_1qd4's comments

jbob2000 | 5 years ago | on: Ask HN: What are some “10x” software product innovations you have experienced?

Multiple cursors in Sublime Text. Made it incredibly easy to do repetitive edits to json data or html templates. VS Code does a better job of cursor management now, but I think that was inspired by sublime text.

Language and date time services like Moment and i18n. Huge productivity gains from having off the shelf solutions for multi-language features.

Node.js and Express got rid of all the cruft from backend API development. It’s a breeze to spin up a new API, whereas years prior needed a fairly strict environment setup to run reliably.

jbob2000 | 5 years ago | on: NASA Needs to Rename the James Webb Space Telescope

Sex is the only thing that matters. Views on sexuality are the highest our morals go right now, the test of how much you care about the world all comes down to what you believe people should do with their penises and vaginas. Obama kickstarted drone bombing warfare, but he also repealed Don't Ask, Don't Tell, so therefore he is Good.

(I'm being sarcastic... I think...)

jbob2000 | 5 years ago | on: Sir Kazuo Ishiguro warns of young authors self-censoring out of 'fear'

The problem with cancel culture is much the same as the problem I'm having with my QA department:

We have a very small, rock solid front end. Most of our work is simply updating content. It's very straightforward work and you have to try very hard to introduce bugs. But when you staff a team of 6 people and tell them "it's your job to find something wrong with this website", they WILL find something wrong. I have a meeting this afternoon to explain to my Product manager why the content looks different on a mobile screen than it does on desktop because the QA team thinks line breaks are a bug ("the content document didn't break the line here, but the mobile view did, it's a bug").

When you empower people to take others down via subjective rules, then it's always a moving target. You can never reach a point where people are safe and happy. Check out the shuffles deck subreddit for some egregious examples of cancel culture gone wrong, https://www.reddit.com/r/Shuffles_Deck/.

jbob2000 | 5 years ago | on: The GPU Sadness Index: Tracking eBay Pricing

This is a market inefficiency. These companies could be reselling the video cards without doing the extra work of putting together a full PC and everyone would be better off - you don’t have to resell parts as “used”, the company doesn’t have to ship you parts you don’t want, both of you don’t have to pay taxes on stuff nobody wants.

jbob2000 | 5 years ago | on: Facebook says it will pay news industry $1B over 3 years

This analogy doesn't work because information is not a limited commodity. Once you've "printed" the news, its value drops to 0. This isn't the old days where you had to physically print 1,000,000 papers if you wanted the message to get to 1,000,000 people. You can "print" the news once now, and EVERYONE can see it.

jbob2000 | 5 years ago | on: The unusual ways Western parents raise children

Checkout this article, "Childhood autism spikes in geek heartlands": https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn20589-childhood-autis...

There's a correlation between parents who are both "systemizers" and their child having autism.

I've also heard the theory that Austism is basically what we've been genetically selecting for over the last 100 years or so - the world wants brainless consumers - what is better than someone with sensory disorders, who can be primed to get up and buy with a simple prick?

jbob2000 | 5 years ago | on: My billion pound company has no HR department

I work for an enterprise company. The motherboard on one of my staff's macbooks died during the lockdown and it needed to be repaired. Do you know what the Enterprise IT told us to do?

"Take it to the Apple store".

Are you fucking kidding me? You want me to send my staff out during the lockdown to get a piece of YOUR hardware fixed? No option to ship it, no drop off desk at our office or something.

You're absolutely right that when you setup a department called "IT" they are now a group of people that need to be catered to as much as the other staff.

"We don't want to expose IT staff to risk, so send your own staff to get the computers repaired. Then it's your fault if they get sick and die." was the message I got.

jbob2000 | 5 years ago | on: I built ByteDance's censorship machine

We do the same thing in the west. Look at the people you see in ads and on TV, it's always an idealized look at what the people in power WANT society to look like.

My company recently moved away from animated characters back to using humans in their ads. Most of the people in our ads are mixed race, you can't really tell if they're asian, white, arab, or "tanned".

So it's the same promotion of a genetic look, just with a different group of people.

jbob2000 | 5 years ago | on: California State Legislator Introduces Bill to Decriminalize Psychedelics

The cultures with a long history of psychedelic practice are just as bad for spiritualist bullshit as this new age culture. Actually, most of the bullshit these New Spiritualists spout is taken directly from these cultures; chakras, spirits, "bad energy", shamanism, etc. all comes from those cultures.
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