whatevertrevor

I highly doubt that describes the average neurotypical experience. Maybe an extreme one.

I don't have Autism, and none of those things apply to me.

Not disagreeing with the content of what you said. However, sometimes telling people they sound insulting (unintentionally) has its own value, outside of the logical debate-making about the content of what was said.

Unfortunately a lot of people aren't like that. Corporate/brand loyalty is definitely a thing, and not just for products, for all sorts of extraneous reasons. For example, I know people who will buy whatever game Larian and Remedy produce next, and boycott anything EA makes, regardless of the quality or even the genre.

Yes, and in order to identify them, we need to separate the technology from the social context in which it is deployed. That's exactly what I'm saying, glad we agree.

Imo the distinction is very important in this context because there's a lot of technophobia and cynicism in general discourse, to the point where new developments in technology are often immediately met with extremely pessimistic takes re exploitation.

It's good to remind ourselves from time to time that new developments in technology have both positive and negative potential, and how they're applied is largely due to sociological factors. When we dissociate the issues with "technology" we allow ourselves to see the underlying issues causing potential misuse, making progress at solving those problems possible instead of a knee-jerk negative lashback against anything new.

Had this in the Beat Saber mod manager recently. The game released 1.40.10 and my mod manager suddenly thought that game went backwards from 1.40.9

This can be simplified, conflicting field names at the same level also don't compile:

https://go.dev/play/p/D3eFi9_can8

Conflicting functions at nested levels also compile:

https://go.dev/play/p/xXXDZCjQJOh

It's not about method vs field, it's about the nesting level of the conflicting identifier, if it's at the same level there's an error, if it's at different levels, the higher level hides the lower level identifier:

https://go.dev/doc/effective_go#embedding

Unioning interfaces like this does seem convenient for composition/mixin patterns, I'm not sure if extending it to structs in general seems worth the cost of potential footguns though, especially external libraries and such where you probably don't want to think about the full potential tree of embedding conflicts.

It wants you to find Stop, Sign and Bike. Not stop signs and bikes.

I agree very much!

A lot of smart people get woo-ed by bad pitches or wrapped up in cults too. It's all about how the message is coded for the target audience. An astute MLM seller uses very different language to sell to a small farmer vs a young silicon valley graduate[1]. There's also the aspect of how vulnerable the audience is at that point in their lives, cults are especially good (bad?) at finding people in tumultuous periods in their lives, looking for any sort of hope and/or support system to pull them through it. Then the cult provides the community and short-term structure they crave at the time, to their long-term detriment.

Personally, how relatively smart and even generally skeptical people fall for cults and conspiracy theories is one of the most fascinating sociological phenomena out there.

[1] leaning somewhat on general stereotypes for the sake of argument, not insinuating all these people are the same, or implying anything about the relative intelligence of a farmer vs a silicon valley graduate.

I'm in that phase somewhat right now. 30 months in, I'm still kinda unsure what I'd like to do. I know going back to a big enterprise software firm is bit of a last resort at this point, I just cannot convince myself that work is meaningful. Thankfully I'm financially secure (for now, who knows how the global trade shenanigans will actually affect my retirement funds), so there's no urgency to jump headfirst into another job. Yet, despite having plenty to do in terms of side projects, it would be a lie to say I don't feel that I need to do something more meaningful with my time.

As someone coming on 30 months of retirement, I'm consciously shifting away from toy projects to projects where I commit to a more polished deliverable.

It helps with commitment and pursuing a deeper learning of the activity instead of doing quick and dirty stuff in my experience. Just don't expect it (or aim for it) to be a steam top-seller, my aim is usually to have at least one other stranger get some amount of value out of what I produce.

Not to say there isn't a place for quick and dirty projects, of course. Bespoke 3D models to fix things around the house are my current favourite category for that.

Quit big tech after a decade in the industry about 30 months ago. At the time it was supposed to be a "break" because I was badly disillusioned with the meaningfulness of what I was doing, and in some ways where the industry had shifted over that time period. But then, we looked over our finances as a no-kids household with a combined 35-years of work in the tech industry (which of course is a very fortunate situation to be in) and decided we can retire.

So that's where I'm at right now. I've spent this time picking up new hobbies (currently 3D modelling, branching out to add some electronics elements right now), programming board game probability aids for fun, learning some university level courses from my partner and teaching her some myself, getting more active (my last month has been the best physical shape I've been in since university).

My personal project list keeps growing, so I have plenty to tackle and "keep me busy". Though I do want to move on from toy personal stuff to more meaty stuff in the near future. Yet, figuring out the exact nature of that is a work in progress currently.

Maybe you're making really mild "Indian" food haha. I'm Indian and if we're making anything remotely spicy, we're dumping lots of hot stuff in a tadka or pan frying it, which is not only unpleasant elsewhere (read: eye watering and cough inducing), but sometimes prohibitively much for the person doing the cooking, if the ventilation is inadequate.

Even with an open mesh door during the summer to let replacement air in, our range hood feels completely inadequate. After any sort of fried cooking the spices and oil can be smelled everywhere on the level of and above the kitchen.

I have no reliable and in-depth data on how many of my ancestors died of skin cancer, or how many hours they exposed themselves to sunlight, and what kind of sunlight, or what clothes they wore over those thousands of years.

Using this line of thinking is at best an attempt at rationalizing what lifestyle you wanted to live anyway.

