> There are probably edge cases this code solves that we don’t remember.
Oh yeah, I agree with that. I wrote a program for work recently that probably should have been object-oriented. It would have been nice for it to be, because it's a bit of a mess now. But it works flawlessly and in truth it doesn't need any real feature upgrades now that it's done. So, I decided to keep it as it is.
That is absolutely great! But I will be really impressed if humanity as a whole ever "flattens the CO2 curve" -- still going up at a greater than linear rate!
At face value I was inclined to agree with you (SO2 causing acid rain and being generally impactful to health through cardiovascular and respiratory issues, damaging mammalian DNA, impacting hormones like testosterone etc.).
However given the strong role SO2 can play in reducing global warming, and that there are even proposals to introduce more SO2 to the atmosphere to achieve the Paris objectives, like most things in our complex interconnected world it gets a bit more complex.
Of course one hopes there are better responses to the changing climate than reactively doubling down on polluting contaminants into the atmosphere when that has contributed to the current mess and we clearly have narrow and incomplete understandings of systemic intervention.
Wow you guys are sensitive. I was trying to underline the hopelessness of what we are doing. I'm not condoning any illegal activity....jeez. But I'll leave. The hostility here is incredible.
definitly a bent mind, mixing "true hope" and "mass sabotage", but overlooking the scale of infrastructure involved in producing fossil fuels
and that destroying it would require a massive military industrial and technological base to do it with,hmmmmmmm
That realy, realy is a call for random terror.
I like to think of myself as 665, almost but not quite evil, but this guy goes that last bit,
blithly.Concerning given the goings on.
Takes all of the fun out of nibbling a bit at at the edge of (oh so) polite discourse.
I will have to up my game, as the last thing I want to do is encourage actual muckers.
> According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), 2025 will see renewables surpass coal to become the largest source of electricity generation. It also predicts that the next five years will see almost 3,700GW of new renewable capacity come online.
Looks like we got a good strategy. 3,700GW or 3.7TW versus the over 110,000TW provided by fossil fuels. Right on there...0.003% replacement in 5 years. Seems like a quick response to the climate crisis. /sarcasm.
Please provide a source for 110E3 TW for all fossil fuels, the US electrical grid time averages over a year about 0.4 TW in generation [0]. Did you actually mean TWh over a year, comparing instantaneous generation with annual production? was such a choice deliberate or accidental?
One thing I love is the continuing comparison to coal, even though coal is being phased out mostly from the expansion of natural gas, not the expansion of renewables. (keyword: mostly). Natural gas has risen to almost half our energy.
This is still a very good thing in terms of CO2 and air pollution. One can hope that renewables continue to expand at an exponential rate, eventually offsetting natural gas.
Right; natural gas in the US has gotten cheap. This has been a progressive trend (with some pauses) since natural gas was deregulated under Carter. The nuclear renaissance here in the US was knifed in the cradle because of natural gas prices becoming so low after a misleading burp upwards.
I remember you posting a similar comment last year. Certainly emissions have flattened, but just looking at temperature data from the last two years, it seems likely that we have already set in motion some positive feedback loops which is quite bad news. I suspect we'll have little choice but to intentionally alter the albedo of the atmosphere rather soon in order to at least buy our selves a bit of time.
It's about 20 years later than it should have happened, and we've got a lot of speed to scrub, but late is a heck of a lot better than never.
Climate change is accompanied by an incredible amount of doomerism. I've had lots of people tell me variations of "we're all doomed anyway, I'm going to vote for the drill drill drill party and party until the world ends".
If we don't celebrate the wins we do have, everybody will give up.
You are off by one derivation. Breaking would be putting the carbon from the atmosphere back into the ground, which we are not doing at all.
Your doomerism argument is a strawman, it is fact that we are still accelerating the current temperature excursion. If it helps you, we are at one of the coldest moments in earth's history, so most of what climate change will cause will have been there before.
Like when people took “two weeks to flatten the curve” with a silent “and then the pandemic is completely over” instead of the obvious “well then it has to go down later for it to mean anything”.
2025 emissions lower than 2024 emissions don't imply the flattening of the total ppm CO2 curve. It COULD result it that, but it's not a necessary outcome because of deforestation. Also, emissions accounting is sometimes wonky...
