6 ms·

in what sense is it getting worse? While there may be local minima, I'd argue that its the best its ever been. News has always been pessimistic because negative

in what sense is it getting worse? While there may be local minima, I'd argue that its the best its ever been. News has always been pessimistic because negative emotions are easier to trigger to drive attention which pays the bills.

spencerflem 3y ago
Whether the world as a whole is getting worse is debatable, but I think it's very clear that tech companies are
- WrongAssumption 3y ago
  Is it clear? Microsoft of old? IBM of old? AT&T of old? Juggernauts with abusive monopoly power that tech companies today could only dream of.
  - uoaei 3y ago
    I'm getting visions of that New Yorker cartoon about shareholder value but it's just a techie in Allbirds saying "is it really worse, tho?"
  - zilti 3y ago
    Apple, Google, Amazon are every bit as bad, and Microsoft is still up there, too.
    - WrongAssumption 3y ago
      Assuming that’s true, is that counter to my statement? Mine was in response to someone saying it’s clear tech companies are getting worse, and your response to mine is they are just as bad? So also in your mind not clear they are getting worse, correct?
      - zilti 3y ago
        Just as bad, and then some. The big ones used to only have B2B power with vendor lock-in. The new ones have much more. They have power over their individual users, too, by locking in their data and controlling the communication and sharing with others, and trough that even over people who are not their customers yet. You want to communicate/share with person X? Looks like you have to have an account at Y for that, too bad, eh?
- jrockway 3y ago
  Yeah, I mean, these companies are at the end of their "startup" lifecycle and are now just ordinary big companies that exist to chill and produce dividends. When you hear "Amazon", think "IBM". When you hear "Apple", think "Coca Cola". When you hear "Google", think "Goldman Sachs". All of those companies make an enormous amount of money but haven't done anything interesting in 50 years. There will be new startups that eclipse all of these companies in interestingness. The one for the next 20 years is probably OpenAI.
- bbor 3y ago
  Yeah this seems like the important factor to me. The whole industry is doing layoffs, at least partially in an explicit attempt to combat the insane amount of privilege that we techies have cultivated since the .com boom. Hacker News is bound to get a little more vicious when people are being fired and told that it’s because someone else took their job
reactordev 3y ago
[flagged]
- mym1990 3y ago
  At almost any other point of time you could have made a similar list with the relevant issues of the time. The news cycle today is so much more accessible, and is skewed towards pessimism, so your view of the world will also skew that way depending how much news you consume. Trying to condense the world state into "getting better" vs "getting worse" is not a useful exercise, its anyone's guess. The world is definitely changing though, and many people don't like that.
DanHulton 3y ago
A lot of things are getting superficially better (personal computing tech has never been more incredible), but there's a lot scary shit that is encroaching on the daily without sufficient plans in place to really deal with. Off the top of my head: - Global warming and how we don't seem to have any plans to a path to hit any of the less-than-apocalyptic warming targets, - Corporate regulatory capture, with more and more wealth going to a smaller and smaller segment of the population while the impoverished fraction grows on the daily, - The rise of right-wing and/or outright fascist authoritarianism across the world, even in countries that would have fought strenuously against it a scant hundred years ago, - This one is a combination of all three of the others (and a lot more), I suppose, but capitalism eating itself and taking a lot of really helpless-feeling people with it. A lot of things do keep improving, but a) a lot of people never get to see or benefit from those improvements, maybe more than you think, and b) there are these terrible monsters on the horizon and nobody with the power to do anything about it seems to be willing to actually do so. It shouldn't take a whole lot of empathy to project yourself into the shoes of someone for whom shit is the worst it's ever been, nor a lot of creative thinking to realize that there's a whole lot of those people out there.
- arandomusername 3y ago
  [flagged]
- mym1990 3y ago
  Would you agree that whatever you are currently working on, either at Nodewood or evisort, is contributing to this superficial betterment of the world? Not to be dense but you are talking about empathy for people who are at the bottom of the human totem pole while posting on a tech forum while working on products that most likely don't contribute anything to actually making the world a better place. If you really cared, you would give up almost everything to give up what you have to go help those in need...but I guess a post on HN will do as well.
  - spencerflem 3y ago
    Isn't that sad though? An entire industry that in your own words doesn't "contribute anything to actually making the world a better place" I think people realize this more than they used to which explains so much of the tech pessimism
boplicity 3y ago
We've already passed the 1.5 Degree Celsius limit on global warming. That alone has catastrophic consequences. Yet, the production of fossil fuels remains near record levels, and producers are aiming to scale up, as opposed to scale down. Political discourse on this topic often amounts to "but my expenses are already too high." For many people, this is still an abstract and slow moving problem. Yet, it is a very real problem with dire consequences. (That are somehow easy to ignore!) Is the world getting worse? In some ways, it's getting better. Yet, we seem doomed to cause so much destruction. It's gonna be bad. Very bad. But not right away (for many of us). https://www.sei.org/publications/production-gap-report-2023/ https://www.sei.org/publications/production-gap-report-2023/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2024/02/08/1-5-celsius-global-warming-record/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2024/02/0...
- educaysean 3y ago
  While I agree that global warming is a serious issue without a clear future, it seems a little far fetched to attribute that as a factor in the deterioration of hackernews community's cultural standards.
- gridspy 3y ago
  We've been over-polluting with CO2 for over a 100 years[1]. I prefer to focus on how now we're slowly gaining the will and the way to address that. - Solar and wind power - New Nuclear options - Grid Storage - Electric vehicles It would be nice if we'd done a hard left turn on the economy and somehow never got here but that was probably never realistic. [1] https://xkcd.com/2889/ https://xkcd.com/2889/

spencerflem 3y ago

Whether the world as a whole is getting worse is debatable, but I think it's very clear that tech companies are

