This is really ableist. Sociopaths? Most people in charge of running companies from top to mid-level are average people, even if some dark-triad coded people exist. What you're angry at is what capitalism is supposed to do: maximize value for the the capital owning class, that is to say ownership. There was never some engineer owned utopia. Business culture has always been this way, in fact, its only been worse in the past pre-socialist/labor movement times, not just with labor (child labor, long hours, dangerous conditions, etc) but also product (poison put in bread to make it cheaper, etc.) There is no way out of this dynamic in capitalism because this is all fundamental to capitalism.
In case you are serious, engineers were most likely to lead companies until the 70s. In some countries they still are. The negotiated middle ground was engineer + MBA. But even those are kind of going out of fashion and instead there are marketing/HR/accounting + MBA filling up boards and leadership.
It's also a function of young ambitious people just following the money over time. Finance has grown and grown and grown because it's the easiest place to skim the cream. Combine that with the fact that it's transferable from company to company and it's clear why the trend. Obviously the only innovation these people are capable of is financial innovation (repackaging derivatives, ever-more-convoluted deal structures to snow people, etc), but that doesn't much matter as long as there is a sufficient base of enough new companies with actual innovations sprouting up that it provides enough grist for the finance mill.
That's absurd. First because nobody uses the word 'sociopath' to mean 'mentally ill', they are using it as a moral judgment / to describe a type of amoral person. Second because the reason one negatively characterized the mechanisms of capitalism is because they are not, like, immutable laws of the universe, but rather things that society has quite a bit of control over (whether or not it currently knows how to exercise that control).
(incidentally I disagree with the sociopath characterization anyway; I'm just contesting the weird use of the word ableist)
I mod a couple subs on reddit, and one that is fairly famous. I see this stuff all the time, even if this person is lying. Its a real phenomenon. Usually its messy like "haha, my husband just loves these cookies" and with a link to the site and its obvious its spam, but stuff like this happens too.
I take some supplements for health reasons and its pretty obvious in that space too. I remember one day one brand of a certain something (which came from a no-name company and over-priced compared to competitors) was near everywhere in comments. In fact, people just referred to the product by the brand name, not the actual chemical. Eventually people got wise to it, and you'd see a "hey this is astroturfing," but the comments remain and if you google or reddit search this supplement, the top results are people raving about this one specific brand still. This stuff works and I imagine it works very well because it keeps happening.
Its also especially bad in women's spaces because there's so many competing brands of fashion or makeup or whatever. Much of it using stealth advertising, relationships with influencers who won't disclose its a paid partnership, etc. A lot of makeup brands get big almost soley because of internet engagement, so there's a strong incentive to try.
You can see this happening in realtime almost. Suddenly this face cream or this mascara is big on reddit, with new-ish accounts raving about them. I've noticed lately that they've been buying old accounts and repurposing them. I've dug into people's posting histories (a mod can see this if youre on their sub even if private) and the account is 5 years old that went silent 3 years ago and now is suddenly back but this time its someone purporting to be a woman, when the previous posting history is very male-coded and even may call himself a man in comments. I don't think we fully appreciate how fake this all is and how little will there is to fight it. This is also done politically too, especially around election season, but is generally happening all the time.
I remember tracking this stuff for a while when Stellar Blade came out, which had some fair accusations of male gaze-y marketing and graphics. There was no shortage of "I'm a woman gamer/developer, and Stellar Blade is actually not sexist, its empowering," posts and comments on a popular women's gaming sub. It was really incredible to see this and again, a lot of these accounts were recently awakened accounts from someone who did not fit the profile. There is so much bot PR. I won't even go into the Depp-Heard case because its a huge topic, but wow, that was a great example of bots controlling the narrative almost entirely.
And then it's picked up by LLMs as a fairly trusted organic source. It slightly peeves me how often LLM cites random reddit post as an authoritative trust worthy data point :-/
I think its naive to think capitalism doesnt lead to dirty tricks. There's tons of PR and stealth marketing out there. The idea that our system is all "honest good guys" doesn't fit in with the facts.
Back then the working class was simply more powerful. Companies had to have good PR, hence feeling 'magical' or 'mysterious.' Of course now in the later stage of capitalism, these execs, investors, etc can just do full-on mask slips.
