So "why" is just "idk" and it seems like the person generating them found her on accident once, and then kept trying to find her again. I'm a fan of a good creepypasta and honestly a memetic SCP that "lives" in the models of AI sounds pretty tight to me. But this ain't it.
I'll admit I was expecting the "why" (aside from SCP...) to be something like "turns out DALL-E gets live humans and corpses mixed up and in macabre images the live humans get a bit more corpse-y due to this".
> so he drives to the Google parking lot on a weekend and finds no one there. Obviously Google+ wasn't a serious enough concern to Google that would require weekend hours so the author concluded (correctly) that its not the existential threat that Facebook thought it was.
This line of reasoning was viscerally distressing for me to read. Both for what it implies the FB guy thinks about what productivity/seriousness looks like, and for the brittleness of the reasoning used to draw his conclusion.
Did Google+ really fail, though? It seemed to me that their primary goal was less about building a social network and more about preventing Facebook from owning the whole digital identity space: that is, Google+ was a response to the wave of "Log in with Facebook" buttons sweeping the web at the time. While the social network never took off, Google did successfully prevent Facebook from becoming a gateway to the web.
I'd love an explanation of what technical delivery failures--not the right functionality, or delivered too late--the author thinks led to G+ not beating Facebook.
I think its a bit of a resources curse. Google+ goes live and instantly they have tens to hundreds of millions of users.
If you bootstrapped a social media company and you have that many users, you'd likely read it as a signal that you're doing something right. But with Google that's baked in to their brand and connections with existing services. So it takes a lot of skill to tease out signal from noise. How many people actually find this valuable and how can we iterate? Again, its relatively straight forward for most companies by tracking a few key metrics, but with Google the dataset it just polluted.
It also wasn't existential for their survival. If Facebook failed, it would have brought down everything, so they were very much invested in the product and geared all resources to ensure survival. With Google+ it was just a feather in the cap and not a priority
I think the "resource curse" hypothesis is interesting, but there's also a simpler explanation: social networking is an _extremely_ sticky, winner-take-all market.
Google+ isn't the only competitor to fail to unseat Facebook. I think that says far more about Facebook than it does about Google+.
The FB guy demonstrated how thoughtless his mental model of successful companies was, and eventually got what he deserved.
Google+ worked differently from the rest of the company and definitely had a few all-nighters and all-weekenders (those folks had haunted eyes) but only because people thought they could parlay their efforts into promotions or more influence at work.
Amusingly, Google+ got turned into a commercial product (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Currents) which is being slowly wound down. The only successful Google+ community i ever saw was inside google (in the internal corp Google+) and even then, almost nobody who joined after ~2018 even knew it existed (instead, most people just used memegen). My current employer had it, and it was a ghost town.
I just recently migrated all (4) of my domains from google domains to cloudflare. Some of them (.cafe) because it was 50% cheaper (20ish bucks instead of 40) and others (.com) because even through the price was ~ the same ($9ish vs 12) I still wanted to decrease how load-bearing my google account was.
The transfer was quite smooth. It was easy to turn off the cloudflare "protection" (my sites don't need it (yet?) and I didn't want to have to think about it, the threat model, tls stuff, etc). And so far no problems.
My main qualms with bash as a scripting language are that its syntax is not only kind of bonkers (no judgement, I know it's an old tool) but also just crazily unsafe. I link to a few high-profile things whenever people ask me why my mantra is "the time to switch your script from bash to python is when you want to delete things".
There are couple of flags you can use to mitigate the safety risks. `set -u`, for instance, will thrown an error if an unbound variable is used. I always start my scripts with
One of the weird things about Java is that there's a big low-latency/high-performance Java community around that stems from Island (now owned by NASDAQ) using Java as the platform/language for their matching engine. Then, talent flow from that team resulted in lots of proprietary trading shops using Java to low-latency trading/order execution.
Heartbleed was reviewed twice by literal OpenSSL experts and security experts who were specifically looking at it to determine whether it was a security vulnerability or not and concluded (incorrectly) it was not. And now it's the poster child for bad software bugs.
It's really hard to write correct software in any language, and time has shown again and again that memory safety is just not something you can hope to do without if you care about security in the slightest.
Yes I'm sure China or Russia would be *thrilled* if their citizens wanted workers to own the means of production. Definitely would not involve tanks or squares or soon-to-be iconic historical photography at all.
China is called the CCP… if Russia and China aren’t communists or communist friendly then who is? And why won’t you accept the proposition that americas problems might be due to a poor implementation of capitalism but then call all unattractive communist countries just “poor implementations of communism?”
China isn’t communist. China is a one-party state with state-controlled capitalism. The name CCP is only historical and fuels propaganda. Instead of looking at names, look at the actual economics of the country.
