achenet

the original business model was, if I'm not mistaken, licensing the search technology.

Then they found that showing ads with the search results made them a lot more money.

They started optimizing for money made from ads, which depends on user data - letting advertisers show ads to targeted customers.

I think this is the time to share this classic PSA about why you should always exercise your right to silence:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-7o9xYp7eE

Location: Lyon, France

Willing to Relocate: Yes, to Barcelona, Roma, Hamburg, Koln, Den Haag, Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Stockholm or Switzerland.

Full Remote: Yes. I offer a discount for full-remote work, because it saves me the hassle of relocation and commuting :)

Technologies: Go, Rust, C, Elixir, JavaScript, TypeScript, Python, web technologies (HTML/CSS, frameworks, browser APIs), Bash, Zsh, Fish, Linux, FreeBSD, MySQL, SQLite, PostgreSQL, Redis, Kafka, Docker, mathematics

Email: [email protected]

Website: https://arielche.net/

I am a software developer and researcher with half a decade of experience and a Master's degree in mathematics. I have ample experience with Golang in a professional context often on backend services like REST APIs and programs interacting with databases and message queues, am fairly proficient with a variety of other languages and technologies, and am comfortable working on a variety of domains, from accounting/financial management/CRM software, to IaaS products, to scientific and mathematical software and language apps. I enjoy learning, and am always open to learning new things, especially if they happen to ignite my curiosity.

I like free or open-source software, systems programming, web services and the infrastructure required to run them at scale and would love an opportunity to continue to contribute to and learn about them. I enjoy mathematics and quantitative research like biology, engineering and physics. I enjoy writing, and in particular writing documentation for software, educational content, and research.

I am happiest working with people who are open-minded, truthful and kind, and I try very hard to always embody those qualities.

I am open to both full-time employment and contract work. I am a French citizen and can work freely anywhere within the EU.

I suspect "Linux ISOs" are not actual Linux .iso images but ~pirated~ movies, music, and digital books ;)

Ceasar's assassination was politically motivated, and performed by many of the most powerful people at that time - other Roman Senators.

I'd describe it more as a power struggle between 'elites'/the people running the country that got violent (indeed, it led to a civil war), rather than a "even the rich are at the mercy of random violence".

In other word, Ceasar dying is basically 'the system' at the time, the Roman Senate, or at least a large part of it, deciding that, actually, Ceasar had a little too much power, and the way to fix that was stabbing him.

I view it closer to Louis XVI being guillotined than Franz Ferdinand being assassinated - the former is a violent transfer of power between elites, the later is an elite being killed by a member of the common people. The former happens because the elites (and sometimes the people as well, although AFAIK Ceasar was quite popular with the commoners in Rome) are unhappy, the later happens despite the elites being happy. The Vienna upper-class probably quite liked Franz Ferdinand, but that wasn't enough to save him. The Parisian upper-class, however, did NOT like Louis XIV, and that got him killed. Similarly, the Roman aristocracy (or rather, a large chunk of it, obviously Ceasar had his fans in the Senate) had an issue with Ceasar, which got him killed.

While civil administration, police, courts, infrastructure and army all do cost, wealth, I would argue that they also help to create it.

It's a lot easier to create a software company when you live in a world where the power station cannot be held for ransom by bandits, where everyone is educated and speaks a similar language, when there are laws governing the creation of businesses, a financial system, backed by the government, which enables trade to happen easily, etc.

For example, the Roman Empire, in unifying the Mediterranean, led to a large increase in trade - you can estimate shipping volume across the Mediterranean by counting shipwrecks, and the period of ~0-150AD when the Empire was at its peak had a much higher volume of shipping than preceding and following periods.

I think of administration, police, legal and financial system as something like a capital investment - a bit like buying a widget producing machine - you spend the money/effort/resources on it because you expect to get more out of it than you put it.

> Spain had extreme wealth from colonies, but wasted it on nothing but debauchery.

I disagree with this, I don't consider "expensive wars with other European powers" to be debauchery.

