Knusper

I enjoy this:

return a.or(b);

But yeah, that requires an Option type rather than null pointers...

I certainly don't want to dismiss any individuals as tech bros. Tech broism is more like a natural phenomenon, which occurs when you lock exclusively privileged people into a room for long enough and then let them discuss user needs.
At some point, they'll ask themselves questions like "Why do we need privacy?" and everyone else in the room will agree that they've never needed it either ~~and then they'll found Google~~.

I am very much at risk of this, too. I have to constantly go out of my way to try to re-adjust my perspective, so that I don't completely miss the ball on what users actually need.

And places like Hacker News naturally form, because of course, we all do want to only talk about topics that we consider relevant. And folks whose needs are not generally considered relevant by the Hacker News community will look for different places, too.

I guess, a question you can ask yourself:
If you've ever interviewed a senior engineer who was for example black, gay, trans and/or a woman, did they frequent Hacker News?

Wow, it's been a while since I've been there, but my impression was the polar opposite. That it's filled with business folks and tech bros. That their unbalanced voting system unearths controversial takes rather than informative comments. Every now and then, you'll genuinely see a comment from someone with expertise, but that was not worth sacrificing my mental health for.

Yeah, that is a valid opinion to hold. I am saying that trust is garbage.

You could consider compiling the KeePass app yourself, if you're worried about that one in particular.
A guy I used to study with, decided that he just wouldn't have a password manager on his phone.
I've certainly considered switching to a Linux phone for that, among many other reasons...

Yeah, I have watched videos of the guy before and would be down for 4 hours of it, but not if it's about how FluffyMcWuffington stole the pixels from sbubby82...

I don't even understand which part of the tree experience these tanks are supposed to replace. Are they really just there to pick up CO2? Because you can also plant a forest outside the city for that.

You'll miss out on all the other tree benefits, but so you also will with these glass tanks.

Well, those will work in Firefox just fine...

Yeah, people will use anything, if it comes as default...

Sure, yeah. The way I imagine this would work out best for humanity, is if companies are forced to open up platforms they provide, when they have e.g. more than 40% market saturation with that.

Most small platforms will want to strive for interoperability with the dominant platforms anyways, so this threshold is just to keep the burden of regulation low.

In practice, this might mean that Twitter would be forced to allow federation with Mastodon.
Or that Microsoft is forced to open-source the code for the Windows API.
Or that Reddit is blocked from closing up their third-party API.

Ultimately, I don't think, it even needs to be as concrete. I feel like even a law stating that if you're providing a platform, you need to take special care to keep competition alive (along with some detailing what this entails), and then leaving it up to a judge to decide, would work.

The GDPR is implemented like that and while most larger companies are IMHO in violation of the GDPR, I also feel like most larger companies actually did go from atrocious privacy handling to merely bad privacy handling, which is an incredible success.

That's effectively all I'm hoping for, too. That dominant platforms can't just stagnate for multiple decades anymore. That they do have to put in at least a small bit more effort to stay in that dominant position.

Yeah, I could imagine their legal department actually making up a sizeable chunk, with how much the music industry loves to sue.

Yeah, and from what I understand, learning the language itself isn't the hard part. It actually has rather few concepts. What's difficult, is learning how to program a computer correctly without all the abstractions and safety measures that modern languages provide.

Even structured programming had to be added to COBOL in a later revision. That's if/else, loops and similar.

I don't think, the human brain is special either, but we are still two big steps ahead IMHO:

• We can perceive what we've generated, to judge whether it's good or bad.
• We perceive many, many inputs throughout our lives. Not just text, visuals, audio, but also taste, smell, touch and more. To be simultaneously creative and relatable to humans, AIs would need to be equipped with these concepts and would need to be given 'memories', which are fleshed out with all these kinds of input.