hux_

I just moved all my email accounts to China.

Politics. People use whatever they can to take each other down at that level. Which is why they get paid so much. For their mindless ambition and to put up with each others mindless ambition.

Ya right. I have wasted many years of my life dealing with Debian/Ubuntu audio packaging.

Here's the 20 step process for the layman if audio doesn't work - https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SoundTroubleshootingProced...

God help you if you are building enterprise software that requires that audio stack across a hundred different sound cards. Never had any such problem on Windows.

I guess Bourdain didn't have anyone around him who could say 'how are you' right?

So you think the like counts don't have negative effects on people's beliefs and behaviours? Please read Nudge by Richard Thaler to understand how easily misguided the herd is when following the wrong signals.

Adults in my book are those you automatically/instinctively turn to when life throws you in the deep sea. It's not really about age but what they have gone through in life.

They are the folk who have not just survived the deep sea, but come out the other side with minimum damage. These people exist just like people who have summited mountains exist. You can't fake that shit. And you'll automatically know them when you see them.

You haven't heard of the game called religion?

Once upon a time the network, storage and data center guys thought Facebook/YouTubes one to many broadcasting of content would never scale too. Now they fall over themselves to work there.

His point is we know how to keep a large part of the global population constantly touching their devices like well programmed guinea pigs the whole day, negatively effecting themselves and society in uncountable ways yet postively effecting our share price. Please protect us to exit the loop or we get lynched one way of the other by customers or shareholders!

There the govt builds the controls. Here Twitter, YouTube and Facebook do. No big difference in my book. In terms of outcomes, only clowns get propped up either way.

don't make any sense unless they're decentralized

Things that make sense decentralised to service freedom have a track record of becoming centralised to service convenience. Source: The Master Switch by Tim Wu.

You are talking about people with mental illness. I think the platforms produce mental illness. If you influence and produce a certain kind of behaviour through appropriate reward mechanisms and then after a few years of conditioning reduce/remove the reward what do you think happens? Mental illness. YouTube has conditioned a generation of people to chant "subscribe like and share" like a robots. The day the "subscribe like and share" model stops being viable the robots will break down.

For those who care about doing something here is a starting point - humanetech.com

Well ever since social media converted the US into the United States of Meme Generators & Consumers, it is not really possible to go back without mass lobotomies.

Yup. Everything has been reduced to generating memes/outrage and reacting to them.

Only exit from the trap is turn off the internet.

He should resign. Or this bullshit will keep repeating. As it already has too many times.

Tech/Engineering folk are totally unfit to run social companies of the scale of YouTube/twitter/facebook etc. They don't have the skills or the experience or the sense in handling this stuff.

They know how to scale things and that's where their expertise ends and contribution should end.

They should be run by elected politicians with an advisory board filled with people who understand sociology, psychology, religion, culture, law and security. Those are the people who keep society running not the fucking plumbers.

The amount of global bullshit they have enabled in so many spheres of social life is going to take generations to repair.

Can't wait for heads to roll at Facebook/Twitter/YouTube. And they will. It's high time.

Can't wait for Sheryl Sandberg to write a new book now on garden soil or something.

HN used to be a daily source of nourishment. But today it is a source of "informed bewilderment" like everything else on the web. Google the term. Understand it's consequences on you and the people around you.

A sociologist would point you at social stratification theory.

Hardly matters what groundbreaking research the US does if it's happening neck deep in a celeb worshiping, engagement metric obsessed culture. Unless you are an Elon Musk type P.T. Barnum character good luck getting any attention. All I forsee happening is NASA, National Science Foundation etc being run by YouTube stars soon.

There are no good outcomes in the current noise. People on both extremes will misread and misuse it.

Silicon Valley's achievement in the last 10 years is to make sure ambiguity is profitable. Resolution of anything or even a path to resolution just produces less clicks, talking heads and outrage.

The proof is in the pudding. Who wants to bet 2-5 years from now the status quo wouldn't have changed? Replace the issue with gun control, climate change or universal health it hardly matters.

If you guys want to see change the noise levels have to reduce.

I don't think there is any asymmetry unless you are American. Where are the Chinese branded products on American shelves? This story plays both ways.

Thanks for the link. Interesting read. Had no idea about the gear and work involved.

You are not trying hard enough. I was at Trinity College Library, Dublin a few months back. There are few spaces that are more peaceful and inspiring to work in than that one.

You have to understand that cafés like churches or pubs or the town square have traditionally been designed as the "The Third Space" in people's lives behind home and work. It were community building happen. It's designed for that, not for work. Howard Schultz founder of Starbucks tried to bring this to the US where he felt people were loosing touch with those community spaces but still had/felt a need for them. It has been very successful for his company to tap into that need. But on the flip side lot of misguided notions have developed in peoples(cafe owners/patrons) heads about what that third space is for or why they need it.

That and find a good library. Libraries are designed for people to focus. Cafes are not.

Having lived through those days it's hard to believe this new avatar.

I wouldn't blame the people. I would blame what passes for a modern "educator". Putting a student in 'contact with beauty' of a subject is easy. Getting them on a disciplined track to mastery is another matter entirely.

For those who want to do the latter, it's not enough to be passionate and skilled in your subject. You have to deeply understand how discipline can be produced in a student.

KhanAcademy?

People fall into two broad traps. Either they are loosing money for no good reason (a consumption culture with ever escalating healthcare/edu/housing prices makes this simple), or they are accumulating money for no good reason, thanks to some class they took that says beating inflation is the point of their story. Once your housing/family healthcare/edu expenses are taken care off kiddos, there is no good reason to be beating inflation. Unless you are trying to build the Taj Mahal or something.

I am going to bet IBM, SAP and Oracle are going to disappear from that list over the next 10 years. Their numbers just represent Enterprise IT that is getting unnecessarily milked.