Weren't they the ones who pioneered DNS hijacking of unknown domains to serve their own recommendations and ads?
172 karma · joined May 12, 2021
Thank you for sharing this and really brightening my day.
I'm not sure what AQI means in this context. Air Quality Index? I don't think anyone's arguing that to be the primary societal impact from climate change (not the same way that smog would be). It's more the cascading effects from extreme weather, drought, food & water shortages, sea level rise, wildfires, and the resulting refugeeism and geopolitical instability from all of that... to say nothing of the widespread impacts of the rest of the ecosystem (mostly harmful to existing biota, but can help a few species). If you think immigration is an issue now, wait until more of the Global South becomes even more impoverished and living on even more marginal land.
> College may become incredibly expensive. I think if it happens parents could invest in an ETF instead and provide their children with investment income while they pursue other opportunities.
But what other opportunities? Already college is barely a positive financial return in most majors. Right now the American economy is mostly services already, a large swatch of that in tech or finance. Either you're in that field or there is not really a pathway to social mobility anymore. That's only going to worsen with increased automation and competition from China, India, a resurgent Russia, what have you. And layer on top of that the waning of American power both as a sovereign, domestically, and as a hegemon globally, our kids -- with or without college -- will have far fewer opportunities than our parents or us, ourselves. Especially when you couple that with the looming myriad crises that come when you combine that perfect storm of climate change, economic polarization, and a general increase towards authoritarianism. There will be more "have-nots" than ever, sharing ever-smaller crumbs.
Anyhow. You take a paleolithic ape and give it godlike powers with medieval morality, then increase their population eightfold in <200 years... it's gonna be a shitshow. All the resource-consuming things (breeding, extraction, production, warfare) scale up much better than the forces of restraint (academia, law, treaties, philosophy, self-reflection, etc.). It would happen to any species given such a sudden surge in power without planning, and we are not altogether different enough from our ancestors to prevent this.
I think the "rational" people would do what little they can, if only to fill the time and provide some inkling of hope, but doing so under the assumption that the future is already lost. It's too late for a reversal that doesn't involve billions of people and animals perishing.
Even those tools suffer from Apple's lack of fucks given. I often have to replace included system commands with the homebrew equivalent because Apple's is missing some common functionality.
I wish Apple would just adopt homebrew as a firstparty package manager.
Two, with climate change and geopolitical instability, it's both unfair to the kid to bring them into what is essentially a dying world, and also unfair to the world when their lives as an American (especially) will consume a disproportionate level of resources. Every new American adds to climate pollution and American imperialist bullying in the middle east and beyond. We're just adding more casualties in the wars to come.
Three, with increasing automation and wealth concentration, social mobility is likely going to decrease even further. They will likely end up poorer and prospect-less than their parents. The USA is becoming a more feudal society where only corporate elites have worth and the growing underclass is just for exploitation. It's already bad enough for my generation, why would I want to make it worse for the next?
It's an aspirational document in a largely lawless land, more a historical oddity than the supreme anything. If you wait for legislators and law enforcement to fix personal privacy, you've already lost... the US law enforcement culture is actively hostile towards individual rights because it makes their jobs harder. The only real difference to, say, China, is that we like to pretend otherwise. But the reality in the ground is that nobody on the grid has had meaningful privacy for decades now.
None of that is far fetched. Facebook, Google, Apple etc. all track and use first party data. If anything this just consolidates advertising power into the hands of an oligarchy that's already largely above antitrust law.
The law is never simple, exhaustive, or agile when it comes to regulating technologies.
GDPR has been the most successful of the bunch and all it really did was force a bunch of cookie notices and deletion processes. That still largely depends on people being lazily accepting advertising.
Any proposed law that singlehandedly destroys ad tech is unlikely to either pass or stay relevant for more than a few months.
Stack combines the reference (which flags) with the expertise (of educated guesses by sometimes wiser users).
