anexprogrammer

That is exactly free speech. A right to express an unsavoury view without the system punishing you.

Never gave you a right not to be ignored by your neighbours, or not banned from the bar, or not having others nudge their friends to make sure they notice and avoid, etc. Free speech almost always came with consequences until the internet age.

For those who weren't around, Usenet was built on uucp in the early 80s. As messages were store and forward you had to wait a good while for your messages to propagate - many servers only connected daily! Oh, and better set cron to dial in often as messages didn't stay in the spool too long!

Usenet back then was spam free and you could usually end up talking to the creators of whatever you're discussing. I rather miss it.

Quite a few tech companies used private newsgroups for support, so you'd dial into those separately. As they were often techie to techie they worked rather well.

I first came across Usenet and uucp via the Amiga Developer programme. Amicron and uucp overnight all seemed a bit magic back in 87 compared to dialing into non-networked BBS's to browse, very, very slowly!

Well the luck of finding a place that can deal with a middle-aged apprentice means I'll be collecting those skills for a while yet! I came across the opportunity whilst looking for options and directions for degrees to drive the career change. Well, that and deciding quite what other field I wanted to land in. Opportunity arose, I leapt. :)

Sometimes I'm glorified handyman, sometimes more significant, almost alwats learning more about old methods and tech, or previous centuries' restorations. I'm still collecting pieces of paper, including for some required modern things like electrics, that usually feel like basic commmon sense, until you see the folks in the class who are barely grasping it.

There's opportunities for specialising more as I go on.

Europe is littered with old sites, some owned by the large conservation charities are pretty formal in recruitment and role. Some of the individual estates and smaller organisations are more flexible probably because some of the niche skills are needed only more rarely. So I'd probably have never got near the National Trust without a 5 year run up.

This has come up a few times!...

I left because I was utterly sick of churn, NIH, and the endless succession of this week's magic (javascript framework etc) bullet. OK. It's different. It's almost never better.

Also felt most of my efforts were NOT making the world a better place but tech was contributing HARD to the throwaway world we need to cease, not increase.

I now work maintaining and restoring an early Elizabethan estate. Some of the things I do might outlast me, and it seems a worthwile contribution to the world. Some of the work done will count in a century or two all being well.

Do I regret leaving? Hell no. Best decision I ever made.

Still read HN because I am still interested in tech, but mostly not the 80% that the world seems to have settled on. I am extremely agin many of the uses, decisions and techs that give us the modern world. Exponentially increasing throwaway hardware on a finite planet? Surveillance? IoT? Security? Everything as a data slurping webapp? Disrupting perfectly sensible things that work nicely? Meh ^ 200.

I'd be glad to get involved in a project that I could believe made a significant substantive difference. Like if a Mr Musk phoned (not terribly likely) about alternative energy, climate change or some such...

> Hmm, this donut's a bit stale, I'm not prepared to pay anything for it thanks Mr.Tesco.

You go to the customer service desk, say "This doughnut is stale" show your receipt along with the partly eaten doughnut, then get a full refund or exchange as you prefer.

If you're doing it daily the rules will change. :)

The Amiga kernel and Intuition (the GUI).

Partly because it was just so damn clean and intuitive. Equivalent Windows apps were an order of magnitude larger, but seemed to offer less.

Partly because each was almost entirely the work of one - RJ Mical for Intuition, and Carl Sassenrath, who would later create Rebol mentioned below, for the kernel.

Lastly the whole was greater than the sum of very excellent parts.

Xwindows and Windows etc were an endless series of disappointments after cutting my teeth on Intuition. I often used to wonder what might have been had it continued to be developed... Or succeeded as it deserved.

In the case of Google, and to a lesser extent Microsoft, I don't have enough trust they'll keep their offering around to ever start using and relying on it.

Google and to a slightly lesser degree Microsoft have horrible histories of simply turning off successful services. Or "improving" them by replacing with something objectively worse.

..and despite the Readme implying it may not be stable yet and it being prerelease I've found it flawless for the 2 or 3 weeks I've been happily running it!

To start I'm probably outside the usual IoT demographic - it mostly doesn't deliver what I'd like. I looked at your campaign and thought it interesting, but didn't back it. Here's some entirely personal thoughts, make of them what you will - I don't expect to be very representative though! :)

I don't care to have my phone always around at home, couldn't care less about most apps. I even turn the phone off! Have always wanted not an Internet of Things but a local net, with a miniscule subset allowed near the net or usage slurping phone apps.

Was interested seeing MacOS app, hoping for a Pi or similar app further down. I liked that you can have say 3 remotes doing entirely different things or switching functions etc. Oh, bluetooth, iMac is usually in the other room to us in the evening (when I'm more likely to want a remote for something), so we're mainly out of Bluetooth range, and the Thinkpad is either on standby or being used.

Would have been more interested if a) the remote tethered to wifi to talk to the iMac, or better a low power Pi or similar hub so I don't need to care about iMac, phone and their apps just to remote music or lighting and b) there was a cheap n cheerful plastic option for the kitchen etc too. I'd probably look at a couple of plastic cheapies (to get dirty or lost etc) and one nice premium wooden one for the coffee table in main room.

I've seen a few large, well-known places downgrade candidates from certain places by dint of ability or technology stack in use. Or to be honest, just plain prejudice. So they'd be less likely to get interviewed in the first place.

I'd far rather be an early, perhaps too early leaver, than stick around for six months to not job-hop only to find the Corp blew up. Now there's 3,000 Uber engineers on the market, and quite possibly a lot more bad press.

So for OP, consider carefully, including your insider perspective, before deciding either way! (I'd probably lean towards an exit as the bad PR does seem to have reached critical mass).

Before it was FB/Internet/Phone games, it was TV, so we're perhaps just continuing further down a well worn path.

See Roger Water's underrated Amused to Death album or the book that inspired it Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Showbusiness.

Hah. We got rid of the tv a decade or more ago. Though being pretentious wasn't part of the decision. :)