Losing the entire Spanish Armada [1] was a very expensive mistake, but the reason the Armada was lost was because the Spanish crown wanted to invade England over religious differences (England being Protestant, Spain being Catholic), not because they decided to throw a huge boat party and got so drunk they accidentally sank everything.

Much like the wars of the French crown which would end up so hurting the country financially that they caused a revolution, the wars of the Spanish crown also had a rather unpleasant effect on national finances.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Armada

They had a more technologically advanced society than anyone else at the time, which enabled their empire building.

The Industrial Revolution started in England, which gave them a technological leg up on everyone else, somewhat like playing a strategy game where you get to unlock certain techs before everyone else. If you have factories producing steamships while your opponents are still building sailboats by hand, you're probably going to win a naval conflict, which you can then use to start a colony.

Looking at pictures of Churchill, who was admittedly a bit after the Victorians but seems to have followed a somewhat similar lifestyle, he doesn't exactly strike me as skinny.

I imagine they did have a fair amount of obesity in the older members of the population, although it's also possible that the sportier ones (which I'm guess would have entailed things like polo and horseback riding) would remain fit into old age.

Okay, I'll say it's wrong.

Look at the average life of a person living in Western Europe 400 years ago.

Look at the average life of a person living in Western Europe today.

Heck, look at the lives of the top 1% of humanity living 400 years ago.

From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_XIV#Personal_life

> Louis and his wife Maria Theresa of Spain had six children from the marriage contracted for them in 1660. However, only one child, the eldest, survived to adulthood

From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_XIV#Health_and_death

> Louis outlived most of his immediate legitimate family. His last surviving legitimate son, Louis, Dauphin of France, died in 1711 of smallpox and barely a year later, Louis, Duke of Burgundy, the eldest of the Dauphin's three sons and then heir-apparent to Louis, died of measles. Burgundy's elder son, Louis, Duke of Brittany, died of the same disease a few weeks later.

The king of France, arguably one of the richest people on the planet at the time, had 5/6 six children with his wife, the Queen of France and daughter of the Spanish King die before adulthood.

Now look at the life of an average middle-class French person (or American, or English person or any of the 6+ billion people living with electricity) today. See anyone dying in childbirth? Anyone dying of measles or smallpox before they're old enough to vote?

Technological progress, helping not just the rich get richer, but everyone get richer.

QED.

Decriminalization isn't necessarily the optimal solution.

For hard drugs, something closer to Sweden's Systemboaget [0] where the drug is carefully controlled (and taxed!) by a state monopoly, with the proceeds of this monopoly being used to fund rehabilitation efforts or other support/public-health efforts might be better.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systembolaget

> Not getting political here -- but what would you think if organized crime in a neighboring country was murdering 50,000 to 70,000 of your countrymen per year?

I'd blame myself for giving them that market, and then I'd start pushing hard for a drug policy that actually makes sense, as opposed trying to continue a policy of drug prohibition which has spent the last 100+ years [0] completely failing to do anything but give money to criminals whilst having almost no effect on actual drug consumption.

The government's job is to protect its taxpayers. If the taxpayers have a demand for drugs, which is clearly the case with the US, then the government should stop cosplaying a pearl-clutching 19th-century Victorian housewife and start regulating the drug trade properly, the way it does with alcohol and cigarettes.

Will this solve all problems? No. So long there is misery in the world, there will be people trying to escape that misery.

But at least American opiate addicts will have fewer overdoses, and therefore hopefully contribute more to tax revenue.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prohibition_in_the_United_Stat...

Frenchman here. French companies and organization, in my experience actually really like the English language (at OVH for example, most official docs are in English), but I do think it makes sense for a government funded by people who speak mostly French (ie the French taxpayers) to do stuff in French, the language most of its citizens will be most familiar with.

Putting stuff in English will tend to exclude the less educated, or people who struggle to learn foreign languages.

EDIT: and actually, from looking at the README of https://github.com/cloud-gouv/securix

> Ce README est en français mais le reste du code, les issuers et les PR sont en anglais.

The README is in French but the rest of the code, the issues (they wrote issuers, but that is a typo I suspect) and the PRs are in English.