I would never trust a man page over a good Stack answer. (edit: as a web dev who uses *nix all day, but has no desire to become a full fledged sysadmin... Just give me the tool I need to get the job done without sacrificing performance or security. I don't need to know every possible gnu tool and flag and distro dependent options...)
That forces it off no matter what your query is.
I, err, only know this because of anatomy class homework.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/view-image/jpcmhce...
(not arguing for GI over DDG or any other image search, just pointing out that those UI issues -- which were coerced by publisher lawsuits, not Google's own preference -- can be trivially fixed with extensions)
It's hard to say any one technology is "greener" than another when they have vastly different types of impacts...
* Nuclear waste remains a big issue for all except the newer reactors, which are uncommon, with little to no planned upgrades to existing generation or storage facilities
* Solar runs into land use concerns & endangered species, along with battery-related supply issues (child labor for mining minerals, political issues for where those materials are usually mined from, etc.), waste issues for end-of-life panels and batteries
* Large hydro devastates river and riparian ecology, not to mention local human communities all up and down the watershed. It has non-negligible greenhouse gas emissions too, between altering river carbon stores and using a metric asston of concrete.
Most of those concerns can be improved upon in human lifetimes. In terms of climate change though, arguably the priority should be to get "good enough" technologies deployed widely and quickly enough to change the emissions trajectory ASAP, if it's not already too late (it probably is). In that sense both nuclear and renewables are a net positive (in an off-the-cuff cost-benefit analysis weighing the urgency of climate change vs future issues).
But of all the types, nuclear alone leaves behind a non-trivial issue for thousands of years into the future. We can fix most other energy mistakes within a decade or few; not so much nuclear waste creation and storage, especially in an era of increasing geopolitical instability and waning democratic checks & balances. Stable and safe nuclear power relies not just on technological and economic factors, but also on stable and safe world regimes and balances of power that can limit both combat and proliferation, especially to non-state actors. None of those can be guaranteed in this century. Domestic regulations aside, existing nuclear powers have a strong vested interest in limiting nuclear access to nations outside of existing blocs/alliances.
I would be strongly pro-nuclear in an idealized world run by sane scientists and engineers, but that's very much NOT the world we live in.
Capital and technology need not respect sovereign borders and laws as long as they can keep one step ahead of enforcement and still get enough revenue. The laws and lawmakers are fundamentally slower and weaker and poorer; by the time CCPA et al have an actual deterrent effect (beyond just mandated privacy notices), the industry will have moved on to some more sinister loophole.
It's an arms race that 1700s-style government simply cannot keep up with. It takes months to come up with new algorithmic loopholes, decades to change the law, one industry-friendly administration to undo all the progress.
Offloading privacy to government only works when you have strong states (China, the E.U. maybe). In the US, what's left of the federal government is too crippled to effectively tackle this (and arguably any technological problem) at scale. State-specific laws are subject to the same constraints, and additionally face the problem of enforcement across borders and Commerce Clause issues. If anything this will be an arms race between adtech and adblocking; Congress is the kid in the corner crying, "But I wanna play too!" and pretty much shrugged off by everyone else.
Google, the engineering company, always plays second fiddle to Google, the advertising company.
Yeaaaaah, let's just pretend Snowden and Manning never happened.
Next.js makes the frontend a lot nicer to work with, especially if you want to deploy to a serverless config. Out of the box, it handles things like:
* Data pre-fetching (Next talks to the CMS during build instead of via a clientside request during load), then inlines the JSON response into the page so the React components have access to their initial load data (like the first page in a gallery, or the first set of blog posts) as soon as the page loads. No AJAX required. It's FAST for visitors.
* Handles page routing (like /blog/my-post or /products/24453) by mapping CMS entries into page templates
* Makes the developer experience a lot nicer, with preconfigured but extensible webpack, sass, tailwinds etc. support. Also extends the create-react-app dev server to support all the next features so you can get a good preview of how something works before you build for production
* Adds a bunch of optimizations (CSS, web fonts, tree-shaking) for faster performance
* Has optional modules you can use (authentication, ecommerce, AMP, etc.)
