cactus2093 (u/cactus2093)

cactus2093 commented on OpenClaw – Moltbot Renamed Again openclaw.ai/blog/introduc... · Posted by u/ed

So i feel like this might be the most overhyped project in the past longer time.

I don't say it doesn't "work" or serves a purpose - but well i read so much about this beein an "actual intelligence" and stuff that i had to look into the source.

As someone who spends actually a definately to big portion of his free time researching thought process replication and related topics in the realm of "AI" this is not really more "ai" than any other so far.

Just my 3 cents.

cactus2093 · 15 days ago

This comment sounds exactly like the infamous "Dropbox is trivially recreated with FTP" one from 20 years ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

cactus2093 commented on Netflix to Acquire Warner Bros about.netflix.com/en/news... · Posted by u/meetpateltech

thayne · 2 months ago

I want a separation between the streaming platform companies and the content making companies, so that the streaming companies can compete on making a better platform/service and the content companies compete on making better content.

I don't want one company that owns everything, I want several companies that are able to license whatever content they want. And ideally the customer can choose between a subscription that includes everything, and paying for content a la carte, or maybe subscriptions that focus on specific kinds of content (scifi/fantasy, stuff for kids, old movies, international, sports, etc.) regardless of what company made it.

cactus2093 · 2 months ago

This is how it worked a decade+ ago, when there was still alpha to be had on providing better streaming service. It was great and we got things like the Netflix Prize and all sorts of content ranking improvements, better CDN platforms, lower latency and less buffering, more content upgraded to HD and 4K. Plus some annoying but clearly effective practices like auto-play of trailers and unrelated shows.

Now these are all solved problems, so there is no benefit in trying to compete on making a better platform / service. The only thing left is competing on content.

> I want several companies that are able to license whatever content they want. And ideally the customer can choose between a subscription that includes everything, and paying for content a la carte, or maybe subscriptions that focus on specific kinds of content

This seems like splitting hairs, it's almost exactly what we do have. You can still buy and rent individual shows & movies from Apple and Amazon and other providers. Or you can subscribe to services. The only difference is there is no one big "subscription that includes everything", you need 10 different $15 subscriptions to get everything. Again, kind of splitting hairs though. The one big subscription would probably be the same price as everything combined anyway.

cactus2093 commented on I ignore the spotlight as a staff engineer lalitm.com/software-engin... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti

postit · 2 months ago

One thing I’ve learned in my 25+ year career is that if you don't own your narrative and your work, someone else will claim it - especially in corporate America.

I have lost count of the brilliant engineers who were passed over for credit simply because someone less technically capable, but extremely popular, pulled the strings to steal the spotlight.

You don't necessarily need to be in the spotlight, but you do need to leave a paper trail. Claim your work and inventions both internally and externally. You don't need to be a 'LinkedIn thought leader' to do this, just submit talks to conferences and find peers at other companies who understand the difference between those who build and those who only talk about building.

cactus2093 · 2 months ago

I've always kind of expected it to work this way, with people being cutthroat and stealing credit for other people's work.

What I have seen in reality is a lot more nuanced. There are a lot of good ideas that will simply die if nobody pitches them the right way, i.e. if no one gets the rest of the team/org/company to understand and agree that it solves an important problem.

There are also very few novel ideas in a mature business or technology space. Every time I think I've come up with one, I search the internal company docs and often someone had mentioned the same thing 5 years ago in some long-forgotten design doc or something.

I've come to realize that the hard thing and the bottleneck for a good idea to have real impact is not the idea itself or the execution, it's pulling the right strings to make space for the idea and get it accepted. At a small scale, in your own team or ownership domain, this isn't necessary and you can just build things and let the results speak for themselves. But the amount of impact that thing has on the broader company will be limited if you don't pull the strings the right way.

Some people despise this idea and in that case, a big company is probably not the right place for you. But most of the cases I've seen of "brilliant engineers passed over for credit" were people not realizing and not doing this necessary part of the job. If someone else steps in and gets the idea more widely recognized after you had let it stall and moved onto the next thing, then 1. usually you do still some partial recognition for it so it's a win/win and 2. the other person is not really stealing credit, because if they had done nothing the idea would have just died and you wouldn't have gotten credit anyway.

cactus2093 commented on MrBeast's Faux Philanthropy unherd.com/2024/10/mrbeas... · Posted by u/elsewhen

alwa · a year ago

I feel like part of the author’s point was that the well-digging thing is a long and tired example of attention-hungry rich outsiders prancing in to “fix things” and not caring about (or considering) the long-term consequences of their ideas. Even the really good development organizations are constantly learning lessons about unintended second- and third-order consequences: it’s particularly cynical, then, to make a spectacle out of doing the naive thing that seems obvious but that we already know doesn’t really work well.

