specproc

What if they're already in the wrong hands?

All my notebooks are dirt notebooks

I did the same for a friend's birthday recently: put together a bunch of mix CDs as a present. My concession to the fact he probably doesn't use a CD player much was a QR code, with a link to a matching Spotify playlist.

It's a privacy-focused application for secure communication, last place you want slop.

As noted elsewhere in this thread, scale is important: I think it's entirely reasonable to have different rules for platforms with millions of users.

Aye, it's the curation, innit. If the platform is making opaque decisions on what you see, then it should be accountable for what it's showing you.

I think scale is important here too. If you've got a user-base that's an appreciable proportion of a country's population, you're a utility. My energy supplier has a tiny fraction of the customers of say, Meta, and is subject to considerably stronger oversight.

Yeah, hundred percent, find a new boss.

There's always time for lessons learned, but gloating isn't mature or helpful.

Honestly, I've never stuck around with a bad boss long enough to get into this sort of situation with them. Life is too short.

Most managers I've had a long-term relationship with have been, at worst, overwhelmed or utterly beholden to bad priorities set further up the chain. They all have been decent enough folks, trying to do their best for the organisation.

You gotta spend all your time with these people. Rubbing your correctness in their face ain't going to make either of your work lives better.

Try doing the same with your partner, see how that goes.

The article seems to be about arguing with your boss in _public_. Having a fight with anyone in public in a professional environment is pretty intense behaviour. Not saying I've never done it, but it's not usually productive. It takes a lot of skill to get things done your way without alienating people. We should always be careful of how we "debate" in a professional context. Discussion habits picked up on HN translate poorly to Slack.

Arguing with your boss in private, now that's a completely different deck of Magic cards. Totally helpful, productive behaviour if done respectfully and constructively. You're there to solve problems together, having differences of opinion is natural. Thrash it out between you in a 1:1, book time to engage and brainstorm.

Be nice, be prepared, find solutions that move things forward without bruising egos, try and get them to think it was their idea.

Importantly, you're coming to a decision in which they get the final say, because it's their team. Once a decision is made, after consultation, you just gotta roll with it. Don't bitch, or moan, or rub it in if things go wrong. Chain of command. One of these days you'll be there too.

If you keep on "losing" or finding yourself in constant conflict with your boss, that suggests a deeper problem. Jobs are like relationships, they've gotta work both ways. Maybe this isn't the right one for you (or them, but just as likely you).

Anyway. Never argue with your boss _in public_. Debate in private, come to a decision and move forward.

I came here for the boss key

Interesting framing in "we should ask" and "social media companies should ban". We have sovereign states that make laws, companies must comply with them if they wish to make money in our markets.

Otherwise, I think my perspective here is very similar. I'd personally emphasise legal publisher responsibility, a repeal of Section 230 in American.

By absolving social media platforms of legal responsibility for the content they publish, we've allowed some very unpleasant scenes to flourish in the most mainstream of places.

Well with you on the issues of addictive design. I'd throw in data harvesting, sketchy advertising, and increasingly platform- level political bias.

Age restrictions simply increase the age at which users are exposed to harms, rather than addressing those harms themselves.

These platforms have become staggeringly wealthy and powerful, it is them what needs to be controlled, not kids.

The author is highlighting an ugly contradiction in a policy that is being rolled out across the anglophone world as we speak. I see plenty less-substantive think pieces on this site, I don't feel it's necessary for every blog post to be accompanied by policy recommendations.

I pulled a few alternatives out there. What's your take?

What it has to do with social media bans, is that the incident was propagated on social media. The author is arguing that the ability to shame others on the internet, should not be restricted to the old and powerful.

In answer to your first question, what do we do. We regulate the platforms, not the users.

There are loads of things that can be done to reduce online harm, that don't just say "OK, you're over this age, you can experience online harm now".

