- mihaic parentNot really. At that point TV was competing with cinema for attention, and each needed to provide something different. Now the mediums have merged as well.
- > How many competitors do you need? Apple, Disney, Netflix, Comcast, and Paramount are five major competitors.
I actually already agree that the number is not the problem. I can't articulate better, but somehow these don't actually feel like "competitors" in the classical market sense, but rather as stars orbiting the same center, as they're all moving in the same direction, and from time to time merging with one another.
- It's always great to read about how the people the own the means of distribution aquire also the means of production, trying to create a meta-monopoly. /sarcasm
I'm rooting for someone on the regulary side disliking all the crap that Netflix produces, and just shuts the whole thing down. Those 5 billion they'd have to pay for a breakup fee in that case would have me feeling better that I couldn't cancel their service, since my family pesters me to keep it.
- > "Defeatism" is yet another shibboleth for people who refuse to accept reality.
Sometimes you'd be right, as some people use this as a shield to do whatever naive thing they want, and build sand castles. But I don't think this is the case here. Society needs some level of potentially useless effort, otherwise the things that are barealy possible are never attempted because they are so close to the line.
There's also plenty of causes for which people can mobilize themselves, we don't all need to jump on the ones that are highly likely to succeed.
- > I don't understand how deflationary policy is a wealth tax. The wealthy wouldn't lose anything, would they?
Wage earners would always receive "fresh" money, so their relative purchasing power grows compared to someone that just sits on their shrinking money. The money supply is a zero-sum pie. You actually can get richer if you're income stays the same but others have their net worth shrinking.
- I have been using inheritence for 15 years, and have sometimes regretted it and sometimes loved it.
It does have actual benefits if you can limit its usage, and don't use the full insanity that languages like C++.
I generally dismis people that tell you to always use composition over inheritance without first understanding the problem space, and how it could be modeled.
- I don't think it helps if you're arguing their position. We don't want to allow them to upsell. They're crossing the line into social ostracization grounds.
At this point, their destruction of social trust is so severe that simply boycotting is not enough, just like you don't just boycott a company that's doing environmental destruction. They simply need to be stopped, regardless of their goals.
- I think it's not at all self-contradicting.
HN is a niche forum that is all about making things that scale. Most human interactions shouldn't scale, there's no space for them to be absorbed except by other humans.
Only the very top should scale down, and that can be done in more ways, some more ethical than others.
- Sorry, but what you just said is bullshit, and I'm not even sure you know it.
Plenty of copyright holders don't want their creations to be trained on LLMs, regardless of cut. There is no voice for them.
The general statement of laws being applied differently by size is also more and more obvious in the recent climate.
- I'm actually fine with almost all the decisions that Rust made in terms of logic and concepts, but specifically don't like the synthax itself: the symbols, keywords like the consonant-only "fn" instead of "func" for instance, the fact that || {} starts a lambda instead of || -> void {}, the fact that you can return things by simply having them in an if branch. It's the main reason I don't use the language.
- Would be fascinating if true, but I'd be very curious what kind of model of "reality" they actually have.
The paper itself [1] seems quite compact and extremely high level, so I'm sure some heavy hitters would try to reformulate it. Would be the most unintuitive thing to happen since Bell's theorem [2].
- Well said, this sort of oversimplified dichotomy is used by people to get out of responsability. "We have to choose between X and Y, so I just choose X because it's better".
No wonder the author is a Facebook exec that want to be ignorant of ultimate intent, instead of reconciling them.
- Policing the tools instead of policing what is being done with them is the problem for me. Third party cookies have a valid reason to be used in federated authentication for instance, or a bunch of other valid purposes. Just ban shitty data collection practices.
Knives can be used to chop vegetables or stab someone. Don't ban their sale, ban their usage.
- Human evolution actually escaped the trap of this short term thinking twice: first some 100k years ago, when altruism bloomed (see E O Wilson), and some 2500 years ago with the universal moralistic religions.
The group that maximizes their long-term reproduction is the one that inherits the earth.
- The needed inovations for any potential new business model of the internet are not technical.
Even if some system of making crawlers pay for a content access, how could you be sure it's never used without your permission? It's not like DRM solved internet piracy.
And even if a technical solution were possible, it's natural to see this level of cynicism of how an internet giant would handle it.
- I think the biggest problem in arguing against tech and social media is that it in truth you rely on counterfactual positions, which describe how the world would look without that thing.
A world without online dating for instance wouldn't just be the same as now, except without those apps. Now forms of socializing would emerge, which you could argue are more local and healthier for society.
When talking about social media, I now ignore the more powerful arguments of how better the world could be without people spending hours on their smartphones, and focus on the problem that it's a surogate for socialization where everyone wants to sell you something, which most people seem to agree is wrong.
- > you've seen plenty of people that didn't do what he did?
Yes, because I've seen them build software that was actually used. And I've seen a few that did just like him, impressive sounding projects that had no usage.
I understand it's something subjective. I get the same feeling when looking at Damien Hirst's monstrouly expensive stuff that leaves me cold. Even after I get the concepts behind the works, my end feeling is of "so what?".
- Thank you, perhaps I worded it harshly, but that was my general feeling. Being a good developer already is a high level. Being able to start impressive-sounding projects that never materialize into anything is a luxury for which most competent developers simply don't have the extra energy.