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Yeah this was the same for me. When I first made the switch to Linux for my dev machine Ubuntu was the distro I was by far the most familiar with so that was just the default choice. Later on after learning more and seeing how Ubuntu progressed I regretted not going straight to Debian.

The difference is that other new technologies didn't have a literal trillion dollars invested into them within the first few years, nor were the industry leaders warning that the tech could destroy humanity. Given those conditions I think "Has it made any money?" is a reasonable question to ask.

Yeah once I progressed past junior level work the value of asking questions on SO fell off a cliff. At that point most of the problems I got really stuck on were more niche than how to do $standardThing with $CommonLibrary, and there just weren't many people answering oddball questions like that. Even with popular languages like Javascript and Python most of my questions would get zero useful answers, so I pretty quickly stopped writing them. I think it's true that SO really didn't do much to encourage folks who would write answers like that to stay active on the site.

It stayed useful as a reference tool for quite a while, for when I needed to look something up that was fairly common but that I wasn't personally familiar with. But as others have said, the way they handled dupes and supposed opinion-based answers was really poor and meant that the top answers got more and more out of date each year. By the time LLMs came around they were strictly better for those kinds of lookups. Strictly better for now at least, LLMs will themselves get enshittified in the coming years.

Obama deported at least as many people as trump, but did it in far more competent way.

If the goal was actually just about enforcing immigration laws we wouldn't see armies of masked thugs beating the shit out of people in the streets. That's counterproductive because it drives local governments away from cooperating, which is essential to actually getting things done in a productive way.

Look at how this administration handles cases where ICE agents murder non-threatening people. They lie relentlessly and blatantly, even when there is clear video evidence showing up happened. Then they absolutely refuse to investigate any violent misconduct and even go out of their way to block other governments from investigating or trying to hold violent incompetent agents accountable.

The message should be clear to everyone. Fascists love a good spectacle. This is about that, and developing a paramilitary force that operates outside of the rule of law.

They already are. A majority of ICE detainees have no criminal record and that has been true for most of this administration.

Give me a break. Dems weren't throwing people in foreign torture prisons for not wearing a mask at the grocery store. Or throwing them in internment camps and stripping them of their citizenship for simply expressing an opinion.

A core principle of a free democratic society is that everyone has obligations to more than the whims of a wannabe fascist dictator. ICE agents who do things like violently assault peaceful citizens are in the wrong, both morally and legally. The fact that the current president wants to destroy the pillars of our society means there won't be immediate consequences for that kind of behavior, but that doesn't make it any less despicable or immunize them against future consequences.

This is totally wrong. Accounting for partisan non-response bias is a standard part of a pollsters job, not some insurmountable gotcha. Some are better than others at this. Polls aren't oracular, nor are they claiming to be. It's almost always better to look at an average of polls rather than a single one.

There is a lot of public data on past elections that anyone can analyze and see exactly how accurate polls have been in the past. If you're expecting polls to be a perfectly accurate prediction then you are misunderstanding their purpose. What they are great at is giving a probabilistic estimate of the outcome, within a certain range.

It's likely that any key race you care about next week will end up within 4 points of the current polling average. It's extremely likely that it will end up within 8 points. That's useful information!

Bird watching is something that my younger self would have never ever believed would be appealing, but it's actually really enjoyable! Getting out and exploring the natural world is great and I highly recommend it, but even for people without the opportunity or inclination to get out there birding is still extremely accessible.

Everyone can see birds around their home or work. Getting started can be as simple as noticing which birds you see regularly and figuring out what kind they are, and how the males and females differ in appearance (or don't). Usually males are the prettier more colorful ones, which is an effective signal for fitness.

Common birds will be easy to identify. Figuring out unusual birds or behaviors can turn into quite the detective project.

From there you can start to recognize calls and behavioral patterns. Once you learn a little bit in those areas it can be like seeing in another dimension. It's neat to hear a particular call and immediately know that there is a hawk in a nearby tree, or a cat behind a car.

