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Which country has an anti-complaining bias? I’m guessing it would be somewhere people are empowered to solve their problems. High purchasing power countries?

The US and UK used to both be kinda stiff upper lip countries in the 90s but now are full of complaining.

Does anyone have experience moving somewhere and noticing it was much less complainey?

It's also worth noting you only admitted you were not an expert once your initial post was debunked

No, that was in the original comment. I added only the paragraph prefixed with EDIT.

My friend, you are just picking a fight on the internet. You don’t actually know what the comment was and yet you say you do. Please do not.

Alternatively, please tell me how my comment is misleading now, if there truly exists an argument in your comment beyond an ad hominem. That would be more useful.

I clearly stated “I’m not an expert on this” and publicly corrected my mistake to not mislead readers.

Don’t fulminate, my brother, see comment guidelines on HN for more info. There’s need to act like this and your comment doesn’t contribute anything to the discussion.

I think selling hard drugs being criminal is OK. But the US should actually do something with the severe addicts rather than just tossing them in prison, or creating laws against that and leaving them on the streets.

Mandatory rehabilitation would do a lot. But rehabilitation would work much worse in an environment where relapse is easily attainable, anyone who has had any kind of addiction will tell you that.

I think part of the problem is people with no real experience pushing their narrative. Many honest drug addicts will tell you the actual solutions that will be around wholistic rehabilitation: withdrawals treatments, reintegration into society, no permanent records, removing stigma. And some would prefer to be funneled into that rather than go to rehabilitation by free will. Free will stands no chance against a heroin or meth addiction.

My family member works in a psychiatric clinic in Central Europe. They deal with severe addictions. They have proper rehabilitation programs with dedicated facilities where people with severe addictions that have led to mental disorders learn to reintegrate with life, attend job interviews, take care of themselves, and so on. I have spent my childhood around these people as family members of clinicians would attend various events (Christmas parties, weddings, funerals, other outings, etc) and I have not felt threatened by anyone in rehabilitation.

But yeah, what I see in West Coast cities is threatening. It’s a day and night difference between that and proper care for hard drug addicts though. West Coast is what ignoring the problem looks like. Central Europe is what solving the problem looks like. In both cases, hard drug sales are not legal.

And the solution is ridiculously simple. If someone is acting out in public due to drugs, police would be called. The police would deliver them to a psychiatric clinic in a municipal hospital. The clinic would put them in a ward and on a rehab program, start withdrawals management, set up a social worker for employment, and so on. It would take several months to rehabilitate someone and some people would go through the program a few times. Not all of it is easy and the taxpayer pays for the healthcare. But that’s the cost of solving this problem, and that does solve it.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-modern-heart/202...

Ah, thanks for the additional knowledge. I’ll edit my comment for clarification.

Epic Games v Google is going to appellate now, though, isn’t it?

Yes, ultimately our morals, culture, and sense of justice gets enshrined in law. But I did feel a big difference between living in a common law country and a civil law one.

There was a sense in business circles in the latter that what is not legally a crime, one cannot be punished for. So there was a bit of a drive to exploit that for profit. If something becomes forbidden by law, it’s “verboten”. It cannot take place, no matter how ethical it might be.

It’s much less clear in common law countries, where you could be tried and be unable to defend yourself for immoral things. Or you could break the laws but have such a strong moral argument for it, it is possible to defend. So generally, people and business are more considerate of each other, less stone cold bureaucratic. But that invites ambiguity in the legal process, even if the ultimate forces shaping it are similar to civil law. And you can get different outcomes in similar cases, like Epic Games v Apple and Epic Games v Google. These cases started out very similarly.

In civil law countries, if something was prohibited by a code, then it would be penalized, there wouldn’t be much debate in the courts. I think this is why the EU keeps fining these large tech companies all the time, it’s like a non-event, whereas it’s much more difficult in the us.

That is what I observed. Of course, what you say is also true.

Well, it’s common law, not civil law. So lawyers, juries, judges and so on all heavily influenced the Epic Games v Apple outcome, as they did in Epic Games v Google.

