Downvoting is one way disapproval is expressed, so the premise is the article is flawed. However, we must also remember that the point of speech is to convey truth, not crowd pleasing, not stirring up conflict for the kicks, not bland milquetoast niceness. What the appropriate tone or style is, or whether engagement makes sense at all, will depend on the situation and here we need prudence (in the classical sense). Feedback can be of help in shaping prudence, but it is not the final arbiter of the correct course is action. It must be examined for validity.

So please, do not couch your language. Be clear and direct. Let your yeses be yeses and your noes be noes. Make definite assertions. Avoid tame, colorless, hesitating, non-committal language. Listen to to your interlocutors, but speaks plainly and honestly. Let the chips fall where they may.

If you live in a very aggressive and malevolent environment that constantly wants to break you and use you for its own needs it's important to follow these rules:

1. Don't forget to love. There is always something to love. This is the most important thing. Enemies will try to make you hate (no matter what).

2. Be happy. It may sound as a trivial advice, but to be actually happy it's very helpful to consciously set your inner state as "happy". Despite all negative aspects of the situation you are in.

3. Be grateful. This is also helps a lot. There is always something more to lose. Be grateful for what you have now.

4. Dream! Dreams are the force that move us in our life. And the movement is necessary.

5. Live! Another trivial advice. But you can easily stuck under the burden without noticing it.

6. Try to fly over the problems, don't let them control your mind and thoughts. Think of them as walls (well, sometimes you have to break through).

7. Try to use long-term planning. Uncertainty is not a good thing for happiness.

8. Don't get sucked and destroyed by the temporary situation. There is always sunrise after darkness. Remember it.

I did that yesterday, more than 100 of the videos.

Eventually I saw a pattern, surprising since it was common in major cities all across the US and as if there were some single, central training materials. Apparently:

(1) Police are taught to be in control of any contact with a citizen. Recently the police have been taught to act nice initially, but, once it is clear some actual law enforcement is to be involved, be in control.

Being in control can mean that the citizen has been intimidated and made submissive so that they won't resist. Part of this is to demand that a citizen DO some little things, e.g., stand with feet apart, move back 10 feet, or tolerate being falsely accused of something, e.g., "weaving" in the road, being too close to the officer, etc. The officers are looking for things, even trivial, fake things, to object to so that they can object. It's like Captain Sobel in the 101st Airborne training in the series Band of Brothers -- "find some" infractions so that can complain about them and force the soldiers to accept being falsely accused so that they will be more compliant -- the police seem to have borrowed this tactic.

If the citizen does not look submissive, then the officer provokes a defensive reaction from the citizen so that they can arrest the citizen or threaten to arrest them.

Then, finally, maybe arrested, the citizen has been subdued and is submissive, which is what the police wanted to begin with.

(2) The police like to teach citizens, to change their attitude, and do this by hurting them, e.g., hitting them with a club, bending their arms, throwing them to the ground and putting a knee on their neck, spraying them with pepper spray, etc. They regard good police work as meting out "cruel and unusual punishment", with pain and maybe serious injury, without "due process". So, the police want to be absolute dictators on the streets.

(3) In a confrontation with a citizen, the police want some result where they successfully took some law enforcement action, a ticket or an arrest. E.g., in Atlanta, at first they didn't want merely to leave the citizen alone or, if the citizen was drunk, let him call a cab and (ii) later wanted to make sure the citizen was not able just to run away. The reaction to a citizen running away?

"Shoot them and kill them. Gee, they might 'get away'; can't permit that; that would violate due respect for the police; so, shoot the citizen." -- or some such.

(4) The expected, usual approach to an arrest is to throw the citizen to the ground, hold them down with a knee to their neck, their arms behind their back, and put on handcuffs.

From the 100 or so videos I watched, it appeared that (1)-(4) are so standard that they have been taught from some standard source. E.g., in all of that, some semi-bright guy had the idea that it was good to put a knee on a neck, and it appears that that is now standard.

Apparently part of (1)-(4) is the associated support for it from the Blue Line, e.g., police unions, Police Benevolent Associations, liability insurance cities buy for their police, the norm of police sticking together, local prosecutors, DAs, and judges who work daily with police and want to cooperate, politicians who want safe streets, etc. And at times maybe there has been more to police power, e.g., confiscating cash, shakedowns, payoffs, etc.

