The thing is that buying a hamburger while knowing you can afford to buy a billion more of them is not the same as buying a hamburger knowing you can't afford another one.

Taxing the most "successful" players and burdening them with regulations is exactly what is needed (provided those most successful players are large enough in size and few enough in number). There is room for more nuance in regulations in the sense that they can scale up more gently as companies grow, but the regulations on megacorps like Facebook and Google should only become more brutal. The existence of those kinds of companies anywhere in the world is a threat to people everywhere.

It's way more than just pushing timelines back. The person took $400k from people without knowing anything about how to provide what those people had already paid for.

I especially liked the "we tested the lamp we sold as 50k lumens to find out it only did 39k". Like, how do you even go setting up a product page for a product whose main selling point you didnt even test before?

It's almost certainly because they believed the datasheets of the chosen LEDs.

I know, so they didnt event test a single prototype before starting taking orders...

That's how most Kickstarters operate. One of my first jobs was at a contract manufacturer that would get hired by ideas people without experiences to make the products reality. Kickstarter campaigns were our bread and butter. Usually they found us after trying it on their own first and failing.

The article starts by saying that the person took $400k of orders without knowing how to make the product he had just sold, nor any experience that would help him do so. What?

But neither congress nor the presidency is an accurate representation of the will of the people, and that is one of the flaws with the American political system.

The problem is that it does represent a lot of people in America. A very vocal and active part of America. It’s not some tiny demographic either. It doesn’t represent the majority but the majority doesn’t vote, doesn’t take action, and is overall extremely passive in their political position. Some of this is good because most Americans are wildly uneducated. Problem is that people are more likely to try to protect what exists than try to move towards a new paradigm. That’s the biggest reason we have such a slow moving system in the US. Most people in the US are very wary of change at this point because they’re not educated about anything.

That's true to a certain extent, but I think a significant reason for Trump's success is precisely that the government is so unresponsive that many people were willing to suffer an extremely painful self-inflicted wound just to break out of the status quo.

The flaw is that they are able to make such a choice.

Every government is always able to turn totalitarian. That's why voting is important. You don't vote for the totalitarian.

Well yes, but the US was supposed to have three separate branches of government to keep each other in check.

Unfortunately turns out that in practice two of the three don't actually have any power at all when push comes to shove.

I think Congress does have power, it's just chosen not to wield it to control this presidency.

Based on what we've seen of the courts, I have doubts about that.

Congress does not have an army they can send out to enforce any law they pass, so turns out the president can simply just ignore it all without consequences. What are they going to do?

Courts don't have an army either. Only the executive has an army. Actually the president doesn't have an army. The generals have an army. You know we've never invented a system that stops the guys who have an army from taking over the guys who don't have an army, and we call it a coup d'etat, and it happens all over the world with some regularity. The best we can do is make sure the guys who have the army are guys who are committed to the wellbeing of the country.

> Courts don't have an army either. Only the executive has an army.

Exactly, that's the bug. Two of the three branches of government can only write sternly worded opinions on paper. Only one has the brute force to impose their will. So there really is only one branch of government in the US.

It was a long period of time voting for totalitarians. Checks and balances worked by design: preventing immediate radical changes. And they worked by design: allowing changes gradually over a period of time if people keep voting for the same thing. And now it's here.

> So it's probably fine to just block the big platforms. Forums or messengers (without ads and public channels) are probably fine.

Even better might be to just destroy the big platforms by breaking them up.

This is one reason I always roll my eyes when people talk about how vim keyboard bindings are so great because you don't have to move your fingers from the home row. The actual action of typing text is a small part of the process of coding.

Vim recognises that the typing text is a small part of coding by defaulting to a mode in which you can’t even type :)

For me, vim is a nice way to navigate code. It’s really fast to jump from place to place so I can explore quickly and build an understanding.

Is anybody claiming it makes you more productive at writing code? I just find it more convenient and more comfortable.

Theoretically, isn't the fact that you are being more convenient and more comfortable likely to increase your productivity too?

Depends on how you work I guess. I explore solutions through coding different versions of some algorithm, sure I could theorycraft as well but I am stronger by just writing code and see if it runs. I type a lot so vim motions help me a ton.

Just because it is small doesn't mean that it isn't important.

Roll your eyes if you want. A professional takes tools seriously, that includes key bindings and shortcuts.

Yes, it's not the time it takes to type that's the matter, but once you're in the zone you need to stay there without any resistance.

This.

For me, navigating with shortcuts feels like I can keep my inner monologue, it is part of it, maybe because I can spell it?

Dunno, but reaching for the mouse and navigating around breaks that, even if it can be more convenient for some actions.

I agree. Vim is my default text editor, but it's not great as an IDE. Don't have much of a choice there either, and have to use the right tool for the job.

Writing code, notes, diagrams and now also AI prompts is certainly a big part of my work

A thousand times yes.

If they wanted users to pay for the service they're using they should never have made YouTube free in the first place.

They made it free just like any other startup makes a free tier to obtain market share.

I'm sure the US government will be appreciative of a Chinese car manufacturer selling free cars in the US to obtain market share, and there definitely won't be calls of "dumping", no siree.

YouTube got to where it is by making intentional moves to be the only game in town. They aren’t the most user-hostile platform by any means, but they have been coasting on the network effects of backlogged content for close to a decade now. Even if a competitor could deal with network and storage costs, and somehow manage to attract a network of uploaders, the platform would be 20 years behind, and there’s certain content (e.g. older content) that you simply wouldn’t ever be able to find there in any appreciable quantity.

Drug dealers invented this business model, they would give heroin to young children for free and then once hooked hike the prices or force them to turn tricks to pay for their habit. It’s effective but not very admirable to say the least.

Cheese isn't so far off drugs after all: https://www.mountsinai.org/about/newsroom/2015/study-reveals... plus you have to make baby animals to get the milk for the cheese, so some exploitation is going on. I like cheese and youtube, but maybe they're both bad.

Cheesemongers have a bit less impact on society than drug dealers or Google. If Google were raking in hundreds of billions giving kids free cheese then charging them full price for parmigiana some might complain and I would not find fault in that. Scale matters.

It's not that we got hooked on YouTube (that would maybe be ok in a free market), it's that YouTube used "free" to make itself a monopoly. That's what the issue is, that you have no other options now.

Yes, the monopolistic aspect and scale are the parts I’m most bothered by. I think we all agree dangerous chemicals should be regulated, but we lack this sensibility when it comes to many tech products. So far at least. Eventually we’ll catch up. Will there be the lingering legacy, the tech equivalent of super fund sites? Maybe.

I don't disagree that some of these apps might need to be regulated, because they're basically attention crack, but to me that's more TikTok and Instagram rather than YouTube.

I hear TikTok is on the decline, and arguably the forced change of ownership is a sort of regulation. Instagram is owned by meta who has an interest in not letting it overtake Facebook in terms of popularity I imagine. It seems like a sort of hedge against other platforms mostly, but I really don’t know much about any of these platforms tbh. I use YouTube very heavily, but have only used twitter, Reddit and tinder in the distant past. I’ve never been on Facebook, TikTok, snap, etc… To me, irc and usenet were greatly superior and I’m waiting for people to return to their senses.