So. :P

It is possible to argue that basically all modern governments are inherently "abusive", in the sense that, to my knowledge, all modern governments will use the threat of violence to extort wealth from the population, in the form of taxes.

Now, in theory, these taxes are spent for the benefit of the taxpayers, in a philosophical tradition that can be traced back to at least the French revolution and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen [1], and possibly earlier (the "no taxation without representation" [2] of the American Revolution, possibly other examples I'm unaware of). However, in practice, the ruling class has been known to help itself to that sweet, sweet tax revenue [3][4], and if we look at history, governments such as the Bourbon monarchy/Ancien Regime [5] whose claim to legitimacy rested not on "the will of the people" but "the divine right of kings" would do things like extort money from the populace to pay for foreign wars merely because their belief system held that the will of God was that everyone did whatever the King wanted, whether or not it appeared to be good for them.

We can compare modern governments with modern corporations - both will take your money and in return give you a service (you pay taxes and get police + an army to protect you, courts to resolve disputes, etc, you pay a Spotify/Netflix subscription and get access to streaming audiovisual content), but the modern corporation can't really force you to take that deal - Spotify can't put a gun to your head and force you to pay your subscription, while the government does force you to pay your taxes.

As such, if you believe that any transaction that is not freely consented to by both parties is abusive, then all modern governments are, by virtue of forcing people to pay taxes, inherently abusive.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declaration_of_the_Rights_of_M...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_taxation_without_representa...

[3] (in French) https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affaire_des_emplois_fictifs_de...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolas_Sarkozy_corruption_tri...

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancien_r%C3%A9gime

While I agree that the quality of the government is correlated with the quality of that government's people, you do also have other factors, namely the way the government is set up, which matter.

Take for example the USA. The entire electoral system is "winner takes all". Duverger's law [0] tells us that this will lead to a two-party system, as opposed to proportional representation, which tends to create truly multi-party governments.

I believe many of the current problems in US politics are in fact side-effects of the winner takes all electoral system. Each election, the only two choices are "candidate chosen by Republican Party" or "candidate chosen by Democratic Party". As such, elected officials are basically forced to first convince the members of each party to support them, which often leads to Trump-like strategies of "alienate half the country in order to please the other half", because that's a good strategy to get the party nomination, which is, in a two-party system, is basically a necessary condition to get elected.

On top that, news media and social networks have figured out that tapping into the human tribal instinct and framing politics as an 'Us vs Them' conflict sells more ads then being neutral, so the media ecosystem will tend to aggravate this two-party system.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger%27s_law

We live in a world that has an immense amount of wealth, so it's possible to build a pretty bad business and still make money so long you're providing a minimal amount of value and/or have some sort of lobbying/regulatory capture/juicy government contracts obtained via wining and dining key members of government that enables you to leech off taxpayer money.

This is why I really like Apple, despite their faults, they've shown that "being marginally less bad than Microsoft" is a good enough strategy to build a trillion-dollar business.

Given that there is evidence [0] to support the idea that (spoken) language is hard-coded into the human DNA, I think language might, like dancing, be something 'innately human' and not a learned technology :)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_grammar

As in, if we had a total disappearance of all humans on Earth, and then put some new humans on the depopulated Earth, they'd quickly develop a common language, if they were genetically similar to modern humans, but would take a while to start writing.

Arguably, things like counting and geometry could also be viewed as something innate in humans - our mammalian brains view the world as a 3-dimensional real vector space, and so we will instinctively have the ability to understand the concept of a 'circle', or 'seven', or a square, or even multiplication ('three groups of three people each'), but the act of writing down those thoughts, and the literate culture focusing on those concepts which stretches from Euclid to Wikipeda, Library Genesis, and Terry Tao's blog, is obviously a developed technology.

I can't help but read this and be reminded of what Steve Albini said about refusing a major label contract with Big Black:

> If you don't use contracts, you don't have any contracts to worry about. If you don't have a tour rider, you don't have a tour rider to argue about. If you don't have a booking agent, you don't have a booking agent to argue with.

