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@dang Stop rate limiting my account. Please calm down. Thanks.
For those not in the know, if you post a few comments on HN that go against the hivemind (or a mod takes issue with it), you will get ratelimited (banned) with the message "You're posting too fast. Please slow down. Thanks."
This toxic behavior turns HN into an echo chamber.
If you think this edit is spammy, then blame dang for not letting me post new replies but still letting me edit old ones. Time for a new account.
This is reminiscent of my previous struggles with cyclothymia[1], for example. Furthermore, the perception of impending calamity was contributing to the stress and worsened the symptoms further. (I wonder if there is an analogy to be drawn here as well, but I suspect this part is much less generalizable.)
At the same time, it makes sense for people to have heightened awareness of "the bad times": each cycle represents added stress to the system, and with a heightened probability of calamity (eg. becoming insolvent / suffering a mental health emergency).
[1] https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/17788-cycloth...
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euler%27s_formula#Relationship...
In your version pretty much any internet disagreement is gaslighting.
You cannot determine or know ill intent, so it's not really helpful as a property.
> In your version pretty much any internet disagreement is gaslighting.
Disagreement alone does not suffice. You need to tell the other person that what they see is not real and/or that they imagine things. But as I said, it's a bit exaggerated, however it's not so farfetched either.
You're clearly still trying to change the definition and are still ignoring that gaslighting itself requires negative manipulation. From wikipedia, these actions are easy to identify:
>Obfuscation: deliberately muddying or overcomplicating an issue.
>Withholding: pretending not to understand the victim.
>Countering: vehemently calling into question a victim's memory despite the victim having remembered things correctly.
>Blocking and diverting: diverting a conversation from the subject matter to questioning the victim's thoughts and controlling the conversation.
>Trivializing: making the victim believe his or her thoughts or needs are unimportant.
>Forgetting and denial: pretending to forget things that have really occurred. The abuser may deny or delay things like promises that are important to the victim. Although anyone can deny or delay, the gaslighter does it regularly in the absence of real external limitations. The gaslighter may make up or create artificial barriers to allow themselves to deny or delay that which is important to the victim.
Telling someone who asked for feedback, in earnest that you think their perceptions are wrong is not in any way gaslighting.
Gaslighting probably isn't an exact answer, but it's dismissive enough to be close. Hand-waving it as "rosy retrospection". Telling OP to measure things they actually do seem to be measuring.
There could be a name for this exact sort of "You're not really paying attention to everything you're obviously really paying attention to" dismissiveness, and if the churn of language lands on "gaslighting, definition c", I don't have much argument against it.
And when compared to the present, media narrative driven present its hard to see the improvements happening across the global population.
It helps me put stuff in perspective - of course mileage may var (and maybe it's just helping me delude myself into getting out a funk but it works!).
[1] Hans Rosling's 200 Countries, 200 Years, 4 Minutes - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbkSRLYSojo
[2] See how the rest of the world lives, organized by income - Anna Rosling Rönnlund https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4L130DkdOw
In 2022, we:
- Reversed organ death in pigs
- Made the first embryo from stem cells
- Made a pan-influenza vaccine
- Saw the beginning of time
- Got best-ever results from cancer & obesity therapy trials
- Maybe cracked the case of multiple sclerosis
From: https://twitter.com/DKThomp/status/1600864770751860737 (https://archive.is/pi95L)
Researchers want to slightly oversell their discoveries, and the media wants to misunderstand to oversell them even more. Humbug 9 times out of 10.
Yep, and they were clear that this was not ignition.
https://cleantechnica.com/2021/11/09/breaking-news-fusion-re...
So a order of magnitude larger output power promised... except when you count total input power and reasonable heat engine efficiencies (if installing one had been planned), it's unlikely they would even get more power out than in !
But then, the very same month I was also made aware of SP(ARC), which is revolutionary because it can (in theory) afford to be so much smaller than ITER (which is ridiculously large and therefore expensive in a super linear way) :
https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/10/smaller-more-efficie...