I'm sure that changing (1)-(4) can be done but won't be easy.

I sure am tired of hearing about "the fundamental flaw" in empowering people. What you describe is not a flaw in empowerment, it's a flaw in their business model, and it's one that can that be fixed (i.e. "innovate a better business model"). Can we stop propagating the idea that people who do not want to use their limited bandwidth and processing power to rasterize someone else's advertising are somehow "flawed"?

The only thing more insane than blaming users for having self-interest are the people who pretend that Facebook et al. are somehow owed the business model they have, painting ad-blockers as some kind of dangerous society-destabilizing technology instead of the commonsense response to shitty business practices it clearly is.

How many people opt-out of this kind of culture and become self-employed?

The theory of specialization and collaboration increasing productivity is fine, but look at all of the time lost for this nonsense. Imagine paying the salaries of these disaffected employees as they Svejk their way through the workday.

Think of the overhead for the office space, medical and paid leave for all of these people. I also wonder about the value of those who are compliant and obedient. Not sure that those qualities go hand in hand with innovation and critical thinking.

Solo-entrepreneurship limits the kinds of problems you can solve, but the ones you do select can be low maintenance, passive income situations. After building up a portfolio like this, there is no need to build resumes, learn buzzwords or tolerate the nonsense described in this article. Your surplus of free time can be invested in creating more revenue streams.

The problem there is that '10k+' "engineers" are trying to make the same 'photo, video, post and message-sharing website'.

It's a structural problem and little more: the website (and app) is their main money-maker, so they're going to give it a disproportionate amount of resources.

Imagine you hire ten thousand people to lay one railroad track. [note; see end of post] If any single one of them doesn't contribute directly in some way, you'll fire them. This seems kind of strange, doesn't it? Sure, it probably requires more than a single person to lay a track. But ten thousand people to lay one? How is that supposed to work, mechanically? This would be enough to warrant shareholder revolt.

Now, the railroad track gets broken a few hundred times, maybe they hammer it enough to make it twice as long, whatever. It now no longer resembles a railroad track. Certainly no train could go across it. Send a few hundred people to go ask the managers of this project for a replacement track. Okay, we're now at...maybe a tenth of people having contributed? Repeat this process until everyone's contributed. Maybe the manager gives different groups different materials for the track to fuck with them, whatever. But somehow, every single person manages to not get fired.

What's the outcome look like? You have a single railroad track, probably not even well-fit for the job (sparks fly whenever trains run on it; maybe it causes them to tilt, so on), but it's laid! And ten thousand people are employed!

It's the same thing with a website. You can't put a terabyte onto a user's device every single time they load your website; you just can't. So you have a window of performance you have to hit. Between ten thousand people trying to have things thrown onto user devices? Good luck making anything resembling 'decent'.

It's the same problem that Dave Zarzycki noted in his talk about launchd[1], but worse. Instead of 512 megabytes shared between some random abstract parties you can basically ignore, it's <10MB shared between ten thousand coders, translators, graphic designers, users, managers, etc. Does something seem strange about this?

[note]: This is the appropriate comparison here; at the scale of 'Over ten thousand people working on one program', it's grunt work, not art, science, or even programming. There's a word for implementation-grunts that's fallen out of favor in the past few decades: coders. This was seen as distinct until recently.

[1] https://youtu.be/SjrtySM9Dns?t=255

I've noticed a fairly big distinction in what I learned as science and the philosophy of science as it was practiced up until around the last 20 years or so and now.

Science was based on rigorous falsification. Scientists actively tried to prove themselves and other scientists wrong. Science has always been more about, 'well we know it's not all of these things, so it's probably that until we prove that wrong too'.

Sometime in the last couple decades, it's stopped being like that. Instead it's, 'my models and data say this, so it is this and everything else is wrong'.

Science at this point is really only authority driven because journals and even governments charge exorbitant prices for access to them, cutting out a vast majority of the population from actually partaking in any part of the scientific process.

When all you get is contradictory news reports on a handful of selected research from journalists that barely understand what they're reading, you're going to be stuck with an elitist authority driven system.

There's zero reason for this in todays world other than control and profit. Even within the scientific community, there's 'caste' systems, financial guardianship and other such barriers, keeping again, many people from learning and partaking.