The next time someone sues Apple for this, there will be precedent. But then again, Epic Games v Apple might be used as precedent in Google’s appeal.

EDIT/correction: Apparently, only appellate and higher courts can set precedent for case law. So it might take a bit longer for Epic Games v Google to set a precedent, while Epic Games v Apple has already been dealt by a higher court. The next time someone sues Apple, there might not yet be precedent set by Epic Games v Google.

In theory. I’m not an expert on this. But this doesn’t happen as often in civil law countries I lived in (EU), where the law doesn’t apply before it’s written, and when it’s written, it applies universally.

Things will even out in the US over time, I think. There will be case law for what’s allowed and what is not for everyone.

Why one or the other?

There are moral principles, and legal principles. Legally, you are right. But the moral perception of piracy is shifting, and broadly speaking, this entire debate is in the moral/philosophical realm.

Legal systems ultimately enshrine the human morality in law. Common law - through case law, civil law - by committees that the legislators consult, religious law - by morality described in legal texts. We're not talking about any of it though. We are talking about day-to-day things, like what does it mean to steal, what kind of consequences it has, are these consequences real or supposed, and other such things.

Law is generally blind to externalities of an action. An action itself is legal, illegal, or undefined in law. We're not in this domain if we talk about the consequences of piracy or how someone might feel about it. We are having a conversation on morals.

Shifting morals will eventually shift the law, of course.

Games are always pirated if they are even a little bit popular. I work in the games industry, and games I worked on are always pirated, but the more popular they are, the more copies will be sold legitimately.

People make two choices when they pirate - moral, and economical. If economically they cannot afford the game, they weren't going to pay. If morally they are against paying for a game (like if the game company is associated with suicides, etc), they weren't going to pay. There are some people that will pay if piracy isn't available, but not that many.

Anyways, after the income goes around, and all the exec, upper management, and publisher salaries are paid, the piracy or lack of it probably makes about a $1 difference to my weekly earnings. I put a lot of artistic and creative effort, blood, sweat, and tears into it. If it costs me $1 to make people enjoy it, so be it.

In the AAA games industry, piracy is a thing. People talk about it. And most people have only very mild things to say about it, except for execs. Execs make a disproportionate amount of money off games for what they do, and they do kinda have a lot of time to sit on their hands sometimes, so they can fight these piracy battles, die on these piracy hills.

Anyways, don't speak for us please.

I don't think the three points you made are a consequence of speed limits or making cars inconvenient. They are a consequence of city planning and making public transit and bicycle transit convenient.

I think cars are in quite inelastic demand for many people who use them in Amsterdam. There are people with cardiovascular conditions, people who need to transport others, carry heavy items, and so on.

Incentivizing works better than punishing generally.

The jailbreak patches are for the walled garden, too. Security is not a concern for those who use jailbreaks. They want to get their devices in the insecure state and go to lengths to do it.

It's similar to how OpenAI uses "safety" to make sure their LLMs don't get them in hot water, and PlayStation uses "safety" to make sure their consoles do not become associated with piracy and make publishers think twice.

This kind of "safety" is about business interests. :) Some companies can say it openly that they wish to protect their business, as fundamentally there is nothing wrong with that. Others can't as that will bode poorly for their monopoly status and they will suffer (overdue) legal repercussions. So it becomes "safety".

Notice how companies that argue against user freedom for "safety" are always in circumstances where bringing up business interests behind "safety" won't bode well.

I was not mislead by that comment. It was clear that most people have their messages accessible to Apple, which is what the article also talks about - how privacy of "blue bubble" messages is at the center of this.

There are ways to opt out. But that's for the margin of people who worry about these things. So what that comment said is very relevant and accurate.

Wouldn’t this cause more pollution? Lower fuel efficiency, increased congestion, more half-clutch inching, more stopping, more time spent by each vehicle on each road…

…At least assuming the number and routes of travels stay constant.

I used to drive a 2010 Diesel VW Golf, about 55kW, in Central Europe. It would take 4l/100km at 70kph and closer to 11l/100km when maneuvering slowly. 2.75x pollution diff per km in these scenarios.