Doing something pointless with your lavish resources is insulting when, with the same resources and the humility to study what works and ask for good advice, you (or the local population) could instead have done something sustainable. It’s putting your ego and your public profile ahead of the very real material needs whose egregiousness you’re profiting from.

It’s bad enough when it’s nonprofits just making their (sometimes lavish) salaries off the pointlessness. In this case, the man has made a career out of directly turning people’s disability and economic disadvantage and suffering into his primary product that he profits from. His $750-million company got that way entirely by exploiting people’s misery for views and profit. By selling the idea that the problems aren’t all that real, that all it takes is a rich dude with a magic wand and some righteousness. “Fixing” 100 people’s problems and pretending you fixed a society’s worth.

And his little treatise that leaked a few weeks back makes his logic explicit: do the minimum to sound flashy.

> He argues that it is far cheaper and funnier to offer a prize of five packs of Doritos a day instead of $20,000. Then one section asks “What is the goal of our content” before replying “the goal of our content is to excite me”.

At least an evil capitalist WellCorp, Inc. would have to dig wells that keep working after the camera crew leaves, if it wanted to stay in business for very long!

cactus2093 · a year ago

> His $750-million company got that way entirely by exploiting people’s misery for views and profit

Uh, what? The guy runs big elaborate game shows. The contestants are thrilled for the chance to compete to win money. How could you spin that as exploiting people's misery?

cactus2093 commented on Capitalism and Cozy Games blog.glyph.im/2024/01/a-c... · Posted by u/earthboundkid

djur · 2 years ago

Animal Crossing is also a game where natural resources are infinite and not rivalrous, alienation of labor is impossible, the labor theory of value dominates, and comparative advantage doesn't exist. You make money by personally extracting resources from land and (optionally) creating finished goods with your own labor. Demand is constant (other than the daily 'hot items'). You cannot saturate the market or run out of supplies.

So it's not just that it's a world where you won't starve in a ditch for not working hard enough, but a world where your reward is reliably and indefinitely proportionate to your labor investment. If you work hard, you will succeed; the harder you work, the more you will succeed. Who wouldn't want to live and work in that world?

cactus2093 · 2 years ago

> Who wouldn't want to live and work in that world?

Who would want to? There are a lot of jobs in the real world that do work this way, and they are generally not the most desirable jobs. E.g. data entry or picking fruit or customer support or working on an assembly line.

The ability to improve, scale your work, and over time make a bigger impact with less effort is one of the key things that makes any kind of work interesting.

Not to mention a lot of the the most desirable jobs, like, say, professional athlete or movie star, tend to work very differently than what you're describing. Many people work very hard in those fields and never succeed, it's the combination of hard work and skill and a little bit of luck/randomness that makes it interesting.

cactus2093 commented on The note Reddit sent to moderators threatening them if they don’t reopen theverge.com/2023/6/16/23... · Posted by u/lewisflude

munificent · 3 years ago

> When you're working for yourself doing what you want, when you want, you don't mind not getting paid for it. When a boss is telling you want to do and when to do it, you expect to get paid. Reddit is making itself the boss of the mods.

This is spot on. Reddit's success relies entirely on the intrinsic motivation of moderators. That intrinsic motivation in turn is derived from the feeling of building something of long-lasting value.

There is no instrinsic joy in wading through your mod queue and deleting spam and garbage. The work itself is deeply unfun.

The reward is feeling that if you do that work and do it consistently, then you will create a space where a community of people you care about can thrive.

Now Reddit is sending a clear signal that at any point in time, they can stomp all over your community and kick you out. If I was mod of any decent-sized Reddit, that would make no longer feel safe investing the time it takes to earn that intrinsic reward, when the reward could evaporate at any moment.

cactus2093 · 3 years ago

> create a space where a community of people you care about can thrive

> the reward could evaporate at any moment

Wait a minute, is the reward the fact that the community exists? That's not going to evaporate overnight when Reddit replaces a mod.

