There's a great Twitter/X post floating around that I saw a few days ago that I've come to agree with:
"IMO it should be considered quite rude in most contexts to post or send someone a wall of 100% AI-generated text. “Here, read this thing I didn’t care enough about to express myself." - https://x.com/littmath/status/2010759165061579086?s=20
Rather than ignore it, I'd deem it rude that something as low-effort as an AI generated blog post was shared here. I may not be able to set rules, but I wish we could flag posts like these. Some faux-gineer told their agent of choice to write up another fearmongering post about software developers and AI; I feel like my time was stolen from me.
> If you don’t have a domain or hosting yet, now’s the time to buckle down and do that. Unfortunately, I don’t have good advice for you here. Just know that it’s going to be stupid and tedious and bad and unfun. That’s just the way this is.
I cannot remember if it was here or elsewhere but there was an amazing blogpost making fun of beginner and intermediate "coding" tutorials (coding as a catch-all for programming, markdown, etc.) where the author assumes the reader has deep familiarity with the subject at hand and all of its jargon. This has the exact same vibe.
1) This is a people problem, not a site problem. Technology professionals do not have a good track record of being socialized and generally well-adjusted, and for every singular tech professional who is, there are a dozen horrid maladjusted ones who are unfortunately successful and find themselves with power they aren't mature enough to have.
2) StackOverflow is still a treasure trove of information and a place anyone can go and ask questions about even niche and deprecated technology. Just recently asked a question about InnoSetup on StackOverflow and got a great response from possibly the expert fellow on InnoSetup.
Having an "invested community" requires an inordinate amount of effort from a tiny handful of founders for uncertain reward.
> Technology professionals do not have a good track record of being socialized and generally well-adjusted
Eh, this a pretty stigmatising boring old stereotype that's only vaguely based in reality at best. I've worked in a bunch of different industries over the decades, and there are unsocial and unadjusted people everywhere.
Places like this (hackernews) and Reddit are where concepts like 996 become normalized and picked up by everyone else, including unrelated industries. I think this is something that needs to be nipped in the bud ASAP and not given any time to fester because "startup founders need to work 996 to secure revenue" or whatever.
No sarcasm, no humor; 996 posts should be met with nothing but flat out ridicule and disgust. One's life isn't solely about work and this kind of behavior just makes everyone else's life worse in the long term because there's a chance for short term gain.
The most important question, in my opinion, is will this class-action suit actually result in any meaningful change or will Bezos/Amazon scrape up some cash to make this "little lawsuit problem" go away?
> It seems like chasing golden unicorn super smart bois has been more of a problem than a solution in SV and companies like google. It starts to look like a schoolyard game or mensa.
> What I'm talking about isn't just awkwardness and lacking charisma. I'm talking about randomly telling women that they can tell she is on her period and things like that.
These don't seem limited to SV and Big Companies™ like Google, all it takes is a cursory scroll either through this website (even this thread!) or a trip to any of the CompSci-focused boards on Reddit. Additionally not limited to women and minorities, but anyone from a non-traditional background as well.
If anyone feels like working on these issues, the problem is extremely local, you don't even have to leave HN!
Maybe true, but in other industries, such as ones that are more "business and engineery, there's less of this obsession with getting an ultra-genius, although we know how valuable engineering talent is.
As a result you get pretty average people. Even the weirdos tend to be just quiet and reclusive. My brother on the other hand, went to work for a smaller B tier to google, and he had multiple co-workers that were just beyond bizarre.
I think that there needs to be a separation of meditation's tangible benefits from both the religious associations, such as seeking nirvana or psychedelic experiences, and the social & financial ones stated in this article that either view meditation as a genuine secret superpower or are see it as a backdrop to take advantage of people simply trying to find mental peace.
My belief is that the idea Kabat-Zinn had, which is paraphrased in the article, is good. "Pay attention to the present moment, on purpose, without judgment" - stop, take some time to reflect on your feelings, process them. Maybe just take some time and not "think", where you give yourself some away time from the world. The anecdata from countless people seems to vaguely support the notion that this view on meditation works; I wouldn't call it concrete by any means, but it's as solid of a scientific start as one can get with something like meditation.
Software developers and those adjacent love to tout acronyms like "Keep It Simple, Stupid", why does the buck stop at software? The further one gets into the article, the more outlandish things get: electronic stimulation, microdosing various drugs (mentioned a lot on HN, which I've always found disturbing), cranial ultrasounds, even the stock photo of the lady meditating with a VR headset?
