You know almost instantly when you meet them in the field, often within a few sentences. It's really eye opening moving between areas of high and low densities people like this.

I did used to think it was normal and common but I've definitely come to doubt that as I've got older. I think it's been a hindrance at times though, particularly in some business environments that aren't producing systems that feel nice. Although there's a certain satisfaction and special sense of achievement in making an unhappy feeling system do amazing things.

Exactly. But don't let the interview people know that, or it will become another ritual that everyone checkboxes and fakes. :)

This sentiment makes me sad. You can do things for fun, y'know? And when someone's just having fun, not hurting anyone, and being creative - that's got to be more than just tragic. It's basically the definition of a hobby.

The operating systems course I took in college was foundational to my understanding of how programs work and the memory model of modern computers.

Someone appears to have written an operating system from scratch. I've just spent 30 mins going through the commit history of it. This is an incredibly unique project undertaken by an incredibly skilled individual who's committed a huge amount of time to doing something 99.999% of even HN readers couldn't dream of doing.

I'm not saying it's perfect, there are things I don't like, and if I had the capability to do this, I would want it done differently (e.g. not windows only build). But I also recognise that this is the sort of project that requires a special kind of person and approach to make even start planning, let alone execute through to a functioning UI.

But you just rocked up, and essentially said "you should start from the UI first, it looks crap."

This is 100% snark to you: I think it's just plain rude and also just wrong of you to say virtually nothing other than how this is ugly and will go unnoticed as a result, simply because it doesn't do the thing that's important to you (e.g. look nice).

I should give you credit because you said "Impressive" at the start. That's all.

FWIW, I think it already looks better than a fair few Linux desktops I've seen, just my opinion as someone who doesn't know anything about design.

You've overlooked my point.

I think you're the problem in this instance, and the majority here seem to have agreed with me. That's unfortunate if you can't see that angle.

Suffer compared to what? That's the alternative? Number 1 stays number 1?

The world works in peaks and troughs, swings and roundabouts. What goes up must come down. Time marches on, change happens. This comes with suffering, but is also the definition of progress.

Nothing is the best forever, and the one's at the top who don't acknowledge that are the ones with the hardest fall ahead. That applies to complacent SV leadership as much as it applies to the average American citizen.

I can't fault this way of thinking about the world: change is inevitable, you have to roll with it. If I accept it though, the idea of "planned decline of America" is interesting to think about. If you're at the top, decline is inevitable, it's the only direction. What's the only thing you can do to mitigate the pain of the inevitable? Try plan to work with it. Not sure how I feel about this way of thinking, it feels pragmatic if nothing else.

Decline is not inevitable. others like China can rise, there could be multiple successful and wealthy countries. heck, even in a decline, america can become like germany instead of like venezuela. the decline you're thinking of is a lot nicer than what I'm thinking of I think.

Preventing a decline requires established institutions to function as designed. America is not declining because it's like the roman empire, it is declining because the corporate ruling class are strangling the nation for short term profits. It isn't "we the corporations of america" it is "we the people". They've assaulted the foundation of the wealthiest most powerful empire in history and it is collapsing as a result.

I think you don't understand what I'm saying because you said e.g. "others like China can rise" - my point is China has already risen, and fallen, and risen and will continue to do so: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_ages_of_China. Just like the US will. And the troughs will be tragic compared to the peaks.

This is what long term empires do. They rise and fall and rise and fall, and that rises and falls include wars, famine, disease outbreak, advances in war, science, tech, health etc.

I feel civilised societies have said exactly what you've said since the dawn of man "we're civilized, we've moved beyond incivility now" when in reality, they were just in one of the many times where their society just so happened to be leading the way.

Sorry, because I know you don't believe this, and you want to believe "we the people" can stop change this natural cycling, but it's a feature of relativity. Ultimately, you're saying the same thing optimists have been saying for millenia, and here we are, war, hunger, famine is all still happening. Same stuff we've been doing for millenia, just with fancier tech.

What I'm saying is while you're right in that the pattern is likely to repeat with America, it doesn't have to. We are humans, we are capable of learning from history. Not only that, the amount of technology progression and destructive capability of humans has changed drastically within the past century. Lots of things are happening right now that break from historical patterns. Also consider the number of people like you that hold that opinion, your preemptive surrender is equivalent to a confirmation bias. In other words, your prophecy is self-fulfilling because of the number of people that believe in it.

If so many people like you understand history and the variables involved, is it impossible to change course? If you knew lightning will strike you tomorrow, would you not attempt to stay indoors?

Look at the US, we're all calling our country an empire but what empire in history has behaved like the US? the soft-power approach of the US is what I mean as well as using a real-time-connected global commerce/financial market where everyone relies on the US.

Rome fell, but no one depended on Rome when it failed. China has fallen many times but the world didn't depend on Chinese currency or military like it does with the US.

