Hacker News might be the most insufferable and childishly naive place on the internet.

The worst thing about many programmers and tech people is that in general these types of people will always be more obsessed with the next technology that will save us by allowing us to consume more and become more selfish than with genuine solutions to actual human problems not neatly defined computer/math problems.

Like problems computer programs are useful for, techbros see the climate crisis as an optimization problem with easily definable numbers and quantities. Politics, ideology, emotions and systematic oppression and suffering don’t enter the algorithm in quantifiably explicit ways so they are considered trivial for the purposes of solving the problem. Most computer programmers I have met would have no problem writing a computer algorithm to save time for cops having to manually choose who to pull over and instead use a crime prediction algorithm trained on who police officers have previously pulled over in the past to “solve crime” and “make policing unbiased”. Maybe that is changing, but it isn’t because most of these people actually get what is so evil about writing a program like that in their hearts, they just understand they get shamed every time they suggest crap like this.

Thus you get legions of these people decrying environmentalists and their strategies with a fatalist cynicism in places like hacker news while they simultaneously trot out whatever lame Elon musk style “revolutionary technology” that they think will solve the crises we face that revolves around catastrophically stupid global scale geoengineering or tech that is eternally 30 years away just magically becoming distributed and ready for mass market use tomorrow.

Everything is optimization, everything must scale as quickly as possible, everything is about bigger and bigger regimes of control that enforce rigid operations and interactions. These people think the entire universe can be seen through the lens of factorio and it makes me vomit in my mouth a little every time I think about it.

This is of course by far the most dangerous part about many programmers and tech people, by and large they seem to believe that because they understand computers that they understand everything they need to know about the world. It is really no different than any other kind of hubris, it’s just the rest of us give tech people more leeway to engage in it because the tech world preys so intensely on our practical real world hopes and dreams while laying claim to large swathes of our imaginative capacity to envision different realities.

There are also many amazing tech and programmer type people, I am speaking in generalizations that will never include every instance of the type. I love you, cool and radical lefty techies!!! This isn’t aimed at you.

Very Sharp

I mean… how big really is the category of software tasks that you can’t properly do on Linux in 2024? I feel like it is getting to the point where you do genuinely have to be specific about what Linux can’t do that is a dealbreaker for you rather than just falling back on “Linux can’t do what people need to do” as a general criticism of it.

Windows can’t do what people need it to do, and it fails to do so while sucking up your private data (which if you work at a business with confidential information IS a dealbreaker). At least when Linux fails it usually isn’t simultaneously violating the IT security structure of your organization….

The funny thing is businesses and government entities can’t even claim with a straight face that they can trust Microsoft to adhere to the meager insufficient data privacy laws that do exist when there is zero evidence Microsoft would behave that way based on the track record even if the financial penalties for failing to do so were actually real to the ruling class and not just theoretical thought experiments that involve a slap on the wrist or more like a light tickling with a feather on the nose.

It is okay to be the person that always recommends Linux, especially if you are a kind person with the patience to explain things to people in approachable terms (and you don’t just scream at people SOMEBODY ALREADY ASKED THIS QUESTION USE SEARCH whenever a newbie walks in the door and asks the obvious questions a newbie would ask).

Now is the time, Linux is pulled up out front waiting to pick us up (with bags packed) and Microsoft is loudly shitting the bed upstairs, NOW is the time to walk straight out the front door, jump in the car with Linux and never look back. We owe it to Microsoft’s long relationship with consumers to leave Microsoft sitting confused on the porcelain throne wondering why they were abandoned and where all the toilet paper is (we are the toilet paper in this metaphor).

Billionaires have no legitimate right to exist.

Period.

It doesn’t matter if some of them “do nice things” maybe.

Billionaires should not exist.

So I think the irony is that if standing with Israel means he can win the election, it’s still a better outcome for Palestine than if he loses. If he loses the election, Trump will tell Israel to just go ahead and glass the area.

The irony is how much you have twisted your political beliefs to find a position you feel ok about this from.

