handrous

You seem to be assuming I don't consume a bunch of content that could be replaced with Snake Game or Solitaire at ~0 loss of enjoyment, because it's incredibly low-value entertainment, so am somehow looking down on others. What do you think this is? That I'm doing right now? The value, in every sense, of nearly all online activities can be found next to "marginal" in the dictionary.

[EDIT]

> if all you have to contribute is moralising about the worth of other people's preferences

Definitely a complete characterization of my views on this, and of these posts. You've looked carefully, considered thoughtfully, and discovered the entire thing. Very good.

> It wouldn't just be 'non profit', it would be 'considerable loss'. You can't provide a service like YouTube or Google without incurring enormous expense, even if you're only counting the infrastructure costs.

I'm not a bit worried we'd go without capable search engines, without ads. Very likely there'd be donation-supported ones that are at least as good, and maybe better for some purposes (IMO Google's utility peaked around '08).

The free side of Youtube is a UX problem to be solved by something like torrent clients (maybe plus some RSS). Or probably a dozen other ways. It's far from insurmountable, there's just no motivation to fix that now (because there's no demand for it). That's the story for most of the services that could be replaced by [two or three existing protocols] + [some not-exactly-rocket-science UX effort]. The commercial side of it is solved by... hosting videos. Yourself, or paying a service to do it for you (these services already exist, despite YouTube's dominance, all the way from simple video-hosting to full white-label video streaming services).

> Anything that's used by someone is valuable to someone. I don't like paella, but I don't propose to eradicate all paella restaurants for that reason. Again, this feels like a hand-wavey and not very wise answer to dismiss problems with your idea.

It's plain that a huge percentage of online content could be replaced with Snake Game on an old Nokia with ~0 loss of enjoyment for the consumer. A perfect replacement for them is a book of Sudoku puzzles. People look at the stuff but the value is extremely close to zero, in that nearly any other time-wasting activity is just as good. And that's after dismissing the ~75% of the Web that's spammy garbage of negative value (because it drowns out better material covering the same thing).

> You may have your own wishes and preferences, but it's not a good idea to let those invade the rational, evaluative part of your mind.

Beats accepting the wishes and preferences that created the bad situation that exists now, right? Why should that be privileged over what I'd prefer? Has zip to do with a lack of rationality on my part, though it's easier to dismiss ideas if one first paints them as irrational.

We can have useful, widely-used open protocols or we can have spying (ads may or may not also be on the table, but take away the spying and there goes much of the advantage of the huge tech companies, anyway). The two very clearly cannot co-exist. I'd prefer the former.

> It came out the summer before 9/11. It is petty and weird and, maybe I’m pilled, but it’s pretty good.

I remember thinking it was OK when I watched it when it came out. I watched it again just a few months ago, for the first time since then, and found it to be about as bad as a movie can be. Not even accidentally entertaining, like some bad movies are.

> This is all well and good, but then we need a serious alternative funding model for websites.

Why?

Without competition from free-but-funded-with-$billions ad-supported services, most of the valuable stuff would probably be replaced by volunteer and non-profit efforts.

Others would survive by charging (more) money.

Some would be replaced by protocols (several social networks would be among those replaced). Clients & hosting may be paid, or not. It'd work out fine.

Most of the rest isn't valuable.

> is more experimental protocols to enrich the web,

New protocols are DOA until we significantly nerf the incentives to "own" the user.

IOW it's not gonna happen until we outlaw anything that resembles spying on users. And maybe also ads generally.

C. 2000 I was able to match state-of-the-art web designs, solo, without much difficulty, writing raw HTML & JS. And get paid for it.

I was in high school.

That was the best time to build websites.

(Though at least "flat" trends and terrible UX out of several major companies mean my shitty designs are back to looking about as good and working about as well as "pro" designers, so that's, kind of, an improvement over ~2005-2014)

Follow up: which one's the most fun if you're onboarding to it and aren't already very very good at, specifically, the underlying tech/framework?

That's where a lot of the fun-for-greenfield ones are way less fun, including Rails.

Those of us not in elite circles have a little trouble getting worked up over the difference between something that looks like it's scummy, immoral cheating, but is legal, or the same, but illegal.

Same played out with the college entrance scandal. "Bribery is great and we love it a bunch—unless you do it wrong because you're not rich enough to do it right, then it's a big ol' no-no" is the message a great many received from that one.

I wonder: what's the average age of a worker whose wages would increase if the federal minimum wage increased to $15/hr? There's "supposed" and then there's what's actually happening. I suspect most people in those jobs are not the people you're saying should be doing them.

Besides, given how necessary cell phones are now, perhaps especially for the low-income, spending a little more for one that works really well and is very reliable isn't crazy.

Affording Internet access and a cell phone is no problem for me, but the only reason I have either is because they're de facto required for my work, for my spouse's work, and for our kids' school. I do use it for other stuff since I have it anyway, but I absolutely see it as a ~$140/mo tax on participating in the economy. Stuff like streaming services only makes sense because I already have to pay that "tax"—it'd be way cheaper to just buy all the media I want otherwise. $140/mo + (cost of streaming services) buys a lot of movies, books, TV shows, and music.

Overall, I think having the Internet makes my life significantly worse except for how it makes it possible for my family to participate in the modern education and the modern job market. It's a benefit mainly because you're shut out from things that previously did not require it if you don't have it.

[EDIT] ~$140/mo is my home Internet service and roughly what it costs for Internet service on two cell phone lines. I'd probably keep phone + SMS service even without the societal requirement to have Internet service.

> I would compare Tiananmen Square with the Tulsa race massacre. How many Americans don't know about it?

I'd never heard of it until I watched Watchmen. So, I'd lived nearly half my life before hearing of it.

I spent my entire childhood in states bordering Oklahoma, and, for a while, in Oklahoma itself (though not in/near Tulsa).

Our economy seems really good at producing cheap garbage that's hardly worth even their low prices, expensive shit that actually works (expensive in part because the cheap garbage eats into its economy of scale by taking market share), and, for some product categories, super expensive shit that exists for the sake of being expensive (as in, conspicuous consumption).

Absent is any ground between cheap garbage and expensive shit that actually works. Some products are in that middle-ground price range, but they're actually cheap garbage that's been marked up to rip you off.

This seems to have increased over time, especially as factories became better able to produce goods that use barely enough material to work at all, without a too-high defect rate. I wonder sometimes how much inflation this is masking—goods stay the same price or even get somewhat cheaper, but are significantly worse than before.

I like Redux because it's portable—you can easily rip it out of a React project and use it anywhere—and because it provides a really nice way to separate backend-talking-stuff from frontend-rendering-stuff, if you're dividing up dev tasks. Nice clean place to split off a library for whatever service(s) you're consuming.

And with Typescript, it's not a bit unpleasant to work with.

> Because if not, aren't you just adding another attack vector onto all your employee/contractor laptops when you use 'Drata' to check a policy box on your SOC2 application?

I have bad news: gaining security certifications mostly through pointless or even harmful measures is the norm.