Yes, the game is over, the corps have won. Where the Internet used to be a forum for creativity, it's now a weapon of influence. Where we used to have an anonymous (or at least pseudonymous) playground, we are now monitored more than anywhere else. Where we used to be able to genuinely connect, everything is now artificial and manufactured. And where we once had control, we are now the product.
We should be able to do something around this problem. I don't know myself, but I know there's a lot of smart people on this site and if we all came together to work on something, surely there could be something we can do for this problem.
The people on this site are, overwhelmingly, the people who already "came together" to build businesses like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter/X, and so on.
We pretend we're the victims, but none of these platforms would have been built without an army of willing, enthusiastic, highly-paid engineers who made small "ethical compromises" every day.
And now that there's money made in something else, many of us would accept a seven-digit offer from OpenAI in a heartbeat, leaving the task of figuring out the downstream effects to other people.
> The people on this site are, overwhelmingly, the people who already "came together" to build businesses like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter/X, and so on.
The most powerful force in the universe is not gravity, or the strong nuclear force - it's the prisoner's dilemma.
Don't fool yourself into thinking you could have avoided this. If you didn't, any one of the other ten million people would. You didn't choose for it to happen, you chose to be the one who got the money from it happening.
They're also the ones that won't let their kids anywhere near the things.
That really is a strong statement of the ethics here - they're happy to let "those" kids get addicted to it, have it help ruin their mental health and generally create an unhappy generation of narcissists. All sold under the tagline of "Connecting the world". But when it comes to their kids? No way.
I wonder if we'll treat the folks that worked on these things the way we treat the folks that worked at Phillip Morris?
Mastodon seems to solve the problems for those that use it. It's a genuine social network that people use to talk to each other and form real communites. Not owned or manipulated by any one person or organization, no algorithms or gaming. It's a constant meme that "going viral" on mastodon is when your shitpost gets 50 boosts and likes.
But the same people decrying corporate social media declare mastodon a "failure" because it hasn't captured literally 100% of Facebook users and doesn't male thirty billion dollars. Shrug.
As far as I see the "problem" with mastodon is the lack of addiction mechanics. The first time someone has an negative mastodon interaction, the close the app and because it isn't that addictive, they don't come back.
Meanwhile on Facebook people get angry every day on something they see on the feed yet come back in hour "just in case the are is something interesting this time"
> We should be able to do something around this problem. I don't know myself, but I know there's a lot of smart people on this site and if we all came together to work on something, surely there could be something we can do for this problem.
Far too much money in tech traces its roots to ad tech.
You are asking all the later gen engineers at major tech firms to blow their salaries up.
There used to be an ethos to do the right thing, however the people who came to tech later aren’t driven by the same values. They (understandably) would like to get paid rather than go on a crusade.
Don’t listen to the defeatists. This is like post-modernism. Post-modernism as a phenonemena is a very real thing, studied and documented extensively, critiqued extensively. And when you read about it it seems hopeless. Like everything is destined to be a pastiche. But once you stop reading about it you realize that there is no Matrix that you’re trapped in. The biggest Matrix is your own mind. People had problems disciplining their minds a millenium ago. They do today as well. It’s marginally more difficult today, yes. But smart phones are just addictive like bad food. Not like a ahrd drug.
We also, thankfully, don’t need a clique of very smart people to save us. We’re all in this together. (Except the psychopaths wanting to enslave us.)
I am going to push back without entirely disagreeing. Most of the people online are definitely caught in this social media as cable tv thing. But the number of people using the internet back in the early days is probably similar or even smaller than the number of people today that use niche areas of the internet, niches that still have that 'playground' experience and much less corporate overwatch control. Maybe?
There's a perspective by which you aren't wrong, and yet everything about how we interact with the Internet has changed in the last decade or so. Because (to quote School of Rock) the world is run by the man.
