wordupmaking

I think that it's more about politics and investors/advertisers not really clicking. The rest I just don't see, we already opened the flood gates to stuff like discussing "another trivial update of this piece of software a bunch of us use". Most of the comments aren't technical, and it's not like anyone ever got downvoted for telling an anecdote about their child or their parents, and "X is awesome" is exactly as valuable as "X is shit". Yet one is allowed, the other isn't.

Wal-Mart will pay employees to deliver packages on their way home

What's the hacker angle? There isn't one. It's interesting to people who care about politics and for people with dollars in their eyes. Amazon being "in the industry" is enough. How's that interesting? Maybe it's the idea that having a lot of users or commanding a lot of investments makes something intellectually interesting, a notion that is as widespread as it is mediocre.

All in all, I often feel the best analogy to some HN subcircles is the beam breakers in Stephen King's The Dark Tower. Don't think too much about it, just do what feels good, and just avoid what scares you, nevermind how that feeds into what disfigured and forced people into settling for such a life to begin with. Gotta keep those attention spans short while pretending to be deep.

For every 10 stories about people labouring under psycho bosses for years there's one of someone standing up to them the second they violated boundaries. The opposite ratio would be a start, and people who don't do that in their life I genuinely have no business and no politics to discuss with, and I don't care for their rationalizations of their weakness and accomplicehood, either. I read and comment because different people write and read here, too.

"political battle of the day"

That doesn't require you to not think or respond deeper than that. How many "0.001 release of the day" posts trigger people into tirades about general programming principles? How much do we learn from that? There is no consistency here, either, and if you find one interesting, why don't you find the other even more interesting?

If people understand intellectual curiosity, why don't they understand the combination of intellectual curiosity, a moral grounding, and a will? Maybe because those who don't have it can't possibly accept that they are indeed the weakest link. It's like when we assume attractive people are dumb -- we wish! Sometimes they just have and are everything we do, and then some.

You're downvoted because you're exactly right. People on here generally can't handle inconvenient truths that include themselves. Never trust a person who can't rend their garments.

This generation

No. Resoundingly NO! These smug clowns can't speak for anything and anyone. They're not even a generation, just farts in the wind. Even just 1% of the people paying attention outweigh them easily, and at any rate, the world belongs to those who genuinely care about it. Period, anyone who disagrees can come fight me. Think less "no child left behind" and more "Noah's Ark"; they had their chance, they made their choice, let's not be held hostage by them. At the very least, let them queue after those who are not ungrateful.

Yeah, but when you stand up to snoops and crooks, you don't have to contort yourself in ways that are a.) undignified and b.) futile anyways, and c.) waste your own resources of which you have fewer than the server rooms of megacorps, so why not do that.

Is it so difficult for you guys to just have a facebook account that you don't check in on?

Yes. Is that so difficult for you to accept? Tough shit.

Allow people to tag their posts, and have friends who tag their posts. Then have an option to not see posts of type X (link, photo, text, video, audio) tagged with Y by contact Z. Have further options to display little icons with some info for hidden posts to easily expand them inline. And so on.

Yes, you'd have to manually curate some things, but otherwise I think it's mostly just a matter of not hiring any marketing people, and creating the features first and looking how to make them easily usable second. Especially if the goal isn't to "kill FB", but simply offer an alternative to those who want the good bits and actually like, uhh, reading manuals and being proficient with the tools they use.

They can't come if there is nowhere for them to come to, and then it's easy to pretend they don't exist. But they do, even among the old and young and not so technical.

Yes, I absolutely agree that plenty of commonly practiced or even accepted things are malicious, too, at least with the way they're hand waved away ("to improve our service" and worse).

Also see "to have or to be".

This is not so much a matter of debate as of reading up.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malware

Some malware is used to generate money by click fraud, making it appear that the computer user has clicked an advertising link on a site, generating a payment from the advertiser. It was estimated in 2012 that about 60 to 70% of all active malware used some kind of click fraud, and 22% of all ad-clicks were fraudulent

If you want to coin a new term feel free, but malware means what it means and refers to malicious, not "more malicious than", not "malicious against the user" etc.