Why can't we do something about the genocide of young black men that is being committed by young black men, for example?
Are you talking about a specific country in Africa? If so, what do you propose? Should we send US military to force a regime change? Because that worked so well in Afghanistan, right?
Our crime statistics show the greatest threat to a young black male is another young black male. Look at the Chicago shooting stats every weekend.
Dig deep into gun deaths and you will see that is young men if color shooting andurdering each other in gang and criminal contexts that accounts for most of the deaths.
And yet the media can only rise to care about gun deaths when it is white children being murdered. That shows their real values.
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https:/...
Call it whatever you like, but acknowledge that this is horrific.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/251877/murder-victims-in...
I have zero sympathy for criminals who're killing each other. Have you tried comparing murder rates of innocent non-violent civilians across different races?
And the greatest threat to a young white male is another young white male. Does that mean that there's a genocide of white men by white men?
More black men are murdered than white men as an absolute count, which is horrific considering that whites outnumber blacks by at least 4:1.
Is it more racist to not talk about black on black violence, or to address it directly? Refusing to acknowledge the issue so we can tailor policy to save black lives is white privilege exemplified.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/251877/murder-victims-in...
Murder is bad.
If black people are murdered out of proportion to all other races, by a wide margin, that's something that needs to be investigated.
Down vote me racists.
I resent the Taliban for depriving of the right of women to receive eductaion, but that doesn't mean I support meddling in other countries' internal affairs. Believe in Afghanistan will generate an enlightened regime in the future.
eg: something like 99.95% of the planet (all but 1-2 Million) have 0 or near 0 benefit from most of those findings (save for maybe the vaccine). But important things are going away -- treating people well, having happy lives, justice and being treated fairly. It's not a good tradeoff IMO.
I think that depends a lot on where you live and what you look like relative to those around you. I wouldn’t think black citizens in the US in the 1950s would agree with what you’re saying. An Asian coworker of mine said he always thought it would be interesting to go back in time and live for a little bit in the 1940s, but every time he thinks that he has to remind himself what they did to Asians in the 1940s here in the US.[0]
I do think that tech (particularly social media) has amplified a lot of the bad social behavior that people have always had. I don’t think there’s more of it, just that it’s gotten louder. Someone who could only be an asshole to the people around them can now go online and be an asshole to millions of people around the world at once.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment_of_Japanese_America...
This is not the right way to evaluate the benefits of science. This is the year those advancements start having an affect. The same thing was true about microchips the year they were invented, and about radioactivity, and even about the health benefits of washing hands and drinking clean water. All scientific discoveries are an investment in the future, and those four I just mentioned have at this point touched nearly every single person on the planet, just like the above list may well do in the future.
There isn’t strong evidence that the things you mentioned are actually going away, why do you believe it’s true? Women and minorities are getting more justice and fair treatment than they have in the past. People treating each other well is subjective, and it’s arguable how well they ever did in the past. But murder, violent crime, property crime and hate crime rates have all gone down for the past ~40 years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_the_United_States Happiness is also subjective, but take a look at the Human Development Index and note how all 66 countries in the list on this page have a positive year-over-year growth rate. All of them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Development_Index
Sorry, I'm not buying it anymore. More than likely, none of that is going to help me or anyone I know from struggling just a little more each year.
Another angle is if I struggle and work hard, what rewards accrue to others, and what do I get in return? The ROI on effort seems to be dwindling cause fakes are crowding out the real hard workers. And the buyers (ie wealthy investors) cant seem to tell the difference between expertise and bald faced lies. (I blame social media and rise of influencers for this, a bunch of fancy graphics and a iphone and now you know the 1 real secret the life long scientists have been holding back to our fatloss/clear pores/million dollar a month business).. Then again it was the missteps of institutions that even gave influencers their chance (a little lack of integrity ruins it for all)
From the distribution chart it seems most of the US stock market is owned via IRAs/401Ks/defined benefits and insurance versus individual accounts. [1]
Those evil corporate landlords that drive up rents? Well, likely they are acting on behalf of former hardworking teachers of Canada. Sure there is skimming involved but a bulk is going toward to teacher's retirement. [2]
Of course mileage may vary whether this helps how one feels.
