861–870 of 1001 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
i dont really understand, if you hate working from home now (and it sounds like you have for a long time) why dont you switch to an in person role? there are certainly plenty of those.
Because I have got very used to using my own toilet whenever I need to.
Before, we got paid well to do what we loved, and we were sought out for our ability to code.
Now, the "fun" has been automated...by our own hands. Seeing the thing that was so highly-prized be minimized and ground into dust is fucking depressing.
Well, that and the massive layoffs from "efficiencies" brought about by AI. And the compensation "rationalizations" that come from an employers' market with no end in sight. And the ABSOLUTELY LEGENDARY amounts of cope, especially on this forum.
"It was never about the code," they say, as they write the equivalent of a TRD [^0] into a slot machine and pull the lever, hoping to get their hit of efficiency for the hour.
So, yeah, I get the BA dude in the article who lights up when they pull out the piece they're knitting. The end is coming for us; might as well take up knitting while waiting for the fall.
[^0] https://www.timelytext.com/technical-requirements-document/. I did a stint as a BA in college for a pharma company and converted FRDs into these all of the time. You had to be technical enough to translate business-speak into nerd-speak, but not necessarily technical enough to actually implement these solutions. As a result, we never saw a line of code, since these were handed off to some PM who, I'm assuming, turned these into tickets in whatever their ticketing system was. This was during the waterfall days, so it was probably something god-awful. Writing these was soul-sucking to the maximum degree. How people get satisfaction from this process befuddles me. Maybe it's the real-time back-and-forth arguing that's fun? I'll never know.
Saw a meme on mastodon the other day contrasting people of the '90s going online to escape from offline reality, and people of the '20s going offline to escape from online reality. There's something to that. I think a big part of it is just how incredibly toxic the web has become. If you spend any time online, as most tech workers do, you have exceptional resiliency if you're able to stay sane and level headed. Going…
Saw a meme on mastodon the other day contrasting people of the '90s going online to escape from offline reality, and people of the '20s going offline to escape from online reality. There's something to that. I think a big part of it is just how incredibly toxic the web has become. If you spend any time online, as most tech workers do, you have exceptional resiliency if you're able to stay sane and level headed. Going…
I see.
You complain of astroturfing, but you seem unaware of things that you have come to believe because of it.
Saw a meme on mastodon the other day contrasting people of the '90s going online to escape from offline reality, and people of the '20s going offline to escape from online reality. There's something to that. I think a big part of it is just how incredibly toxic the web has become. If you spend any time online, as most tech workers do, you have exceptional resiliency if you're able to stay sane and level headed. Going…
Yeah I'm not sure what happened but Reddit in particular is beyond saving, and I'm not saying it was ever great. I think we simply don't know how to create online communities that make any sense yet. I'd rather have second hand smoke than any more algorithmic "engagement" maximization at this point.
We do, and we knew decades ago.
The problem is, they can't become large or useful. That limitation is inherent, and due to human social behaviour.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Who's making money off our misery exactly? I can see it as a foreign adversary psyop (they benefit from us being demoralized) or as a side effect of the attention economy (more clicks is all that matters) or even a hyper-partisanship epiphenomenon (whichever side is currently down wants people to think everything is awful). But "our misery is some potential investor’s financial prospect" sounds like some schlock B-mo…
Advertisers make money on clicks, and content creators get a cut. This is the backbone that the entire internet operates on. Fear is the best driver of attention and clicks. Someone can choose to pass on a light-hearted fun article. If they feel their life or the fate of the universe is in the balance, they will read it. There isn't some evil mastermind behind it, just the banal economic incentives and evolutionary p…
Impressive work, but surely there were suspicions?
Saw a meme on mastodon the other day contrasting people of the '90s going online to escape from offline reality, and people of the '20s going offline to escape from online reality. There's something to that. I think a big part of it is just how incredibly toxic the web has become. If you spend any time online, as most tech workers do, you have exceptional resiliency if you're able to stay sane and level headed. Going…
Many folks have talked about optimizing for engagement and while I do think this is a factor, I don't think this is the cause. HN has a pretty simple set of algorithms and yet it's largely followed the same trend of negativity and despair. I'm partial to what I call the "doomer effect". If you feel sad or disenfranchised you're just much more likely to spend time online talking. A person with a fulfilling social life…
I agree with you, but would also add that, ~99% of people do not post anything. They mostly consume. When your consumption habits are constantly doomerism, and "all the bad stuff that will happen in the next 5 years", your mind also starts thinking that way. And spirals down that way. There's a lack of healthy dose of reality in online circles. So everything just becomes outrage/doomer hell.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah I'm not sure what happened but Reddit in particular is beyond saving, and I'm not saying it was ever great. I think we simply don't know how to create online communities that make any sense yet. I'd rather have second hand smoke than any more algorithmic "engagement" maximization at this point.
I feel like we're probably going to have to give up something, most probably anonymity, to get back to anything like sanity. We'll see communities that are militantly anti-AI where it's hard to get in and easy to get kicked out, and it will probably cost money and require you to divulge who you really are. It could still be semi-anonymous at the user level but not at the administrative level. I'd like to see somethin…
Saw a meme on mastodon the other day contrasting people of the '90s going online to escape from offline reality, and people of the '20s going offline to escape from online reality. There's something to that. I think a big part of it is just how incredibly toxic the web has become. If you spend any time online, as most tech workers do, you have exceptional resiliency if you're able to stay sane and level headed. Going…
The fact you say "on mastodon" proves it's effectively centralized, just pointing that out
This problem is not inherent to the task. Nitter instances can do almost everything without JS.