Well when the alternative is someone who is openly in favor of violently overthrowing fair elections it's hard to get too upset about someone winning fairly, even if it is their fourth time.

It's wild how closely Brazil's politics have mirrored the US in recent years, at least at a high level. They literally had their own Jan 6 insurrection. Lula, like Biden, was competent enough for a time but ultimately outstayed his welcome and ran for another term when they should have gracefully retired. Unlike Biden, Lula actually imposed some consequences on the people trying to destroy his country's democracy.

It's a really bad source compared to what? Downdetector is not perfect, but is usually correct when I check it. Official status pages on the other hand are usually wrong when I check them.

That was hardly a one-off. Just off the top of my head...

There was the massive amount of CSAM it produced for weeks that wasn't an oopsie, the company adamantly refused to do anything about it for a long time despite the outrage.

Plus there has been all of the monkeying with the system prompt to push random propaganda elon wants.

Also the weird fixations on white genocide, election lies, and other nonsense.

On top of all that any data or funding sent to this company directly supports the ongoing destruction of US democracy and state capacity.

The guy literally owns a business in this space and has a huge financial incentive to push passkey adoption. Technically he has an "industry connection" just like millions of other people who work in tech and happen to know about passkeys through other work, but conflating the two is wildly misleading. His perspective is as far away from unbiased as possible.

Research funding is hardly perfect, but most of the people studying climate change are doing actual research and trying to draw evidence based conclusions that hold up under peer review. Their incentives are not the same as a tech founder who could potentially make generational wealth if one particular outcome is realized.

The ones who are actually good at investing largely do. The vast majority of investment managers soliciting new accounts are pure sales roles, not investors. Their job is to get as many assets under management as possible; that's how they get paid. They will fluff up the presentation with some nice charts and stuff but the actual "investing" will just be tossing the money into some generic funds.

Are you under the impression that all current and future shady business transactions are public knowledge?

To give a specific example of where I've seen this utterly fail... A few months ago one of my pets had an unexpected reaction to a new medication. It was late at night, well past our vet's hours. Google's AI response was basicaly "They are going to die, rush to an emergy clinic now".

But nothing else matched that. I was looking up all kinds of resources and that hadn't been the conclusion from any of them. It turned out Google AI was just wrong and put us in a bad spot for even looking at those results.

Agreed, it's surprising to me how often I see people on HN and other tech communities who don't assume every big tech AI product will get aggressively enshittified over time. It's a surprise to me because these same communities universally agree that the last era of big tech products has been ruined by greed and abuse.

Products like Facebook and Google search were magical in their early days, but over the past couple decades they have been relentlessly and deliberately degraded into useless slop.

The people who made all of those unfortunate decisions are the exact same people building and funding AI! What do you think they are going to do with more powerful Skinner boxes? Help the masses live their best, most empowered lives?!

Politicians literally write the laws that people get convicted of violating, and they can write those laws pretty much however they want. A juror's job is not to decide if they think an act was morally wrong, it's to judge them against the law as written. Laws can and have been written in all kinds of horrible and negligent ways.

Yes, based on it being one of the largest most profitable industries in the world. There is an immense amount of data showing that shoveling ad money into a product will convince some percent of people to buy it. Or just glance at the ads that fill up most people's Facebook feed and Google SERPs; it's mostly crap that looks flashy but few seconds but that few if any people actually have a real need for.

I've personally blocked who knows how many tens of thousands of ads online over the past couple decades. Somehow I doubt my life is lacking for not buying hundreds of extra products I would have learned about from all those targeted ads.

I've been seeing this kind of argument increasingly often from Israel's defenders and I have to say "Look at this other horrific atrocity that might be even worse than the one we're doing, but gets far less coverage in the US media" is a terrible defense. If that's the best Israel can come up with, and they continue down the path they are on, their western support will be gone before they know it.

