That is exactly free speech. A right to express an unsavoury view without the system punishing you.
Never gave you a right not to be ignored by your neighbours, or not banned from the bar, or not having others nudge their friends to make sure they notice and avoid, etc. Free speech almost always came with consequences until the internet age.
Free speech to be really free must be free of consequences. This also requires a rational, mature audience. The fear of consequences will not allow free speech to exist.
Preaching Bible can offend my atheist neighbor. My neighbor's blasphemous speech can offend my religious sentiments. There can be no end to this. In effect, no one will be free to speak their mind.
Reminds me of a New York comedian I heard who said something like, "I discovered that in the South, guys don't give any warning before they punch you."
It is like that where I grew up in the Midwest, too. Knowing that there will likely be immediate physical consequences for inflammatory speech is a great way to limit that kind of behavior. Unless, of course, it's Saturday night and you're mildly drunk and looking for a fight.
Actually, the guy got punched for insulting someone. He went on to talk about how in New York there would have likely been some warning first. So yeah, insults and name-calling comes with immediate consequences in real life. I think that's acceptable.
I'm not advocating public violence to limit speech or "de-platform" people. We have too much of that already. Rather, the point was to contrast the kinds of things people will say online that they would probably not say in person.
> Knowing that there will likely be immediate physical consequences for inflammatory speech is a great way to limit that kind of behavior.
it's also a great way to limit unpopular political speech and marginalized people taking up public space. "gay bashing", for example, is still a thing that happens to some of my friends.
unless we can count on people to only administer beatings to the right folks, i don't really see how you can have it both ways.
>it's also a great way to limit unpopular political speech and marginalized people taking up public space.
It's also a great way to defend unpopular political speech and marginalized people. The civil rights and gay rights movements used the same means of inflicting social and physical consequences against the status quo that its defenders used to defend it.
Speech doesn't exist in a vacuum completely separate from the universe of physical consequence, it never has.
No, the civil rights movement almost always was at the mercy of those willing to commit violence and kick people out of businesses. Your ideas about how people can kick you out of businesses and punch you if they don't like what you're saying benefit only those with power.
>Your ideas about how people can kick you out of businesses and punch you if they don't like what you're saying benefit only those with power.
They're not my ideas, and they don't benefit only those in power. If that were true, no protest, union or revolutionary movement of any kind would ever have been successful. The paradox of tolerance[0] is a real thing.
Me, I'd rather emulate a few classic games. But it had me wondering for a while if I'd get any value from this, before deciding "no".
I find it interesting that so many of the people making YT videos and in the current Amiga community don't seem old enough to have been there first time around! So it can't be just nostalgia.
What I really want is someone to reimagine a 3000+ prototype[0] for this decade and a modern Intuition. Then I'd probably impulse spend a lot of $. Of course that would cost someone a lot of R&D spend! It's almost inconceivable anything could recapture the magic though. :)
I started out doing real programming on an Amiga and I took a LONG time to retire it. Wasn't for lack of trying...
For years after if I needed to do something useful I used the Amiga over Win, on my first couple of very expensive PCs, because it was an order of magnitude more productive. It felt faster, with endless virtual screens, despite the ludicrous MHz/graphics gap. It was actually faster at most real world tasks except those needing raw CPU loads. It was far more reliable ripping or writing CDs etc. You generally plugged any Zorro card in and it just worked - none of the faffing with interrupt jumpers and Plug n Pray/BSOD. I used it over Linux/BSD as the sw wasn't there.
It took until the XP era, and much expense, before the Amiga became pointless. I was delighted when the Macbook Pro arrived... I'd sold the 4000 well before then.
I still miss many aspects of it. Not because I am somehow stuck in nostalgia for the 90s, MHz over GHz or scanlines and flicker fixers, but because I feel it was, in many ways a far better starting point for modern computing - mostly Intuition, but also the approach to everything in the hardware design (pre 4000 anyway). If only they had developed over the years since...
I suspect, had Commodore lasted, that they'd have gone an OSX-like route - new processor (this was already planned as there was no future in 68k series) and reimagining of Intuition on top of nix, maybe BSD. It already had a rather nix flavour, ARexx and so on. Hopefully on something more interesting than just PC clone hardware, though I doubt it these days.