> To us, every moment we remained unfettered and in control was a success. We never had a manager. We never had a booking agent. We never had a lawyer. We never took an advance from a record company. We booked our own tours, paid our own bills, made our own mistakes and never had anybody shield us from either the truth or the consequences. The results of that methodology speak for themselves: Nobody ever told us what to do, and nobody took any of our money.

If you bootstrap your business, you never have to worry about the board trying to fire you.

Frenchman here, I see plenty of Hoka sneakers, usually worn by people I'd describe as "athletic bourgeois". Generally white, ~25-45+, often also wearing other "sporty" clothing, usually running focused (shirts for various marathons/long-distance runs, for example), seemingly well to do (not the lower class types with their Nike Tn shoes and football jerseys, but people who look and act like they have well-paying office jobs).

> Social media addiction is definitely much more detrimental to society than drug addiction, imho. Drugs aren't used by foreign adversaries to sow discord and chaos. We should not treat drugs and social media the same.

If you'll forgive me doing the cliche HN "well actually"...

Well actually, FARC, revolutionary armed forces of Columbia, used cocaine traffic to fund their political activities.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolutionary_Armed_Forces_of_...

> I agree on your stance of 'tax and regulate' for drugs, but it should also be accompanied by heavy prevention efforts: people need to learn very early on how to have a healthy relationship with addictive things, whether it be gambling, alcohol, drugs, gaming, TV, or social media. This way they can protect themselves, in freedom.

Agree with this, but I believe the "healthy relationship with addictive things" often comes from "a health life + environment", which can be facilitated with tax money from taxing addictive things.

> Even if we could magically update the education system to teach people how to not be manipulated by social media, we are way too late to prevent the terrible effects they are having in adults and seniors. We need a way to educate or protect those in a non-authoritarian way. Otherwise the slide developed societies find themselves in today will hit rock bottom again very soon.

One idea which I'd like to see attempted would be "government social media".

Rather than argue politics on Twitter and TikTok, have the government of $COUNTRY put that country's text of laws online, put the budget of the government online, and let people propose changes. Create an upvote/downvote mechanism like on HN and Reddit to filter through to proposed changes, have the government enact the most popular ones.

Why bitch about your president on Twitter when you can literally create a proposal to impeach them on your country's official social media site?

Make account creation dependent on showing a valid national ID, so each citizen has one profile, and therefore one 'vote' on each proposal (upvote or downvote), and see if that isn't a better system than "laws will be made by a guy you get to choose every couple years, basically without any input from you, while rich people will buy ads of social media sites to confuse you into voting for their preferred candidate".

sorry for taking forever to reply ^^"

> I know! But I have a hope in society, in our improvement as a species, that war and conflict grows less and less common. And I believe that should be a social aim.

Generally agree with this, and when things look bad politically, I take comfort in looking back on life 300 years ago and celebrate that things have gotten better since then (the average French citizen now can read, write, and has access to universal health care, the average French citizen 300 years ago was a barely literate peasant).

> Right. Yes, I think I'd support 18+, but even for adults require the companies don't use addictive algorithms. That may seem inconsistent, but the reason is, gambling already exists. Addictive social media algorithms are new. It is much easier to prevent something new, than to deal with something millennia old. And I genuinely think wiser - that is, act to prevent it before it becomes something like gambling and alcohol.

> Yeah. It kinda does. But social media didn't require this in the past: it's developed it. So I feel it bans negative forms, not social media per se. But that said...

Hmm... I think focusing on the features may miss what is generally the root cause of addiction - the environment. Not sure if you're familiar with Rat Park

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Park

but I believe generally addiction issues are best solved via solving the environmental problem that leads people to becoming drug addicts, namely a lack of other ways to have fun, not by banning the 'addictive' activity, be it drugs, alcohol or gambling.

To use a personal example, when I was an edgy 16 year old back in the mid-late 2000s, I went on 4chan a lot. Arguably, I was addicted, given that my 4chan time got in the way of homework and sleep. Now ~2007 era 4chan did not have an algorithm that optimized for engagement and ad revenue. It did not have infinite scroll. The only thing it had was a high volume of users submitting content, but that was enough to keep me staring at 4chan instead of doing more important things.