* It renders React + the data into straight HTML+CSS (again, fast) and that means some React components also work without Javascript enabled
Additionally, if you host on Vercel*, you get some additional features:
* Automatic image optimizations (auto-generated srcsets, webp, blurry lazy loads, etc. on the CDN)
* Incremental static regeneration: A backend server monitors the CMS for changes every X seconds, then rebuilds only the affected page (in a few seconds) instead of the whole project
* Complex rewrite rules that would normally be difficult with a static site. Not as powerful as .htaccess or Varnish rules, but good enough for simple cases
In general, the upside is that it turns React from a feature library to a more fully-featured web app framework. Still not as powerful as Angular, but hits that sweet spot where you can easily spin up a website with Next.js in a few minutes, and not have to worry about scaffolding or be overwhelmed by having to get a PhD in Angular before you can start using it.
The downside is that its primary maintainer, Vercel, also runs a hosting service. There is an inherent conflict of interest there because some Next.js are Vercel-only, and these are NOT clearly labeled in the docs. You just have to find out, upon deployment, that some features just invisibly break with no error or warning if you try to self-host or host elsewhere. Everything magically works on Vercel, but it's a crapshoot anywhere else. And it's only getting worse as they keep iterating features like next/image or Next Live but only with Vercel support.
Edit: Sorry about the formatting. I don't know what formatting engine HackerNews uses but it's awkward.
It's like the difference between a diary (for yourself) or writing a book (for an audience). Don't just make it a dumping ground for random thoughts. Figure out its purpose, or if doesn't have one, just stick to Facebook.
For example, if you're doing this for career prospects, provide quick access to the most relevant things: your resume/CV, portfolio of work, link to repos/profiles, contact info, etc. Don't need the distractions like animations and overly long narratives.
Don't mean to sound harsh, but the world has largely moved on from the 90s and early 2000s when it was still cool to have a personal website or MySpace. People don't have time for that anymore; just give them what they need instead of trying to turn your website into an art project (unless you ARE an artist).
Re: Vercel, it's not the $20/mo that's expensive, but their exorbitant bandwidth and serverless charges once you scale to actual production usage. Their plans are great for hobbyist projects that fall within fair use limits, but it gets really expensive to scale up past that. Their CDN cost is something like 10x what Fastly (their underlying backbone) would charge you directly, and a lot more than Cloudfront too. I mean, I get that they have to make profit, but they don't build their own infrastructure (mostly Fastly and a bit of AWS, I believe).
I don't think there are any other hosts that have out-of-the-box support for 100% of Next.js's features (ISR, image loaders, page rewrite rules, etc.). A lot of it only works by magic and only on Vercel. Would love to see Ness keep evolving, and especially if it supports infrastructure other than AWS.
100% Next.js support on Cloudflare would be the holy grail, with an unmetered CDN and super fast, super affordable serverless workers (albeit JS only, no Node).
I only ever really make time for the news on the crapper. It's a nice way to compartmentalize. Plus it cleanses the soul... shit goes in, shit goes out. Current events are too depressing otherwise.
It's the lack of agency and trust in your people, rather than the specific dollar amount, that bothers me. If it was a $10,000 or even $1,000 purchase (such as buying that ad blocker for the whole company), yes, of course it should merit more evaluation, but is there really a need to micromanage every single transaction instead of having an expense account of some sort and a procedure for small purchases and reimbursements?
Not arguing that all your employees should be able to arbitrarily spend company funds willy nilly, just that they deserve some say in how they do their jobs, and the tools they need for it, instead of being simply being told "no, because if we scaled that $10 up to all the X employees it would be too expensive..." Did all the X employees even ask for that..?
Newsvoice was an app that tried to crowdsource that job instead of using algorithms. It very quickly became an alt-right cesspool, presumably because those are the same people who feel disenfranchised by FAKE NEWS LIBERAL MEDIA and so flock to alternative communities.
Good luck getting a Breitbart/Newsmax reader to switch to even the NY Times or Reuters or AP, much less The Guardian.