Bakary

Essentially I see two competing processes here.

Google still has powerful boolean operators. If you use those with intentionality, and pick the hidden 'verbatim' option, you'll have a decent chance of finding what you need. However, these are all vestigial features that a minority of users employ.

The vast, vast majority of users are funneled into product choices. In a way, it helps to see that as the core function, and everything else as a secondary funnel towards that primary funnel. The search engine is designed to work so that people use it, but the end goal is for ads/SEO to be effective for the great mass of users that are particularly vulnerable to them. The GP was looking for price differences, which is something many websites base their business off of, but that's still a tiny portion of the whole and not something Google needs to optimize for compared to the misleading but lucrative results the GP had to sift through.

Google is an ad company that produces a search engine, rather than a search engine that features ads. Although it may have been the latter in the olden days

Time is the greatest resource, but energy management is your greatest goal. You will always run out of energy before you run out of time.

If you have a life where you pursue autonomy, the development of your capacities, and a sense of meaningfulness in what you do, you'll be able to withstand and enjoy much more than you think. If you don't pursue these things, everything will be harder.

Simply spending your time with more intentionality and being conscious of each moment changes so much.

It's easier to find satisfaction in goals outside of your own self, because they introduce a finite boundary whereas the self is infinite in its desires

Try to picture what a confident and well-adjusted person would do in the same situation, to determine if you are currently acting out because of trauma or fear.

If you have a habit, ask yourself what it will look like if it continues uninterrupted for decades. Conversely, try to picture what a habit you don't currently have could do for you over the same timespan.

The point is more that it doesn't matter in the way the person wanting to be remembered would want it to be, or in the way the person wanting to be forgotten fears it to be.

Look up the fundamental attribution error

Reference books are the one thing it's a good idea to spend money on, because flipping back and forth through a digital copy is still a miserable experience

If you already know the product you are buying down to the model, Google isn't tailored for you. It's meant for people who have a vague idea and then pick what's at the top of the search results. This is why SEO has grown to be an entire profession.

If you provide infrastructure or support for something, and that something is almost exclusively surveillance and data-gathering based, that's not so great either.

If I lay out the reasoning more precisely and in the simplest terms, maybe it would then be easier to identify which part might be the stumbling block here.

1. An employee of Google makes propellers for Google.

2. The sum of their work benefits Google, either in profit, new assets or some other way, because Google isn't employing them just for fun

3. As an adtech company, surveillance and datagathering are at the core of Google's activities and modus operandi.

4. The growth in power and reach of Google thus directly implies increased surveillance

5. As per 2., The employee currently dedicates their working life to making Google more successful and powerful

6. Therefore the employee furthers surveillance and datagathering, even if their contribution might be small

This is a similar reasoning to claiming that college is not useful because people such as Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, or the Zucc did not need it to do well. It's a form of cargo culting.

The end result of their work is to increase the power and success of a surveillance company, one of the most successful and powerful surveillance companies in the world if not the most, so how could they possibly not be involved or morally responsible? They don't exist in a vaccuum where their work is magically independent of their employer. This is typically the sort of cognitive dissonance I'm trying to highlight.

Can you imagine someone saying "Nah I'm not responsible for what the Russian army does, I'm just paid by them to help with logistics"?

The software just isn't there yet, but we have some inkling of what might be possible in just a few years. Perhaps a closer analogy would be human computers. You would have meetings with them back in the day to set out calculation tasks, but now they are so reduced away that their existence is in itself something that has been forgotten by most. Employees just perform the duties of the human computer throughout the course of their day without even thinking that they replaced what used to be an independent function.

What if you no longer need meetings? Take accounting software for instance. This function will probably go from an entire team of accountants to one of the C-levels just triggering the right software at the right time as part of their normal duties.

If software engineers end up automated away before truck drivers are, (not a completely harebrained concept given that one type of AI is doing better than expected and the other worse), it will put a hilarious spin on the "truckers should just learn to code" concept.

One thing I notice from the community is that for previous generations (let's say pre-2005) it was significantly easier to make a great living as a programmer without engaging in shady nonsense. My post was very critical, but to some extent it's hard to escape the logic of the times when you have to navigate them.

By news, I didn't mean it had to be political. Much of news is political of course, but far from all. What I'm saying is that looking on the platform and seeing how Zoomers consume news, it has that fireside chat quality where news are filtered by an approved person much like in traditional settings.

If someone works for a surveillance company in a non-trivial role, they are furthering the progress of surveillance. They can't wash their hands of it.

There are a ton of profiles I've seen over the years. A few seemed to have lifestyles so independent and idiosyncratic that they'd put the Unabomber to shame. Many were involved in fascinating and helpful projects. But I find the assumption that the overall tone is of venture capital, digital nomadism, gentrification and so on to be fairly sensible as well as the idea that as whole the community greatly contributes to increasing authoritarianism.

