Derpelopment

There is no sadder story in American capitalism than the decline of HP from a wonderful equipment engineering company to a racket for selling tiny little tubs of overpriced ink.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37784394

At my Fortune 250, our threat model apparently includes -- rather conveniently and coincidentally -- everything! Well, everything they make an off-the-shelf product for, anyway. It makes new purchasing decisions easy:

"Does your product make any thing, in any way, more secure?"

"Uh... Yes?"

"You son of a bitch. We're in. Roll it out everywhere. Now."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37573074

Remember AOL keywords? They basically had their own private DNS alternative. Every commercial on TV for a website would say "AOL keyword !" instead of the actual URL. I guess it was a lot less scary for your average internet user to type in "nick" instead of "http://www.nick.com". I feel like we still kind of have the "URLs are hard" problem. I've noticed a lot of ads in Japan tell the users to search (presumably Google) for a specific phrase, and buying the adwords for that is more or less the modern equivalent of paying for an AOL keyword. Search was really rough back then (although it's gone full circle into shit again I feel), and the URL bar UX wasn't quite figured out yet. Will users be able to adapt to wacky new TLDs or will we be stuck with .com forever because it's recognizable as a domain name? Do people still type "www."? Is the app store the modern equivalent of AOL channels? Sometimes I wonder if we're stuck in an infinite cycle of reinventing AOL.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37416005

That's what happened with the internet, which was supposed to be the new Library of Alexandria, educating the world, liberating the masses from the grip of corporate ownership of data and government surveillance, and enabling free global communication and publishing.

It's almost entirely shit now. Instead of being educated, people are manipulated into bubbles of paranoid delusion and unreality, fed by memes and disinformation. Instead of liberation from corporate ownership, everything is infested with dark patterns, data mining, advertising, DRM and subscriptions. You will own nothing and be happy. Instead of liberation from government, the internet has become a platform for government surveillance, propaganda and psyops. Everyone used to have personal webpages and blogs, now everything is siloed into algorithmically-driven social media silos, gatekeeping content unless it drives addiction, parasociality or clickbait. What little that remains on the internet that's even worth anyone's time is all but impossible to find, and will eventually succumb to the cancer in due time.

LLMs will go the same way, because there is no other way for technology to go. Everything will be corrupted by the capitalist imperative, everything will be debased by the tragedy of the commons, every app, service and cool new thing will claw its way down the lobster bucket of society, across our beaten and scarred backs, to find the bottom common denominator of value and suck the marrow [from] its bones.

But at least I'll be able to run it on a cellphone. Score for progress?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37306153

Everyone here knows where this is heading, and yet people will sit here and defend these companies as if they're on some righteous path. Humans are already becoming disposable statistics and the engines of compute, all for free and all for the benefit of corporations who didn't pay for any of it and don't even contribute back taxes.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37159259

Nowadays some insist it's ok to have a site that won't begin to do anything without JS, but at the same time it's not OK to mix JS into the HTML code.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37138869

Originally advertising was designed around the premise of explicitly highlighting utility and functionality of goods/content. It wasn't until Bernays came along and adapted his uncle Sigmund Freud's theories into practice by designing advertising to manipulate people into believing that they actually need the product.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37070274

Things will continue to spiral downwards for the majority of people while the rich will benefit from people like you to spread the word to all the commoners that everything’s fine and this is great for innovation!

https://old.reddit.com/r/ ... ogress_this_fast/jty8aos/

The ruling class wants slaves.

Be it animal, human, or machine. In every case where something made a better slave, capital has switched to using it.

Recognize what class you're in and see it for what it is (lotta people identify with the ruling class on this site), but don't pretend for a second us tech workers are somehow insulated from being workers. No one will care when we're homeless on the street anymore than the current group of i-got-mines care about the current homeless.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36830411

The only way for upper management to really understand what's going on and give useful input would be for them to be directly involved on a day-to-day basis.

In other words, they would have to do actual work.

That's not going to happen. So the best they can do is to stay out of the way of people who are actually working, avoid making decrees, and maybe try to keep the other managers from interfering with the work also.

Maybe another approach would be for the workers to share more equally in the spoils so that they would be naturally inclined to integrate business improvements and goals. But that's never going to happen.

The structure is much more directly related to a caste system than people may acknowledge.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36827241