Posts

Industry and workers 2020-06-25T20:03:10.212Z
Innovation and Dependence 2020-06-19T19:39:58.350Z

Comments

Comment by smaslennikov on Industry and workers · 2020-06-27T20:09:41.423Z · LW · GW

Good call, I did find vast evidence on the subject.

Industrial revolution was just an example of automation not being beneficial for the worker, I'm not trying to link events that are two hundred years apart.

Comment by smaslennikov on Industry and workers · 2020-06-27T19:56:21.811Z · LW · GW

Good point, Google's products were not at all a good example. Rethinking it now, I'm not sure why it sounded right at the time of writing.

As for your example of Signal's strategy amendment, aside from my personal opinion on the subject[1] (which I'd prefer not to focus on), I'm not sure that's relevant to the general discussion here. I'm not advocating that every product made follow this path, I even state that it doesn't fit everything. Even for those that fit, there will always be exceptions. If a rewrite is deemed necessary, why would that not be prioritized under my model?

Frankly, it seems to me you're not focusing on the general idea.


  1. I fully realize I'm in the vast minority here, but not only am I all for client federalization, but especially considering Signal clients' quality, I really wish they took the former path and offloaded client work to whoever chooses. Linux Signal UI has been broken for me for years: I left a group and still get its messages every once in a while, typing indicators are erratic and appear when no typing happens. I know there are many proponents of Signal, but I simply am not due to its many erratic bugs I've encountered, aside from the two I've listed. ↩︎

Comment by smaslennikov on Industry and workers · 2020-06-26T16:04:47.887Z · LW · GW

Good call, OSS projects definitely quickly catch up to major non-niche products.

Comment by smaslennikov on Industry and workers · 2020-06-26T15:57:42.563Z · LW · GW

No, I don't think this can really work elsewhere. Ideally, competition would have to be controlled judicially, the idea would have to be implemented at the government-owned level, but I don't believe that powerful men can always make ideal decisions to make this work.

Comment by smaslennikov on Industry and workers · 2020-06-26T15:53:28.351Z · LW · GW

Both, actually: there's too large a gap between the richest and the poorest. At least that's how it seems to me in the States. I'm not the only one who says this, the middle class really is decreasing.

Comment by smaslennikov on Innovation and Dependence · 2020-06-21T17:14:47.358Z · LW · GW

You're right, there definitely have been positive innovations - my writing may have been a bit too strong-winded there. I suppose it's the side effects of these that ruin it for me: the advertising, smartphone games, in-app purchases - the useless.

I obviously ended up in some kind of a middle ground: while I use latest computers for work and infrequent video gaming, my phone is a Nokia 8110 4g mostly because I can't stand how modern ones look: but there's also nothing one can't fix with them at home, as opposed to weird computer issues new ones run into (I don't believe I need to provide examples, but if this is disputed I certainly can).

Overall my issue is clearly not just with needless innovation but with capitalism at large, and it's all so hard to grasp at in writing. You're right, just like with anything else, the trick is finding the middle ground happy path.

Cheers, thanks for the commentary!