- > Communicating with Voyager 1 is slow. Commands now take about a day to arrive, with another day for confirmation.
I found this a bit silly given the headline: "well duh, that's the theoretical limit barring fancy quantum entaglement nonsense or similar!"
TIL all electromagnetic waves, including radio which Voyager 1 [uses](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_1#Communication_system), travel at the speed of light. For some reason I always thought we had satellites doing some slower process or needing to somehow "see" light photons coming back from the probe to achieve near-lightspeed communication.
- There's some thoughtful comments here already, but I wonder the same thing constantly as a fairly addicted user of YouTube who wants to avoid short form video altogether.
I think Premium users tend to be the most affluent desirable group for ad targeting (similar to iOS users on other platforms) and even though YT Premium lets you avoid ads on YouTube, I suspect one's activity feed/"algorithm" on YouTube factors a lot into Google (and others'?) ad targeting. The same eerily effective feedback loop for getting TikTok and YouTube suggestions works better with short-form video, so even if users aren't seeing ads, YouTube still has an incentive to have people use it. So, there's money to be made in dialing in your "algorithm" from using YT Shorts even if you're a premium user.
I'm sure the other stuff about KPIs for increasing usage of shorts to compete with other media sites is accurate too
- I think you're advocating for better mental health care and rehabilitation of addicts, which I agree with. However, the idea that addicts will destroy their lives regardless of whether they stop using, or are forced to stop using, their drug of choice is an extremely dangerous statement. Many addicts get better by changing their environment and quitting/going to rehab/etc.
Furthermore, heroin != vodka in terms of how addictive it is for the average user, and that's partly why only one of them is legal for recreational use.
Controversies about decriminalization aside, harm reduction exists as a studied component in addiction, public health, and psychology circles for a reason.
- For all of the naysayers in the comments, I think the author has hit on a palpable societal trend, at least in the US.
My leading theory is that the pandemic supercharged a lot of folks' individualist tendencies and/or nihilism, and we're seeing the decline in real time. To claim that the author is simply missing the incentives, bureaucracy, or other structural mechanisms behind enshittification, is missing the point, and they even allude to these towards the bottom of TFA!
Poking holes in the examples is similarly missing the point, but I know we love correcting people on the internet. Cunningham's law and all that...
- Thanks for throwing in references like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_forest_hypothesis even though this was a silly response to the science fiction implications.
I found it an interesting read and hadn't heard the term before, but it's exactly the kind of nerdy serendipity I come to this site for!
- > Perhaps we need a corporate structure between a non-profit and a for-profit
Maybe a co-op (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative)? There are also "for-profit" like businesses that are oriented around a different goal than just profits, https://good.store/pages/good-store-about-us comes to mind.
- Notepad++ was a life saver in my early days of needing to open and edit large files without having the tech literacy or familiarity required to use an actual IDE. I was a Windows "tinkerer" for a long time before learning programming and getting into engineering, and I suspect I'm not the only one on HN who got started that way. It's probably the first editor I used with line numbers, tabs / multiple view panes in one window, and customization options.
I can't say I use it as often these days, but it's still installed on my PC at home and it's a reliable tool that I think back on fondly. Without it, I might not have "leveled up" to more advanced tools later on.
- For anybody who's wondering, Nintendo doesn't _actually_ own Pokemon (a common misconception), but has a major stake in "The Pokemon Company", which does https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo#Subsidiaries
As such, I wonder if this structure makes it harder to sue over IP infringement. I agree with others here that patent infringement is a seemingly odd pick, but perhaps this also has to do with character design patents, since Palworld didn't explicitly use Nintendo's IP?
Should be interesting regardless to see what happens
- That's a pretty grim outlook, but I honestly can't poke a "hole" in its logic.
Well stated, somebody's clearly done their reading on Marxist theory :)
I've been struggling recently with limitations on "managing upward" I've seen thus far in my career -- eventually incentives become aligned such that no "good" manager that represents their employees well to leadership and says "no" when necessary has stuck around very long. I suspect it's largely systemic but I appreciate the way you've highlighted why.
The only cases I've seen where incentives align in favor of the rank and file employee tend to be ambitious projects as "growth" opportunities -- but of course this tends to be more often than not in the form of "experience" rather than necessarily higher "pay". Good managers still try to proactively find opportunities and make sure the team keeps growing. Eventually you "fix" the pay part by switching jobs, but I do wish we had a better system where I could just be "loyal", grow expertise in a relevant area, and be fairly compensated without having to worry about basic things like healthcare.
- > And similar proposals like the Negative Income Tax would cost far less money and have none of the presented downsides.