Sound is important, but cars also pollute the air.

Why do US banks do that? I’ve never had a UK or EU bank call me to verify a transaction.

Do you have the IdentityCheck/SecureCode/3-D Secure stuff (2FA for online transactions and at certain terminals)? Are these calls for transactions without chip + PIN?

I’ve had some transactions declined while travelling but maybe about 1/1000, and still no call, and nothing the bank support could do to allow them if I called. I’d just have to use a different bank with a vendor. It’s very much a “computer says no” situation then. Otherwise, the payment just goes through in the 99.9% of all cases.

But the banks in central EU, the Nordics, and the UK don’t seem to monitor the transactions I make while travelling to the point that there would be an actual person involved (calling me or reaching out in some other way).

I’m mostly curious about what problem these bank calls are solving. Is it for credit card fraud? In that case, I wonder why this seems to not be a practice in Europe. Is it because we do chip & PIN in physical payments, and 2FA for online/some kiosks?

My Samsung “HDR” TV can only approach what an HDR image looks like on a studio display if a bunch of these settings are on and balanced just right.

It feels as if Samsung deliberately lowers contrast, for example, until their dynamic contrast is enabled, as the picture matches studio displays much more closely then.

No proof, not making this claim, but it did feel this way when I had my TV side by side to a studio display.

“In some respects” is such a weakening qualifying statement, that it could be made about anything.

In some respects, this comment is like Pulitzer-winning writing. (Pulitzer writing is in English, too)

In some respects, I am as good as George Clooney. (I am as good if not a better software engineer in my niche)

In some respects, $1 is worth far more than $10. (Earning the first $1 is in business is a bigger milestone than earning $10)

“To the best of my ability” is another funny one. To the best of my ability, I am the rubberhose variant of Mickey mouse. To the best of its ability, this comment is Diet Coke.

Such completely meaningless statements, but strictly speaking, unfalsifiable.

You’re responding to a statement you straw-manned. The comment you’re responding implies a slippery slope, not an equivalence between DIY safety and letting kids be outside.

I also wonder what that means. What target would this software be compiled for? Apple Silicon or x86?

If x86, then some feasible but difficult approaches exist, such as a translation layer or providing own reverse-engineered APIs. It would be tremendously difficult to achieve practical usability beyond very limited cases. However, by the time it could be done, won't the x86 macOS target be entirely obsolete?

If the target is Apple Silicon, it makes even less sense. The instruction set is ARM + Apple's mods which are proprietary. Moreover, they keep iterating on that instruction set and making new software alongside it. What's to stop Apple from using a Rosetta approach to run their M2 code on M1? If they have a translation layer, they don't need backwards compatibility in the instruction set.

So reverse-engineering would be extraordinarily hard - like, beyond human capability for a small team with no insider leaks out of Apple. Can this project keep reverse-engineering the instructions fast enough as Apple iterates on the arch? Not in reality. x86 is hard but this is that, and a moving target (pun intended).

So... how?

EDIT: Upon looking into it more, it looks like they want to use x86 translation layer Darling + open-source APIs. This seems more like running (maybe) basic GUI applications compiled for Apple's x86 targets that do not rely too heavily on the Apple ecosystem's APIs. So more for fun than for robust day-to-day compatibility akin to Rosetta. So I guess then it doesn't matter that it's a dying target, as it's more of a theoretical thing?

The idea is nice, I don't want to dismiss it. I think attempting it could be a lot of fun. They're kind of brave to call it a project aim though, I don't think it's wise to set such expectations.

There was also a time when the iPhone looked like this - https://i.imgur.com/wwH2UoF.jpg

Yes, but you are straw-manning the argument. This is skankphone UI - a UI used by the technical team building back-end services and features for the original iPhone. The actual UI was being built in parallel, and obviously it never looked like that.

I think it's at least five elements:

1. Hacker-tinkerer culture, where you want to build new things that haven't been built on new hardware for fundamentally non-commercial reasons. This could be called Carmack-style hacker culture in my mind, which produced Quake.