Medhi Ali wanted to cut cost above all, and make some crap PCs, so the world got the piece of junk A4000 and AGA instead. Oh, and a cost-cutting A600 that cost more to produce than the A500.
For those who weren't around, Usenet was built on uucp in the early 80s. As messages were store and forward you had to wait a good while for your messages to propagate - many servers only connected daily! Oh, and better set cron to dial in often as messages didn't stay in the spool too long!
Usenet back then was spam free and you could usually end up talking to the creators of whatever you're discussing. I rather miss it.
Quite a few tech companies used private newsgroups for support, so you'd dial into those separately. As they were often techie to techie they worked rather well.
I first came across Usenet and uucp via the Amiga Developer programme. Amicron and uucp overnight all seemed a bit magic back in 87 compared to dialing into non-networked BBS's to browse, very, very slowly!
Or eternal-september. Free accounts, although you don't get access to the binaries groups I don't think. I mostly use it for comp.risks, comp.arch.embedded, and some other things like that.
I left because I was utterly sick of churn, NIH, and the endless succession of this week's magic (javascript framework etc) bullet. OK. It's different. It's almost never better.
Also felt most of my efforts were NOT making the world a better place but tech was contributing HARD to the throwaway world we need to cease, not increase.
I now work maintaining and restoring an early Elizabethan estate. Some of the things I do might outlast me, and it seems a worthwile contribution to the world. Some of the work done will count in a century or two all being well.
Do I regret leaving? Hell no. Best decision I ever made.
Still read HN because I am still interested in tech, but mostly not the 80% that the world seems to have settled on. I am extremely agin many of the uses, decisions and techs that give us the modern world. Exponentially increasing throwaway hardware on a finite planet? Surveillance? IoT? Security? Everything as a data slurping webapp? Disrupting perfectly sensible things that work nicely? Meh ^ 200.
I'd be glad to get involved in a project that I could believe made a significant substantive difference. Like if a Mr Musk phoned (not terribly likely) about alternative energy, climate change or some such...
> I now work maintaining and restoring an early Elizabethan estate
how did you pick up the necessary skills to be able to do this?
It looks like something that would take years of focused effort, rather than an easy jump.
Well the luck of finding a place that can deal with a middle-aged apprentice means I'll be collecting those skills for a while yet! I came across the opportunity whilst looking for options and directions for degrees to drive the career change. Well, that and deciding quite what other field I wanted to land in. Opportunity arose, I leapt. :)
Sometimes I'm glorified handyman, sometimes more significant, almost alwats learning more about old methods and tech, or previous centuries' restorations. I'm still collecting pieces of paper, including for some required modern things like electrics, that usually feel like basic commmon sense, until you see the folks in the class who are barely grasping it.
There's opportunities for specialising more as I go on.
Europe is littered with old sites, some owned by the large conservation charities are pretty formal in recruitment and role. Some of the individual estates and smaller organisations are more flexible probably because some of the niche skills are needed only more rarely. So I'd probably have never got near the National Trust without a 5 year run up.
> Hmm, this donut's a bit stale, I'm not prepared to pay anything for it thanks Mr.Tesco.
You go to the customer service desk, say "This doughnut is stale" show your receipt along with the partly eaten doughnut, then get a full refund or exchange as you prefer.
If you're doing it daily the rules will change. :)
Partly because it was just so damn clean and intuitive. Equivalent Windows apps were an order of magnitude larger, but seemed to offer less.
Partly because each was almost entirely the work of one - RJ Mical for Intuition, and Carl Sassenrath, who would later create Rebol mentioned below, for the kernel.
Lastly the whole was greater than the sum of very excellent parts.
Xwindows and Windows etc were an endless series of disappointments after cutting my teeth on Intuition. I often used to wonder what might have been had it continued to be developed... Or succeeded as it deserved.
In the case of Google, and to a lesser extent Microsoft, I don't have enough trust they'll keep their offering around to ever start using and relying on it.
Google and to a slightly lesser degree Microsoft have horrible histories of simply turning off successful services. Or "improving" them by replacing with something objectively worse.
..and despite the Readme implying it may not be stable yet and it being prerelease I've found it flawless for the 2 or 3 weeks I've been happily running it!