Most people file taxes once a year, meaning they would get this payment once rather than monthly, which makes a huge difference if living on the poverty line. Similarly, many people making less than the minimum for filing [1] likely don't file their taxes. This was an issue with the child tax credit as well -- you want to get resources to the lowest-income households, but doing that with tax credits means you don't actually reach those households, meaning you still have to introduce new programs to reach those people [2]. There were proposals to make that tax credit into a monthly payment but IIRC they did not pass before the child tax credit was ended in 2022.
[1] https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/who-needs-to-file-a-tax-return [2] https://www.vox.com/22588701/child-tax-credit-accessibility-...
- I think so. My company's new refresh policy is "buy your own recycled corp device from us and we'll install all of our tracking software on it so you can use it as a corp device" (the _worst_ kind of BYOD imaginable). So, I'm probably using the initially "free" Intel Macbook until it dies, I do, or my job does.
- This author strikes me as one of the greatest "counter examples" for our hiring system. They sound more useful and experienced (IMO) than myself and most coworkers I know, and I think most companies would be lucky to have them. Dark times we're in... darker times ahead.
> How do we try to exist when we need income, but almost all jobs have become impossible fantasy roles overloaded with divergent tasks trying to cram 5 departments worth of concurrent work into single people? Is it time to rip up our tech industry membership cards and just leave all the roles to overworked amateurs who only know the broken world since they haven’t ever seen a functioning company with professionals in single-purpose professional roles? I don’t know anymore.
Nailed it! I think the cynical answer here is obviously "yes". This was a problem 10 years ago and continues to get worse, not better. After layoffs and outages and enshittification, it all seems to be "holding together", so I'm truly not sure what the "breaking point" is. Probably social revolution or labor camps (half kidding).
> The tech roles at most companies are completely busted it seems. I didn’t sign up to be a “software servant” to non-technical product teams who just define tasks and priorities for actually capable people to implement every day. Somewhere along the way the entire industry lost its heart and now most companies are more interested in “playing company” instead of actually carving out created creative contraptions? There is a thing called “Engineering-led management” where, imagine this, the people doing the work are also the ones defining the product and talking to users and defining requirements while implementing features all themselves. You can’t create good products if you have less capable “product idea people” controlling implementation capability. Office Space wasn’t supposed to be our destiny.
This was probably my favorite part. As one of the "5+ years at <big tech corp>" people, this is inescapable in my experience "from the inside". I'll also note I don't make $5-10k per day like the author assumes, nor do any of my peers, even the "extremely highly paid" ones. The peak is mostly $2-4k per day but most people make 0.5-1k per day. I highly recommend http://levels.fyi as a reference for these types of data points.
- or not, from comments they seem to have a bit of a "reputation" in the redis community. I don't have time to figure out how veritable these claims are. At a minimum they sound experienced and talented enough to get into one of these high paying tech firms they seem to not be able to get into. I don't think it's indicative of an "individual problem" in the current environment.
- > Somehow, only Apple has seemed to be able to solve this Herculean problem.
Bit of a stab in the dark here but I would assume ARM has at least something to do with this? Tablets, phones, etc. get standby a lot better than x86 systems seem to. My pre-M1 Macbook Pro does not handle standby well but my partner's M2 Macbook Air lasts for forever and handles sleep etc. well. The lower power consumption in "standby mode" on ARM seems like at least part of the picture for why Apple gets this so much better. I bet it's part of why Windows is trying to release their ARM variant and have been working on it for 10+ years
- The fact that "worth their weight in cold" typically means in the single-digit millions is fascinating to me (though I doubt I'll be able to get there myself, maybe someday). I looked it up though and I think this is undercounting the current value of gold per ounce/lb/etc.
5320814 / 180 / 16 = ~1847.5
Per https://www.apmex.com/gold-price and https://goldprice.org/, current value is north of $2400 / oz. It was around $1800 in 2020. That growth for _gold_ of all things (up 71% in the last 5 years) is crazy to me.
It's worth noting that anyone with a ski house that expensive probably has a net worth well over twice the price of that ski house. I guess it's time to start learning CUDA!
- This was well written and (imo) a pretty objective analysis of the sociopolitical shift of things in the US. Thanks for writing it, especially the part about the 90s not being all that much better. It kinda seems to me that many people forget this due to Y2K and 9/11 resetting peoples' memory, or maybe the average internet user has gotten younger and that's affected "discourse".
Your last bullet also kinda hints at why the trend towards "low-trust" cuts both ways -- liberals and progressives are similarly "done" with interacting with the other side. I don't see a way out but it saddens me we're heading to a more anti-social society (anti social in the political sense, oxymoron intended)
- I hadn't considered the interpretation where "bank" is a verb. Thank you for clarifying, this was driving me crazy!
The semantics of "how you <do thing> can screw you over" is still a bit odd, as "screw over" is typically done by people in the English language ("the mailman screwed me over" reads better than "the mailbox screwed me over" or "how I closed the mailbox screwed me over"), but that's less egregious than the obvious typo I took it for (assuming noun form of "bank"). I digress...
