People will praise the Arab Spring organizing on Twitter without considering the implications for the events at the Capital on Jan 6th.

People are fine with Parler getting banned by all their vendors for not moderating violence and threats. But people would loose their minds if the same thing happened to Facebook for their failure to moderate violence around the Rohingyan genocide.

Am I right in seeing that a monthly subscription is the only option to get a client and start using Aether?

If your data is local to a user's device (laptop, desktop, tablet, phone), then it's not online 24/7. So, you need some way for other people to see it.

If you require people to use a server, there's either problems onboarding and trusting that server operator. Or you make people host their own server and nobody uses it b/c that's too technical.

They see things in a more absolutist free speech lens, meaning any content that is legal should be allowed. And they don't see platforms as being responsible for moderation. They view centralized moderation as inherently biased and illegitimate. If they can't or wont allow legal speech, then they think 230 should be repealed and these sites should cease to exist.

They are reacting to takedowns from social media sites, SaaS providers, IaaS providers, and financial services because they view these sites as an oligopoly acting in unison to bar them from the basic infrastructure of modern life. Imagine if typewriter companies ganged up to stop selling to right leaning newspapers and authors. Or, imagine if telegraph companies said they wouldn't transmit messages for Abraham Lincon.

On 230, they see social media sites as a monopoly due to network effects. Also/alternatively they talk about a bait-and-switch, where the social media sites held themselves out as public squares when they were small. But once they were big, they started enforcing their views.

Generally, I think people are failing to put themselves in a Trump supporter's shoes. Imagine you genuinely believed that the election was stolen. The court cases were almost all dismissed on standing and laches. From their perspective, no one will substantively address their videos, affidavits, statistical anomalies, etc.

And when they protest, people call them violent insurrectionists, despite all year BLM doing very similar things (again from their perspective).

Personally, I think even a complete repeal with no replacement would be a good thing. The vast majority of social networks, forums, comment sections, and other public spaces online are a cancer that are destroying our society.

And censorship is a poor alternative. Even if you find yourself on the favorable side of the censors now, inevitably they will come for you.

But once you start to consider forms and interactive content, the possibilities for expanding interactivity are near endless: raster or vector maps, the spam bot / capcha arms-race, custom form widgets (ie. better dropdowns, file upload dropzones, datatables, drag/drop items), different connection types or wire protocols (XML/JSON vs. binary formats, Websockets, WebRTC, QUIC, more UDP-based stuff in the future), rich API's like payments, hardware security dongles, and social networks (webmentions/activity-pub/etc).

Kind of like Excel, these are each must-have's for some industry or app. Each one requires a different 10% of core features to work. So, we need them all if the web is going to be an application delivery platform. And for better or worse, it is the current de-facto standard cross-platform apps.

But I think this shows an interesting effect: platforms are very unlikely to ever be feature complete. Whereas distinct pieces of software are. PDF is another example of this kind of scope creep.

A couple more examples I can think of:

- jq: https://stedolan.github.io/jq/

- pass: https://www.passwordstore.org/

- tokyo/kyoto cabinet: embedded key value database

- awk: text processing tool / programming language

- (almost per-se) any game that shipped on physical media

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25632137

Points: 24

# Comments: 6

After a couple years, the company did start adjusting RSU refreshes to reduce grants to people outside of top cities. Even with that though, I'm still breaking even or ahead.

Just another voice saying that you need to do the math and think about your company's policies. You can only account for changing policies so much.

I got in at a time when the deal was very good. Today, my salary reduction would be much higher (2-3x the reduction) and all other comp has caught up to being location adjusted. But, the deal at my company can still be good as long as you check the math.

Another gotcha to watch out for is benefits. Make sure the company health care plan(s) have doctors in-network where you are moving. Since health care networks are very regional, this is not always the case. I had to switch plans.

Also, you won't be able to use a lot of the other tech company perks that people don't price in a lot: free food/snacks/drinks, gym, spa, health center, daycare, etc. Though some company's will give you money to get a gym membership, but probably not the other things.

[0] The cost of living savings mostly came from housing. But nearly everything local (grocery's, restaurants, gas, etc) is 30% to 50% cheaper where I'm at, which adds up quick too.

The broader point is that it's not clear that lockdowns are beneficial or necessary. They have real costs. Nobody is talking about how we weigh those costs and benefits. And despite the lockdowns, California still has a swamped medical system.

To move the conversation forward: people will never give up their sacred cows. The lockdowns were never about COVID, they're about control and rewarding political allies. Texas tried to ban abortion. California tried to ban religion. And nobody cares if the lockdowns work or not.

Edit: also, the military, FEMA, and non-profits built temporary hospitals in spring, but they weren't needed.