To start I'm probably outside the usual IoT demographic - it mostly doesn't deliver what I'd like. I looked at your campaign and thought it interesting, but didn't back it. Here's some entirely personal thoughts, make of them what you will - I don't expect to be very representative though! :)
I don't care to have my phone always around at home, couldn't care less about most apps. I even turn the phone off! Have always wanted not an Internet of Things but a local net, with a miniscule subset allowed near the net or usage slurping phone apps.
Was interested seeing MacOS app, hoping for a Pi or similar app further down. I liked that you can have say 3 remotes doing entirely different things or switching functions etc. Oh, bluetooth, iMac is usually in the other room to us in the evening (when I'm more likely to want a remote for something), so we're mainly out of Bluetooth range, and the Thinkpad is either on standby or being used.
Would have been more interested if a) the remote tethered to wifi to talk to the iMac, or better a low power Pi or similar hub so I don't need to care about iMac, phone and their apps just to remote music or lighting and b) there was a cheap n cheerful plastic option for the kitchen etc too. I'd probably look at a couple of plastic cheapies (to get dirty or lost etc) and one nice premium wooden one for the coffee table in main room.
I've seen a few large, well-known places downgrade candidates from certain places by dint of ability or technology stack in use. Or to be honest, just plain prejudice. So they'd be less likely to get interviewed in the first place.
I'd far rather be an early, perhaps too early leaver, than stick around for six months to not job-hop only to find the Corp blew up. Now there's 3,000 Uber engineers on the market, and quite possibly a lot more bad press.
So for OP, consider carefully, including your insider perspective, before deciding either way! (I'd probably lean towards an exit as the bad PR does seem to have reached critical mass).
Maybe I'm not paying close enough attention; is there some evidence that Uber is "blowing up" outside of Silicon Valley conjecture and blogs? People I talk to outside of SV don't know anything about Uber's recent internal issues.
I wouldn't say uber is blowing up but there business model has a lot of unknowns.
Right now, Uber is subsidizing each ride and their marginal cost is high compared to their marginal profit. The only way they can become profitable is either cut drivers pay, increase the cost per ride or both.
If they cut driver's pay, will the drivers stay with Uber? The other side of the coin is how elastic is the demand?
Right, but that's always been the case with Uber and the employee in this case knew that going in. Uber's overall business model doesn't seem to be his or her concern, but rather recent bad press.
How can this be true? I thought Uber takes a cut on each ride. Are you suggesting that they actually pay the driver extra money on top of what the riders are paying?
It's based on total operating costs--not the cost of the driver only. If you include how much they have to pay for everything else (developers, management, advertising, etc), the "cut" they get from each fare is less than how much they spent in other areas. (I could be wrong so please do correct me if so but I believe this is the case here).
Scale only helps if you have high fixed costs, the ones you mentioned, and the marginal revenue - marginal costs is large. But if your marginal profit is small, scale doesn't really help.
People like to compare Uber to Amazon and how long it took Amazon to become profitable. The differences are:
That Amazon was putting money into expansion and could turn a profit anytime it needed to.
AWS is their most profitable division - a category with high fixed costs and high marginal profit.
They are already using a lot of automation for their warehouses. It will be decades before driverless cars are ubiquitous.
Well there's been several pretty negative pieces on the Guardian front page in the last month. OK they're left of centre, so will undoubtedly have a view on the sexism aspect of recent events, but it's not been just those aspects they reported.
I think most also got picked up by Metro.co.uk and the Daily Mail etc - like the CEO argument - so reporting is well outside SV. Not forgetting the whole #deleteuber thing. A couple of months back the only mention of Uber outside of HN, Tech Crunch et al was reports of the driver self-employment case or expectation of driverless cars.
What I can't guess is how influenced non-techies are from current events. It does feel like they've hit a certain mass that those negative events are now being widely reported in the mainstream.
I'm the wrong side of the Alantic to be well up on the SV jobs market, but as I say, were it me I'd be concerned by the apparent change in mood. I'd have been equally concerned by the change in mood, and endless bad press, just after Ratners CEO called one of their products "cheap crap" as a joke [0] - 12 months later Britain's largest jewellery chain was no more.
Never gave you a right not to be ignored by your neighbours, or not banned from the bar, or not having others nudge their friends to make sure they notice and avoid, etc. Free speech almost always came with consequences until the internet age.