nutshell89

Also related: "I-XRAY: The AI Glasses That Reveal Anyone's Address Just from Looking at Them" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41713204

I think what's missing from a lot of these discussions is how much more commerce-driven the present day internet is over the 90s-00s. Social media is highly addictive and destabilizing in order to get it's audience to eventually pay for something in TikTok Shop, or view sponsored content, for example. Dark patterns were introduced to increase revenue or to get users to dole out their personal information for advertising effectiveness.

I personally think that these sorts of changes were inevitable, especially since the development of internet-native payments infrastructure lagged (and continues to lag) the development of web technologies, as well as humanity spending more of our time on the internet — if the society revolves around accumulation and transfer of capital, the internet would eventually change to facilitate trade

The answer here is pretty simple — you take money, resources, etc from people who don't reproduce and you redistribute them to the people who do until the population stops declining.

I really wish Spotify or Apple offered the ability for the listener to simply listen all of the songs released on their platform on a day or a week, good or bad, and directly pay the artists for the songs listeners enjoy. Spotify's "New Releases" for example, tracks only music that major labels promote, or that fit a predetermined genre, or are similar to the songs and artists that you already listen to.

There are smaller services yes, which allow for independent promotion and distribution (Last.fm, RateYourMusic) but these have fairly obvious flaws in how the listener can approach new music (RYM pushes ratings first and foremost, and both last.fm and rym push trending artists to their users).

Instead, because the value of music is zero (really, negative since the number of listens, streams, album purchases, etc can fail to recuperate the cost to make it ), the act of distributing music presents economic risk unless the release itself can be controlled by the investors through advertisement or paid promotion.

I think it's less about memorizing lyrics, tunes, etc and more about associating certain musical pieces with specific memories, feelings, and life events (like a grandmother baking pies in November while she whistles The Beatles, remembering navigating the pain of a breakup through Taylor Swift, or churning through homework with the soundtrack of Daft Punk)

Something that has bothered me about Hacker News for years at this point is its complete disdain and disregard for an independent, reputable press.

Journalism isn’t a perfect industry by any means, but it hasn’t been responsible for the wholesale discount sale of America's manufacturing sector, nor has it pushed for the erosion of societal attention and trustworthiness like Social Media, nor has it been at the forefront of abusing gig work to the extremes of major players in the Sharing Economy — yet any center-left, traditional media outlet is met with ad-hominem attacks, logical fallacies, etc. If anything, that industry has been picked clean like vultures by the financial and thought leaders in this industry.

I don't fully understand the dynamic between the west-coast hate for the east-coast press but it seems inconsequential to me because while the truth has costs, weaponized lies can hurt much more.

I kind of wish Molly White spent more time researching and disseminating information on CBDCs — the PACs to me are emergent behavior due to popularity and rise of crypto ETFs so there's not much of a story there.

ETFs aren't really financial instruments that the mainstream public will likely interact with or directly invest in, but CBDCs will probably proliferate wildly throughout the global economy in a matter of years so it's a bit of a missed chance for the public to weigh in on them.

The study involves AI based code generation on Leetcode problems using GPT-3.5 — functional code was produced between 0.66 percent and 89 percent of the time, but I'd like to see the same study conducted with GPT-4 or the latest Claude models.

I know a lot of HN readers are probably of the mind already that, "when a product is free, you are the product", and "these companies use zero marginal cost to create economies of scale".

The article hints to much worse impacts than that — with massive data harvesting and collection, companies can effectively monopolize knowledge, create information asymmetry advantages, allowing customers (e.g., data brokers) to charge consumers the maximum that they are able to pay, directly increasing prices.

I'm not sure why you set the track playback to the middle of song, but it feels very literal. There's the "suffering" starting from 2:50 or so from the distortion of the guitars — I guess it reminds me of 56k modems, maybe?

But because that distortion fades completely by ~ 5:00, and the track ends at 7:30, it feels like 90 seconds of "dead space" so it feels incomplete if that makes any sense. It's a song which places its emphasis on the dead center of the track, but because it doesn't build on the distortion or play off of it — it kind of overstays it's welcome.

I'm not quite sure I get it, the album itself is kind of...mid? It's 2+ hours of an aggressively boring take on the previous decade's music ideals desperately in need of an editor.

Honestly, it solidifies the ideal that with the vast quantity of new music released today, that if damn near every song isn't worth the listener's time, those songs don't belong on an album, they don't belong on a remix album, they don't belong on a deluxe edition, they really only have a place in live shows, livestreams, or anthologies when you're dead.

