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The shareholder need their profits!! won't someone think of their needs?


But 4chan is also a complete cesspit. Like any place that adopts "free speech absolutist" attitudes. Reddit's heyday is long passed, but at least it is still very useful for grassroots information amalgamation. If you've ever had to google some issue, typing reddit into the query will land you some posts with discussion in them. Good luck finding that on 4chan.


It is a cesspit but for broadening perspectives it is much much better than reddit, even with less structure of discussions and worse discoverability.

"free speech absolutism" wasn't ever a huge problem, on the contrary, the suggested alternatives always seem to end up worse.

You have to suffer through idiotic opinions if you expose yourself to new ideas. There is never any alternative to that and there is no magic moderator that can make this decision in your stead. It isn't any more complicated than that really.


> You have to suffer through idiotic opinions if you expose yourself to new ideas. There is never any alternative to that and there is no magic moderator that can make this decision in your stead. It isn't any more complicated than that really.

The main issue with that is that it assumes anyone on the internet is arguing anything in good faith. Boosting checkmarks has turned twitter to nearly unusable to actually unusable, because the signal to noise ratio on the replies from checkmarks tend to be somewhere on the factually provable incorrect to outright slurs spectrum. Expecting any better on 4chan of all places will be a a fruitless endeavor more akin to self-harm. If you don't want to wade through shit, maybe don't have your discussions in a sewer.

HN, while not perfect, will often be a place that cultivates some rare insight.


There is no trivial way to detect motivation, on the contrary leveraging the accusation of someone arguing in bad faith is usually seen as ending an intellectual exchange.

To be realistic, this can be that case, especially on the net, and there are ways you can make an educated guess. But it stays a guess and in the end I want to do the guessing myself. It cannot be outsourced aside from the most trivial cases like spam, advertising, etc.

That aside people with a foul mouth might use words differently while others people might receive it as a slur. We now have words that have much more might than they had before with the better approach to such issues.


This seems very naive to me. There are enough people yelling "OK Groomer" at me on certain platforms that I know the signal to noise ratio is bad enough that engaging is at best a waste of time and at worst getting more soundbites than I could possibly debunk, so I lose the optics part of the debate by default.

See "Never Play Defense" from the alt-right playbook: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wmVkJvieaOA

And as an aside - HN is not guilt free on this topic. There's a general tendency for comments to go right past the topic even outside this. For instance, every remote work thread turns into a generalized remote vs onsite debate, without the specifics of the article being weighed in. Even worse, HN also has a tendency to devolve into calling authors of posts deranged (or deranged, but with nicer choice of words) more for their identity and politics rather than the words they wrote, as was the case with Alyssa Rosenzweig's article being posted a few weeks ago.

It simply isn't viable to assume good faith for everyone. I often (unwiesely) get into fights with transphobes that I shouldn't, and I had maybe 2 insightful well-reflected discussions over the past 10 years. Sometimes they'll complement me on not fitting their expectation of an "SJW" (which is, presumably, a screaming child), but then go on to call me a slur anyway. And when I say slur, I am very positive that this is the right classification. Unambiguously.

I recommend the entire Alt-Right playbook series, in fact. A lot of these concepts are not limited to the alt-right and are often used incidentally by everyone, but it is important to know when you have no chance at rhetoric overcoming... anything. I guess sometimes the sword is mightier than the pen, especially in a post-fact world.


there's a few semi-shady things that 4chan does better than anywhere else though. like finding pdfs for rpgs. not to say it's not a pit, cess or otherwise, but there's a good few nuggets swimming around in there.


After a long period of stalled weight loss, I switched to a low carb diet (to reduce my feelings of hunger and aid in eating less), and with that came a plethora of keto-friendly protein bars. For a while I thought that 4/5 BMs being straight liquid was just my body acclimating to the diet, but after reading about how erythritol can cause diarrhea, I decided to hit the breaks on those bars and everything has gone back to normal overnight.

I may have one occasionally but definitely not going back to eating them every other day.


I've been using FF more lately because it has a functioning ad block. Mobile web has become borderline unusable with the amount of ads that get shoved in your face. It's not enough to take up 90% of the screen, it has to pop up autoplay videos with audio over that last 10%.


