achenet

if your sole goal is making money, yes, because Microsoft have actually done a pretty good job of making money, even if that's generally at the cost of the well-being of people using their software.

I'd argue that generally speaking, the problematic social media tend to be ad-supported websites that focus on user-generated content.

so Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Reddit are all social-media, because all are ad-supported, and all are focused on user-generated content. HN is focused on user-generated content, but not ad-supported (okay, technically HN is 'advertising for YC', but in practice, the site isn't optimized to get you doom-scrolling so you click on more ads), and a website with a comment section, if it's like a blog or something where the majority of the content is generated by the website owner, isn't focused on user-generated content.

The combination of user-generated content + advertising, however, seems to create websites that will try to get their users addicted to the site, which can harm the lives of their users.

<HN is the 'well actually' capital of the internet>

well actually, it's Ronald McDonald, not Donald McDonald

(but Donald Duck's first name is indeed Donald)

</HN is the 'well actually' capital of the internet>

sorry for the stupid quesiton, but why do you use Emacs daily if you consider the performance atrocious and the foundations unsound?

Do you have to use it for work? Do you just consider other editors to be even worse, so Emacs is the best of a bad bunch?

yeah, that is honestly a good win, going from awful side effects of prohibition to intelligent legalization. Even cannabis has been largely legalized, although there is the opiate epidemic to worry about now.

Still, overall, I feel like drug policy now beats 100 years ago :)

what he did

Obviously, calling out for violence and building organizations that commit atrocious acts of violence is a bad thing.

However, it is really hard to do without the help of others.

If you start arguing that your country should invade your neighbors and mass murder various types of people, the people listening have a choice in how they react - do they politely remind you that we're generally happier and richer if we're nice to each other and "treat others like we'd like others to treat us", or shout "JAWOHL MEIN FURHER" and go invade neighbors and mass murdering undesirables?

The problem isn't always the guy shouting hate, it's the crowd listening and implementing hate.

As for WW3, well, there's a diaper-wearing senile old man, with an inferiority complex to boot, in charge of a nuclear arsenal and major conventional forces.

Wait, which one are you talking about?

Putin? Trump? Nethanyayu? Kim Jong-un?

human beings are not always perfect communicators, regrettably.

Luckily, other humans can 'clear things up' :)

Why do you refer to "good propaganda"?

The piece compares the USA and 100 years ago. He notices that we are still in a time of large social change, often in some of the same areas, while also noting that we are materially more comfortable.

I don't think "this some sort of a paid advertising piece, to make you feel better about inflation, lack of affordable medical care, lack of affordable housing, lack of jobs for recent graduates, etc...", I think it's just a historical retrospective.

Author is pointing out that material, we're more comfortable than 100 years ago, and it's true.

It was arguable also true in 1926 - I I'd rather have been 26 in 1926 than 26 in 1826 (especially if I were a woman or black), and I'd rather be 26 today than 1926.

Being educated enough to whine on the internet about how despite recently graduating from university, I've not found a job that pays me enough to buy a home in a super expensive metropolitan area, while not ideal, is still, in my opinion, than moving from the farm to go work in various factories and shops in the city.

Have you ever seen a graph of the stock market?

It doesn't always go up all the time, but in the long run, it generally goes up on average.

Personally, I really liked both your writing and the fact that you took the time to flesh out the main point.

Thanks for taking the time to write this up and share it ^_^

the two party system is, in my opinion, unlikely to go away without electoral reform to change election at all levels of American government from "winner takes all" to "proportional representation", if Duverger's law is correct.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger%27s_law

Solidly prophetic?

Er, it kind of predicts the internet, but everything else?

Quebec separatism? Corporate sponsored calendar? All of North America under the same flag? Dumping toxic waste in/on Québec instead of Africa ?

none of things actually happened

I recommend you read the book "Pimp" by Iceberg Slim, about a Black America in the early/mid 20th century.

Personally speaking, I found the book very 'awe-inspiring'/it made me go 'wow' a bunch, because I found the author's experience so completely different from my own :)

thanks for your reply ^^

It'll probably take me a while to grok it all, but I appreciate you taking the time to educate me, thank you ^^

Any resources you'd recommend to learn economics?

I have a hard time seeing how "I'd like to live in a world where everyone is equally cared for" accidentally leads to "others must suffer for me to be better cared for than any other human who has ever lived", but then again I'm not exactly an intelligent person so I can struggle to understand these sorts of things :)

power laws basically spoil it because it gives a hard worker an exponential advantage

s/hard worker/person with more capital/

I can make 500 euros from a day of consulting as a software engineer. That's a typical day, working remotely, 9AM to 5PM, with a nice long lunch break.

