over_bridge

I feel like I'm crazy here but isn't China just sitting there doing nothing?

On one hand there's the relentless barage of American propaganda. I get that a militaristic society needs an enemy to fight against lest they turn on each other. I get that if you tell people a bad guy is coming for your jobs or your lives then you can maybe get your workers to accept worse conditions and living standards which increases profits. It's ghoulish but there's some logic.

On the other hand I can't see China doing anything except minding its own business. No tariffs. No bullying other nations. No wars started. No threatening allies. They don't let their people waste their lives on brain rot or gambling. They largely align with UN resolutions. They respect international institutions instead of always being the asterisk.

Has American propaganda just failed to work outside it's borders? It's not landing at all

I don't trust any American company because they will switch into extraction mode eventually and squeeze every cent they can out of you.

Even if the founders didn't want that, eventually the upper ranks will fill with MBAs and the board with private equity and they will make it that way. Their bonuses are based on quarterly performance not customer experience

Long gone are the companies who served their communities for decades or centuries, providing a stable return to the owners, jobs for the workers and value to the customers.

I'd rather China have my data than America. China might do something with it one day but America built exploiting it into the business model (disclaimer that I'm not Uyghur or Taiwanese though)

What I like about Hacker News is each day I open it up, scan the first three pages, open 2-5 links to read, then close it again. Those pages make it easy to monitor my usage and set limits. I used to do the same with Reddit before that changed

I'd fully support removing infinite scroll or even just banning it from under 18 year olds

Unless you also believe the neutral view is earth being half flat and half round

I like this analogy. You can't just average two ideas and call it a centrist position. Sometimes one position is right and the people supporting the losing idea should be ignored. Facts are how we decide. People are not logical creatures and will cling to ideas beyond all reason or common sense once they've incorporated it into their identity. There is a reason that right wing appeals to emotion aren't popular with LLMs

Or if you read Sapiens you'll know money is a story we tell each other. You can't literally do much with a coin or bank note or numbers on a screen but as long as we all believe it has value, it does. It becomes part of the culture, as you say.

Crypto also has to tell a story about why it's valuable. There was a lot of anti government rhetoric and fear mongering (from libertarians) but the public never really believed the story was true. It was a lot of FOMO.

NFTs failed completely to sell their story but crypto is still hanging on among its supporters. AI is telling a similar story about the value of tokens which is being well received

Agreed with this. The majority would happily stop working but we never hear that message because a small percentage of nutters have tied their whole identity to their job and how hard they work. These people dominate headlines and shift the Overton window. Elon is the poster boy of this but there are plenty of others pushing extreme habits.

Most people I know just want to hit their escape number then they'll never be seen again.

I just regret the loss of the Renaissance values. They believed people should pursue many things to become broad and well adjusted. Nowadays it's just obsession about a single thing to the detriment of all other aspects of life. We've embraced one dimensional people and given them the world.

How is it legal to have different share classes? You could make 100 shares that can vote and then sell 99.9% of the company while maintaining full control. Seems strongly against the spirit of a publicly traded company

Can you imagine if the world ever actually achieved a state of utopia? Stupid people would burn it down within weeks just to have something to watch

Cowards. I maintain my position that all political polls are either useless or actually detrimental to democracy though - how many didn't vote for Hillary because the polls said she'd win? How many more might have turned out if they hadn't seen that? Only the election matters and the rest is noise

Wait so now SpaceX is the company letting you undress people? Why mix gold and poop? SpaceX plus xAI.

Seems like we've got a few of these imbalances now where you'd expect 50:50 but instead it's skewed to one side where nature had a different idea

Matter-antimatter ratio

Left vs right handed molecules

Now galaxy spin directions

Maybe there are others I missed too

I really don't agree. People behave differently when they know they are being recorded. They are less likely to admit mistakes or ask dumb questions.

There's just this odd formal air about them and I get annoyed when certain people try to record everything. Sometimes people just need to be able to speak freely.

There's a time and place for recording stuff - technical walk throughs, bug reports, demos, meetings where attendees are employed by different companies etc. Having your standup recorded just encourages one sentence answers (and yes, that's a bad thing if you want people to actually tell you if they have a problem)

PhD should never be considered a sign of intelligence. Anyone can get one if they pay enough and don't have any better prospects

Skip Crossroads of Twilight. Read the summary on Wikipedia. It's a gimmick that covers the same day and events from lots of different perspectives. None of them are good. That book serves as a slap in the face for the author who made a course correction for book 11 and got it back on track. Then Sanderson naturally has a faster pace than Jordan and brings it home strong. 11-14 are great again for those who survive 7-10.

