karllager

replacement parts for models several years old are still plentiful.

Data point:

Just replaced a battery in a six years old Samsung smartphone in 20 seconds. It did not even cost me $10. Incredible value compared to the hassle to do this on todays phones, if it is possible at all.

A friend of mine enjoyed her first years in school in the Pannonian basin; I am not sure, whether they did something special - but it was enough to get her into a selective German high-school specialised in maths and sciences later in her life. Always admired her for the experience, as she repeatedly speak of it if it has been fun and games.

Firefox 56 had some kind of performance regression[1], but FF Quantum is a joy to use.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/74irm5/is_ff_super...

Met a guy in his twenties recently. He wanted to share something with me on FB. Told him I had no account. He replied politely: Oh, yes. I believe the many people in tech do not have one.

He was a smart guy.

I wholeheartedly concur. Most people see the problem of power in that they don't have it. I believe, fewer people understand, that power itself is the problem, and not its particular location in a point in time.

We could have had a cultural renaissance, a democratization of information and thought.

I have hopes, that we will see a new mindset in the coming decades, which looks back at our times and recognises its primitive state.

There are ways to give the power back to people and raise them in ways that encourage benevolent cooperation and progress.

most powerful distributor of news and information on Earth

Sandberg (somewhere else recently): "We are explicitly not a news company, we are a tech company."

Would give this study a fresh angle, wouldn't it?

The trouble with this study - if I should guess - is selection bias: How many of those high IQ individuals are actually member of Mensa?

Given some test many years ago, I might have been qualified to become a member of this club - but never tried, as I would like to see people as people and not people as their brains, only. Maybe Mensa selects for those who are anxious about their abilities and find the notion of the club card in some way - soothing.

However, Facebook really is, at this point, a clear monopoly.

But here's a point: The zero-cost marginal cost characteristics of many software businesses makes this sector prone to be monopolistic. Acquire: data, users, or intellectual property and from there, competition will have little chance until a new wave washes clean the shores or you mismanage your company.

So the only way to stop this is to - do what? The political will and instinct, that would be required to redirect technological progress by not allowing monopolies is enormous. Not to mention the economical dynamics that come from companies competing on how to destroy privacy faster.

1 billion people shouldn't have their lives dictated by a proprietary, opaque Skinner's box with no regard for privacy or rights.

Of course they should not. Or should they? We live in a free society and you are voluntarily participating. Or not. It's your choice. And that's wonderful.

People do not realise, how simple it is to stop. As with cigarettes the real trick is to just not do it anymore. You need some willpower and some plan to cope with the temporary withdrawal effects.

Single datapoint: I briefly used FB for a few weeks about ten years ago, but never saw its value. Today, thanks to dusty email and many other (more open) sites, I have a growing number of friends around the globe and locally.

There are places (like Central Asia), which are already operating in a Free Basics mode in that basically anything beyond facebook is an extreme hurdle to use. But anyone in the western world with lots of choices can stop feeding FB today, if they cared.

Yes, true. But I am not a salesman to sell you a solution.

All I ask for is to be more conscious about these, sometimes subtle, sometimes less so - things.

If it helps you, here's a simple framework of mine to develop some kind of directional feeling for technology: If it helps to lessen the power of a single entity it's perfect, if it enables you to do new things it's good, otherwise, it might only be a distraction.

Linux and free software is perfect, it is free and a huge enabler for all kinds of things - even for businesses. Bittorrent is good, because it is a huge enabler and took power off content distributors. Raspberry Pi is perfect, because it puts computing into a lot of hands. AWS is only good, because it is an enabler, but it actually feeds a single entity - so that's bad. Cryptocurrencies in theory are perfect, since they take power off single large entities - but they are not robust yet. Solar power is perfect, because it can a human make independent of a single large entity.

So, it is somewhat simple: There are things that liberate you - you as a person and let's you voluntarily choose to cooperate and there are things that lock you in - facebooks walled garden, adtech in general, where information asymmetry only grows - and many other things, that only make sense in the capitalist framework (in however shiny colors you want to paint its advantages).

Maybe that's a start?

I'm sorry for being short on content, but I wish, more people would really go deeper into theory and open their eyes on the things around them and realize, that capitalism is an extremely aggressive beast that has sucked up everything, that is not itself.

Three days ago, I wondered (time and again) about all the fuzz about this site called facebook - within ten years it took something, that was not really exploited (social relations) and made it a first class business. Startup hubs are still dreaming of the next social startup - meaning exploiting special kind of relations (neighbours, potential partners, coworkers, what have you).

And we won't stop here. Think your dreams belong to you? Maybe today, but I can see large enterprises exploiting your very being for profit, soon. You find that disturbing? But why?

Fun fact: Capitalism depends on crises - they are not the exception, they are the rule. People forget that and treat it as something that happens, like a natural catastrophe. This is unfortunate, because this is a purely man-made thing, but still, even the high end media is kind of left in the dark about this central theme (let alone economists, who sometimes get lost in the details of their specialisation).

Now the real analytic question to ponder is: where exactly does this destructive element of capitalism originates from (left as an exercise for the reader).

So, for example, a family would go to their local technology artisan to put together a smart home system tailored specifically to their needs.

I am a software developer and consultant and you do not figure how insanely expensive I am - when your family comes through the doors of my artisanal soldering boutique and demands a custom built home automation system, I would suggest them to invest the money in a long, long vacation with the whole family instead.

I am the proud owner of a Laptop, that I can enjoy for years to come, since I can upgrade and replace disks, RAM and battery (hint: it's the last Macbook Pro that allowed this).

