Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48235190

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

The funny thing about this is that practically every single person in the US between the ages of 25-45 was an early adopter and a big fan for some (or all) of FAANG in the early days, and clearly saw the importance. The fact that they aren't filthy rich and far wealthier than older people tells a story. Not a story of lattes and avocados, but a story where housing and education costs guaranteed that as a group they couldn't save, never had a chance to invest, still can't invest. With certain adjustments the story isn't so different for much of the western world.. maybe education was cheap/free but their domestic labor market was weaker, whatever. They were and are still pretty much guaranteed to be on the outside. Luck, timing, and good connections are nice at any time, but the last few decades it's everything. In another timeline maybe wealthy youth is landlording it over the impoverished oldies, but in the best timeline we'd split the difference.

Even worse, it's a uniquely bad time to be smart and hardworking, because that's the type of attitude that could stick you with a lack of resilience at just the wrong time. People who've coasted may do much better than ones who are striving. Would you rather be a university grad with new debt right now, or be a certified HVAC tech for the last 5 years? If you were a mechanic, would you want to own the shop with loans to pay off in this economy and tariffs to deal with, or would you prefer to be a simple employee that can just bounce once the company goes under? I've met phd's who are delivering pizzas to make ends meet. Blue collar folks not only have better job security at the moment, but going back some years, if they got a mortgage at the right time and place with that stable job maybe they could do normal life stuff like kids, retirement one day.

What lessons do we think young people will take from all this? Nothing against anyone who is lucky, but a stubborn belief in mythical meritocracy or the legendary American dream is absolutely stone-cold crazy these days. There's just the insiders and the outsiders and there's not much rhyme or reason to any of it.

Seems easy in the way that a lot of things are easy, and this definitely isn't about making everyone and everything untraceable.

We don't really need to play ads at 15% extra volume from content. GDPR didn't mean that every website has to do the passive-aggressive "Just following the rules here, click this so I will leave you alone" popup. Facebook could track users and sell ads without eagerly getting involved in things like election interference. Gas stations and airplanes could enjoy the good thing they've got going without pushing ads at captive audiences, increasing their margins some tiny percent of a percent while increasing friction and misery a lot more than that. A lot of this stuff is like arson, or stealing clothes that don't fit.. often the bad guy barely profits so it just seems pretty self-destructive and crazy.

I'm no idealist and I take for granted that greed and evil is going to happen, but I think most people can see that we need to pump the brakes. No-limits enshittification just blows up everything in the long term, including profit margins. Why the board and shareholders always tolerate this stuff from the person temporarily in the executive office is mystifying.

Why? Just eliminate surveillance.. no tracking is no money. There's another theory that maybe no money is no content, but that's sort of what tfa (and other stuff on HN lately) is actually talking about. Lots of people who would make content or just conversation for free are still relying on some sense of community which is under attack everywhere if not already destroyed. Community means organic discovery, organic participation, and some reasonable expectation of continuity / non-enshittification that's actually independent of corporate interests or sponsorship.

As for the cat's smile, analytic philosophy substance/property stuff goes back to Leibniz if not Aristotle. Dodgeson basically predates much of Russel's career, but he could have been an influence on his idea of "bundles" and he definitely influenced Quine. He wrote a few textbooks if you want to dig into his research interests but IIRC it's more along the lines of Boole and DeMorgan, even if fictional fun is arguably anticipating the next wave. I linked the haddock's eyes elsewhere in thread.. good fun but also some rich implications. Since he's preoccupied with self-reference you could argue it anticipates Godel. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use%E2%80%93mention_distinctio...

> Being afraid of losing one’s job is quite a step up from being afraid of a rival tribe ransacking your village.

The rival tribe is MAGA, ironically destroying the commons partly because somone told them another tribe was taking their jobs. The ransacking is uncontested and uncontestable because the civilizing forces they oppose only serve to bind others against fighting back.

> Or a predatory animal.

That would be capitalism, killing far more people daily than wolves or bandits ever did.

> Or bacterial infections.

Full circle with this threat, since having lost healthcare at the same time as losing a job means that modernity isn't saving you from a risk like this anyway.

