At its core, there's nothing wrong with conservatism. Wanting to preserve traditional cultural and social values; the nuclear family with a father and mother figure; theology as the moral backbone—all of these are reasonable ideas. But somewhere along the way this got associated with xenophobia, racism, bigotry, intolerance, hatred, and all kinds of evil shit, which goes against even the teachings of their holy scriptures. How people can hold these conflicting viewpoints is beyond me. Either they're using this ideology as an excuse for their heinous thoughts and behavior, or they're intellectually incapable of introspection and critical thinking. Maybe both.

I'm moderately left leaning, and the extreme left has also undoubtedly lost the plot, but at least that side espouses tolerance, humanism, and some ideas that I find appealing but don't consider essential to humanity, such as secularism, skepticism, liberalism, etc. There are objectionable ideas on the left as well, but these are often a reaction to the intolerance of the other side, and rarely a product of the ideology itself. I do think this is needed to a certain extent, as complete tolerance is a weakness that opportunistic people will exploit (paradox of tolerance).

So to me it's clear that one side is on the right side of history, and the other one isn't. One is trying to move us towards a better future and well-being for everyone, while the other is sabotaging this to destroy and hoard riches for a few.

I'm still unable to process that people like Trump, Putin, Orbán, et al, are able to not only be successful, but to accumulate unimaginable wealth and power. It's not only that I disagree with their politics. It's that I'm baffled by the fact that we put people like this in power, and that the majority are unable to see the harm they're doing to the world, only so that they can enrich themselves and their very close inner circle. These are signs that humanity is still held back by some deeply rooted social traits which I'm not sure we'll be able to overcome before it's too late. Part of me is also disturbed by the negative role technology is playing in all of this, yet we're all entranced by its appeal to do anything about it.

That said, I struggle with this as well, so I'm speaking more aspirationally than from a place of wisdom. :)

That said, I think your day job is more enjoyable when you see your work as a craft. It becomes less of a chore, you feel more engaged, and generally happier, which ultimately has a positive impact on your work and your colleagues. This has been my very fuzzy experience over the years, going through periods of both, but there are no definitive perspectives either way.

What the author did wrong was mishandling the negative response. If he had been open to the feedback and worked on a plan to address the concerns, the site might have stayed up. Hopefully this is a learning opportunity, as he clearly needs it.

Why does Adobe need to exfiltrate some information from my machine anyway? If I'm a customer, then they should know this when I sign into my account. They absolutely don't need this information if I'm visiting their website without logging in.

Modifying a global system file is something their software shouldn't be doing in the first place, but relying on this abuse to track me on their website is on another level of insidious behavior.

The effect of this "AI" trend is that now humans with no musical background or experience can flood the medium, making it much more difficult for anyone to make a living from it, whether they're an artist or not.

> Stop thinking that finding a flaw is a contribution. It's half of a contribution at best. The other half is "and here's how we might solve that." If you're pointing out a problem without offering a path through it, that's not contributing.

So... finding a flaw is "half" of a contribution, but it also isn't a contribution?

Critical thinking is valuable. Yes, it can sometimes be counterproductive, but it can also be steered in a productive direction.

If someone criticizes something, ask them to elaborate. Why couldn't this work? What are the exact roadblocks? Is it based on prior experience, or gut feeling? If it's based on experience, how similar is the current situation to their past experience?

Chances are that after some prodding their criticism turns out to be a non-issue, or far less of an issue than they originally thought. In either case, the discussion itself often steers the group towards a better solution, so bringing up potential concerns, even if they're invalid, is often a good exercise.

The skill is aiming for the right moment to bring it up, having a bit of tact in the delivery, and not burying your head in the sand and being defensive (or offensive). Too often people attach their ideas to their identities, which is the root cause of why design discussions can be frustrating and nonproductive.

I partly share this opinion because most branding and UIs, products that are primarily marketed as a "lifestyle", etc., are obnoxious. Yes, appearance is a factor of anything we interact with, but when using technology my primary thought is if it solves a practical problem. Not if it's broadcasting an image, or even if it's enjoyable to use. The latter is important, but often companies prioritize it over functionality, which is backwards to me.

So starting with a mostly functional product, and giving me the choice of how to style it, is appealing to me. This is why I still use RSS, custom style sheets, the CLI and simple GUI wrappers, etc.

There is an audience for this type of product, but it's of the magnitude of a rounding error, so naturally most companies don't, and likely shouldn't, focus on this segment.

This is in no way comparable to the "flow" state that programmers sometimes achieve, which is reached when the person has a clear mental model of the program, understands all relevant context and APIs, and is able to easily translate their thoughts and program requirements into functional code. The reason why interrupting someone in this state is so disruptive is because it can take quite a while to reach it again.