[1] https://i.insider.com/5746013852bcd044008c527e?width=1200for...
[2] Why Canada’s Teachers Run an Investment Firm in Singapore https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7HXcT_xlLB0
As the meme goes, ¿Porque no lo dos?
Sure tech progress is cool, but it's hard to care when I feel more isolated from my community than ever, the world feels "angry", and in many important ways my life feels much worse off than just a few years ago.
The meme about "but living standards doubling every X years!" is little comfort when you can't feel any of those impacts - not to mention that the material is scarcely the only thing that matters for human happiness.
Most of the HN audience is likely at self-actualization stage where its going to be hard for society to help double life standards when every one's such standard is decided in such a deeply personal way for each individual. [1] It's also going to be really hard to measure progress on this front at a societal level.
[1] The importance of Maslow's hierarchy of needs
https://www.theschooloflife.com/article/the-importance-of-ma...
But. The past 5+ years have not been kind to the general arc of progress, particularly in already-developed countries in the West, and the US most of all. There has been genuine, real backsliding across the board on a variety of measures. And it's important to acknowledge that, too.
Here's the link to view the photos by income:
Compared with historical photos, the narrower scope of dollar-street photos might be less fun? Or not - it's a richly textured image set. Deep linking the dollar-tree site could give richer follow-up context. Perhaps paired guesses of income and location, might quickly teach their relative salience?
[1] https://www.gapminder.org/dollar-street/about? [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34559867
This one is wrong. If this were the SNES era to play 50 games the best you could do is rent for $3 to play for a couple nights. That's $150 (more like $300 in today's dollars) which is more than they paid for unlimited access to the games. To match that they'd have not much choice other than retail for $50 a pop, $2,500 for all of them, or $5,000 in today's dollars. Used for maybe half that with effort.
HBO was more expensive when it launched in the 80s and that doesn't count the base cable subscription fee. I pay much less for the 2-3 streaming services that I use than my parents paid for cable when I was growing up. That alone is undeniably better. Plus you can do things like buy any Disney DVD used for $2 pop plus a flat $3 shipping on ebay. No way that happens in the VCR days. Not to mention that used DVD players are practically free vs a couple hundred for a vcr player.
I guess I feel shafted paying $5 a month to get b list games for only so long as I keep paying $5 a month in perpetuity. The eventual sum of this is approaching infinity or something like 1500-2000 for my remaining life expectancy.
Versus on steam you can sometimes buy great games for $10-20, albeit your betting steam will exist in the future to distribute the game to you.
That's not something you can do away with seeing the past in a more rosy way. Because in the past people had to interact to get through life.
The most important thing for socialization is to just have physical proximity to other people in shared spaces, be that a park, office, school, club, etc. If anything, social media is just enabling people to sit in their boxes longer while still getting some form of socialization.
Explain this then: https://www.thelocal.se/20230127/ten-terrifying-stats-about-...
Numbers talk. At least here in sweden rich are richer and everyone else is poorer.
Actually, the fact that people are supposed to pretend things are OK, while everyone over there is possibly a few steps away from being drafted into war, is another sign that things have headed in the wrong direction in exactly the manner OP is suggesting.
You need a backbone of experienced military professional and infrastructure to do that ( eg : France used to have a lot of military center to host / train people. Those have been abandoned in the late 90s )
Why do you think so? Might be different in Eastern Europe, but as a Central European I think it’s quite unlikely that a direct conflict is going to happen.
Nobody in UK discourse is talking about conscription. Mind you, UK political discourse has gone increasingly off the rails with trying not to deal with corruption and incompetence of Tories.
