I think what bothers people is the idea of having to work to pay for somebody else's leisure. Obviously lots of arguments to be had about the specifics of that, but I think it's more about this than a moralistic concern about "unearned" leisure. Nobody minds much if somebody wins the lottery and lives a frugal and leisurely life on the proceeds.
I see your point, but it feels like you're engaging in a broader defense of the system rather than directly adressing apercu's concern about wealth concentration and elite influence.
My first draft had examples of what "working to pay for somebody else's leisure" means for different people, but I thought it better to omit specifics in favour of the general point.
As per other comments, women being played by men was and is a venerable tradition in British comedy and not actually very transgressive at all. It feels more "transgressive" now than it did then, I think because we imported US culture war stuff in the last decade or so.
I don't think HN actually hates humour, it just has a relatively high bar. Some of my most upvoted comments have been jokes. But I like to think they were reasonably good ones.
Regarding the Pythons and transgression, I think for me it's probably a case by case thing. There's obviously "good" transgression and "bad" transgression, but I suppose you have to have some support for the willingness to transgress, if you want positive social change to be a possibility.
Regarding specific things the Pythons said, the most actually transgressive-at-the-time thing I can think of is probably Graham Chapman's overt homosexuality and support for gay rights, which was no small thing in 1970s Britain.
Edit: Or you could make a case for it being the "blasphemous" Life of Brian, although I don't think the public outrage about that was really in step with mainstream opinion.
Edit2: I'm wondering whether Some Like it Hot, Milton Berle etc were considered transgressive in the US? Were these things not actually quite mainstream in the 20th century, even in the US?
That's insightful though I wasn't pitching that so much as humour
being just part of life and removing/excluding it distorts
discourse. I've heard many fascinating accounts of how sensitivity to
humour indicates the "health" of a society, and when it vanishes that
is prelude to conflict, even war.
Yes, I think us Brits defused many of our internal tensions as a
mult-cultural AND classist society in the 70s and 80s with the
transition from vaudeville racism to new-wave "alternative comedy".
It didn't change the status-quo but it did move the dial toward more
progressive ideas.
I do think HN is an odd place in it's intolerance of humour, and I
don't see that "high bar" because TBH it's the lowborw geeky
"knob-gags" that make the grade here in my observation. I think it's
actually the old struggle of poets and philosophers (see Republic 2,
3, 5 [0]) is at play. HN adapts to filtering what it can't process.
It's a bit like that AI brain in Blake's Seven that Villa causes to
explode by feeding it riddles. I'm noticing even this "meta" talk
about humour is being downvoted (and I hope those doing so are getting
a good ironic laugh from that) :)
I'm not familiar with Reddit, but assume it descended into total
clownery. Hence the rules "don't comment that this place is starting
to get like Reddit" I guess.
I wouldn’t say just Reddit. It’s counter to just about every other online forum out there. HN is pretty unique in its strongly enforced taboo against humor and silliness.
People taking minute-long pauses before answering questions.
People confidently saying things that are factually incorrect and not being able to explain why they would say that.
People submitting code they don't understand & getting mad when asked why they wrote something that way.
I get that candidates are desperate for jobs, because a bunch of tech companies have given up on building useful software and are betting their entire business on these spam bots instead, but these techniques _do not help_. They just make the interview a waste of time for the candidate and the interviewer alike.
I interviewed every single candidate for development positions in a 300-400 company for the last three years and I saw some incredibly crazy stuff.
- A candidate who wore glasses and I could faintly see the reflection of ChatGPT.
- A candidate that would pause and look in a different specific direction and think for about 20, 30 seconds whenever I asked something a bit difficult. It was always the same direction, so it could have been a second monitor.
- Someone who provided us with a Resumé that said 25 years of experience but the text was 100% early ChatGPT, full of superlatives. I forgot to open the CV before the interview, but this was SO BAD that I ended in about 20 minutes.
- Also, few months before ChatGPT I interviewed someone for an internship who was getting directions from someone whispering to them. I managed to hear it when they forgot to mute the mic a couple times.
Our freelance recruiter said that people who aren't super social are getting the short end of the stick. Some haven't worked for one, two years. It's rough.
> I interviewed someone for an internship who was getting directions from someone whispering to them. I managed to hear it when they forgot to mute the mic a couple times.
What do you do when something like this happens in an interview? Do you ignore it, call out the interviewee, make a joke about it?
I ignore and cut the interview short in a subtle way, then ask HR to reject the candidate.