I'll throw out another "class" of person - someone who believes something, and at least grasps the concept of philosophical reasoning enough that they'll attempt to build one of the basic forms of argument - usually an argument by analogy - and having done so, they'll trumpet their conclusion. Then, commenters will pile in, either being part of the class of people you mention (who will skip reading the argument and just check to make sure the conclusion is what they want) or being part of the same class who will review the argument, stamp a "lgtm!" on it, and upvote/concur. We're right! And look, it's got proof attached, too!
But then even the most amateur student of philosophy, perhaps about 60% of the way through their freshman (mandatory) Philosophy 101 course, would be able to examine the argument and identify mistakes so appallingly obvious that they might be provided as practice problems in their homework. The analogy isn't appropriate; or it begs the question; or it assumes some predicate where their proof may hold if the predicate is true, but the predicate itself must be proven for the conclusion to be substantive.
I see this a lot on reddit. Especially recently due to the abortion debates re-heating. Arguers - regardless of side - are so poorly equipped by our education system, and so poorly incentivized by the highly polarized/tribalistic nature of modern political discourse, that even when people try they're still not making any progress in reasoning about their positions.
Adding on: and sometimes, even when they manage to make an interesting point, they've gotten so lost in their appraisal of their argument that the philosophical question ends up not even being the one they actually care about.
To that last point, I've lately seen a lot of arguments for abortion being ethical/unethical that end up just being modified Trolley problems. One I saw that stuck with me was: "Suppose there is a fire in a building. You have a test tube of 1000 human embryos in one hand, and a 4 year old girl in the other. The only possible outcomes are you saving the vial or the girl, or neither. Which do you choose?"
I thought this was an interesting take, since it reads as a very different situation depending on your view of the embryos!
A "pro-life" person would clearly interpret this as a modified trolley problem. You have 1000 embryos who could become people but cannot feel pain or terror or [etc] right now (or at least not in the same way as the 4-year-old). Or you have a 4-year-old who can, and will suffer greatly. This is quite trolley-esque and while this one seems to have somewhat of a likely-correct answer, it's certainly not without some complication.
Someone who thinks the embryos aren't yet people or persons will see this as a much less interesting thought exercise - of course you save the 4-year-old, the vial is just some cells that clearly don't even have consciousness yet.
And there's even a whole swathe of positions in between who will assign some amount of humanity to the embryos and attempt to resolve the quandary between the embryos vs the 4-year-old.
But, as interesting as this is, it completely misses the point of the original question-poser. Regardless of which option you pick as correct, it doesn't really inform us much as to whether abortion is ethical. Going back to my main point of bemoaning the dreadful state of the average internet argument.
Assuming those 1000 embryos belonged to e.g. 100 cancer patients who were subsequently rendered infertile by chemo, the choice really comes down to, kill one child, or effectively sterilize 100 cancer patients by removing their option to have biological children.
You could rephrase the problem as this: you have a sterility gun that will fire 100 times. You can direct it into a crowd where it will permanently sterilize 100 random people. Or point it at one 4 year old, who will be killed by the accumulated 100 shots. Which is more harmful?
Politics on reddit? Isn't that shills arguing with shills moderated by shills ranked by a biased algorithm that other shills try to game with vote bots.
I'm not a greybeard by any stretch, but I personally get a lot of mileage out of just stopping to ask: Does the extra layer of abstraction, or extraction of code to a method, or creation of a class - does it make the code *right now* easier to understand? If yes, do it, if not, don't.
The example I keep coming back to is when I was a junior, one of the other juniors refactored the database handling code in one of our apps to use a class hierarchy. "AbstractDatabaseConnection" "DatabaseConnection" etc. And mind you this was on top of the java.sql abstractions already present.
I don't necessarily know what his end goal was, since the code still seemed pretty tightly coupled to how java and postgres handle connections and do SQL. One might theoretically now be able to create a testing dummy connection that responds to sql calls and returns pre-baked data. But the functions we had were already refactored to be pure functions, and the IO was just IO with no business logic.
Anyway, all it ended up doing was making it so I never touched the database code in that app ever again. Integration testing was handled by just hooking it up to a test db via cli args and auto-clicking the UI. And eventually when people started side-stepping it, I took the opportunity (years later) to just go back in and replace both it and all the side-stepped code with plain ole java.sql stuff that literally anyone with two thumbs and 6 months of java experience could understand.
So now, unless I have some really strong plan (usually backed up with a prototype I used to plan out the abstraction) for an abstraction model, I just write code, extracting things where the small-scale abstractions improve current readability, and wait for bigger patterns (and business needs) to emerge before trying to clamp down on things with big prescriptive abstraction models.
The problem is that the author probably likes manhattan for various reasons that you can't just move outside of manhattan, like:
- family nearby
- friends nearby
- as a consequence of the above two: support network is in manhattan
- enjoying the local parks/scene/etc
I grew up in <midwest plains city> and then moved to <rival midwest plains city> for a long while after college, eventually moving back to my home city because that's where all my family was.
