1. WL disclosed information to US population. 2. WL is accused of being "Non-state Hostile Intelligence Service". 3. Hostile intelligence services work for enemies. 4. US population is the enemy.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18420054

Points: 9

# Comments: 0

The "fake news" meme itself is the last desperate attempt to preserve the fake news monopoly which giant publishers enjoyed for so long. There is really nothing left when this one wears out.

Before "fake news" we had massive injections of noise to drown out information, but that didn't work quite well, not in the long run.

The current trend of turning giant social platforms to Disney-like dystopias is not working well either. People are flocking back to ... web sites!

So what can we expect after "fake news" ? Probably Disneyfication of DNS, and that's where it ends.

Because audiences will shift to the lowest commeon denominator - IP addressing, as they did in the beginning (Napster, Gnutella) and still do (Bittorent, Tor).

The narrative funded through GOOGL (and its affiliate EFF) and other big platforms is that this is evil doing of big content distribution monopolies.

What is missing in this picture is that this Directive gives affordable enforcement muscle to all content producers, including the smallest ones.

This Directive is the death knell for these platforms, which peddle content produced by 'nobodies' (their users) without any remuneration. There is nothing natural, just or given about it.

- it's impossible to effectively use horn and brakes in emergencies;

- one starts to rely on the horn clearing the way instead of slowing down, which is suicidally dumb;

- horn is used after-the-fact, which needlessly raises the temperature.

The only sensible use is to alert far-away pedestrians that are obviously going to do something stupid.

If we put aside creation of unemployment, putting limits on what human drivers will be able to do, and similar dystopian outlooks, what are the benefits for the masses?

People who cannot drive will be able to use cars as people who can. Is this good? Are interesting places on the planet going to have the same fate as Internet did, when it transformed from elite audiences in 90s to tragedy of commons today?

Like all pets, they are to be kept in the appropriate place, like horses that is. Not in the living room.

Who do you think can smoother monetize your data - your local ISP or Cloudflare? Or maybe Cloudflare solemnly promised never to do it?

If an effort is to be taken, the best thing is to run your own DNS resolver that will query root servers and follow the chains directly.

"Google Workers Astonished: Found Out They Work In Capitalist System, Not Nerd Commune"

This looks more like _Lord of the Flies_ setup than like for-profit company workforce that sells 8 hours of its time in return for paycheck, with some reasonable socializing at work.

This seems to be the trend, and is by no means limited to Facebook. Providing socializing benefits (food, playground, etc.) and requiring emotional committment at work is far more sinister than it appears.

While keeping employees emotionally arrested at 12-year-old stage may extract extra sweat, the overall downside for the society is abysmal.

The actual people are not much different than anywhere else in the US. But they quickly learn to provide lip service to the official ideology, especially when seeking employment or acceptance in social media-mediated groups (and there are very few that are not.)

The real problem with computer techies is that they tend to be more sycophantic to the prevailing power than other profesions.

The SV political and ideological climate is all about pidgeonholing you into 0.01-0.3% segment ('left-handed bisexual javascript expert'), then maintaining these segments and manipulating the fractured society into neoliberal directions.

It is obvious that there is nothing that can be named as a common interest in SV: there is no such discourse. The commonality is restricted to your 0.01-0.3% segment.

You are not middle class if:

- you will lose home, car if you are out of job for 6-10 months;

- you don't take 30 days vacation a year;

- you cannot afford health services without going to debt;

- you cannot send your kids to university;

- your diet is mostly junk food because you can't afford fresh stuff.

If some of the above is true, you are poor.

"Post a selfie of feeding the hungry"

"Leftover food spotted on the corner of 5th and Lincoln"

Then sell user data to law enforcement.

Some back-of-the-envelope calculations based on total sustained mining power consumption in 2017, extrapolating back, using the good old E=mc^2, yields the average weight of a bitcoin of about 0.2mg.

This makes Bitcoin the most expensive substance today.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15271968

Points: 2

# Comments: 2

This approach worked well (for some parties) in many other areas, for example in education: now the teachers are the only ones left responsible for the structuraly failing education system.

Now, if these were 1930s, with hundreds of independent auto makers, perhaps the invisible hand of the market would fix this.

The art of managing relies on the capability to get work done by all kinds of engineers. The talent is rarely universally allocated. Some very 'bright' ones will never properly finish the work. Some 'slow' engineers may have remarkable attention to details.

And monoculture is the elephant in the room most pretend not to see. The current engineering ideology (it is ideology, not technology) of sycophancy towards big and rich companies, and popular software stacks, is sickening.