Overall i find your reply very negative and zero value. You didn't pass yandex test, right? :)

That cuts both ways - you don't see a problem with the needy practices of pretty much all major and many minor tech players, right? You don't get sick with all this mediocrity adorned with euphemisms, all this crap called awesome and all the greatness in life belittled? Do you honestly know not a single person that does quality work they can be honest about for a fair price that you would assume it's either "business" or "charity"?

Overall i find your reply very negative and zero value.

The "argument" that "it's a business so hey" could justify anything, including robbing people, as long as you don't get caught. You know that providing value for society is one of the reasons societies let corporations operate at all, right? Modern business seems to think now that the bath tub is filled nicely (for them), there's no need for the plug anymore.

In kindergarten I asked a friend why "Hitler didn't like Jews". He said his grandmother was Jewish and he didn't like her, which made sense to us. When I was 9, my Jewish best friend and I had friendship armbands in neon colors, which I loved to bits, exclaiming that "I'm a Neon-Nazi". Still totally clueless, it was still all just words to me. The deeply appalled reaction of his mother was like a gut punch, probably like my innocent but horrid statement was to her.

When I was 11 and alone, I randomly changed channels (we only had the 3) and was faced with a bunch of corpses being shoved into a grave by a caterpillar. I remember that as if it was yesterday, and with everything I learned since then, that was the horrible anchor. But like you probably too, I wouldn't want to unsee it either. And I still sometimes can't help but wonder about the streets I walk through. Did some of those houses see people get dragged out and carried to their murder? How would the dead judge our too common unwillingness to speak out against injustice, even though we're very free to do so in comparison to them? There's so much, but I fear it less than I fear looking away.

While I also think testimonies, big and small, by real people (e.g. https://www.youtube.com/user/YadVashem/videos ) are important and need to be preserved, I can honestly say that for me, they were not really necessary, that is they came long after this had already become and integral part of me. Even "just" what can be read in books sufficed, but that's because I went looking for it, because I needed to learn. Similarly, I think it's perfectly possible for people to be so jaded to even shrug off a testimony given in person. So that's both good and bad news, I guess?

There are many great authors of the past who have survived centuries of oblivion and neglect, but it is still an open question whether they will be able to survive an entertaining version of what they have to say.

-- Hannah Arendt

Read the serious thoughts of the heavy weights who lived through that time. Don't other Nazism, so many things that made it tick have since metastasized, not vanished. I would say we're constantly reenacting it on various scales, and to during that then solemnly swear to never forget that one horrible thing is kind of perverse in its own right.

https://www.opendemocracy.net/uk/jamie-stern-weiner-norman-f...

I remember once asking my mother, ‘How did you do in your studies?’ She replied, ‘What are you talking about? How could you study under those conditions?’.

When she saw the segregation of African-Americans, whether at a lunch counter or in the school system, that was, for her, like the prologue to the Nazi holocaust. Whereas many Jews now say, Never compare (Elie Wiesel’s refrain, ‘It’s bad, but it’s not The Holocaust’), my mother’s credo was, Always compare. She gladly and generously made the imaginative leap to those who were suffering, wrapping and shielding them in the embrace of her own suffering.

For my mother, the Nazi holocaust was a chapter in the long history of the horror of war. It was not itself a war – she was emphatic that it was an extermination, not a war – but it was a unique chapter within the war. So for her, war was the ultimate horror. When she saw Vietnamese being bombed during the Vietnam War, it was the Nazi holocaust. It was the bombing, the death, the horror, the terror, that she herself had passed through. When she saw the distended bellies of starving children in Biafra, it was also the Nazi holocaust, because she remembered her own pangs of hunger in the Warsaw Ghetto.