There are software solutions that exist yes, (DOSBox Staging as mentioned below, certain RetroArch shaders look very good) but neither really represent an actual product — DosBox Staging is supposedly zero config but simultaneously requires configuring a DOS environment. Replicating a shadow mask, or curved screen for example requires fiddling with shaders, not to mention aspect ratio, the size, or display resolution.

In any case, most emulation software is geared towards gaming — many art galleries for example still use CRTs for preservation (https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/17/t-magazine/technology-art..., https://youtu.be/rHBtmPZx82A?t=1828) and these software solutions don't really fill the gap of a general-purpose CRT display.

Unrelated to anything in the article, but I'm curious as to why there haven't been OLED or LCD panels manufactured specifically for general-purpose CRT emulation in hardware + software (via curved panels, artifacts unique to CRTs such as pixel blurring, phosphor persistence, scanlines, etc) for retro video games, film preservation, and artwork.

The Fed study mentioned in the Bloomberg article: https://www.frbsf.org/economic-research/publications/economi...

Gift article: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/09/technology/taylor-swift-l...

The SCOTUS not chosen to review this case yet.

https://archive.ph/wkm57

Tesla comes pretty close:

- lists all models on the homepage, along with products like Solar Roofs and panels

- The order button on any model's page has a compare button

- Specs are also available on the model's page

- Allows for payment with minimal clicks

- Shows financing / fees choice depending on state

I think this is because Tesla, like Apple is a deeply vertically integrated company with financial and company-value incentives around marketing and selling mass-market luxury goods honed in on the idea of consumer-friendly, tech-savy products / services.

In early 2020, NYC transit operators were barred from wearing masks and the MTA reasoned that there was not federal or state policy at the time recommending mask usage.

At the time, the surgeon general cautioned the general public to stop buying masks because, "they had not been proven effective in preventing the spread of coronavirus."

https://gothamist.com/news/subway-train-operator-says-mta-wo...

COVID-19 by and large goes from an overwhelming threat to most countries healthcare systems to a seasonal flu variety.

I think that what many of the comments here miss is that "Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era" was not officially mentioned until a year later, and the Chinese Constitution was not amended until 2018. China in 2016 likely didn't appear like the threat to Western geopolitics that it does today.

Hired also mentions:

Exceptions included San Francisco and New York City from 2020 to 2021 due to increased demand for junior talent.

so maybe junior talent is replacing the more senior level talent in SF / NY and depressing wages.

https://hired.com/blog/highlights/state-of-tech-salaries-in-...

In the case of violence-based examples above, the hypothetical society doesn't address the issue of past harm (decades or centuries of a disadvantaged position in society). It also doesn't address non-economic forms of harm (like media underrepresentation, leadership underrepresentation, etc.)

The hand-drawn version feels less "mechanical" to me. It's hard to explain, but it's like watching an anime where the artists switch from 2d to 3d animation for complex or repetitive scenes in a way that feels cheap or jarring.

Masking up on transit. Along with learning about subway air quality, I don't think there's ever going to be a flu season where I don't wear a KN95 mask on a train.

I think there's more to the winner-take-all economy than the rate of technological change though. In theory technology should democratize information and power, but we've seen the opposite in recent years.

It's probably what PG wrote back in April—starting with the Chicago School of economic thought and the Carter administration, the US federal govt. deregulated the economy and took a more lax approach to policing anti-competitive behavior.

Even the NBA avoids "perfect meritocracy" at the margins of the league; there's a player's association, the NBA has had a pension since the 60's, there are salary caps and luxury taxes (to prevent super-teams from forming on the coasts), top draft picks often end up on the worst performing teams in prior yeas, each team has to contribute players to new rosters whenever the league expands, etc.

I think what's key in the author's musings is that meritocracy on its own can lead to sociopaths, bullies, and tyrants controlling society because the institutions at bay sort individuals according to merit, not morals, or subject matter interest.

In many cases the skills of one meritocrat are indistinguishable from another, which leads to ever-increasing hoops that one must jump through to succeed in society.

A lotto could be combined with meritocratic measures like Texas's University 10% rule which ensures geographic and racial diversity.

I wonder if / how this sort of thing might be implemented in video games (like classic micro console releases or video game remasters).

Arguably $30k isn't a meaningful wage increase to the people surveyed on Blind — especially if the users are heavily weighted towards the FAANG / SV / SF crowd with high housing / cost of living expenses.