Just yesterday I finally got tired of all the browser security warnings and decided to buy a domain name and set up SSL in my local network. I spent like 10 minutes flummoxed by why my reverse proxy couldn't get a new cert from Let's Encrypt until I looked in the logs to see that Let's Encrypt refused because the account my reverse proxy had been using since I set it up had the email address as "admin@hostname" because this was all for my own personal use and my local reverse proxy doesn't need an actual email address, it just needed some value for some entry in some database.
This is my long-winded way of saying, "Who cares?" Give it whatever age you want. When people object to these type of initiatives for political reasons, they should state the political argument for why they are bad. But rebelling against them for practical technical reasons always seems a little silly to me and can end up being counterproductive when it shifts the conversation away from the central issue.
>is a very "traditional" way of fucking with people and expressing your broad contempt for their society.
Motivated in large part as a response to society saying fuck them. I'm not defending assholes being assholes, but I think what we have been seeing in the US over the last 5 or 10 years is classic collapse of the social contract stuff. The less a society cares about its people the less its people will care about the rest of society.
I get what you're saying, but blasting music on buses has been a thing since boom-boxes were invented, it's nothing new. I am also not inclined to blame systems instead of individuals because most people with the same background of injustice will choose to respond to that injustice by being better than it. It's only a very small number of people being disruptive like this, while the number of people with fair and understandable grievances against society is massive.
Digging more into this... because why not... it appears that he (Kirk Thatcher) also wrote the song and there's a nice bit of real life lore in the Wired article.
> According to the movie credits, the song was performed by the obscure band Edge of Etiquette. (Edge of Etiquette was, indeed, so obscure that it is rather difficult to find anything more about them than their having performed this particular song.) The punk on the bus who flipped Kirk "the bird" was played by Star Trek IV associate producer Kirk Thatcher. According to the Star Trek Encyclopedia, 4th ed., vol. 1, p. 354, Edge of Etiquette was a pseudonym for Thatcher.
> Thatcher also wrote the lyrics for the song to music written by Mark Mangini. A game card, from the Star Trek Customizable Card Game released by Decipher, excerpted the lyrics of the song. Thatcher had complained that the new wave music previously considered would not have been an accurate representation of what a 1980s punk would listen to, and offered to write "I Hate You" instead.
> But portraying “Punk on the Bus” would turn out to be Thatcher’s most lasting contribution to The Voyage Home. He and Nimoy had grown chummy during filming, so when the filmmakers were looking to cast the punk, Thatcher lobbied the director to get the role. “I told him, ‘Look, I used to have a mohawk, and I’ll dress the part—you won’t recognize me,'” Thatcher says. “Leonard said, ‘Huh, really,’ in that deep, basso profondo way. I couldn’t tell if he thought it was a stupid idea.”
> ...
> The song itself came later. Paramount Pictures had a music-licensing deal that gave it to access to songs by new-wave artists like Duran Duran, but none of those bands seemed like a good fit for Thatcher’s snarling character. “I said, ‘Leonard, that’s not punk. I could write you a punk song and it will cost you nothing. I’ll do it for [a few hundred dollars],'” says Thatcher. He wrote out the nihilistic lyrics, which he brought to his friend (and future Mad Max: Fury Road Oscar winner) Mark Mangini, a sound editor who came up with the song’s snotty, simple guitar riff. Thatcher himself sang vocals, and the whole tune was recorded on a weekend night, in a hallway that would provide the necessarily shitty sound.
> “My idea of punk at the time was the Dead Kennedys, Germs, Black Flag—real West Coast hardcore punk, that real raw sound,” Thatcher says. “I also wanted a Sex Pistols ‘God Save the Queen’ vibe, which is why I did the British accent.”
> As for Nimoy’s response? “He came by, heard it, and said, ‘OK. That’s very punk.'”
>I get what you're saying, but blasting music on buses has been a thing since boom-boxes were invented, it's nothing new.
Yes, because people have always felt like outsiders in relation to society. My point was that this sort of public misbehaving is getting worse because social cohesion is getting even worse. Not everyone with grievances against society will respond this way, but as more people have grievances against society, more people will respond in a manner like this.
This comment is phrased as if the article is confirming these points when it either doesn't mention them or even directly refutes them. First there is no mention of either crime or rent control in the article. But more importantly, it states that "A key piece of Austin’s strategy has been to encourage the construction of affordable housing." So why are you concluding that affordable housing isn't needed?
The comment is phrased in the greater context of the public discussion about housing, in general. Not the specific information of the article.
You know, like how a discussion about war might reference the various recent wars that everyone knows about; it's not limited to just the content of the article.
But it didn't reference anything, it stated political opinions like they were confirmed facts, provided zero evidence to support those assertions, and completely ignored the ways in which the article provides counterevidence.
They aren't saying affordable housing isn't needed. Just that the method for making housing affordable shouldn't be trying to make the current housing supply cheaper.
And from this is where you get "rent-control is a terrible idea". Essentially: trying to artificially drive down housing prices in any way is generally inadvisable if you can just build more housing.
Sure that's technically an opinion, but it's one based in facts, and it certainly doesn't have "zero evidence".
Blanket statements like this is the point of many of the above replies, it’s not a true statement with evidence. All rent control does not reduce the number of rentals, “more restrictive rent control”[1] [2] does. These nuances are important in the conversation.
Affordable housing is the only type of housing that will ever be built. Builders aren't so stupid as to build products that their customers can't buy. Government intervention is not needed.
Just up the street from me, a local builder is trying a tactic I have not seen before (in our area, at least). They are building out a new neighborhood, but it is quite diverse -- one end is dominated by duplexes in the 500K range and some smaller single family homes. The other end has larger, nicer homes priced at 2M or a little over. All in the span of a quarter mile or so.
They think it will work. I will be interested to see how it plays out.
I'm not sure if you're intentionally changing the definition of "affordable housing" in an attempt to make the desire for it seem silly or if you genuinely don't know how the term is typically used. But what you're describing is generally referred to as "market-rate housing" and not "affordable housing".
Affordable housing = housing that regular people can afford
The only silly thing here is that "low income housing" got rebranded as "affordable housing" and absolutely everything else got rebranded as "luxury homes" for political reasons.
"Market-rate housing" is even sillier given that it is literally the opposite of what "affordable housing" policies dictate
I'm not going to debate what the definitions should be, I'll just say I don't think it is productive to join an existing conversation using terms with different definitions than everyone else uses. Defining all housing as inherently "affordable" makes the term meaningless and even if you disagree with the motivations behind the desire for "affordable housing", at least the term has meaning in the way it's typically used.
You are quite literally debating what the definition should be, because this is _not_ the existing definition of affordable housing, it is legally what OP is saying. "Affordable housing" is just when the household spends <= 30% of gross income on housing related costs. This is the definition used by the HUD and the same definition applied in policymaking.
What >you< are referring to and what it is conflated with by progressive policymakers is "low income housing" which imposes an AMI based restriction on the resident's income. This in turn means that 30% of their income is much lower and restricts the sticker price of the home.
In recent years, most 'affordable housing' policy has been advanced by progressives, who use that term for marketing purposes, whereas the actual policy primarily relates to 'low income housing' or even 'very low income housing.' This does not mean 'affordable housing' = 'low income housing', it just means the term 'affordable housing' is used in the title and the actual measures advanced are related to AMI and 'low income housing.'
There is no "progressive" definition, income level is not at all part of the definition. Per the universal legal definition of 'affordable housing,' if a home costs $1B but is occupied by Elon Musk, it would still be affordable because it is less than 30% of his gross income.
When you are dealing with income levels it is universally called 'low income housing,' and the HUD definition is already scaled to local income levels, the 'A' in AMI stands for 'Area.'
