someguy7250's comments

(Edit: @chrisan I am soft-banned from replying to you. The reply button is gone. Yes I know I should be open to new options. But I have suffered silently for years and everyone only hated me for my own ideas. So you have to excuse me when the flood gate opens. None of these have anything to do with you. I wish I could have said it back then to the people who actually shunned me)

(Edit: @HN, just delete my account. I am done with programming career. I will change the password shortly and never log back in)

If anything I'm concerned about future developers.

If we don't understand how things work under the hood, and future generations are discouraged even more from understanding them,

And if AIs can program and code for us,

Eventually one day we will forget how to program, how to fix low level coding errors, and how to fix a broken Linux kernel.

What happens then?

Yes it sounds like the slippery slope fallacy. But we have been slipping towards this direction for too long, even before AIs became a thing.

Here is an example where I would have had a better day if I simply didn't show my skills to anyone

https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=37308823

Sure. I'm the elitist, the coder who can't keep his job for longer than 2 years because he doesn't have any soft skill.

At the moment I am literally considering quitting (my second job), working at a phone repair shop instead of programming, exactly because people at work prefer your kind of coders than enthusiasts like me.

Thank you for convincing me. I will become a phone repair technician instead. Have fun with your amazing programming career. You will do great. (This is the sarcastaball moment for me. Seriously I'm not even being sarcastic. You will do great)

> guaranteed to be faster

That's good for you. I still prefer to just write `pbpaste | base64 -d` into my terminal.

Sorry for wanting to solve problems in a different way

Honestly when I accepted that clever code is bad code, my passion for coding died and now I just want to coast until I get fired and then go work at a phone repair shop

I think when I picked my major, I never understood what software engineering is, or even what engineering is. Honestly I shouldn't be complaining. So many people have it worse.

Coding would still be fun if it weren't a job, where we bend tech backwards to please the users (instead of teaching users to do the right thing)

I think it's sadder that developers would rather use an app rather than learning the proper command line for basic things like decoding base64

Many people living in these countries, know what's going on. They silently support the violent levels of censorship because they think our government is just as bad and often hypocritical (even though the US is objectively better in most reasonable cases)

IMO, the disagreement between the two political parties doesn't just cause domestic polarization, it also delays foreign progress towards democracy. People get jaded internationally from it. I'm hoping we can either have more parties or just help the two parties make up.

All I can say is.. Garbage collection, and memory management ("recycling"), are hard, lol.

That's good. And I am biased. I personally liked American and Japanese culture better anyways.

Growing up in China, everyone I knew keeps telling me our culture is fake, reconstructed from a pile of burning books and detached from both history and modern life, at least ever since Cultural Revolution.

But frankly every country is having a cultural crisis today. I just want to preserve some things more. And yes I know that is biased.

Yeah you are right that people are applying the wrong laws and expecting results. Ideally we would consider creating new laws. But it is hard to explain why a company's control over its own platform can be harmful especially if competition exists.

IMO the reason is that both customers and small creators end up losing in this scheme. They end up purchasing/making products often not for creativity or joy, but for necessity and FOMO. And yet these products are planned obsolescence. So even if this isn't a monopoly, it is exploitative.

I'm not sure whether the US can/should make a law against exploiting customers. But people should at least talk more about this weird tech environment we are in.

Lol it's funny to summarize this discussion as: "we don't want to make a (seemingly) positive change because too many people rely on us to live in their 'backwards' ways".

If everyone can band together and generate N fake clicks for every 1 real click, And provide N wrong Captcha answers for every correct answer,

Then we might just be able to send a message to advertisers and those "data anal-lysts"

Question is: Will I be held liable for randomly clicking on things? What if I use a bot instead? (Maybe that's why the author eventually abandoned this project)

> NEVER paste code you don't understand into the development console

Tech companies have long achieved security by simply locking people out of choices that they shouldn't make.

I'm suspecting that Google will soon lock people out of Chrome's developer tools unless they can prove they are a developer (with a certificate that's tied to the website they are debugging)

My point is book burning can cause backlash. Therefore so can deletionism.

When the backlash happens, it's often already too late. But people are aware something was gone, that's why there is a backlash.

I know this because it happened in the past with the Cultural Revolution. Not saying it will happen in the same way here.

Maybe the only backlash we'll ever get is against my stupid comments. Lol.

Yes but book burning had backlash, too. And frankly if we are really that stupid then we didn't deserve tech and culture in the first place. Might as well delete wikipedia. Let people forget everything, then evolution will take over. /s

Frankly I say we let them delete all public backups of internet culture. Eventually there would be a backlash when this goes too far.

Lots of games, websites and TV shows would be gone. Let them.

Don't make local backups either. Or at least encrypt the backups and make sure they will be lost when we die.

*Let DRM and Copyright become the modern equivalent of book burning.*

Let people forget. Let it be the government's problem to preserve knowledge and history. And let it decide when the cost is higher than whatever benefits we get from strict authoritarian levels of Copyright protections

Wow! This might just be what I've been hoping for, since 2020.

What I hoped for was more of a generic backend for multiplayer games.

But this is even better. It looks like a next-gen bittorrent which natively supports operations?

How did the EU support something like this without worrying about misuse?

It would be fun to build something like a Blender plugin that allows people to cooperate on free 3D models and animations. But it's also unclear whether anyone would be legally liable when something goes wrong.

(Edit: It sounds like we want to avoid legal issues by having everyone run their own local instances. I like that feeling of hosting our own servers. But something just feels odd. Since when are we allowed to be so open? What's the catch?)

Yup that's a better idea.

Hopefully one day we will be advanced enough to start transforming the desert. It's not an easy task and I don't know enough about science or economics to say it's definitely feasible. It's just a hope.

And if people would hope for that then they would be willing to improve existing small towns too.

I don't like this trend that we all move to major cities and compete for scraps of lands and housing.

True. I am not asking people to just accept anything though.

If you want growth, have at it. When my phone completely breaks, I would love to get a better hardware with more features.

People don't really like each other enough to work for a positive future. And yet they all want to live in a populous city with amazing opportunities/infrastructure/environment/etc

That's the problem.

If technology is so advanced and if solar panels are getting cheaper, why aren't we building new cities in the desert? (Or, why aren't we bringing new techs to small towns that already exist?)

If everyone is so tired of planned obsolescence and not owning their devices, why aren't we making new industries based on sustainable, repairable, open source phones?

There could be whole new towns running an economy on producing sustainable hardwares and then selling the repair parts. It wouldn't be a lot of money. But if everything we use is repairable and sustainable, we wouldn't need a lot of money.

Maybe I am just silly to hope for such a future?