2. Genuinely extensive programming expertise.

3. Not partaking in the current and quite toxic VC-funded game development culture, where funding dictates rushed deliverables (through schedules, and the constant race to attract funding with demos). It's feature factory or die in a lot of VC-funded scale-ups.

4. Lucky circumstances - knowing someone who could get you Quake source on "just have it, we'll work something out eventually" terms back then was exceptionally lucky. Quake was very far ahead of it's time. Most companies that produce such work now would work very hard to make sure no one else gets it. And that goes back to the hacker culture of just building cool things to share with people that was more common in games then.

5. Time - the games industry was young, before Quake there were no proper 6 DoF generalist 3D game engines, so it was an auspicious time for game development.

I'm a game developer and I am a bit old school, so I'm not the best person to speculate on why JavaScript programmers seem less able to build cool tech. But I have seen many young people approach programming differently now, probably because it has become a lot more commodified. The mindset of a "clock-in clock-out" programmer wasn't common in game circles in the 90s and 00s. Also, there was much less focus on using "correct" idioms and beautiful code as the end goal in hacker circles, and a lot more focus on building something that others haven't built before and working out the details later. Moreover, business viability was rarely the first thing you would think about and work backwards from when you worked on a game project. Business success was a byproduct of building cool games.

If you would remember game trailers from early 00s, like Half-Life 2 (since we are talking about Valve), you would pick up that they show off cool tech like physics simulation, which is quite janky and imperfect. Carmack also has spoken many times about how in his early games (pre-Quake) the graphics would initially be quite bad and he would be worried about getting everything fixed in time. Cool over safe, cool over perfect, and showing off cool things that were not polished was normal.

Nowadays, things are different in some ways. The game development has become methodical and focused on the exploitation of passion for money in a repeatable way. You get as many features as you can for marketing (you only need to have them, they can be whatever quality, it's only for the Steam page and trailer). You cut all the awesome new things as they are a risky waste of money, you instead funnel all the passion into velocity for delivering that bundle of features as quickly as possible for as cheap as possible, and that's it. If you can strike a deal with a nice IP, that will make the game sell a lot more. So will striking a deal with a publisher with deep pockets for marketing. But the "do cool things" hacker culture is gone in AAA and blockbuster games. It's now relegated to indies where quite a lot of janky but incredibly cool games are made. But they have a funding access problem as their business is too risky for most publishers and VCs. And that's probably why we don't see many new and big id and Valve-type companies anymore.

Although with VR, there are some companies that I believe could be like that. And they attract senior talent quite well. With the right management and timing, I think we could see another Valve in VR. Even Carmack played a big role in VR until recently, before he moved on to the next new thing in tech. Being on the precipice of new tech is important for people of that culture.

An interesting read on grit that was popular on LessWrong, despite not being posted to their platform - https://docs.google.com/document/d/1CyHvCwWh_BwukwNE-y61oBCj...

Some people think it's not a big deal. I don't know why.

Isn’t it almost always much better in acquisitions that the acquired company owns all of their code? I have been told so many times. Apparently the valuation is significantly impacted if they do not.

This often happens ingenuously, not out of calculated ill intent. Coders will keep code snippets and thoughts in personal knowledge tools like Notion, and then reuse them in different companies. Or contractors will straight up copy and paste code from source files of projects they worked on for different companies, thinking "I wrote it, so I could write it again, but why bother?", or something along those lines. People don't usually brag about these things, but they do come to light in random conversations.

This is exactly what happened here:

According to Valeo's complaint, Mohammad Moniruzzaman, an engineer for NVIDIA who used to work for its company, had mistakenly showed its source code files on his computer as he was sharing his screen during a meeting with both firms in 2022

In most cases, these people are asked to remove all such code from the codebase and never do it again, but news about this rarely reaches the executive level. Usually, there aren't clear rules that it's supposed to be reported, so low level managers handle it the best they can. Of course, this guy got caught in very unusual circumstances.