I think some of this is definitely childhood nostalgia, but its also very different world today. I don't know any kid that sees Nintendo as magical as I did. The Legend of Zelda was this weird, dark, and mysterious thing. So many games were oddly mysterious or weirdly ported from places like Japan, which had their own design language and often the translation was odd which only added to the mystique. Games came out with little to no fanfare and you just had to sort of figure them out. There were cheat books and magazines and such, but generally you had to approach this art with an open heart and open mind and sort of drink it in. If everything is a google or AI search away, then there's no real mystery anymore.
Kids today are forced to be savvy and 'realpolitick' at a young age. They just complain about the pricing and more 'inside baseball' about games and absolutely get a little brain fried by youtube gaming culture that often runs on outrage so no game is good enough. Suddenly, everyone is a critic and magic and love are hard to cultivate in a highly critical environment. Its like everyone is stuck in a Philosophy 101 class with an overly argumentative professor, forever, and its unrelenting and makes us miserable.
Also kids aren't ignorant, in fact they can be very savvy. Games constantly begging them to buy DLCs or sell them microtransaction items absolutely hurt the 'magic.' How can you develop these feelings when you feel like you're locked in the room with a shady used car salesman constantly?
I don't know if kids today can even experience that old magic. At least not in games. It seems now its only in books and getting lost in novels where magic exists now. A book can't beg you to buy an extra chapter or make you pay gems for the next sentence.
I disagree actually. There certainly are games that I have felt are pretty 'magical' as you put it but they tend to me almost childlike in some of their design choices. Monument Valley for example was amazing. I was so impressed by that game and how it mixed the childishness of magic toyboxes and Escher inspired puzzles with the adult complexity of some of the puzzles and the eeriness of the setting.
"Of course now in the later stage of capitalism, these execs, investors, etc can just do full-on mask slips."
Just a reminder: we've supposedly been in/near late/end stage capitalism for over a hundred and fifty years now. Marx was proposing this back at the end of the nineteenth century.
I think starting in the 30s and esp after WW2/cold war era helped reset it somewhat. It started to pick back up in the 80s and into overdrive with the internet
That's fine, if not very good, but the central problem remains (ignoring the capitalist corrupted business culture and its merging with the state behind much of this). We can't centralize our communications without major concessions in significant ways that non-techies seem unaware of until a big news item like this comes out. "What, they're logging my chats, and IP, voice clips, and now they want my ID for 18+ discords?" Yes, absolutely you are being logged and those logs will go places you have no control over. Maybe even to oppress you or your loved ones.
Discord's entire value proposition was "Hey just click here, no need to pay for a teamspeak server or do peer-to-peer jank." Deeply personal stuff is said and posted in those spaces. Common communication should not be shared like this and we keep falling back to the "tapped my phone line" problem.
The difference between then and now is that for a long time there was no alternative to POTS. You just had to use the phone to call someone. The phone company and whatever government tapping was very hard to get around. But today there are other ways to do near everything if we give up on for-profit centralized services.
I think society keeps flirting with federation and other things similar to that but never quite makes the jump. The twitter exodus went back to a new centralized service like Bluesky that will one day be sold to another deep-pocketed buyer with its own agenda, thus creating this problem again. Sure, now with federation or personal servers, the privacy issue goes back to the server operator, but at least that could be someone you trust, or even you. When currently, neither of those options are possible with things like Discord or Bluesky.
I'm testing moving my friends and gaming group to self-hosted teamspeak or stout or mumble or something like that. I think we'll lose some convenience, but life isn't all about gains. Sometimes you have to sacrifice things for the greater good. I also really want to start moving away from things like reddit, bluesky, HN, etc to federated services and have dipped my toes there quite a bit, but the population isn't there (yet?).
I hope this is a wakeup call that people need, much like the wake-up call the fight against personal encryption was in the 90s. I think we're in a super bad place right now, and its worth discussing the elephant in the room, even to non-techies, and what alternatives there are to the current system. I think people need to get over the convivence of the current system and realize if they want privacy and safety, they may have to migrate to services built with that in mind.