You are conflating marketing ('we need more affordable housing!') with policy ('low income housing')
It is productive to decline to use propaganda terms. If, every time someone says they support affirmative action they are asked if they support having higher standards for Asian applicants to medical school than for white applicants that’s good because forcing people to defend their support of racist policies reduces support for them. By the same token pointing out that affordable housing doesn’t mean housing people can afford, it means politician allocated housing paid for by the general taxpayer, reduces support. Reducing support for bad things is good.
Its also helpful to know that there is a specific (US) program called "affordable housing" that subsidizes rents for low income people. The economic effect of that program is to increase rents (but not home prices). This especially hits the working poor who make just a bit too much to have subsidized rents.
This is not a program, it is a term used by the HUD and very explicitly does not relate to income levels. That is the point I keep making, when the modern (<5y) left keeps touting “affordable housing” they are misusing the term simply because they don’t want to say “low income housing” even though everybody acknowledges they are actually referring to “low income housing.”
It is very important to distinguish the two because “affordable housing” is a marketing term that could reasonably convince someone that the policy is meant to help 80% of people including themselves, when in actuality it is low income housing which is restricted to <20% of the area population and even fewer voters.
I like this reasoning. If there exists a person or organization that can afford to buy a thing then it is an affordable thing. Now this might sound like a tautology but that’s only because it is
That's not what gentrification is. Relevant to this article, I lived through the gentrification of large parts of Austin in the early 00s.
What happened was that good housing full of artists and musicians and other self-employed creatives began gentrifying, driving up property values, which drove up property taxes, which became unaffordable to the existing residents (who had owned their homes for a long time). Many (actually, most) of these artists had to sell and leave.
They often left for other cities. But hey at least the good houses everyone liked all got torn down to be replaced by McMansions for the influx of techbros.
Austin still has that slogan, "Keep Austin Weird." It failed. Austin isn't weird anymore. The University of Texas still is responsible for a lot of great stuff about Austin, but huge chunks of the city are just boring these days. There's certainly much less interesting culture happening. It's been airbnbified.
The existing residents (artists) made money by selling their appreciated houses. Those who could afford to remain were now in areas with less crime and poverty.
The new residents spent a ton of money to live in a place they themselves culturally diminished.
We should re-evaluate the winners and losers here.
I don't think many home owners got a price for their land that allowed them to buy a similar house elsewhere.
The world is far from an ideal model where what you get is what you deserve.
Note the history of the East Side power plant, which depressed property prices. Ditto, I-35 construction plans. The article says the plant will become a park now. After the new developers locked in purchases.
You see this business model everywhere. They buy up all the land around an industrial site, small airport, race track, pig farm that smells bad, etc, etc. Then they and their Karens lobby for rule changes that force that use out or make it non-competitive in the broader market. Then they develop the land.
Nothing will fix it until some case goes up to the supreme court and results in some sort of "they were there first the .gov can piss off" doctrine.
My heart breaks for those poor people whose houses became worth multiple times what they paid for them. A true tragedy. I would be devastated if my house became so valuable that the property taxes were more than I could afford.
Even if we don't enact Prop-13-like things to keep property taxes reasonable I'm sure we could get a compromise where your property tax remains stable as long as you deed the appreciation over baseline to the city/county.
> good housing full of artists and musicians and other self-employed creatives
It looks like - it might not be what you mean, but it looks like - you're saying 'good housing' is housing that has "artists and musicians and other self-employed creatives", as opposed to poor working people.
Many artists and self-employed creatives are themselves poor working people - making art is work (and so is marketing it to potential customers), and most artists are not lucky or successful enough to become wealthy doing it.
But yes, I think there is a sense in which people who are driven to create have some kind of ineffable, cultural capital that people without this drive do not have. So a neighborhood that is full of artists is more interesting, and therefore more valuable to spend time in, than one that isn't.
See the photo in the above East Side article. In the old neighborhood, people talked to the photographer because the front yards didn't have privacy fences.
What is a better faith interpretation of downplaying gentrification like this? Like what do we talk about when we talk about gentrification if not this? Gp is not even, like, denying the concept, and literally saying that it is good (in a sarcastic way).
It's not "better faith" to construct an entire alternative world for the user's comment to remove it from the actually existing implications of their point. I am not sure what that it is, but it certainly isn't a healthy exchange of ideas.
"I think we should burn down all the forests"; "Oh geeze that sounds like a terrible idea.."; "um it's actually pretty bad faith for you to assume they were talking about forests on Earth and not some bad evil forests that could hypothetically exist somewhere else..." taps the guidelines sign
I don't want to throw the dictionary at yeah but gentrification is the word we generally use to talk about a downside to maybe a more general effort in urban development. This is really really weird hill to die on.. Just pick another word, I don't think you'd lose the nuance you are trying to inject here. As it stands its just needlessly provocative, a Twitter-hot-take vibe that is generally frowned upon around here.
Also (imo) don't link to yourself like this! Especially when its to just another short comment in the same thread! Why do that??
There’s nothing good faith to be interpreted from a pithy comment that denies real suffering experienced by real people. If OP wanted to be interpreted in good faith they should’ve written more substance to their comment.
Can you guess what the #1 source of wealth increase in the AA community has been over the last 20 years? That's right, grandma's house...guess where she lived.
This is a huge important part - if gentrification of an AA community occurs in an area where the homes are owned by the residents, it's a great wealth-growing event; generational even.
If the gentrification of an AA community occurs where the residents rent then they capture none of it and are forced out.
Let's assume communities are rated on a scale of 1 to 10. A "gentrified community" goes from being a 3 to being an 8. Renters are forced to move because they can't afford 8/10-rated-community rents, while existing owners profit handsomely. On this we all agree.
Where do the new residents of this now-8/10 community come from? Probably a place that was less than 8/10 - maybe it was 7. So now there's less demand for all the 7s and their rents decrease, allowing residents living in 6s to move there. And so on.
Assuming housing construction in the region has kept up with the population, even the renters who were forced out of the previously 3/10 community will likely find new housing in a 4/10 neighborhood at the same price. Their relationships from the old place were probably disrupted by the move (bad) but they also got better housing for the same money (good).
The key in this is housing construction must be allowed to increase with population.
Exactly - when things are happening "naturally" for some value of "not artificially constrained" you find that people move over time and what were the luxury dwellings of 20/30/50 years ago are the new "starter homes" of today.
When supply is artificially constrained, the old homes get torn down and replaced with luxurious ones - without increasing dwelling spaces available.
Good for whom? If it's good for the residents, that's great. If it's bad for the residents, who get driven out, but good for some developers and outside rich people - that's what gentrification is.
Unless all of the housing is owned by non-residents prior to gentrification, some residents always benefit from their neighborhood going upscale. Either through increased home values, allowing them to sell and improve their lives. Or because it's now a more pleasant area to live in.
Even renters in gentrifying areas may profit if housing construction outpaces population growth. Yes, they may have to move, but also the places they move to on their current budget may be nicer - because the people who can afford better have moved too.
> increased home values, allowing them to sell and improve their lives
That also raises property taxes, making the neighborhood unaffordable and driving them out.
> it's now a more pleasant area to live in.
For new wealthy residents. People who have spent lifetimes there don't want everything to change and have their communities destroyed.
> Yes, they may have to move, but also the places they move to on their current budget may be nicer - because the people who can afford better have moved too.
These are theoretical and very general averages. The actual individuals often do not benefit. Being forced to move is not a mere inconvenience to your theory.