-- Norman Finkelstein

Read Sebastian Haffner's book about the times in Germany before the Nazis and see if you can find parallels, I found it uncanny. Everybody and their dog is all about numbers, be it users, money, hits. Not about judging your workmanship with your own mind. Judging "objectively" is something we actually pretend we can do, rather than something only lunatics would assume for themselves.

Hannah Arendt again:

The outstanding negative quality of the totalitarian elite is that it never stops to think about the world as it really is and never compares the lies with reality.

One of the greatest advantages of the totalitarian elites of the twenties and thirties was to turn any statement of fact into a question of motive.

Now the police dreams that one look at the gigantic map on the office wall should suffice at any given moment to establish who is related to whom and in what degree of intimacy; and, theoretically, this dream is not unrealizable although its technical execution is bound to be somewhat difficult. If this map really did exist, not even memory would stand in the way of the totalitarian claim to domination; such a map might make it possible to obliterate people without any traces, as if they had never existed at all.

For legends attract the very best in our times, just as ideologies attract the average, and the whispered tales of gruesome secret powers behind the scenes attract the very worst.

The fanaticism of the elite cadres, absolutely essential for the functioning of the movement, abolishes systematically all genuine interest in specific jobs and produces a mentality which sees every conceivable action as an instrument for something entirely different.

The ceaseless, senseless demand for original scholarship in a number of fields, where only erudition is now possible, has led either to sheer irrelevancy, the famous knowing of more and more about less and less, or to the development of a pseudo-scholarship which actually destroys its object.

Since no one is capable of forming his own opinion without the benefit of a multitude of opinions held by others, the rule of public opinion endangers even the opinion of those few who may have the strength not to share it. This is one of the reasons for the curiously sterile negativism of all opinions which oppose a popularly acclaimed tyranny. [...] public opinion, by virtue of its unanimity, provokes a unanimous opposition and thus kills true opinions everywhere.

The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any.

There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking itself is dangerous.

If the ability to tell right from wrong should have anything to do with the ability to think, then we must be able to "demand" its exercise in every sane person no matter how erudite or ignorant.

The net effect of this language system was not to keep these people ignorant of what they were doing, but to prevent them from equating it with their old, "normal" knowledge of murder and lies. Eichmann's great susceptibility to catch words and stock phrases, combined with his incapacity for ordinary speech, made him, of course, an ideal subject for "language rules."

When confronted with situations for which such routine procedures did not exist, he [Eichmann] was helpless, and his cliché-ridden language produced on the stand, as it had evidently done in his official life, a kind of macabre comedy. Clichés, stock phrases, adherence to conventional, standardized codes of expression and conduct have the socially recognized function of protecting us against reality, that is, against the claim on our thinking attention that all events and facts make by virtue of their existence.

The ideals of homo faber, the fabricator of the world, which are permanence, stability, and durability, have been sacrificed to abundance, the ideal of the animal laborans.

Under the most diverse conditions and disparate circumstances, we watch the development of the same phenomena - homelessness on an unprecedented scale, rootlessness to an unprecedented depth.

What has come to light is neither nihilism nor cynicism, as one might have expected, but a quite extraordinary confusion over elementary questions of morality — as if an instinct in such matters were truly the last thing to be taken for granted in our time.

There are more than a few people, especially among the cultural élite, who still publicly regret the fact that Germany sent Einstein packing, without realizing that it was a much greater crime to kill little Hans Cohn from around the corner, even though he was no genius.

The concentration camps, by making death itself anonymous (making it impossible to find out whether a prisoner is dead or alive), robbed death of its meaning as the end of a fulfilled life. In a sense they took away the individual’s own death, proving that henceforth nothing belonged to him and he belonged to no one. His death merely set a seal on the fact that he had never existed.

I'm more than ever of the opinion that a decent human existence is possible today only on the fringes of society, where one then runs the risk of starving or being stoned to death. In these circumstances, a sense of humor is a great help.

