At the risk of repeating myself, “dying of whiteness” was a pretty interesting and depressing look at this. Turns out a lot of people would rather suffer if it means those people have it worse.

Reddit initially catered to a young, libertarian, white male internet crowd, clinging to a “free speech at all costs” ethos, until the hate speech and harassment became too extreme, and too alienating, to ignore.

Idiots.

In the end, Reddit became just another neoliberal venture, seemingly willing to cash in regardless of any concerns of social harm it might inadvertently cause.

Yep. Capitalism.

Reddit’s foundational problem is that it grew out of a narrow demographic with socially negative and often exclusionary values.

What a polite phrasing

Structural flaws, cultural toxicity and algorithmic design have turned what could have been an ideal forum

I don’t think a privately owned for profit platform could ever be ideal

No, I meant one where the business is owned by all the workers, not one where the owner also does some work.

This is saying if you have a module with public functions A and B, they shouldn’t call each other, right? But it’s not saying that module A shouldn’t call module B’s public functions. That’s what I thought it meant at first, but that seems crazy.

Capitalism remains a problem.

I don’t think worker owner businesses would be so rabidly eager to do this AI shit. It’s ghouls and anonymous shareholders. People who don’t even work on the stuff being made.

Middle managers like to set targets and goals because it counts towards their bonus, and it looks less like they’ve got their dick in their hand when the boss comes calling.

It’s the same problem all over. Capitalism. You have people who don’t do work keeping the benefits from the work.

Most people aren’t going to give themselves stupid or useless metrics. Software people aren’t going to impose “tokens used” or “lines of code” metrics on themselves. They know those are stupid.

Some players are hoarding all the resources, and formed gangs to keep their power. Sucks. You can’t just shoot them because the other players whine, and you’ll probably get banned.

If I expanded that explanation to everyone, that would be silly. In no way am I proposing everyone has the same reason for disliking pink Floyd as my 10th grade friend. I do think some people feel like he did, though, about various things.

This is vital context. Big difference between like working in a kitchen with a bunch of people and working a software remote job.

Private profit from community kind of sucks. Thus, reddit sucks. Fuck them.

I had a friend in high school who was always putting down pink Floyd. He’d say the lyrics were simple and the music was gimmicky.

Eventually, one day, I got out of him that the real source of his ire was he, quote, “didn’t want to be one of those kids who’s into pink Floyd”.

I think about this sometimes. He made up all these plausible sounding excuses, but the truth was something social that he was embarrassed to admit.

Granted, we were in 10th grade, but I think a lot of people still act that way.

Hopefully Tim’s doing good these days.

Good. Fuck that management. Oust them and give the company to the people who actually do work.

I saw master boot record a couple months ago. Great show. They covered Doom’s e1m1 and I was like “ooo shit”. My partner was like “do you know this song?” Yeah babe it’s burned into my memory

It definitely seems like we’re setting ourselves up for a dystopia, where no one knows how to do software anymore. Like the time machine or Idiocracy. Management just wants short term gains, and they don’t care if there’s no one around in 10 years with any experience

Interesting. For stuff like “what’s the #1 in category?” it’s really “what’s the #2?”, because that’s what people probably guessed a lot of.

How fuzzy is the matching? Like if the answer is Chocolate Chip, how close do I need to be to get credit?

Suppose for example, you’re an automobile manufacturer. Then the success of campaigns to eliminate automobiles is a risk to your business.

We should come up with a society where people’s individual interests aren’t bad for society. Somehow. Perhaps magic?

But yeah there’s a lot of “but I need my orphan grinding machines to sell that’s my whole business” and I don’t have a lot of sympathy, because those machines are dangerous and bad. Like, just stop selling mega-suvs or single use plastic junk or whatever. I’d be happy for the state to pay them to do something else instead.

Yes. Microsoft is shit. They’re too big and the people making decisions there are too removed from shared reality. Fuck them. Split it up. Give it to the workers. Bury the owners in lead containers with warnings.

Linux is fine.

. The net result is that everyone has learned very quickly to praise executives on their visionary AI prowess, or they will be gunned down in the proverbial streets.

Once again, the people making the decisions are idiots.

As tempting as it is to be like “what took you so long??” it is more productive to be supportive.

I run a tabletop game of Vampire, and last week the players found a NIMBY “no bike lanes” activist and ran her over with her own SUV until she was dead. Gosh was that cathartic.

I’m so tired of being helpless as fucking idiots make things worse for stupid reasons.