The alternative: new housing doesn't get built. Existing housing - including the "bad" neighborhood that isn't redeveloped for fear of "gentrification" - gets bid up to the moon. People who can't afford rent end up moving anyway and commuting from very far away, if they're lucky. Or they end up on the streets, if they aren't so lucky.
That isn't theoretical. I just described the SF Bay Area.
When people in NYC are driven out of their neighborhoods because of gentrification, they generally move down south. There isn’t some magical part of town that they can afford with their “current budget”
Economic theory says some things are theoretically impossible, no literally, but economic theory wouldn't say that here:
The local housing market is much more complex than supply and demand, with larger economic factors (e.g., interest rates), very imperfect information (affecting everyone from buyers, to sellers, real estate agents, lenders, etc.), coordination by landlords (e.g., RealPage), non-economic factors such as prejudice (or just a co-op board!), government actions, larger trends, temporary inefficiencies, etc.
Economic theory is useful, but it does not predict or circumscribe the immediate reality of individuals. Life is much more complicated than that.
First, I didn't say there is no supply effect; I said it's far from impossible for the effect to make a difference.
Second, many factors are involved in a complex market; you and I don't know how much effect the supply had in this case. That you are interested in that input isn't evidence of its effect.
In this case affordable housing nets out as a way to overcome policy barriers to market rate housing. So it actually makes the market freer.
Many other implementations of affordable housing further raise the barrier and thus even if any is built it doesn’t help widespread housing affordability issues.
Rent control is just another flavor of housing affordability policy that often (always?) backfires.
Crime, social peace, and economic opportunity are very linked. A lot of house prices in urban areas are wildly distributed and often the increase cost is to buy distance and safety (often just a couple blocks) from high crime areas.
>In this case affordable housing nets out as a way to overcome policy barriers to market rate housing. So it actually makes the market freer.
>Many other implementations of affordable housing further raise the barrier and thus even if any is built it doesn’t help widespread housing affordability issues.
Can you be specific with what you mean here? Because this reads like a no true Scotsman argument that it doesn't count as "affordable housing" if it works. The article discusses the programs encouraging income-restricted units which seems like a classic affordable housing program. What specifically do you think is different in this case?
Affordable housing in a vacuum disincentivizes development and results in worse affordability.
Affordable housing used as an incentive or way to overcome other barriers to housing (density limits, height limits, zoning etc) that makes the market more “free” net is will produce more development.
You don’t need it for development but it can be used effectively depending on other policies. As with all things it depends on what policy makers are optimizing for. These are all tradeoffs. But affordable by itself all else equal limits developer upside and incentives less development meaning less supply and higher prices.
>Affordable housing used as an incentive or way to overcome other barriers to housing (density limits, height limits, zoning etc)
I'm not sure what type of affordable housing program doesn't meet this definition. They are almost always tied to incentives for developers, including sometimes in the form of a removal of other housing restrictions. Or are you specifically objecting to financial assistance on the renter/buyer side? Because I assumed the “it” in “it doesn’t need to be “affordable”” was referencing the new development.
See San Francisco. Also generally anywhere else where prices are rising and developers can’t develop and yet there are a lot of affordable housing policies. CA as a whole has mismanaged this so badly they have a net migration outflow.
Also removing other housing restrictions that ostensibly were put in there by constituents is a valid reason for constituents to oppose AH. They get called NIMBYs for this but if the local populace wanted more high density development then the density limits wouldnt be there to be excepted by AH
> if the local populace wanted more high density development then the density limits wouldnt be there to be excepted by AH
If people didn't want housing there, it wouldn't be built. If they didn't want the exemptions to be codified, then they wouldn't be.
The only way your statement makes sense is if you restrict "local" to a sufficiently small subset of the people (a town? A block? One single address?), but in that case, a greater number of people within a greater definition of "local" seem to disagree.
If the state gifts a locality power to impose zoning restrictions, then the state can usually alter (or withdraw) that gift when it stops being beneficial to the people of the state, even if a small subset of those people living in that one locality don't like it.
>Also generally anywhere else where prices are rising and developers can’t develop and yet there are a lot of affordable housing policies.
Like I said, the “it” in “it doesn’t need to be “affordable”” seemed like it was referencing the previous “Build more housing”, so situations in which nothing is built are different. If your original intent was that not all housing policy should be about affordable housing, then we agree. But I do think it's an important part of the solution.
>you're buying a vehicle that already has the capabilities, but are disabled, then paying rent (or a fee) to turn them on.
This is very much not what "software-defined vehicle" means which itself is very much not the same thing as EVs. It's possible to criticize the explotative business practices you mentioned (or bad UI practices like moving everything to a touchscreen instead of physical buttons) without linking them to other issues that have no real relation beyond falling under the general category of "technology".
At a societal level, EVs are generally better than ICE cars. At a societal level, cars that can automatically fix a "recall" with an over-the-air update are generally better than recalls that will wait to get fixed until an owner schedules an appointment to have the car serviced. These two things can be true without endorsing automakers who charge and extra fee to activate the seat warmers that already exist in the vehicle.
That's all motherhood and apple pie, but I'm sorry: the reality that we live in and incentives at play are such that if a capability can be exploited, then it will be exploited to the detriment of the consumer. Full stop.
It's interesting how many complaints I see on HN that are framed as if they're complaints about a specific piece of technology when they are really complaints about capitalism. I'm all ears if you want to criticize our entire economic system, but I think it's silly to have that conversation specifically in the context of car software rather than at a societal level.
> when they are really complaints about capitalism
it's not a complaint about capitalism. It's a complaint about asymmetric bargaining power in the seller/buyer relationship.
That's not inherent in capitalism. It's inherent in an anti-competitive market. The failure is in gov't making sure there's sufficient regulation to prevent monopolistic practises.
"It's not a complaint about water. It's a complaint about the wetness."
If capitalism requires constant vigilant government intervention to prevent monopolistic practices, anti-competitive markets, and asymmetric bargaining power, then it seems to me that this is absolutely a complaint about capitalism. If anything, your comment just makes the indictment more damning.
i'd rather have the gov't be vigilant, than to have the gov't be the one monopolistic dictator. None of those problems of monopoly are inherent in capitalism - they exist in one form or another under a different market style (that of a command economy). It just appears different.
> The failure is in gov't making sure there's sufficient regulation to prevent monopolistic practises.
This may not be a problem inherent to capitalism, but it certainly is a problem caused by the capitalism we currently have (by which I'm specifically referring to the US, but it may apply more broadly elsewhere).
And the government's failure to adequately regulate the market is due to the right. The party that claims government doesn't work has repeatedly - for generations - run on this as their platform, and when in power, they ensure it doesn't work by continued regulatory capture and gutting of consumer protections.
The world we live in is capitalistic. We can imagine another world that isn't, but when we're considering specific pieces of technology, it's worthwhile to judge it by how it will perform or be exploited in the world we live in.
When you're fighting the same enemy on a dozen battlefields, you won't stand a chance of winning until you understand that fact and go after the root cause.
The whole idea of enshittification is that someone makes a high-quality app (or whatever), outcompetes all other entrants, and locks down the market. Then, having acquired pricing power, they can raise prices or, more often (as these tools aren't 'priced' from the perspective of the consumer, but rather indirectly funded e.g. through ads) lower the quality of the product. The steps in this chain are not inherent to 'making products', they emerge entirely from the confines and incentives of our market-based economy.
And it's not just "centrally planned economies" that avoid this. We see evidence from historical modes of production like artisinal handicraft. Despite there not being a free market of producers (as guilds generally possessed legally-enforced monopolies over saleable production) the general quality of goods thereby produced did not generally trend downwards. Indeed, we can see from the sources that in cases where quality was known to have dropped, popular backlash led to interventions, e.g. the various Parisian bread laws, or hallmarking regulations for goldsmiths. Obviously, similar mechanisms exist today in the form of governmental regulations, but the problem with free market economies is that they produce actors both incentivized and empowered to hamstring the government, capture regulators, and ultimately undermine that self-same free market, to their own benefit.