What is more constant than empires falling is people at a macro level acting in their best interest. Even China would prefer the US to have a healthy consumer market until it has it's own regional consumer market that can displace the US. China doesn't want to replace the US navy's fleet in policing the seas and it won't get Europe's trust like the US when it comes to the RMB to displace the dollar.

It's not that i don't want to believe (although I don't) the US will fall, it's just that those prediction have too many assumptions. When China,Rome and other empires were falling, there was no internet or wide spread mass education. Or even things like widespread democracy (a democratic empire?? lol).

LLMs have a real issues with polarisation. It's probably smart people saying all this stuff about knockout blows, and LLM uselessness, but I find them really useful. Is there some emperor's new clothes type thing going on here - am I just a dumbass who can't see he's excited at a random noise generator?

It's like if I saw a headline about a knockout blow for cars because SomeBigBame discovered it's possible to crash them.

It wouldn't change my normal behaviour, it would just make me think "huh, I should avoid anything SomeBigName is doing with cars then if they only just realised that."

But the ivory tower misses the point of how LLM improved the ability of regular people to interact with information and technology.

While it might not be the grail they were seeking, it’s still a useful thing what will improve life and in turn be improved.

I agree. A framework forces a shared consensus on how to solve a particular set of problems.

A single competent engineer on their own can make that consensus themselves. If the system is larger than a single competent engineer can manage, it seems intuitive that a small handful of engineers who are familiar with working with each other are less dependent on a framework for shared consensus.

However, the frontend build systems are often complex to do complex state management. Sure, it's possible to reimplement it all and accidentally end up rewriting your own vanilla JS frontend framework, but beyond a point, that's equally as unfun as modern webdev.

It's not hard to shift the state management though, and when I find myself sat with a nice architecture that's formed without a complex frontend system, and with some really simple, uncluttered backend that could probably serve millions of requests a day from a homeserver and internet connection.... it gives me a profound feeling. It's a satisfying and familiar feeling from webdev I enjoyed around 2 decades ago as a teen. It feels like the old way of doing it.

Now, having designed, built and run systems from on-prem, through VPS & VMs onto serverless and static site stuff, doing it the old way again just feels better overall. Maybe it's nostalgia.

But then I feel the reason why we moved away from doing it the old way was because the complexity of the applications needed more efficient ways to make use of relatively limited bandwidth, storage and compute resources at the time. Now these things are all commoditised, and my home desktop and internet connection now has probably the same capabilities as a small datacentre back then... the dreamer in me wants to believe there's no reason why we can't all go back to the old ways of doing it now.

Not sure I fully understand the second bit. Given how much more powerful servers are now (both physical and abstracted) doesn't that vertical scaling mean horizontal scaling is less necessary? If horizontal scaling is necessary, depending on where in the stack you're scaling, the global consistency offered by modern cloud data stores make it more efficient than ever for lots of servers to exchange a session cookie for state and return fully rendered HTML.

..but then they kept adding. And adding. And adding. And adding.. and now where are we? Death by a thousand cuts. 10x the complexity for an additional 7% benefit

I agreed it makes it harder in places. Like when I (as a be dev) have to write JS hooks, or the JS dev's on the team have to interact with the database.

I find I'd rather code in a RESTfull code base than a socket system. I miss the lines.

> something that sounded like every other thing: some dude talking to some other dude about apps that some third dude would half-listen-to at 2x speed while texting a fourth dude about plans for later.

It's not that the dudes don't care, it's that the dudes have 15 other things expected of them, which weren't expected 15 years ago and caring capacity feels like a biological limit. There isn't the required amount of caring available in the average human any more, and caring is needed for standards to be maintained.

15 years ago, the world was in awe that stuxnet, a cyber attack, had impacted the real world. I was in cyber at the time, and the idea that day to day lives of normal people would be impacted in the real world was like Hollywood fiction: unthinkable.

A few weeks ago, I didn't even notice the reason my local big brand store shelves were empty was because of a cyberattack. It was a week later I saw the article explaining it on BBC: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ckg4zrpk5p7o

I feel like a cynical old man, but I'm sure most here will relate - the age of tech we are living in now is not the one any of us thought we were working to create.

I genuinely think this is a factor in some ways. 500 years ago, what were people worried about? Their immediate concerns, those of family, and neighbors. Realistically, there was no way to get caught up in the minute-by-minute concerns of people in other cities, other states, other countries, other continents. Things changed more slowly and the only time you heard about about a tragedy was if it was truly enormous - or very local.

Now, there is this constant vying for attention/support/outrage/etc. It's exhausting. People genuinely expect you to care about the back-and-forth between two celebrities you've never met, or some event halfway across the world, or some new thing that released now like literally now.

