131–140 of 420 posts
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Earlier quoted context omitted.
> each year, a person spends more time on the internet (on average) than a year before, which shows that it is getting more and more useful for everyone. How in the world does that sound like a reasonable conclusion?
You choose to spend your time on a place A instead of the place B, it means that the place A is better than the place B. Why else would you do it, if B was better? It is a simple logic.
1. Describing "proponents [of the industrial revolution]" as some external group seems pretty absurd, and gives the rest of the piece an unsettling Kazinsky vibe. Yes, of course there are a variety of problems in the world related to the textile industry, that's obvious. But blaming "wage theft" and "over consumption" on the technology itself just seems absurd. You can still buy handmade clothes, and due to transportation-enabled specialization, they'd almost definitely be much cheaper and higher quality than they would've been in 1725!
2. Citing a 256 page report on antibiotic resistance[1] with no page number for the vague claim that they were overprescribed to some extent in the 1950s-70s is just plain rude! Regardless, there's no economic system forcing antibiotics on you; if you really wanted to for some reason, you could even save money by refusing them. Rather, the basic realities of human health are what makes them so ubiquitous, in the same way that they make food or hand washing ubiquitous.
3. This summary of the issues with LEO internet satellites is just way, way oversimplified -- the most egregious part being the implication that it is now "impossible to use earth-based sensors... to learn about space"! More fundamentally, equating LEO telecommunications with astrophysics research because they both involve things above our heads is goofy and misleading. Even more fundamentally--and to return to my overall point--there's no attempt to even vaguely gesture at a "radical monopoly" here! It's fair to say that the vast, vast majority of people only interact with LEO satellites when using GPS, which, again, is absolutely not mandatory.
And, finally, the web:
The web is no exception to this pattern. A vision of interoperability, accessibility, and usability, the World Wide Web was first conceived in 1989... But the proliferation of access and ultimate social requirement of access has spawned countless troubles for human society...
It’s an industrial, production-minded way of approaching a discipline that has all the hallmarks of being a great craft
Hand-coded, syndicated, and above all personal websites are exemplary
And, finally, my thesis:
The internet does feel genuinely so awful right now, and for about a thousand and one reasons.
I, for one, see a world without advertising within our grasp -- still-capitalist or otherwise. We can do this. The Free and Open internet can exist once again.
[1] https://iris.who.int/server/api/core/bitstreams/a04b4607-044...
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Sure, the medium is the message. But if the medium distracts from the message it means they are not aligned well (side note I put your comment into LLM to make sense of what it meant re my comment without mentioning HN, it said "this is a classic Hacker News–style metaphysical sidestep: You made a practical design aphorism, He responded with ontology and epistemology. That usually signals polite disagreement or intel…
> (side note I put your comment into LLM to make sense of what it meant re my comment without mentioning HN, it said "this is a classic Hacker News–style metaphysical sidestep: You made a practical design aphorism, He responded with ontology and epistemology. That usually signals polite disagreement or intellectual one‑upmanship" LOL) Woah homie, watch out for the model which is trained on reddit comments dataset to…
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Haven’t people been saying that since the late 2000’s?
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html > Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills. The actual quote has links, the first of which is to a comment from 2009.
this website isn't turning into Reddit, this website has been a pretentious orange subreddit for well over a decade if not right from the get go and a link to this site's Reddiquette page (just as ignored as on any subreddit!) is evidence TO that effect, and not against it!
the fact that the link petuously denies reality notwithstanding!
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Is it "negative" to identify shitty things as being shitty? I wouldn't necessarily blame the commenters for that.
Constantly? As if it were a psychological compulsion? So often that dang had to make a guideline about it, which no one even attempts to follow? Two actually - the guideline against being "curmudgeonly" is separate from the guideline against going on a tilt because you get triggered by any website that doesn't look and act as much like plaintext as possible. And yet if someone so much as cracks a joke they get rapped…
I think the OP website is pretty cool by the way.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> each year, a person spends more time on the internet (on average) than a year before, which shows that it is getting more and more useful for everyone. How in the world does that sound like a reasonable conclusion?
You choose to spend your time on a place A instead of the place B, it means that the place A is better than the place B. Why else would you do it, if B was better? It is a simple logic.
Most people will readily admit to this, especially when it comes to the internet, and it’s well documented that many people are not happy with how much time they spend on the internet or how it impacts their lives.
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Each year, I spend more time in my car during my commute (on average) than a year before, which shows that being stuck in traffic is getting more and more useful to me.
You chose to do it, so it means it was better to you than all other choices. Why would you still do it otherwise? If your goal is to suffer as much as possible, it does not matter. You are still making choices that lead you to your goal as fast as possible.
Maybe this is just a disagreement of what it means for something to "become more useful"? As an example, If I need a bank account and every bank goes online only and shutters their physical locations, that is not online banking becoming more useful to me. I was perfectly happy going to the physical location, but i am now spending more time doing banking on the internet.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> each year, a person spends more time on the internet (on average) than a year before, which shows that it is getting more and more useful for everyone. How in the world does that sound like a reasonable conclusion?
You choose to spend your time on a place A instead of the place B, it means that the place A is better than the place B. Why else would you do it, if B was better? It is a simple logic.
Without the retatrutide dose I'm on I frequently consume large amounts of food. I love apples, and blueberries, and chicken and rice. I can easily eat an entire Costco bag of Envy Apples at a stretch. Inevitably, I regret this once I have exited my fugue state of food consumption. So why do I do it? My behaviour on retatrutide is far superior at getting me both total content and joy (in the sense of area-under-the-curve rather than point-in-time).
This concept has been explored for a long time[0]. The earliest documented I know of is the concept of Akrasia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akrasia from the Greek philosophers. But I think any notion of utility must build in the notion of regret and perhaps the bicameral mind and perhaps also the notion of non-rationality. My utility functions for the things I do are not time-translation invariant, therefore I think any model that optimizes for greater content and greater joy must necessarily involve temporally non-local terms. I don't yet have a strong model of this.
But we know this is common to many mental disorders. Part of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is an interruption of some mental pattern. My wife and I have a game we find amusing to play when we want to overrule the other's temporally local preferences: we challenge the other to a game of rock-paper-scissors to see whether the countermanding applies. When she exercises it, I frequently find that even if I win the momentary desire has passed.
tl;dr: Utility functions have different values depending on the temporal stride they take
0: Recently, Elon Musk claimed that the aim for Twitter should be "unregretted user minutes". Sadly, despite this stated aim, I found that his changes decreased these and increased regret so I had to stop using his platform. I agree with the notion of maximizing (value - regret) expressed in some abstract form, however.