OK, a serious and burning question: why do we have sex scenes in so many films to begin with?
Like, I came here to see a sci-fi film about time-traveling murderbots. Why is there 30 seconds of moaning and bad softcore erotica in the middle of my cybernetic murder spree? I'm sitting there awkwardly and thinking to myself: Mr. or Mrs. filmmaker, what exactly do you want me to do?!
I know it's a part of life, but we don't show the protagonist picking their nose or taking a dump. Why not just stick to wholesome murderbots?
I always found it weird how many people in tech build their entire identity around their job.
Don't get me wrong: I think it's healthy to take pride in your work and do it well. But don't let it get to the point where every argument at work is an attack on your entire self. "I work at Google" isn't a good tagline for your life. For most of us, our legacy won't be what we did in the office. In ten years, nobody will remember or care about the all-nighters we put in to refactor some JavaScript.
Part of the problem is the mythos of Big Tech: the idea that we're changing the world for the better, no matter how disconnected it is from the reality of 99% of all day-to-day work.
It's probably also a matter of recruiting folks fresh out of college and asking them to move across the country or across continents. This severs their social connections and forces them to rebuild their life around work.
But by the end of the day, tech companies are not your family. Despite the pastel-colored interiors, board games, and lounge chairs, they have no qualms firing you if you bring the wrong "whole self" to work, if they get bored of your project, or if they need the numbers to look better in the quarterly report.
Time flies more quickly than you suspect. In your later years, you probably won't be reminiscing about all the OKRs you aced at BigCo. Find ways to disconnect every now and then. Save some of the energy for your family and friends.
Say what you will about capitalism and socialism, but I'm pretty sure California invented the worst in-between option with PG&E.
It's essentially run by the California Public Utilities Commission, which decides rates, mandates specific infrastructure investments, and caps profits. But it's notionally a publicly-traded company primarily responsible to shareholders.
So, politicians get to scapegoat a "greedy corporation" for policy failings; while PG&E execs shrug and say they're not responsible for outcomes because CPUC effectively runs the show.
And the result is somehow worse than any conceivable alternative.
You know, I *really* dislike ad blockers from the security perspective. They need exceptionally broad permissions that make the extension a juicy target for attacks. Pop one of the maintainers' Google or Github accounts and own hundreds of millions of people overnight - their email, bank accounts, social media identities, and all that.
The consequences of simple coding errors are similarly disastrous - and I bet that there are some good UXSS bugs lurking in all that JavaScript.
For these reasons, I resisted ad blockers for 20+ years, and I endured countless cookie prompts, subscription interstitials, "sponsored results", and unskippable ads. But around 2020, the anti-user patterns on the web have gotten unbearable. And I say this as a person who grew up in the era of auto-playing Flash-based pop-under ads.
I'm not a security absolutist. It's all about trade-offs: the convenience of using a modern web browser, for example, generally outweighs the risks of living with its massive attack surface. But in the case of ad blockers, you gotta take a hit just to continue to browse in peace. It blows.
By the way, I watch a lot of movies, and I think Dr Strangelove is one of the very best films ever made. If you haven't seen it, don't be put off by its age. It's pretty timeless.
From the Cold War, to the MAD doctrine, to patriarchy, to Operation Paperclip, to fringe conspiracy theories, to the suppression and revival of Nazism (its titular character's arch), the film deals with really profound topics without ever sounding preachy.
Seriously, I see what's happening on HN and Reddit, but don't lionize Ted Kaczynski.
First, saying "I agree with his ideas, not his methods" is akin to saying "sure, but Anders Breivik had some interesting points about political correctness run amok". Kaczynski's and Breivik's ideas prompted them to kill people. It wasn't just a coincidence; it was the whole point. The foregone conclusion of their ideology was that it "had to be done".
Second, Kaczynski's manifesto is a rehash of the same tired anti-progress ideas that have been cropping up since antiquity. A longing for some made-up bygone era when men lived meaningful lives in harmony with nature, juxtaposed with the purported moral, societal, and environmental decay of today. You can find complaints of this sort in ancient Greece, in the Middle Ages, in the 18th century. By all metrics, our lives keep getting better: less poverty, famine, disease, war. Yet, we keep imagining how idyllic it would have been to be a peasant in the 13th century and die of dysentery or because your turnip crop failed. I bet you could find meaning in that.
Misplaced nostalgia aside, the other problem with most of these ideologies is that they involve force: in common with some other terrible revolutionary movements, they posit that the minds of the "sheeple" are too corrupted to see the truth. Whether the remedy is blowing things up or hanging a lot of people is just an implementation detail.