WrongAssumption 3y ago
Is it clear? Microsoft of old? IBM of old? AT&T of old? Juggernauts with abusive monopoly power that tech companies today could only dream of.
- uoaei 3y ago
  I'm getting visions of that New Yorker cartoon about shareholder value but it's just a techie in Allbirds saying "is it really worse, tho?"
- zilti 3y ago
  Apple, Google, Amazon are every bit as bad, and Microsoft is still up there, too.
  - WrongAssumption 3y ago
    Assuming that’s true, is that counter to my statement? Mine was in response to someone saying it’s clear tech companies are getting worse, and your response to mine is they are just as bad? So also in your mind not clear they are getting worse, correct?
    - zilti 3y ago
      Just as bad, and then some. The big ones used to only have B2B power with vendor lock-in. The new ones have much more. They have power over their individual users, too, by locking in their data and controlling the communication and sharing with others, and trough that even over people who are not their customers yet. You want to communicate/share with person X? Looks like you have to have an account at Y for that, too bad, eh?
jrockway 3y ago
Yeah, I mean, these companies are at the end of their "startup" lifecycle and are now just ordinary big companies that exist to chill and produce dividends. When you hear "Amazon", think "IBM". When you hear "Apple", think "Coca Cola". When you hear "Google", think "Goldman Sachs". All of those companies make an enormous amount of money but haven't done anything interesting in 50 years. There will be new startups that eclipse all of these companies in interestingness. The one for the next 20 years is probably OpenAI.
bbor 3y ago
Yeah this seems like the important factor to me. The whole industry is doing layoffs, at least partially in an explicit attempt to combat the insane amount of privilege that we techies have cultivated since the .com boom. Hacker News is bound to get a little more vicious when people are being fired and told that it’s because someone else took their job

reactordev 3y ago

[flagged]

mym1990 3y ago
At almost any other point of time you could have made a similar list with the relevant issues of the time. The news cycle today is so much more accessible, and is skewed towards pessimism, so your view of the world will also skew that way depending how much news you consume. Trying to condense the world state into "getting better" vs "getting worse" is not a useful exercise, its anyone's guess. The world is definitely changing though, and many people don't like that.

DanHulton 3y ago

A lot of things are getting superficially better (personal computing tech has never been more incredible), but there's a lot scary shit that is encroaching on the daily without sufficient plans in place to really deal with. Off the top of my head: - Global warming and how we don't seem to have any plans to a path to hit any of the less-than-apocalyptic warming targets, - Corporate regulatory capture, with more and more wealth going to a smaller and smaller segment of the population while the impoverished fraction grows on the daily, - The rise of right-wing and/or outright fascist authoritarianism across the world, even in countries that would have fought strenuously against it a scant hundred years ago, - This one is a combination of all three of the others (and a lot more), I suppose, but capitalism eating itself and taking a lot of really helpless-feeling people with it. A lot of things do keep improving, but a) a lot of people never get to see or benefit from those improvements, maybe more than you think, and b) there are these terrible monsters on the horizon and nobody with the power to do anything about it seems to be willing to actually do so. It shouldn't take a whole lot of empathy to project yourself into the shoes of someone for whom shit is the worst it's ever been, nor a lot of creative thinking to realize that there's a whole lot of those people out there.

arandomusername 3y ago
[flagged]
mym1990 3y ago
Would you agree that whatever you are currently working on, either at Nodewood or evisort, is contributing to this superficial betterment of the world? Not to be dense but you are talking about empathy for people who are at the bottom of the human totem pole while posting on a tech forum while working on products that most likely don't contribute anything to actually making the world a better place. If you really cared, you would give up almost everything to give up what you have to go help those in need...but I guess a post on HN will do as well.
- spencerflem 3y ago
  Isn't that sad though? An entire industry that in your own words doesn't "contribute anything to actually making the world a better place" I think people realize this more than they used to which explains so much of the tech pessimism

boplicity 3y ago

We've already passed the 1.5 Degree Celsius limit on global warming. That alone has catastrophic consequences. Yet, the production of fossil fuels remains near record levels, and producers are aiming to scale up, as opposed to scale down. Political discourse on this topic often amounts to "but my expenses are already too high." For many people, this is still an abstract and slow moving problem. Yet, it is a very real problem with dire consequences. (That are somehow easy to ignore!) Is the world getting worse? In some ways, it's getting better. Yet, we seem doomed to cause so much destruction. It's gonna be bad. Very bad. But not right away (for many of us). https://www.sei.org/publications/production-gap-report-2023/ https://www.sei.org/publications/production-gap-report-2023/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2024/02/08/1-5-celsius-global-warming-record/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2024/02/0...

educaysean 3y ago
While I agree that global warming is a serious issue without a clear future, it seems a little far fetched to attribute that as a factor in the deterioration of hackernews community's cultural standards.
gridspy 3y ago
We've been over-polluting with CO2 for over a 100 years[1]. I prefer to focus on how now we're slowly gaining the will and the way to address that. - Solar and wind power - New Nuclear options - Grid Storage - Electric vehicles It would be nice if we'd done a hard left turn on the economy and somehow never got here but that was probably never realistic. [1] https://xkcd.com/2889/ https://xkcd.com/2889/