Recently my smartphone battery died and I could order a new one for less than $10 and replace it in 20 seconds.

Both devices are more that four years old but I am not going to replace them with something, that does not have at least this amount of repairability.

Smartphones and laptops with soldered batteries, RAM or SSD? Come on, these things are not throwaway devices - even if this is what marketing wants you to believe.

Gini coefficient is the among the highest in Europe, about 0.76. About ten years ago, a neoliberal shift loosened labor laws and saved the overall economy by letting less skilled workers not get unemployed, just take a pay cut (what France is trying to push now against a lot of protests, since government realized, the global party is over).

Wages in Germany stagnated as well, domestic trade is dwarfed by export. Living has gotten much more expensive in the cities continuously moving the shrinking middle class further down.

Germany has a track record of being strong enough, so that revolutions seldom happen. But if they happen, the are almost guaranteed to be catastrophic.

Germany is becoming a low income country for a lot of jobs and the unions are doing nothing against it.

Yes, this is true. About 39% of the currently employed have so called atypical jobs [1] - some of which are actually subsidized by the state, because income is so low.

Germany is an austerity poster child - I wonder what will happen, if the export boom is over. Things might become much worse, once the debt-financed foreign purchases dry up for some reason.

[1] https://www.boeckler.de/108863_108907.htm (German only).

23andME HAS handed your most personal data over to the authorities.

Now just wait for some strange shift in power. I hope I do not wake up in ten years, leave my house and am welcomed by the authorities (maybe the Evocops), because my subpar DNA didn't pass some unit test.

The amount of mindless, repetitive boilerplate one has to write because the language tries to be "simple" at the expense of abstraction, genericity and expressiveness looks intolerable to me.

After wasting half a day staring at a totally nonsense generic class definition in Java spanning more than ten lines of code (after having worked in with Java for many years) I do not want any programmer to be clever any more, except he or she has so much social (and code) proof, that I will be delighted to learn something in such an exercise.

For the rest - I might add as a hyperbole - even Golang is too expressive.

I'm sure I read this long ago but wasn't thinking about it. But it seems very relevant, unfortunately.

Thanks for this story. I believe a lot of people would love to work on some greater good. I, for one, would love to work for a aggressive non-profit, if there is such a thing. Software and automation is the way to the future - why let just a few profit from it?

I believe the tech sector is extremely prone to this: If you cannot climb out of a technical role, over time, you realize just how clueless most people are, especially those who imagine themselves of being "in control". Not just a bit uninformed, no: absolutely positively clueless[1].

If you go the management route, you often give up, what got you started with all this is the first place: curiosity and exploration, creation and progress. It becomes: handling paperwork, keeping the clients' bad ideas in check, motivating those on the payroll, who wait for your instructions to act. It must be nightmare.

Where is the exit?

[1] Update: I believe this is what is called the nerd/nerd-exploiter dilemma.

so my guess would be 2025 at the earliest.

And since we are in guessing mode, here is another one: In a few years we will have multiple sci-hubs and pirate edu sites so by the time the public arrives at completely free research, it won't even be a victory any more - just a symbol of the wretchedness of their fight - which, by then, will make everybody wonder, why it took so long.

The research system is kind of ill[1] and this illness (ratings, prestige, grants, publications, metrics) is very much in line with the interest of publishers. So both the researcher and the business man have a shared interest - and this is why it is hard for universities or other public entities to compete.

[1] http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2013/12/11/how...

Best of luck. Elsevier and other giants are putting significant resources in mimicking free and open structures in their portfolio to hide the infamy of their business model (selling a few bytes of publicly funded research over and over again).

To the average decision maker these "new models" will sound perfectly fine. The EU want to make all research public by 2020? Elsevier and other have very deep pockets, so my guess would be 2025 at the earliest.

One thing that made me smile on https://stackblitz.com/edit/ball-demo:

The dependency placeholder. Funny for those who remember, useful for those who don't.

I could have said "two people", it would have not changed the situation not much, I guess.

The universe itself is a giant ocean of distraction.

Well said. What makes me a bit sad is that generations of scientists and engineers poured their sweat into building chips, network and a giant incredible infrastructure and what we cheer to is a site with gifs.

I want technology to solve more pressing needs, millions of people commute to work and pollute the environment even tough we have all these internets. And so much else is wasted. Why cannot we have a nicer world - the tech seem to be is here?

Congrats on the launch.

We’d love to hear your thoughts on our product

I find it useless and just another dash in the ocean of distraction.

This experience makes me sick. There are very different places, where people are generally polite and professional and even fun. And where a sexist comment would not go unnoticed. Hope your next job will be like that.

I once attended a hackathon around some humanitarian cause. Participants in general were nice. However, I joined a team, which had two kind of strong male characters in them. None of them would be able to discuss and think freely. One guy has worked in various startups. Without him telling me more about this, I could just infer how blame-driven his developer jobs were by seeing him interacting with the others. Really scary. The other imagined himself as an activist. So active, that in the end, we did not produce anything at that hackathon and I believe without these two males it would have been much simpler to actually get a discussion going and to have fun.

In general, the more educated and diverse people are, the more they are able to think and think independently. The more people are responsible for themselves the more they are responsible for creating a work atmosphere, that is healthy for all participants - because hate and exclusion lessen motivation and there is one thing that need to go out to all businesses and managers and hierarchical elements: You cannot motivate people - you can only demotivate them. And this can happen much faster than one might believe.