This feels to me like a false dichotomy. The only alternative to the current way of doing things isn't a planned command economy, no matter what "libertarians" or tankies might argue.
Anything other then capitalism with slightly more regulation is just going from the US to Germany. Great, but they have software updates on cars too.
If you want to change anything more fundamental, you are going to have to do a planned economy.
At best you can say, maybe could be slightly better Germany by having a better political process or something. But even then, software updates in your car are going to be a reality because it solves are problem for manufactures, saves consumers lots of time in many cases and generally the positives outway the negatives.
I bet you 100% that in any planned economy OTA updates would still happen.
At best we can argue for some better practice about OTA Updates in regards to security and functionality. Maybe forcing manufactures to have a 'security only' feed an a 'feature feed'.
> I bet you 100% that in any planned economy OTA updates would still happen.
How so? In a democratically planned economy, we would expect that economic decisions considered by the majority of the population to be unwise/upsetting/etc. would not take place. Yes, many/most decisions would probably happen 'behind the scenes', according to the delegated authority of smaller committees or individual officials, but that's only so long as those decisions don't cause bad results for the broader populace.
More broadly, how exactly would enshittification take place in an economy not based around market principles? The whole idea is that someone makes a high-quality app (or whatever), outcompetes all other entrants, and locks down the market. Then, having acquired pricing power, they can raise prices or, more often (as these tools aren't 'priced' from the perspective of the consumer, but rather indirectly funded e.g. through ads) lower the quality of the product. These steps are not intrinsic to reality, they emerge entirely from the confines of our market-based economy.
And yes, you can argue that in an "ideal market" they wouldn't happen, but a truism of modern economics is that "sufficiently free markets" produce actors with the power and desire to capture/destroy said free market.
Criticising our entire economic system tends to have very little effect. Criticising specific poor business practices and/or technologies that enable them has a much better chance of improving people's lives.
> Criticising our entire economic system tends to have very little effect.
I think its actively counterproductive. Criticising the entire economic system doesn't do anything. Complaining in broad strokes about stuff you can't change reduces your sense of agency over the world.
Also, if people believe that businesses must be sociopathic, they will make sociopathic choices in business. The belief reinforces the problem.
Do personal computers even really emerge under communism? it is yet to be seen. But this specific technology seems to only evolve under capitalism to suit the needs of a certain type of buisness against the consumer.
If it emerged under communism, it probably would be equally as bad. I imagine if it emerged under communism or socialism it would be designed to solve a similar problems: securing the needs of the state against the citizen.
The economies of all countries that claimed to be socialist or communist were the extreme form of monopolistic capitalism.
Because nowadays the economy of USA resembles more and more every year to that of the socialist countries from the past, a non-negligible risk has appeared for the personal computer to become an endangered species.
The prices of personal computers and of their components have been increasing steadily during the last decade, long before the current wave of extreme price increases.
There is a steadily increasing pressure from big companies and from the governments controlled by them to eliminate true ownership of computers and of many other electronic devices, by introducing more and more restrictions for what owners can do with their PC/smartphone and by introducing more and more opportunities for others to control those devices remotely.
Many kinds of computing devices have eliminated their low-price models and they are offered now only in models so expensive as to be affordable only for big businesses, not for individuals or SMEs.
Ten years ago, I could still buy various kinds of professional GPUs with high FP64 throughput and any model of Intel Xeon server CPUs.
Nowadays I can choose to buy only high-end desktop CPUs for my servers, because the state-of-the-art server CPUs and datacenter GPUs now have 5-digit prices. NVIDIA, Intel and AMD see only big businesses as customers for such products, and they no longer offer any smaller SKUs in these categories (Intel nominally offers a few cheap Xeons, but those are so crippled that they are not worth for anything else but for enabling the testing of some server systems).
So in the kind of unregulated capitalism that exists today in USA, PCs would not have appeared and there is a risk for them to disappear, because they have become a relict of the past.
Ah the old 'No true Scotsman' argument. Except of course that the centrally planned economies like the Soviet Union were exactly what socialists before WW1 demanded. And what they tried to implement.
If the Soivet Union and friends were not Communist/Socialist then a communist economy simply doesn't exist, and has never existed and we see 0 reason why it would ever exists. And its not even clear what it would be or how it would work. So its completely and utterly irrelevant for any debate in the real world.
Its only in circular marxist self-mastrobation logic to redefine Soviet Union as 'monopolistic capitalism'.
> The prices of personal computers and of their components have been increasing steadily during the last decade
Not in terms of actual performance ...
Maybe for Graphics cards, but at the same time, those graphics cards can do things now they could not before so they gained in value.
Those against capitalism are going to speak out against what capitalism will lead to be exploited. I don't consider it "silly" to be against something that will lead to disaster, even if the disaster is systemic. Like, so what? Honestly. You can be against giving bad actors new tools without the tools having to be bad themselves. That's the premise of gun control for example.
As another poster already said, the complaints are not about capitalism, even if sometimes they are worded in such a way, but they are about monopolistic capitalism.
For "capitalism" without other qualifications, there are no alternatives. The so-called socialist or communist economies have always lied by pretending that they are not capitalist. In fact all such economies were the extreme form of monopolistic capitalism.
Towards the end of the nineties of the previous century, a huge wave of acquisitions and mergers has started and it has never stopped since then.
Because of this, to my dismay, because I have grown in a country occupied by communists so I know first hand how such an economy works, the economies of USA and of all the other western countries have begun to resemble more and more every year with the socialist/communist economies that were criticized and ridiculed here in the past.
While the lack of competition and its consequences are very similar, in some respect the current US and western economies are even worse than the former socialist/communist economies. At least those had long-term plans. While those plans were frequently not as successful as claimed, they at least realized from time to time useful big infrastructure projects.
The main role of the laws and of the state must be the protection of the weak from the powerful, for various definitions of weakness and power, to prevent the alternative of attempting to solve such inequalities by violent means, when everybody loses.
Therefore there must be a balance between the economic freedom of the private companies and the regulation of their activities.
It is obvious that in USA such a balance has stopped existing long ago and the power of the big companies is unchecked, to the detriment of individuals and small/medium companies.
The US legislators spend most of their time fighting for the
introduction of more and more ridiculous laws, which are harmful for the majority of the citizens, while nobody makes the slightest attempt to conceive laws that would really protect the consumers against the abusive practices that have now spread to all big companies.
cars that can automatically fix a "recall" with an over-the-air update are generally better than recalls that will wait to get fixed until an owner schedules an appointment
Haed disagree. You've been bamboozled, too.
Recalls of any kind are a signal to me the vehicle shipped half-baked. I'd rather have the car with slightly older features that took a little longer to release, but got it right before leaving the factory floor. Or at least the one with sufficient isolation between safety-critical and convenience features that recalls like those you describe are low priority enough to not be urgent.
The reality is, and this is just a fact that all cars have recalls. And currently there are already lots of recalls that require software. Now you just have to go to the dealship.
At best you could argue, maybe the software is better because a bug is more expensive to fix. But that can also lead to low risk bugs not being fixed.
Either way, the solution is not to prevent update, but make the cost higher for companies if their software or their update causes anything safety critical to be wrong.
Regulation around having a separate update for security critical things might be reasonable on government level. But usually the update is not forced in if its mostly features.
> I'd rather have the car with slightly older features that took a little longer to release, but got it right before leaving the factory floor.
