bgun

Complaints about complainers are even more exhausting.

In a forum for tech nerds, of all places.

Even if you are not the one addicted, other people’s addiction problems are still your problems. Being blind to that fact makes you both complicit in it and vulnerable to it.

I agree, but being mildly offensive is kind of the point: makes it more memorable, and clearly differentiated from “popup” which is too broad and has many valid uses in an interface. Dickovers never have a valid reason to exist.

”Smart” sex toys.

You seem to be under the impression that making services better or cheaper _for the consumer_ is the goal of any corporation. The goal is to make their own operations better and cheaper for them. They are laying off employees and adding features of questionable value as a pretext to raise prices. The playbook has not changed, it has only accelerated.

A little disappointed that the writer never attempts to address the title of the post, which is either a) why most people can't juggle a single ball, or b) how the author even knows this to be true, aside from some limited anecdata.

My (admittedly limited) juggling experience would indicate something closer to "Anyone can juggle", or that your average person, particularly young people, can learn to juggle one, two, or even three balls with an afternoon of practice, but I suppose that makes for a worse title.

If you're asking whether advertising works, there is plenty of science making clear that it does, without fishing for anecdata.

As to whether every company buying ads is making a good investment, mileage may vary - but the blunt answer to your question is that yes, people do purchase things because they saw ads for it, the advertising economy is well understood. Companies like Google whose fortunes rest almost entirely on the known efficacy of advertising are not full of idiots who have never thought about whether or not ads actually work.

"Is an economy based on selling attention ultimately the most beneficial and productive one for all participants" is a separate question, but it's not the question you're asking.

Say what you will about Zuck, he's made investors a trillion dollars. If they cared about his occasionally being wrong and losing a few billion here or there, it's not showing up in the stock price.

You mean cars being allowed to endanger human lives? Enshrined by law, urban infrastructure and cultural notions of independence for over a century? Why is it just now seen as a problem because robots are driving, instead of the stupid, reckless, poorly trained, often intoxicated humans who have been driving up until now?

Do you have locks on your doors?

Developments without which the modern world would be unrecognizable:

Materials: concrete, petroleum, steel, aluminum, cotton, plastic Music: 12 tone equal temperament Food: Cereal crops, food preservation (canning, pasteurization), fermentation Technology: batteries (lead-acid, lithium-ion, alkaline), circuitry, GPS Transportation: internal combustion engine, asphalt road engineering, flight, rocketry

Lists like this, or “tech trees” as you might find in Civilization-type games, are hard in part because language is insufficient to map technological progress. There’s also no version of modernity that could exist without some form of philosophy, pedagogy, and cultural development, but naming “most significant” ones in a modern context involves going back to very ancient and deeply opinionated texts that include the Bible, Koran, Torah and so on.

I like this. Although - can we stop naming every project with a single short, common, vaguely related English word? Does anyone name software after what it actually does anymore?

It’s almost as if software authors are afraid that if their project names are too descriptive, they won’t be able to pivot to some other purpose, which ends up making every project name sound at once banal and vague.

Isn’t “paying for what you use” the ultimate expression of personal responsibility, though? Is unlimited high-speed internet a basic human right? (I’d argue _access_ is, given its necessity in participation in modern society, but not unlimited data).

The point may end up being moot, however, since the dark patterns feeding the social media-data harvesting pipeline are driven by keeping most people hooked on algorithmic infinitely scrolling feeds, and that attention-selling system will fight any attempt to rein it in, whether cultural or governmental.

If a computing device can’t actually do more useful things tha another computing device, then saying it has more “computing power” is a bit silly.

It’s like measuring national power by population, or saying that ants have “more power” than humans because ants are more numerous, have more legs and can lift more per unit of size. It’s fun to think about for about five seconds before recognizing that “power” is about capability, not abstract numbers.

tl;dr Engineer discovers that sales & marketing are real jobs. Calling it “content creation” or “influencers” are just another way of minimizing a side of business development that scares you. Thanks for the story, it was an enjoyable read!

If you sell access to the data then buy it back, that basically lets you get it organized, formatted, and searchable for a fraction of the cost of developing and maintaining your own internal API’s, no?

All it costs is your citizens’ privacy, which if we’re being honest was never a priority in the first place.

