yedava

9 ms·

61.
by yedava 3y ago
The long tail was what was promised a couple of decades ago. What we got instead is plain old winner takes all dynamic, with a surveillance economy bolted on top.
62.
by yedava 3y ago
IMO The Broken Earth trilogy winning the Hugos is the best argument against the claim that Hugos are politicized. The books are a SFF must read.
63.
TikTok cuts jobs as tech layoffs continue to mount(text.npr.org)
3 points by yedava 3y ago|0 comments
64.
by yedava 3y ago
Subscriptions should have a time based expiry option. It's trivial to implement from a technology standpoint and not providing that option is an anti-consumer tactic. The fact that all businesses are so anti-consumer is a testament to
65.
by yedava 3y ago
I would say less if they had stayed on Wall St. The past decade has laid the groundwork for an Orwellian society. Digital communication and commerce is now centralized to a few big firms and that is going to hurt us as a civilization.
66.
by yedava 3y ago
Offshoring has been a thing for a few decades now. So has the technology that facilitates remote work. So I don't think this is some new push for offshoring.
67.
by yedava 3y ago
Earlier today, this[1] was on the HN front page, a blog post on how Meta processes trillions of serverless functions. All that impressive tech exists for one single reason - massive surveillance at scale. [1] https://read.enginee
68.
by yedava 3y ago
With symphonies, I'm already familiar with them after listening to them the first few times. Like I've listened to individual movements separately several times, but if I listen to all them together, fully concentrating on the mus
69.
by yedava 3y ago
If you spend your whole life obsessing over material things, you can miss the things that matter. I care about audio quality, but not to the extent where I can call myself an audiophile. For me, the goal is the music. When a symphony clicks
70.
by yedava 3y ago
I actually wanted to buy a Google One plan, but when I read their terms of service[1], it said that my data still is subjected to their privacy policy[2]. Which means Google can still sell my data to advertisers, even if I were to pay for t
71.
by yedava 3y ago
The thing about language and culture is that they adapt. This essay of of Orwell has been pretty popular for a while and people know what language to avoid when employing Orwellian tactics. A modern example of Orwellian language can be foun
72.
by yedava 3y ago
I avoid Amazon as a rule, but when I try to buy something which is out of stock on sites (like say a dietary supplement), I go through the reviews and will inevitably find someone saying it tastes or smells funny. There are plenty of positi
73.
by yedava 3y ago
Google is in the business of surveiling users and selling them to advertisers. Hell, if it weren't for Google, other business models that don't require user surveillance might have taken off. The only solution to surveillance is s
74.
by yedava 3y ago
Your freedom does not give you the right to infringe on my right to live in a noise and air pollution free environment. So why don't you go far away to do your polluting activity?
75.
by yedava 3y ago
The elephant in the room is the ad-driven world we live. People need to be manipulated into constantly buying things in order to create an illusion of progress and doing work that matters. If facebook, spotify, youtube etc... did not exist,
76.
by yedava 3y ago
As Indian-American parents, we are leaning towards letting our kid have a relatively normal childhood instead of enrolling them in the grueling rat race of chasing "success". We know that this might mean the kid will have a lower
77.
by yedava 3y ago
It does, but Youtube still collects your data and sells it to advertisers. So watching a video on Youtube could mean seeing targeted ads on other platforms. So the solution is to always use adblocking everywhere.
78.
by yedava 3y ago
What are we, as a civilization, losing when we let these surveillance companies dictate how technology is used? Increasingly every aspect of our digital lives is being controlled by the need to sell ads.
79.
by yedava 3y ago
Data could be encrypted (on the cloud, with backups and all) and the software could be given permission to just access the data it needs, do the computation and then discard the data. To clear, these are hard problems to solve, which coul
80.
by yedava 3y ago
If the big tech companies hadn't made surveillance and ads as the defacto business model, letting users own and keep their data would have been the natural evolution from desktop computing to mobile computing. Instead we are stuck with
81.
by yedava 3y ago
You can see it here on this discussion, or even in general on HN. It is taken as a given that men are hard wired to optimize for getting laid and all their behaviors follow from that. It's like culture is irrelevant and humans are resi
82.
by yedava 3y ago
Do Darwin Awards look at all of humanity or only a subset of it? Maybe there is a cultural component to behavior. Maybe there are cultures which don't treat men as idiots. How can anyone assert that men are genetically stupid without c
83.
by yedava 3y ago
The most important cognitive distortion to be aware of is that being aware of cognitive distortions will make you more rational. No matter how hard you practice rationality, you will exhibit these distortions at some point or the other. Var
84.
by yedava 3y ago
I wonder what will happen to the Spring ecosystem. Will Broadcom close it off and try to monetize it?
85.
by yedava 3y ago
Here's a hard problem that I would like the world's highest paid people to solve: Give us an app where everything, including metadata, is end-to-end encrypted and works at "web scale". No one other than the people in the
86.
Big Tech Is Exploiting the Mental Health Crisis to Monetize Your Data(jacobin.com)
6 points by yedava 3y ago|1 comments
87.
What punch cards teach us about AI risk(bcantrill.dtrace.org)
2 points by yedava 3y ago|0 comments
88.
by yedava 3y ago
I wish those had been Linux laptops. Now Google gets 133K more devices to spy on.
89.
by yedava 3y ago
I won't mind paying if it is a fair transaction - that is I'm being charged for (paying the creators + infra costs + profit). But Google is still siphoning my data and selling it to advertisers. If these companies can do business
90.
by yedava 3y ago
Historically, whenever there was an inflection point for a new technology, you'd have lots of people working on the same problem, and whoever cracks the problem first is put of pedestal. Revisionist history is built around that one per

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