sporkydistance

For the past 30 years, cars have been "good enough". This idea that one manufacturer is "vastly" better than another is nonsense. All care manufacturers are vastly better today than they were in the 1980's. This is largely due to regulations. When left to their own devices, auto manufacturers put bigger fins on cars to outsell each other; but under the pressure of government regulations we literally get safe, more efficient cars. But to claim EU should import US because they are somehow "better" is laughable from a technology perspective. US auto manufacturers are just adding bells and whistles (keyfobs? use a fucking KEY. giant touchscreens replacing consoles? NOBODY likes or wants them).

So weird. RFK is now in charge of this stuff for humans, and is anti-vax, but apparently our gov't thinks vaccines are fine for chickens.

On the one hand, I disagree with her, because I believe that 99.99% of people with purse string control are dumb a/f, and that "real work" will happen in the cloud of VC/Politician-stroking. That's the way it works. (And how much money did earlier scientists pump from kings in order to study transmutation?)

On the other hand, I agree with her, and it would be great if this didn't have to happen.

Should I be a purist or a realist?

I can't tell.

Probably Proud Boys, Patriot Prayer, or some other new fascist militia.

I would make fun of this as a PE event, but when I graduated high-school (US) we were still wearing parachute pants and break dancing to the Fat Boys. So I'll refrain from throwing stones. Each generation has their own precious cringe.

When I was at Intel in the late 90's, early 2000's, one CPU project decided it was going to use it exclusively. It was agonizing: slow, terrible UI, buggy, missing a lot of features. I never tried it again, did it get better? It's tragic that there is no competition in this space (rip Lotus).

I tried blogging in the mid-2000's about drones. I was documenting my experience building drone flight controllers (mind you I was using Cortex-M3 cores and early 3-axis IMUs) and had published schematics and source code.

About 5 years later my site had been forgotten, and a company in the UK offered me US$10,000 for use of my schematics and source code.

I was floored. I did ZERO advertising. I was blogging because honestly: I wanted intellectual validation because everyone I admired was blogging and I wanted people to think I was smart, too (I had even joined MENSA that year). I had serious FOMO/esteem problems in my 30's.

Fortunately--somehow--Google connected me with this company through simple search. The company went under, but I got my check for real. My friend at the time was mad at me for not asking 10x that, but so what?

Before ~2010 I stopped blogging and took all my stuff down because I really don't like being known or exposed publicly (I'm still very hard to find on google because someone more famous than me with my name is a top hit!), and I outgrew the FOMO. It doesn't seem to matter anymore because I'm so old: at my level the contacts I developed over three decades matter more than blogs. But it was pretty cool to get an email out of the blue with money attached!

Sorry, I was refering to Hacker News, not all social media. My question was unclear.

1. HN is centralized, but not for-profit.

2. HN does not drive engagement, AFAIK

3. HN is not surveillance capitalism.

You haven't demonstrated how Usenet differs from HN, but since my question had a typo and omitted HN, I can see how that is confusing.

Ah, thanks. That's a good answer. I was coming at it from the discussion angle only. However, both Usenet and HN don't allow you to friend people, like other social media. I see I accidentally dropped the term HN, which makes my question unclear. I still don't see spiritual difference between HN and Usenet when framed around your response, though.

I really would like to know what exactly you consider a "clear difference" between how Usenet and differ conceptually (e.g., ignoring the GUI, the # of users, and mechanics, [e.g., usenet updates diffused around the globe because we didn't have cloud servers]).

Please back that statement up with some facts.

We're literally socializing right now. We're a special interest group meeting to communicate about special interests. The opposite of socialization is isolation. If you hadn't posted, you wouldn't be socializing, but here we are, socializing.