It is also very unfortunate to be the software engineer who notices others doing this, because it puts you in a whistleblower's dilemma. The upper management does not want to be implicated in this and they do not want to know. Besides, informing them would definitely lead to the coder's firing. What is worse, many programmers see liberal use of IP as "not a big deal". So you would be perceived as causing problems for upper management, and getting people fired for "petty" reasons. It can sink your career in most companies if you witness this and it gets out. There are laws that protect whistleblowers from being let go sometimes, but it's not conducive to anyone's career growth to remain in the company because they cannot be fired.

Generally, not good. Many SWEs in games want to leave for cheaper countries or countries with better pay (US). Our salaries are low, but we don’t have a good social safety net to show for it (i.e. our public healthcare is practically inaccessible due to wait times in hospitals, and public dental — forget about it). So it’s a raw deal.

I don’t think about how people on average salaries live. Or people with kids, or both. It is too depressing of a thought. One third of kids now live in poverty, more than one in five adults — a better stat thanks in part to professional DINK couples threading water. Poverty is below paycheck-to-paycheck.

There are no clear prospects for things improving. No meaningful political action. See BBC, Guardian, etc for what the government is concerned about instead. There’s no point turning this into a political discussion and beating the proverbial dead horse.

Upskilling and migrating into more well paid jobs is hard. If you didn’t have enough time to study outside of work before, now with the CPI rising and your real wage dropping, you have even less time.

Even if it sounds grim, people are finding individual solutions, like leaving.

The last two years in the games industry has seen a lot of attrition just from people becoming unable to sustain their lifestyles in the UK. And a lot of these people are exceptionally skilled 10+ years of exp professionals, and very driven, so they deserve at least an average lifestyle.

What is going on thanks to Brexit and all that is an injustice to them. And good on them for looking out for themselves first. Whenever a colleague leaves for a better life elsewhere, I am happy.

OpenAI is in fact not open

This meme was already dead before the recent events. Whatever the company was doing, you could say it wasn’t open enough.

a real disruptor must be brewing somewhere unnoticed, for now

Why pretend OpenAI hasn’t just disrupted our way of life with GPTs in the last two years? It has been the most high profile tech innovator recently.

OpenAI does not have in its DNA to win

This is so vague. What does it not have in its… fundamentals? And what is to “win”? This statement seems like just generic unhappiness without stating anything clearly. By most measures, they are winning. They have the best commercial LLM and continue to innovate, they have partnered with Microsoft heavily, and they have so far received very good funding.

A lot of people in tech say that executives are excessively diplomatic and do not speak their truth. But this is what happens when they do too much, too ardently, too often. This is why diplomacy and tact is so important in these roles.

Things do not go well if everyone keeps poking each other with sticks and cannot let their own frame of reference go for the sake of the bigger picture.

Ultimately, I don’t think Altman doesn’t believe ethics and safety is important. And I don’t think Toner fails to realize that OpenAI is only in a place to dictate what AI will be due to its commercial principles. And they probably both agree that there is a conflict there. But what tactful leadership would have done is found a solution behind closed doors. Yet from their communication, it doesn’t even look like they defined the problem statement — everyone offers a different idea of the problem that they had to face together. It looks more like it was more like immature people shouting past each other for a year (not saying it was that, but it looks that way).

Moral of the story: tact, grace, and diplomacy are important. So is speaking one’s truth, but there is a tactful time, place, and manner. And also, no matter how brilliant someone is, if they can’t develop these traits, they end up rocking the boat a lot.

The quality of ads also differentiates YouTube from other platforms (like proper TV) and even burned in sponsored messages. Ad reads in popular podcasts are miles ahead in terms of quality.

The average ad on YouTube is scraping the bottom of the barrel in terms of creativity, cinematography and appeal to people in general. I’m talking about the average ad with personalization off — the mobile game “mafia boss”, slightly pervy, and really weird shock value ads, or the get rich quick schemes, or even straight up crypto fraud. If some better advertisers are targeting you - consider yourself very lucky.

I do enjoy a good ad every now and then. Something creative and well executed. But that’s not what YouTube is serving. And you might hate all ads — it’s ok, everyone is different. Though I think some people would be ok with ads that are respectful of their time as I am one of them.