Minimum wage in Bangladesh is around $133 per month. Many workers in the Bangladesh garment industry work 12 hour days. I look at what they do, and think "wow that's really hard I could never do that, glad I don't have to work that hard to live".

Yet somehow, I have exponentially more money than they do. And, thanks to the beauty of our current system, I can go ahead and invest that in the stock market, and get even richer while basically doing nothing.

It would be nice if we lived in a word that rewarded hard work, but as far as I can tell, we don't, and never have.

Look at the institution of slavery. For literally thousands of years, there was "those who worked", and "those who had".

The system rewards decision making, not hard work.

Now, if you're a young tech worker working on an important project at a big company, yes, choosing to work hard, IN THAT SPECIFIC CASE is a good decision, and it'll be rewarded.

But if you're a child laborer in a Third World sweatshop? No, your extra hour at the office probably won't get you anything extra.

If you're a Roman Senator in the year 30BC, you don't get rewarded for your work, you get rewarded for deciding to have your slaves spend more time farming grapes for wine and less farming wheat because wine sells for a higher price, which means that with your good decision making, you can now hire more slaves, to farm more grapes, to make more wine, which you can make for more money.

And if you look at rich people today, what they have is probably closer to the Roman Senator than the Third World sweatshop laborer - they find a thing that people like to buy, and invest lots of resources (their money, other people's labor) into making that thing and selling it, and are rewarded with money.

I really hate to call people stupid, but I would actually go ahead and call people who choose option B idiots.

I'm sorry if that offends anyone reading this, you can downvote me out of spite if that makes you feel better.

I say this because I read a while ago (like years) an article in the Economist showing that happiness in a society is correlated with equality - (sorry for the dash I am a human I just happen to use em dashes sometimes) not just amongst the poor, but also for the rich.

You'll note that rich people in highly unequal societies tend to struggle with mental illness more than in equal societies.

Money doesn't buy happiness. Being filthy rich won't heal the hurt in your heart. If you're too stupid too realize that, that's fine, enjoy your suffering, but I'd appreciate you having the honesty to admit that you're a deluded moron instead of trying to create completely false arguments for why the misery you're creating for yourself and others is actually a sign of anything less than pure human stupidity.

I couldn't find the original Economist article, nor the study it cited, but here's a link I found on Google.

https://leftfootforward.org/2017/03/people-are-happier-in-mo...

arguably, capital is also value.

If you have a machine that makes widgets, which requires people to operate, the machine (capital) without anyone operating it (labor) is worthless, but if you have people (labor) without any machine (capital), you won't have any widgets.

I feel like this is one of those situations where "the whole is larger than the sum of the parts" - combining the power of capital and labor, you get much more value than just capital or just labor.

Of course, this does NOT imply that "I provided the capital, it couldn't have happened without me, ergo I deserve all the rewards" is true, even if, if we look at the history and current state of the world, generally speaking it is more advantageous to provide capital than it is to provide labor.

not the person you're replying to, but someone who agrees with the gist of their message - I personally use Claude Code as a better Google search for debugging and syntax.

It used to be "oh, why am I getting an error on line 352, let me google the error message and wade through Stack Overflow answers" now it's "Claude, why am I getting an error on line 352? Ah, it's because $REASON, let's see if that fixes it, yes, thank you."

Obviously reading the official documentation is very useful, but sometimes you can't find anything that relevant to your exact use case, and forums are also very useful, but it can take hours or even days to get a reply to question when the LLM can do it in like a minute.

relevant Derek Sivers article "Delegate, don't Abdicate" https://sive.rs/abdicate

there's a difference between having the LLM write stuff for you, checking it yourself, modifying it and merging it yourself, and just blindly trusting it to do whatever it wants.

You can ask an overseas consultant to prepare a prototype of your program for you, check it yourself, and only use it if it passes your standards, or fire your whole dev team and blindly trust the overseas bodyshop.

The difference, at least from my point of view, between "using" and "outsourcing" is that in the former case, you're still responsible for the output, you view it as a tool that helps in some use cases, vs just giving up all control.

for STEM topics, I feel like some amount of "personal study time" is kind of needed to really grok stuff, at least for a percentage of students.

I studied maths, and spending time alone trying to solve problems and redoing the proofs from memory was important for my learning.