As citizens, we must prevent wrongdoing because the world in which we all live, wrong-doer, wrong sufferer and spectator, is at stake.

When all are guilty, no one is; confessions of collective guilt are the best possible safeguard against the discovery of culprits, and the very magnitude of the crime the best excuse for doing nothing.

For the idea of humanity, when purged of all sentimentality, has the very serious consequence that in one form or another men must assume responsibility for all crimes committed by men and that all nations share the onus of evil committed by all others. Shame at being a human being is the purely individual and still non-political expression of this insight.

Education is the point at which we decide whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it, and by the same token save it from that ruin which except for renewal, except for the coming of the new and the young, would be inevitable. And education, too, is where we decide whether we love our children enough not to expel them from our world and leave them to their own devices, nor to strike from their hands their chance of undertaking something new, something unforeseen by us, but to prepare them in advance for the task of renewing a common world.

The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.

Since the comment is way too long either way I decided to cut my own rambling rather than these quotes I think are all dearly important and as timely as ever. FWIW, I consider this sharing the best I know of, I can put things in my own words but not this well. And if it makes just one person go to the library and get a bunch of books by Hannah Arendt, it's worth it.

I want to build and refine and improve and make useful and a lot of things, but not add credibility to such practices. And I want people to know what an URL is and how copy and paste works. Everything I write is secretly about wanting people to know what an URL is, anyway, so it would be kind of self defeating for me.

That Facebook ever offered these buttons without warning about the privacy implications in bold red letters put them clean outside any sort of human history I can be arsed to care about. Don't get me started on Twitter, they don't even need to snoop for that, haha. They're toys. Some people can't fit that together with reach or money or whatever, but all FB is proving is that toys can have success, too. We knew that, so in the end there is nothing there, except something with which we can diminish ourselves and those who visit our sites. This is my personal outlook and I know I'm deluded to think this holds any weight in the real world; but my inside weighs more than the world so that still doesn't move the needle for me.

What's "fully dependent"? If A going away makes B go away, I'd say that's pretty dependent. Shifting goal posts from that to "major difference" is silly, you could argue for anything that way, there are major differences even between individual people, even between individual mass produced screws, it's just a matter of resolution.

Anyway, nothing in the universe is separate from anything else in it, and even if it wasn't, and entitites (supposedly) being separate from another and "just on a machine" are apples and oranges, not opposites. This doesn't seem very thought through.

they can own that machine

People owned and still do own other people. Why should people not be disallowed from owning sentient machines?

In the same way that I'm okay with abortion, I'm okay with this - your dependence on someone or something else is a defining factor of your rights as an individual.

Is there a magical exception for disabled or sick people? And are those also not real? I ask because you start out with something about copying, but end up with

If you depend on a machine that someone else is free to control

Which is an entirely different thing and just a way to say might is right, with qualifiers that mean nothing. Someone's foot is also a bio machine, if your life depends on them not murdering you with it, you might as well skip to taking their orders, no? If not, what's the magical exception?

I'd say individual rights are based on things like empathy and concepts of fairness. If they were just based on mere poopy power they would serve no purpose.. we had and have that already.

True. I kind of settled at seeing it rather like art. What happened and all traces of it might be gone ultimately, but it still happened. It's purely subjective why anyone would prefer one thing over another happening, or care at all, true, but I know what I prefer. And more than a happy life, I want a meaningful one :) Possibly a content one. It's temporary either way, but I want it to have been some things more than other things.

Just because.. that's the best reason anyone can give you for living anyway I think, there's energy available and it kind of finds way to get used, whether by people hurting eating each or by blades of grass being jolly good friends, it will get used.

I wasn't at that school anymore when that happened, but a classmate killed himself when he was 18. He stabbed himself in the heart, and he fucking succeeded.

He was a very kind and gentle person. Good looking and well built, even. Very into death metal. I still should have his tape of death metal songs he recorded for me. In hindsight he would probably have made a good friend, but he never dared to really reach out to people and we kinda overlooked him, took him for granted.

