Mostly because the kind of people who run and advocate for programs like this are actively hostile to the idea of merit. Prioritizing talented people would be antithetical to them.

Prioritizing merit would be fine if there was some way to measure merit empirically, and if that measure couldn't be gamed by anybody with money and/or connections. But this is for artists, so...

I bet you also think government shouldn't be picking winners and losers.

And thinks that s/he's a winner and the stuff s/he enjoys is made by winners, and the stuff s/he doesn't like is made by losers. Merit, universal, objective = ME; Worthless, narcissistic, special interest = YOU.

GitHub has a long history of being extremely unstable. They were down all the time, much like recently, several years ago. They seemed to stabilize quite a bit around the MS acquisition era, and now seem to be returning to their old instability patterns.

We're going to need decentralized open source alternatives with E2EE for any major communication services, unfortunately. It's just too temping of a target for Governments. They're never going to give up trying to destroy anonymity online.

They already exists except that most people don't know about it and also it is extremely hard to move over all the existing users from Whatsapp to something less popular and less user friendly.

Until that changes, then the governments around the world are going to keep pushing to get access to all our messages in order to "protect the children" TM and ask you to prove that "you are not a child" TM

Hard no. Reality is that this push is everywhere. Authoritarian governments are cracking down hard on dissent, they're not going to leave huge platforms for communication untouched. We'll need open source decentralized alternatives.

Indeed, the article basically says as much in more pacifying terms:

> driven by an international legal push for age checks and stronger child safety measures

I’m always amazed that despite decades of evidence… there are people that not only don’t know that you can do anything if you say “it’s for the children” but they’ll actively support it.

Children generally have these things called "parents" who are supposedly responsible for their well being. Oh hey, suddenly there isn't a contradiction.

Right, helicopter parenting. Gets a lot of praise here, I forgot.

Empower parents. Parental controls are a minefield - especially with competing companies (ea, microsoft, steam, nintendo, apple) all doing their best to get you to turn them off so they can push lootboxes and other junk more easily.

you may be surprised to learn that you can be a parent and have rules without being a "helicopter parent".

given your other bad faith comments in this thread, though, im sure you know that and are just trying to be contrarian for... fun? is it fun?

HN commenters are many. Not 1. And 1 person can believe 2 things are bad.

Interesting article. The color is nice on the Pro, but could definitely use some improvement.

That aside, the Remarkable Paper Pro is one of the biggest deltas I have ever seen between hardware and software quality. The hardware feels and looks great. I was pretty excited when I unboxed it by it. That all disappeared rapidly as I started using it. Their entire user experience is terrible, and just shockingly unuseful. I don't understand who it's designed for, because it doesn't seem to do anything well.

This is one of those topics where everyone is going to insert their personal bête noire as the cause. "Tech, the economy, culture, immigrants, loss of religion, corruption, polarization, capitalism, socialism!". I actually really like threads like this, since it's a good way to get a pulse on what the different discontentment topics are at any given time.

All of the boogeymen you mentioned are strands of a singular issue, a singular phenomenon.

losing the gold standard 1971?

when the ruling principles are growth, consumption, and profit, the ability to invent money tends to be quite appealing.

What is that singular phenomenon? What can result in blaming both capitalism and socialism, for example?

Man, what does that say about the human race if we're only able to be happy under the dubious eye of a supranatural daddy?

I think it says we need more time in the evolutionary oven. With how fast tech and education have accelerated we're running Ubuntu 24 on the Enigma machine.

Yeah, that seems to be a better conclusion - that we're not built with enough sophistication to deal with everything we're currently dealing with. But I think that's also due to the fact that the things we're dealing with are intentionally built to take advantage of our weaknesses. You can't out evolve technology.

Does it matter? Based upon the poster I responded to, it appears to be only the belief that's important, not the being.

If such being does exist, then how could it possibly not matter? If there's an architect and we are the architect's creation, then how could our belief alone be the important thing?

That's immaterial to the discussion. The comment I replied to simply stated: "Displacing God as the center of life." They aren't arguing that god matters, it's our displacement of them.

So, on the existence of god, we have two possiblities: God does exist, god doesn't exist.

1. If god doesn't exist, then we're unhappy because we're displacing a false god as the center of life.

2. If god does exist, then we're unhappy because we're displacing a real god as the center of life.

In that discussion, god's existence in fact doesn't matter, it leads to the same outcome.

But that framing only really works if we assume a Abrahamic world view.

Other cultures don't and didn't relate to their deities in the same way. Do we then have to assume they all suffered lower life satisfaction than a 11th century German peasant because of their detachment from a singular god the creator? Why didn't they strive for the relationship you're describing?

Trying to put God with a capital G at the center of our lives as some innate need doesn't make sense from a historical context.

That’s not what we’d have to assume.

I don’t know about religions in the general sense, and you’re right to point out that I very much have the “Abrahamic world view”, though my case is much much more specific than that but that’s not relevant here.

What we might more safely assume is that the Creator is revealed through history and a group to whom it he’s not revealed might pursue him more ignorantly (I appreciate the language might sound offensive or condescending but that’s not the intention) but in that pursuit they’re still better off than someone who willfully rejects him.

This I believe is relevant to the post, as these societies have not gone from one god to another, but to none.

That's a lot of assumptions, and really only make sense if you're trying to put your own beliefs as the "correct" choice. Somehow, all these other cultures got it wrong, but the ones who believe one single god, they got it right.

> This I believe is relevant to the post, as these societies have not gone from one god to another, but to none.

I don't know what you mean by this. Particular God's importance rose and fell out of fashion in ancient societies.

I totally agreed with you, right up until the last paragraph. Reddit is among the worst communities on the internet.

You aren't wrong. There is no real use for this for most people. It's a silly toy that somehow caught the AI hype cycle.

The thing is, that's totally fine! It's ok for things to be silly toys that aren't very efficient. People are enjoying it, and people are interacting with opensource software. Those are good things.

I do think that eventually this model will be something useful, and this is a great source of experimentation.

> How's the $100K H1B fee that was announced to distract from the Trump Gold Card announcement [0] going? The HN hive mind said it would bring back the jobs and those of us who warned [1][2] it would incentivize offshoring were hounded.

Yep, offshoring needs to be heavily penalized as well.

> ChatGPT has become a safety-critical system.

It's really really not. "Safety-critical system" has a meaning, and a chat bot doesn't qualify. Treating the whole world as if it needs to be wrapped in bubble-wrap is extremely unhealthy and it generally just used as an excuse for creeping authoritarianism.