I don't think I'd have learned as much had those moments been replaced with more in class discussion.

You can always nationalize ;)

The facebook/meta algo might be same for all users, but it had different inputs for each user.

HN, on the other hand, everyone has the same front page. If I like a post I can favorite it to 'bookmark' it, but HN won't modify my front page based on what I favorite, whereas facebook will.

I think the GP's argument is, when it comes to social media, "one size fits all" might be less addictive than "custom made" :)

Yes.

Fascism isn't government making laws, fascism is "we're the superior race, kill anyone who disagrees".

I wouldn't call this move fascism, even if can be considered a bit heavy handed.

mainframe industry vs personal computers.

If their product is "access to a big model running on a really big computer" (if we can count 'multiple data-centers' as a single enormous distributed computer), then the product "small, accessible device that everyone has" risks killing their cash cow.

Ironically enough, the first company to really focus on "an LLM in every phone" will have a good shot at actually being the ones that "changed everythingTM", in the way Microsoft changed the world from IBM mainframes to PCs, or Apple made smartphones a thing.

This is beautiful, makes me wish I'd made it.

Excellent work, thank you for sharing it with us ^_^

Well, there's only 2 hard problems in computer science right?

Yes there are only 2 hard problems in computer science - caching, naming things, and off by one errors.

In my opinion, the basic idea of social media isn't necessarily bad, it's the fact that it is ad supported, which incentivizes completely controlling the attention of users, which is the issue.

He has designed 4 consumer prodocts that a good portion of humanity use every day.

Yes, but how much of that was luck and how was extraordinary talent?

It's like saying "Donald Trump is really rich, ergo he must be a financial genius"... getting really rich isn't that hard if you're born into money and invest in New York real estate.

Now someone like Jobs who had fairly working class parents and founded a multi-billion dollar (now trillion dollar) company that radically changed the modern world, that, I would argue, is extraordinary talent.

While I don't personally have much an opinion on Ives's skill as a designer, I understand the GP's point of view - any "good but not great" designer could have done what he did, Ives was just lucky enough to win the lottery w.r.t. what company he worked for.

For a similar example, consider the case of Hollywood - you'll have plenty actors as talented as Brad Pitt (or whatever big name you'd like to choose) that don't end up staring in massive blockbusters, not because they lack talent, but because they weren't quite as lucky to get that first big break, which led to more recognition, more job offers, all of which compounded into making him a proper movie star. Obviously Pitt is a really good actor, but part of his success is likely due to luck as much as it is acting talent - he has tons of talent, but others might have equal talent and less luck, and therefore be less successful/have fewer people influenced by their work.

To use a software metaphor, consider the relative popularity of FreeBSD and Linux. Both are good OSes, but Linux got "luckier" because they didn't have to deal with a lawsuit, which meant it got more attention, more features, which led to a compounding "Matthew effect" where it now has a far larger market share than FreeBSD, despite them originally having roughly the same 'quality'.

Colonizing only helps the colonizers, not the indigenous population.

I am not sure that this statement is completely true in all cases.

Take for example the Roman conquest of the Mediterranean. Romans tended to win their wars because they had superior organization - they could field more armies, and equip those armies, better than their adversaries, even if their adversaries had better commanders (eg Hannibal).

Once conquered by the Romans, the indigenous population got access to all the benefits of being part of Rome's 'empire' - access to what was then one of the largest trade network, the roads, the aqueducts, the Roman legal system...

I do believe, although, not being a professional historian I have the humility to admit my belief could be wrong, than overall being conquered by the Romans led to an overall increase in living standards for the local population.

Or consider the brutal conquest of what is now Mexico by the Spanish. We rightly remember the conquistadors as being incredibly violent and oppressive, but if large swaths of the local population chose to join them in their assault on the Aztec empire, it may have been because the Aztecs were even more violent - indeed, if my understanding of Aztec culture is correct, the Aztec religion required a human sacrifice every day to ensure that the sun would rise. Compared to that, arguably even the Spanish Inquisition is a step up.

Finally, consider that the practice of slavery in what is now Algeria ended only in 1830, when the French colonized it. Now you can accuse the French colonizers of being vicious brutes (and you'd have a lot of evidence to support that claim), but... at least they weren't enslaving anyone. Of course, this last point makes a value judgement that basically boils down to "slavery is always bad", if you have a value system where "some things, including colonization/colonial/imperialist violence are worse than slavery, then you can safely discount it ^_^