The "current one" is Department of Defense. They are illegally branding it otherwise without congressional approval, but that doesn't mean we should welcome it.
More fundamentally, it's hard to convey just how much better a government that wages wars but ostensibly says that they're bad is than a government that gleefully does so. I'll take a flawed democracy that partakes in immoral operations over an openly-imperialist autocracy any day of the week -- as should we all!
It's a joke, a meme response to "games looked so bad back then" types of comments made about games built during the CRT era and played on modern "perfect pixel", so to say, monitors.
Also, yeah. The site was ugly, you're not missing or misunderstanding anything. It's pure nostalgia to those who experienced the web back then, a reminder of a simpler, more ideal time in the internet's life.
It's just a reference to how CRT-era games look better on CRT as the devs were working with CRTs in mind and taking advantage of their way of rendering images[1].
I don't think there is actually a noticeable difference for the website itself, CRT performs a sort of interpolation which is great for old games that accounted for it, but for content that is already high-enough in resolution there is not any improvement
It’s been posted many times, I think mostly due to it’s association to Mitchell Hashimoto. It’s left as an exercise the reader to determine why this is important.
I'm fine with people never justifying their personal choices. It's their business. But if they do bother to justify it then it's a show they put on for me. And reading this kind of explanation is like the show runner takes me for a fool. The net result is that I lose all respect for the person.
Unless they put on a show for themselves and that's who they try to fool. Probably why nobody mentions money in these shows. They're self motivational.
That is normal on his blog. He is a brand that he has developed over many years, and he is constantly promoting that brand.
Yes, he has done a lot of good work in the past, but he has put as much effort into self-promotion and landed a series of interesting and well-paying gigs.
I can't blame him for that. It just makes me tired to watch.
What the OP was pointing out is two typical tells for lazy ChatGPT-generated text, right in the intro. (The m-dash, "it's not just X, it's Y").
Of course that kind of heuristic can have false positives, and not every accusation of AI-written content on HN is correct. But given how much stuff Gregg has written over the years, it's easy to spot-check a few previous posts. This clearly isn't his normal style of writing.
Once we know this blog was generated by a chatbot, why would the reader care about any of it? Was there a Mia, or did the prompt ask for a humanizing anecdote? Basically, show us the prompt rather than the slop.
Reminds me of the TechCrunch episode of Silicon Valley TV show. Everyone was there to make the big buck but all collectively pretended they were doing their work for the good of humankind.
Do you think some of them are honestly like that? I can never quite figure out how many levels of irony^H^H^H delusion there are. Spoken as a person that would totally have his job, but just because it most certainly pays plenty and is likely fun to do.
You're entirely relying on a false dichotomy and an unsupported causal chain, assuming (without evidence!) that unions inherently reduce efficiency, slow growth, and lower living standards. The fact is that there's evidence that unions can correct power imbalances, raise wages, reduce inequality, and even support long-term productivity and social stability
Unions are everywhere and always a market distortion. Using political power to pull wealth into your union that would otherwise spread to the rest of society via competition (in labor and capital markets) is bad.
The only good unions are the ones that serve geopolitical interests of states that are positive for humanity. A steel workers union is subsidized by the rest of society, but if it keeps steel production in the US, making the US more formidable and able to project humanity-advancing policy, then it is good.
Unions freeze market forces, which raises wages, but those raised wages come directly from other parts of the economy and do so inefficiently (cost more than a dollar elsewhere to increase the wages by a dollar). This is because it distorts comparative advantages. Inequality can be reduced by unions, but only in short term. By freezing market forces in this pocket you are creating inefficiencies, which come at a cost over time (like competitive and bad actors becoming dominant).
Wages and inequality was better in the 1950s/60s US despite of unions. The US was 50% of the global economy, had dollar dominance, just about the only industrial base intact, a skilled workforce with a clear competitive advantage. These are what made wages high and inequality low.
Take the long-term perspective and center humanity rather than picking winners and losers. Unions are an emotionally charged topic because labor groups reap power from them and business groups lose power from them. This is noise. We should make decisions like this based on what serves humanity’s long term interests, and unions (and business cartels/lobbies) hold humanity back.
> The fact is that there's evidence that unions can correct power imbalances, raise wages, reduce inequality, and even support long-term productivity and social stability
I suppose there was a time when American manufacturing had a big power/equality/productivity and social stability imbalance over Chinese manufacturing and the US unions did play a role in correcting that and promoting Chinese wealth and power. So in principle I agree. I'm just less sure that AWS employees are going to benefit from doing the same thing in software.
reply