The majority of Americans think what Israel is doing is heinous and want it to stop, the idea that Americans are evenly divided on this is not grounded in reality.

I especially can’t stand that people keep treating it as a fact here that US voters are split 50-50 on Israel’s genocide to stop. The polling is clear, US voters with a decisive majority support Palestine and ending this genocide.

People in this thread asserting that most Americans support Israeli’s actions in this genocide rather than support Palestinians as a some kind of indisputable fact as part of their rhetorical arguments is a self fulfilling prophecy of attempting to manufacture consensus where it doesn’t exist.

Terrorism is not an ideological choice, it is a military strategy employed by groups that do not have the means to fight a more traditional conflict.

Hamas uses “terrorism” but the IDF doesn’t need “terrorism” because it has tanks, advanced fighter jets and one of the most advanced and well armed militaries in the world. It can just slaughter innocent tens of thousands of Palestinians and claim it is doing “military operations” and the world media will shake their heads and agree.

Why? Using a car you can lock up seems like a better alternative intuitively, I am pointing out that other than the emotional distress of having an object of yours stolen, owning a car is a regular rolling disaster of costs and suffering that dwarfs somebody running off with your $800 used e-bike every couple of months.

How is this a bad take? It is literally a documented phenomena that people don’t rationally take into account how expensive owning and using a car is.

Alright buddy so you want to burn it down and cause utter chaos just cause you don’t like how things are going?

Well, when you put it that way it actually sounds a lot like the US military/government! You too should be friends!

…or are you only interested in blowing up pipelines in rich countries where the correct oil companies and defense contractors already own everything and are making money hand over fist?

If so would you hurt the soul of America like that? It would be like burning down Fenway or smashing the liberty bell to bits. Those poor executives would have to go home to their families and explain through tears and sobs that the halcyon days of shitting on the future of humanity for the next 15,000 years are over, and that consequences for the ruling class have officially arrived.

shudders what an awful thought!

I mean, how much does your e-bike cost? If you can get one, especially a used one for a relatively affordable price and you actually sit down and tally up car costs like insurance, gas, maintenance, AAA, tires, any number of other costs…. I don’t think it matters if someone occasionally steals your e-bike (outside of it being extremely frustrating and inconvenient). Someone could steal your e-bike every 6 months or so and you likely will still be spending FARRRRRR less buying a new/used electric bicycle than you would just owning a car and using it and then having to deal with the insane never ending bullshit costs of keeping a car on the road.

So idk, build up a savings so you can replace your e-bike if you need to and then just use it. So long as you get a years use out of it or so it has already earned you quite a bit of money from cutting car costs.

Get one of those e-bikes with a removable battery with a key lock, then take your battery so if someone steals your bicycle they can’t steal the actually expensive part.

Hey, I agree with the sentiment but sex work is a respectable job unlike being a crooked as shit congress person ruining the future of countless people :)

Also being a slut is a respectable job too, the world runs on sluts like me.

ACAB but especially the NYPD

Thank you!

Such a long rant about something so old and so universal as *outsourcing

*Class Warfare

FTFY

no! That’s not how unions work in capitalism. A union can’t decide the business side of things. There’s a clear separation of responsibilities

Ahahahaha right, I love how you just accept the legally defined rights of what a union can do and what it can’t as if those laws in any given country aren’t just a record of the battlefield between the working class and the ruling class. A union can do whatever the fuck a union wants to do, and the law will attempt to constrain it in favor of the ruling class and capitalists to the degree that is politically tenable in a given environment. Sometimes it will be successful, sometimes it will fail, but unions fundamentally exist outside of capitalism because they have a level of legitimacy that capitalism and the idea of owning other people’s labor will never have.

It hardly needs to be said that like libraries, if unions didn’t already exist as a concept there is no way they would be legal at all if they were developed in this day and age. Unions are only ever temporarily legal along limited contexts under capitalism.

Union-lead society wide innovation for the sake of the current workforce is probably the dumbest thing i’ve read in a while.

high five solidarity my friend, even when you insult my intelligence you are still far more my friend than my boss will ever be

First, unions don’t prevent mass layoffs. They might help make things more manageable and help some individuals in need but layoffs are entirely at the discretion of the business.

