tmcb

> I am directly threatened by their program. […] Could the left imagine being a little more democratic and making a few more concessions towards… omg, white males?

I am not from the US, I am originally from Latin America. I am considered a “white male” there. I am now living in Europe as I am a dual citizen. This kind of position is interesting to me. What is so bad about being a white male in the USA at the moment?

I’d like to elaborate further, but I want to engage in an honest conversation so I would like to hear your opinion.

Private companies' adoption of affirmative actions is not enforced by law in most countries, I would say. In the U.S., only government contractors have this obligation---since 1965 by the way, so it is not a new thing.

So, companies may opt for it but, as other management decisions, owners are free to do with their company as they like. Of course they will might face backlash from the general public, but this should not be an issue.

So, with all due respect, what the heck are you talking about?

You mean cheap for the user, right?

In that case, I beg to differ, it is not cheap. When we are talking about highly addictive platforms, this is a zero-sum game (in which every second spent benefits the platform and only the platform in detriment of the user's own health).

Varoufakis' point is not about the size of those entities, but rather the nature of economical relationships inside these realms.

Of course the analogy will break at some point. Every single analogy will.

We should also ask which kind of power structures have nation states borrowed from feudalism, and which ones were borrowed again by big tech.

It looks like the "you" in your analogy is different from the "you" in mine.

Not OP, but

> But there's a detail here that its hard to answer, or at least for some platforms. Given the complexity of some of these algorithms, do the techno lords have that sort of control of deliberate control, or it's just the uncontrolled optimization for a given outcome?

I think it doesn't matter, and we should be concerned with the outcomes instead. "Control" may be used as a metaphor here, just as OP's point is a synecdoche. They have the inherent goal of making shareholders happy (in the cases where it does apply), and maintaining domination over their respective markets; and they have enough resources for that.

If the usual faces (Bezos, Cook, Musk, Zuckerberg, etc.) are the ones making the hard decisions is unimportant, and it is even dangerous to go down this path. This is how conspiracy theorists start f**ing up everything.

That is not how I interpreted GP's point. It sounded to me as if they were saying that anyone in tech could move to other industries and make big bucks if the points in the interview were true.

Thing is, even if the points in the interview are false, that would not apply, as devs are not the ones making the shots.

Edit: btw, thanks for the heads-up about the heated seats subscription thing. I hope it doesn't make the point moot.

Now I get it, my bad.

Yes, his discourse is very political, but he does not come off as a demagogue to me. I personally think that there should be a room in the public discourse for people to come up with unrealistic policies, as realistic ones always require a compromise that benefits those in already in power. It would be very hard to carve out new avenues for social progress otherwise.

There are ethical and unethical ways to maintain engagement.

Anti-government spending apologists keep saying that politicians should run their budget like households...

(Also, I'm not saying you're one of them the way, but you happen to sound like one.)

... Negotiating debt settlements is the very first thing a financial advisor would tell you to do in case you (or an irresponsible family member) has contracted a huge debt. The fact that the lender denies your request doesn't say much about you besides your ability to negotiate. If you're dealing with a loan shark, that says more about them than it says about you.

> You can only do that if you have cornered the market.

How does capitalism address the fact that so many companies have cornered their markets not on merit but on resource access inequality, and have now accumulated enough resources to engage in lobbying and legal harassment for a long time even if free-market "reforms" are eventually passed? Should these companies be closed based on their past record?

What does it have to do with devs? Those are business models devised by business people, some of them devs, some of them not.

The article mentions enshittification. BMW is offering heated seats on a monthly subscription [1]. If an average teams of devs was asked to implement that as a practical joke, they would certainly be able to do it. Some of them can't quite make the jump between that and the fact that companies do expect to make a profit out of it.

[1] https://edition.cnn.com/2022/07/14/business/bmw-subscription...

> Mr Vanufakis believe that countries have the right to ask for money, spend it and never give it back, with no consequences.

This is actually the opposite of what happened. The Greek government, which was already virtually bankrupt in 2010, took a 110b EUR loan from the IMF on very harsh conditions, and Varoufakis was very vocal against it at that point already.

He was appointed Minister of Finance, he simply tried to renegotiate the terms of the deal, which the other involved parts refused.

Sorry, I am not sure if this is sarcasm :)

> By simple analogy, which self-imposed costs were paid by feudal lords?

Mantaining lords and knights, letting go of a parcel of their land so that they could accommodate enough serfs and their families (as in comparison to, say, slave quarters used in the Americas).

You seem confused. It is not your fault, commenters here are focusing too much on the X/Twitter quote from the article, which by the way comes from its introduction and not from the interview proper.

The crux of the matter is not the compensation (or lack thereof) for the content produced, but the fact that, for companies like Amazon or Apple, their main mode of wealth extraction is not wealth but rent. In traditional advertising, for instance, the publisher is not entitled to a cut of your sales. Companies pay a fixed price for the front page ad in a print newspaper. In digital platforms, it is not the case anymore.

