jamesrowen@gmail.com
- > Of course, by internet law, HN (or a subset of its members) considers itself to be the smartest, more thoughtful online community.
I would call that disparaging.
If we're going to be pedantic, the post you initially quoted said "it's entirely possible" and "it seems likely." That's not a claim, that's a suggestion that invites a substantive counter-argument. Just saying "uh no, it's obviously not" is not substantive.
"It goes without saying HN is not the smartest" is more of a claim.
It really should not be that difficult to actually attempt to make an argument rather than point out that someone else's is probabilistically not totally factually correct. It's just bad faith, pure negation. You're defending the lack of substance in your argument by saying someone else's argument lacked substance. Put something forth yourself.
I'm not just trying to debate here, I am genuinely curious to hear about what other communities people find "smarter and more thoughtful." If they can't even be named then yes I am going to call that empty posturing.
- I see you're downvoted, it wasn't me. I wasn't making any claim, you're making claims and disparaging remarks that you won't substantiate.
- > It goes without saying HN is not the smartest or more thoughtful online community.
How does that go without saying? Name some others then, compare and contrast. As-is your argument is just posturing.
- This is perhaps only tangentially related to formal verification, but it made me wonder - what efforts are there, if any, to use LLMs to help with solving some of the tough questions in math and CS (P=NP, etc)? I'd be curious to know how a mathematician would approach that.
- I'm not the one dismissing anything. I'm arguing for tolerance, goodwill, and cooperation. There are lots of practical concerns in life, there are tradeoffs, there is balance.
A few days ago you said "the impression the different groups have different ideals is correct." You've spoken mostly in mystical aphorisms so it's been hard to glean much.
- Before this O'Saasy situation, I hadn't fully understood how much ideological purity was baked into the the term "open source," which to be fair is not really implied by such a general term.
I still feel like it would be a happier world if open source was more of an umbrella advocacy organization containing free software and source available, but now I understand that that's not going to happen.
- > If they were getting taken down I'd heartily agree with you.
At some point it won't be worth it to maintain them, hopefully.
> I still largely get the experience that after I buy a toilet seat for example on Amazon, Amazon then regularly shows me ads for additional toilet seats, as though I've taken up throne collecting as a hobby or something.
This is definitely a thing, I feel like it's getting better though and stuff like that drops off pretty quickly. But it still doesn't bother me nearly as much as watching the same 30 second TV commercial for the 100th time, I just swipe or scroll past, and overall it's still much better than seeing the lowest common denominator stuff.
> I mean, I personally loathe the way my attention is constantly being redirected, or attempted to be, by loud inane bullshit. I tolerate it, of course, what other option does one have, but I certainly wouldn't call it a good or healthy thing. I think our society would leap forward 20 years if we pushed the entirety of ad-tech into the ocean.
I hear you, the attention economy is a brave new world, and there will probably be some course corrections. I don't think ads are really the problem though, in some ways everything vying for your attention is an ad now. Through technology we democratized the means of information distribution, and I would rather have it this way than having four TV channels, but there are some growing pains for sure.
- Yes, I'm saying, as a consumer, I much prefer the latter, and I get more value from it. And it's only enabled by modern individualized data collection.
- > Billboards and other such ads, which were once commonplace are now solely the domain of ambulance chasing lawyers and car dealerships. TV ads are no better, production value has tanked, they look cheaper and shittier than ever, and the products are solely geared to the boomers because they're the only ones still watching broadcast TV.
This actually strikes me as a good thing. The more we can get big dumb ads out of meatspace and confine everything to devices, the better, in my opinion (though once they figure out targeted ads in public that could suck).
I know this is an unpopular opinion here, but I get a lot more value out of targeted social media ads than I ever did billboards or TV commercials. They actually...show me niche things that are relevant to my interests, that I didn't know about. It's much closer to the underlying real value of advertising than the Coca-Cola billboard model is.
> A lot of younger folks I know don't even bother with an ad-blocker, not because they like them, but simply because they've been scrolling past ads since they were shitting in diapers. It's just the background wallpaper of the Internet to them, and that sounds (and is) dystopian...