Preach. Using my iPhone, I clicked on an HN link to Tom’s Hardware earlier today. Readable text occupied less than 1/4 of the screen. Everything else was taken by various banners, modals, etc. I tried to scroll down a little. It jumped back to the top of the page every time I tried, then started reloading itself. So, in sum, I read one(ish?) paragraph of a post before giving up.


Interesting. I've always done this as a natural habit, I thought it was acute latent neurosis. But now I feel validated.


true words spoken by a false man, makes them false.


If a part of person is false, doesnt mean everything is false. If you cheat on your wife doesn't mean you never loved her. Mistakes are part of being human.


Well, no. That's what thinking is for. To separate words from their source and consider them for their content. A reading of Principia Mathematica by Hitler doesn't tarnish or invalidate the words in any way. Context matters.

Basing judgment on the source of an idea isn't a perfect tool for navigating life. If someone is telling you lots of true things but in a way to compromise you, or to sell you something, or to get you to join a cult, then who that person is provides valuable context.

If you want a system, Peterson has a ready-made and inoffensive set of rules to play off of. It has a built in technique to improve on the rules that doesn't compromise your ability to think about new material (whereas scientology or other religious systems cripple you deliberately.) Identifying a collection of true things is the point, and then looking for good faith operators willing to share their model of successful behavior.

Robbins is a typical self help guy, and the value is there, but to me it's been most useful as a baseline against which to measure other systems. Robbins represents the line of hucksterism for me, where if you're playing with those ideas and presentation techniques you might not be legitimate. I think he's mostly just over that line on the side of authentic, but he often falls short.


Peterson is a disheveled, drug addicted, religious nut. He doesn't have anything to teach anyone.

Robbins is a sex predator.

Not role models, not teachers.

Poison the milk, poison the ghee.


When I code I use white noise, or pink noise, but it's run through a low pass filter to trim off the harsh high ends.

I'll also add a slight comb filter then modulate the frequency with a slow LFO (around .05 hz) to give it some movement. Some extra processing then happens like a compressor to even it out a bit and add warmth.

It's quite effective, especially for noisy environments.


Do you have a sample you could provide?


Those passion projects exist you just haven't heard about them. Unfortunately , we're past the point where reach is free and organic. You now need to pay if you wanna be heard.


> You now need to pay if you wanna be heard.

Citation needed. Plenty of games get picked up and become popular organically. How much did they spend on Minecraft's marketing? Fortnite? Factorio? KSP?


Most of your examples first popped up 10 or so years ago give or take, when organic reach was still possible. The only one that didn't was fortnite (Dec 2017) but it's a far cry from a small indie project, it came from a AAA developer that not only had multiple well known games, was also behind the unreal engine, one of the most popular game engines.


Define organic and payment. We still have successful indie games exploding in success, mostly on its quality. It's just that the threshold for "quality" is higher with more competition around. So not any little crappy project becomes automatically successful, nor does the hundred clone of something gains any attention just because it makes something different.


Email is too socially antiquated at this point to be useful in that regard, and that's not even taking into consideration that because everyone uses gmail, you're trading one centralized service (reddit) for another (google).


GMail isn't really centralized, it's (still) federated.


Hey, at least you have a paycheck. There are tons of people out there who work 50-hour weeks (artists, musicians) who get less than a decimal of that pay, none of the benefits, and all of the stress.


Artists and musicians specifically get a lot of social prestige. Similarly for actors.

That's part of why many people are willing to have a go at these careers despite the well-known abysmal earning expectations.

It's just a lot of very willing supply and rather limited demand that depresses monetary earnings for labour in these sectors.

Compare also pay and conditions for programmers in the games industry vs those working on in-house corporate CRUD applications.


Artists and musicians specifically get a lot of social prestige. Similarly for actors.

No, they - in general - do not. A few get this. A few more lucky folks make a living off of it. In the case of an artist, you are probably doing commissions and spend a lot of time on social media, in the post office, and such things just to tread water. Comic artists and animators you've never heard of go about their day in invisibility while they destroy their wrists, elbows, and shoulders for your enjoyment. (a number of these are contract jobs, too, which means no benefits).

