>There is a huge difference between supporting the regulation of algorithmic feeds and other dark patterns and a direct attack on personal privacy.
Normies don't see the difference and politicians don't want there to be a difference. Normies want security and politicians will offer it wrapped in surveilance.
I've been wanting to update my (100TB) NAS for over five years, but I haven't yet found anything that I feel is worth upgrading to. One of these with a QSFP56 interface would be nice, but I would need to sell one of my houses to pay for it, so I'll be waiting a little longer...
I work in the refurb department of an e-waste recycling company. In my n=1 data point, some server drives are shredded/destroyed, some aren't (maybe half) before they reach my team. Of the ones that aren't, most are too small to sell, or have bad reads or reallocated sectors. Maybe 10% are fit to resell, not zero.
NVME SSDs are consumable items more so than HDDs are.
These drives will arrive in the secondary market to be snapped up by businesses lower in the food chain. By the time you can find them they will be ridden hard and put away wet that you probably wont want them.
I work in the refurb department of an e-waste recycling company. Some SSD brands are more durable than others. In my experience, a greater proportion of Intel and Micron SSDs are (or have) failed than any other brand. It's as if sysadmins are like "Intel is a good brand, lets use these SSDs to cache our HDD storage array", then throw them out when they turn read-only.
Hey, like so many others, I managed to beat NFS Underground 1 and 2, Most Wanted and Hot Pursuit using only the budget brand e-waste special keyboard, no analog controllers.
IIRC some of the top NFS players also used the keyboard instead of fancy racing syms.
So it's probably possible to control real life cars with a keyboard, provided they implement dedicated input filtering, PID controllers or Kalman filters, and throttle maps, instead of having a key press just be 100% gas/break.
>Art isn't special, as far as I can tell, it's just a shared cultural perception.
This. The Mona Lisa didn't get famous until it got stolen. Famous paintings are just 3D NFTs for the wealthy elite, doesn't mean they're more beautiful than paintings made by noname authors.
The Mona Lisa was famous before the 20th C because da Vinci carried it around for 20 years saying “this is the greatest painting I have ever done”. That kept it famous for 500 years. It then gained modern new media celebrity by getting nicked (and because the person who stole it did not do it for cash but because he thought it was the greatest painting ever)
So it’s hard for people to judge brilliance themselves, but we can rely on other peoples judgement if enough people follow the crowd or put enough passion in. (Not saying that makes it right - science is not a democracy, but it’s a great heuristic for 8 billion people)
Yeah, but da Vinci's art sucks. It was good for its time, when the entire world population was 400m and literally 90% of those people were farmers and only the very well-to-do had the time and resources to practice a non-practical craft. Now we have a population of 8 billion, everyone has access to incredible art tools for a fraction of a month's minimum wage, there is an absolute wealth of information including books and in-depth video tutorials for everyone to learn from, and countless millions of people have time to try their hand at art. The quality of art produced today absolutely blows away the Mona Lisa, which might as well be garbage. The only reason people pretend to like it and most of the rest of the 'fine art' is an emperor has no clothes schtick, a sort of snobby social game where everyone has to act like it's so special and good because that makes you cultured, even though there are literally millions of art pieces produced today of vastly superior quality but which are not famous.
> The quality of art produced today absolutely blows away the Mona Lisa
I don’t like the Mona Lisa, but this is shortsighted. I agree that more people would tend to generate more instances of good art, it has nothing to do with the tools or the technical aspects. The point of art is beauty and emotion. Better tools do not always help and in fact modern art is often famously opaque and inaccessible.
> The only reason people pretend to like it and most of the rest of the 'fine art' is an emperor has no clothes schtick, a sort of snobby cultural pressure where everyone has to act like it's so special and good because that makes you cultured
It’s all subjective. People liking something you don’t does not make them brainwashed, and it does not make you better.
If you are genuinely interested in this, you could have a read at this https://dynomight.net/bourdieu/ . It’s a bit more subtle than you say.
