_dibly

I'm almost two years into self-employment and I'm wondering when I'm going to either stop cutting myself on things or land a position with some people who can show me their cool scars for a while.

This forum is the closest thing I get to coworkers and I don't even understand what half of you are saying. I'm fortunate for the opportunities that I have, but my antisocial tendencies and lack of professional peers can make progress a bit of a bear on occasion.

>I make full use of curated feeds, and make sure my feed has a good signal to noise ratio. The ADs are annoying, but I would rather trade my data for them.

I just don't think that is a sustainable position with the way things are moving. If anything, this is the direction social media is moving away from. Feeds are increasingly curated by the user's browsing behaviors and and not their conscious decisions. Data is only becoming more valuable as more people make the choice to trade theirs away with no real thought about the long-term effects of colossal repositories of complex user data and very little regulation in place to restrict their use.

Not to say that it isn't possible to make social media work for you. I just continue to wonder what the threshold is where users won't be comfortable leveraging their personal data for convenience.

Where I live, the $300 from the federal gov’t continues until early September but the $300 from the state ends this month, I could be wrong but I assume it’s going to differ moderately from state to state.

At any rate, a lot of people I know that quit have already found or started looking for a different job. Most people aren’t looking to keep living off the system so much as they are looking to find a job that doesn’t pay them _and_ treat them like dirt. Social services companies around here are literally offering $1000+ referrals because they can’t keep group homes staffed or run any community interactions. I think it’s pretty clear at this point that it’s not just about the handouts, it’s about people realizing how atrocious their working conditions were and not wanting to put up with it anymore.

I feel like a lot of time was spent convincing the reader that instant games are the future and not explaining the benefits and potential shortcomings of the area. A significant amount of the article is filling in background information. I didn’t need two pages on why Apple and Steve Jobs are the worst thing to happen to instant games, the explanation of how flash games were once monetized, or a rundown of all the different ways that they (or indeed any digital service in the modern day) could become profitable.

The article starts with a point that there is a huge spectrum between the arcade-style instant game and modern “full” games but then never really addresses that gap. They highlight that these games can be on a maintained third-party streaming service but then go on to focus mainly on browser games and make points that don’t even apply tangentially to things like Game Pass or PlayStation Now.

From reading the article it seems like the job areas getting hit the hardest would be low level hospitality jobs and on-site jobs with little to no remote opportunity. I imagine those would be the hardest positions to outsource. People quitting their job at McDonalds are in more danger of losing their job to a high school dropout than a foreign agent.

The first thing I said when the $600/week unemployment started rolling out was that people were going to realize how little they were being paid to work, and here we are. It's almost like they didn't know any better.

I'm sure the landscape is different for people already set in their careers or making some decent money, but everyone making minimum wage got to see how little $10/hr actually is.

Yeah, something tells me the fact that your coworkers are more excited to be back in person doesn't have anything to do with how brave you all are.

Maybe consider that are other reasons besides fear for why people prefer to work in an environment that is productive for them?

Yeah, being unaware of your alcoholism doesn't make it any less influential on your behavior. If anything, telling someone who is in denial about their alcoholism to "stop drinking" seems like the most useless option.

Sure, but good luck explaining that to everyone in my apartment building.

Because it's free?

Even better, you accidentally click on the incorrectly typed word and add it to your dictionary.

Reading the other article on HN definitely helped me understand more. I think really it comes down to me not understanding why they had so much trustworthiness to begin with.

They've been obscuring their code for about a year and even then, it's not like Signal has always come out and said "we love the passion our fellow developers have for our commitment to privacy and security". They just let people sell their relatives on that promise and waited until they had a massive userbase to start monetizing their platform.

Thanks for your reply, I just wonder where all this trustworthiness has been coming from for the last 12 months while they've been quietly working on the platform without publishing any changes. It feels like a beta tester for a game being mad that there were lootboxes in the full release of the game when they weren't in the beta. Even if you didn't know they were coming, you had to assume something like it was inevitable given enough traction.

I should probably say first that I totally agree with the overall point of the article. This was a sketchy move by Signal and I really question the motivations that played into making such a decision. With that said, there's just something about the way this is written that really bothers me. For starters, the first paragraph makes it sound like Signal was a grassroots movement the entire tech community got behind that then stabbed us in the back, and I can't get over how naive and borderline dangerous that line of thinking is.

"This news really cut to heart of what many technologists have felt before when we as loyal users have been exploited and betrayed by corporations, but this time it felt much deeper because it introduced a conflict of interest from our fellow technologists that we truly believed were advancing a cause many of us also believed in. So many of us have spent significant time and social capital moving our friends and family away from the exploitative data siphon platforms that Facebook et al offer, and on to Signal in the hopes of breaking the cycle of commercial exploitation of our online relationships. And some of us feel used."

I don't understand how any of that is the fault of Signal and not the user. Don't treat the products you use like they mean anything other than the profit motive that built them. It just seems kind of naive to say "every consumer messaging app you use is terrible, come use this one instead and we'll all hope that a massive userbase doesn't inspire them to monetize their platform" when that is essentially the job of what I roughly estimate to be half of the people on HN.

I think it's whack that Signal thought this was a good idea, but I also think it's insane how many people are up in arms as if Signal was once a utility for public good and not the product that it is. They did this because they know how many people bent over backwards to get their loved ones on the platform and they know most people aren't going to get their entire extended family to switch to another messaging app because they added in GarboCoin or whatever the fuck.

Forgive me if this is a stupid question, but how exactly is that the case?

It's been damaging to their claims of transparency for almost a year now, if anything this should be the first step in repairing that slight. How is dumping a year's worth of private work into your public repo somehow doing damage to their trustworthiness?

