chronotis's comments

I wouldn't object, though I also don't see how to put the genie back in the Citizens United bottle.

There are some efforts to do exactly that, though overall I'd observe that the general level of technological sophistication / early adopter-ism is pretty low in the politician cohort. There are tools for developing campaign plans, direct mail messaging, text campaign content, etc.; we used AI social media ad generation tools to help fill our content pipeline. We developed some internal tools to assist with direct mail fundraising letters to PACs / labor unions / etc.

Former (failed) candidate here, state legislative race in a smaller state that's not generally described as competitive. Money = time. When large donors can deploy large amounts of cash, it relieves you of the need to spend tons of time raising money and you can instead spend that time on other things of greater ROI or that can scale your outreach to a larger audience.

As the parent of a teen with ADHD, I find myself comparing my growing-up experiences and anxieties with his. I'm confident that if I were coming of age today, I would probably have been diagnosed with something because I was firmly a couple standard deviations away from the societal mean.

Because we didn't have as extensive diagnoses or therapies back in the 80s compared to now, I had my own phase of wondering what was wrong with me. There weren't any peer or adult role models available to me that really related to my experiences. As a result, there were some difficult years in there...but also, I had to find my own resiliency and ways of mapping my worldview to other people.

Fast forward 40 years. I am conflicted about which is better: to be left to figure it out on your own, or to have a support system that is (at times) overly biased towards leaning on the diagnosis as the explanation. But I can say with high confidence that at least for the coming-of-age years of my child, I am far more thankful that his experiences are different than mine.

"Being a human" is grossly inadequate as a lowest common denominator definition of the needs and experiences of children. Even as broadly discussed as it is, it's still only ~11% of US children and that's still a challenging hill to climb if their peer culture doesn't provide some sort of explanation or incentives for understanding each other.

For me, as much as it pains me to admit this, the sales and account relationship process is just as important of a factor now. I'm at a level where I'm not the end user of most of the infrastructure I purchase for the business, but I'm the one that has to deal with most of the vendor interaction.

Datadog is a pain in the ass. I've got two emails and a voicemail from them just this week. We are not an active customer.

Heroku/Salesforce is also a pain in the ass. It causes enough friction with legal that I'll spend whatever effort it takes to replatform our workload just to not have to have those unending inbound calls.

NS1 was easy-peasy, but post-IBM I now receive a PDF invoice for $50 once per month with no credit card-based billing options and have to remind finance to cut a paper check. I'll be rehoming our DNS as soon as we decide on where to move it to.

tl;dr: the business experience is part of the product

Not doubling down, this is just the original article that started the controversy.

Without irony, here's ChatGPT's summary:

This legal complaint alleges that defendants operating a non-profit entity for the benefit of humanity have committed massive fraud on donors, beneficiaries, and the public. The complaint raises concerns about OpenAI's operation, including its dual structure as a non-profit and a for-profit entity, potential insider dealings, and the exclusion of the general public from its benefits. It claims that OpenAI has used deceptive advertising, unfair competition, and fraud to develop its valuable resource for personal gain.

The complaint highlights OpenAI's mission of benefiting humanity and points out that a narrow group of stakeholders have received commercially invaluable early access to its technology. It also argues that OpenAI's for-profit operations might infringe on copyright and fair use laws, as the technology is built on large datasets, much of which is copyrighted. It accuses OpenAI of breaching trust and fiduciary duties, disrupting legal frameworks, and potentially engaging in willful and wanton negligence by increasing existential risks related to AI.

Finally, the complaint alleges that OpenAI might have engaged in banned political activities, specifically suggesting that the technology may have been used to influence the 2020 US presidential election in favor of the Democratic party.

A friend of mine works at a law firm that exclusively handles train injury cases. It happens a LOT more than you'd expect, primarily at crossings. Hearing-handicapped or people blasting their speakers who don't hear the horn; faulty crossing gates; distracted drivers; and so on.

The cases almost always include a fatality.

I don't personally know the OP, but his profile isn't that of a passing crypto fanboy hustling to attract a followers list. I'd wager that he probably doesn't care much if some pro-Elon HN folks don't agree with his views on capitalism or proper vs. improper ways to migrate a follower base between platforms.

