Your point would be more plausible if you weren't responding to someone who's been "shitposting" on the internet (your "Intenet") for over 30 years and whose "shitposting" has been highly educational for generations of people, including me — especially HCI researchers, of course.
The "law" you are proposing is a bad one, based on either faulty observations or a value system so out of keeping with my own that it might as well belong to the Ayatollah Khamenei.
Since my post hasn't broken any laws, and I haven't murdered anyone, or sent any bombs in the mail, let's give phlakaton the benefit of the doubt and assume good faith, that he's not making baseless accusations, and by "shitposting" he's referring to the actual convicted murderer Ted Kaczynski, who posted bombs in the mail that killed 3 people and injured 23 people.
Unless he can cite any criminal codes I've violated or people I've murdered, I'll assume phlakaton is not just being histrionic and totally overreacting by calling my post "a disaster for Intenet (sic) discourse", or accusing me of murder.
Speaking of melodramatic shitposting about network based disasters and the triumph of Worse is Better, from the Unix-Haters handbook which included a chapter on Lisp: Good News, Bad News, How to Win Big:
>The book concerns the frustrations of users of the Unix operating system. Many users had come from systems that they felt were far more sophisticated in computer science terms, and they were tremendously frustrated by the "worse is better" design philosophy that they felt Unix and much of its software encapsulated.
Sir, I refer of course to the law of social discourse that most of us adhere to which says you don't bring Kaczynski completely out of left field to a HN discussion and not get called out for your foolishness. No matter your assumed eminence in the community. You are neither half as amusing nor clever in this moment as you think you are.
I didn't post the Unibomber manifesto. Quite the contrary: I was dismayed that Ted Kazinsky's manifesto was beating out Richard Gabriel's manifesto, so I pointed it out to dang, the HN moderator, who flagged it and knocked it off of the front page.
Did you report it too, or did you [quavering melodramatic Dudley Do-Right voice] just sit by silently and say nothing while evil was being perpetrated?
If COVID-19 digs in deep in the US then there is going to be a transformational change in how US citizens think about work, travel, entertainment, security, and the relationship between US citizens and their government. All of these aspects are intertwined:
Work: More people will work more time from home and many firms will switch to virtually full time remote with limited physical gathering. This will decrease the cost of office rents and alter the work/life balance. It will affect wages because people can live outside of city centers and still work so companies will pay less. We may be on the cusp of US government guaranteed sick leave.
Travel: People will, for the short term, do less travel for pleasure, but the big impact, long term, business trips will decrease. More and more business meetings will be replaced with voice and video conferencing. There was no big driver other than some cost reduction here, but now safety and security will be the big drivers here. Global pandemic concerns (prevention, containment) will complicate travel to varying degrees, and in a way that most US citizens aren't used to - it will affect interstate travel, not just trans-national travel.
Entertainment: Many of the sports that have been deferred or canceled will likely be replaced with other forms of entertainment that can be viewed on television or the Internet. Fewer people will go to live performances, both because they can't (cancelled by the government) and reluctant to after COVID clears. This will affect service workers - where most of the lesser skilled jobs have been created in the last three decades.
Security: Security will no longer be seen as just a physical access control concern. Business has been preparing over the last two decades for the eventuality of global pandemic - now they can put those plans into action, and the impacts of them will cascade into personal lives. US citizens will be demanding more from their government in disaster preparedness on pandemics - it will affect travel.
All of these tie into how US citizens see their relationship with their government, and what they demand from it.
> Entertainment: Many of the sports that have been deferred or canceled will likely be replaced with other forms of entertainment that can be viewed on television or the Internet. Fewer people will go to live performances, both because they can't (cancelled by the government) and reluctant to after COVID clears.
My guess is that you're overstating the long-term effect on this front. People like leaving the house; people like gathering with other people; people have liked these things for as long as there have been people. They're not going to stop liking them because they've been stuck alone indoors for a couple of months. Enforced abstinence for a while may even increase demand for social entertainment, once the dust settles -- "you don't know what you've got until it's gone," etc.
Not to mention, people can still go to low-density venues outside. I wonder if both neighborhood parks and county/state/national parks will experience higher rates of attendance.
I understand everything that you wrote is just speculation starting from the conditional, “If COVID-19 digs in deep in the US then...” but I just don’t follow the logic.
It’s not our first pandemic. It won’t be the last. And I don’t see any reason at all to think why people won’t go back to living their lives at the first possible opportunity.
But what does “dig in deep” even mean? In the vast majority of cases it’s a mild virus with symptoms generally lasting a week.
If anything I think at the end of all this people will be deeply suspicious the next time the WHO declares a pandemic and insists we need to shut down the world economy.
We are not dealing with an exponential function. We are dealing with a logistics function, I.e. an “S” curve.
The predominant factor to coming out the other side of the curve is herd immunity.
IMO, the faster that young and middle age people acquire herd immunity, the safer it is long term for the elderly who are at the highest risk, because it drives R0 below 1 and extinguishes the pandemic.