- This was fascinating!! Please do consider bringing it back to life as a library and sharing with HN.
I had no idea how much better such an editing experience is until your video, and completely agree about the benefit of not having to context-switch a la git commit "interactive mode". The "inline typewriter" effect is also really cool
- Most of the new policies and court decisions, including the one I linked in my reply, have been disjoint with the will of the people. I don't see how your point about shifting sentiment (which I very much agree with) means we'll see any sort of regulatory action from the federal government, especially in the US. Maybe in the EU, someday, after most of the damage has been done?
> What happens when both blue state white collar workers and red state blue collar workers need to contest with AI. Perhaps not within the next 10 years, but certainly within 20 years!
Populism. Probably the fascist right-wing kind, but I expect some form of populism. Related, if we're talking about a 20 year time horizon, I'm genuinely unsure if society will still exist in any recognizable fashion at the rate we're going...
- I became aware of this quite recently (on this site too IIRC), but it's worth noting that the "growth mindset" findings of the last several decades haven't quite panned out or been replicable upon further review: https://matheducators.stackexchange.com/questions/24418/are-...
I agree the Persistent / Obstinate paradigm seems quite similar, and if anything for those reasons I'm inclined to be (obstinately :P) skeptical.
Less relevant to engineering etc., but I personally find a lot of "successful people do X, unsuccessful people do Y" findings, especially when presented as "innate" or "personality" features, are pretty similar to IQ, the marshmallow test, and other things where it's a frequent victim of selection bias for how scarce resources were in one's upbringing or cognitive development.
- > once the big regulatory hammers start dropping to protect American workers
Have we been living in the same universe the last 10 years? I don't see this ever happening. Related recent news (literally posted yesterday) https://www.axios.com/2024/07/02/chevron-scotus-biden-cyber-...
- > How you bank can screw you over
This is the first heading 3 paragraphs into the article (note the typo in "you"). Do people ... not even read their own writing before publishing an article these days? I understand people don't want to "waste" money on editors but most random dev blogs have fewer typos than sites like this where content is _monetized_ through ads.
I bank with one of the main US companies and probably should look into using a second, but setting up credit cards etc. at each one seems like a bad idea...
IMO, this is why we should have basic banking through USPS or some other federal organization. I don't care what it costs or why private organizations with [clear histories of fraud](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wells_Fargo_cross-selling_scan...) are supposedly better. We should just have better nationalized banking offerings (airlines and healthcare too for that matter) and remove this problem altogether.
- AFAIK, the "borrowed" books on this platform weren't downloadable on the library site, merely viewable. Per TFA:
> "We use industry-standard technology to prevent our books from being downloaded and redistributed—the same technology used by corporate publishers," Chris Freeland, IA's director of library services, wrote in the blog. "But the publishers suing our library say we shouldn’t be allowed to lend the books we own. They have forced us to remove more than half a million books from our library, and that’s why we are appealing."
Is the "lend the books we own" part somehow inaccurate? I'm assuming IA has some sort of claim to the books they're lending and scanned, similar to any physical library. This seems very different from "a gigantic book piracy site".
Furthermore, I'd argue removing access to those books on IA will likely lead to one of the following:
A. people will fall back to actual piracy through other means to get the same content "even less legally" through well known alternatives
B. people simply not being able to access the content, e.g. if it's out of print , not available locally, or only available used for some exorbitant cost that wouldn't go to the publisher
C. people will spend whatever the publisher charges by buying from them directly
My understanding is that A and B are way more likely than C, since the vast majority of books on IA's website include out of print and hard to get books.
- This seems like some sort of polarizing issue for some, but the reasons "why not" are totally unclear to me. I'm a regular advocate for detailed and self-explanatory code change "commit" descriptions, and I feel as if I'm in the minority trying to advocate for (at a minimum) proper bug tagging and context links in description for PRs that I come across.
This gets omitted sufficiently often that I have largely given up on requiring it except for noteworthy code changes that I am a reviewer for. It's a very hard thing to get consistent adherence to in my experience. I highly recommend others in a similar boat to at least lead by example and annotate your code changes consistently so you can at least identify relevant changes that you wrote. Getting everybody else to is another story...
- I'm sure I'm probably just less used to seeing StackExchange answers than StackOverflow answers but I am truly in awe at the length and thoroughness of the existing currently-top answer. By my quick + dirty JS console calculations, it's ~2930 words: https://matheducators.stackexchange.com/a/27841
Yep, here it is: https://kibty.town/blog/mintlify/
Also linked in his guide (which I missed) and [here in a separate HN post](https://www.hackerneue.com/item?id=46317546). I think this other author's post is a lot more detailed and arguably more useful to folks reading on HN.