Hacker News: SQueeeeeL

New comment by SQueeeeeL in "The PhD Metagame: Don't try to reform science – not yet"

SQueeeeeL — Tue, 18 Mar 2025 18:25:45 +0000

Unfortunately there are many popular ideological movements with little to no penetration in the structures that actually swing material conditions. That disconnect between the holders of an ideology and the existing power centers leads to intense cognitive dissonance. Generally organizing is helpful in achieving anything political (i.e. affecting distribution of resources). I feel like it'd be very hard to form a popular ideological movement without any form of collectiveness, as if a movement is one individual writing for themselves to read, it doesn't seem like it's popular.

The concept of lobbying itself has been basically shattered in our modern world with businesses having a near infinite amount of resources to exploit it. I don't think there's anything implicitly unreasonable about conveying your understanding of the importance, impact, and potential consequences of major choices onto key decision makers.

New comment by SQueeeeeL in "The PhD Metagame: Don't try to reform science – not yet"

SQueeeeeL — Tue, 18 Mar 2025 17:38:51 +0000

I think a senator being influenced by a grand child is a good mental case study in productive dissemination of an ideology. There are many people in leadership roles who may sometimes be on the lookout for strategies to tackle problems, but the only way those strategies become actionable is if someone nearby 1) has had the idea communicated to them and 2) is able to rhetorically sway those commanding the decision making process (the is an instant victory if sufficient decision making position has been captured by allies). Ultimately the ideas themselves only gain material action with a dissemination network with a connection to the people making decisions.

New comment by SQueeeeeL in "The PhD Metagame: Don't try to reform science – not yet"

SQueeeeeL — Tue, 18 Mar 2025 15:10:07 +0000

I've never really understood the sentiment that "articulation of a problem = solving that problem." Articulation seems to me to be Step 0 in solving a problem, there needs to be people on the ground advocating for why this new ideological framework is "better" than the status quo and actively convincing decision makers or acquiring decision making positions. Otherwise any amount of highly articulate complaints are just sophistry.

New comment by SQueeeeeL in "The DOJ still wants Google to sell off Chrome"

SQueeeeeL — Sun, 09 Mar 2025 09:47:45 +0000

Yeah, I really feel like Brenden pretty much screwed over the entire browser scene by going all political and not doing his heavy lifting of reading the mid 00s political zeitgeist better. Feels like he doomed us all to live under Google's boot for his poorly timed performative activism.

New comment by SQueeeeeL in "NASA freezes Starliner missions"

SQueeeeeL — Sun, 20 Oct 2024 12:48:40 +0000

Investing back into yourself is generally true, but only under healthy economic conditions. Boeing exists in a really weird place of being "too big to fail" (ie a monopoly) where investing money into personnel and improved processes is actually wasteful towards the shareholders because it isn't necessary to maintain the core business.

New comment by SQueeeeeL in "Detective Who Arrested Man for Satirical Facebook Post Denied Immunity by 5th C"

SQueeeeeL — Wed, 30 Aug 2023 14:18:58 +0000

People use comments as a substitute for reading the article, that means whatever ideological thread is dominating the comments is also defacto going to be the mass interpretation of events. "Winning" a comment section can have relative major ideological concerns as it makes a whole community start framing events around them with certain sets of priors

New comment by SQueeeeeL in "Detective Who Arrested Man for Satirical Facebook Post Denied Immunity by 5th C"

SQueeeeeL — Tue, 29 Aug 2023 22:25:08 +0000

The defacto assumption that internet discourse is a "discussion" is pretty implicitly wrong or at least very misguided. Most forums are much more in the mode of loud public arguments, which is why we have votes.

Even my own comment, by continuing this conversation serves in rhetorical, political, and philosophic capacities; many of which I don't intend but are implicit to how the medium is presented

New comment by SQueeeeeL in "WeWork Warns of Possible Bankruptcy"

SQueeeeeL — Wed, 09 Aug 2023 14:43:46 +0000

Free markets are sometimes useful tools in making profits but are also sometimes hinderences towards being able to extract the highest amount of profit from consumers.

That's why we see so many mergers and intensive lobbying for government regulation in things like healthcare, telecoms, and air travel, it's way easier to make money if you can restrict competition in your market and it's something essential to consumers

New comment by SQueeeeeL in "WeWork Warns of Possible Bankruptcy"

SQueeeeeL — Wed, 09 Aug 2023 13:22:20 +0000

The issue pointed out by these two comments come from a conflation of vocabulary (which is typically intentional at least at some point in the education). A truly "free market" would ensure that things like WeWork wouldn't happen because the ultimate material inputs and outputs of the company don't square. "Capitalism" is the seeking of profit at the expense of all others, where having a viable company no longer is an objective in itself but simply is a means to increase personal wealth. In such a system, WeWork makes a lot of sense because the long term solvency of the company does not impact how the market measures it's success.

Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk

New comment by SQueeeeeL in "Most promoted and blocked domains among Kagi Search users"

SQueeeeeL — Sat, 05 Aug 2023 02:18:02 +0000

New comment by SQueeeeeL in "Netflix touts $900k AI jobs amid Hollywood strikes"

SQueeeeeL — Fri, 28 Jul 2023 07:48:11 +0000

South Park is written by a pretty atypical crew, most of the writers/actors I follow (from middle budget sci Fi shows I like) just seem like they're mostly politically unengaged folks just trying to get paid and make their specific product, but obviously ymmv

New comment by SQueeeeeL in "A Drug Maker Profited by Slow-Walking a Promising HIV Therapy"

SQueeeeeL — Sat, 22 Jul 2023 12:52:54 +0000

I'm not really sure what "the problem" with this is? Like we all do know that the point of pharma companies is to make money, and that things like 'helping people' are just incidental byproducts of that fact.

If pharmaceutical development was government run, I'd understand the outage at lowering the quality of life of US citizens; but faceless corporations literally cannot act in a way that is not financially optimal without committing a crime.

New comment by SQueeeeeL in "Lawyers with Supreme Court business paid Clarence Thomas aide via Venmo"

SQueeeeeL — Wed, 12 Jul 2023 16:47:08 +0000

The US government has fallen so far from the days of Jimmy Carter selling his peanut farm to avoid any conflict of interest to people being okay with aids to supreme court justices being given envelopes full of money.

Decades of partisan politics really does have cool effects on a nation state

New comment by SQueeeeeL in "Nearly half of the tap water in the US is contaminated with ‘forever chemicals,’"

SQueeeeeL — Tue, 11 Jul 2023 12:11:58 +0000

The 'rich white people' shorthand typical serves as an obvious stand in for 'those who have the political autonomy and systemic support to fight against harmful government and corporate actions'.

The vast majority of readers can quickly make the connection between 'politically powerful' and 'rich white people' assuming they live in America. It's not on random HN commenters to be egalitarian humanities writers who deconstruct every concept

New comment by SQueeeeeL in "State Dept. cancels election meetings with Facebook after “free speech” ruling"

SQueeeeeL — Fri, 07 Jul 2023 06:05:12 +0000

I feel like them cancelling their meetings is a reasonable response no matter the content. Clearly there's some amount of attention going towards these meetings, and they have a literal court case directly policing what can be discussed. If I were some rando working for Facebook doing communications, I'd cancel that shit until my boss told me what to do. Conspiracy or not, I don't think the cancellation of be used as a strong signal.

Much more likely they'll resume meetings but with transcripts vetted by lawyers

New comment by SQueeeeeL in "State Dept. cancels election meetings with Facebook after “free speech” ruling"

SQueeeeeL — Thu, 06 Jul 2023 21:52:40 +0000

> The injunction doesn't cut off all contact between the Biden administration and social media companies. Doughty's ruling said the government may continue to inform social networks about posts involving criminal activity or criminal conspiracies, national security threats, extortion, criminal efforts to suppress voting, illegal campaign contributions, cyberattacks against election infrastructure, foreign attempts to influence elections, threats to public safety and security, and posts intending to mislead voters about voting requirements and procedures.

This sounds like this injunction does literally nothing. If there was a weird political conspiracy between the White House and social media companies, they could easily couch their complaints as one of these issues. This really obviously reads as a judge trying to make a ruling so broad it can't be overturned for press

New comment by SQueeeeeL in "Twitter is threatening to sue Meta over Threads"

SQueeeeeL — Thu, 06 Jul 2023 20:23:53 +0000

It's interesting to think if grift of book sales and random convention talks can equal the ~30 billion of material value wiped out by Twitter.

Somewhat reminds me of Andrew Wakefield who went from being a licensed research MD to a guest of honor for "Conspira-Sea", a novelty cruise. Just a complete loss of authenticity and meaningful career prospects.

New comment by SQueeeeeL in "Injunction issued in case about social media pressure from US Government"

SQueeeeeL — Thu, 06 Jul 2023 13:31:58 +0000

Damn, the US is doomed if we have a systematic expectation of individuals validating people telling them to panic

New comment by SQueeeeeL in "Ask HN: What boosted your confidence as a new programmer?"

SQueeeeeL — Thu, 06 Jul 2023 12:20:45 +0000

You are correct, but current geopolitical conditions and economic policy have created financial situations that basically enforce short sightedness on the side of corporations. If your employer is publicly traded or has institutional investors; they need to report quarterly earnings. Investors won't care about code health or the longevity of a product, they only care about sales/revenue.

It's a fundamental systemic issue that's why we see so many tech companies produce terrible products. But we (the programmers) have no ability to fix the shortsightedness of the American financial system.

New comment by SQueeeeeL in "Ask HN: What boosted your confidence as a new programmer?"

SQueeeeeL — Thu, 06 Jul 2023 03:10:45 +0000

Writing extremely good quality software is hard and expensive. In the vast majority of cases all you need is okay software developed by people who just want to get the job done. Understanding how software creates value and what kind of software at any moment is valuable; and which parts of your job is tied to that process makes this much clearer.

If anyone reading this just want to write bash scripts that don't violate fundamental principals, there are jobs out there, but they're typically low paying and academic