Read [1] recently and it paints an bleaker picture than some other analyses.
https://www.russiamatters.org/analysis/whats-ahead-war-ukrai...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=deK98IeTjfY
It's a video essay on ammunition stockpiles on Ukraine and Russia by the youtuber Perun. It doesn't paint a rosy picture per se, but it does directly refute at least a few of the points made by the author of the RM blog you linked.
Hackernews is approaching the topic in a very characteristic way but depression is an important phenomenon that manifests to the individual as, among other things, worsening negative appraisals of everything. So do the consequences of poor fiscal and monetary policy. Funny how we use the same word for both.
Not really, no.
Don't get me wrong, 5 years ago I was in the UK, I moved to Berlin towards the end of 2018. Visiting the UK again last December… it felt very broken.
But it was the same kind of broken that I saw in Portsmouth when I was a child.
Landlords being greedy? Sure. That's one of the things Marx and (from what little I've read of him) Adam Smith agreed on.
People are loud? I'm remembering a neighbour in my mid-terrace place in Sheffield in 2009-10, the husband and wife yelled at each other every night loud enough I could hear the words. I'm remembering a biker housemate in Cambridge who openly discussed the motorcycles with illegal loud exhausts. I'm remembering the stories in my childhood about illegal raves being shut down.
Worker apathy, that's hard to gauge. Could therefore believe it if it came with evidence stronger than an anecdote.
Software development looks like it's much the same combination of fads, technical debt, and Peter Principles as it ever was. But that's anecdotes, the proof is in the pudding, and everything is more stable and less crashy than I remember — while I think that Apple's UI peaked a decade ago, that's mainly because I am deeply nostalgic for skeuomorphic UI.
Subscription models: well, if you don't like them, don't get them. We're getting Netflix for one month of the year because that's enough to watch what we want, and there's plenty of others with different stuff we can watch later.
I'm not going to get a Photoshop subscription, but I did buy Pixelmator, and if that hadn't existed I'd have used GIMP.
The police? BLM started in 2013, the word "woke" originated in 1938 in the lyrics to a song about racial injustice in the legal system.
I have become very cynical about the legal system as a whole, but for very different reasons: if you were fully enforce all the traffic laws the only people who would be allowed to drive would be people like me who don't, if you fully enforced the drug laws you'd bankrupt whichever country you were in, and so on. But none of this is new, as evidenced by Sir Patrick Stewart's stories about his father.
For rich grifters, I suggest Robert Maxwell. He's… mostly forgotten. Fraudsters often are, so the question should be: what's the fraud rate in your country?
Everything is poison? I grew up with acid rain (solved), a hole in the ozone layer (getting better), indoor public smoking (banned in the UK, doesn't seem to be here in Berlin), asbestos (banned), and leaded petrol (banned).
Do we still have problems? I assume so! But they don't appear to be worse, rather they appear to be milder.
But now you have to worry about plastics in your food, leaching of chemicals from batteries that power new technology, depression and suicide, resulting from social media (especially amongst young children and teens), loss of privacy due to technological devices, dangerous side effects from new drugs that are pushed and marketed onto the public, dangerous chemicals and metals found in modern vaping devices, reduced quality of life due to income stagnation and exorbitant real estate prices, etc
Loss of privacy concerns me. Most people seem happy to over-share, presumably because the thing also allows more connections with more niche interests than most people can name.
Dangerous side effects of drugs? I remember seeing thalidomide victims in my local mall. We're a lot more cautious these days because of things like that.
Vaping is an odd thing to have a moral panic about, as the alternative for many people is to set fire to a tube of things known to produce carcinogenic smoke, and stick it in their mouth.
Stagnant quality of life is by definition not getting worse.
Exorbitant real estate prices are the only thing where I agree with you they're a genuine concern for the average Millennial and post-Millennial.
https://www.cdc.gov/suicide/suicide-data-statistics.html
“A "vape," or electronic cigarette, is a device that heats up a liquid to create a vapor you inhale.”
https://www.webmd.com/connect-to-care/vaping/what-is-vaping
What liquid? I know what tobacco is, but I don’t know what a “liquid” is. It could be anything and many of them contain dangerous metals, fragrances, and other mysterious chemicals. Hardly an improvement over cigarettes.
