grosjona

They shouldn't have advertised 'free forever' on the website. OMG. In that area, people don't even think about the next day.

One of the things I learned is that you should never offer even one tiny ounce of added value which the average user is not capable of perceiving.

Literally the entire idea of profit rests on arbitraging between perception and reality. You don't want to pay for surplus value that is beyond your customer's perceptive capabilities.

I thought I'd found my place when I got into open source distributed pub/sub over WebSockets. I worked in this area for over 10 years but you won't find my project in the first 100 results on Google for those niche 7 keywords.

Surprising considering that almost none of these terms even existed 20 years ago.

I would argue that there is very little correlation between a programmer's perceived skill level and their actual skill level. I know some programmers who used to be considered rock stars because they created a lot of popular libraries and modules at an opportune moment in history but years layer it turns out that their code was full of security vulnerabilities.

Also some programmers are highly optimized for certain things to the point that they're terrible at everything else - I know programmers who are really great when it comes to writing performant code, but they are unwilling to make compromises to make that code more readable.

I wonder what would happen if Let's Encrypt started charging for their service AFTER HTTPS became compulsory. Seems like a great (but evil) business strategy. All these CAs could just start increasing their prices and we'd all be forced to pay.

If you understand human behavior, then you know that this WILL happen eventually.

I think that the argument that you can't trust ISPs is weak.. With HTTPS, you still need to trust certificate authorities. It is somewhat suspicious that Google suddenly decided to create their own Certificate Authority in 2017. Forcing every website to use HTTPS just reduces the pool of entities who are able to track and manipulate us and it gives a false sense of security.

There is no doubt that this change is designed to take power away from some entities and to put it in the hands of a few key players which Google trusts.

Also, the video created by the author is highly deceptive; the author makes it look like he has hacked the website itself; in reality, he has only intercepted the traffic to his own machine so in reality he has only modified his own view of the website; he hasn't actually hacked anything. I'm sure that the author is being intentionally deceptive; he knows exactly who the target audience for that video is and he knows exactly what it looks like.

I was reading about non-disparage clauses and I find it disturbing that these clauses are allowed to override a law as fundamental as free speech. It's disturbing that the US needs to make new laws just to reaffirm the validity of some of its oldest, most fundamental laws.

Doesn't that in itself reduce the credibility of all laws? Maybe the real problem is that the justice system is not doing its job properly.

I think that there are lots of people who could do a better job than Elon Musk but they will never have the opportunity to prove it. The vast majority of people would know that calling the Thai cave diver/rescuer a 'pedo-guy' was a bad decision. Also, announcing that some funding was secured when it actually wasn't - That was a bad decision as well. To suggest that Elon Musk is irreplaceable is ridiculous. People used to say that Steve Jobs was irreplaceable but look at the Apple stock price now.

One positive thing about being born in a third-world country is that if you can manage to train yourself to become a good software developer (which I admit is probably much harder to achieve than in a first-world country), you can find remote work for a foreign (first-world) company and then you can live like a rich person in your own country (buy houses, etc...); this seems relatively attainable if you put your mind to it. When you're from a first-world country, becoming rich is essentially unattainable; you wish you could move to a third-world country to live a better quality of life, but that's not really an option; often, the law of these countries forbid foreigners from owning property; also, you don't know the language or culture so you might end up getting ripped off when doing large transactions.

Maybe these types of people would not have power if everyone knew who they really where.

That said I understand people who are afraid that loss of privacy would be asymmetric but I don't think that would happen. Celebrities and public figures will always have less privacy than everyone else.

I disagree with that statement because they have fundamentally different purposes.

Free speech affects my ability to improve society. Right to privacy affects my ability to cover my own ass.

I think it's fine. If you did nothing wrong then you have nothing to lose by unlocking your phone. So if you don't unlock your phone, it's an admission of guilt.

People are way too paranoid. Nobody cares about what you do with your phone.

Sometimes I feel like the upper classes of society (especially hypocrites who have money and a reputation to protect) are projecting their fears on all other classes. Then like fools, the honest proletariat adopts all these ridiculous fears as their own.

I do think that our current social system rewards the wrong things and drives human evolution in the wrong direction. Traits like lying, cheating and hypocrisy are rewarded evolutionarily because they help people to accumulate more resources and produce more offspring; this works at both the genetic and environmental level. The good news is that predators cannot exist without the prey to sustain them so there should always be more prey than predators. The solution to the problem is decentralization of wealth; otherwise power becomes too concentrated in the hands of predators and it decreases their reliance on prey.

I find modern minimalist architecture depressing; the ceilings are low, tables made of glass, everything tends to be white (made worse by modern LED lights), there are no decorative features. Big modern cities are designed to trick people into paying more money for a lower quality of life.