"There are several ways that unionization’s impact on wages goes beyond the workers covered by collec- tive bargaining to affect nonunion wages and labor practices. For example, in industries and occupations where a strong core of workplaces are unionized, nonunion employers will frequently meet union standards or, at least, improve their compensation and labor practices beyond what they would have provided if there were no union presence. This dynamic is sometimes called the “union threat effect,” the degree to which nonunion workers get paid more because their employers are trying to forestall unionization.

There is a more general mechanism (without any specific “threat”) in which unions have affected nonunion pay and practices: unions have set norms and established practices that become more generalized throughout the economy, thereby improving pay and working conditions for the entire workforce. This has been especially true for the 75% of workers who are not college educated. Many “fringe” benefits, such as pensions and health insurance, were first provided in the union sector and then became more generalized—though, as we have seen, not universal. Union grievance procedures, which provide “due process” in the workplace, have been mimicked in many nonunion workplaces. Union wage- setting, which has gained exposure through media coverage, has frequently established standards of what workers generally, including many nonunion workers, expect from their employers. Until, the mid-1980s, in fact, many sectors of the economy followed the “pattern” set in collective bargaining agreements. As unions weakened, especially in the manufacturing sector, their ability to set broader patterns has diminished. However, unions remain a source of innovation in work practices (e.g., training, worker participation) and in benefits (e.g., child care, work-time flexibility, sick leave)."

https://www.epi.org/publication/briefingpapers_bp143/

https://files.epi.org/page/-/old/briefingpapers/143/bp143.pdf

i can guarantee that nothing can stop a business from maximizing profits.

You are not a union, you cannot stop a business from doing anything, together with your fellow workers however you can dictate anything about the behavior of your company that you and your fellow workers feel sufficiently passionate about enough to fight for.

And second, the industry is contracting because it hasn’t innovated in more than 5 years now.

Why should an industry bother innovating to increase dividends to shareholders with expensive and risky new technological ventures when it can just keep slashing labor costs and crushing employees under their foot? There is no economic incentive to innovate when unions don’t have the power to make executives think about choosing other less difficult paths than trying to directly reduce the quality of life of the companies employees.

Let the death of the programming industry as a respectable professional job be a warning to centrist workers in other industries what happens when you don’t unionize and just assume your personal talent will always be rewarded by the ruling class.

It won’t.

Also let the rhetoric computer programmers use to defend the intrinsic value of their livelihood be a lesson to all of us. They talk in terms of raw productivity, in terms of securing a living wage through being more savvy than people who are dumb and take manual labor jobs. They speak about the threats of automation with COMPLETE confidence it will only be used by their bosses to create more jobs for people like them.

Finally, let it be a lesson that the confidence of programmers who look at AI/LLMs and think “they can never replace me with that, it would be a disaster” totally misses the point that it doesn’t matter to the ruling class of the tech world that replacing tech worker jobs with shitty automation or vastly more underpaid workers won’t work longterm. The point is to permanently devalue and erode the pride and hard fought professionalism of programming (Coding Bootcamps have the same objective of reducing the leverage of workers vs employers).

^ Programmers make a classic person-who-is-smart-at-computers mistake here of trying to understand business like it is a series of computer programs behaving rationally to efficiently earn money

I have met a nauseating amount of programmers who truly believe that tech companies would have to come crawling back to them if they fired tech workers in the industry en masse and everything began to break. What these programmers don’t understand is yeah, they will come back, but they will employ you from the further shifted perspective that you are an alternative to a worthless algorithm or vastly underpaid human when they do. That change in perspective, that undercutting of the “prestige” of being a skilled programmer is permanent and will never revert.

Shit is dark… but also damn if I don’t have a tiny bit of schadenfreude for all the completely unfounded self confidence and sense of quiet superiority so many people who work with computers project when doing something like teaching a classroom of 20 kids or fixing someone’s plumbing problem is way fucking harder any day of the week.