Science isn't hard, it isn't magic, it's a systematic way of looking at the world through observation and falsification. That is all science is. Anyone can do science. I've taken groups of kids, volunteers and many people and in short time, taught them to do science.

It's just people don't really get taught to do this. It's easier to control a population that's trickled information through 'authoritative' sources than it is one that's educated and capable of thinking for themselves.

This is stuff I was literally taught in school, by other scientists. Like, we were actually taught that most people need to be given only the information they need to know, because essentially they're too dumb to understand and scientists should just run things in the world. I'm not making this up, we were actually told this by several of our professors.

There are a whole bunch of people who do not qualify for any benefits, have little savings, and are blocked from going to work.

In a recent press conference, New York Governor Cuomo failed to provide any reasonable response to a reporter when asked about someone in a very similar situation (the person qualified for benefits, but checks have not arrived).

What is to happen to these people? Is the lockdown to protect them from something truly worse than not being able to buy food?

Anyone care to address this single point without going off-topic?

I'm fairly certain that a lot (if not most) regular tracking can be avoided today. Sure, you can never know for certain what exactly you are leaking and what not and total anonymity is pretty much impossible. But I dare say, most tracking is probably low-effort and can be circumvented (especially if you are technically inclined). So your picture of the world may be your reality but certainly not everyone's.

But apart from that, even if the world was really on fire in terms of privacy, it would still not be an excuse to shrug everything off and "give up already". You wouldn't sign off your rights and shut up just because everyone else does, right?

I agree, harassing developers for including telemetry in their programs is absolutely disgusting and not the right way to push privacy. And usually the best response to terms you don't like is to just not agree to them and not use the app.

But in this case, I think it's a bit far-fetched: The dotnet SDK (for instance) is not overly complex (as in: the CLI; crash reports are a different topic), has a nice public GitHub repo and is only used by developers who, if they don't like something, probably know how to file an issue on said GitHub repo. So why does it need telemetry? I don't know what's going on in the dotnet team and maybe there's a good reason behind this choice but from my POV it just seems like it's unnecessarily shutting people who disagree with it out of .NET. And I think this is kind of an injustice to .NET as well (since - and I can not stress this enough - it is really good!)

Alright, </rant>. I'm not angry but "popular apps" (let's just call it that) have largely become a minefield for me, so I just avoid most of them. It's kinda sad that developer tooling is now also shifting in that direction.

Ideology may set rough attractors and no-go areas, but it's naive to think that our current battle lines have been drawn by individuals independently pondering their own positions.

At a deep level, our experience of reality has become wholly moderated by mass media. Reds and Blues are watching different channels, and thereby experiencing different realities. It's as simple as that.

Nonconformance to a media narrative is punished by all, in a distributed fashion. If you express an independent point in a Blue flavor, you will be attacked by both the ever-present Reds as well fellow Blues for breaking rank (and vice-versa, obviously).

Even this comment itself would be better if I tied in some basic examples. But they would inherently reflect my own filter bubble, opening my point up to partisan scrutiny looking to reject self-reflection xor continue caricaturizing the others.

I'm having similar issues, and i think i found a way out: stop playing their game. Don't make enterprise software. Don't write unit tests. Don't accept pull requests. Simply write software for yourself and have fun doing it. Forget refactoring code into modules, just fucking code. Don't worry about deployment with k8s, just copy the Python script to your production folder and run it. Fuck all that shit about git branch naming conventions, or how you're supposed to use an object factory, just do whatever you want in the moment, bit by bit, until your software works most of the time then use it. Forget configuration, just hard code values for now. Don't worry about documentation, just do it.

Your expectations, and the expectations of others, are your enemy here.

At least, that's what got me out it. I'm still disillusioned with the world but it's manageable if I can realize I'm making a difference to my son and wife every day, and that's what counts for me.

The reason is they've been stealing games since 1997 with UO, that was the plan. For those of us who remember kali and kahn IPX emulation over the early internet that allowed us to play warcraft 2, doom, descent, duke 3d, etc.

The internet changed the incentives because it made it trivial to steal software en masse from the public by client-servering it, and therefore there is no incentive to make high risk high definition games with lots of content when you can make low risk multiplayer games with tonnes of microtransactions.

That's what killed dedicated servers, once stupid kids started paying for skins in game or mounts in wow, that killed any incentive for game devs and publishers to make software we owned and controlled.