I learned two languages growing up and was speaking both as soon as I could speak and could write in both not long after. This is typical for nearly every kid in the world outside of countries with strong language monocultures. I certainly think Mills was a very talented person, but there's this weird cult of being impressed by "speaks 7 languages" hagoigraphies which aren't helpful. People bring up it as some acid test of intelligence and its just not very accurate.
Especially when you actually know the language these kinds of people claim to speak and you realize they actually don't speak 7 languages but maybe know 2 or 3 fluently and know 'kitchen' versions of all the others. I'm not going to name names because I don't want an argument and don't have the spoons for it, but lots of these international luminaries and leaders and such with "speaks 7 language" are often little more than conmen or simply enjoy building their own little hagiographies for their own PR goals.
There's this wonderful deep-dive on youtube on Feynman's high-questionable personal mythology that is a great example of this kind of self-promotion and how easy it is to sell one's self, especially in academic and techie circles, if you have a certain amount of charisma and drive.
Also as a lefty, I'm also not impressed by breathless ambidextrous tales either as most lefties are forced to be ambidextrous and its not actually exceptional at all. I can write with both hands, play musical instruments either way, play sports either way, etc. The left hand is better at these things, but my right-hand is okay-ish at almost all these things and I use a right-hand dominant near everything in my life anyway. I even like to switch it up to keep wear and tear down. At work the mouse is on the left, but at home for gaming its on the right. This is all boring everyday stuff for lefties.
There's a toxic 'great man' mythology that humanity still can't get over and its weird seeing it taken seriously when so many 'great men' have been debunked or seen as recipients of the system they were under (Mills' father pushing him so hard and being in the privileged class that would allow all this instead of back-breaking farm labor all day). Personal talent is important but its vastly played up in dishonest ways for dishonest gains. We probably pass many highly talented people a day on the street, but only some had the opportunity to grow those gifts into something they can use.
The famous quote comes to mind. "I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops." - Stephen Jay Gould
He was shot in 1918 leaving bullets in his body and left him weakened, then in 1922 he suffered at least three debilitating strokes. He lost his ability so speak and had to learn to speak again. He even proposed assisted suicide because he was suffering so much. He then had a final fatal stroke in 1924. I don't think "he looks crazy so he must have had some STD" is medically accurate or remotely appropriate on what's supposed to be an academic forum. He most likely had brain damage towards the end thus his illness of course was reflected on his body looked. Lenin's eyes reflected his post-stroke damage.
He was quite sane in his life and his work expanding on Marx is of course extremely important.
While on the other hand I'm often frustrated and feel limited by a steam-only deck and am going to start installing the other store fronts. I have games there I've gotten cheaper or even free. I don't like being locked into steam and "Gabe the goodest billionaire" propaganda exists to keep people from engaging in competitor products. I also want to support stores that take less from developers, especially smaller ones. Steams 30% cut while Epic is 0% up to $1m is concerning. I want smaller devs to succeed better. Steam is a huge compromise even if its a 'fan favorite' quasi-monopoly.
So yes I want gog to be native linux on things like the deck.
Comparing it to agriculture which has a very large demand for water by its nature is very apples to oranges. We need food, its questionable if we need grok taking people's clothes off.
These data centers do come at a real environmental cost. I don't think cherry picking water usage is really helpful here.
If they're shills (= people being paid to behave a certain way), then delusional doesn't come into it. However, such commentary on downvotes isn't productive. From the news guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.
> Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.
None of that is solved by automated driving. You want public trains, BRT bus systems, trams, etc. The ideal universe is you stepping on public trans, not piloting various rube goldberg-esque machines that are far more dangerous and will always contribute to traffic and "one more lane" does not work.
Sure, public transit can be nice. But so is owning my own vehicle that isn't subject to routes, schedules, and minimal luggage constraints. I'd much rather hang out and read a book or play a video game than babysit a vehicle in stop and go traffic for half an hour. Even if traffic is moving at a decent clip I'd still rather do something else.
Public transit is great but it is not a catch all solution. Farmers need trucks, people in rural areas need to get places at odd hours. Drunk people need to be ferried to distant places. Automated cars and good transit are not mutually exclusive.