> Population is peaking soon which should be a good start for flattening that curve.
It might help but most of the world is still considered "in development", we need for that development to happen with sustainable energy sources, and for that it needs to be as simple and cheap to be harvested and used as it is for those countries to use fossil fuels today.
If that doesn't happen then these countries will use fossil fuels to develop, and the population peaking won't be of much help when those countries start emitting more per capita like many developed countries.
Yes, it's important that the development of large groups of people who don't emit much at all, leapfrog directly to more modern energy.
I think it's safe to say there is a large risk that a billion people in india will still use fossil fuel for a large part of their development. Their first cars will be internal combustion and so on. They'll use that increased wealth to eat more meat than they did before and so on. I'm not optimistic about our chances to change any of that.
I think there's signs of that happening already, as well as precedent. A lot of developing countries just kind of skipped ahead to modern internet infrastructure, for example, and solar is booming in India, especially, at the moment.
If the developing world develops, there will be less exploitable cheap labor, so everyone in already developed countries will have to start consuming less when their wages aren’t so disproportionally high compared to where their iPhone gets made.
Ignore everything this guy states. Look at his comments, he is an eco terrorist at best who benefits and uses technology himself but then turns around and wants to sabotage human advancement and the use of any fossil fuels.
"I believe the only true hope is mass sabotage of fossil-fuel producing infrastructure."
He is calling for terrorism in his posts and preaching his gospel. I personally don’t think terrorism should be tolerated in any form. Maybe it’s ok with you but not me. His gospel is hypocrisy and dangerous.
There is no such thing as polluting substances, only an accumulation of those. The problem lies in the fact that our technological process graph has too many sinks leading to an accumulation of 'dead-end' by-products. There is almost never such occurrences in nature, and when it does (great oxygenation event), the system manages to circle it back into the process graph.
Contrast this with current ecological recommendations: they boil down to reducing the production rate of such substances, which can only asymptotically delay the looming apocalypse.
> There is almost never such occurrences in nature, and when it does (great oxygenation event), the system manages to circle it back into the process graph.
It is actually recent earth's biosphere with its many negative feedback loops which is the exception here. Earth could have turned into a Venus or Mars if conditions were just slightly different, and it almost did several times.
I don't understand what point you're trying to make. Life never appeared on Venus or Mars as far as we know.
The question I want to ask is: why is there almost no existential pollution problems in nature ? Why does the way civilization lays out its own process graph lends itself so easily to dead ends ?
Net neutrality is crucial for a free internet. This will be even more important for the future, because without it we will have tighter and tighter controls over the internet. A lack of neutrality will, among other things, allow secret deals between service providers and big platforms that will squeeze out the independent internet and accelerate a total commercialization of all aspects of the internet.
Large businesses are becoming a greater liability than ever before. Although I applaud net neutrality advocates, something greater must be done: the takedown of large corporations and rebuilding them from scratch.
I'm pro net neutrality, but if it's ever going to work we need the legislature to do their job and put it into law. They either need to broaden the powers of the FCC or - better yet - enshrine net neutrality itself as law.
This is a part of the windfall from Chevron and all according to plan. Tear down the executive structures and have a congress in conflict. Leave the rest to "states rights" for their motte. When in reality we're giving the keys for private corporations to do whatever they want.
we'll likely see similar moves with the Department of Education this year.
I fully agree with what you wrote. The question is: current laws are fit for purpose? There are many things that are wrong and supported by laws or things that can be improved but existing laws forbid that. Is this a question about net neutrality or a question about how can/should be implemented?
Same about corporate powers, especially in US where consumer protection seems to be a lot weaker than in EU, even if US has a lot more regulations.
Good points. I do feel like the current laws are still insufficient, and will ultimately fail due to the corporate control of the internet/governments. More drastic solutions are probably needed. Much better anti-trust laws perhaps to combat the excessive power of big tech, maybe.
The issue is the government has been ignoring for nearly 4 decades passing proper laws. They have been deferring to these groups to make fiat laws and calling them regulations. Laws not passed by the congress or senate. The current ruling exactly because the supreme court has basically said 'hey congress do your job and we are not deferring to these made up laws anymore'. It is going to be very messy for a long time.
