_jal

Yeah, they play this game enough that I simply question fucking everything. They will explain every single line item in a way that I can map back to a timeline, or they will take it off.

This has to be done in person, where they can't be, uh, accidentally disconnected, but I've found the rate-of-return on that time hard to beat. They discover all sorts of "mistakes" when you're taking up their billing specialists' time.

It is a bit like haggling over your car price after you already bought it; the main thing to get over is the social discomfort of being a pain in the ass, so they can't use that against you.

Worse that old network gear is technically incompetent business partners.

Speaking in very general terms, let's just say that we've had to maintain an extremely locked down machine running a version of sshd from about a decade ago hosted in its own DMZ, all for one particular partner. It is monitored for everything we can think of, and I still find myself stressing about possible ways someone could escape from that machine - I'm mostly surprised we haven't been attacked through them yet.

Their problem is they bought proprietary software that's no longer supported, and look at it as a one-time purchase rather than a forward commitment. Our problem is the nontechnical relationship is important and we can't cut them off.

The loss of ad revenue isn’t a consequence of downtime or losing staff

Firing the Trust and Safety team had a huge impact on advertising - that's why big brands find Xitter so toxic.

It is certainly also true that Musk's... emanations haven't helped relations with advertisers, but it is the lack of moderation that freaks them out, and also by-the-by chased off a noticeable fraction of the user base.

And now there's the bots:

https://www.threads.net/search?q=Twitter&serp_type=tags&tag_...

There's a reason for that. If civilian PTSD were more widely acknowledged, insurance would be paying out more and people would want employers to do something about high-stress jobs.

Top of the list: train drivers.

I rather suspect front-line in Trust and Safety at any major social media outfit is up there, too.

Necessary but not sufficient.

Also, don't confuse empathy and sympathy - you need to extinguish the latter, but the former is incredibly important to your ability to play suckers.

Funny, I read this just recently.

https://adrianco.medium.com/signs-that-its-time-to-leave-a-c...

That was his excuse for eviscerating (not paying for) T&S. Since that decision cannot have been wrong, community notes must be working as intended.

their histrionics won’t change Boeing’s incumbency

You seem to entirely miss the possibility that this has nothing to do with "punishing" anyone, and that people simply don't want to stress out about dying during their flight.

You can call it irrational if you like, that feeling of superiority and a few bucks will get you a snack. The brain worm is there, I know I'll be thinking about it next time I book tickets.

I don't know that they could. We're talking about Boeing, they're the sort of MBA hive that's embarrassed to have to employ engineers.

Do we know it doesn't cheat?

We know the range estimates used to (?) be gamed[1], I don't see why this part wouldn't be, too.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/tesla-ba...

Other folks have mentioned several other reasons, I'll just mention screen tech. My first monitor (bought in '93) was a 640x480 pixel 13" CRT screen. (And that was expensive - the Mac Classic had 512 × 342 mono, pretty comparable to the Apple Watch.)

Doing a lot of reading on that was rough on the eyes and you were scrolling constantly. I printed a lot back then.

If we're going to blame the victims, at least do it right - the mistake was submitting sensitive information to a gross, sketchy outfit like 23andMe.

Much like Uber, self-enshitification was obviously the "???" part of the underpants gnomes' plans.

The examples were chosen by the author to make a point precisely because they are well known.

But every single copyright holder with their works online (which includes you and me) has the same legal rights as the NYT or Disney. Naturally some copyright holders have more real-world capability to go legal than others, but that does not reduce the legal risk.

If anything it means they only infringe on archetypal works and not the other 99.9%

How on earth do you get to that conclusion? There's no "popularity" floor to copyright protection. Either a work has been infringed or it hasn't.

I can't tell if this is typical hn pedantry or genuine misunderstanding, so I'll point out that I was not referring to "some entity named Simone", I was referring to the particular Simone in this very comment thread, for whom we have strong evidence about preferred pronouns.

Of course, it's still safer to look them up if you don't actually know the person in question and want to use he or she.

Physician, heal thyself.

When does Simone become something else?

Yep, me too. I worked at Sybase at the time, and installed it to use a beta PowerBuilder to (try to) build some internal tools. Granted, I in my early 20s and far less experienced with this stuff, but found PB utterly incomprehensible. Unix started making sense fairly quickly, although I still had years of learning ahead to get to competent.

Only later did I realize how odd it was that they had me doing that on a Mac. Those where the days where they had farms of various Unix workstations because they ported SQL Server to a ton of different platforms. I remember ending up in a storage room one day and there were piles of unopened Suns, Apollos, DECs, SGIs...

Slightly less of a commitment, there was also MPW, which was kind of unix-ish.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_Programmer%27s_Works...

...you just found one and talked to him.

You're right that it is in-group signaling[1]. But it is also socializing. Comparative-opinion jawboning passes time and serves as a social learning mechanism as well as an assortive signifier. That sort of thing is also, by volume, a huge fraction of interpersonal communication - much like gossip, it is a double-edged mechanism hard-wired into human behavior.