The same applies to social media, but on a different manner which I will not cover here. If you are an ordinary consumer of these platforms, you help companies enable their business model, but the dollars are not coming off your pocket.

Science has very solid evidence on social networks being extremely addictive, and there are growing suspicions that some companies have it like this by design. It might be a choice, yes, but this is not a black-and-white situation.

This is interesting because many Georgists would say that commercial arrangements like malls only exist because land wealth is a leftover from Feudalist societies.

This is the modern equivalent of "if you don't like living in society, go build a cabin in the woods".

Medieval serfs could be rewarded with food housing at no monetary cost as well, but it didn't make the system any less unjust.

Also, having the company pay for infrastructure costs does not necessarily imply that users are getting the upper hand in this deal. They are providing "value" (quotes intentional) to customers at the lowest cost possible, otherwise it would not be a viable business.

For some unknown reason, HN trims the URL, removing the `.md` extension. Here's the formatted version: https://write.as/5f5nw9ad1njduk71.md

I don't get it. Reddit's OP shared a screenshot along with an automatic translation that says "independent research and development". This is not an authorship claim by any means.

This is an opinion piece, not much different from the strip section with regards to journalism standards. And I mean that as a good thing.

I wouldn't consider it prophetic, although it was a reasonable prediction of what could occur after a global war is fought where the main actors are totalitarian regimes and imperialists. It could have been applied within the context of WWII or the Cold War.

Back in 1949 when the book was published, it wasn't a far-fetched notion to assume that the world would essentially be divided between conflicting forces by the 1980s. However, in reality, the last African country under colonial rule gained its independence by 1980, and the Berlin Wall fell in 1989.

So, looking back, it wasn't prophetic but still stands as a hell of a cautionary tale. There is always the looming danger of going back to this clusterfudge of a state of affairs again (c.f. Fourth Political Theory or Duginism and how readily the so-called "Atlantist" opponents in the far-right embraced this terrible ideology).

had a similar thought the other day, but I couldn't put it into words.

It crossed my mind that the word "idiot" in Ancient Greek meant to describe someone who was not involved in public affairs in a derogatory way. It must have evolved into the current meaning not by sheer coincidence: well, idiots, as in its current sense, used not to take part in public affairs.

My hunch is that, after WWI, not having a strong opinion when it came to politics was too much a giveaway of someone being poor or uneducated — traits usually associated with the stereotypical 20th-century idiot, especially in prosperous societies. Then, people simply started to fake it.

A blind spot of this coping mechanism that has been carried on to this day is that, although there is no reason to assume that true idiots have no access to education and capital in the current days, people still assume that this is the case.

So, politicians and the elites cannot be considered dumb anymore; they must have ulterior motives. If their intelligence is ever called into question, it is always in the dubious sense that Umberto Eco warned us about in his essay "Ur-Fascism."

It only scratches the surface of my thoughts, but, well, I think I understand what the author means.

You are probably looking for help at the wrong website---anyway, just let me know if that helps.

    suspense_cleanup () {
     echo "Suspense clean up..."
     exit 0
    }

    int_cleanup () {
     echo "Int clean up..."
     exit 0
    }
    
    trap 'suspense_cleanup' SIGTSTP
    
    trap 'int_cleanup' SIGINT
    
    sleep 600 & wait

> OO is not a natural way of programming.

That is quite a bold claim. Can we define what is a "natural" way of programming? From my experience you are exposed to one or many programming paradigms and then, when required, you pick the one that works best for you, your problem or your team.

I still see value in modeling some particular problems with OOP and let the underlying model do the heavy-lifting. I know that under the hood every `subject.action(object)` has it corresponding `mangled_action(subject, object)`.

By the way, in our culture, the first exposure we have to functions as children is through infix operations: +, -, *, /. I would not say it is "natural". Prefix and postix operations are not "natural" either. You pick which one works best for you.

I understand what you mean, but this is not the point I was trying to get across with my original comment. Maybe that's the reason why I haven't touched this subject. Although both languages can be easily embedded, the programming experience is still different, and there are still lots of "freestanding" systems in both languages, so the language design comparison still applies.

I've done a fair amount of programming in Lua in the past but it still feels different from Tcl. Back in 2010 I would probably compare Lua to (a better) JavaScript due to its prototype-based nature. JavaScript evolved in a different direction afterwards.

Tcl is a little gem of programming lore, an ugly duckling story where the ducklings are LISPs instead.

One of the most mind-blowing things to me as a (perpetual) Tcl noob is that when you look at

    proc my_function {x} {
        puts $x
    }

You are lead to believe it is an ordinary C-inspired language with an odd syntax. It took me an embarrassingly long amount of time to realize that

    proc my_other_function "x" "puts \$x"

Is equivalent to the former. Other little oddities like `upvar` are beautiful once you understand them. It has some warts but Tcl has never had the luxury of under the scrutiny that languages like Python or Ruby have had. This is one of the reasons I would really like to see a "modern" version of Tcl more suitable for programming in the large---something that happened to Python 3 almost as an accident, imho.