Not included in the above, but handy is also an alternative web UI for Reuters news: https://neuters.de

Link to the YAML spec, for the (very) brave: https://yaml.org/spec/1.2.2/

no you didn’t Mr. Simpson, no one can

took me a couple but worth it

well there was probably awareness of ideas of sacrifice, punishment, right/wrong. Old ideas…

I honestly find it worrying that someone would think it’s some sort of deeply ingrained human trait when it’s clearly not culturally universal (eg. small hunter-gatherer tribes wouldn’t exist otherwise) and not present through all of history.

I think “growth” is a strong signal for people to put faith and trust into something. And that these emotions have influenced our behaviour for a long time.

Why did the Roman empire keep expanding? What made them want more? I’m not a historian nor an anthropologist (far from either!). But this feels like “line go up” behaviour. What would it mean for those in power to communicate that some part of the empire was receding? Even if, overall, the empire was objectivetly huge relative to other organised groups?

One thing I think about is there could be eroding confidence and trust of those in power by colleagues and the general population. If people lose faith, the powerful lose power; they lose ability to influence behaviour. Growth is obsessed over because it’s a means to capture influence over the means of production (and capture profit).

The line has to go up because the current economic system demands it has to go up

What about outside of economics? Even metrics on https://fedidb.org: shrinking numbers are coloured red. Growing numbers green. Green = good, red = bad.

Another thought. The other day I was at a cricket match. Grand final. Because the home team was losing, the stadium started to empty. It wasn’t about enjoying the individual balls/plays. Supporters were not satisfied with coming second (an amazing achievement, much “profit”!), it needed to be more.

To stretch this shitty metaphor further, when the supporters (investors?) lost confidence in their ability to deliver more, they just abandoned the entire match (enterprise?) altogether!

Again: I’m not stating anything here as fact. I’m just absolutely dumbfounded as to why “line go up” is, as you say, such an obsession. I hear you when you say that it’s a consequence of how the modern economy works. That makes sense. I guess I wonder what would happen if we snapped our fingers and we could start again. I wonder what the economy system would look like. Would we still be obsessed with growth?

Growth might be impossible, but a steady and “boring” amount of profit should still be possible selling plain-ole-dishwashers. Yet … for some reason, we don’t see that.

God yes this bothers and fascinates me.

Instead companies throw everything into growth and we get the retarded bluetooth enabled dishwasher problem everywhere, and I’d like toknow more about why.

I think it’s alluded to in the article:

They found a way to make consumers spend more money on dishwashing. The line goes up, for one more year. But it’s not enough. It has to go up every year.

Digging deeper: why must the line go up? Pesonally I see it as a deeply emotional, human thing.

When you read those annual financial reports from big companies, they will do anything to make sure things look rosy. Bullshit terms like “negative growth” are used because “loss” or “shrink” sound bad. So what if it sounds bad?

Confidence. Trust. It’s emotional. These are deep in our psyche. It’s how governments get elected, contracts are won, and investments are made. It’s what makes us human. If that line goes down… will it go back up? What’s going to happen? Alarm bells! Uncertaintly. Anxiety. People abandon you. Money, power, influence fades. You could find yourself replaced by the up-and-coming who “show promise”.

Our social emotional species has hundreds of thousands of years (millions?) of years of this stuff hardwired into us. Trust let us cooperate beyond our own individual or family interests. Would we be human otherwise? (I found the article Behavioural Modernity interesting).

Not sure it’s capitalism per se. Perhaps rampant waste. Criticism of capitalism could include monopoly formation; massive tech companies buy small ones (obtain more capital = more control over production = more profit).

There’s despair over everyone, big & small, resolving the same recreated problems. Kelley doesn’t talk about breaking Microsoft up (i.e. redistributing their capital). He implies he’d be ok for Microsoft to maintain its market position if it just fixed some damn bugs.

The art of turning a 500-line text file into a 50MB tarball. Welcome to the future :(

Here’s the article’s source: https://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_Future_of_Jobs_2023.pdf

That report’s data is a survey they sent out to companies. Quantising “so… what do you think is gonna happen?” seems… shonky?

AM radio paywall? Where?

I suppose there’s positive, then there’s “totally changed how I work”. It’s a big call. Maybe a real-world example would make it sound more believable: “before ChatGPT, I would have to sift through stacks of outdated VB6 documentation on $task. This took up most of the day. Yesterday I used a LLM to get a basic implementation of $task then I tidied it up and installed it within an hour.”

You can report the message so that future messages from the spammer won’t send. Unfortunately no direct way to mark the message as junk automatically like email, but Signal does have Message Requests which may help? https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360007459591-Signal-Profiles-and-Message-Requests

BYD employ about 570,000 people and by some measures are the largest carmaker in the world. I’d never heard of them either until a couple years ago. They’ve definitely got the cash to put into PR like this. Past couple years Australia started importing their electric cars. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BYD_Company

Even with (more) UX engineers, it was incredibly difficult to get any development done. When I was in this space, management and contractors were incredibly entrenched playing political games to grow teams even bigger to get more funding. There was nobody with any authority using the thing end-to-end saying “this sucks”.

Ironically this site serves koko analytics, which now ignores the Do Not Track header (as per Mozilla’s recommendation, mind you). See commit 6890f3c.

Thankfully uBlock Origin blocks loading the scripts.

Thankfully uBlock Origin removes those parameters for us. The default filters include a whole bunch of removeparam filters; e.g. privacy.txt See also removeparam.

Maybe you could help your friends and family install Firefox and/or uBlock Origin? Every little bit helps :)

I’ve never heard of Skiff. Beyond studying the protocols and system design, here’s a couple of things off the top of my head to help:

• Follow the money. Are they charging enough to not be tempted to sell data about their users?
• Who is in charge? Have leadership demonstrated respect towards their user’s privacy in the past? See their About Us page
• Read their privacy policy
• Keep up-to-date. Lots of services start out with good intentions, but over time they get acquired, acqui-hired, big investments… and policies change.

A very gifted programmer I met from Iran had to do the same. Originally from Iran, he wanted to marry a girl from Myanmar. This was forbidden for some reason so they said “fuck it, let’s go to where there is loads of tech jobs”. I was working in the Netherlands at the time when I met them. He’s now flourishing in the open source software space over there. Brain drain 100%.