Platforms can become legally responsible for content, they can be compelled to be transparent about their feed algorithms, enable monitoring via public APIs. We can ban infinite scroll. There are so many policy levers that can be pulled, without getting the ban-hammer out for people of an arbitrary age, and without forcing the rest of us to hand over our IDs to platforms.

I am increasingly finding my consulting work to be orientated around clearing up after people who outsourced their thinking to AI.

I'm seeing some incredibly dumb stuff: researchers spending months on Claude trying to do insane deduplication, unrelated to their research question, using regex; whole research methodologies YOLO'd out of ChatGPT.

The results invariably chaotic, resulting in huge amounts of stress and wasted time.

Non-technical people are treating LLMs like an oracle, making big assumptions and decisions with little regard for their implications, because their clanker told them to.

It's scary out there. The lack of critical thinking I'm seeing in some of these projects is horrific. Not unique to the post-AI era, certainly, but on a whole new level. Bad things are undoubtedly happening everywhere, right now, because someone's just like "let's ask Claude".

It becomes much harder to go back to school after a while. Responsibilities pile up, you fall out of eligibility for funding.

I loved doing a masters as a mature student, but I was very lucky to be able to do so.

School won't always be so easy. Do school.

Also, Amazon are gross.

I think it would be absolutely insane to hand over a serious-sized company's books to an LLM.

As a small consultancy though, looking forward to my next filing, and having just moved to a new and better-specced jurisdiction, I'm sorely tempted to outsource to Claude.

I've had mixed experience with accountants in the past. No horror stories, but I often feel I'm not getting everything laid out clearly, and that I don't fully understand the process.

I've got plenty of reasons to dislike LLMs in my own work, but when dealing with well-scoped but professionally gatekept things like tax or property transactions, they're an absolute godsend.

I love them! It's a really nice, fun way to explore a corpus. Cosmograph for this sort of thing is great, it supports graphs as well as 2D projections, and is blazing fast.

That said, I've never had a client or stakeholder show any interest in using one, beyond an initial "that's cool".

And UMAP etc., is just as much an art as a science. You'll go mad trying to get the perfect layout.

Great toy if you're into that sort of thing, but yeah, fiddly and overwhelming for most.

I was around fourteen when I read A Clockwork Orange and worked it out fine. I think the author's point stands.

42 and frayed. Lifelong reader who really has to remind himself constantly to read.

It's my greatest pleasure and a great source of pride, but God, do my electronic devices interfere.

Danger, danger. Cannabis detected in the vehicle.

I'm not even clear if it requires Windows. Say if one had a Surface running Arch, would that still be traceable?

Asking for a friend.

Just because I have a car doesn't mean I should stop walking.

It was never sustainable, just regulatory capture by large IP owners.

Spotify, Netflix, Amazon etc provided OK value for a while, but now enshitification is biting, this is due a massive comeback.

Piracy remains the best way to consume films at home. If you don't have it on your hard drive in an open format, you don't own it.

I know Droitwich, this made me laugh

In the 51st state.

Number one issue of our times. I'm eternally frustrated discussion of this basic fact of our political lives is near zero in public discourse.

In which case, they route it all through some subsidiary in the Cayman Islands and it magically disappears.

No, this is a deterrent against anti-consumer behaviour, and it should be meaningful.

It's the staring at a screen I hate. I do it for work, I do it when I'm not working.

Best is being out with family, friends, dog. Creating things.

Computer saps my life.

I'm not sure about these new dumb phones. Just not having social media in the first place has worked alright for me.

I hate my phone, and my relationship with it, but sometimes you just need to use one.

My preferred strategy is having a normal phone, minimal apps, and just keeping it switched off most of the time, particularly round the house.

Thing is, I've got a worse problem with my laptop and desk. Between HN, lichess, and a handful of favoured blogs, I can easily blow a day doing nothing, without the help of a phone.

Honestly, I think something deeper than a different form factor is required. If anyone has found it, let me know.