It’s a difference of degree not kind. The constant audiovisual stimulus running through the internet is much more powerful than any of those things, and more widely available. Cable TV was close. It was always on in the room, but you had to be in the room, and you had to negotiate with your cohabitants over what to have on, or else you could go somewhere and be bored. There are no constraints anymore, with exceptions for the most impoverished among us - there’s always something close at hand to tickle your particular reptile brain until you fall asleep.
Computers with social media are so extremely reactive. Literally within half a second I can react to my boredom and find new content. I've noticed myself beginning to read a sentence, get bored half-way through, switch tabs, look over the new recommendations, do it again 30 seconds later.
Never bored, and yet never really entertained or satisfied.
The best is when you're on reddit, think "this is boring", open a new tab and type in "reddit.com"...
On that topic, I've luckily managed to make reddit boring that I open it, scroll for a minute or so, and close it again: I unsubscribed from the "interesting" subreddits like politics or tifu or askreddit.
One trick I've found to help with this is to live-stream. I once streamed a game on Twitch, nobody really watched, but it forced me to sit down and actually play the game for a good 2 or 3 hours. It was draining, gloriously draining and satisfying. You can stream programming and other personal projects as well. It doesn't matter if you get many viewers or not, just forcing yourself to maintain a consistent course of action helps. If you do get some real viewers though, all the better, you can monetize your work and enjoy free advice and socializing with viewers.
Yes, normally I would play for 30 mins and then do something else. It was Outer Wilds though, a mystery / puzzle game similar to Myst and so the problem solving made it more tiring and more tempting to take breaks.
That's not what happens when people doom scroll. They are not perfectly entertained. They are profoundly bored on social media. But they still scroll for scraps of entertainment because more promising alternatives are not really accessible to them at that moment, because of physical limitations or their state of mind or their energy levels.
Agreed, and quite often there was nothing of interest. On the net I can almost always find something of interest or at least interesting enough for me to crap my time away
yeah, internet has near no constraint and this is the key problem
TV had time.. you may be able to store it but you'd need tapes .. still space and efforts constraints
today your hard drive and infinite connection create an infinite pit
I also believe our brains love, just like muscles love exercise, prioritizing, you feel better when you made a smart decision. the feeling of never having to choose, skip through many videos, pausing them, in any order tickle the gluttony in us but then you get stuck and rot
This is really going to mess with some highly stressed out, low digital literacy people in my life. I guess I'll need to help them move to something else - is there any other basic SMS app on Android that a) looks like it's from a legitimate developer, and b) doesn't skim your message content for ad personalization?
How long is your trip? George Guidall reading Don Quixote is good. Also there's this book called Death in Yellowstone, which is just hours of short descriptions of people who have died in various ways in Yellowstone. Something like that can be good if you're talking or concentrating on the road and can't follow a detailed plot.
Not enough Danes? He’s not doing demography, he’s telling a story. Should Nick Cave be playing more ragtime? Where are the Italian neorealist films of Guillermo del Toro? Complaining about Neil Gaiman over representing gay goths is like complaining about Kenny Rogers over representing gamblers.
You've missed the point and constructed a straw man.
The point I made was any minority representation on television is good. Art should reflect life. Unless it is a cultural work, which The Sandman is not, vastly over-representing a minority, and one that is already recognized as over-represented in the industry, is obsessive and indulgent. If it was essential to the story, that is one thing, but almost none of it had anything to do with the story or its advancement. It is gauche wallpaper. It is gratuitous. The homosexuality of the characters doesn't matter. It could be remade entirely with only straight characters, and it would still be sexually gratuitous and indulgent.
Dreams are inherently sexual, but this fact is entirely lost on Gaiman.
I don't know where the meme came from but I've heard it from two independent Honda Element owners, and it comes up on random SEO-spam blogs as a benefit of the Element if you're searching for "dog-friendly" cars. I never thought to question it myself - the trunk area does look like something you could hit with a hose. Glad this made #1 on Hacker News before I bought one!
> do you mean not every tests positive for seroconversion months after infection
This wasn't your point but I'm trying to see whether this is accounted for in the study. I don't think it is, unless I missed something.