A ban of "addictive algorithms and infinite scroll", which is similar to what you're proposing would not have blocked 4chan, or helped me live a healthier and more economically productive life.

However, I'm totally okay with taxing "addictive features". If the Aussie gov't wants to tell Meta "hey, we notice you do things like 'push teenage girls to suicide to sell more ads', so we're taking a cut of everything you make in Australia, which we will then use to enact various initiatives which help the mental (and physical) health of teenage girls", I think that's great.

Also relevant - I got on Facebook around the same time/age (~16, mid/late 2000s) I got on 4chan, and the latter has really been nothing but a positive presence in my life. Despite having moved between countries and continents, I have an easy way to find and reach people I've not seen in years, if not decades.

> This is a really interesting comment! Why? (Not saying I disagree, for Youtube at least. But I'm really curious about this.)

YouTube has become television 2.0. Basically everything bad that can be said about YouTube is "bad parts of cable television, amplified". However, it's a great way to learn basically anything.

Facebook/Instagram are really good tools to help small businesses find customers. I have a friend launching her personal coaching business right now, and Instagram is how she finds and stays in contact with customers.

As mentioned above, Facebook can also act like a 'global phone book', enabling people who have lost touch due to circumstances (moving away) to get and stay in touch.

More generally, basically all the major social media platforms are popular because they give people who don't have a bunch of technical knowledge, who might not understand how to write up an HTML website, host it, and register a domain name, a platform to express themselves online.

A Facebook or Instagram profile is the internet's version of the Model T. It makes having an online presence accessible to the unwashed masses, and, being something of a techno-optimist, I believe creating a world where anyone can communicate with anyone will lead to what you called "our improvement as a species", and make "war and conflict" less common, because we'll be too busy arguing online to actually be killing each other :)

Thanks for your reply ^^

> the effects of negative social media are on par with these things. Political violence, violence against minorities and specific genders, and worse.

I hate to break it to you, "humans hurting each other over tribal distinctions" is not new. Look at literally all of world history. If you want a very well-documented example, look at the treatment of the descendants of former slaves in the southern United States 1865-1965. People don't need social media to start lynching each other.

> "Even" hurting the way children grow up and think should not be controversial to ban for children. Part of society's function is to protect kids as they grow.

Yes. Tax and regulate doesn't imply "unrestricted access".

Children are already 'protected by society' from alcohol, cigarettes, pornography, and a host of other things, I'm totally okay with Instagram/Reddit/et al. being "18+" as well. But there's a difference between "18+" and "illegal".

> I don't think likening it to Coca Cola, or even alcohol, is the same at all. And I did not ask to ban social media. I asked to ban harmful expressions of social media.

That's true, you specifically said "I'd like to see addictive algorithms, content, and doomscrolling banned entirely"

but I feel like that definition basically bans all popular social media: 'addictive algorithms, content and doomscrolling' would describe basically the business model of all major ad-supported social media sites (Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, TikTok). Basically the entire 'web 2.0' business model is "have users create content, push the stuff that keeps people staring at the site the longest as much as possible so we can sell more ads".

And I don't believe that a blanket ban on Facebook/YouTube/et al. would be a net improvement.

> if the matter really were so clear, then why, over the last ~200 years, did every country introduce a prohibition-based stance, and why has no country switched to tax-and-regulate?

First off, you do have countries switching over to tax-and-regulate, Canada, for example, some U.S. states, countries in Europe (Germany, Netherlands).

But to answer the question of countries going to prohibition-based instead of tax-and-regulate - off the top of my head

1) US-led world order + US deciding to ban a bunch of drugs for political reasons (I hear, from multiple sources that discriminating against Mexican immigrants was one reason cannabis was outlawed, Reagan and his whole 'War on Drugs' schtick...)

2) tradition - have you noticed that, also for the last ~200 years, basically all world leaders, from French presidents to the Emperor of Japan, will dress in the style of the English monarch George IV (and, more precisely, in the the style George IV copied from Beau Brummell)?