Is fear of losing jobs still a step up? This is more savage than actual savagery and deeply unnatural. Poll 5 strangers, and remove the threat of permanent isolation. You can snap your fingers, and be accepted into the community of an uncontacted tribe in the Amazon. Or be a monk in medieval times. Transported with your family/community to pioneer days, whatever. At least 1 will tell you they don't want to live like this, that almost anything is better, and they'll be very happy to risk early death, extra illness, and extra lawlessness, come what may, because they face these things anyway. Whether you'd choose it personally or think it's wise isn't really the question.. it's hardly an inconsistent position and it's a very common way to feel about modern life.

This is barely relevant, because it's not a plan for agency or comfort, it's strictly worse in that it would destroy both, in addition to adding displacement and isolation.

> No, real life is not a hero wish fulfillment movie.

Frankly that's just projecting your cowardice onto everyone else. But there's a point where anyone will trade comfort for agency. Ready to lose access to modern dentistry if you don't ever have to worry about the coercive attention of the tax man? How about losing access to hot water if your vote is worth 1000x? No more scented soap if you can work on your schedule instead of the one the boss chooses?

By your logic, Ukraine would fold the first time the power went out. And there's a reason you can't just opt out of capitalism or citizenship, that land which is not used is still off limits everywhere, and so on. It's because probably a fifth of the population would take a very big hit in comfort to increase their agency

> at the relatively mild cost that such applications now have security that is "game-based" instead of "simulation-based."

Quite interesting and mysterious. What is a game but a kind of simulation with two or more potentially competing "physics engines" involved? What is a simulation but a game, where exactly one player happens to be called "The Environment"? If these aren't two ways of looking at the same thing, what's this about a relatively mild cost?

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48168700

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Nexus series has a great story with great pacing, classic cyberpunk ambiance with genuinely fresh takes, but be warned.. fairly bad writing. Astonishing that there is no movie yet because it really seems like one of those things very much written with that in mind. As Hollywood continues to discourage original work and scramble for adaptations with an existing audience.. even more astonishing if it doesn't land in the next few years. Someone will realize they can get the ready-player audience and the cyberpunk 2077 audience without paying big royalties

It reminded the authors of this too, since they quote and source it

I totally support a goal to get those groups talking more but something tighter is probably better. And why isn't it tighter? Without big original contributions, the goal does seem to be a survey

If you talk to people, I think you'll find there are an increasing number who don't actually agree with your idea of worse. It's a question of comforts vs agency. Victims of slavery or displacement are not automatically happy just because the water is cleaner than where they started.

Things we cannot control are a risk in any world. If you must die, do you want it to be because of bad luck and natural causes, or because you're increasing someone's profit margins? Do you want to fight and perhaps die in an desperate battle with a deadly but essentially honest viking invader? Or do you want to live in a authoritarian system that's characterized by ignorance, misinformation, and disenfranchisement where any resistance to different kinds of faceless violence makes you the bad guy or the crazy one?

Manfred's a smart guy and a worthy hero, but I think we see this mostly from his keen sense of what is ethical. Besides that.. we're lionizing an entrepreneur and a influence broker who suggests we should synergize our way to post-scarcity, which always works for him mostly because he's already there. As he's up against against a lot of backwards-looking people, he looks like a prophet. Maybe lots of people in the general public could do what he does, but don't have the wealth or influence to pull it off?

I forget what Stross has to say about it, but maybe this tension is why he's not a fan of the book. Sure, everyone wants to be an influence broker, but they were never very heroic and often are villains. Since the early 2000s entrepreneurs have lost a lot of ground in the eyes of the public in that they are not seen as visionary, just normal people with extraordinary access.

Not that the work linked here is doing this, but.. using category theory to describe the approach could make a lot of sense even if it's not required. The idea would be that instead of inventing the next architecture from scratch maybe you aim to correct problems in the current generation of systems by showing some generalization/transformation that doesn't have the problems.

Now that "more is different" is something that everyone believes implicitly, the alternative to an abstract existence proof is literally millions/billions spent on a proof of concept that may not work. Doesn't mean we need to use category theory, I mean there's reasons that might be a good idea, but if this were doable without some big change in perspective then it seems likely it would be done already