When we were children, our elders were well aware of a link between alcohol and cancer (among other failures like cirrhosis) because their elderly friends would pass away from one or more of these. It was, albeit unscientifically, established that there does exist a strong enough correlation to warrant warning children about it. To this day, none of us needed a study for any of this. What happened?
To see HN stand up for Big Alcohol and twist this study with whataboutism and other nonsensical detractions is just plain morbid.
> To this day, none of us needed a study for any of this.
I guess this means I should stop cracking my knuckles then since my elders told me doing so would give me arthritis in my hands.
I mean, shit, by this logic I should wear a 3M respirator 24/7 since the elders of my elders (of my elders…) believed "bad air" and "foul smells" were the cause of The Black Death.
This has been the case for a very, very, very long time. You're old enough now to see it for what it is. There are things around the owners that you are not allowed to say, perpetuated by culture and society writ large. The only two kinds of people unwilling to admit to this are either paid shills, or useful idiots. Everyone else is mum on the subject but they can see the world is orchestrated by powerful individuals who are in lockstep. They know they own things, and they are all chummy about it. The pie is divided among them.
You can file anyone who says "You're just old" under the "useful idiot" category. Anyone who believes they are a temporarily embarrassed millionaire is equally useful.
All three are owned by the same group of people and are designed to control what you see and what you think.
Instead:
1) Read books.
2) Socialize with like-minded people.
3) Lift heavy weights.
4) Help others and being kind.
5) Seek out nature - swim in lakes, eat in the mountains, and learn the sounds of birds.
6) Learn useful knots.
While I think there are some solid points made here, overall this feels reductive and almost isolationist. In particular, strongly agree that many wings of mass media have become a core problem, both as a vector of control and fountain of propaganda not often subject to critical thought.
The reality is that we live in an ever more complex technological environment and the true failure is that we have resisted evolving our laws and moral structures to match. Privacy laws should have been implemented more than a decade ago in the US, and likely will not be for another decade. We've allowed tech organizations to create entirely new economies, fundamentally disrupt existing ones and twist the idea of the web being a series of connected nodes to a structural trap for our minds and the minds of our children.
Disconnecting fully and abandoning the systems we helped build will allow them to slide deeper and faster into the dystopia that many of us feel is already here. If we do not find a way alter the direction of this, no one will.
It's always been interesting to me that in most science fiction that I'd classify as anti-dystopian, the reasons societies become that way is not because of technology solely, but because those societies gradually (or suddenly) changed their fundamental outlook and perspective to be communal and inclusive instead of individualistic and exclusive. Star Trek is probably the standard bearer for this idea, but I think it's worth analyzing, because there's an argument that we'll collectively face the same challenge and it's not hard to imagine that we're staring at it now.
Andreesen, who this article is written by, was himself trying and succeeding to get his own city council to axe housing development in his own neighborhood, causing the very problems he's writing about.
I evaluated their tech early on, and it struck me right away at how poorly thought out some decisions were. Very basic things, too. One distinct issue I remember is not having any sort of an "Application" object or app-state pipeline interface/object that I can place my non-component logic into, stuff like checking various timers, handling app-level event hooks, and so on. Turns out, people attach this sort of logic to the Camera component. How the fuck did you get to that point without thinking about any of this?
You use this and then register whatever hooks you need. Can run before or after the first scene has been loaded etc. Put the configuration in some ScriptableObject somewhere in the project and load things based on that, or just hard code the things you need.
Edit: Alternatively just have a main scene and load/unload the other scenes as sub scenes, and put the application level objects in the main scene. Or use the above attribute and spawn the global objects and mark those object as "dont destroy on load" to make them survive the simple scene transitions. Or use normal C# static objects. There are so many ways to handle this, unity doesn't really block you from doing things, just code whatever you need.
This is what confused me the most about Unity in my game dev class in high school. It made no logical sense. Why would I put logic that has nothing to do with specific objects, inside a specific object? And why would I create a random invisible, unfunctional object to attach the code to? It's such a weird system.
Pessimist's take: When thinking about what we trade our time for, TV shows (and films, to some degree) have always been to me an endless source of a time sink for relatively little return. Games, slightly better, more social in some ways, certainly more mentally engaging, but also parasitic of time. To concurrently pay for multiple streaming services is unfathomable to me, moreso right now where, as you point out, your expenses have ballooned and your salary can't keep up. You aren't the only one, and yet it's highly likely (anecdotal experience here) that your friends know more about the last season of a show than they know about how to prep for the looming days, as you are prepping. One would think there's better ways to have downtime than to tune out in front of a box, but these habits are difficult to break.