Most musicians are pretty local or fly under the radar. Band teachers are usually musicians, and i'm pretty sure there isn't a lot of prestige there. Lots of "musicians" are working in such jobs, many are touring local circuits, picking music for commercials, and things like that.

The most common sort of artist or musician, though, is the unknown one. There are way more artists and musicians than we have space for in our minds. I'm not sure what sort of prestige you think folks are getting. Even worse, I'm not sure why that would be a substitute for decent pay. Supply and demand obviously aren't the constraints on wages people make them out to be.


That's true yet still feels rosy ;-)

There's a lot of waiting tables, and if lucky, teaching gigs. Paid performance gigs are rarer and not that rosy either, eg, boring wedding music or sporadic & low-paid pop-ified club gigs. In COVID... yikes.

Prestige includes a lot of 'when will you get a real job?'

Even for the rare folks who 'make it', there's often a lot of weirdness, especially around the one-hit wonder commercial music circuit. Unlikely and hard to get there, and often ugly if you do.

Sound rough? Even worse in visual areas because even less money. Gallery scene is basically charity from upper crust and whatever small grants, if you're lucky. More likely, still waiting tables or some other day job. There are commercial gigs, but rarely related to your art: an artist's exploration of abstract oil painting is far from say musclebound video game characters for adolescents. Even if someone likes your aesthetic style, commercial versions for say a big hotel/ commercial/product are dead/generic for accessibility reasons.

I was around a lot of this in my early 20's. The entertainment industry is at odds with art. Happy to be away from it, and empathy for artists pushing through it.


It sounds like the main rewards aren't financial. Why do people pursue these careers?

It's hard to try and make money on something lots of people do as a hobby, it's the same situation in professional sports.


> No, they - in general - do not.

Yes they do. I'm both a musician and a software developer and the difference in social prestige is night and day, depending on how I present myself.

You're trying to refute the statement that musicians and artists get a lot of social prestige, by stating that they make little money and do work that's not glamorous, and that's irrelevant, it's rather actually part of what gives it prestige.


I think it depends on how you define the word prestige. I work as a software engineer but also freelance composing music for mobile games, I wouldn't say that people are exactly "in awe" of what I do in either situation. Neither job is particularly difficult.


It's because you are not performing, it's the performance that's the awe inspiring part.


> Most musicians are pretty local or fly under the radar. Band teachers are usually musicians, and i'm pretty sure there isn't a lot of prestige there. Lots of "musicians" are working in such jobs, many are touring local circuits, picking music for commercials, and things like that.

> The most common sort of artist or musician, though, is the unknown one. There are way more artists and musicians than we have space for in our minds. I'm not sure what sort of prestige you think folks are getting. Even worse, I'm not sure why that would be a substitute for decent pay. Supply and demand obviously aren't the constraints on wages people make them out to be.

I've been working professionally as a music creator for nearly 20 years. I think what separates the musician types you're referring to from actual professionals is an understanding of how to make money with art and when to pivot one's career, e.g. "live gigs are paying me nothing... how else can I make money with my music?" I'd be miserable if I'd stayed in live music beyond my early twenties or believed that teaching was an adequate substitution for being paid to create for a living.

Most hobbyist musicians never work beyond the genre or instrument they initially learned, like a "programmer" who learns HTML as a kid but fails to take their expertise further. It's a severe lack of business acumen, self-awareness, and desire to evolve.


To remove some of the weasel words:

Posing with a guitar will help you get laid. Even if you don't play remotely well enough to make any money, or for anyone to really care about your music.


> > Artists and musicians specifically get a lot of social prestige. Similarly for actors.

> I'm not sure what sort of prestige you think folks are getting.

Groupies, maybe? I've encountered them hanging on even celebrity impersonators (in Los Angeles) and cover bands (in Las Vegas), not just originals. Not to mention authors and visual artists. Most artistic scenes seem to attract them.


So whose fault is it that they're pay is not decent, if it's not a matter of supply and demand?


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