Trying to streamline the government of a massive nation the same way you would treat efficiency projects at a large corporation represents a miscalculation so inestimably ignorant that it has to be malicious.

If the United States had lost a world war with Russia & China coalition, this is exactly what the victorious powers would do to concentrate power into the hands of a few figureheads and oligarchs. This administration has saved them the trouble. This is what losing an economic & cultural conflict in the modern era looks like.

The idea that an average person, working hard, can eventually own part of a nation's land and resources, setting up their family with generational wealth, is derived from the pioneer days when land was plentiful.

This was never going to be able to last forever as long as the population keeps increasing. This is why settlers left Europe etc in the first place to seek fortune overseas. And since there is no un-owned land remaining, the market price for land will match or exceed regional population growth worldwide forever, unless a whole lot of people start dying.

Working hard is necessary in its own right for many reasons, but promising everyone that if they "work" hard enough, they too can set up their heirs, is pure marketing. So is shaming anyone who fails to achieve it as "lazy", when it was never going to be possible for more than a fraction.

Lecturing comments about what the world needs from someone who uses words like "pointless drivel" just serves to prove the poster's point. We need more writers and fewer critics.

Most people have been “just writing” on the web for over a decade

This sentiment is also hard to take seriously. Who are “most people”? How would you know who is “writing on the web” and if it somehow represents a majority of humans, or even a majority of humans with home Internet access, which I highly doubt?

I would argue that a very loud, very small minority of people write on the web, which may be the cause of our dysfunction. Encouraging a more diverse crowd to think deeply and overcome presentation anxiety via public long-form writing seems like a good thing.

Every comment from this account so far feels AI-generated. Not trying to dismiss you entirely, I understand if this is an attempt to interact across a language barrier but this kind of response is very suspect. I really hope HN doesn’t succumb to the dead internet problem where bots are just responding to bots.

Republicans have learned to weaponize attention far better than Democrats. Negative attention is still attention, and where Democrats shrink from "gaffes" or criticism, Republicans just recognize that public criticism is still a form of attention. Even among each other. Whoever gets the most eyeballs, top stories, and headlines for longest wins this game.

Vicious, vindictive, petty, nonsensical, random, and trolling tactics are all strategically useful in this media landscape.

Over the last 40 years, China’s version of socialism with state-controlled markets have lifted more people out of poverty than ours. Democracy and capitalism have not benefited me in my lifetime. My taxes go to fund foreign wars and lining the pockets of American oligarchs.

“Radically increased wealth”, for who? Government has never solved my problems, only created more. My point is that I would have been doing better under China’s system than ours.

This feels like a shallow dismissal, and I’d love to understand what you’re trying to communicate in more depth.

“Fragile” trust? That trust has been beaten out of us at every turn for an entire generation. There is nothing fragile about American exceptionalism or the dream of achievement; we’ve just been shown repeatedly that we are becoming the third-world bully regime in the eyes of the world and, increasingly, in our own.

Every bad thing we’ve been taught to believe about China or Russia, it turns out we do too and often worse. So what loyalty should we have? What has democracy and capitalism done for us but bankrupt our seniors with medical debt and addict our children to iPads and amphetamines?

I’d love to be able to trust my government and the American ideal again, but don’t tell me I’m weak for second-guessing the whole con game this century is turning into.

This is basic "mind palace" theory, no? Human memory is linked to navigation; the more you associate memories with navigable places, the stronger your memories will remain.

This is straight-up identity theft, and likely breaks any number of consumer protection laws. I don't necessarily mind AI being used to write articles that are otherwise factual, but stealing a reporter's name to write about places he's never been and things he's never done, restaurants he's never eaten at - strikes me as a dangerous gamble for companies playing in the slim margins of advertising-based journalism.

AI may write a great restaurant review or local experience story, but the lack of fact-checking is disturbing and I hope the corporations behind these tools can be held to account when they inevitably harm someone with egregious misinformation.

You realize that video slots, financial software, HR software, legal software, educational software and MANY more all have some amount of regulatory compliance, right? Do you think social media is special somehow and should just get a free pass when aspects of it have been shown to be potentially dangerous?

It’s not like 14 year olds were reading newspapers before, and this is not a legacy media cartel trying get more teenagers into watching the news. Not everything has to be a conspiracy.