Because 'line go up' is the only globally shared value left in modern society

Humans need a world where being lazy causes their standard of living to deteriorate in a very noticable way, where working hard causes their standard of living to improve

The opposite of capitalism then? Right now, as soon your absolute asset gains equal your expenses, you can coast along doing nothing forever. You'll probably get richer too if you can live below that level. The whole goal of society is to retire and literally stop working hard (minus a few workaholic CEOs who will die alone at their desks).

Once you learn that online outrage doesn't actually impact your life that much, its easy to ignore. Gone are the days of public apologies and now we just sweep criticism under the rug and carry on.

Jira now makes your requirements for you. They all seem perfectly logical and not connected to anything your actual customers need.

You joke but the drive to increase profits at any cost is having pretty insidious impacts on the world. Enshittification is everywhere now with companies being forced to degrade customer experience to appease shareholders. Nothing wrong with making a profit but making additional profit every single quarter is making the western world hostile to most people on average wages. It's too expensive to even live here with only a small percentage of people doing well under these circumstances.

I think we might be seeing the end of hyper specialisation. The need for pure coders will decrease in the same way pure scrum masters, business analysts or project managers did. The skills are still there and used but they are aspects of roles rather than the whole role.

That is my optimistic read on AI. Return of the generalists (note - don't read that as a 'jack of all trades' but rather someone who is very good at 2-5 things rather than an expert at 1-2). Have a broader base and know how to use AI tools to do the prescriptive parts.

A profitable company that lacks DEI is still a success

A company that loses money but has plenty of DEI is a failure.

DEI is not the factor that determines success or failure.

It is a tool that you can use but it makes no sense as a goal or target in itself. If your customer base has some attributes that aren't reflected in the staff, maybe hiring some will help you relate. The idea that your company must match the 'diversity' of the general public (in one country) is all backward.

I'm interested in a device like this for my sight impaired older relatives. They struggle with smartphones and would benefit from a single purpose device with big obvious UI elements. Not sure they are the target demographic for the R1 but I can see v3 (R3?) being pretty useful. Maybe sell a case that looks like a tea cosy and ditch the orange first though

You have to wonder if there's some 1-5% of humans who don't meet the bar of being self aware. They seem to exist as parodies of people who can't learn or reflect on past actions. Being on a continuum would make a lot of sense with the sharpest crows and dullest people maybe crossing over a bit.

Free market ideology has a lot in common with religion. Ignore all data and common sense and just embrace the idea that its true. All will make sense once the goal is achieved and until then you just have to have faith.

The idea that competition is the holy grail of progress is a similar situation. Cooperation is far superior. When two lions compete, both get covered in scratches and bites and they die of infection. When they work together they can hunt and raise a family. We are always expecting companies to compete when one look at an actual megacorp will show you how much effort they spend on avoiding competition. It's all mergers and acquisitions. Buy your competitors before they are a challenge and add them to your empire (cooperation). Why does every industry merge into a monopoly? Because its far easier to cooperate as a single unit than as separate entities sniping at each other

The pursuit of the ideal free market forces us to adopt such unnatural beliefs and behaviors, and we have to pretend they are just fine.

Politicians 'come to their senses' when they interact with normal people and are accountable to them. Public funding of elections and bans on large private donations remove the incentive to only talk to rich people. Getting money out of politics needs to be a top priority. If money isn't a factor then all voices become equal and democracy can rear its head once more.

I feel like modern presidential campaigns are just two team captains assembling as many billionaires as they can on their team. Biggest net worth team wins

Finally a solution to the problem of tech companies sitting on huge piles of cash with nothing to buy! Give it all to NVIDIA

A site with accounts that you never want linked to your real self, or your other accounts, under any circumstances. It bucks the trend of every profile linking to every other one somewhat

That fiduciary duty needs to die/ be reimagined. It's turned corporations into one dimensional money makers. Profit at any cost. You should make money in order to achieve your goals, not just to set the high score for making money.

It's way too easy for hostile shareholders to force companies to do things that the workers, even CEO level workers, don't want to do.

What are you on about? So condescending...

I'm just saying that you can link certain zones to specific outcomes. If we move into a new zone we haven't crossed the boundary (which feels final and irreversible), we are in a new zone with new consequences. We can leave that zone as well and change the outcome.

Obviously I'm in favour of fixing the problems but I'm not the majority of elected officials or their climate denying donors. You need to frame it in a way that they can act on it hence the choice.

Agreed. Setting a boundary invites people to point out that nothing happened the second that boundary was crossed. Maybe defining zones with consequences attached might be more meaningful so we can evaluate which cost is preferred - solving the problem or living with it.