To take this example, the Azerbaijani president didn't talk the American one into a major shit show of a war; one that is materially harming American lives. The Azerbaijani government doesn't run a major political influence operation in the US, spending 10s of millions of dollars against candidates for the sin of mildly criticizing them. The Azerbaijani government doesn't receive anything close to the level of military, diplomatic, and financial support from the US that Israel gets. The Azerbaijani prime minister didn't give an address to the US Congress to undermine a major foreign policy agreement, one which has only looked better in hindsight.

So no, it's not at all weird that the citizens of the US care more about Israeli committed atrocities than Azerbaijani ones. The US is far more involved with Israel's actions and has far more influence over them, influence that has so far not been used to try and alleviate the suffering in Gaza.

I'm with you on the older tech era. The 2000s were the peak of technology in my opinion. The freedom and openness of the internet was a unique point in human history. It was still standard to control the hardware you owned back then and IoT hadn't yet infected a bunch of stuff it didn't need to be in.

This seems like some serious rose colored outlook. Support for Israel in their patron state has absolutely plummeted in the last year. Support is almost certain to be cut back sharply by the next administration and might go to zero in the near future.

Iran's nuclear program has hardly been destroyed long term and there is almost no chance a durable nuclear agreement comes out of this war. It will almost certainly be a vague memorandum where Iran pinky swears to never build a nuke and then starts building one as soon as the fighting stops. America isn't going to start endless wars to prevent that and Israel can't do it alone. The long term future looks grim for the Middle East, especially for Israel.

They don't own the OS. One of the most powerful forces in consumer software is the ability to set defaults. The vast majority of users will never change the default browser, launcher, or app store; most don't even know it's possible. Google's position of controlling Android allows it to be wildly more corrupt and incompetent than any competing app store and still remain the dominant one. If another store does manage to gain a strong foothold, there are any number of OS changes Google can make to hamstring and stifle the competition. The situation is extremely asymmetric.

Near the end of high school a teacher said something that really struck me. She said that some people would look back on their high school years as the best time of their life, while others would slam that book shut and never look back. Not the most profound statement, but it really lit up my teenage brain.

High school was a really awkward period for me that was much more stressful than enjoyable. The idea that I could choose to never return to anything like that and have a completely different rest of my life was exhilarating to contemplate.

It turned out to be true. College was much better for me than high school; finishing college and becoming an adult was better than being in school at all. Everyone has different experiences but I doubt mine is all that rare, I think a lot of people have kind of a miserable time in high school before going on to figure out a life they enjoy. This pop culture idolization of the period does seem over the top to me as well.

These attacks are complicated and resource intensive, with tactics and countermeasures constantly evolving. Attacks need to happen in large coordinated swarms in order to get past defenses, and arranging dozens or hundreds of different drones to all attack deep into enemy territory at the same time without being detected beforehand is challenging. The successful strikes make the news, but there are many failed attacks that get less coverage.

Target selection is difficult as well. High value targets aren't always easy to identify and sequencing is important. It took Ukraine years to develop the technology and strategy to have consistent success. They were smart about targeting air defense systems early on which has led to a virtuous cycle where successful attacks make future attacks more likely to succeed. Despite the rampant corruption, Russia has plenty of smart people on their side as well and they are constantly adapting and finding effective ways to counter specific tactics.

Similar experience for me. I find f-droid a great supplement store but cutting out the default store entirely has felt like more of a commitment than I'm interested in so far.

But they are all still using traditional file systems constantly, but usually through an abstraction that gives them less understanding and control. Dragging stuff around on a smart phone is often changing some files and folders under the hood. The knowledge of how things work one step down the abstraction layer is still valuable for anyone who wants more than the lowest level control and understanding of what they're doing.

That's fine for you, but why on earth do you think every other person out there will only use these for innocuous nerdy reasons? Ask any adult woman you know and there's a good chance she will have at least one story of being stalked or getting really creeped out by someone. Consumer tech that enables creepy behavior will be used in that way by too many people.