The flaw with “flatten the curve” is overly simplistic thinking around the severity of cases. The best way to eliminate severe cases, assuming strict containment is impossible or cripplingly costly, is to gain herd immunity in the low-risk populations.
> It’s not our first pandemic. It won’t be the last.
As far as I can tell, for almost all Americans, this is our first pandemic. The closest analogue might be polio in the 1950s, but maybe 10% of the population remembers that.
Going down the list, none of the remaining pandemics within living memory seem to have made a large impact on life in the US [1].
It’s not crazy to imagine changes from this event. There doesn’t seem to be much precedent here for it.
In 2009 we had swine flu, H1N1 which was declared a pandemic by the WHO.
> These final estimates were that from April 12, 2009 to April 10, 2010 approximately 60.8 million cases (range: 43.3-89.3 million), 274,304 hospitalizations (195,086-402,719), and 12,469 deaths (8868-18,306) occurred in the United States due to pH1N1.
It remains to be seen if the hospitalizations or deaths due to COVID approach or exceed the levels of H1N1, which itself was less fatal than a typical flu.
Certainly the response to COVID is markedly different. But I think in the end what will matter is the actual numbers impacted. If the virus turns out to be not as deadly as H1N1 I think people will seriously question the role of the media in building up hysteria around this coronavirus.
> If COVID-19 digs in deep in the US then there is going to be a transformational change in how US citizens think ...... All of these tie into how US citizens see their relationship with their government, and what they demand from it.
I certainly hope you are right, but unfortunately I suspect the companies making billions of dollars will do absolutely everything in their power to make sure those changes don't happen.
Because there is so much money tied up in the current way things are done Americans have decades of fighting the power structure before they can expect to change their relationship with their government. If only they knew what Europeans get for their tax dollars.
> "If COVID-19 digs in deep in the US then there is going to be a transformational change in how US citizens think about work, travel, entertainment, security, and the relationship between US citizens and their government."
Even the Spanish Flu didn't manage to do that and the actual death toll was even higher than the projections from COVID-19.
Instantaneous worldwide communication is arguably a game-changer. And while it's easy to be pessimistic about the state of science education, the ability and motivation to self-educate may have some impact on national and global consciousness. Neither of these things were even slightly possible 100 years ago.
I don't see how it will make long lasting changes other than your first point about WFH and virtual meetings being even more normalized.
Travel and entertainment, doing these in-person is interwoven in our DNA. These industries (lol at how Trump says this word) are gonna take a huge hit, but will of course rebound.
I do think people will be more hygenic for many years to come because of this.
It helps move consoles in the first year or two when they don't have many compelling titles of their own. Not every title gets remastered, and the ones that do don't tend to be launch titles.
I've been blind drunk in Milwaukee. I was attending the Naval training center just South. It was hell to wake up the next day with a raging hangover and have to march to chow in the cold wind coming off Lake Michigan in the winter. +2 years for me as well. I'm a much better programmer since I quit drinking.
I understand that Milwaukee has long been a center of brewing in the US but you're saying it also has a big binge drinking culture as well? Is that a historic relic of the big breweries were a substantial employer in the city?
I suspect it's the climate and location. pretty much any mid sized great lakes city is the same way. It's ridiculously easy to turn into an alcoholic, especially in the winter.
It really does. There are two things that fit together for me:
First, access - I can think of twelve bars within walking distance of my apartment, four of which are on the same block, and a total of eight of which are within two blocks of my apartment. Almost every grocery store has a liquor store as a part (not separate store, just separate section with a register), and some stores, like WalMart, sell booze in the normal aisles. It's everywhere.
Second, culture - in Wisconsin, if you're under 21 but a parent, guardian, or spouse then you are allowed to be served, possess, or consume alcohol, so teenagers drinking at home as part of a party is completely legal in the state. Bars are so close to the house, and every area has their own, so social drinking, especially when the winter is cold and dark (in parts of the state in parts of the winter, the sun is set by 4:30 in the afternoon), is very popular. Many of the locals, if they're religious, come from a history of Catholic, Lutheran, and similar religions that were typically not parts of the temperance movement, and many of the cultures that settled the land - Scandinavian and German most commonly - are also known for their relationship to alcohol.
Third, recent developments - the part of Milwaukee I'm in was decimated when the manufacturing base was systematically hollowed out in the late 1980s through the current day. Desperation and escape are two motivators to drink, and there are parts of the community that I'm in that have been hit hard by that.
Lewis Black has a bit about drinking in Wisconsin. It is exaggerated, but only slightly so, in a way that I didn't quite understand before I moved here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7WlwumGkSec
If you're going to treat investigative reporting and news gathering as a profit making venture then you can only charge what the market is willing to pay, and for the vast majority of people, that's nothing.
Investigative reporting is in a tough spot in a capitalist democracy. In a democracy, good reporting is a vital part of the system, but in capitalism, people pay for what they want to see and hear, and that's not always the truth.