I'm not cold blooded enough to joke about this hahahaha
I do tend to give immediate feedback to most candidates, but I try to make it strictly technical and very matter-of-fact. A suspicion of cheating is not really something that I'd give feedback on. :/
I would tell the interviewee that I want to continue the interview with the other person since their answers indicate they’d be a good fit for the position.
Years back, I had someone interviewing in person for a low-level, bit-twiddling, C++ role without knowing what hexadecimal is (no clue how they got that far; the external recruiter was given "feedback"). Pretty much lied about everything, tried to bullshit his way through questions. I have no idea how they thought they'd manage the job.
Just like with semi-personalized phishing/spam, it's not that these things didn't happen already, it's that people are empowered and emboldened to cheat by it becoming easier. The difference is in quantitative not qualitative.
From my subjective experience, having "been there at the time", I think this was sufficiently obscure that "not really a thing" is not an unreasonable take. It's a bit like "Yes, in the 2020s we got NFTs tattooed on our bodies".
Edit: Although having just googled it it seems like NFT tattoos might be more of a thing than I was aware, so what do I know.
It's probably obscure, but anyone from that time would find it plausible because we know both radio and computers used cassettes.
So for me, this title was "Yeah, I get it how that would work".
For fun I just asked my 16 year old son "Do you think it was possible in the past to download a computer game from the radio?". He thought is was impossible, and had no clue how that would work when asked further :D. It totally confused him because "you can't play games on a radio".
It was 'big in East Germany' though (see my comment about Prof Dr Horst Voelz). A translated section from that link:
"The response to the show was unexpectedly overwhelming. Over the course of the approximately 60 episodes, the station received a total of approximately 50,000 letters from listeners. This was unprecedented in the history of broadcasting."
...and of course as a teenager I was eagerly awaiting each show and recorded the programs that were broadcasted at the end :)
Eh, I was a little too young to be there at the time but your experience sounds infinitely cooler than a NFT tattoo which just might be the lamest thing I've heard in my life and I feel worse about the world for learning about.
My money says Frank Sidebottom (Chris Sievey's alter ego) probably has more cultural currency than The Thompson Twins in 202x. But obviously idk what they're thinking of.
Tengentially: Since a lot of us are hybrid workers now, can't we have a better solution than having to constantly schlep our laptops to work and back? I want an easily pluggable SSD that doesn't dangle precariously out of the side of my laptop. Something like the old PCMCIA form factor. Then I could have a work laptop and a home laptop.
At that point, why not have a home desktop and a work desktop? You've been able to have external hot-swap SSDs in a relatively small form factor for years. They make m.2 hot swappable frames[0].
I don't know, maybe! I just did a half-arsed google and got an M.2 adaptor that doesn't look like it's designed for daily swappage? But maybe you're talking about something else.
Thank you, that does look interesting! I haven't really considered the Frameworks so far because of my secondhand Thinkpad habit, but I do like the idea so I should probably think more seriously about it.
Although, there are multiple people in the talk section[0] arguing for the "'physical' machine" definition. Might have to get used to it, along with "crypto" and "algorithm".
The trendy uses are "algorithim" and "crypto" are specific cases of the general meanings of these terms -- there's no contradiction or ambiguity introduced here, so these uses are OK, although people presuming the narrower trendy meanings in broader contexts are wrong.
This use of "bare metal" does contradict the pre-existing meaning, so is not quite appropriate. What is valid is describing the OS itself as running on bare metal in contrast to running within a VM/container -- but an application running on top of that OS is not running on bare metal.
This isn't particularly egregious, though, since there are negligible cases of actually running applications on bare metal today: if you are talking about applications, the context can usually explain the intended meaning. But that wasn't always the case in the past (PC "booter" software used to be common), so this doesn't necessarily apply retrospectively, and may not be the case in the future, especially considering some of the interesting things companies like Oxide are working on.
Can't remember the name (if it has one), but there's a linguistic phenomenon where words take on opposite meanings from the original. The "Peacemaker" was a missile, "literally" now means "figuratively", "awful" used to mean "awe-inspiring". And apparently "bare metal" now means "runs on an operating system".
OTOH, technical fields develop jargon specifically as a solution to the problems created by semantic drift in vernacular vocabulary.
Sure, languages evolve, but that doesn't mean "anything goes" -- to the contrary, novel mutations have to survive intense selection pressures in order to eventually become part of the standard language.
Where new ways of using existing terms create ambiguity and conflict with existing meanings, their survival chances aren't always great.
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