> Its objectively the most detailed city in a first person action/RPG. It objectively has the most detailed quests:quantity.

Sure, it's gorgeous and the on-rails scripted side-quests are fantastically written and animated, but driving around the city just makes me realize how empty it all feels because only the handful of vendors actually programmed to have an inventory are capable of interacting with you. But then on the other hand, they didn't animate half of the immersive shit you actually can do, like buying a drink from a bartender. It feels like a game that wants to be an immersive sim, but the second you try to immerse yourself in it you realize that it's just a massive facade.

>The depth of character development is huge, that alone is worth another playthrough, would love to build a character that's built differently than my current one. And most missions support a huge variety of outcomes depending on decisions you made earlier and how you behave.

I'm about 15 hours into a second playthrough and this is just patently not true. There isn't much variety in character building outside of combat mechanics, you pretty much always play the same V as far as narrative and dialogue goes. I was doing a second playthrough just to see how different things could be and intentionally looked for dialogue I hadn't seen the first time, my experience was that it showed how on-rails 99% of the experience is. At this point, I'll pick it up again in a year or two when they've added some content and hopefully fleshed out the open world somewhat.

>I see people going on a murder rampage in cyberpunk and then complain that the police chase that spawns isn't sufficiently realistic. Like......I don't feel like that's how this game should be played

I mean, then why are you able to go on a murder rampage and get in a police chase? It's just a basic level of competence that the game doesn't have. Park your car in the street and come back after the mission to find a huge traffic jam because the AI is incapable of driving around your car. Accidentally hit a civilian during a shootout with the local gang? Cops will just spawn 10 ft away from you and continue spawning until you die unless you get in your car and drive for 15 seconds.

Maybe you're lucky and the way you play doesn't expose you to a lot of the things people are complaining about but it seems kind of silly to dismiss complaints of game mechanics as "you're doing it wrong".

Well they qualified that statement with 'I literally have enough money not to worry about it and now my interest is in the things I spend my money on' so I'm not sure if that disqualifies what GP was saying. It's easy to say you're not solely focused on money anymore when you have enough money to never worry about your financial security again.

None of these comments are reacting to people complaining about Amazon in the comments or claiming that HN is unfairly biased against Amazon, which is what the comment I replied to was about.

Sorry you're so salty about downvotes that you're resorting to ad hominem and debating semantics instead of discussion, but you clearly don't have anything more productive to say so enjoy your well-founded sense of intellectual superiority I guess.

>Particularly if you are only pointing out the obvious bias.

Sure, let's pretend you didn't take my original comment completely differently than I meant it and then act like I'm too dumb to understand what I was talking about. Have a nice day.

Maybe don't get into an argument about semantics when it's pretty clear what the person you replied to originally meant. Half the comments in this thread are reacting to the negative comments about Apple in this thread. Typically for other big tech companies you don't see that because there's a huge bias towards Apple on HN. Idk why you went totally off the rails because of "cowardly" downvotes but I assume that you received them because you were very clearly misconstruing my statement.

I specifically mean reacting to the criticism Apple is getting. You see the same level of criticism of any major tech company in the comments section of the front page but very rarely are those criticisms followed up by a bunch of users defending the tech company in the comment section. You're arguing a weird semantic that doesn't really have anything to do with what I'm saying.

Third party developers are typically for-profit, and your argument was that those developers are capable of factoring in the long-term impacts of their decisions over the short-term profits when in reality that is very frequently not the case.

>They likely did the math and found that the risk is worth the reward to them

GP is saying that they likely did not do the math or that they prioritized short-term gains over the long-term impacts of their decisions as for-profit entities typically do.

I'm not sure what there was to misunderstand about my original comment since I more or less said exactly that.

I don't understand, so you don't care and it's okay if he cares, but if he says that people not caring is part of the problem then he's an elitist? What is your argument here, that he has no grounds to point out the apathy toward the long-term impact of your decisions?

You go so far as to validate the things he's concerned about and reiterate that you just don't care about them. I don't see what's wrong with pointing out the inherent shortsightedness of that line of thinking.

>it’s disappointing to me that so many here simply can’t conceive that some people don’t share their priorities, and make conscious choices that reflect their own priorities.

Have you considered that those people understand basic human psychology and that they take issue with the exact priorities that they are speaking against?

I think it's funny that you accuse someone of not considering the alternatives with the supporting argument that 'they probably considered the alternatives'. What makes you think a for-profit company is thinking about the long-term negative impacts of their business on the industry when that's rarely the case in a free market?

>Actual money in the hand now is worth more than theoretical money in the future and so on.

Exactly, short-term profit will almost always trump long-term problems. Is that so difficult to consider?

I don't see how that's any different from Microsoft, Amazon, or any other major tech company that makes the front page of HN.

In fact the only difference I can think of is that there's always some degree of reactionary discourse when Apple is mentioned by people who feel the need to defend the company personally. You never see this type of comment on a thread full of people complaining about Windows or AWS, but you almost always see it when there are a few comments critical of Apple.

Those things aren't mutually exclusive.

Apple contradicts public statements from Apple pretty consistently, they have a habit of saying they won't ever do something right up until they do it. I don't think there's anything unreasonable about those types of concerns because when/if Apple does go back on their public statements you won't have much recourse.

I mean, the Muslim 're-education' camps officially don't exist if you consider a statement coming directly from the CCP to be official. I have a hard time understanding how so many people here are either minimizing that fact or ignoring it entirely.

Well the freedoms being taken away in this instance involve throwing certain religious groups into labor camps, so maybe consider the context of the argument.

They absolutely detract from that achievement.

Imagine making an account just to defend concentration camps.