In the mid-90s, when I started my career, I was convinced (and very sad) that Microsoft had won the computing business and I was doomed to work on their software the rest of my life.
So, perhaps "general" sentiment wasn't there yet, but certainly plenty of us held no love for the company. The only software from Microsoft I've ever really appreciated was Microsoft Musical Instruments.
Could you please not sermonize or act like a demanding customer? We don't, and can't ever, see everything that's posted here, and even if we could it's not appropriate for moderators to adjudicate on the correctness of any claim. It’s by cultivating discussions between different people with different perspectives that we illuminate topics here. Obviously you have deep expertise on those topic. Great! Please educate people rather than berating them.
This is only a place anyone wants to participate on because we have guidelines and others make the effort to observe them. You've been here long enough to know that. Please don't trash what you seem to have found value in for so long. We don't need you to be "effusively pleasant" or erudite, just respectful.
For the price of all this righteousness you could have provided a reference. Some reference. So that curious bystanders like me can learn from the exchange.
Sure. I think that I’d you were expressing concerns about all the leopards running around and having discussions about whether we need to do something about the leopard population, it’s perfectly reasonable to be upset when a leopard eats your face.
It’s just that the median tech worker was more often to talk about moving fast and breaking things and making glib statements about buggy whips. If you were the sort of person to just shrug and say that a few leopards were the price of advancement then you’re probably not going to get a lot of sympathy. That is, unless you connect your current faceless state to your previous stance on leopards and admit that maybe you were shortsighted (generic “you” here, not you specifically).
It's not a matter of being "allowed" per se. What the parent is saying that people need to do a better job being internally consistent in their beliefs and moral stances. If you are one such person, great! But my impression is that most people aren't.
I watched a guy driving on the interstate, one hand holding his phone to his ear, the other hand gesturing wildly, zero hands on the wheel (a few years before there was any car available that could conceivably be even so much as lane following).
i hold the steering wheel with my knee all the time, and make reasonable corrections, curves on highways are pretty gentle. the key is to be disciplined about paying attention to the road ahead.
We’ve never had a central data store that would make it practical to achieve such a feat. Now we have one that could answer questions like this, forever.
Mass surveillance at scale is not a trivial problem to solve, but Flock is both making it happen and making it clear that they are fine with enabling bad actors to take advantage of it.
While I don't love the FBI's history of data collection, there is a world of difference between warehousing data from government records, and building a graph of warehoused data from all possible sources and selling access to any small town police chief that can convince the city council to pay for it.
Plus, data in FBI custody is nominally subject to laws and oversight in a way that privately held data is not.
If you think democracy still has a chance in a nation as diverse and expansive as the united states, given that technology empowers despots and poisons democracies that are too big to be held by social bonds, then you are much more optimistic than I am.
At this point, the only way to preserve democracy would be to mostly dissolve the federal system, leaving states as democracies without the heavy hand and massive financial leverage from above.
States are closer to the right size for democracy to be resistant, but I think we’d need city-states of the metropolises, and big states like California would possibly need to subdivide.
I've thought about this, too. The difference is that for most of us, TV shows ended at the top/bottom of the hour. I grew up watching morning cartoons in the 1980s starting at 6am, but the times that the shows ended reminded me that it was time to get dressed, eat, etc.
Now, all the video services have feedback loops where they can determine what keeps people glued and provide more of that. Some "programs" like cocomelon have dialled that up to 11.
The only defence is the terrible parental controls and/or taking devices away. That almost always results in "fights".
I hope the negative reactions here are to the truncated title (HN drops the “How” from titles). The author doesn’t seem to be claiming anything revolutionary, just describing how they created their pipeline.
Good grief.
> Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
Not even that. Bury it in a sufficiently-large PR and there’s a very good chance it’ll be rubber-stamped because no one wants to take the time to carefully review the entire set of changes.
So, perhaps "general" sentiment wasn't there yet, but certainly plenty of us held no love for the company. The only software from Microsoft I've ever really appreciated was Microsoft Musical Instruments.
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