lmao, just saw this. Imagine defending a guy's tech literacy by pointing out that he wrote a basic threaded social website over 16 years ago that since has only seen minor tweaks to the CSS, and no added features, largely because it was developed using a variant of Lisp that went unmaintained in 2018.
Tech literacy is a moving target. If someone's skills and knowledge from 2007 haven't improved in 2023, then those out-of-date skills don't count towards literacy.
Given that his own website has remained misconfigured for years now, I think it's safe to say that PG didn't write HN website single-handedly, and certainly isn't responsible for maintaining it. It sounds like, as a billionaire, he just paid other people to do things for him. Anyone with money has that power, it's not that impressive.
Yeah, I know that this is YC site, that YC is very successful, and that PG was a founder. But I'm not a chump. I don't judge a billionaire with the circular logic most people in this forum employ, where being a billionaire is the default proof that a person is competent. I look at who that person is, what they say, and how they interact with technology as an individual. When I look at PG, I see a guy who knows a lot about finance and business administration, who has made a lot of money investing in tech, but I also see someone who is deeply disconnected from the real world, a person who follows capitalism as if it were a religion, and a person who, despite past talents, has not kept up to date with technology, and who outwardly demonstrates that incompetence in the things he says and writes, and how he personally interacts with technology.
Also, as someone who works in cybersecurity engineering, I know that when trying to figure out who your highest-risk users are, you just need to look at their worst behaviors. If PG's self-branded website is going to throw a huge red flag in my browser, then that website function as a huge red flag about PG. It it says "I couldn't figure out how to install a certificate, and I don't understand how important this is for security and trust in the tech world". Come to think of it, it's almost always the guys at the top of the hierarchy who end up at the top of my at-risk list, because they're the same guys who click through all the Phishing test emails I send them.
Is that the kind of guy I want to be listening to for inspiration? Absolutely not. I learned long ago that Capitalism is not a meritocracy, and that while you can benefit from kissing the asses of those at the top, you lose the plot if you try to emulate them, because most engineers are smarter than the Peter Principle men who hoisted each other to the top of the pyramid.
CEOs should admire engineers, engineers should not admire CEOs. If you want to be a CEO, stop coding, maybe get an MBA, and start your own company. If you want to make great tech, interact with C-Suite folks a little as you can, and focus on making good tech.
But once you start trying to be inspired by the C-Suite folks, you're going to end up adopting their values, and anyone who has worked at any tech company will tell you that their values are garbage.
There is a difference between recognizing that racism exists, and saying that racism is at the root of a particular problem (rather than "merely" something that also exists).
This is one of the big problems with this kind of stuff, because as soon as racism merely exists it becomes completely taboo to offer any other sort of explanation as the root cause.
So whenever anyone suggests a racial motive in a specific case, where this is no supporting evidence in that case, your stance is to just go along with it, because racism pervades our society?
Describing NIMBYism as "narcissistic assholes" is a gross oversimplification, and misses the point I'm getting at.
In the US, you'll reliably get a lot more NIMBY response from "set up a nuclear power plant in the neighbourhood" vs. "set up a gas power plant in the neighbourhood". However, if you look at the risk assessment, the gas power plant is far more lethal to the neighbourhood.
> you'll reliably get a lot more NIMBY response from "set up a nuclear power plant in the neighbourhood" vs. "set up a gas power plant in the neighbourhood"
I don't associate the term "NIMBY" with either scenarios, just housing. I don't think there's much value to overloading it. It's not like anyone's trying to put a nuclear power plant in the middle of Boston to begin with.
> I don't associate the term "NIMBY" with either scenarios, just housing.
You might not, but the broader population associates NIMBY with any scenario where a neighbourhood pushes back against some kind of change in that neighbourhood (adding a prison, a power plant, a half-way house, a school, a bar, trains, airports, etc.). There are NIMBY responses to pretty much any change, and the magnitude of that response tends to have little bearing on the relative merits of the change.
> It's not like anyone's trying to put a nuclear power plant in the middle of Boston to begin with.
No. For the most part no one is putting nuclear power plants anywhere in the US. However, there are other power plants in Boston (and for good reason). This is a direct byproduct of the NIMBYism I'm talking about.
Neither party is obligated to the interests of the people living in this country. I'm not saying this is necessarily bad advice but there are some problems that require actual citizens to do something aside from vote.
I'm not one to ever defend the institution of policing or the court system that feeds and protects it, but cops do not have general immunity. They have qualified immunity from civil cases in some places. The primary friction from prosecuting police for criminal behavior has been and will continue to be DAs unwilling to prosecute (for various reasons, some reasonable, and some nefarious).
There are many reasons why police serve the role they do in society. Neglecting other reasons other than blatant racketeering—the role they play in preserving the institution of private property, the role they play in filling prisons, the role they play in preserving the illusion of justice—serves nobody.
2. Money happened pretty much. First people started monetising their blogs, then they turned into books, which turned into multiple books and youtube channels and then it was no longer a blog and more of a company.
and additionally:
6. The younger generation is used to having their actual face plastered all over the internet and thus feel more natural making videos with their own face and voice.
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I, and I think a good part of the HN crowd, are in the generation where we had actual friends we only knew by their handle/nickname and never saw their face unless there was a meetup of some sort and we actually went there.
For me, using my own face, or even name, to present any sort of content just feels wrong in a visceral way.
People didn't have much interesting to say before, but they didn't have much else to do. Now with #3, other platforms, they spend a lot of time on those other places writing short quips all day.
6. Entities on the internet either copy your work and claim credit, harass you because of your opinions, or use your works against you(mining, social engineering, marketing).
There is no way to know what people will find interesting. There is a healthy gap between someones content being absolutely not worth reading and being professional. I think more people should have hobbies and they should write about their experiences even without it necessarily being interesting. I also don't think it needs to be about making money. Once you start trying to get paid for your hobbies it becomes work and not fun.
With an online blog rather than an offline journal you can easily share it with friends. I think the main difference here between TikTok and other huge social media is that less is more. I don't see much point in a million anonymous strangers looking at my posts. I don't think there is anything "natural" about these huge social media platforms. This kind of socialization feels very unnatural to me. Mostly do to the parasocial relationships that occur from the million people to one person style interactions.
Hell i'm not even sure you or I think. This is the problem with referring to subjective perception when we can't be sure we're even referring to the same thing. A "thought" might just be a linguistic quirk of two meats exchanging information.
Cogito ergo sum... I think more or less the only thing we can be sure of is that we think. However, I don't think we REALLY know what thinking means, and whether the way we think is categorically different from how an LLM thinks.
Spacetime (might be) infinitely large, but that doesn't imply that there is infinite matter or energy.
That said, this is kind of a dumb argument because far lower k values have lower BB(k) values already exceed the apparent information value of the universe at any given instant. Maybe there is infinite energy and matter, but that's also irrelevant if we can't perceive more than a finite subset of it.
Edit: well, i guess what would matter would be the information value of time, multiplied by enough bits to store the machine—I'm not sure i'm literate enough in the area to compute that. But, assuming that the heat death of the universe reaches a single (possibly compressed) end-state, it should still be finite—it's seeming quantized, anyway.
It does not matter how much energy is there available in the Universe. Even if there is infinite amount of it, you can't still use it because only finite amount can ever be reached / affected by any single observer. Only finite amount of universe can ever reach any single observer.
So for example, there is a limit on the mass of the computer that can be constructed and still send its result to a single spot in space in the future. And the longer you wait, the smaller the limit because less and less of the universe is available to you to build the computer.