I don't have actual stats of course but intuitively if you tally:

- All the FAANG/FAANG suppliers

- All startups or established projects that involve data gathering, advertising, SEO, skinner boxes, dopamine response, parasocial relationship manipulation, optimizing time spent on controlled platforms and products

- All projects that facilitate the above as suppliers or second-order businesses

- All gig economy/surveilled/taylorized work facilitators

- All coding work that involves ranking and surveilling people for life altering services such as loans, insurance, healthcare

- All coding work done to optimize the wealth of the noble class (themselves the main beneficiaries of surveillance)

...there's probably not much left. Even if you maintain a strict definition and include only direct adtech shenanigans I wouldn't be surprised if that were a huge number in and of itself.

One aspect I find interesting about HN is that most of the posters there are involved in adtech, data-gathering, FAANGs, or adjacent businesses, whilst reaping very high rewards for their troubles. At the same time, they have an enduring interest in adblocking, freedom, liberal or libertarian values and so on. This creates a situation where their economic wellbeing and working life is directly aimed towards enforcing surveillance capitalism and authoriarian tools, while at the same time they receive enough resources to avoid the brunt of the consequences, and their mental landscape deals with the cognitive dissonance to maintain an identity of progressiveness.

It directly mirrors the feudal system with a tiny portion of the population living in unimaginable luxury and employing another much larger but still small portion overall to keep the hierarchy running. In other words, billionaires supported by well-compensated SWE vassals who devise ever more sophisticated tools to extract value and data-powered obedience through surveillance from regular workers.

By news they mean users who film themselves talking about news topics in a particular way that is adapted to the platform

There is a particular "informational" style that these users adopt for these videos that is increasingly popular as a Zoomer-friendly news source. Of course, in practice the content often has the same informational quality as rumors or bar discussions shared among friends, because that's exactly what it is just with a parasocial instead of a social relationship.

Essentially instead of consuming news directly, they get a curated, (in both a positive and negative sense) orally-transmitted version of it from a source they find enjoyable to listen to in general

What I mean is that from a hiring company's POV an in-demand candidate who won't submit to nonsense because they can afford to will usually be a liability due to the power imbalance. They will either not need the company and bypass them in the first place, or create the risk of dangling interest for a long time before ghosting or declining.

Of course, for the target company itself that is looking for hires the employee in question may well be great but the incentives are not always aligned with that of the hiring company

I don't recall where but Adorno specifically wrote about how the concept of a hobby is in itself toxic and enabling the very logic you are criticizing

What I enjoyed about the Long Ships is how the author avoided moral handholding and let the reader make their own appreciation of it.

Interestingly, the contrast highlights the concept of master vs. slave morality pretty well. The Vikings see strength as the ultimate determinator and servitude as the appropriate result of weakness. Insofar as they have rules surrounding honor or other meta/legal considerations, these are there to facilitate the resolution of power struggles through duels or other such concepts. They nonetheless have a fairly stable civilization. And of course Christianity is the canonical (no pun intended) example of slave morality as identified by Nietzsche.

On one hand, values could stand to change to great effect. On the other, these characteristics didn't pop out of nowhere. It's a bit like cryptocurrency today: as some have put it, a 19th century speedrun towards rediscovering the reason why banking regulations exist.

The other distinction is between companies that have this horizontal ethos AND have a profit generating golden goose (Valve, Motion Twin/Evil Empire) and those that adopt the ethos without it. This is where the real test comes in.

Personally, I would take a 32 hour/4 day workweek at full comp over all of these values put together. Except maybe team-set salaries, that would be interesting if also dangerous for some

We can't see the alternative world where another company or entity ended up being at the helm of the personal computer revolution. Since you mentioned the winner take all aspect that should orient the way we think about these companies.

It's a bit of both. We discriminate with regards to groups, but the measure of crime shifts quickly. Drugs or sexual orientations become legal or illegal. Killing is legal or illegal depending on whether it is performed in an approved way. Certain types of non-consensual genital mutilation are legal, others illegal. States tend to clash when their conception of justice differ too much. There are foundational concepts that most legal systems seem to share to provide stability, but for anything more complex there are always exceptions. The right to pollute, employment relationships, defamation etc. as soon as you move away from basic disorder removal it becomes more and more relative.

To some extent a State is a gang, but at a larger and more sophisticated scale. So is any sufficiently large company. The 'criminal' aspect is always a relative measure.

David Graeber wrote a great book about this phenomenon

By definition if you are not captive they won't have much use for you since you'll end up wasting their time