I think that a lot of people have subconsciously hit their limit. They can't muster the energy needed to genuinely think about or care about a lot of this stuff because they're bombarded with so much of it. And over time, I think that shifts thinking. "Why did I not care when X happened?" leads to "Those people don't matter/are less than human" instead of the real "Because I'm completely exhausted from so much happening".

It's ridiculous. I get a ton of crap for not reading the news or caring about stuff happening 3500 miles away that I can't do anything about.

There are plenty of people out there who live their lives rarely watching the news, or browsing social media, and it is really hard to make an argument that their lives are any worse.

I know people who are so incapacitated by their anger, frustration, and sadness about the Gaza war that they spiral into depression and are incapable of making any impact on the world directly around them. In their own words, they say that they have a hard time seeing how anything they do locally really matters when such terrible things are happening elsewhere. Their excessive amount of care about things outside of their control has actively hampered their ability to care about things that they actually can influence.

I think the concern in Gaza tickled some group the wrong way and there will be more awareness.

Additionally, there should be more awareness that protests are less tolerated by the government, which seems a bad thing.

If almost no-one votes because they think it won't change anything, the few people who do care enough to vote get to say who's elected.

A previous generations old guy told me about this. He worked in the defense industry 50 years ago. You know, they had secretaries or admins that would handle all sorts of things for the engineers. Then the government changed the way they did contracts and companies couldn't bill for "overhead" any more. So the engineers (who bill to the project) had to start handling all those other things themselves and most of the support staff went away.

It's not that hard to handle any one thing, but if you do get the chance to work somewhere with a person that can "just handle that for you" it's really kind of amazing how much mental energy that frees up for your main tasks.

I am a resource for my kids, my spouse, and the rest of my friends and family. I am also a resource to my employer and other customers.

In any organization, a resource can vary from things such as land, chemicals, machines, humans, books, etc.

The term Human Resources seems accurate to a refer to a group of people that deal with the humans in the organization.

I do not see why “resources” is seen as having a negative connotation in this context. Of course, just like a family can mistreat a resourceful family member, so can any organization mistreat a human resource.

One, don’t attempt to invalidate my emotions. They are both entirely valid, given the concerted push from the C-suite to dehumanize their workforce, and entirely necessary. Necessary because our parents and grandparents lived better lives because they weren’t as dehumanized. Necessary because so few people in this community specifically see it that way and it *needs to be pointed out repeatedly*.

Perhaps it would resonate more if you, too, had heard a couple of C-suites & their chosen MBAs joking about this exact topic. Perhaps dehumanizing people would make your blood boil if you experienced it as casually and often as I have.

But perhaps not. One of the great things about the WTFC-era is that I can disregard your opinion utterly.

There were more slaves before MBAs, and before MBAs joked about mistreating employees, factory/plantation owners/kings did.

Maybe this is some unknown privilege of mine or some bubble I live in, but I only know about celebrity gossip when people ask me if I've heard about it and I say no, or not really. You get to choose what to give your attention to, and you don't have to just because other people expect you to. I still have friends and acquaintances, we just talk about other stuff.

It wasn't so much different from our time. Read "Don Quixote" [1] and be amazed.

Whether the updates you read are actually playing out live, or happening in a book doesn't make much of a difference, unless you are actually influencing events.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Quixote

Just moving your head around in a forest also gives an amazing amount of input. And if you're being chased by a tiger through a jungle, you cross about 1,000 different species of plants and small animals.

As an example of out-of-fucks, a regular engineer literally couldn't be convinced to care about customers when a corporatized management creates 10,000 hoops for them to jump over - such as scrum.

Your potential reward for fixing all of it and reminding them to not do it again? Nothing!

And the reward for working tirelessly and successfully to ensure those fires never start in the first place is being "downsized" / laid-off because the job you do is apparently pointless, as "we've never had any problems in that department..." Damned if you do, damned if you don't... and double-damned if you do...

I just saw my org deliver a project that saved the company $4m dollars a year, and we understaffed it and burnt a heck of a lot of people out. 50% of our senior engineers have resigned in the month since launch, and 6 of our L4/L5 have too. Several without backup plans. Two off our managers left and so did a product person.

But our org head is getting a lot of praise for how cheaply and quickly the project was delivered.

Our roadmap plan for the next year is over budget by 63%, so I'm guessing we're about to do this again

But it is true that we are supposed to feel strongly about a myriad things. And possibly more damaging, we are supposed to be a dozen things as well - rich, career-minded, pretty, athletic, spiritually centered, vegan, environmentally-conscious, politically educated, a model partner, there-for-our-children, well-travelled, financially responsible, and so much more... Each of these points is individually good, but social pressure mainly enforced through social media is turning the good life into a sort of whack-a-mole challenge people get burnt out on.

The emergence of the smartphone and The Internet (as a cultural phenomenon) was such an exciting time.