We ban drugs because that's what we're used to doing. Our leaders dress in suits because that's what we expect them to do.

3) naive ignorance - much as how, for hundreds if not thousands of years, "sacrifice a bull" was considered the state of the art in ensuring that there would be water for the crops, people growing up with no additional knowledge will often arrive at "ban it" as a logical way to handle a social ill, even if, as those who have suffered the negative consequences [0][1] know, "ban it" generally just makes the problem worse.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuevo_Laredo

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexican_drug_war

Source [1] notes "Analysts estimate wholesale earnings from illicit drug sales range from $13.6 to $49.4 billion annually".

Not the illicit part. The market is there, even if outlawed. Dozens of billion of dollars per year, and if you tax-and-regulate, all of a sudden you've got billions in tax revenue to help you "respond to social harms, such as the condition of opium addicts".

> For example, in order to maximise aggregate wellbeing, it would be necessary to hurt individuals. Executing people who are burdensome to society.

[citation needed]

With all due respect, I think this statement is false.

If you live in a society that can, thanks to advanced technology, provide for the material needs of all, which, if you live in a rich Western country, is basically already the case (remember the last time you had to actually grow your own food? Probably several generations ago), you don't need to execute anyone.

Indeed, given that in such a society, where there are no shortages of food leading to "only one of us can eat" type scenarios, I'd argue that hurting individuals would lower aggregate wellbeing, because you're hurting people beloved by other people (the elderly? Turns out their grandchildren really like them and get upset if they die? fat people? Turns out their friends really like them and get upset if they die. the disabled? Turns out their family really like them and get upset if they die).

Moore's law still holds I reckon.

Even it's $10,000 to run today (FWIW, the featured article cites the M5 Mac Studio with 256GB unified memory going for $9,500 as "good enough to host something scary"), in a couple years it'll be like $2k to run, and in another couple after that, you'll have used $200 dollar smartphones capable of running a model powerful enough to do serious damage.

no, it's not a perfect system, but better.

Look at the alcohol market in the U.S.

Or even the tightly controlled Systembolaget [0] in Sweden, compared to the modern markets for cannabis and cocaine.

Tax and regulate lowers violence and increases tax revenue, outright prohibition/making it illegal increases violence and lowers tax revenue.

I do believe "sin prohibition" policies, for not just drugs but gambling, prostitution, etc, are one example of "low-hanging fruit", where there is a noticeably better option that is usually not implemented.

Really, for all trades usually controlled by violent criminals (so everything the Mafia/Yakuza/crime groups traditionally specialize in), I believe that the citizens of a given state will be happier if the trade is controlled by the state and not given over to criminals, which is functionally what "make it illegal" does.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systembolaget

things that directly harm other taxpayers - murder, physical violence, theft, false slander/reputational attacks...

prohibiting things that harm the individual should not be the role of government, IMO. Government, in the liberal/Enlightenment tradition, is there as a protector of your 'rights' to life, liberty, and property. While it has a duty to protect you from things which could harm you (eg junk food/sugary drinks), it also has a duty to let you do what you choose to do, even if it's 'bad' for you (eg eat junk food and drink sugary drinks).

Hence the compromise - you can smoke cigarettes and drink Coca-Cola, but the makers of cigarettes and soft drinks have to warn you beforehand, and the transaction may be more taxed than things like basic foods.

Please don't start randomly prohibiting things because you dis-approve of those things.

We have, at this point, over a 100 years of evidence showing that prohibition of psychoactive substances (alcohol, cannabis, cocaine, etc) doesn't actually do much to reduce consumption but do create an immense amount of suffering not just for anyone participating in the trade or consumption of those substances, but also anyone remotely connected to them - cf the immense violence perpetrated by drug cartels in the Americas, mostly because people living in the US seem to be in denial about their appetite for drugs.

So please, stop banning things you don't like, tax and regulate them instead. Use the tax proceeds to fund "social media rehab" clinics if you'd like.

Draconian "I don't like it, it gets banned" government wasn't a good idea in 15th century Spain, it's still not a good idea now. Let your fellow citizens make bad decisions, just ensure that the government is poised to profit from them.