I got ganged up on when this was first done in the FCC. I said it will flip flop depending on who is in power and what their motivations are. Here we are 15 years later and that is exactly what happened. Until Title III is written there will be no real change. We should not let the executive branch have law judge and jury authority. It was not designed that way, it fundamentally breaks the separation of duties. We should also not let the congress and senate and judiciary cede their authority because it is convenient at the moment.
If you look at who we elect and how there is no reason to believe they will every be capable of drafting laws on complex subject matter nor revising them to keep up with the times.
Adopting a strategy that wouldn't have worked in 1980 and probably wont work in 2080 unless the country is literally torn down and rebuilt from the ground up doesn't seem like an effective strategy. The supreme court has never just been a cold arbiter of law and they certainly aren't acting thus now. The intention isn't for congress to do their job the purpose is to gut regulation so that the parties who hired the justices by proxy can profit.
I don't see why experts in agencies can't take the regulations they write up and send that to Congress to vote on. I find the "Congress can't do this" excuse to be rather weak. If they wanted to defer their authority, I'm sure they'd have no issue rubber stamping things. If regulations can't get through in that system, I guess Congress doesn't agree with that deference.
Any regulation with meaningful effect is going to cost the people who ultimately pay to keep individual congresspeople in office. These folks in fact often spend greater than half their time fundraising not legislating or in many cases are replaced by people who will.
Because of the construction of our system your desired legislation can be stymmied by lawmakers representing barely half of states represention 25% of the population so ultimately 13% of us. Worse any meaningful parts are liable to be horse traded away for more vital concerns which are almost always going to be either a crisis or immediate budgetary matters.
See the last 40 years. Imagine your cow died decades ago and you were still milking its bones.
Current laws are not fit for purpose but that gets to the heart of what worries me about the US: we can't pass laws any more.
I mean, that's an exaggeration, but major decisions like this being decided by the courts is fundamentally wrong. If the majority of the population disagree with this court ruling we ought to very simply head to congress and pass a new law to overturn it. But we won't and everyone knows it. Not to draw too many parallels but it feels similar to the recent overturn of Roe v Wade. It feels like we, as a population, are powerless to do something the majority wants.
I think you are looking from the wrong angle. Some court decisions basically said: "based on current Constitution w. amendments, this law fails on constitutional grounds". If change is needed, the people can always amend the Constitution, then laws can be passed. What you are saying is similar to "I am in the pool and I cannot swim because there is no water, so swimming pools are bad" when the answer is "fill it with water".
This doesn't require a constitutional amendment. It requires a law granting the FCC the ability to regulate isp's in this way or a law instituting net-neutrality. These "net-neutrality" regulations were always in a legal gray area and a wasted effort by the activists pushing them without understanding anything besides "net-neutrality good".
You know that the Constitution limits the powers of the Federal government versus State powers. If this is what is the problem with the net neutrality, then you need an amendment. Several states have net neutrality laws, that suggests there is a debate on where the regulation can be implemented.
My point is that the people cannot do that. Yes, the technical ability exists, but the chances of getting anything passed is very low. So we exist in a limbo where everything gets decided by the courts.
I think this understates how essential internet access is these days. It would be very, very difficult for a lot of people to simply boycott their internet provider. Like, “not able to do your job” difficult. Few people are going to risk their job for net neutrality rules.
> It would be very, very difficult for a lot of people to simply boycott their internet provider.
As I said; "Time to actually suffer to get what you want people."
But I am not just talking about the providers, I am talking about compaines like Facebook and Google.
But my Grandfather was a coal miner in PA and they had strikes that led directly to some of their deaths by murder by agents of the coal companies, so do not talk about losing your job would be hard.
You don't see the difference between miners striking to improve their livelihoods and striking for net neutrality rules? I'd think it would be obvious far fewer people are prepared to do the latter. The stakes simply aren't as high.
> because without it we will have tighter and tighter controls over the internet.
Were you paying attention for the last 10 years? We already have tighter and tighter controls over the internet. Pretty much every government on the planet is itching to institute internet censorship, and many already did. Major content providers are tightly working with the governments to ensure no information disapproved by the government is allowed on their platforms. States are instituting digital ID schemes to control access to sites (and if you think it's only about porn you're still not paying attention). People are regularly deplatformed and banned from major internet services for expressing controversial opinions. Are you trying to scare me with something that had already happened?