I think the only reason I remain staunchly independent is because I've never found anything that has had enough common ground with enough people to allow me to profit (to any degree whatsoever) in such a way as to corrupt the core of "me". Oddly I find that the less my venn diagram overlaps with others, the more I like my venn diagram and the more committed I am to it. If other people start agreeing with me, I tend to question where I might be wrong.
I tried writing a similar comment. Yours is much clearer. This 100%. As a runner I used to have to re-tie multiple times per run. I corrected my mistake with this same fix probably a decade ago and haven’t had a loose shoelace since.
Back when I was running, I used the "lace lock" method[0] because a loose heel would drive me to distraction (and because I wore clown shoes with wide toe boxes, there's no pressure from the front to keep the foot stable.)
For sure. I've taken to using a similar method over the last couple of years as I've increased miles and needed to take steps (ha) to take better care of my feet over longer distances. I wouldn't recommend this setup for more active sports with lots of change of direction, but for steady plodding it provides a very consistent and dependable stride for a lot of miles.
I learning this on sailing trip, reefing knot is simply shoelace knot, but you need to make sure each loop is opposing. Game change. And then you learn about bowline.
Runner here. I found some time ago that starting out the classic shoelace tie right-hand dominant and finishing it left-hand dominant results in a very stable knot. Lacing them high enough to keep the ends short helps too. It has been thousands of miles since my last loose shoelace.
This isn’t really true. FL population has exploded so much with high earners that they’re talking about getting rid of property taxes, and Miami is like #2 behind Houston in terms of tech jobs growth.
I wouldn’t say it serves no purpose. It is useful when rewrites are tolerable and loss of history is not. It’s the default when using tools like jj, because the expected workflow wraps git in a way that force pushes are frequent and expected, but blowing away someone else’s work by mistake is not.
It's not necessarily a class of people. It's proficiency vs. mastery. Is some set of people more able to master a subject than another? Sure. Each person has different limits to their potential, of course, but for most things achieving mastery is more a matter of putting the work in over time.
For smaller shops (by small I mean <1,000 employees) this isn't even tenable. We (engineering team of about 10 people) mitigate what we can via tooling and cooldown periods/minimum release age. This will work as long as these malicious packages remain reasonably detectable. I think that's the proper balance, because we can adjust the # of days we are willing to risk against the SOTA of detection tooling.
I have said the same for a while. And I also think there is an increasing trend of clueless CEOs trying to replace expensive developers with AI token spend. We are still waiting on the long tail of consequences from those decisions, but I suspect it is going to look like a lot of perfectly financially viable companies turning into dumpster fires. Followed by opportunities as their clients churn.
Others mentioned dissolving it. I find just getting it over with is easier for me. I dump the whole scoop into my mouth and wash it down with a mouthful of water or two. It is flavorless, after all.
Is this a joke? I hope? A) drinking a glass of water is 'the lowest bar' and 2) using creatine means you have to up your water intake. If you don't drink the water, it won't work.
I still drink the water, I just can’t stand the texture with creatine added. So I swallow the creatine with as little water as possible and drink nice fresh water afterwards :)
Creatine is mostly soluble - it does not have a 'texture' in water.
Or a taste.
It literally dissolves in the water, meaning, you can't tell it's there.
If there's something uncomfortable about the extra bits that don't dissolve (?), then just add more water.
Beyond that, this may be psychosomatic, you're possibly reacting to the 'thought' of the creatine, not the substance.
Much of the reactions here are that. "Creatine made me feel this and that" <- highly doubtful in almost every case. It doesn't make you feel anything and takes a while to have any real measurable effects other than water retention, moreover.
Merely following the instructions to 'drink a lot more water' could bring about benefits.
The biggest factor, is that most of the time when people are embarking on 'creatine' - they are changing other lifestyle habits, esp. working out - and so the 'creatine effect' is really hard to isolate.
Only way to know for sure is to keep a log of lifestyle stuff and check that objectively.
Is there a point to this? Yeah, it's difficult to get it to dissolve completely. For me, it is easier (and faster) to just dump it directly in the mouth and chug water after. So, not sure what you're disputing but it's probably a waste of your time :)
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