demygale

This isn’t slashdot. This is not a server under someone’s desk. This is not a quirky fight for freedom through internet protocols. Y combinator is power, influence, money, and all the abuse that may come with that.

This will never exist. The announcement is the final product.

But you’ll never know if the writer you respect is generating future novels with an AI trained on their past writing. Maybe this is better, but in a very short time, AI writing will be indistinguishable from human writing.

Yes. Sorry that was vague. Chrome dominance is bad for the open web and Google is a bad actor in every space they inhabit. Web devs who code for chrome are as bad as those who coded for ie 6 before chrome.

Chrome saved us from an abysmal browser market and endless websites that said “best viewed in Internet Explorer 6”.

Support ticket from Carvana yesterday told me to try chrome if I was experiencing problems. An open web won’t stay open for long if there’s a browser monopoly.

Do you think Google would try to crush competition the way MS did with their browser?

Get a white collar job. Even if it’s just in the trailer at the construction site. Moving to the other side of the fence will get you connections.

Not necessarily an easy thing to do. But something to work toward.

We have really good insurance and now that my partner needs treatment for a chronic illness, they are denying the treatment. It’s lowering her quality of life, may lead to her death, and it’s absolutely standard operating procedure for insurance companies. It’s a delaying tactic.

Healthcare is hard here.

Serious answer: you’re really bad at practical reasoning.

Not a fan of meetup but there’s no reservation fee in place. You can host free meetups like you always could.

I’m in two meetup groups that have regular meetings and attendees pay nothing.

If wealth disparity continues to increase these treatments will likely be unavailable to average people. Get rich or support economic policies that prevent oligarchs and billionaires.

My daily driver OS crashed multiple times a day 20 years ago and laptop hardware was sus at best. So yeah, I think quality is better. Also, look at cars. So much better with every decade that passes. It’s incredible.

It all makes sense if you assume he’s a dumb guy who got rich by accident.

Some thoughtful comments in this thread so I would like to add something pithy and under-appreciated: once you reach a certain number of users, content moderation is the only thing that matters; everything else is ui chrome.

I worked in consulting and my company was largely unaffected. We had clients in traditional businesses unrelated to the dotcom boom. But I know people who got laid off, particularly from March First, and a lot of people that got into the industry with boot camp training got out and moved on to other things.

Tether is (mostly) fine today.

But it’s an absolute, unmitigated scam and will collapse with the slightest pressure. As BTC declines, Tether’s backing declines as well, even as they print more Tether to pump up the price of BTC.

It may be that the vastness of time is the real filter. We may not be alone but our reach can’t span the time between us and our nearest neighbors

It takes a huge leap of logic to come to the conclusion that Musk cares about free speech for anyone other than himself. What he wants is speech without consequences for himself. His ability to speak is mostly unrestricted by any government power, and policy changes at Twitter will have no effect on what few restrictions he might encounter.

Mutual aid is decentralized charity, the aid comes from the community instead of a NGO.

Thanks. My reading comprehension has not powered up yet this morning.

From the article: "But truly that is the message of the Andersen folktale, that power begets the capacity to inspire delusion in the masses."

Does the "Andersen folktale" refer to Tinkerbell? Has nothing to do with the merit of the article or his argument, but Tinkerbell was a character invented by J.M. Barrie for Peter Pan and not a folktale at all.

From the link: Buffett says, "I didn’t get money from my parents, and I really didn’t want it."

Which kind of elides the fact that his father was a sitting US Congressman. Investors were willing to give large sums of money to a man in his early twenties so he could flip manufacturing firms. Ovarian lottery doesn't quite cover it.

Being a contractor would require me to spend about $10,000 more for health insurance above what my workplace premiums are. US, obvi.

When I was a contractor fifteen years ago, I billed at $1,000 a day ($125/hr) in the US, not remote. Seems like wage stagnation has hit the software market as well.

Really enjoyed the story. I love seeing the personal histories of people in my profession.

Earlier in life I went down the line of thinking that society/arts etc is getting spiritually or creatively worse compared to some earlier era I valued

It's a common idea that somehow modern society's culture and arts are in decline. In any given age that might be the case, but mostly when people make the claim it's without evidence and amounts to nothing more than a "kids today" argument.

In Jane Austen's time, novels were considered frivolous and immoral. It's a running joke in her own books. Today, we consider Austen classic literature and novels the peak of serious art. Why are novels more serious than Netflix movies or graphic novels?

As someone who avidly reads literary fiction, I don't think the genre is in danger. There were no superhero movies when I was a kid, and people who read fantasy or science fiction were bullied. Genres come and go.

Amazon is the only real threat to literary fiction. Stop buying books from Bezos.

Here’s my tenth man take: playing devils advocate is the laziest form of intellectual engagement and lends weight to positions that should have no weight at all.

All discussions about Facebook must include a reminder that they lie about everything. Pretending that they are trustworthy or reliable is disingenuous. Truths about Facebook’s lying can’t be repeated enough.

I’ve always worked in “at will” states (GA, TX), and as a result have never signed an employment contract. The only one I have ever been offered just limited my rights in the form of non-compete clauses and had nothing on my side with regards to length of employment or severance or anything.

I’ve only done subscribe and save a few times, and I’ve always received emails of price changes and delays.

That said, Amazon is the Facebook of Walmarts and you should expect an adversarial relationship. My strategy is to occasionally order something I don’t want and then return it just to chip away at their bottom line. Petty and ineffective, you say? That’s my brand.

If the idea is to pay people for the best answers and take a percentage, then why not just use money?

If your answer is anonymity or freedom from regulations, governments don’t care. They’ll regulate you.

I’ve worked overtime because I made mistakes or failed to understand the technical challenges behind a problem.

The thing is, those mistakes should be baked in to your 40 hour work week. They are for other professions. Lawyers don’t give free billable hours when a task takes more time than expected. Find a company and management that treats you like a human, and don’t give away free engineering hours.

My experience with backblaze has been dark patterns and and customer hostile practices. They get recommended in every thread about backups, and I started using them because of these recommendations. I’m not a customer any more and I wouldn’t use them again.

The GoDaddy of cloud backups for me.