I came of age during the dawn of the smartphone (graduated right as the iPhone was released) and watched all of these nascent markets emerge, connecting people in exciting and novel ways.

Seemed like it went downhill so fast.

> Be yourself.

> Be imperfect.

> Be human.

> Care.

It sounds like a simple message but the 2010's were rife with "care about everything" and "inaction is action" type slogans. Should someone at that paper or the products being represented care? Yes, because it's their job. To blame the reader or anyone beyond that point I think is very 2010's era that yielded some portion of this societal apathy and burnout.

What we need is the people who have a duty to care to care. In reality there are very few people who are on paper duty bound to care. The people that are duty bound are rarely held accountable when they don't. It's a sort of cyclical problem.

If they care by default, all we need to do is give them everything they need and they'll do what is wanted. If not, then giving them everything they need will result in them doing nothing more.

Rather, we should expect that institutions are never so powerful that we have no recourse when we have been wronged by one, and that we have options when one lets us down.

It's been normalized to offload things to the recipients, because it reduces cost. Be it self-checkout, be it governments and large corporate entities doing the absolute minimum and asking you to jump through endless hoops to achieve something.

We're shaving off costs everywhere, without eliminating the need to do that work. And so it travels down to the leaf nodes, to individuals. Who cares, quarterly results are up, OpEx is down, good times.

Tech has enabled some of these things, but ultimately it's the fetishization of Taylorism that got us here. If you can't measure it, it's not worth doing, and not doing it saves money, which you can measure.

This has now spread all the ways to individuals. The commons, always a resource in a precarious position, is now the place for everybody to proudly defecate on. Throwing away litter, listening to music without headphones, rudely shouldering people away - all of it is accepted, because heaven forbid the individual sacrifices for the group. It is, after all, not a thing that has positive impact for themselves.

I don't know what will break us out of it, but yes, caring is missing because we've eliminated non-egocentric things from the rewards function we think we should apply.

It's exhausting.

There’s no reason anyone needs the minute-by-minute Twitter-esque “information” feed, just like 24-hour news stations are a laughably idiotic waste of time and attention. There’s no reason “you” need to spend hours refreshing and obsessing about where your 6th-degree ‘friend’ is on vacation, or their promotion, or their new car or whatever.

Turn shit off.

Or drown, I guess.

Turn off all notifications. Don’t listen to radio, don’t have a TV, don’t buy newspapers or magazines. Talk to your neighbours, friends and family. Join the community garden, go on toddler led walks, go hiking/fishing/swimming/camping.

Live in the real world and fill your life with things from the real world. The rest is pure noise designed for the specific purpose of grabbing and holding your attention and keeping you in a state of panic or concern.

You wouldn’t put toxic items in your pantry to eat, don’t put this toxic crap into your awareness.

Stuxnet did not impact any "normal people" at all. It was very explicitly targeted at the Iran nuclear program. I'd bet that most "normal people" have never even heard of "stuxnet" or know if it had any impact at all in their lives. I know plenty of "normal" people and I'd be hard pressed to find a single one of them that even know what stuxnet was. Outside of people very interested in computers and cyber attacks, very few people could tell you what stuxnet was.

Maybe if Iran had been able to create a nuclear bomb, and maybe if they had actually tried to use it (which would be extremely foolish and would destroy Iran) then maybe the hypothetical non-existence of stuxnet would have impacted some lives, but that's a big IF. Most people have no clue at all.

"No one would have designed it this way," is the refrain that comes to my mind so often. Raising kids and realizing the amount of "institutional knowledge" you need just to have a bank account (for example) underscores this thought (and refrain) frequently.

Nope, I don't care.

Everything is garbage filler vying to buy my attention for some purpose or another and I expect bullshit from everyone. I am generally outraged, but for specific instances of bullshit? Not at all, those are expected. It's not desensitization, you just can't have less than 0 trust in an entity and once you get there specific instances of outrage no longer happen.

The major reason I think tiktok is so successful is it is the platform for punishing BS. You've got 3 seconds to get to the point and if you don't, you don't have attention. People complain about modern tech ruining attention span but I think it's the opposite, traditional content sold out to become ever less worthy of people's attention so people used tech to circumvent it.

I agree with that. At some point you just give up because there's literally nothing left for you to give. I've learnt to be very selective with what I choose to care about

The caring bandwidth’s not just saturated—it’s been monetized, splintered, and stuffed with things designed to trigger micro-concern at scale. You’re not a cynical old man. You’re just sober in a system that treats numbness like adaptation.

The worst part? I’m not even surprised the BBC article didn’t trend.

Only criticism is that it does use or need a bunch of accounts and API keys which probably makes the setup a bit tedious: https://github.com/pirxthepilot/wtfis?tab=readme-ov-file#dat... obviously a necessary evil though given what the tool is doing.