> something greater must be done: the takedown of large corporations and rebuilding them from scratch.
Ah yes, of course, only the glorious proletarian revolution will save us. How does it go? Le monde va changer de base: Nous ne sommes rien, soyons tout!
Please wake me up when that happens. On the second thought, please don't, I'd rather not see it. We had enough of it in the last centrury, thankyouverymuch.
Is there any evidence that this is taking place since it's been over 7 years since it's repeal? And that it's harming competition?
I'm skeptical of introducing federal intervention preemptively as it seems like a natural extension would be censorship. If some regulatory agency is telling ISPs to allow legitimate content equally, it's not that much of a stretch to imagine they'll forbid "illegitimate" content. Think cheap fakes and other misinformation.
Yes we do have evidence. For example ISPs throttling specifically Netflix, and trying to extort money from them, when the customers already paid for the service. And continuing to do so, after Netflix offered to host middleboxes in their datacenters, to discredit their fake arguments. They are not doing that for service quality, but out of greed.
We should have had comprehensive broadband and fiber in every home for decades, but ISPs would rather throttle you, and charge you more for worse service, rather than make overdue investments in infrastructure.
Or ISPs not counting their own streaming services towards the data cap, but counting their competitors. Very anti competitive.
I don't exactly feel bad for Netflix, but can you provide a link?
Let me see if I understand.
ISPs are extorting Netflix. And Netflix is hosting middleboxes that improve quality, but they don't actually care about improving quality, they are greedy, by not wanting to be extorted by the ISPs?
And we don't build out fiber because ISPs would rather throttle you and they can't do two things at once. But doesn't throttling and extorting companies like Netflix give them more revenue to build fiber? Or somehow the new fiber and customers they could get somehow prevents their ability to throttle?
No offense but this is the typical unpersuasive argument for net neutrality I hear. It's just non-sensical and all over the place. It makes no logical sense. Maybe there's a better argument, but so much of what I hear is this and it leads me to believe that proponents are just rooting for a sports team. The equivalent of arguing with a ref after a call against your team.
The person you’re replying to was admittedly shortening the argument somewhat, so let’s expand it for you and anyone else that cares. You misread some fairly crucial points.
ISPs care about something called “transit”. Transit is when you’re given a packet by someone that you connect to directly, but you don’t have a direct path to the destination, and need to go through some other entity to get there, such as another ISP. When you pay them for that (usually as a metered charge, or simply by size of the interconnect), this is called “buying transit”. When you connect that way, though, you can also agree with the other side that it’s mutually beneficial to just interconnect. After all, you might be giving them paths to destination they can’t get to directly. When you interconnect without payment (either way! There commonly are interconnects where only one side pays), that’s called peering.
Internet ISPs exist on something called tiers. A tier 1, by actual definition, is an ISP that doesn’t pay anyone for transit because they peer with anyone. ISPs that only pay tier 1s for transit and peer with everyone they connect to that isn’t a tier 1 are called tier 2s, and so on.
Transit is expensive so ISPs strive to be at a high tier and push as much data via peerings as possible.
The best thing, of course, is when the ISP doesn’t have to go through an interconnect at all and can simply complete the full path on its own backbone, which is just smart use of assets you own.
Netflix sends ISPs a lot of data. This can make the transit an ISP uses to get to Netflix quite expensive. Netflix also offers ISPs caches, which means that Netflix is telling ISPs that they are happy to take a box with a petabyte of storage, put their most popular programming on it, meet the ISP at some exchange point, and put an interface on that cache onto the ISPs network. Now the ISP can just use its backbone to serve Netflix streams available via that cache.
Some ISPs have documented behavior of refusing to put a cache onto their network, instead asking Netflix to subvert or fund the transit cost. They don’t care about how good their customer’s Netflix experience is, they want to generate revenue. This is arguably greedy.
ISPs also have a last mile issue. Backbone networks are typically quite good in the US, but there are capacity problems where the ISP meets actual customers. Some ISPs have a documented history of taking federal grants given to improve last mile networks and just not making those actual investments. This was particularly prevalent in the 2000s. Instead, they simply offer lower speeds or introduce data caps that let them throttle end users after certain thresholds, which reduces the overall load on their last mile networks
This is a difficult demand to meet, because (as many people have said) the main causalities of net neutrality are the companies and platforms which never get started because potential founders rationally calculate that they can’t compete with existing zero-rated services when ISPs play favorites. Lack of NN has massive opportunity costs for innovation, but these are difficult to quantify.