Working with LLMs is the complete opposite of this.

CAPTCHAs were never meant to work 100% of the time in all situations, or be the only security solution. They're meant to block lazy spammers and low-level attacks, but anyone with enough interest and resources can work around any CAPTCHA. This is certainly becoming cheaper and more accessible with the proliferation of "AI", but it doesn't mean that CAPTCHAs are inherently useless. They're part of a perpetual cat and mouse game.

Like LLMs, they rely on probabilities that certain signals may indicate suspicious behavior. Sophisticated ones like Turnstile analyze a lot of data, likely using LLMs to detect pseudorandom keyboard input as well, so they would be far more effective than your bespoke solution. They're not perfect, and can have false positives, but this is unfortunately the price everyone has to pay for services to be available to legitimate users on the modern internet.

I do share a concern that these services are given a lot of sensitive data which could potentially be abused for tracking users, advertising, etc., but there are OSS alternatives you can self-host that mitigate this.

But, as you know, you can also manage this configuration yourself, either via traditional config mgmt tools, helpers like wg-meshconf, or even plain shell scripts, if you like. I'm aware this is a very HN-Dropboxy comment, but it's really not that complex[1], and is easily manageable for a small deployment.

Another VPN tool I used before WG gained momentum was tinc, which supports mesh networking out of the box. It's even easier to configure and maintain, and supports all platforms. It does run in userspace, which should make it slower than WG, but I found the performance acceptable for my modest use cases. Highly recommended.

[1]: https://www.procustodibus.com/blog/2020/11/wireguard-point-t... (this blog is a great WG resource!)

If a technology to build airplanes quickly and cheaply existed and was made available to everyone, even to people with no aeronautical engineering experience, flying would be a much scarier ordeal than it already is.

There are good reasons for the strict safety and maintenance standards of the aviation industry. We've seen what can happen if they're not followed.

The fact that the software industry doesn't have similar guardrails is not something to celebrate. Unleashing technology that allows anyone to create software without understanding or even caring about good development practices and conventions is fundamentally a bad idea.

The question is how much does the market value this, and how much it should value it.

For one-off scripts and software built for personal use, it doesn't matter. Go nuts. Move fast and break things.

But the quality requirement scales proportionally with how many people use and rely on the software. And not just users, but developers. Subjective properties like maintainability become very important if more than one developer needs to work on the codebase. This is true even for LLMs, which can often make a larger mess if the existing code is not in good shape.

To be clear, I don't think LLMs inevitably produce poor quality software. They can certainly be steered in a good direction. But that also requires an expert at the wheel to provide good guidance, which IME often takes as much, if not more, work than doing it by hand.

So all this talk about these new tools replacing the craft of programming is overblown. What they're doing, and will continue to do unless some fundamental breakthrough is reached, is make the creation of poor quality software very accessible. This is not the fault of the tools, but of the humans who use them. And this should concern everyone.

Was advertising necessary to produce all of this inarguably useful technology? Is this technology somehow unique in the world?

There are alternatives to all of those products that are not monetized via advertising. You may argue that they're not good enough, and I may agree to some extent, but they certainly work well enough for many people who decide to not use Google and other ad supported products and services.

Google et al don't have a monopoly on "amazing" technology. They just dominate the market to make it seem like they do.

Besides, it's not like Google developed these products in a vacuum (except perhaps early web search). Many of them are based on the work of other companies and individuals, which they either acquired, forked, or depend on. Which is fine, but the point is that not all of it is built and maintained entirely by G.[1]

[1]: The Roman analogy actually works in this sense as well, since accomplishments of the Roman empire were also largely based on work borrowed, adapted, or simply stolen from others. So were all the atrocities they committed necessary to advance technology? Perhaps. But if alternatives existed during their time that didn't come with the same downsides, I'm sure people would choose to use those instead, which is where your analogy falls flat. :)

That's a false dichotomy.

First of all, the technology is far from "free". It's easily accessible, perhaps, but users pay handsomely to use it, even if they're unaware of it, which most adtech companies go out of their way to ensure.

Secondly, advertising isn't the only business model companies can choose. Far from it. It may be the most profitable, and the easiest to deploy, simply because adtech companies have made it so. Companies can just as well choose to prioritize user experience, user privacy, and all the things they claim to care deeply about, over their revenues, which is what they actually care about.

Oh, and lastly, I would strongly argue that social media, web search, office suites, etc., are hardly "amazing" technology. There are very good alternatives to all of these that don't come with the drawbacks of ad-supported software. It's just that adtech companies are also unsurprisingly quite good at advertising themselves, and using their position and vast resources to dominate the market.

Snatched the collection. Thanks for mentioning it!