Yes, I too have only ever shipped perfect code without any bugs, especially with incredibly large and complex software systems involving dozens of teams. You just need to spend another week or two and you'll get it perfect every time!
Imagine having a car that pulls packages from npm or Docker hub whenever it gets a network connection. If there were cosmic justice that's what many HN users would get.
Knowing the HN crowd, they would probably run over some family barely being able to make rent, then whine on the internet for the next 7 years about how much that event affected _them_ and _their_ feelings.
When was the last time you worried about someone cutting your brakes? A lot of times these hypothetical fears are disconnected from reality. Security is important, but people generally don't engage in destruction for destruction's sake so improving default safety levels has been a clear net positive for society so far. Maybe I'm being shortshighted and a future security exploit will change that, but it's not something I currently fear as someone whose car gets occasional OTA updates.
Cutting someones breaks requires physical access to the hardware.
Changing:
if (brakeDepressed()){
engageBrake();
}
To:
if (brakeDepressed() && currentTime < '5/6/26 4pm EST'){
engageBrake();
}
Can be deployed to thousands of vehicles, and would stop brakes from working during peak commute time on the East Coast.
Someone who can write out that code with that specificity should know there are countless technical and procedural ways to help prevent that sort of thing from actually making its way into consumer vehicles (or that OTA updates would be the only avenue to accomplish that). In a properly designed system, the only real fear here is a state-level attack. And I just don't think getting every Honda to crash at 4pm is a vulnerable enough attack vector to make this hypothetical worthy of much thought.
How do you know that a car is the result of a properly designed system before you get behind the wheel (or step in front of it?).
>the only real fear here is a state-level attack
Why isn't this a valid concern? We should just be fine with russia or china having the ability to remotely hack all of our cars and kill/spy on individuals, even critical members of our leadership? What about our own government? What about some terrorist launching formerly state-level malware from his basement with the help of AI?
Not only state actors. Vulnerability can be exploited by non-state actors. A terrorist getting hold of this capability to crash every Honda at 4pm introduces new challenges. The impact of 9/11 was not about how many people were killed. But it terrorized the population with that act. People stopped getting into flights. Imagine similar stuff with our daily routine cars.
State level actors have plenty of money to find any exploit around those protections and some need little incentive. They can hire a spy to cut my break line but their gain is much lower vs the cost. They don't care about me at all anyway except if I'm in a group of 100k people they can get at once.
> the only real fear here is a state-level attack.
This is blatantly false. In the real world there was a major recall after security researchers (not state actors) demonstrated that they could remotely interfere with safety critical systems. OTA updates without user involvement are a massive security vulnerability. So are internet connected safety critical systems. Neither should be legally permissible IMO.
> I just don't think getting every Honda to crash at 4pm is a vulnerable enough attack vector to make this hypothetical worthy of much thought.
Setting aside assassinations do you just have no imagination? There have been all sorts of crazy disgruntled worker sabotage stories over the years. Mass shooters exist. Political and religious terrorists exist.
For a specific mass scale state level hypothetical imagine that the US enters a hot war with a peer adversary for whatever reason. The next day during the morning commute the entire interstate system grids to a halt, the hospitals are completely overwhelmed, and the entire supply chain collapses for a week or so while we pick up the pieces. With a bit of (un)luck it might happen to catch an oil tanker in the crossfire while it was in a tunnel thereby scoring infrastructure damage that would take years to fix.
> should know there are countless technical and procedural ways to help prevent that sort of thing
Sometimes when I look at code it feels like I was led into a weird surprise party celebrating structure and correctness, only for everyone to jump out as soon as I get past the door to shout, “Just kidding - it’s the same old bullshit!” All that to say, we’re about as good or worse as anyone else, at our respective jobs.
> A lot of times these hypothetical fears are disconnected from reality.
Conversely, a lot of times people don't fear real dangers of reality until it bites them. "Hackers wouldn't care about me, and the single password I use on every website is super good and complicated."
> but people generally don't engage in destruction for destruction's sake
Generally true, but they do engage in destruction when there's profit to be made or when it becomes in their geopolitical interests, and sometimes that destruction is quite notable: Remember when it was safe to assume that passengers could passively wait out airplane hijackings?
Your average script-kiddie might not seriously consider cutting everyone's brakes simultaneously, Al Queda would have been giddy.
Software has an atrocious track record for security. Doubly so for hardware manufacturers. It only takes one smart cow to disable millions of vehicles vs a local knave cutting brake lines.
I yearn for the days of wrapped software where developers had to make a gold pressed release. Not, “we can patch it later”.
If you want to talk about society, then this is about systematic security not individual security. If someone somewhere can push a button and flash your car with OTA firmware to drive you off a bridge, political assasinations become a lot easier.
In fact, with all this data they are collecting, you wouldn't even need to be the next edward snowden to get this treatment. You could set the firmware to target, say, every left-wing voter in america.
You don't even need the own the car with such behavior. Everyone becomes a pedestrian eventually.
> At a societal level, cars that can automatically fix a "recall" with an over-the-air update are generally better than recalls that will wait to get fixed until an owner schedules an appointment to have the car serviced.
Experience with boxed versus updatable software, particularly video games, says otherwise. When it costs a lot for the manufacturer to fix defects, they put more emphasis on not having them in the first place. Otherwise we just just a parade of defects all the time. Even if it's minor things and never fixed, the user can adapt; that's not possible in the face of continuous updates.
> At a societal level, EVs are generally better than ICE cars.
Cite your sources, please
> cars that can automatically fix a "recall" with an over-the-air update are generally better than recalls that will wait to get fixed until an owner schedules an appointment to have the car serviced.
If a "recall" can be fixed via software, doesn't that mean just shitty software to begin with? And that usually happens only when a car is infested with tons of software - proving the exact opposite of why we need less software inside cars?
we need sources for the fact an electric motor, all other things being equal, is better than a combustion engine? If you agree that people in general value the health of their lungs that alone is sufficient reason.
It's also becoming quickly a question of geopolitical resilience, running your transport system on dinosaur juice coming from regions where people blow each other up is bad in particular if you happen to be Japanese automaker Honda
> an electric motor, all other things being equal, is better than a combustion engine?
This is not the core argument. Motors maybe superior - we can agree on that. The power source (batteries) and the environmental impact they have - that has always been the core argument. [1]
My background is global geophysical exploration, primarily for mineral resources with some dabbling in the energy domain.
For a single example, this passage:
High demand and prices are already encouraging some producers to cut corners and violate environmental and safety regulations.
For example, in China, dust released from graphite mines has damaged crops and polluted villages and drinking water. In Africa, some mine owners exploit child workers and skimp on protective equipment such as respirators. Small artisanal mines, where ores are extracted by hand, often flout laws.
is entirely emotive, intended to tug on feelings (which it does) but otherwise it has no bearing on the bulk of major mining that contributes to bulk of mineral processing.
The tonnes of nickel and cobalt we see largely comes from big mines, big trucks, formal Occ Health and Safety regulations, etc.
It also commits the usual mistake of confusing "just in time" exploration results that firm up suspected deposits with sizes and density estimates for the commodities of interest with absolute limits on what is available over the cycle of time.
As demand increases further areas that are "known" (but not measured) get further technical inspection (magnetics, drill sampling, etc) and become new fresh reserves.
Does the article you cited cost money to read? I found a description on google scholar:
> Ten years left to redesign lithium-ion batteries
> Reserves of cobalt and nickel used in electric-vehicle cells will not meet future demand. Refocus research to find new electrodes based on common elements such as iron and silicon, urge Kostiantyn Turcheniuk and colleagues.