> I'm skeptical of introducing federal intervention preemptively as it seems like a natural extension would be censorship.
Slippery slope fallacy.
The most natural side-effect from lack of net neutrality is throttling, ISPs can throttle high-bandwidth applications and ask them to pay up, if competitors pay up they have an advantage so it forces everyone to pay up for access to non-throttled customers. Smaller companies/startups will be in absolute disadvantage.
Now imagine throttling for almost any kind of application: game providers not paying for "premium access" get a 500ms delay, messaging apps not paying will have media delivery throttled (good luck sending a 20MiB video to your family when the ISP throttle it to 256kbps), it opens a new way for ISPs to monetise their networks, it opens a new way for bigger players to subjugate competition that doesn't have deep pockets.
ISPs experimenting with throttling has already happened, when data caps were a bigger thing they also sold "partnerships" with apps that wouldn't be counted towards the data cap.
it's not really a slippery slope when we're already this far down the slope. Netflix was the most obvious example. As well as ISPs benefiting their own streaming services over others (borderline censorship).
And it can't really be contested by customers because many only have 2-3 choices in their area. If they all collude...
> it's not really a slippery slope when we're already this far down the slope
My slippery slope comment was about their jump to censorship being the end result, I completely agree with you as I said the same on the other paragraphs.
I don't really think so. Anti-trust law is outdated. It may have worked for the static sort of corporation that produces stuff like a tire factory, but it doesn't work well for tech corporations. They evolve too fast, and by the time anti-trust gets around to it and the court case is done, the damage is done.
We need a whole new set of laws of technology that go beyond the feeble anti-trust laws we have today.
Every major tech corporation is grossly in violation of anti-trust laws. 'Back in the day' Microsoft lost an anti-trust lawsuit over nothing but bundling Internet Explorer with Windows, seriously! [1]
Nowadays that's not even scratching the surface of what companies are doing. But we seem to have simply stopped enforcing anti-trust for the largest corporations, about the time they all started joining PRISM. I don't think that's a coincidence. Quid pro quo.
At one point in time the concept of the separation of State and Church was revolutionary. It's time for the separation of State and Big Business/Banking. So many things could be fixed basically overnight if the relationship between corporations and the government was more adversarial, and less incestuous.
from my glimpse, it's bad enforcement and outright sleazy lobbying or conflict of interest. the laws can be better, but I find it hard to imagine any actual court case ruling in Google/Amazon's favor in anything.
Apple is a bit harder and that may be where the laws are a bit outdated. But EU is setting a good precedent when that comes around.
Sadly, the Biden Administration was the first Democratic one in decades which vigorously enforced antitrust. A Lina Khan type probably won't resurface anytime soon, if ever.
Most likely never. She made too many enemies in both major parties - who only agree on one thing: corporations are king, and we must rubber-stamp all their desires, because after all, they've bought all the lawmakers.
Time to tear down the existing political incentives and rebuild something better. To do that, we need to get big money out of politics, to replace the "lesser of two evils" voting system, and to tame partisan gerrymandering.
Yes. My entire life since I attained voting age has been choosing between a douche and a turd (South Park reference for those not immediately getting the context). I get more and more weary with each election cycle.
>> the takedown of large corporations and rebuilding them from scratch.
They are actually destroying themselves. Enshitification is killing Microsoft, Google, Netflix, Facebook, and more. Just build solid alternatives focused on user satisfaction instead of profit so people have viable alternatives.
You can't build anything great from scratch in less than 10 years.
You won't be able to when connecting to Facebook and Netflix is free and unlimited but connecting to the solid alternatives costs extra and are throttled.
We don't really need to build from scratch in less than 10 years. We don't really NEED something as good as netflix, google, or Facebook. We need smaller, better alternatives.
Ask yourself this: imagine Facebook and Twitter going down for good. Would society be worse off? Probably not. We'd quickly find alternatives. Maybe they wouldn't be as fully featured but they'd work.
The number of people complaining about the quality. They're locked in but once the pressure builds enough and a perceived viable alternative exists, it will be over. The decline will take years but it will happen.