Like I said, let me know when your utopia has eliminated assortive signaling about sports, tools, accents, clothes, art, food, housing, hairstyles, schools, employers, sex, shoes, religion, cars, text-messaging background colors, music, politics... all of which is far more pervasive, and some of which has historically escalated into literal wars.

[1] I also personally agree that it is boring. I couldn't care less what editor people use unless they've configured it wrong in a way that messes up a repo I have to use, and even then only to the extent that I probably have to explain to them how to fix it.

I think it is time for all status-chasers

You're more or less just telling people they should socialize less.

Get back to me once you've convinced people to stop arguing Ford vs. Chevy or Dodgers vs. Giants or Makita vs. Dewalt or....

There's a "polite society" thing going on.

Briefly, something like:

1) Ycombinator could not tolerate HN becoming a site known for sharing IP-law-violating content. And the people who come here by and large are smart and socialized enough to implicitly understand why.

2) At the same time, a large number of folks here mostly wink and nod at that sort of consumer infringement. And there's a society-wide bias towards "things like news are less protected", so that gets to slide.

3) But people also have a need to tell consistent-seeming stories about how things work, thus the mental gymnastics.

It ends up being similar to trying to explain why people pretend to be prudish innocents about sex. It largely reduces to "a small subset of the population goes sufficiently ballistic about what I consider to be relatively trivial stuff as to make it not worth fighting over, even if I find that to be ridiculous."

There are a lot of different versions of this that become so normalized it can be hard to notice.

I guess we're down to music, movies and microcode.

I hope this results in OpenAI's code being released to everyone. This is way more important to humanity's future than any single software company. If OpenAI goes under, a dozen other outfits can replace them.

Dunno about you, but my takeaway is that asking "how much space does X occupy" on a modern filesystem is a poorly specified question. Which means that there isn't a single answer. Which means that software should not try to report a single answer, unless there is additional context that fully disambiguates the question. And generally speaking, that last part will not be true, but programmers will think things like "well, they're looking at backups, so we are in this context...", which will sometimes be wrong.

Stepping back a bit, this becomes partly a UX problem and partly a user education problem. Software alone is not going to be able to perfectly guess[1] why a human wants to know, so the human needs to learn enough to competently ask. Software can certainly help educate them, and I wish more software tried to level up the machine operator instead of trying to guess the right thing in the face of ignorance.

[1] Don't mention "genai". Even if the robots get to the point that they are better than me at contextualizing this sort of thing, until they assume legal liability for outcomes, humans need to make decisions.

Maybe that works for pure entertainment.

I buy a lot of books, including a lot of nonfiction. I care quite a bit about the author. There's a lot of garbage out there with just flat wrong information. One of the few things you have to go on is an author's reputation.

Which, if you're making that up, becomes a garbage signal, and something approaching fraud. So for now at least, any outfit that publishes something that's supposed to be informative that's demonstrated to be "genai" derived means they've utterly lost my trust, and I won't be buying from them anymore.

There's also an ancillary issue I've never heard a good answer to. If you are publishing "genai" output, why would I pay you for it? I'll just ask GPT4 myself and not pay your cut.

If the answer is, "because we larded it up with all the signals that make it look like a human wrote it", well, see above about fraud.

Who says it isn't?

Me. And, I believe, the vast majority of other humans who have given it any thought.

They don't? Why not?

If you feel that way, you must also believe I have the right to display whatever I want on your devices. Which you naturally agree I do, right? I hope you like very early morning disco...

it seems obvious that they can say "in exchange for sending you this video you must watch the ads".

People can say whatever they like. Like, I can say "for reading these words, the person behind the insanitybit account owes me $20."

Tell me, just how obligated do you feel to pay that?

I loved TechShop while it lasted, it was so great. They were two blocks away from me, I could treat it almost like "my shop", just walking over to do small tasks as I worked around the house.

But as others noted, it is not an attractive business. High fixed costs, you're significantly more optional than gym subscriptions to many people, and your best customers naturally tend to graduate to owning their own.

Just wait until they find out that you can smell and taste with things other than your nose and mouth.

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20130710-how-our-organs-s...

Lambda Calculus -> Lorena Bobbitt was 4 degrees.

I feel like the existence of pages like "List of notable people from Buffalo, NY" are sort of cheating this sort of thing.

Just to be clear, you are saying that no collection of images can ever contain any CSAM, ever [1]. If some activity might run the risk of including it, that activity must be stopped.

Is that correct?

If so, why are you not calling for the internet to be shut down? The collection under discussion is just a subset of the internet.

You'll also want to either ban or enforce review of all camera output, including closed-circuit cameras. Someone is going to have to watch all those watchers pretty closely...

As for totalitarianism, well, how are you going to make any of this happen? As we just saw you'll need client-side visibility into everyone's visual data stores. Not to mention old photo albums world-wide contain images that would set off ImageNet. There are famous paintings and statues that would, too.

[1] Do you exempt NCMEC? If so, how do you justify that?

So is key management, key exchange and discovery, revocation, etc.

That stuff is very hard to get right within a single app.

Now do it across mutually-antagonistic companies with incentives to not cooperate.