I think the trigger was having failed his drivers license. Other than that, and that he had strict and cold parents, I basically knew nothing of him, and I can't guess at his mind state or the reasons. But I know that they weren't good reasons. Time has this funny way of putting adolescence into perspective, and it makes stuff like this more tragic and pointless with every passing day.

I also worked at a cancer ward for a bit, and a nurse told me a patient once offered her some obscene amount of money to kill them. Of course she didn't do it, but, you know.. it's hard. But that's far off from something like my classmate, or Kurt Cobain for that matter, whom I also consider a waste. Toughing it out is always even more brave. I'm not in a position to command anyone to live, but I would rather err on the side of life. So many things are a matter of perspective, of lighting, and it's such a big thing to throw away.

If you're ready to kill yourself, you're not losing anything if you life longer, and suffer some more, do you? I mean, the second you die, your memory of whether you suffered 5 seconds or 50 years would be equally gone. I say this as someone who went through dark times, too. But whenever I pictured something like actually putting my neck on a train track, and a train incoming, I KNEW it would make the hair on my neck stand up and shoot up like a bolt, I couldn't even do it in fantasy. I'm glad for that, I know that's not something I can take credit for, and loosing the will is nothing to be ashamed of IMHO either, I never thought low of that classmate for example. But a tragedy is a tragedy, damnit! Don't be one :(

Awesome, thanks!

would require so many people to agree

You don't always have to remove something, you just need to introduce doubt. It only took x% industry shills to make any evidence for climate change effectively disappear for a lot of people.

What's the copyright? Would it be legal to unzip those and serve them directly, so archive.org or anyone else can make them more inviting for access?

I know you shouldn't look a gift horse in the mouth but there's not even an index or a rough idea what something like "Name Authorities" might mean. That's not what I call wide open doors, that more seems like doing some legally required minimum.

Not that I don't get what you're saying, not that I never want revenge, but still, since I also tell this myself: can you imagine someone hurting a child who has not been damaged in some way? I'm not claiming to be perfectly healthy, but healthy enough that I cannot fathom it, just like I cannot fathom rape. And how many people are responsible for how many thousands of dead children torn to shreds by wars of aggression and get invited to how many gala dinners each year, on your dime? Even just that should make us pause. Do we punish the weak because they deserve it, or because we can't get at those who deserve it even more?

The parents who today don't have the time or energy to raise their kids well, maybe because they have to work 17 jobs to survive or whatever, and the marketing which doesn't care for anyone other than inspiring fears and wants they would be happier without and taking their money, create the sociopaths, and education systems that pigeonhole people cutting off what doesn't fit, and so on, those create the sociopaths of tomorrow much more than those poor fucks themselves do. The guy spitting at the window in the subway while twitching to music and some hellish mixture of drugs didn't have the same life as me, just making bad choices. Maybe in some cases that's true, but generally I consider the fact I'm not a murderer something I should be grateful for, not something to be proud of. Justice is a big word, and like "why?" it can have many iterations.

I'm not saying this to put you on the spot, but this is how it ends up for me, that's the train of thought that sometimes even replaced my thirst for revenge with things I like better, and which I think are better for me. I think the best revenge is to attain the ability to get revenge and then not get it, to no longer need it.

Take this, "for example".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Nickel_Mines_School_shoot...

If turning the other cheek is weakness, why does this make my jaw drop and give me goosebumps?

Imagine if the relatives of 9/11 victims calling out against meeting violence with violence, against murdering more innocents, would have been listened to. The Middle East would still be a mess, but orders of magnitude less so. It just used the people who griefed to sow more grief. Justice, hmm.