I notice that the article was published in 2018. So I guess we only have to wait two more years to decide if it's right or not. Will we be out of cobalt and nickel by then? I'd be happy to take a bet with you, assuming you stand by the article you cited.
it's not a fact, it's an opinion, and just because you see it as truth doesnt mean it is. This is why the left/progressive crowd is so disliked by the conservatives - they phrase any argument from an inherent view point that they assume is self-evident.
> This is why the left/progressive crowd is so disliked by the conservatives - they phrase any argument from an inherent view point that they assume is self-evident.
the fact that a combustion vehicle inherently produces byproducts that are extremely harmful to your health and an electrical engine does not is not an opinion, it's a medical fact you can verify yourself by breathing next to a car exhaust.
Conservatives, I assumes this means American modern conservatives, dislike this because they make French postmodernists from the 70s look like evidence based scientists
> Conservatives, I assumes this means American modern conservatives, dislike this because they make French postmodernists from the 70s look like evidence based scientists
Cite your own sources that they're not. And maybe try to avoid the ten year old nonsense that's frequently floated as "evidence".
On recalls -- like the one that said that individual icons have to be slightly bigger? Yeah, shitty software.
Or the one that made Tesla annoy drivers with a smaller timeout? That was actually a safety issue --- people would turn off FSD to adjust something and then turn it back on again. Much, much less safe.
You made an assumption about something I never said and used that as the base of your argument to make a point.
I didn't say anything, I simply asked them to cite a source for that kind of a grandiose claim. If you make a claim like that without citation(s), the onus to prove it lies on the person making the said claim, not on me to disprove it.
>a societal level, cars that can automatically fix a "recall" with an over-the-air update are generally better than recalls that will wait to get fixed until an owner schedules an appointment to have the car serviced
Maybe? At least in my experience, once the cost of patching buggy software goes down, it typically means that the people become more willing to ship software with more bugs with a fix it later attitude.
> At a societal level, cars that can automatically fix a "recall" with an over-the-air update are generally better than recalls that will wait to get fixed until an owner schedules an appointment to have the car serviced.
This doesn't have anything to do with EV vs ICE, but whether it has a over the air updates and whether the problem can be fixed with a software update or not. I expect car recalls are pretty well into the noise in terms of "societal level" problems too aren't they? Even if they were not I expect whole "software defined car" thing, whatever that really means, has not resulted in mechanical defects plummeting, but rather just more software defects. Although it is quite possible EVs have less defects in general than ICE cars I suppose.
I’ve never had a software-based danger on my hardware-based vehicles. As such, there is a whole class of recalls that I never needed: all the ones you tell me I’m missing out on.
I'm impressed that you're daily driving what must be a 30+ year old vehicle. What model? Most enthusiasts have another vehicle to keep the miles down and use when the antique needs maintenance.
1990 AU Ford Falcon family here - still in near showroom condition (well, looks good but has a scratch and a minor ding) with ~ 600,000 km on the clock.
> when the antique needs maintenance.
You're talking about all the 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, et al cars, tracks and tractors that litter our district? Yeah - there are a lot of them in this part of the world.
All the farmers love the bleeding edge gear and are getting into AgBot boom sprayers, etc - but they still can't shake a love of keeping the really old stuff going - pimped up rat-trucks abound and we rebuilt an old Alice Chambers tractor ourselves two years back.
"Antique" is a term for any vehicle that meets the local criteria for antique vehicle registration [0], usually older than 25-30 years. Your falcon is in the same club as those older vehicles now.
> Your falcon is in the same club as those older vehicles now.
No, it isn't - you missed:
In Australia, the rules for antique vehicle registration vary between states.
I am well aware that the vehicle I own and drive is normally registered as a normal vehicle and is not treated as an antique.
What we do have, here in W.Australia, is a limited usage "Classics" rego for vehicles 30 years or older.
Reduced rates for enforced (but how??) reduced usage:
The owners must also be a financial member of a Department of Transport (DoT) approved motoring club.
a 1991 Holden Commodore would drop from $867.55 to $171.30 per year
Vehicles in the scheme are only able to be driven on public roads for a maximum of 90 days per annum.
Classics (not antiques!) are beloved cars kept road ready but only occassionally used on public roads.
Specifically, I believe Section 230 protections shouldn't apply to algorithmicly promoted content. TikTok hosting my video isn't inherently an endorsement of what I'm saying, but proactively pushing that video to people is functionally equivalent even if you want to quible over dictionary definitions. These algorithms take these platforms from dumb content-agnostic pipes that deserve protections to editorial enterprises that should bear responsibility for what they promote.
There is a decent legal argument to be made that §230 doesn't immunize platforms for the speech of their algorithm, to the extent that said speech is different from the speech of the underlying content. (A simple, if absurd, example of this would be if I ran a web forum and then created a highlight page of all of the defamatory comments people posted, then I'm probably liable for defamation.)
The problem of course is that it's difficult to disentangle the speech of algorithmic moderation from the speech of the content being moderated. And the minor issue that the vast majority of things people complain about is just plain First Amendment-protected speech, so it's not like the §230 protections actually matter as the content isn't illegal in the first place.
I don't think we even need to go that far. Just remove protection for paid advertisements. It's absurd that Meta cannot be held liable for the ads they promote when a newspaper can be held liable if they were to publish the same ad.
But isn't this difficult when the tech bosses are in cahoots with the country bosses? And honestly even if the leadership changes, I somehow have a feeling the techs will naturally switch boats as well - might be a reason why the opposition doesn't paint them that much nowadays, to make sure they switch along.
Listing content alphabetically or chronologically is technically an "algorithm" too. What I'm specifically challenging here is the personalized algorithm designed to keep individual users on the platform based off a user profile influenced by countless active and passive choices the user has made over time. The type of HN algorithm that serves the same content to every user based off global behavior is fine in my book because it is both less exploitative of the user base and a reflection of that user base's proactive decisions in upvoting/downvoting content.
So if HN added anything personalized, like allowing you to show fewer stories on topics you dislike, it would lose protection? I can't get on board with that.
I also think it would be extremely unpopular. People like their recommendation engines. They want Netflix to show them more similar shows. They want Reddit to help them find more similar subreddits. I know there are HN users who don't want any of these recommendation engines, but on the whole people actually want them.
>They want Netflix to show them more similar shows.
Perhaps that example was a little too revealing on your end. Netflix doesn't have/need Section 230 protections and they're doing fine.
I'm not suggesting these algorithms should be illegal, just that Section 230 protections were defined too broadly because they predated the feasibility of these type of algorithms. These platforms would be free to continue algorithmic promotion, but I believe these algorithms would be less harmful if the platforms had to worry about potential legal liability.
Think YouTube and copyright for comparison. The DMCA is far from perfect, but we have YouTube as an example of a platform that survived and even thrived in the transition from a world that didn't care about copyrighted internet video to one in which they that needed to moderate with copyright in mind.
Cigarettes weren’t made illegal. Cigarette companies are not liable for their user’s choice to consume them. What’s your point?
> Perhaps that example was a little too revealing on your end. Netflix doesn't have/need Section 230 protections and they're doing fine.
Perhaps it was a little too revealing on your end that you conveniently ignored my other example of Reddit.
If you need to cherry pick to make your point it doesn’t look very strong.
I still don’t see consistency in your argument that Section 230 should still apply to Hacker News but not, for example, Reddit, simply because one of them allows users to personalize the content they see.
> Cigarette companies are not liable for their user’s choice to consume them.
They kind of were. Not completely liable, but partially. Because... um, well, uh, yeah, they are. They are literally liable.
If you produce cigarettes, you are partially responsible for people smoking. Smoking is also not a "choice", come on now. The only people who believe that are people trying to sell you cigarettes or people who have never smoked.