I feel nothing when I look at the Mona Lisa, and even accounting for subjectivity, I would honestly be surprised if very many do. You can get an art snob to wax poetic with fifteen paragraphs about what emotions it's meant to convey in you, or alternatively, you could just look at good art produced today which evokes emotions on its own merit, without needing somebody to tell you why and what emotions it's supposed to evoke in you.
> People liking something you don’t does not make them brainwashed
It very much does when you get to the points of comical absurdity like this bullshit[1] and that bullshit[2]. Once people are committed to the social status game of art snobbery, they have to take it further and further, justifying the artistic merit of increasingly meritless 'art', lest they reveal their snobbery was fake all along, and then you have a blank fucking canvas selling for millions. It's not even that people like something I don't, but rather that the idea they actually like it at all is a charade.
Skimming the article you linked, I don't think it's in contention with what I'm saying? It essentially points out that "taste" is not about actually liking something, but responding to social incentives, which is exactly what I mean by a social status game.
The only reason people write comments like this is because they've unconsciously normalised the contrarian/rage/emotionally-charged-comment economy.
They clearly don't really mean what they write and to suggest that "everyone" has access to incredible art tools in a world where millions don't even have reliable access to clean water is trite.
Yeah, yeah, Africa exists. The vast, vast majority of people in the societies I've lived in can afford a $100 tablet, though. Even the very poor, of which I was growing up. I didn't have air conditioning or working plumbing for years of my life but I still had access to art tools.
I'd also suggest your comment is rather more contrarian than mine. I laid out logical reasoning at length for my beliefs. You mostly gainsayed my comment, engaging with only one tiny pedantic point and otherwise ignoring what I said to instead insult me.
For their bug bounty program, the company can just charge 5-10$ per submission to guarantee everything you send gets thoroughly reviewed by a human, and so it completely eliminates bot slop DDoS submissions overnight. If your bug and PR was actually good, then you get 10 + 1000$ back, and if it wasn't good, then you need to do better due diligence next time, and the skilled human feedback you received on why it wasn't good, was a valuable lesson for your engineering career, and it only cost you the price of a Starbucks latte, and it also cut out all the scammers polluting the system. This way everyone wins.
I said it before and I'll say it again, for opportunities open to the entire world on the internet, adding monetary friction is THE ONLY (anonymous) WAY to filter out serious people from bad actors doing spray-and-pray hoping they'll make some money, or get that job, by weaponizing AI bots. You can't rely on honor systems and a high trust society on the anonymous open internet, you need to financially gatekeep to save yourself and your sanity, and make sure the honest serious people you want to engage with don't end up drowning in the noise of the scammers and unscrupulous opportunists.
But we can't shut ourselves down just because we refuse to apply solutions to AI slop DDoS.
Thankfully the number of beg bounties I've seen has been stable so far. Maybe they're just devoting most of their time on the places that openly promise money.
This is a great strategy idea, I like it. I'm not good at thinking out the curse of the monkey's paw, so I'm curious if folks can think of any downsides.
I said it before and I'll say it again, for opportunities open to the entire world on the internet, adding monetary friction is the only way to filter out serious people from bad actors doing spray-and-pray hoping they make some money or get that job through weaponizing AI bots and sucking all the air in the room.
So many problems can be solved that way, including customer support. Instead of having to post a sob story on Twitter and HN when the AI at BigCo bans my account for no reason, why not charge me $100 for access to human support that is empowered to triage and escalate genuine issues? Then, issue a refund if the problem is on their end.
$100 is way too much. Maybe $5 to get people to spend 30 seconds on google to solve the easy problems instead of calling. But I wonder if even that would be enough to significantly incentivize claiming everything is intended behavior / user error just for another revenue stream.
>$100 for someone in SV isn’t much. $100 USD for someone in Africa, India, some parts of Asia could be a week or even months salary.
That's kinda irrelevant. A Macbook Pro is still around $2k USD whether you're in US, EU, LATAM, Africa or India. They don't sell it cheaper to people in developing nations just because they earn less money.