He's contributed to the software industry longer than most people here. That's not to say that anyone is owed anything in deference or respect, but "he's seen some shit." It's hypocritical to applaud what you believe to be pro-free-speech changes at Twitter while criticizing somebody for the manner in which somebody communicates their decision to deprioritize that platform.

If somebody has 50k followers, I imagine they would have reasons to communicate to that audience why they're not going to be as visible on their current platform and how to go about finding their content in the future.

Seems relevant to me. The article is from your organization, and that information is something I wouldn't have known if not for the prior commenter's comment.

I agree that we're not going to see a US privacy framework that's identical to GDPR and where all players have the same obligations and enforcement mechanisms. What is extremely problematic, IMHO, is the US having _no_ privacy framework to speak of while the rest of the world does. Beyond HIPPA and COPPA (and CCPA if you happen to live in Cali), there's really not much recourse for US citizens besides their collection of company-paid credit monitoring after each security breach.

If one outcome of GDPR is that 10-15 years later, the US adopts some sort of national privacy framework that motivates industry to reevaluate their data monetization business models, that's a good outcome.

I'm mostly just projecting based on the current 48+2+50 state of the Senate where virtually everything gets held up. If the Democrats brought it forward, I would expect the Republicans to filibuster just on principle.

Ten years or so ago, I was participating in a small business roundtable discussion with one of our state senators. At the time, I ran a consumer research agency and would often have multinational projects involving consumer data collection in both the US and EU; this is before GDPR had become ratified, but Safe Harbor was failing and there was ambiguity about what the future state would look like.

Of the 15 or 20 business owners in the room, I was the only "pro privacy" voice. People were very focused on what would be the perceived additional cost of complying with any GDPR-style rules in the US, and weren't yet thinking about the negative effects of having different privacy rules in different markets. "Different markets have different rules all the time," in short.

I maintain that it would be less complicated, less expensive, and more human-friendly to use data privacy rules as globally universal as can be achieved. There will always be capitalism leeches that drain money through arbitrage between the policy gaps, yes, but it would help.

(Also: there is zero chance this gets through the current US Senate. Would never clear filibuster.)

Those same pay-once video games also sell season passes, MTX content, expansion packs, and in-game currency.

It may not have made national news, but here (I only live a couple hours from Mendon) some of this made its way into local awareness. It was mostly focused on the efforts of the boy scouts in the area, though.

In this new climate, it will take more than laws. Permanence will require constitutional amendments (which is actually how most things get rooted at the state level, the state constitutions change pretty regularly).

I grew up in suburban Midwest America. Monoculture is great if you're aligned with the monoculture, but it's quite miserable if you're unwilling or unable to conform.

I went on to start my career on the east coast over 25 years ago, and then the west coast (Boston / SF / SEA / LA). I'm now back in a Midwestern monoculture community because of family. It's not an easy cultural adjustment if you've acclimated to something that's not monoculture.

In my case, the appeal of large city blended culture is that (1) I can find my tribe much more easily and (2) the tribes all have to get along because there's no dominant tribe enforcing its norms on the others. (There's obviously generalization in this statement, but I'd argue that relative to a monoculture community that these things are more truth than not. SF, SEA and others have plenty of challenges, but IMHO it's in part because they've become monocultures, or at least tech has become the dominant tribe and asserts its will on other cultures.)

If you enjoy living in the monoculture you occupy, there's no reason to leave. Visiting or temporarily living in blended cultures will not feel better to you, as it causes more stress than where you came from. But it's very presumptuous to assume that others would find living in "flyover" country better than the life they currently lead.

I consume Reddit in generally the same way I consume Twitter - I completely ignore what's trending and only look at the people/subreddits that I've made an explicit choice to follow. Twitter's algorithm gives me more leakage than Reddit's, but I find it to be a tolerable amount.

I endured 13 months. In my mind, very little skill development happened during those 13 months. But here I am, years later, and that line item in my history still carries some sense of market validation - that, because I successfully navigated the recruitment funnel and was at one time an Amazonian, that I must have useful skills.

Midwestern GenX suburban parent here. Nothing important happens in our subdivision (hundreds of homes) without mention of it in the neighborhood's private Facebook group. Our public school district uses a Facebook page as a primary announcement platform. Kids' sports and social groups are all organized as Facebook groups and pages. You cannot escape Facebook if you're a suburban parent in the US.