That's why you can't advertise cigarettes anywhere anymore and they're very hard to find. And, when you do find them, the box tells you "hey please don't smoke this". R.J. Reynolds didn't do that by fucking choice, we forced them.
Cigarette companies paid billions, and continue to pay, for the societal harm they cause. That's a liability. They're not legally liable in the sense that nobody is going to jail. But they have financial liabilities. Because they do, literally, cause financial harm.
I don't think people really understand just how harshly we ran Tobacco companies into the ground. Many pay more per cigarette for liability than they pay to make the cigarette.
This is the type of comment that suggests you aren't engaging with what I'm saying beyond a superficial level. My argument is consistent. I'm not cherry-picking examples. The differentiator I'm criticizing is the personalized nature of the algorithms. But rather than engaging with the merit of that distinction, you're acting as if there is no distinction at all. I'm not sure if there is much point in contuning the conversation from there.
I think the other person's issue with your position is that the distinction is entirely arbitrary. You're not giving any reasons why the demarcation line for which feed algorithms are OK and which are not is there instead of anywhere else. It seems to be just "Facebook and TikTok are bad; Their feeds are personalized recommendation engines; Therefore personalized recommendation engines are bad, and other feed algorithms are OK".
>I think the other person's issue with your position is that the distinction is entirely arbitrary.
Basically all laws related to speech are abitrary. Can you define a clear and self-evident line between pornography and art as an example? Or do you agree with the Supreme Court that we just "know it when [we] see it"?
>You're not giving any reasons why the demarcation line for which feed algorithms are OK and which are not is there instead of anywhere else.
Let me just copy and paste what I said before: "The type of HN algorithm that serves the same content to every user based off global behavior is fine in my book because it is both less exploitative of the user base and a reflection of that user base's proactive decisions in upvoting/downvoting content." I can understand if one of you want to challenge that line of thought, but you both acting like I didn't give any reasoning at all is bizarre and gives me the impression that you aren't actually reading what I'm writing.
> Basically all laws related to speech are abitrary.
True. This is a fair point. But the expected counter argument would be that the exact line isn't the issue instead it's the justification for the principle.
IE why is personalized algorithms more dangerous than general ones.
My answer (because I mostly agree with you) is that the difference is that personalized algorithms almost feel like brain hacking. And this brain hacking simply doesn't work at scale when applied to vague general algorithms.
>Basically all laws related to speech are abitrary. Can you define a clear and self-evident line between pornography and art as an example? Or do you agree with the Supreme Court that we just "know it when [we] see it"?
I'm a free speech absolutist, so I personally don't find which laws already exist on the matter to be a compelling argument. If it was up to me, I'd get rid of any such laws.
>The type of HN algorithm that serves the same content to every user based off global behavior is fine in my book because it is both less exploitative of the user base and a reflection of that user base's proactive decisions in upvoting/downvoting content.
The argument hinges entirely on the relative exploitativeness of different feed algorithms, but that metric is merely asserted with no support.
Typically free speech absolutism leads individuals into logical traps they find difficult to dig themselves out of.
But we don't even need that in this case. Private property can have all kinds of restrictions put on it based on the potential dangers and harms it causes. This in fact is one of the most common attacks on speech I see right now (Meta et el) that they will just put age requirements on sites.
>Typically free speech absolutism leads individuals into logical traps they find difficult to dig themselves out of.
Yes, "free speech absolutists" tend to define these terms in ways to hide the true arbitrary nature of their beliefs. The obvious test case is do they believe in legalizing CSAM. Either they answer "yes" and ostracize themselves from almost all of society or they say "no" and have to come up with arbitrary rules why this specific content doesn't count as speech. Either way, self-applying the label is its own red flag.
I wasn't the one who brought up free speech into the discussion; slg was. That aside, whether it curtails it or not would depend on how one defines "speech". Even if the particular way in which a website displays information is not speech, I still think it would be an overreach for a government to legislate how websites are allowed to function. If I as a user want to see a feed populated by recommended content, and the site's operators want to show it to me, what business does the government have stepping into our interaction?
I don't believe the argument was that personalized algorithmic recommendations need be forbidden per se, but that doesn't mean that should be the default, nor that companies should be able to wash their hands (under section 230) of what they promote
Like the other posts you're arguing against have said, the argument is not that social media or personalized algorithms should be "illegal"
And "are we going to pretend" is a non-argument that works both ways: "Are we really going to pretend individualized algorithmic social media hasn't caused harm to society on par with smoking?" would be equally unconvincing
What do you think about the case of Lucy Connolly, who, during a riot where rioters were burning down hotels housing immigrants, tweeted that people should burn down hotels housing immigrants and was arrested for that?
That is not comparable because of the little you have over the algorithm for the other cases. On bandcamp, you can select the genre and a sorting criteria and have very good control over the list. But on Spotify, it’s very obscure, with things you’ve never asked for being in front even before your own library.
for me, the distinction is control. If I'm filtering out things I don't like, I'm in control. If the system is filtering out items or promoting items, I think it fair it take on more responsibility.
A system doesn't want your feed empty because they want your eyes, but because money. When they choose what goes into the feed, they should gain increased liability for what comes out. The risk they take on for more money. If that money is not worth it, don't recommend.
I enjoyed the internet in the beforetimes. Recommendations were limited to "this is objectively related, this is new, this is upvoted, this is by someone you follow or someone they follow, or this is randomly chosen." I still feel there is some liability there, but it is less than when it changes to "this is something we have determined we should show you based on your personal past behavior." That feels different than liking a category when the meta-categories are picked for you. Especially when those meta-categories allow for things you would not want to opt in to, like doomscroll material.
I like some of the stuff I get algorithmically. I never would have searched for a soul cover of Slim Shady, but I'm glad I found it. And I'm glad I found knot tying videos. I think there is space for fancy feeds. But I think it should come closer to being a publisher. This _will_ depress throughput creation if things all have to be monitored which will change the economies and maybe that means some businesses can't exist as they do today. I'd likely pay a subscription to a LearnTok that had curated, quality material.
1.) I do not know anyone who would particularly like netflix recommendation algorithm.
2.) Netflix algorithm is not relevant to "Section 230 protections", because it does not contain any data from third parties. All of that is Netflix content.
I'm paying for Netflix to do that as a feature. Instagram uses that to drive engagement to sell ads. Disabling personalized content on Netflix is a revenue-neutral choice. On Instagram, that would mean their ad revenue takes a huge dive. Apples aren't oranges.
Theres a paper that studied the spread of misinformation online, back before COVID - they found that messages cascaded through more science and research oriented networks differently than they cascaded through conspiracy communities.
Popularity is not a sign of Signal. It’s a sign of being able to scratch the limbic system and zeitgeist at the same time.
For a site like HN, popularity isn’t a good predictive signal.
But algorithmic feeds can actually be useful for discovery of related material - I want Youtube to show me more Japanese jazz and video essays about true crime based on my watch history, I wanted Twitter to show me more accounts from writers and game developers because I follow them (before the platform went full Nazi) and I like that Facebook shows me people and information from my local area. Forcing all platforms to use only alphabetical or chronological feeds because of the exploitative way some platforms use algorithms seems awfully close to the "banning math" argument people used to use about cryptography and DRM, and it would remove a lot of legitimate use from the internet.
It's all about who controls the algorithm. A sensible approach would be to decouple recommendations from platforms, to treat them like plug-ins that the user must be allowed to add or disable. You want to use YouTube's recommendation algorithm on YouTube? Great, but there needs to be an off-switch and a way to change over to another provider. This is classic anti-trust stuff, breaking up a sector into interoperable pieces.