The fear of your reward evaporating sounds a lot more like this work is driven by ego and the desire for control.

cactus2093 commented on Wow, is Apple’s Vision Pro loaded with pixels spectrum.ieee.org/apple-v... · Posted by u/mfiguiere

radicaldreamer · 3 years ago

Apple's displays basically hit the mark exactly.

cactus2093 · 3 years ago

That's why I'm curious just how good the resolution can be on the Vision Pro. If it takes a 5k monitor at, say, 2ft away which covers maybe 30 degrees of your field of view vertically to be truly "retina", then surely a 4k display 3 inches away from your eye that covers ~120 degrees of your field of view is not quite there.

But you also have lenses that are stretching out the screen to cover your periphery where it can be much less sharp so it's not exactly comparable.

cactus2093 commented on The note Reddit sent to moderators threatening them if they don’t reopen theverge.com/2023/6/16/23... · Posted by u/lewisflude

jmull · 3 years ago

I'm almost starting to think they really will break Reddit.

When all this started I had no doubt that the protests would come, make their point, end, and then Reddit would continue on its way.

But this has been so poorly handled.

I think a key to reddit's "success" (such as it is) is that they figured out how to scale moderation -- by getting volunteers to do the tough work for free. I'm sure reddit can toss all the uncooperative mods and get as many new ones as they could ever want.

But they are changing the fundamental dynamic between mod, subreddit and reddit the company. I wonder if this won't actually break the system.

Before, mods could run subreddits as they saw fit, users could choose the subreddits they participated in, and a user can always create a new subreddit if they don't think any existing ones suit their needs.

Now mods will have to accept that supporting reddit's business goals is the "zeroth law" for any subreddit. I just wonder if enough quality moderators will be willing to put in the time and effort required to keep a larger community from devolving into a cess pool, or to build up new subreddits -- for free.

When you're working for yourself doing what you want, when you want, you don't mind not getting paid for it. When a boss is telling you want to do and when to do it, you expect to get paid. Reddit is making itself the boss of the mods.

The thing is, this is an entirely unforced error. Overwhelmingly, the natural interests of subreddits are aligned with Reddits business goals, or at least aren't in opposition to them. The horribly handled roll out of the API pricing has essentially backed mods into a corner, basically forcing them to protest and then extend the protest.

IDK, maybe this was all 4D chess, and reddit wanted to get rid of third party apps and have an excuse to purge moderators with a sense of ownership over the subreddits they moderate. But it sure seems to me like they just don't know what they are doing. I know reddit needs to figure out how to become sustainable (profitable), and changing the dynamic between reddit and third-party apps is likely a necessary part of that. But I can't believe disengaging moderators can possibly help.

cactus2093 · 3 years ago

> Before, mods could run subreddits as they saw fit, users could choose the subreddits they participated in, and a user can always create a new subreddit if they don't think any existing ones suit their needs.

As a frequent Reddit user I don't agree with that. The network effects of subreddits plus the fact that they usually own the default name for a topic grant a lot of subs effective monopolies.

As a user if I don't like something about a certain subreddit including how it's moderated, the more realistic option is just to not participate in that subject matter on Reddit. I can still use Reddit for other topics but I feel like there's very rarely an alternative subreddit on the same topic which is anywhere near as active as the main one.

So, no offense to Reddit mods, but I really don't think these are all highly skilled, irreplaceable individuals. There's no competition that incentivizes the best people to rise to the top, these are just average folks that volunteered at the right time and now they're mods. There is apparently even a lot of cronyism among the mod community and I have heard that it can be hard to break into for first time mods.

If Reddit forces some of them out, there will be many people willing to step in who can do just as good of a job. It might even be a net positive thing to get new people involved.

cactus2093 commented on Reddit’s blackout protest is set to continue indefinitely old.reddit.com/r/technolo... · Posted by u/rajeevk

idiotsecant · 3 years ago

It seems to me like this is turning into a subreddit migration in slow motion. A lot people still want to post content and a lot of people still want to read content, so what's happening is people are posting it to the less popular 'alternative' versions of the popular subreddits and those posts make the frontpage instead. It seems like there is a noticeable decline in quality but i'm still seeing quite a bit of posting. Not sure if it's having the intended impact or not. I think the missing thing here is a viable, popular alternative. Digg died because reddit existed. If there was a consensus on the next reddit I would think reddit should be much more worried.

cactus2093 · 3 years ago

I agree with all of that, but honestly the more important factor is this is just not a very good cause to get all worked up about. Reddit is trying to grow into a profitable company, their business model is showing ads to users, they obviously can't just let millions of people use 3rd party apps for free.

I think even casual users understand this perfectly well. They don't use 3rd party apps for browsing Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or Tiktok (because those services also don't offer APIs). Why should Reddit be different?