Ask HN: Why Is Everything Declining?

Some young men face a tough choice - work at McDonalds for $8/hr, or work for a local gang selling drugs on the streets. Yes, this choice in US is forced by society upon overwhelmingly black or latino men. But it is still a choice, and not every black man born in a poor neighborhood chooses a violent life of a gang member.

I have zero sympathy for criminals who're killing each other. Have you tried comparing murder rates of innocent non-violent civilians across different races?

You have vastly more faith in the ability of human society to manage these technologies than I do. The problem is not a question of whether the vast majority of actors will do the right thing the vast majority of the time. It's that very small groups of people can do incredible amounts of damage, on purpose or even just accidentally.

Given the horrors we've seen committed by large groups of people over protracted time frames, I absolutely believe horror magnified by technological leverage is inevitable.

Life is pretty great right now, but we are living in the aberration. I expect that I'll live to see the end of the equilibrium that has allowed this aberration to persist.

Meditations by Marcus Aurelius is a good entry point. These are reflections of someone who had "everything" for its time (emperor during the golden age of the Roman Empire). It is an eye opener regarding how having things and being rich and powerful doesn't solve anything with what is the meaning of a life.

It is about about differencing what is in your control (what you think and do) and what is not (outcomes and what others think of you), doing what is right with courage and not worrying about outcomes. Ultimately because caring about the opinion of strangers who like you will soon die and be forgotten is pointless. Nobody cares if you're successful in your life, close friends and parents, while they are still there, only care about your happiness (and if not you can then confidently ignore them).

Also the book Sapiens was another eye opener for me on what is physically real and what lives in our mind collectively (nations, institutions, companies, money, relations, the name of things, ... or simply all the things other animals don't see are in our mind). Seems obvious but really working on intuitively knowing to differentiate the two really helps with identifying what problems are real and what problems are juste consequences of mental constructs, and so are self-imposed.

Don't want to spook you with spiritual bullshit but also mindfulness meditation (stoping thoughts, focusing on breathing and experiencing all senses) really works for me for experiencing all of that and happiness without any material thing or doing anything. I could be billionaire nothing I could buy could significantly really improve my life in a meaningful way. Nature will not be prettier, I will not have better friends to laugh, my coffee will not taste significantly better, ... Material thing and experiences are nice of course, I would absolutely enjoy them, but like all things they will pass and leave only insatisfaction if I crave or cling on them too much.

Things are better now than they ever have been in some regards, but yes in others we are entering the "find out" era after the "fuck around" era.

Low fuel and house prices. Not worrying about the environmental impact of humanity's excesses. Pointless wars when we all thought we'd learnt better.

Very similar observations about software trends and quality. Particularly the trends to remove essential functionality like one importat example in Windows 11 that you cannot put task bar on left or right side of screen and using ungrouped and fully labeled items. It's de facto unusable for my case because I need a lot of different windows with constant context switching between and was totally lost (went back Windows 10). Left/right taskbar has all items exactly the same place where opened, enought text to instantly indentify what program and what document/IP address etc. it contains, nothing moves itself and it's almost muscle memory to glance and see what program and window I need to open the current moment.

It's not the most popular use case for sure but if even 0.1% users like developers or other multitask heavy workers need similar overview on desktop workspace then that is like ignoring 10 million users. And for what? So that company can optimize away like two workers on Windows UI team for 6 months effort. Instead released broken Windows to RTM and 2 years later still essential functionality missing.

There have been problems in this area before, like Windows ME and some but those were more like broken drivers and things that were not or at least did not seem to be intentionally broken, just bad quality. Now there are more problems that are literally in the genre of f. u. user, we do what we want and optimize everything to 51% users, if you are in 49% then good luck.

Maybe need to adapt and accept that everything needs tinkering, third party tools and constant management after updates to be barely usable, still not fond of this method but what are the options any more.