Stagnant wages over time, while they may have the same numeric value, result in far less purchasing power due to inflation.
Ridiculous real estate values are a concern for every generation.
> What liquid? I know what tobacco is, but I don’t know what a “liquid” is. It could be anything and many of them contain dangerous metals, fragrances, and other mysterious chemicals. Hardly an improvement over cigarettes.
Do you really know what tobacco is? Or do you take the mental shortcut that most people necessarily have to take with organic chemistry and mentally categorise "tobacco" as one single monolithic thing?
"""Of the more than 7,000 chemicals in tobacco smoke, at least 250 are known to be harmful, including hydrogen cyanide, carbon monoxide, and ammonia.
Among the 250 known harmful chemicals in tobacco smoke, at least 69 can cause cancer.""" - https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/t...
Combining:
> In US, suicide rates increased 36% between 2000-2018 and declined 5% between 2018-2020
With:
> Stagnant wages over time, while they may have the same numeric value, result in far less purchasing power due to inflation.
Yields some combination of:
There was significant nominal growth in incomes in that group (USA) in those period (both 2000-2018 and -2020, only a brief dip in 2020 and more growth since then but that's beyond the scope of what I'm responding to here), it was only stagnant after compensating for inflation — and then mostly in the poorer half (which I'd say is really bad because I'm European and therefore so left-wing I think the Democrats are dangerously right-wing).
And:
The worldwide suicide rate didn't follow the USA's, and is down by about a third in that period: https://ourworldindata.org/suicide — This graph also doesn't support the CDC percentages you quoted, because it's saying USA +10% over the same period they're saying +36%. (I wonder what the difference is?)
And:
Worldwide income per capita, at purchasing power parity, almost doubled from 7.954 PPP dollars in 2000 to 17.038 PPP dollars in 2020.
I can't begin to believe you're not trolling here. Seriously. "Everything" is more stable ?
Pick a random every-day operation ("rent an hotel", "book a flight", "pay your taxes", "order a pizza", etc...). We'll go to the first website that will come out of a google search, and try to follow the process from start to finish using a modern browser on a modern OS of a modern computer.
I bet we'll get at least 3 to 5 bugs (either in page loading, some server crashing, some page layout issue, some text display, some translation, some form field validation, some form submission, some confirmation email not being sent, etc...)
The most charitable view I can have is that software is "as bad as it ever was, but there is now new kind of bad software that lets you badly do things that were not possible in the past". But claiming an "improvement", especially in stability, seems like a stretch.
There was a distant time where those operations were done by calling a human being on the phone. Those were awkward conversations to have, and there were "bugs" in those too - but human interactions had had a few thousand years to iron out those bugs.
As a software engineer bringing my own set of (hopefully not too buggy and moderately useful) software into the world - I seriously miss those days.
I have literally never had any of those crash, which is what I was writing about.
> some page layout issue, some text display, some translation
Almost certainly on some of them, but that's not what I was talking about.
I have, 4.5 years ago, had an airline not understand how a + before the @ works in an email address. But it didn't crash.
And Ryanair's app and website sucks, but it didn't crash on me.
Booking hotels is reliable enough I've done a 1000 km cycle ride where I booked each hotel en route 2-3 hours before arriving because I didn't know which village or city I would reach before that point.
Taxes I can no longer do online because the UK won't let me do their bit online now I live abroad and I don't trust my understanding of German tax terminology for the other bit so I have an agent, but that's a legal issue not a website limit, and I can't remember ever having had a problem with HMRC online.
Likewise, the biggest problem I've ever had with buying a travel pass digitally was 5.5 years ago, because BVG didn't support iPad (not a typo, my phone was a Blackberry and I had an iPad).
I grew up with "System Error Type 11 (Restart)" on a weekly basis; nothing like that happens any more.
This probably explains why we don't understand each other.
I grew up with fairly crashy stuff too, don't get me wrong. I ordered stuff on a Minitel, for heck sake.