The anti-trust argument doesn't work for me. Neither Youtube nor any other single platform represent a "sector" in the way Standard Oil or Ma Bell represented a "sector", they don't "control the algorithm" in any sense beyond implementing code on their site. Certainly not in the way that a monopoly preventing other entities from competing against it by controlling access to some physical resource. Other video hosting sites besides Youtube exist, other social media platforms exist, so competition exists.
And besides, what's likely to happen is that you'll only have a few "algorithm providers" controlling access the entire web which only centralizes it even more.
Really nice to see someone else bringing this up. Algorithmic editorial decisions are still editorial decisions. I think ultimately search and other forms of selective content surfacing should not have ever been exempt. They were never carriers. I appreciate that this would make the web as we know it unusable. I think failing to tackle this problem has will also make the web unusable, and in a worse way.
> I think ultimately search and other forms of selective content surfacing should not have ever been exempt. They were never carriers. I appreciate that this would make the web as we know it unusable
I can’t be the only one confused at these calls to have the government destroy things like searching the web, am I?
How is this a real idea being proposed on Hacker News, of all places? Not that long ago it was all about freedom on the Internet and getting angry when the government interfered with our right to speech online, and now there are calls to do drastic measures like make search engines legally untenable to run in the United States?
It’s also confusing that nobody calling for banning things or making the web unusable appears to be making the connection that the internet is global. If we passed laws that forced Google and Bing to shut down because they’re liable for results they index, what do you think the population will do? Shrug their shoulders and give up on the internet? Or go use a search engine from another country?
> How is this a real idea being proposed on Hacker News, of all places? Not that long ago it was all about freedom on the Internet and getting angry when the government interfered with our right to speech online
I can be upset about the government trying to make the world worse, and about other huge balls of power who have been making the world shitty in an ongoing fashion. Freedom of speech doesn't mean shit if a handful of people can buy up or otherwise absorb control of 90% of media and choose who gets heard. The call for regulation is an acknowledgment that the market fucked this one up. When the government threatens speech, I'll call for civil disobedience and proactive protections. When oligarchs threaten speech I'll call for regulation and punishment.
> It’s also confusing that nobody calling for banning things or making the web unusable appears to be making the connection that the internet is global. If we passed laws that forced Google and Bing to shut down because they’re liable for results they index, what do you think the population will do?
You assume that the only way to get a good, free search engine is to give control of it to some private entity. That if we don't do it in the US, people with turn to someplace else. I think you may be lacking in imagination. At a minimum, the possibility exists for nonprofit organizations to run quality search engines, but it's also possible to decouple the indexing business from the ranking provider. Google could run an index and charge for access, and ranking providers could build on top of that and recoup costs with non-tracking ads, donations, sales, whatever business model they please. Just because an unregulated market doesn't come up with a good solution doesn't mean a market under different constraints won't find a better way. And if nothing works out you always have the option of grants or a public digital infrastructure approach. There are so many things to try beyond shrugging and declaring that the market has ordained five dudes arbiters of the internet as experienced by most people.
> I can’t be the only one confused at these calls to have the government destroy things like searching the web, am I?
if you find this distressing then i imagine you find it equally as distressing as a couple of corporations destroy something.
the reason the word *enshittification” has become so ubiquitous is because corporations are actively destroying the internet and desperately trying to convince us the internet is separate from “the real world”.
sometimes stopping a person from burning the house down is necessary. no matter how loudly they cry about their freedom to have a bonfire in the living room.
What we need is quite simply a very good protocol for distributed search. It takes some storage, some bandwidth and some cpu cycles. Have people contribute those and earn queries and indexing. Make it very good but simple enough for a half decent programmer to make a lvl 1 node that can only announce it exists. Trackers, supper nodes, ban lists, ranking algo's etc etc Write server code in all the languages, have phone and desktop clients. There can be subscription based clients too so that the cpu, storage, bandwidth can be done for you by a company.
>Taking the time to write something, and read over it is a better skill than asking an LLM to do it for you.
Furthermore, if someone doesn't think whatever they're saying is worth investing the time to do this, it's a signal to me that whatever they could say probably isn't worth my time either.
I don't know why this isn't a bigger part of the conversation around AI content. It shows a clear prioritization of the author's time over the readers', which fine, you're entitled to valuing your own time more than mine, but if you do, I'll receive that prioritization as inherently disrespectful of my time.
First, please don't take this as an endorsement of minimum-effort posting (of any kind, whether LLM-assisted or not). I feel the need to say this because people seem to be on hair-trigger alert for anything that seems in any way to denigrate the importance of human-written comments. I want people to "be human" here while also being mindful of how to contribute to the culture and conversation. What that looks like and what that entails is certainly up for discussion. / Ok, with that out of the way, I have four major points that build on each other, leading to a more direct response to the comment above.
1. Reasonable people may disagree in meaningful ways about what "respecting one's audience" means. There is significant variation in what qualifies as a "good faith participant" in a conversation.
In my case, I strive to seek truth, do research, be thoughtful, and write clearly. Do I hope others share these goals? Yeah, I think it would be nice and helpful for all of us, but I don't realistically expect it to happen very often. Do other people share these goals? Do they even see my writing as striving in those directions? These are really hard questions to answer.
2. It helps to recognize the nature of human communication. It a sloppy, messy, ill-defined not-even-protocol. The communication channel is a multi-layered mess. Participants bring who-knows-what purposes and goals. (One person might care about AI-assisted coding; another might be weary and sick of their employer pushing AI into their workflow; another might be seeing their lifelong profession being degraded; etc.)
3. What do the other participant(s) have in common? Background knowledge? Values? Goals? Norms and expectations? Part of communication is figuring out these "out-of-band" aspects. How do you do it? Hoping to do this "in-band" feels like building an airplane while flying it!
4. How does communication work, when it sort of works at all? Why? Individual interactions (i.e. bilateral ones) often work better when repeated over time. These scale better with the help of group norms. Norms make more sense and are more durable in the context of shared values.
So, with the above in mind, you might start to reframe how you think about:
> It shows a clear prioritization of the author's time over the readers', which fine, you're entitled to valuing your own time more than mine, but if you do, I'll receive that prioritization as inherently disrespectful of my time.
The reframing won't suddenly make the communication a better use of one's time. But it does shed light on the mindset and motives of others. In other words, communication breakdowns happen all the time without malicious intent or disrespect.
Considering this is a joint operation by the US and Israel plus the plurality if not the majority of the users of HN being American, I wonder would you have felt the need to comment this if the creator was American?
One of the more unintentionally depressing comments I have ever seen on HN, the first guess on the "purpose" of reporting on a war is to profit from it by gambling. Our society has gotten to a dark place.
>what i find sad is a dashboard so that taxpayers can watch their money turning to murder in real time.
The existence of a dashboard is not an inherent endorsement of that murder. It's easy to look at this dashboard as a critique of that murder even if that wasn't the intent of the author. However, your initial jump to assuming that this dashboard is more likely to serve a financial purpose does reveal an actual political ideology (although not necessarily your political ideology), a cold dehumanizing capitalistic ideology, the kind I would consider largely responsible for those murders.
Just anecdotally looking around my city, it's noticeable that the camera's locations have a much stronger correlation with areas of high wealth rather than high crime.
And, where I am, you're more likely to have a gun if you're poor, because there's more exposure to crime, resulting in a much more realistic understanding that the police won't save you in an emergency.
This is my long-winded way of saying, "Who cares?" Give it whatever age you want. When people object to these type of initiatives for political reasons, they should state the political argument for why they are bad. But rebelling against them for practical technical reasons always seems a little silly to me and can end up being counterproductive when it shifts the conversation away from the central issue.
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