It was a hard move in both directions and all things considered, I didn't even move that far. In city B, I missed my family and the stuff there was to do in city A. But after moving back, I now miss a lot of the things we did in B. And I don't even consider myself to be someone to particularly likes leaving my house!
Advice that tells people to "just move" is pretty shortsighted, I think. I really doubt OP moved to manhattan just to be able to be snooty about living in an expensive city, or something, which is honestly how I kind of read these kinds of advice - though it's probably not a very charitable read of your argument, for which I apologize.
Ah so now it's transformed from I want to be a writer to I want to be a writer in Manhattan specifically, and I'm sure there are a lot of other caveats.
Do you want me to tell you about someone who really has a passion for writing. Brandon Sanderson, he loved writing so much that in college he got a job at a desk clerk at a hotel at night just so he could write more. He writes "novellas" on his flights for fun just because he can, during COVID he wrote 4 more novels just for funsies to deal with the anxiety.
A lot of people say they have a passion what they have is an interest. Anyone who has a real honest to God burning passion is going to be doing it regardless of anything else just because they love it.
Alot of people think they have a passion but really they just kind of like the idea doing something that seems easier.
> A lot of people say they have a passion what they have is an interest. Anyone who has a real honest to God burning passion is going to be doing it regardless of anything else just because they love it.
This reminds me of a part of a Ken Robinson talk (maybe it's a TED Talk), where he describes talking to a friend after a musical performance. He tells his friend, "I'd love to be able to do what you do on the stage." And his friends basically tells him, "No, you don't. If you wanted to do what I do, you'd be practicing on your guitar daily. What you want is the praise and benefits of the hard work. You don't actually want to do what I do."
This whole "you aren't a real <x> unless you suffer through <y>" is just as unhealthy for authors as it is for programmers. Just because someone isn't grinding out leetcode on their lunchbreak or novellas on flights doesn't mean they don't have a genuine love and passion for the underlying art. Sanderson is an exceptional author, emphasis on exceptional. Most people would burn out at the pace he sets.
My point wasn't to say your aren't a real writer unless you write like he does it was to illustrate what a real love and burning passion is.
A lot of us here think we would love to but physicists as it is all so interesting but we can't because of our jobs. The greatest physicist since Newton couldn't get a job as a physicist but loved it so much that he spent any spare time he had working on it and thinking about it and obsessing over it.
If you really actually love something you'll find a way to do it, otherwise it's a hobby. Hobbies are good there is nothing wrong with it. But if you really feel a burning desire to do something you'd do it regardless of finances and time because you won't be able to stop yourself from doing it.
Speaking from personal experience, that's not true. I truly loved being an archaeologist, but I also enjoy the creature comforts of bathing, housing, and having access to the basic institutions of society like voting or dating. Pursuing one effectively meant giving up the others, so I returned to my more moderate (and financially rewarding) love of tech.
There are exceptions like your examples. There are probably others who do have strong passions where they obsess over their art and still want to move to a place where other artist like themselves are.
That's probably why Paris was the place to be if you were an aspiring impressionist painter in the 19th century. Renoir, Monet, etc probably were passionate about their art. And being in close proximity probably helped each other in positive ways.
A lot of people in creative fields thrive off the presence of other creatives around them with whom they can discuss ideas, etc. NYC is hard to beat for that. You're also likely to come across more opportunities to get your work published if you live in one of the centers of the global publishing industry.
People choose to live in NYC for reasons other than narcissism or lifestyle amenities - for many creative fields (especially anything "high culture") it is objectively the best, sometimes the only, place to be if you want to develop your career.
And I'm sorry but if quantity written had any relevance on one's seriousness as an author then Stephen King would be the greatest English-language author of all time.
> And I'm sorry but if quantity written had any relevance on one's seriousness as an author then Stephen King would be the greatest English-language author of all time.
While I would never reach for that kind of superlative, and I definitely don't think it's related to quantity written, I do think Stephen King is an exceptionally good English-language author.
For what it’s worth I agree…he’s underrated, although he seems to be getting more respect these days. But he could have benefited from more editing when he was in his prime.
Edit: Still not the best of all time or even in the top 100. But I’d be hard pressed to name a better American author with his level of mass market appeal.
> A lot of people say they have a passion what they have is an interest. Anyone who has a real honest to God burning passion is going to be doing it regardless of anything else just because they love it.
You're confusing "would you be pursuing that passion regardless of other factors" with "would/should you sacrifice other aspects of your life if you could still follow that one passion".
It's not about the circumstances under which you're willing to still follow your passion. It's about what sacrifices you're willing to make in your life, regardless of your passion. e.g., you might be willing to go to prison or live in a dumpster and still love writing books so much that you'd continue doing that, but your love for writing books doesn't imply you should be willing to go live in a dumpster. The other factors still matter in your life. They just won't get in the way of you writing, is all.
I'll admit I was expecting the "why" (aside from SCP...) to be something like "turns out DALL-E gets live humans and corpses mixed up and in macabre images the live humans get a bit more corpse-y due to this".