> A £100k government employee basically has a guaranteed job for life and gold plated pension.
Sounds like we really need to rethink this massive perk about government jobs. Having a class of people with guaranteed employed for life with no accountability on performance or value they add, always seemed absolutely insane to me.
I don't know much about the UK, but it's really common here in France for public servants to be fired. Including for very wrong reasons such as being unionized. The accountability problem lies with the managers imposing meaningless KPIs (even in life-threatening scenarios such as hospitals and police stations) and high-level politicians who are parasites sucking off public money to destroy public services and give it all to their private-company friends who are going to employ them for very high salaries right after they leave the public service, a practice known as pantouflage.
I'm pretty sure they're "employed for life" because otherwise every new administration would replace as many people as possible.
Can you picture a company replacing 90% of their workforce every 4 or 8 years, all at once? Because that's what I think would happen if government employees could be fired as easily.
Same with all consumer white goods electronics: microwave ovens, washing machines, refrigerators, toasters, etc. most white label by a few conglomerates with the same Chinese factories.
The "high quality ones" that have their own R&D and manufacturing, are very expensive and out of reach for a lot of people.
>I worked at a 50 person company where on my first day I arrived and there was a company logo'd Patagonia jacket on my desk and a small bottle of Veuve Clicquot.
I have the opposite experience and mindset. Companies I worked for would cheap out on salaries, but would buy random knick knacks, jackets, food and drinks for the workers, making the young naive version of me thinking that the company values us even though we were all working below market wages, while the CEO had a massive house and a supercar. Turns out that pizza, coke and a softshell jacket every year is much much cheaper than a yearly wage increase.
Now, I worked for a company who last year cut all the parties, food, drinks, team events, 3 year HW refresh cycle, even the color printers, to ensure we'll still get to keep above average salaries through the tremulous times our industry is going through. Absolute respect. I'd rather have more money to pay the ever increasing bills, than pizzas and a 50 Euro softshell jacket.
>I understand the big tech company mindset of, "If we're paying you half a million dollars a year you should be able to buy your own damn beer", but I think they forget that their employees are human and often it really is the thought that counts.
I wonder if it's possible to tell this story on how dehumanizing it felt to not get free beer with a half million dollar salary, to an average laborer, with a straight face, and expecting any reciprocating "working class" empathy.
The point is it’s not about the monetary value of the perks but about the attitude. If you used to get donuts in the break room on Fridays or get a card on your birthday or whatever, and then management decided you don’t need donuts you’d feel about the same way.
>If you used to get donuts in the break room on Fridays and then management decided you don’t need donuts you’d feel about the same way.
When they took away our daily free biscuits and hazelnut wafers from the break room, I was happy since it meant less sugar and carbs in my diet. My waistline was thankful. I'd rather they cut the junk food than stuff like salaries.
I really don't value small freebies anymore, in fact now it's a red flag to me. A small startup I recently interviewed at proudly showed off the free sweets, drinks fridge and pool table in the break room, but wanted to pay me 50k Euros/year for a senior product owner. They can shove those perks up their bum with that salary.
Let’s say a tin of the queen’s biscuits and hazelnut treacle candies and turkish delight and jupiter jumpers runs 10 quid/day. 250 workdays a year means that one perk cost $2500. I guarantee it had an outsized impact on morale. Company of 100 employees means that cutting that perk earned everyone an extra $25/year. Yay!
> Company of 100 employees means that cutting that perk earned everyone an extra $25/year.
And when you cut other things, the savings add up since such cuts never come alone.
Spending tends to go uncontrolled when the company is in the green, and then multiple cuts come all at once when the company is in the red.
By my former place when sales crashed, they removed the color printers throughout the company(amongst many other things) and only kept the B/W ones and I thought that was stupid until they said it saved 22K/quarter which seemed insanely wasteful. So you see, it's never just 25$/year when the cuts come, it's always a lot more.
