Do you want a happy life, or a worthwhile life? I think they're probably correlated, but I don't think you can guarantee one without risking the other. In that light, optimizing for happiness seems like the wrong move.
Long-term happiness could mean deferring gratification. Caveat emptor: trying to then execute long term plans to achieve that deferred gratification but which go awry in the intervening time can start to turn a gambit into pure misery. From personal experience, I'd suggest building redundancy in the form of things like savings and relationships, before letting an inclination for ambition risk leading you to build long and brittle pipelines which fall apart as soon as unexpected hardship strikes.
It's a cliche, but a lot of the unstated reasons we were happy at one time were there all along, until they start to slip away (social connections, health, etc.)--usually without realizing the extent this has happened until years later. As a rule of thumb, I'd suggest that the most important thing to nurture over the years are your friendships and social connections (even if that means just a chat message every few days to a close friend from college who moved to another city), which are probably your best shot at adapting your new life situation to feel more at home with happier moments in the past, but which also look forward to the future (after all, friendships are more than just shared memories--they're comprised of living, breathing people, and as such can lead to new experiences and connections that lead to even better things than just holding onto what once was).
Finally, if you really think about it, maybe the easiest way to be happy is really the satisfaction you get knowing you've brought genuine happiness to someone else. :-)
The wrong move for people who want a worthwhile life, maybe. I’m not convinced that I, and perhaps a significant fraction of humanity, would choose a worthwhile life if we could only pick one to optimize for.
People can define what is worthwhile to them, such as helping others at their own expense. Perhaps one could argue that is what makes them "happy" and thus achieve "happiness" even though they might be suffering.
This conversation plays out every time the topic of taking notes comes up, especially if roam research and friends are involved. It's "the Dropbox thing", but instead of being too cool and smart and skeptical to buy into a new storage service, it's the written word, one of the cornerstones of human civilization.
Having things written down is a good idea. The big pile of notes you no longer care about doesn't matter. The value is in the small fraction of things you do end up wanting to come back to. Good luck figuring out which is which ahead-of-time. Writing down things that you think might be useful is so easy, and the cost is negligible.
The notion that writing is mostly useful as a memory aid seems like a totally misguided "both-sides" synthesis. Having things written down is actually just a good idea.
Discord isn't on your side. They're an unprofitable (so far) VC-backed company whose only customer-facing product is a well-designed chat client. They're clearly trying to build a platform for PR- and ad-friendly discourse. Nobody should be surprised when weirdos get the ban.
They have expenses, but they also have a rapidly growing (YoY) revenue source. I didn't think I'd need to point out all the pieces of the puzzle.
I'm tired of getting downvoted with every post I make. I can understand when I defend freedom of speech or attack Apple or Google or China that I offend people, but it's happening all the time on totally benign posts.
It's making me cynical about the community. HN is great for information discovery and diversity of experience, but it feels like people are becoming increasingly vicious.
Showing the trademark of a technology they are using in the product, for the purposes of identification of said technology does not count as advertising. According to your reasoning, they would have to say "we use some other company's noise reduction". And no, the chat view (or the voice chat view) does not show the Krisp logo continuously.
They showed the trademark very prominently and that must be because they had a deal. We give you noise reduction, you give us visibility. That is an advertising contract.
Absolutely not. Western liberal democracy relies on centralised power; it’s not clear that it could function without it.
As an extension of that, getting “power to the people” is usually the rallying cry of someone who wants to weaken the government enough to overpower it in some way.
While most democratic governments currently involve some form of centralization, a pure democracy is one where every person has equal power.
I believe that it's possible, and preferable for everyone to have the same amount of power. A democracy where every citizen has equal power would try to do what's best for as many people as possible.
In that system, how do you care for folks who experience rare but serious difficulties. The tyranny of the majority gets real complex when dealing with massive populations.
> Has that ever happened or is that just an argument to let politicians keep their power?
Yes? American history is full of situations like Jim Crow, redlining, anti lgbtq legislation, lack of support for people with disabilities, criminalization of people experiencing homelessness, etc.
That's a pretty thin technicality. In many places those were majority opinions and the representatives were doing exactly what their electorate wanted them to do.
If you'd like, I'm sure there are referendums and initiatives that are directly voted on that I could dig up. A quick search in my local area says WA initiative 192 was a case where the majority chose to deplete a shared resource (salmon) and failed to protect minority interests.
Germany's power was centralized - Hitler was its dictator. I doubt that Germans would've voted to commit the atrocities Hitler commanded.
Americans never voted on segregation. So we'll never know how much sooner black Americans would've been welcomed into society if all Americans had equal power.
I guess I should have said: what's the advantage of democracy over some more authoritarian scheme, if not a higher degree of "power to the people" as you put it?
If diffusion of power isn't fundamentally worthwhile (and there's certainly a defensible position that it isn't) it seems the important question is whether Western liberal democracy is worth the trouble in the first place.
I thought the article made a reasonably convincing case that decentralized networks provide better tools for good actors to control the spread of disinformation.
What does it mean to "remove the cancer before it decentralizes" in this context?
Twitter, FB, Google all benefited from QAnon and bunch of violence that thrives on it. Election misinformation should have been removed. We have proper channels for this - ie courts.
Sure, but that wouldn't have prevented the "cancer" from moving to decentralized networks. If anything it'd probably accelerate the process.
I think the important point is that most operators of nodes on a federated network are not in a position to benefit from this kind of garbage content, and have every reason (and the tools they need) to keep it away from their portion of the network.
The Internet used to be decentralized and only after communication centralized via social media companies did the likes of QAnon become particularly problematic. There was always a fringe, but we had the norms and tools to keep it marginalized. Something has changed and arguments that we can fix the problem by doubling down on changing our norms/ideals (e.g., free speech, equality, tolerance, etc) don’t seem likely at all to pan out. We made a bad turn, but rather than continue to jeopardize our social fabric for pride or dunk costs, we should figure out how we can get back on course. Of course, that requires good faith, honesty, integrity, courage, etc., which are in short supply these days.
Could site owners freely decide who's allowed to post to their site without 230? Seems to me the ability to ban unwanted users would enable a decent degree of moderation without direct control over what's posted. Wouldn't have to be all-or-nothing, you could always give an offending poster the opportunity edit or remove a post to avoid a ban. Would that be a viable way to moderate a community?
Is there a set of earphones that's repairable? Not full-size cans, but earphones?
Most of the ones I've had have that have failed did so at the cable connection. Without the cable I'd imagine these will last longer than your average pair of earphones, and I don't see them creating much more waste; less if anything.
The video says that samsung has their own version of an airpod that has a replaceable battery. Anyone can repair/replace a damaged headphone cable although it's sometimes not very easy. If it breaks at/near the plug it'll be a lot easier.
I think this has a lot to do with the platforms vs. publishers issue, and the Section 230 dustup we're about to see.
IMO any platform whose owners have enough editorial control for these engagment-hacking techniques to be useful (the ability to decide what gets seen, what doesn't, and who sees what) should be treated as a publisher, not a platform.
This doesn't have to kill online communities generally. As long as we can distinguish between editorial control and freedom of association (i.e. the ability to ban rule-breakers and people we don't like) I don't see why effective moderation wouldn't be possible.