There is the reaction you want to have, and there is the reaction that would make your loved one who was harmed proud. Food for thought, anyway :)

But that doesn't "prevent spambots etc.", that merely prevents people from easily and instantly figuring out whether their bots are detected yet. It doesn't stop them from spamming votes, or from making their bots more elaborate regardless of whether they have been detected yet. I don't know all the motivations for spam bots or how people who make them tick, but I'd figure for a significant number the crucial bit is having an impact, not measuring it. Most spam is fire and forget, after all.

How about, here and on reddit, being able to mark threads you're interested in, and having a page where you can see those sorted by last reply. On HN, make that page refresh every 15 or 60 minutes or whatever. Heck, once every 24 hours would be enough... sometimes I just want to talk about the things that interest me, with the people that are interested in them. I would love to be able to think on something for a few days, or to familiarize myself with a subject before mouthing off.

As they are now, reddit and HN are require you to be there when something is "current", and that's ultimately not that much better than TV. Yeah, sometimes you can get something out of it, but it's nowhere near as useful or deep. Even worse, there is a tendency to get semi- or unrelated stuff one out when something slightly similar is discussed, instead of putting things exactly where they "belong", where they add to a useful corpus. [which is exactly what I'm doing right now, and am doing too often.. but I honestly would prefer the alternative which doesn't exist yet]

Just think about it, we have practically infinite storage, there's certainly plenty of expertise in reach of HN -- yet discussions get constantly restrained because our attention is limited. But it's limited because all we get are these flat lists, X items per page, next to no means to curate or organize anything. Imagine how much worse it would be without people who sometimes link to old but very relevant and insightful stories or individual comments. I'm very grateful to them, but to take them for granted, to rely on them for "structure" is totally stone age to me. Give us tools, give us transparency, let us figure out things even if they might be hard - stop trying to hand hold people you might underestimate! We don't need you as much as you need us.

I can't believe that apparently some people see "Tumblr" but not the "researcher employed by NATO". It's just text and images and video, the "place" where it's at matters only for the people having to pay for pipes, really. Some of the best things in the world get posted in totally random places, it has always been thus.

I can't claim it's wrong because I'm not a good ethicist.

Even the best ethics expert in the world would just be one who knows how to describe a bunch of ethical systems and ideas that exist currently and historically. Other than that, they can help you exactly zilch with such decisions. I'm not a psychologist, but I'll claim if it makes you feel upset and disgusted, that means you did decide you consider it wrong. And if it helps, I agree.

As for how to change things, well, ask the EFF for example? There's things you can do which, apart from being a real help, also help you with the dread of this free floating vague blob of worries that you sometimes look at but as you said feel you can't do anything about.

One thing you can always do, is that not giving in. It just takes one person to prove the claim that everybody accepts or wants X wrong. When being that person seems scary, personally, when looking around, I'm not convinced at all that the people who fight no or trivial battles are less scared. It's not actually safer on the side of thugs, generally speaking, and life isn't more fun at mindless parties either, only those who don't have the comparison would think that. I'd rather say that's all built on sand, on holes that have to be temporarily filled with more and more material.

So keep on hanging on, because there might come a point where you feel less upset, more grounded, and the people who drift along will become more and more confused. Real things can hurt, sometimes badly, but real things also have longevity, they bring their own means and nutrients for growth.

At least, that's how I answer these questions for myself, that's how it ended up working out, and while I know that can't be generalized, sometimes it does get darkest before dawn. Don't let it drag you down (Sophie Scholl's outlook = best outlook).. but what you can shoulder, do shoulder. The only way out really is through, ultimately.

If worst comes to worst, don't get crushed when the screeching narcissism machine attempting to eat the planet drives itself and billions of people against the wall and implodes. Easier said than done, but change will come one way or the other. I'm not convinced it would leave spots of unscorched Earth, but that hope dies last, anyway.

My takeaway from reading into these things was that at certain temperature breakpoints, lifetime decreases a LOT, way too much to want to get close to that.