>we will have tighter and tighter controls over the internet.
Years ago, I said this might happen. Way back when, there was no FCC and the airwaves were the Wild West and anyone could throw up an antenna and call themselves a broadcaster.
The internet is too wild and you all know it. I, too, want to be able to put together my own web site to hold content or sell my wares but, as psychologists now warn, the harm this "anything goes" content has caused us needs to be tamed.
Not much difference than the way all modern society works with technology today. Big tech firms often scan our stuff without our knowledge ([1] for example) and manipulate people with advanced algorithms to simply hand stuff over. The only difference is that we have the illusion that we are making a choice.
But now, ask yourself: if you need to work a regular job and do regular stuff (i.e. you're not super rich), how easy is it to go through life without a smartphone? Banks often require one for two-factor authentication. Many businesses communicate through Whatsapp around the world. My condominium's condo fees are only viewable through an app. Etc. If a person HATES smartphones, and NEVER wants to use one, it would be difficult, no question. So, that person is FORCED to use one.
Some people like them, but others hate them and have to use them anyway. Whether you like it or not, we are forced to carry these surveillance devices around because many components of modern infrastructure are starting to require smartphoines.
The only difference between Serbia and here is that Serbian police do it, whereas in the West, all of society collaborates in a downward spiral to do it, which is also heralded and encouraged by law enforcement here too.
While the situation with tracking in the West is awful, there's a huge difference between having a choice, however impractical, and being spied on in secret.
Why is that? Can you provide a source? (Not distrusting you, but it would be great to have a source because I'm a writer and interested in writing about these things.)
It's the law. You can't pay in cash for anything above three thousand euros. If you're a company the limit is even lower at 1000 Euros. Interesting though that a foreigner, such as a tourist, can pay up to 10 thousand euros in cash as long it's not a business transaction.
My entire point was that we don't really have a choice -- for example, most people do not have a choice to own a phone any more. It's a practically mandatory sort of technology. So, we don't really have a choice here either, only the illusion of one.
It's also not just your phone. People seem to have forgotten about things like PRISM [1] because it's no longer in the news, but it's still very much around and likely only more extensive. The surveillance state extends far beyond just phones.
Yet these articles, from well known organisations, extensively investigating (even featuring 0 day revelations) the decline of civil society in lieu of ever more pervasive surveillance and manipulation of opinion, only seem to ever focus on geopolitical adversaries of the US.
> I've tried iTerm2 in the past but I just saw no reason to keep using it.
One feature that's cool in iTerm2 is that you can define the left and right margins so using Vim full-screen looks nicer (I hate narrow margins). But I've switched to Sublime text for everything so I stopped using iTerm2.
These days, I prefer smaller websites more and more. But I do like Substack because they are sort of like a personal website, since there are very few social features and generally you can just visit one person's Substack without seeing ANY content from anywhere else.
> What parts of note-taking should we digitize? What aspects should remain firmly in human hands? And most importantly, how do I create a tool that enhances rather than replaces human thought?
My personal philosophy is to use the most primitive methods possible and only use technology when there really is a strong need to go to the next level. It exposes what I really need, what are the weaknesses, etc. For example, I take all my notes with pen and paper. But if I find that I'm really referring back to something, I might write it up in a document. I don't see the point in digitizing everything right away if I'm never going to use what I write.
Moreover, writing things first by hand helps me remember them better and "feel" the knowledge through my hands.
Same thing with photography. I don't tend to use the burst mode on my camera unless I REALLY need it. When it comes to accomplishing things, I found (personally) that asceticism with tools is best.
It cramps my hand pretty badly to handwrite the amount of notes I prefer to take in live meetings, so I really dislike that this is true. (And anecdotally, it is true for me.)
I used to write a lot and one thing that helped was switch to a mechanical pencil and use 2B lead. It's very soft and requires very little pressure, even compared to pens.
> My personal philosophy is to use the most primitive methods possible and only use technology when there really is a strong need to go to the next level.
This is a good take on life in general. My parents were atmy house recently and my mother commented on how we never have dirty dishes. I told them the solution to me was always obviouse; don't own a dish washer. My wife and I have never owned a dishwasher since we were married, which has forced us to be more discriminatory about our dishware & forces us to wash dishes immediately after use so they're available again. People with dishwashers tend to have double what they need because they wait to start a load until the washer is full. Lots of the available technology we have has progressed past the level of optimization IMO.
