daevout (u/daevout) - Readit News

daevout commented on People who die by suicide want to stop suffering, not to stop living english.elpais.com/scienc... · Posted by u/belter

daevout · 3 years ago

That might be true for the subset of suicides the author has studied, but there are about as many reasons humans commit suicide as there are reasons they commit homicide, which is to say, infinite varieties.

There's religious (Heavean's Gate, that recent kenyan cult), protest (self-immolating monks), media spectacle (Yukio Mishima), honor (seppuku, the samurai ritual mishima was immitating), shame (pompei), escape (L pills) fiancial ruin (1929 brokers), and fads (90s school shooters). Then there's suicide as a way of life (downtown SF, opioid epidemic).

The idea that this is all caused by "suffering" that could be prevented through increasingly sophiaticated treatmant plans or perhaps extended social welfare programs is a peculiar modern secular idea. I wonder if people who believe this sincerely are staving off their own suicide this way.

daevout commented on iOS 17 app sideloading might only be available in Europe techradar.com/news/ios-17... · Posted by u/walterbell

superkuh · 3 years ago

Even if this is small progress the headlines and framing of the story are still doublespeak. Installing applications on your computer is the normal state of things. Walled gardens and not having control of your computer is the new weird thing. The word "sideloading" is a feudal concept and it's unquestioned use is dangerous for society.

Properly stated this story title is, "Installing applications on iOS 17 might be allowed Europe" which highlights the absurdity intrinsic in the practice of users not being able to install applications on their own computers as a default.

daevout · 3 years ago

That is a good way of looking at it. What's missing is a catchy name to debase store-based installation similar to what was done through "sideloading". Perhaps "lord-loading", "begstalling", "babybiting", etc.

daevout commented on Alibaba to split into six separate groups wsj.com/articles/alibaba-... · Posted by u/mfiguiere

daevout · 3 years ago

China has done what's only being talked about in the west: successfully broken up a powerful tech conglomerate.

One needn't resort to the kind of marxist leninist tactics that were at play here to achieve the same outcome, but all we'll get is more talk, or if things go really well, 5 mini googles just in time for openai, bing or someone else to become the next search monopoly.

daevout commented on Japan wants 85% of men to take paternity leave but they’re too scared to take it cnn.com/2023/03/26/asia/j... · Posted by u/PaulHoule

daevout · 3 years ago

The problem is that children, rather than free farm labor, are now too expensive, while the wages on which the majority of people depend, are too unpredictable and intermittent for the kind of long term involvement 2.1+ children represent.

If countries want to solve their fertility problem, they can waste their time with various tricks and "incentives" to postpone what they'll eventually have to do for geopolitical reasons alone, which is to go to war with their own business community.

Capital controls, tarrifs, sector bargaining -- the exploding heads of think tank libertarians guide the way like lit torches through a swampy marsh.

If wage earners can be assured that they are taken care of irrespective of the spasms of the global market, they can have children. Otherwise they will persist in their state of soft rebellion, which is marked by low fertility and low laber market participation, among others.

daevout commented on Ask HN: Was tech always so scammy? · Posted by u/voidhorse

rcarr · 3 years ago

The AI/ChatGPT hype is starting to piss me off, it seems like about 50% of HN is now articles about AI. Meanwhile, stuff like the genuinely incredible Unreal Engine 5.2 demo that hit Youtube six days ago only got 14 upvotes on here. What the fuck is going on?

I've been using ChatGPT for the last week or two and it's not got a single coding question I've asked it right. Seems alright as a 'rubber duck' for generating ideas and seems okish for creative writing but for not a hell of a lot else at the minute.

The visual AI art stuff does seem worth the hype though but yeah, I'm feeling burnt out on this shit too. Based on everyone I speak to, I think the majority of people are. The pandemic probably didn't help.

daevout · 3 years ago

Google's is the best business the world and chatgpt opens up round 2 over who gets the hold the rains of that beast.

The hype originates in the business comminity, and it's about all the money that will be made, not technology.

The technology part is over as far as business is concerned. It's good enough to get everyone in the world to type their every need into this textbox rather than another. Everything else is downstream from there.

Transformers, rotators, discombulators, those things get nerds excited, but what's whipping people into a frenzy is the race to GOOG 2.0

daevout commented on GitHub to lay off 10% and close all offices twitter.com/webology/stat... · Posted by u/pbnjay

sokoloff · 3 years ago

> If your employees are going to be pictures on your screen anyway, might as well pick ones that worker harder and complain less.