Advertisers directly or indirectly impacting the kind of news that gets reported doesn't help.
A site that renders completely blank without JavaScript is a site that I don't enable JavaScript for. They don't want me to view it, and nine times out of ten I can find the information elsewhere.
Yet I'm convinced you probably do enable js for various payment portals and govt/financial websites, and they often tend to go blank or loop out far more than the average site.
Apart from carefully cultivating a working noscript over years, the simplest solution may be to use a different browser for these sorts of interactions.
Reminds me to backup my whitelist. It's actually quite valuable.
It makes Planned Parenthood an organization one should judge in modern context separable from its origins, much like freedom of speech and ownership of other people from Greek philosophy.
This kind of reasoning opens you up to the genetic fallacy. If you believe the moral status of the origin of a thing is necessarily transmitted to the thing itself, then you are liable to consider Hitler's pernicious concept of Der Volk and the Volkswagen to be equally evil.
GOG games are DRM free and typically show up on torrent sites immediately after release, so anybody who wants to pirate the game won't bother to go through the buy->download->refund flow with them.
Inexpensive, downloadable, and DRM free games are what I always wanted. In addition, GOG keeps a store of all the games I own and I can download them multiple times.
This is exactly the service that I would imagine other gamers would want, as well. It seems almost petty to torrent when this is available.
I think you're supporting the parent poster's point: Given that there are a number of petty people out there, GOG may be hoping those kinds of folks will just torrent instead of buy+refund.
I think games cost a lot of money to make profitable (i.e. appeal to the standards of most people).
Even if all professional game designers/programmers/artists stopped getting paid and quit, people would still make and enjoy free games, and they would probably much better than whatever generic crap is greenlight by publishers.
So I don't believe that the artistic value nor the quality of video games depends on the success video game industry, In fact I would say they are orthagonal to each other.
I do believe the best indie games are way better than the best AAA games (gameplay wise). But all of them are commercial. In other words, there is no non-commercial game that I would consider the best at anything.
There are mods that are better than the games themselves, but making the base game is what costs money and nobody does for free.
The game is distributed as an archive accompanied by an executable unpacker. The unpacker is signed by GOG, and it can verify the hash of the archive, meaning no malware concern.
The difference being that GOG games do not need a crack, a client, or use any DRM.
The last part is the reason I buy from GOG instead of Steam. Also because I like oldies and GOG does a great job at making them work on modern systems (with notable exceptions) while Steam is more than happy to sell you a game that only works on Windows 98.
One particular case I remember was the Commandos series that Steam advertised at the time as Windows 7 compatible even if it was absolutely unplayable. I returned it and bought GOG's version that worked just fine.
Gog has a tiny fraction of all games on the market, much less the AAA ones that people are playing. Steam has ~all games on the market, and ~all of them can be pirated.
So it's not very convincing that Gog somehow has it worse or that there's some unique obstacle with Gog. Steam DRM clearly isn't the challenge people think it is.
I doubt it will be many (from ones that are buying games right now). If you expect quality entertainment you should be willing to pay for it. (as with anything).
It's kinda copy of Windows strategy. I was using pirated version od Windows as kid but as I got more affluent I can totally justify to pay for it and turned into customer.
I don't know exact numbers but entertainment/games market should grow a lot as more of the world catches up, so it's worth to invest in capturing them. With current prices the big markets are basically US, Germany and China.
Given making an account is free, expect way more new "customers" now.
This is not theoretical. There is a lot of people that enjoys not paying for anything, if they can get away with it.
And no, I don't like entertainment industries that claim a lot of losses in the press and ask for subsidies or lobby for laws. But it is certainly real that there is a lot of software piracy.
But GOG doesn't do as good as steam does with region specific prices, and ensure that gamers from poorer countries pay less for games than from richer countries.
Tmux could be seen as an example of "terminal middleware" but I mean a more general solution.
Imagine you had a framework that lets you write scripts to intercept and modify I/O from programs running in a shell. You could have password managers that automatically (or semi-automatically) answer sudo prompts. Or filters that censor certain strings (if you're live streaming coding sessions this could be very useful) before they appear on screen.
Another useful "terminal middleware" layer could be pre-processing commands before (or after) the shell parses them. You could wrap every command in a `script -c` invocation in order to capture the output so that you can later re-use it without having to redo the processing. (This is probably my biggest pet peeve with Un*x since it really adds up over time.)
There's a spectrum of these. There's terminals that have their own modes, like Termite. There's also terminals that have their own scripting/extension frameworks, like hyper.js or secureCRT.
My personal favorite is Emacs. It's the only environment I've ever been able to rig up that's truly, fully hackable. Since terminal output is treated like any other text buffer, I can roll just about any package I like on top without issue.
In particular, this solved my ssh woes. There's no need to reconfigure my terminal dozens of times each day, because all my preferences and tweaks exist on a higher layer.