On the flip side, it's a relatively cheap form of entertainment. $5-30/month and you get access to hundreds or thousands of hours of quality entertainment per service. And there are some awesome shows that my family legitimately enjoys watching together.
It was nice having multiple options on a Friday/Saturday night without the overhead of having to think about subscriptions, because the services combined were the equivalent of one or two hours of my hourly rate a month, and we were in the black month-to-month. So who cares? Now my hourly rate doesn't cover nearly as much as it used to what with everything else through the roof, so I have to care, and I'm lucky to be in that position. Fun times.
That seems a rather judgmental take on the "right" way to have downtime. I'm sure some people subscribe to too many streaming services. I try to keep my eye on how much I use a given service. But I'm still paying way less per month than I did when I had cable TV.
I found having 3-4 streaming subscriptions is still quite a bit cheaper than cable tv or satellite. Also I get to watch what I want to watch when and where. Like many others, I cut the cord 3 years ago when I was paying $100/month for just basic cable with mostly useless channels or content that didn’t interest me. Now my total cost is under $50/month for a family of 4 for streaming subscriptions.
I did the same about 18 months ago. I found shows were just piling up on my TiVo and I hardly ever watched them. I miss access to live TV now and then but I rarely want to watch sports and it's just not worth it to me to pay for that access. Of course, I could always add a live streaming service if I change my mind at some point--and I'd still probably be paying less than I did for cable TV.
I've cancelled my Spotify premium sub years ago because in truth they've always had ads: the Dashboard always had artists that I had zero interest in listening to, that were not part of or related in any way to the music in my library, and that big labels wanted to push my way. There was no way to turn this off, so after a month or so I just cancelled my sub.
So, Google-account-cancellation phobias aside, I went to Youtube Music where I still am. No bullshit.
No doubt then you're familiar with the Antikythera.
You would think that more people would put two and two together but what baffles me is the dissonance in people's minds of ancient civilizations - namely that they were oh so primitive, but at the same time there is this underlying current of, "how could they have possibly known this if they were so primitive?" with the discoveries we find that they have left behind - whether it be mechanical, architectural, agricultural, whatever.
I think over all they were not much worse off intellectually than we are, but they haven't yet discovered certain things - much as we have yet to discover certain things. For them, it was a mechanical age for a very long time and they've mastered that in much the same way that we are slowly beginning to master electronics and chemistry. We've had a very, very slow ascent towards electricity until it has become commonplace as it is today. I doubt the design of electrical components that we can easily plug in and out with a bit of molten lead/tin would, to them, be anything short of wizardry.
So don't be distraught by the otherness of it. It is quite a different way to look at problems that really tests our understanding of first principles of the natural world.
It's disappointing to hear, with the number of people here claiming how IA has run afoul of the copyright law, that it's an open-and-shut case and there is nothing more to discuss. I feel like the air of the hacker spirit on the website is greatly diminished when we take an ice-cold approach to a difficult problem like this.
I for one commend them for doing a noble thing in a very turbulent time. We didn't know how the pandemic was going to play out early on in 2020 and they went ahead to help out in any way they could. Perhaps the US Federal Government will give them some kind of an exemption (if such a thing exists). I'm sure they can find a case where their action is justified in the eyes of law.
> I feel like the air of the hacker spirit on the website is greatly diminished when we take an ice-cold approach to a difficult problem like this.
That “hacker spirit” has put years of extremely valuable internet archives at risk for an extremely insignificant gain, all due to a legal issue that anyone could see coming from a mile away.
Hacker spirit and playing fast and loose with the rules might fly when you’re a fresh startup with nothing to lose. It’s just plain irresponsible when you start putting an established business at risk in ways that were trivially avoided.
I don't consider it an open-and-shut case, but they're putting the archive at risk and they may not have enough money to win and I don't want to donate money to their lawyers. I wouldn't have a problem if they spun off a separate organization for this so it didn't threaten the archive.
When we were children, our elders were well aware of a link between alcohol and cancer (among other failures like cirrhosis) because their elderly friends would pass away from one or more of these. It was, albeit unscientifically, established that there does exist a strong enough correlation to warrant warning children about it. To this day, none of us needed a study for any of this. What happened?
To see HN stand up for Big Alcohol and twist this study with whataboutism and other nonsensical detractions is just plain morbid.