Jetrel

21 ms·

121.
by Jetrel 6y ago
The crux of the argument really focuses on that "for profit" bit, and that's really a conundrum in corporate governance. The problem isn't at all "corporations", which are just assemblies of humans for a commo
122.
by Jetrel 6y ago
I wasn't a participant, but ... it definitely hurts that, like, I haven't the faintest friggin clue how HN's whole voting system works - in fact I'm not even sure where the downvote button is. There's a minus [-]
123.
by Jetrel 6y ago
As an observation, I think a great deal of this is because of the "depth of features" of things a really good service (like Discord) gets insanely right. There's just this mountain of really important quality-of-life things,
124.
by Jetrel 6y ago
I mean, if you'd like to put it in perspective, try developing for IE6. You don't even have a dev console. I had a recent revelation when watching a video someone posted of a Symbolics Lisp machine, and its legendary dev environm
125.
by Jetrel 6y ago
Personally I'm genuinely surprised/saddened that nobody stepped up to make an authoring tool. Neither a proprietary company like Adobe, nor an open-source initiative. Because - the flash monopoly is basically "there for the
126.
by Jetrel 6y ago
It's starting to grow, but on any given platform of theirs, the overwhelming majority of their income still comes from the actual hardware, and the services revenue for that platform is maybe 1/6th or 1/8th of what they make
127.
by Jetrel 6y ago
He's arguing that this statement is false: > The average American doesn’t live in NYC/LA/SF, they live in a small to medium size town. http://css.umich.edu/factsheets/us-cities-factsheet "It is e
128.
by Jetrel 6y ago
Yeah, this is spot on. Most people don't quite understand how homelessness works, and it's because of this whole "support network" thing. In most people's mind, homeless = bum living in a cardboard box. What actu
129.
by Jetrel 6y ago
Perhaps one way to put it: You couldn't download this demo into a ROM image and run it on an emulator. To make it run, you'd have to beg the author of the emulator to actually support your chip. This is more than a silly, pedanti
130.
by Jetrel 6y ago
Nailed it. It's epidemiology for ideas.
131.
by Jetrel 6y ago
I feel like a much better quote, which really hits on the more meaningful parts of it is this one, attributed to a "Helen Gurley Brown": "Money, if it does not bring you happiness, will at least help you be miserable in comfo
132.
by Jetrel 6y ago
Promoting free speech would be efficacious as a tool to stop such people if it had any "staying power" to linger on as a defense-in-depth tool to fight them after they assume power - that it would take a while for them to get rid
133.
by Jetrel 6y ago
> The antidote to bad speech is more (hopefully good) speech, not less speech. I used to think that humans could convince each other of facts using logic and rhetoric. Disagreements would get aired out, and the better "done in good
134.
by Jetrel 6y ago
I mean, with new teslas, their range is similar enough to gas cars that you only need to charge them about once a week, if that. And they charge fast enough that it's not terribly dissimilar from hitting the gas station, which current
135.
by Jetrel 6y ago
To be fair, it's pretty outdated terminology. It comes from an era when computers were so genuinely slow that doing almost anything - even using page layout like Pagemaker, or setting up just a single track song in a DAW, had tons of r
136.
by Jetrel 6y ago
Apple did something like this with A/UX back in the day (their variant of Unix which apple sold for its 68k machines). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A/UX The tool that did this was called Commando; I'm
137.
by Jetrel 6y ago
Thank you for posting these responses, because this conceptual material around "Schelling Points" and such is incredibly useful - and tends to be a blind spot within the tech community. (Curiously I've also found that "t
138.
by Jetrel 6y ago
The catch is that you're looking at this through the lens of "comparison shopping between two user-facing apps", decided on by a random consumer out on the net. In that context, it's absolutely true. I personally exper
139.
by Jetrel 6y ago
Speaking as someone who deals with a fair amount of this in their extended family, I honestly think a blind spot the human race has is a struggle to believe this can really get "that bad". I've had relatives (now deceased) wh
140.
by Jetrel 6y ago
Something for historical consideration is that - if we just go full Godwin's law here: in Nazi Germany, most citizens were just "casual followers" of anti-semitism. You don't have to be gung ho to let someone ELSE do s
141.
by Jetrel 6y ago
I've long been sympathetic to ideas like this - I remember as a little kid, blowing off the big stigma around the (then-novel) 3d shooters that had just come out, like Doom. Ironically I agree with exactly what you said, but simultaneo
142.
by Jetrel 6y ago
> Not to try and invalidate your experiences, but "IRC" doesn't refer to any specific software program. I'd be interested to know which of the dozens of IRC clients you were using that was so horrible. We ... did try
143.
by Jetrel 6y ago
I was forced to use IRC for about ~15 years due to being involved in a big OSS project that refused to use anything else, and .. man. I honestly have to say it's my number-one most hated software program in my life. Exceeding even th
144.
by Jetrel 6y ago
As we mentioned before, those weren't my opinions, just my guesses about other people's opinions.
145.
by Jetrel 6y ago
That's an absolutely fair point. One thing to watch out for though, is that it's only half of the rationale behind escapism: we're concerned about our own stewardship of the Earth, but there's a very real concern that a
146.
by Jetrel 6y ago
For what it's worth, the classic Drake Equation is that old "back of the envelope" calculation they put together to try to ask this very question - what's the likelihood life evolved? The problem with the drake equation
147.
by Jetrel 6y ago
That's actually an excellent point; I was really talking about "external" engineers, rather than internal ones, but yeah, the attrition (or even loss of agency) amongst internal engineers is another huge problem. A closely r
148.
by Jetrel 6y ago
Yeah, Echo's probably a perfect example of doing this right, and honestly, the more I'm thinking about this, the more I'm realizing Amazon's doing this stuff surprisingly well. And it's probably down to that: Commi
149.
by Jetrel 6y ago
Yeah, I'm pretty concerned about them (and several others like Apple, but we'll focus on google in this comment). I'm baffled at how google fell into this trap, because it really seems like Larry/Sergey "got it&qu
150.
by Jetrel 6y ago
That is correct. The original poster was saying that generally cults will be rather unpleasant for most mid<->lower level members, but are pleasant for the people at the top (generally by extracting value from those lower-level member

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