so there's that

Consider how real world communities are organized. In most of the world we have residential districts and commercial districts. Residential districts are meant to be a quiet place of rest/reflection and commercial districts are where people gather to advance our society forward.

Big cities are a special mix of commercial/residential but with their own constraints and culture.

When a human being walks down the street, visits a restaurant, or goes shopping they aren't inundated with political view points, bad news from everywhere in the world, memes, etc. We as a society have specially allocated spaces for things like this. Maybe it's the city center where people stand around with megaphones preaching something. Or maybe it's a conference where people gather and exchange viewpoints. Or a university where the focus is learning and information exchange.

These "social constructs", for lack of a better term (?), took thousands of years to build and optimize. And most of them were built in an age where information took a long time to travel.

But today information travels fast. We are all connected more than ever before. Humanity consists of large hive minds that can feed information to each other instantly at any time of day.

What I'm wondering is...

- What are the long term side effects of an unfiltered, unlimited, and rapid transfer of information from arbitrary sources?

- Is the human mind even capable of operating in a global information system. Put another way, hasn't most of human evolution occurred within smaller local ("tribal"?) communities; a scale we can deal with mentally?

Every year it feels like more and more of our humanity is being transferred into a virtual space that is no more real than a video game. The connection with close friends and relatives is still there but I feel the connection loosening despite my best efforts. I see this happening to everyone around me, not just myself.

It feels like local communities are dying or completely non-existent. We aren't "forced" to deal with each other and so we... don't.

Something crucial is missing and I can't quite put my finger on what it is. And I'm worried.

Does anyone else feel the same way?

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36304991

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

Wouldn't it be nice if we could start over and apply all the lessons we've learned over the generations? The world would be a much better place!

Or would it?

We'd end up with yet another mess. It'll be a different mess but it'll be a mess nonetheless. Or worse - we'll end up with two big messes instead of one big mess!

This such a complete and utter lie and I'm surprised people in 2022 still believe it.

You do know what's happening when you run Docker on your Macbook, right? Right?

Your frontend team needs an API call that retrieves only friend requests with user names/avatars because the current API call is too heavy.

Normally they'd go to the back-end team and ask them to add an endpoint or modify an existing endpoint to give them the exact data they need. The problem with that is global API surface area becomes more complicated. Complexity is bad because more mistakes are made.

With this model your front-end team can implement the endpoint themselves in the BFF and model the response data exactly as they need it.

They also don't need to deal with that one zealot on the back-end team that gives everyone a hard time about tiny irrelevant issues.

Not really. When you turn off recommendations, the app icons are hidden but the space for recommendations stays there! Yes, just a big ol' block of whitespace with a prompt to turn recommendations back on. It takes up like 30%+ of the start menu.

It's a dark pattern.

> event sourced architecture

You must be joking. Please tell me you're joking.

Keep building strawmen, I'll be building software.

What kind of function documentation are you reading inline lol? Does it have like 30 function arguments?

In what way would the JavaDoc @param/@return/etc annotations actually help? What Godoc has is more than suitable for the vast majority of cases.

I LOVE Golang's approach to this [1]:

- Documentation generation from code is built in to the language toolkit

- There is a standard for writing the comments so all of them look the same across every project

- It even supports code examples which are visible as a REPL in the generated docs

When people ask "what's so great about Go?". It's stuff like that which is hard to succinctly describe but makes a huge difference in overall quality of Go code in the wild.

[1]: https://go.dev/doc/comment