yannis7

"we were promised social networks, what we got was social media" -- Elad Gil

briefly reminded me of my MATLAB days... back in the 2000s/early-2010s it was all the rage. Great IDE too

the USENIX YouTube link took me down quite the rabbit hole

I think the most tragic of all is that, based on my experiences in both startups and corporate cultures, most of that work people are killing themselves for is just "busywork" handed to them by managers who themselves don't know any better.

The amount of waste in human energy & effort in pointless jobs that optimise for "being busy" is, as far as 1st-world problems are concerned, a humanitarian tragedy.

your last sentence I think puts the 2nd pillar into the problem, which is not only technological (i.e. the abstraction problem mentioned in the original article) but also cultural

VICE seemed to make sense at a given time + place + context: * Gonzo journalism: "On my way to North Korea I'm gonna stop by my auntie where over lunch she'd beg me not to go" * Peak hipster: pre-pandemic hyper-urbanised young white collar people who started making money * Excitement about Web 2.0 weirdness and the over-sharing culture

all of the above created a compelling package back then, but don't seem to scale to a "global media empire" Shane Smith wanted to make, one that would topple the incumbents.

This is also recommended by Donald Knuth in one of his technical writing guidelines [citation missing] so +1

Shazam belongs to that class of iPhone apps that when they were released I was like "wow, the future is here" -- this alongside the first accelerometer and AR ones

+1+1 spot on -- it's a very common issue nowadays that few people actually touch upon, or be able to verbalise

omg Ars Technica is still around! that takes me back..

nit: there are some fragments, say the speech of Spartan King Archidamus, which are recorded in sources like Thucydedes -- these you _may_ consider them as sources that reveal Spartans' self-understanding to some extent