> Now, I worked for a company who last year cut all the parties, food, drinks, team events, 3 year HW refresh cycle, even the color printers, to ensure we'll still get to keep above average salaries through the tremulous times our industry is going through. Absolute respect. I'd rather have more money to pay the ever increasing bills, than pizzas and a 50 Euro softshell jacket.
It's amazing how you can do without the necessities of life, provided you have the little luxuries. Yes, money is always good. But a company that isn't willing to spend a small amount of money on "frivolous" things that have a disproportionate impact on the daily experience of working for them is either an ineffective company, or one that genuinely doesn't value its employees.
> I wonder if it's possible to tell this story on how dehumanizing it felt to not get free beer with a half million dollar salary, to an average laborer, with a straight face, and expecting any reciprocating "working class" empathy.
>It's amazing how you can do without the necessities of life, provided you have the little luxuries.
No, I need good shelter and top end medical care, more than I need a pizza party with co-workers after work. I'm not 17 anymore to think unlimited fast food and Mountain Dew is the most amazing thing in life.
> But a company that isn't willing to spend a small amount of money on "frivolous" things
This is ZIRP VC funded bay area tech bro logic, who thinks money is infinite.
The problem with uncontrolled endless "small amounts of frivolous things" is that when you're a large company, it keeps ballooning adding up over time, to eventually enormous costs, adding to the cost of doing business which could just go to employee wages instead or discounts to customers to stay competitive. If your company industry is hit hard now (like mine was), by global events, you gotta cut all that if you want to keep people employed and survive as a company.
First, I want to fully acknowledge that these are tech bro problems that barely register in the grand scheme of things. I spent the first half of my adult life working minimum wage service industry jobs and more of my social circle than not are not in tech, so I fully get how entitled this sounds to anyone outside of big tech.
With that out of the way, I think you misinterpreted my comment a bit. I wasn't saying that want a nice jacket and a small bottle of Veuve over a decent salary. I was saying that the fact that they took time to do something a little bit special and unique created a positive memory.
I think if I give slightly contrasting stories it'll illustrate my point. At the company I talked about that gave me the Veuve bottle on the first day, the Patagonia jacket that I got was the same one the CEO had and regularly wore. I also learned later when I found a box of small Veuve bottles in a storage closet that the CEO chose that brand because he personally liked Veuve for special occasions. Whether intended or not, I remember feeling valued because it didn't feel like these were cheap knick knacks to keep the workers happy. The fact that he actually liked these things made them feel like a real gift and that was very humanizing.
On the other hand, I was at another company where they gave everyone somewhat cheap jackets for a big event and then the exec team showed up in brand new, matching, leather jackets for the same event. That kind of pissed me off because it basically said, we're too good for the gift we just gave you.
Like I said in the last comment, I don't really care about the things, it's the thought that counts.
So when I talk about the "buy your own damn beer" thing, I'm not saying I want a pizza party instead of a raise. I'm saying that if the company is in financial trouble and we need to cut the perks to make pay, that's fine. If the company telling employees they can't afford a few six packs while reporting record profits and the CEO is buying a new Lambo then that's a totally different story. If a company is penny pinching for no reason and they're fine sending that signal, then it's their prerogative, but given how much companies spend on recruiting talent, I feel like if shelling out an extra $200/yr in a way that feels even a little bit personalized is a no brainer.
> What's great about this country is America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you can know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good.
I think the underlying story here is the transparency: if they cut the shrimp and are able to back that decision in the open, people will understand and accept it. If everything is geting cut randomly (or is not there) and you only hear "we must spare" while the CxO bonuses and share prices show otherwise, the reception will be quite different. And if even basic work-related stuff like laptop upgrade or trip costs are blocked (or feel like that), then no reasoning in the world can fix the bad morale: it just shows disregard to the actual work.
Normies don't see the difference and politicians don't want there to be a difference. Normies want security and politicians will offer it wrapped in surveilance.
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