So I tried to find the rough limits and wrote down idle/load temperatures for various combinations of settings/frequencies, and then picked my "sweet spot" at which temperatures started to increase a lot more per little increased performance. Granted, I did get a good case and CPU cooler, which I clean religiously, and of course there's always luck involved, but divided by the 8 years it's running this current computer is the cheapest I ever had, apart from having to replace the PSU because that was the one bit I paid less attention to, even the hard drives are still spinning, it's freaky. So the next one will have an even better case and cooling and then not get overclocked much or at all, either, that's for sure.

Average users don't care about encryption either, yet we still have the padlocks for those who do. More importantly, average users are not creating browsers, and the people who know better can't hide behind them.

The average smoker probably doesn't want to hear smoking is unhealthy. Does that mean doctors should adjust their advice respectively? At what point does "professional" really mean nothing other than "gets money for it, like a carpenter or a thief or a drug dealer might"?

We don't even have the right to "just give people what they want without any judgement on our part", but we certainly don't have the right to ignore those with legitimate concerns because ignorant or apathetic people are more in numbers. That goes for everything, everywhere. That goes to how you are supposed to look out for little siblings when parents are away, and it goes for expert knowledge or intellect.

Both, since browser these days don't even show the number of connections and download speed for a loading page, much less an indicator for high CPU usage. I'm not saying displaying this stuff would be enough by itself, but hiding what is going on just so we can have a slightly bigger viewport into unicolor surfaces with huge padding and line spacing certainly doesn't help.

I know there are all sorts of flags etc, but consider old Opera, where switching the status bar between none, simple and advanced was right there in one of the main menus. That was a good start, that stuff would be compact and super useful by now if we'd just keep going.

Why not switch to developing in Firefox, like, now? As long as the debug tools are usable, why throw out the baby with the bath water for getting a tiny bit more a tiny bit sooner? Let's have some love for our future selves..

When you're trying that hard to please every trivial whim of anyone, regardless of the cost to yourself: what are you compensating? Who hurt you? Who lied to you? I mean, there's gotta be something that made you rate the approval by others so highly, and your approval of others so unimportant. Something or someone that stole you from you. Would you take 2 weeks of the life of one person to save another person 5 minutes? Unlikely, and it isn't so different when you are one of those persons.

We'd be super weirded out if someone in front of us in the queue in the supermarket committed suicide so we could pay faster. Apart from that probably increasing checkout times for everybody -- just imagine the chaos -- we wouldn't even appreciate "the thought", we'd be like "how DARE you use me for this?". Most of us don't mind being catered to or even pampered, but we don't want others to just throw themselves away for us. There are limits, even though it's kind of invisible most of the time, there is a line where hurting ourselves too much to help others a little bit actually hurts society, and offends others, correctly so.

Last but certainly not least: this over-the-top, dysfunctional selflessness in the sense of having no self (or rather, not respecting one's self) attracts not only knights in shining armour, but mostly baaaad types. You might say abuse breeds abuse in that someone who for some reason is playing doormat is emitting pheromones for people who like to trample on others. I really don't mean this to victim blame at all, but it's sadly true. And the less you let others violate your boundaries, the clearer your sight becomes for what you can freely give for mutual benefit. E.g. don't spend 2 weeks to save someone 5 minutes, but do spend 5 minutes to save someone 2 weeks.

TL;DR: you can't be a good friend to others without being a good friend to yourself first.

"Did Chad ask you with a big fat grin on his face to put everything that matters to you in this awesome garage which he built solely for the purpose of 'helping' people show off and connect without having to know how to build shelves? No? Does he arbitrarily kick some out, and let others stay? Yes? Then this cartoon doesn't apply at all."

It's not about business or legality, it's about being a dick or not, or, as demonstrated here, about being a coward or not when someone's being a dick to your friend. Of course, seeing how hard Facebook and other middlemen try to insert themselves into fucking everything, it's about a bit more than just being a dick, but it's pointless to discuss the ocean before we're clear about what is the water drop and what is the sophistry.