phantasmish

Where does the money to pay for shelf space come from if not the money we pay for food?

It's absolutely wild to me that people can have experienced any amount of the Internet and not think "word of mouth" will absolutely wholly suffice to fill the role of informing people about products. Of course many, many people would create and maintain all kinds of lists and review all kinds of products without being paid to. We know this would happen because it has, and it does, even with the noise of advertising around. The early Web was mostly this, outside the academic stuff and, I guess, porn & media piracy. Without ads clogging everything up, it might even be possible to find these folks' websites!

Impossible to solve I’m sure. Probably lower priority than stopping them from putting lead in bread and selling cocaine snake-oil elixirs, or forcing them to list basic nutritional information on food packaging. Alas, we lack the tools to make businesses do or not do things.

Oh, I know how it works. You could have read my whole comment and saved yourself typing anything about the yellow pages. You sweet summer child.

If I go looking for a directory of [service, in my area] that’s hardly an ad! If those include, say, reviews and pricing info, great! Yes, please!

I definitely don’t want that directory to be skewed with ads in favor of those with the most money, or who have decided to burn the most of their limited resources on ads instead of improving their services, lowering their prices, or hell, just taking more profit. The ads were the biggest problem with the good ol’ yellow pages.

This is what a fucking store is for. They have catalogs. You could ask for one. If they think people will want something they will try to sell it and will tell you about it if you go looking.

I see this pro-ads argument all the time and it’s so obviously-stupid that I’m truly baffled. Is this the kind of lie ad folks tell themselves so they can sleep at night?

… wait, I was pretty sure the behavior used to be to paste whatever you had most recently highlighted. When did that change? Or am I crazy?

As a compulsive text highlighter, I’ve always found this feature more trouble than it’s worth, by a pretty wide margin. Plus, its inability to replace text means I have to be familiar with the keyboard shortcuts anyway. I find it easier to use just the one set of commands. I’d get tripped up over “wait, did I copy that, or just highlight it?” otherwise. Better for me to have just the one habit.

I understand that some folks really like it but can’t quite grasp why. Though I believe them when they say it’s useful for them.

Terrible productivity loss vs. signing up for a hosted Wordpress site.

Seriously, I’m lucky if 10% of what I do in a week is writing code. I’m doubly lucky if, when I do, it doesn’t involve touching awful corporate horse-shit like low-code products that are allergic to LLM aid, plus multiple git repos, plus having knowledge from a bunch of “cloud” dashboard and SaaS product configs. By the time I prompt all that external crap in I could have just written what I wanted to write.

Writing code is the easy and fast part already.

The “double checking” is a step to make sure there’s someone low-level to blame. Everyone knows the “double-checking” in most of these systems will be cursory at best, for most double-checkers. It’s a miserable job to do much of, and with AI, it’s a lot of what a person would be doing. It’ll be half-assed. People will go batshit crazy otherwise.

On the off chance it’s not for that reason, productivity requirements will be increased until you must half-ass it.

Have you considered that your investment firm and other peers at the time were in an information bubble?

In fact outside of tech if the dotcom bubble wasn’t being discussed it’s because most folks—being not, or barely, online yet—weren’t paying any attention to it per se. The bubble they cared about was the broader stock market bubble, which was definitely widely perceived as a bubble.

Any troll or shitposter who can't operate extremely effectively on HN isn't very good at it.

The site basically has a house style for those activities, and you can go crazy insulting and stirring people up all day long and not get moderated for it, as long as you stick to the approved style. Bonus: if you're not just half-competent, but actually good, you can probably get people calling you out on your behavior moderated, if they don't beat around the bush about it in just the right ways! That's why the majority of posts on here are trolling and shitposting, or fallout thereof.

If you stay under the moderation radar, trolling this place is like shooting fish in a barrel, even easier than most sites (no, I've not done it, but it's very obviously most of what goes on here). If the site cared about this, it'd have ignore-lists.

It's one of those initially unintuitive things that makes perfect sense when you consider that "burning calories" is... pretty literally burning calories. Of course CO2 is how most of the mass goes away.

Similar to the "trees are mostly made from air" thing.

No kidding. “Reverting” to something pretty similar to Mac OS in the late ‘90s, as far as visuals and basic UI behavior (but not removing modern features) would be a big improvement. And once they did that they could just leave it that way. It’d be fine. UI churn sucks enough that it’s not worth it for users unless it’s a huge improvement, and nothing has been.

Though if we could get the newer settings panel of macOS a few versions back, before they inexplicably ruined the best OS GUI settings interface I’ve ever used, that’d be great.