incredibly destructive. Rich people want to make more money by building expensive homes. In this case NIMBY is the correct solution. In other cases Rich People want to prevent affordable housing. In this case YIMBY is the correct solution. But blindly applying these terms provides a cover for a complicated situation. We have cults of personality, and now we have cults of Jargonism. Neither helps us.

Being outraged because lawyers don't want you to speak is great. The issues legal and housing issues are far more complex and important.

AI is the poison pill for corporations. They cannot resist the idea that with no people to pay they will make even more profit. If you think about that, and understand that AI is about search, then you see that there will be enormous opportunity to build software that is built to help people not make profit.

Even if you don't really like programming, the takeover by Artificiality will mean that the value of Actuality will increase dramatically. So go for actual value in what you do.

I'm learning about shadertoy so immediately went here:

https://www.shadertoy.com/view/tfKfRw

But no snow piling up which is nice!

Enough already. The way to determine what kind of manager a person is, is to listen for the context they use. For an extreme hypothetical example, if you hear a manager talk about locking their team in their cells every night, you will know something about their context.

If the manager says "They look to you for leadership and clarity", you know something.

It they quote Jeff Bezo, that provides more definition.

The lesson to learn from this article is not the words, but the context. What is the context you find in this article? How does this person talk about other people? What assumptions are inherent in this article? If you find this normal, what does this say about your assumptions?

What I have learned from my years of being an engineering manager is that the corporate model of software development is fubar.

Hmmm. The ruling had a far greater impact than simply that law. It established that corporations have the same right to free speech that ordinary citizens do as a general principle.

What is the result. We now have a situation where a candidate cannot be elected without a large amount of funding. You will need to either be a billionaire or a corporate toady to get elected. Who is the elected official beholden to? What does the elected official have to do to improve their chances of re-election? Do better by the voters do better by the corporation. This is simple logic.

Added to that you have corporations and the rich controlling the media. Murdoch, Bezos, Musk. If the common citizens want to have a living wage be the minimum, Jeff Bezos does not. How willing is the Washington Post to raise the banner of changing the US minimum wage? This is a rhetorical question as the answer is obvious.

And any media that are not outright owned by the greed afflicted, most media receive a substantial part of their income from advertising, they are also not beholden to common citizens. The New York Times wants to appeal to the rich because that is the market for their advertisers. That is why you see stories in the NYT about "How much second vacation home will two million buy you in Maine". And that is why you do not see stories about "How much hovel will minimum wage buy you in Maine".