Also this. It's not dystopian. It's genuinely a better experience than sitting through a single commercial break of a TV show in the 90s (of which I'm sure we all sat through thousands). They blend in. They are easily skippable, they don't dominate near as much of your attention. It's no worse than most of the other stuff competing for your attention. It doesn't seem that difficult to me to navigate a world with background ad radiation. But maybe I'm just a sucker.
- I understand that it's not open source. I just see it as like, a spot where a company that would normally make a closed source product wanted to make it more open and hackable and did actually put the code up and take contributions, which should be a kind of good thing, but it's automatically assumed to be the worst, a rugpull, etc. What if I operated in an ethical gray area right around this pretty reasonably worded term?
- > It’s also vague as, what if I run a VPS provider and someone can upload images to a marketplace like thing, does that count as SaaS? How about if someone’s only use of my services is to run that image?
This strikes me as somewhat contrived. Like yeah, if you're gonna do some weird button-pushing thing, it's not worth it, steer clear, keep this product off your platform, easy. Is a piece of software really only of value to the open source community if any kind of unscrupulous use of it is allowed?
There's a million ways to get value out of source code that don't involve pushing the envelope. I've accepted every EULA ever without reading and never once worried I would get in trouble with any of them, it's generally pretty easy if you're not trying to invent ways to do so.
- That's fair, I understand that it's not the best learning tool but is it doing "good" overall in nudging people toward learning, is it more "educational" than Candy Crush or Tiktok (which he seems to see as competitors)? Genuine question.
As far as CEOs go he did seem sincere to me in a half-business half-believer kind of way. The interviewer asks pointedly about his transition from academia to IPO-land.
- > I am betting on attracting young professionals, academics, white-collar types that like books, language and the experience of a white page with classic, black typography.
This is cool, and I've auto-didacted a number of things with resources like this, and I know most here have as well.
But, watching the interview with the Duolingo CEO linked in this thread, he's talking about reaching the far larger set of people that don't have strong intrinsic motivation to learn. Which is arguably a much more difficult and more important mission. The natural learners (and kids of white-collar parents) are already pretty well-equipped by the general state of the internet. This is where I'm finding some appreciation for some of the techniques that might be considered low-brow or deleterious by that cohort.
- This is interesting and a nice conversation, thank you.
He talks about how they wanted to let people know that they would stop sending them notifications after five days of inactivity, but that the "passive-aggressive" nature of that notification actually got people to come back. To me it illustrates that it's such a fine line to walk if you want to respect the user but also maybe push through their own lack of motivation.
(I'm not a user of Duolingo so I can't speak to where they land on that but it's clearly controversial)
- Gamify it like Super Mario Brothers is a game. Concepts like "fun" and "progress" are good. Nagging, begging, and creating false urgency are bad. Gamification is fine if it doesn't "take over," which it will when business people are running the show.
I feel like there was a time when those coding problem websites with points and leaderboards and such struck a good balance between learning and a game. Then they seemingly all got co-opted by the interview prep industry.
- Notably, the terms "UX" and "experience" are not present in that document. UI and UX are different things. UX is a newer concept that is more based on observing users and their emotional reactions to using the product.
UML and functional definitions and iso standards are still important, it's just not UX.
Good luck never observing users using your product. Not everything is a space shuttle, recall that we are talking about toothbrushes here.
- I would almost define "experience" as that which can't be described by UML.
Ask any person to go and find a stick and use it to brush their teeth, and then ask if that "experience" was the same as using their toothbrush. Invoking UML is absurd.
- Yes, whittling down a stick is pretty much the same experience as using an electric toothbrush. Or those weird mouthguard things they have now.
I don't think most people would find this degree of reduction helpful.
- It could be argued that it was part of "embrace, extend, extinguish" to attract developers to the platform by keeping it open. They would just figure out how to capitalize on anything that got big enough, much like Google.
Apple really pioneered the walled garden (which I would assume was previously taken to be shooting yourself in the foot), and it's proven to resonate with the wider less tech-savvy population.
I would like a desktop pick and place that works like drag and drop, you click and then it sticks to the cursor, but you are free to do whatever gestures until you click again.