At the end of the piece, Laukkonen provides the following rhetorical question: "[W]hat is liberating about chasing different states of consciousness, and not enjoying the one that you have?" I think a lot of the comments here and the research presented towards the end of the article are in too deep in either side and are unable to see the forest for the trees.
> I feel what I'm saying here will be seen as very elitist, but it's probably the same reason you want to live in a nice neighbourhood or send your kids to a good school... Sure, having good police, teachers or moderators can help, but it won't change the people.
I think we're all in this Catch-22: it's an obviously elitist thing to say that various demographics drag down quality by default, but it's something that can't be denied. I believe a lot of online landscapes have changed for the worse as the nerds that used to fuel them have gone from the majority to the minority.
However, I do value some of the changes that have come about in terms of general internet UX because we're not limited to the nerds anymore. It's a hard balance to strike.
I mostly agree with the author in that everyone shouldn't be on one platform and that yes, Twitter, Facebook, etc., aren't anywhere close to ideal sites for actually forming strong relationships and having good discussions. I also agree that the separation of internet self and real self has all but vanished from the internet, despite my own personal attempts to retain it. Additionally, as someone who has spent their formative, adolescent, and even current years being parts of independent communities on the internet, I can assure you that there were people out there who knew what was being lost and what the problems were as Reddit, Facebook, and the others became the hubs for everything.
However, the author makes references to things like MUDs, IRC chats, web forums, and then antagonists like "random internet Nazis" (come on dude) and Gamergate of all things, and I can't help but feel that the author of the article is part of a intellectual group that appeared after things like internet forums, transient chatrooms, and video game servers. It's very popular to try to "dunk" on sowing doubt in a case like this because everyone cites that "Yet you participate in it. Curious!" comic in some way or another, but I think the doubt is warranted in this case.
The author may have been around when those things were active, but expressed no deep interest at worst or a passing interest at best in any of them until centralization became a problem to think about, and SUDDENLY all of those things captured their attention. A HN poster who doesn't really care about non-techie niche communities but puts on big airs about caring because rebelling against centralized monoliths like Twitter is part of (hacker) counterculture/social signaling.
The author didn't have to deal with being a powerless normal user as internet Nazi groups infiltrating communities they were a part of, never had to watch independent sites and projects get absorbed into Reddit and its abhorrent community; it's all just a fun intellectual thought puzzle to ruminate on with a buddy at a bar and philosophical soapbox to stand on with their web blog and Twitter account. The author even boils it down to political pundits retreating to private circles, which completely separates it from the real experiences of loss of and yearning for smaller communities.
We've read this same song and dance here on HN almost weekly if not daily here on HN: everyone's glued to their smartphones, Twitter and Facebook control all online content, return to tradition, yadda yadda. I don't really know how this comment is going to be taken but because of all these things, I find it very difficult to believe the author isn't subject to the tyranny of likes and internet attention himself, and that the post reads more as disingenuous intellectual fellatio than anything else, intended to resonate with those who closely follow hacker culture on HN for traction.
> never had to watch independent sites and projects get absorbed into Reddit and its abhorrent community
That’s not how Reddit works. Different people use different subreddits, there is no “community”.
The default subreddits have the opposite problem; they are so popular there is no “community” because the users are everyone on earth. You’re pretty much just saying you don’t like “everyone on earth”.
Which is fair because they’re quite bad at posting; that’s why AskReddit’s #1 post is, every week, yet another gender war question/sex question like “men, what do you think about women’s armpits?” or something.
Star Wars Republic Commando but with true co-op. There are games like GTFO, Deep Rock Galatic, and Killing Floor that are objective/wave-defense co-op shooters, but there isn't anything on the market that has a cool structured campaign or meaningful challenge to it.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 had an interesting co-op mode where you and a friend could be deployed into a customized campaign level, accomplish the objective, and exfiltrate. I'd love a game to really own this: good characters, fun gameplay, custom levels, mutators, etc.
"IMO it should be considered quite rude in most contexts to post or send someone a wall of 100% AI-generated text. “Here, read this thing I didn’t care enough about to express myself." - https://x.com/littmath/status/2010759165061579086?s=20
Rather than ignore it, I'd deem it rude that something as low-effort as an AI generated blog post was shared here. I may not be able to set rules, but I wish we could flag posts like these. Some faux-gineer told their agent of choice to write up another fearmongering post about software developers and AI; I feel like my time was stolen from me.
reply