Yup, I grew up in a hot subtropical climate and the best counter to the summer was to stay indoors, hydrate. If you have to be outdoors, stay in the shade, if you have to be exposed to the sun, cover yourself. All of the benefits you get from being in direct sunlight can be gained with just being outdoors in shaded areas, maybe for a slightly longer time.

The way western culture glorifies direct exposure to the sun is always hilarious to me, everyone lining up to burn their skin for hours on end to "catch up" on sunlight exposure. Instead of just playing an outdoor sport under some trees or being outdoors in the morning/evening when sunlight is a lot less potent and weather is a lot more pleasant.

It also goes hand in hand with people undervaluing the act of taking on risk in the first place. Hence overbeaten cliches like "insurance is a scam"/"stock market is just gambling" etc.

(Don't get me wrong there are systemic issues with both of the examples above, but the point is fundamentally there's value in understanding and taking on risks that others might be less willing to take)

I do agree with your conclusion, but I'd add that charisma is also very much learned, like a lot of other traits. Lots of trials at seeing what people respond to and honing in on what works, weeding out what doesn't and if you're in the serial entrepreneur/cult leader business: an ever evolving language of sophistry that keeps up with the baseline level of critical thought, but also weeds out actual skeptics quickly because you don't want them around your followers.

> > but that doesn't mean we should just delete everything.

> Where did this come from? This has nothing to do with anything.

Poor wording on my part, because I was typing on my phone. "Everything" refers to everything related to copyright law. Your original comment implied that we should just burn it all down (going "as far as possible to the other side"), and I don't agree with that.

Copyright has been weaponized of course, but there are considerations worth keeping in mind about why it exists in the first place. The intent is to create mechanisms that incentivize creation of art, and allow creatives to distribute said art without other people getting automatic ownership of the fruits of their labor, just by virtue of having the file.

In a world where distribution of media is (relatively) cheap and easy, we need to think more about how we incentivize the creative process, instead of making it a wild west where anyone is allowed to distribute if they have the bits on them. In a world where everyone pirates, very little worth pirating remains.

EDIT: Forgot to respond to the rest.

I agree about patreon, but also:

> Youtube's paying any significant amount to any content creator other than maybe the top 0.01%.

That's not accurate. Of course if you have a couple hundred subscribers you get nothing from youtube, but neither does a random busker on the subway. Arts are just brutally competitive, and there's way more art being produced than people want to consume.

Youtube's partner programs are quite generous as other people have pointed out in sister comments. In addition, a good chunk of your premium subscription goes directly to the creators you're subscribed to.

> I fail to see what else I would derive value from. I just want the damn file in most cases, with minimal interference., but Youtube seems to always want plop their schlong inbetween the content creator and their audience, to everyone's displeasure.

This misses my point, but illustrates the weird thought process people go through when assigning value to digital media. When trying to value a desk we're willing to go through the whole shebang: cost of materials, quality of materials, quality of the craftsmanship and how much labour it would have required, the estimated cost of all the manufacturing processes involved, finishing labor costs etc.

But when the conversation is about paying for digital content we only focus on the direct value it provides to us, the consumer. The entire conversation about input value just gets lost.

Now input value is not always perfectly correlated with the output value (it's shaped differently for each customer), but the fact that the conversation simply shifts away as if creators and people building the platforms don't exist outside of the stream of bytes feels disingenuous.

I may or may not be younger than you, that is of no relevance other than a vague appeal to defer to your experience about it.

I find plenty of valuable things on the current internet that wouldn't exist without commercialization, the possibility of a career as an individual YouTuber or streamer, for example.

And I'd like to see them continue and be actually paid for their efforts in a sustainable way instead of pining for a return to "all content is just passion side projects".

Because absolutely nothing about the current internet stops people from posting passionately as a side project.

I agree copyright goes too far, but that doesn't mean we should just delete everything. Creative content producers still need food to eat. We still need mechanisms to pay them for it, the more direct the better.

The value of digital content comes from more than just the final sequence of bytes.

That's a feature that learns commonly skipped over sections, ads or otherwise.

I don't think the parent implies that. Advertising has destroyed a lot of value, YouTube or otherwise. But you can either push the equilibrium in a (imo) productive direction by paying your creators (via subscriptions) or continue to attack the symptom of the problem (ads) while everything shittifies further around you. That's the choice.

Well they want you to pay obviously, they don't want you to disappear. Setting an expectation that things should be free on the internet is what killed the internet. We all want good things until we have to pay up.

Ah yes the infinitely reproducible digital content fallacy. If you watch a movie at the cinema, they still have the movie, do you expect that to be free too?

Products have more than just marginal production costs, especially true for digital ones.

It would be really tough. I do think YouTube provides a lot of value by making its videos accessible to everyone.

Plenty of closed ecosystem streaming services exist and they continue to be niche things where creators who had no audience before YouTube are trying to keep going. I'm not sure how long the likes of Nebula and Floatplane are going to last honestly, because they have fundamental discovery issues in both directions:

The creators need a constant influx of new viewers to replace people growing out of their content, and the viewers need a platform where they can experiment with new content without a big paywall upfront.

Well, if you don't even want to be understood, why say anything to begin with?

In addition to what other comments have said below, it's also important to state that the indirect impacts of the alternatives aren't widely studied, so it's practically impossible to compare. How do we figure out how many people have a significant impact on their life because of the fossil fuel we burn and put all sorts of crap into the atmosphere?

Without doing or seeing the actual math, my intuition leans on the side of it's probably much more efficient to put people together under certain constraints and fly them in one big container, than lots of unconstrained individual containers. See public transport vs cars for a similar tradeoff.