FWIW I did not expect bad news since I didn't see a date range after the name in parens.

While I did criticize HN in my post, I will note that it is sort of a last bastion of intellectual conversation. I believe the motives are not as pure as before, and I lament that. There simply is not a space for intellectual conversation for intellectual conversation's sake on the internet anymore. It is all twisted.

The owner acts like Omegle was about innocent curious internet explorers asking cute questions and spreading knowledge. Bull shit. I never met a professor on Omegle. The most common encounter is a pervert who quickly ends the chat. I probably would have needed to sink 300+ hours on the platform in order to meet one. And by the time I would have met this professor, I would most likely have gained nothing from the exchange. Therefore, in my experience, I have found such innocent encounters to be the exception. By far. There is no corner on the internet where that happens organically. Even on HN, where comments are verbose and technical, it's only because of the perceived clout and proximity to VC money. The open connectedness of the internet has little to do with it.

If you access Tor, which is considered the peak of anonymous interconnectedness, you will also find a draught of intellectual activity. I would love to find intellectual discussions occurring on Tor, if anyone knows one please let me know the onion address. (Pro-tip: it's an impossible quest.) Instead all you will find are CSAM, scams, and honeypots.

I have found that my life has gotten immeasurably better since I generally stopped using the internet. The reddit API lockdown woke me up and I realized pretty much everything on the internet is garbage. Even HN is of lower quality than before, with the average post being a flex of one's social status rather than a helpful tip from one hacker to another.

Fuck all this noise. The internet is so full of low quality social content that it is overall not worth using for social connection.

Or maybe, just maybe, realize your consumer preferences are not universal and are in fact the minority view

If the person is listening to you and responding just fine, then the AirPods are not a problem. If the person is obviously distracted then you have cause to ask them to take them off. Simple as.

Back then, few people had the mindset of, "if they own my data, they own me." But we're starting to see it take hold.

You're a fool if you think that the way reddit handles content moderation does not create angry people.

The code itself should be treated internally like part of the product and it should be easily extensible, of uniform style, and written so safely that if a child added a line to the code it wouldn't break it entirely.

This is especially true of languages that support macros. If inclusion or modification of macros in your code cannot be done, it is probably a bad sign. When writing code to be resistant to hardware attacks for instance there is a different style that must be adopted entirely, if everyone is writing the fanciest for-loops fathomable then it becomes inefficient and a risk to code correctness to mutate the code to resist classes of attacks. This is terrible and not worth it just because an elite haxor wanted to write a for loop in a single line.

This is a good opportunity to create a new community, and essentially take back messaging from the corporations (let's be real about what reddit is) and put it back into the hands of the people.

Or are you recommending that one opt out of a good portion of society by not using a smartphone? For most people that is not really a convenient option.

- Make alignment of front facing cameras free (for newer automobiles not retrofits), not a $500 service option. The front facing camera is bound to fall all out of alignment, which makes the system begin to see ghosts. This then causes drivers to simply disable the automatic emergency braking, after 1 or 2 scares. Therefore the system is broken.

- Fine car companies that cause accidents due to emergency braking randomly braking due to ghosts or other spectra, if due to flawed mechanics. There should not be corner cutting in a safety feature. Such fines already exist for airbag regulations.

If we were to mandate automatic emergency braking today with the state of the current technology, it would be a disaster.

Just so you know, the point of my post isn't to rip on people with low willpower or to brag about mine (which would be false valor anyway--there are reasons I had issues with alcohol and drugs to begin with). The thesis of my post is that the narrative is that you need a drug to get better.

Ozempic is supposed to be a treatment applied to people who are not yet overweight enough for bariatric surgery, yet it is being used ubiquitously. What does that tell you about the mind share differences between "you need a drug to get better" versus "you can just stop"?

The idea that another drug is your only way out is but a shadow on the wall of a cave, puppeteered by Big Pharma, people need to free themselves, escape outside and see the sun.

Additionally, my post was "flagged" which is a bit hilarious. I wonder what part of my post was hateful or otherwise below the standards of this forum. Unless you define hate as being critical of big pharma.