You have to see the internet is one giant world sized PC, two or more networked computers behave as a single machine.

So they see us as dumb terminals they can put in game/in app stores on every persons device in the world.

That was the whole plan from the beginning, to get rid of software ownership by holding back game and app files since most people are ignorant to how computers work.

They even have industry meetings about how stupid the public is:

https://tifca.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/ClienttoCloud_V...

They always wanted to take control of customers PC's and reprogram them to obey them and they have done that with Steam, mmo's (aka rebranded RPG's with a subscription and non ownership).

That's why we have uplay, origin, steam, etc.

The last 20 years has been the public committing suicide on software ownership and I've watched in horror as everyone, even my fellow nerds falling for this scam which was all part of conspiracy to take control of your computing device.

The tech industry's long term goal was to move us to an authoritarian model of computing device ownership where you no longer control the files or OS or device. That's what mobile was about.

Microsoft and the industry want to do that to the PC and windows 10 is their first version of the OS to turn the PC into a locked down platform like mobile.

The keyword is "premature".

The whole silly meme of "premature optimization is the root of all evil" is a 100% useless statement. Of course, you shouldn't do it yet if it's premature- that's the definition of premature.

But if it's almost the same amount of effort to write faster code from the get go- especially if you KNOW the code will be speed-sensitive, then you should absolutely try to do the fast thing over the slow thing. That seems obvious...

I guess if this were the 1500s YouTube would only have us post videos that confirm that witches and heretics should be burned at the stake. Maybe it would be okay to talk about a few more crusades.

Mankind improves because systems become big, rigid, and unable to evolve. People come along and point that out, suggesting various theories about how those systems got that way, the reasons why they are wrong, and offering suggestions for improvement.

It needs to be said that 99% of the time, these people are wrong. They're emotionally ill, they don't understand the situation, they have perhaps virulent and insidious ideologies that blind them to reality. These are exactly the people you want in the public square. They teach the youth about critical thinking and how to reason about your view of the world. They let the rest of us keep an eye on them in case they get violent. Plus, many of them are just happy to yell into the void; without that, there would be a lot more violence than there would be otherwise.

But every 1% of the time, those folks are actually right. Slowly they convince the rest of us. Our species improves.

YouTube can't do this. Whatever their intentions, they are directly acting against the health of our species by creating a new orthodoxy. They have to be stopped, whether broken up, taxed, or banned. It's not that the WHO is wrong here. They're probably right. It's that YouTube is making it so that the WHO can never be wrong, ie, we can never have a public discussion about their policies. Worse still, history has shown us that when you start going down this route you are actually acting against your society's interest. People treated as if they can't think for themselves turn into a population that can't think for itself. The WHO is fine, it's YouTube that has become the real enemy to public health by doing this.

I see lots of evidence that this is going to be an ongoing situation for the next several years. There are a few likely outcomes depending on the scientific outcome and the country:

1. We could invent a vaccine and discover that COVID mutates slowly enough that we get long term immunity. After mass vaccination in rich countries, the problem is basically solved after 1-2 years and life can go back to what it was in 2019. However, after 2 years of changed consumer habits and a set of companies and supply chains that will naturally adapt to the situation in the interim, the new normal might be significantly different than the old normal. Governments and international trade will have been changed. Investments in automation and telework will have been made. Some changes will be permanent. Like with WW2, 9/11 or the Great Recession, the ripples of causality will spread out for decades.

2. We could realize that the virus mutates fast enough that even with vaccines, we have a new endemic virus, possibly resembling the prevalence of the flu, but much more deadly. COVID will be one of the leading causes of death, up along with heart disease and cancer. People accept this increase in mortality and accept shortened lifespans. After several years of adjusting to the new reality, people start to just live with it. Some common activities completely lose their appeal due to the increased risk, such as theaters, concerts, travel, public transportation, and open offices.

3. We are unable to vaccinate against the virus, but continue aggressive measures to keep it from spreading a much as possible. We accept a new form of digital surveillance state that keeps us the goldilocks amount of isolated. We accept the new reality of algorithms determining our ability to live, work, and socialize. Life is increasingly lived digitally and in VR.

I think it's important to consider these possibilities because of the Normalcy Bias. The best way to overcome it to to seriously consider that tomorrow will not at all be like today. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalcy_bias