Well, naturally, if that’s the all-else-equal trade that’s on offer, they’d be foolish to not take it.

daevout · 3 years ago

Of course, the problem is that the trade is on offer at all.

In the antiquated view that the government exists for the protection of the people, rather than to coddle corporations and sacrificing at the altar of competitiveness, it would be simply shut down.

daevout commented on GitHub to lay off 10% and close all offices twitter.com/webology/stat... · Posted by u/pbnjay

rossdavidh · 3 years ago

Closing all offices, I have to say, makes it way easier to do more layoffs. Having been through layoffs in semiconductor manufacturing in the 90's, when you had to, you know, get the people from work and take them to a place and all that, it involved paying a lot of money for extra security and such. With no offices, it's a lot easier, and you never have to meet the person face to face.

Five years from now, I think we will not see "remote only" for a large company and think "ooh, they value their employees I guess", but rather, "uh oh, they like to think of their employees as being like virtual servers, easy to spin up and easy to shut down the moment you don't need to pay for that capacity".

daevout · 3 years ago

> Five years from now, I think we will not see "remote only" for a large company and think "ooh, they value their employees I guess"

Also, remote work opens the door to replace expensive domestic workers with cheap foreign ones. If your employees are going to be pictures on your screen anyway, might as well pick ones that worker harder and complain less.

For what it's worth, this might finally open the eyes of many SWEs that they're plain workers with little bargaining power and that their inflated salaries are a historical accident owning to many of the current tech barons having been engineers themselves at one point, throwing a larger bone than they otherwise would have to. Other than that, there's few reasons, and certainly no market-based ones, why those salaries should be as high as they are, when they're cheap just across the border.

If remote work being granted and taken arbitrarily -- with not even an attempt at justifying it in terms of business demands -- hasn't alerted you to the feudal reality of the modern tech corporation, perhaps being laid off will do the trick.

Broad pro labour legislation would be the answer here, but while the libertarian crackpot religion remains strong in overclass circles, there's not going to be anything of the sort.

daevout commented on Ask HN: Isn't ChatGPT unfair to the sources it scraped data from? · Posted by u/wxce

daevout · 3 years ago

Yes it absolutely is, but imo less so than what GitHub Copilot and various image generation companies are doing. My theory is that if AI turns out to be as disruptive as the current hype suggests, the conflict between those who feed the AI vs. those who profit from it might be the next big social rift.

Artists are already in full rebellion against this, as they should be, being nearly eclipsed by AI, except when it comes to inventing new styles and hand-crafting samples for the models to train on. These, I assume, are either scraped off the web, or signed away in unfair ToS of various online publishing platforms.

Since the damage individually is small (they took some code from me without attribution, ok) but collectively enormous, in my opinion it the role of government to step in and soften the blow if necessary.

daevout commented on Apple: The only big tech giant going against the job cuts tide blog.pragmaticengineer.co... · Posted by u/cpeterso

sircastor · 3 years ago

> I can't think of a company more blatantly engaged in anti-competitive practices than Apple

In a world where Amazon, Meta, Google, Wal-Mart, Time-Warner, Comcast, etc exist, you think Apple is the most anti-competitive?

daevout · 3 years ago

Amazon, Meta, Google are most certainly cut from the same cloth, only slightly smaller. For Wal-Mart I can't think of anything strictly anit-competitive, but its practice of paying sub-subsistance wages and counting on government relief programs to make up the difference is so disgusting I don't know how to describe. Time-Warner, Comcast I'm not too familiar with, but as I understand they are under regulations that prohibit them from dropping your connection when e.g. they find you visiting ycombinatior.com, a site where their business is frequently ridiculed, which is certainly a step in the right direction and the model that should be applied broadly and forcefully to all of the above.

daevout commented on Apple: The only big tech giant going against the job cuts tide blog.pragmaticengineer.co... · Posted by u/cpeterso

webwielder2 · 3 years ago

Apple is a generally more well run, mature, patient, and scrupulous company than most others.

daevout · 3 years ago

I can't think of a company more blatantly engaged in anti-competitive practices than Apple, but I'm glad to see all that unfairly amassed wealth benefitting even the lowest rungs of its corporate hierarchy through the unusual benefit of not being terminated at the drop of a hat. Bravo!