However, I suspect the fact we're old timers makes it even harder to sympathize with "normal people" confronted with unstable systems.
Because, a page not displaying properly on your phone, a form not liking your first name because it has a hyphen, a website suddenly switching to Spanish for half its content, a email that says "you'll soon receive " before not receiving anything, the message received in batch of 10 explaining that your subscription will now be "${sub}€", etc... All those things (that I literally encountered _this weekend_, on systems developped by big corporations and / or public service platforms): we hackers call them "annoyances" ; fancy people call them "bugs".
Real people call them "stuff that does not work".
And when your are forced, by law, to use stuff that does not work because the software got all the funding, and people are too expensive, then, some real people call it "barbary".
It's "death by a thousand cuts", for sure, in a world where so many die by actual bullets. So maybe it does not warrant a violent uprising.
But you'd be surprised how much I hear it contributing to the overall anger - being the rich "computer guy" trying to help the real people navigating this.
That being said, some things are far better now and other things have gotten worse. Our social isolation and self-imposed echo chambers are the primary cause from what I can tell.
I've noticed the doomsday type of rhetoric as well. I really just don't see how people can keep eating this stuff up and not get tired of it.
None of this resonates with you on a personal level?
Just personally, when my family and I came over from India, roughly twenty-five years ago, we could only afford to call our relatives in the home country once every other month, for five to ten minutes at a time. And, on half of those phone calls, the line would be too noisy to actually hear or make out anything from the other end. Today, my mom (in the US) and my grandmother (in India) speak for anywhere between ten minutes and two hours, every day, in high resolution video. No, things haven't gotten worse. We might not have gotten flying cars, but we did get videophones, and that's pretty cool.
It's not absolutely most rational point, survivor bias and all, but it does have a point about not being excessively negative/anxious.
Loud motorbikes weren't invented last year, and crime isn't higher today than it was 20 years ago.
"You're just imagining it bro" is a rationalisation that lets people cling on to the Eternal Progress narrative.
But just seriously watch leave it to beaver and then watch any modern tv show and compare the "disrespect". Even if people have been saying "kids these days" for 1000 years, that does NOT mean things haven't been changing for 1000 years for the worse.
And don't even get me started on architecture. There's no rosy colored glasses there. Contemporary five over ones are abominable.
And even for people who did live the best possible situation of 1965, we are no longer poisoning everyone with lead and asbestos in the way we were back then. As well as many things we consider absolute requirements like air conditioning being considered an optional luxury back then.
Who did the lifting?
Over the last 5 years, wealth distribution, general wellness, world order, SW reliability have all declined. There are data points for some of those items but no all of course.
For SW reliability, I include: buggy websites, product requiring cloud access making them intrinsically less reliable and less trustworthy, the services needlessly requiring authentication making credential theft wide spread and spam/scam campaigns more likely to succeed, companies pulling the rug under paying customers feet, dark patterns...
I think a major component to societal decline can be linked to the effects of social media and ill willed corporate and consumerist influence on everything around us, coupled with the on-going social and economic conflicts (war etc) being driven by egotistical personalities that have also been an enduring problem worldwide.
As the Internet grows, greed and ego are consuming resources that were previously share across many prior... There is only the illusion of success played out by people (many of them are trust-fund-driven nepo-babies), as web sites. social and dating apps. and many other prominent online schemes are now simply lottery games that rarely pay out even after years of careful participation. Our ability to climb economically is under great threat by greed of far more wealthy people than us.
The future looks grim as long as we keep letting the wrong greedy personalities win... We really need to stop giving that a pass.
If you really want to know if everything is declining, try measure it everyday for the next five years. For example, every day, rate your personal well being, track how (un)happy you are with the current software, how much you pay to your landlords and subscriptions, how many mistakes the police makes, the weather, everything, ... After 5 years you'll have a good idea if things actually got worse than they are now. Sure, some things will get worse, but definitely not everything, and some things will even be better than they are now.