The study's self-reported long COVID group is people who in the past 4 weeks experienced any symptoms that had been ongoing for 8+ weeks. If these infections were 8+ weeks ago, these people would probably be seronegative anyway. To put it another way, seronegativity now doesn't rule out an infection 2+ months ago, so for some of these people their belief that they had COVID may match reality more than this article implies.
I don't know if there is a way to reliably identify a 2+ month old infection but I think you would need that to be able to say anything definitive about the linkage.
From their earlier posts it sounds like they're encountering some kind of MySQL performance issue, which in my (horrible) experience can be extremely difficult for your jack of all trades software engineer or SRE to troubleshoot.
I would hope a company Github's size would have MySQL expertise on staff, but if not I will say a prayer for the poor souls who are feverishly reading the Percona blog and trying to decide whether to tune the doublewrite buffer or redo log, or both, or neither.
I agree that getting deep into the weeds on some of that stuff can be taxing on a smaller development team with a few senior generalists (of which I tend to be one) but I'm quite sure that companies at github scale have deep levels of performance expertise - still not always easy of course, because lots of these types of things only come up at some certain scale
Do not immediately assume that they do. Only those who have management that recognizes the need to have those experts even have a shot at getting them.
If they do have the required staff it still might not be readily available due to org chart boundaries.
Unclear if GitHub has the staff or if they are able to draw from the larger Microsoft pool.
If they keep having issues I expect Microsoft to push them to move everything to MSSQL
GitHub probably _had_ deep levels of performance expertise, but getting acquired by a megacorporation comes with a big shift in culture. I’d bet that many tenured GitHubbers left, and that there are relatively few people remaining who understand the core systems deeply.
Medium-term, the more closely aligned with the rest of Microsoft’s technology they can become, the better - not many MSFT folks understand the ins and outs of sharded Percona, but many of them do understand SQL Server and .NET.
Sure, but the pool of Citus folks at Microsoft is relatively small. I’d assume that many Microsoft teams have worked with SQL Server for years, so it’s likely a widely-available skillset internally.
This is what happens when your company (notoriously) moves away from having meritocracy as a core value: you put people in charge of things who don't have the expertise to run them very well.
Not if they didn't uphold the values written on it. But publicly repudiating some values diminishes the chance of upholding them, and failing to uphold those values in particular is what causes downtime.
The alternatives to meritocracy are organizing relations of dominance and submission around some other criteria other than competence (typically reproducing established hierarchies of privilege from one generation to the next) or anarchy (in the very general sense of having nobody in charge). We know they didn't choose anarchy — it's not even clear how that would be possible inside a shareholder-owned corporation — and we can see from the results that they didn't put the most competent people in charge, but people outside the company can only guess who they did choose to put in charge.
This doesn't cohere into an argument, its like a loose pile of grievances and suppositions about...who, exactly?
For easier scanning I've extracted this author's ideas as to what constitutes "heresy":
- Accusations of politicians and celebrities
- Cheap pablum for frothing basement trolls and listicles of reasons never to let your kids leave the house
- Election conspiracy theories
- A new expose on why red wine and chocolate will cure Covid
- Corporate public relations expressing the deepest committment of the NFL to protect everyone and only good from here on out
Do these things sound at all similar to each other, like they would be produced by a homogenous group of people? Does it sound reasonable that these things are produced by low-paid writers in Brooklyn due to the financial pressures of middle age? As far as I can tell, the progressive unionized sports writers of Brooklyn have been more vocal than anybody against the public relations arm of the NFL, to take one example.
I wonder if the unidentified group of people this guy has a problem with - who do the "progressive cosplay" and produce "little in the way of insight or information" - are even that low paid. Journalism on the whole doesn't pay well, but some national outlets in NYC really do! Unfortunately, this article has no insight or information on the topic.
These niche groups for enthusiasts, tilde club or mastodon or neocities or aral balkan or whatever can't ever bring the old internet back. It's not coming back, it's really not, you just have to accept that the world you used to love is gone and find some new way to do things. Why make a dollhouse of your past. You must move on!
I would say it's not just you, 99% of jobs are totally pointless or actively harmful to the world, if you ask me. Like you say, squeezing profit out of people and absolutely nothing else. But it's not really relevant to wanting to off yourself.
Even if you get to a job with a point, like doing something meaningful or for the good of society, it's not necessarily going to feel great from day-to-day, and might be even more disillusioning (speaking from experience here). I find that I just care about it less when other things in my life are going well.