> This year, that was reconnecting with "unproductive" hobbies like guitar, reading fiction, playing board games and daydreaming in nature.
The post resonated with me. After a couple decades trying different things, I think the best opportunities have always come with doing random fun things. Hard work is important but that's not where the opportunities come from. For example: applying for hundreds of jobs yielded no results for me, but just engaging in hobbies allowed me to find a much better job.
The problem is humans tend to seek out goals and accomplish them because it feels safe, but I think the return is much less than if you just let yourself be a bit more free. It's scary because you don't know what will happen, but it works much better in the long run.
I don't really think so. The Amish have a nice system. Their society has many fewer bad actors compared to general society.
Actually one of the keys is repeated contact. People who have to interact again and again will try and game the system less. Not sure how to build that into a star system but why give up so easily? Do programmers give up when you say "this algorithm can't be made any faster?"
I don't think it's just the Amish. Collectivist cultures in general have (or maybe perceived to have, I don't know) fewer bad actors compared to individualistic cultures.
It doesn't matter if people have to interact frequently if there is no real consequences to that interaction. The punishment in those collectivist cultures involves social shunning, shaming, etc. Individualistic cultures almost pride themselves on how much they can disregard social shunning and shaming. Shameless people are celebrities and elected officials. They are admired as opposed to shunned and ignored. A bad actor in an Amish community is expelled and loses access to what that community offers. That would be illegal in the general society unless their "bad act" was actually illegal. Discriminating against someone for being a dickhead who exploits loopholes and unregulated corner cases (without explicitly breaking the law) would be illegal in many contexts.
> Not sure how to build that into a star system but why give up so easily? Do programmers give up when you say "this algorithm can't be made any faster?"
I don't think people have given up. Online fraud detection is a massive industry as is. Spotify plays, YouTube views, Google search, Amazon reviews, reddit upvotes, twitter's retweets, facebook likes/shares, etc all fall exactly into the same bucket. There is even a significant dollar amount attached to many of those more so that GitHub stars. All are frequently gamed/faked and it's a battle between the platforms and the adversary
Good points. I'll only add that I just mentioned the Amish because it's the only culture ("subculture?") that I've read thoroughly about. But I think in collectivist cultures it is indeed much harder to be a bad actor. Perhaps we should have a little more shunning...
For example, Tokyo has a lot of people and they actively dislike interacting with strangers but if you leave your laptop unattended while peeing at a coffee shop, it's very unlikely to have been stolen.
Me neither. I don't give a darn about GitHub. It could burn in hell for all I care. But my comment was about this phenomenon in general, not how it affects some Microsoft service.
I spent a long time in tech (not 40 yet but close), and my opinion is that technology creates a mechanical mindset that is sometimes a blind spot. Although it might be best for you to stay in it, I suggest testing the waters elsewhere for a bit in a more artistic area. It might be quite fun to take a break.
I am frequently in the minority here but I do believe that spending all your life in a narrow domain like technology can be restricting in the journey to figure out what life is all about.
You can stay in tech but still do something more artistic. Like I was in the video game industry for a while, that tends to be pretty artistic (I still work on games in my spare time).
I was never in the ad industry (like the type that make interesting and flashy websites) but I suspect someone doing tech for ad companies would exercise those artistic muscles as well. When I was working for a video game publisher I did design a couple of ads for our games using Flash at the time, that played on sites like Kotaku and Gamefaqs, that involved some coding and artistic flair.
Working for a publisher did have very little coding though, and I sometimes wonder if I would have had a more fulfilling life if I stuck with a game producer role. But I was also feeling my coding skills atrophying and I didn't feel comfortable with that either at the time. Still stayed with the publisher until we had a couple releases that unfortunately lost money and the company was shut down by the board of directors, though.
That's true. I actually sort-of stayed in tech. Well, I do full-time photography and writing now but I still code because I'm responsible for some of the code on the website I work for.
Oh yeah, I agree with that. I wrote a program for work recently that probably should have been object-oriented. It would have been nice for it to be, because it's a bit of a mess now. But it works flawlessly and in truth it doesn't need any real feature upgrades now that it's done. So, I decided to keep it as it is.