Really cool UI. Makes me nostalgic for old NES games. I'm not sure this specific approach will catch on, but I'm excited to know that people see the need for a "slow internet" after years of algorithms and A/B testing optimizing people's feeds and attention-spans.
So I'll advocate "Stolen Focus" by Johann Hari [0] and my "Digtal Vegan" [1]
Johann's book has some surprises toward the end, that go way deeper into environmental
and cultural factors. He ultimately sees it as a collective/societal problem
with collective solutions. Mine tries to advocate for mindful control and rejection of
toxic tech and makes it a more individual battle.
I'm not one who believes that perfect representational parity is possible or even desirable within all social groupings. That said, I see no reason to ignore the implication of a 1% vs 40% disparity within a highly advantageous profession.
Love Htmx but confident the hardest part of implementing will be convincing managers and designers to fully rethink how to approach UX and product in a way that privileges simplicity over presentation.
Um... it's famously a film[1] staring Audrey Hepburn and George Peppard.
I thought it was okay. It was obviously toned down a lot from the book to meet then current sensibilities which would not offend an audience today. Ironically, there's a comedy bit with Mickey Rooney[2] that probably didn't offend American audiences at the time but that has not aged well. I also thought they added a bit too much slapstick.
The talent on this film is stacked. I was interested the second I saw who was attached.
Greta Gerwig was an indie darling for a decade before she went on to make two highly praised, award-winning films back-to-back.
Noah Baumbach is known for mumblecore indie dramedies like The Squid and the Whale and recently got an Oscar nomination for Marriage Story. The irony of him working on a Barbie movie is intriguing enough.
Margot Robbie has brilliant charisma on screen and this role seems tailor-made for her.
And if you've seen The Nice Guys, you know how hilarious Ryan Gosling can be.
I think Ryan is the only one who actually won an Oscar, but the whole team has something like double digit nominations across their projects... so if the execution is there, as it is hoped w/ Oppenheimer, these are going to the frontrunners for a boatload of awards. One has to imagine the spirit on the set was high on making such a subversive, stylized piece of filmmaking.
I was deeply skeptical that I would be interested in a movie of Barbie IP. But the opening seconds of the trailer piqued my interest, and then the title card introduced Gerwig's name. I was instantly intrigued.
I hope it's good. (Though I've got a suspicion that a lot of HN users will hate it, and not because of it's girl-coded intellectual property.)
That’s the thing. If a kid approaches learning with a language model responsibly, they stand to learn a lot very quickly and solve difficult problems that would otherwise be next to impossible for them.
The thing is, we need to teach them that today rather than tell them it’s cheating and try to catch them using it on essays and deal some kind of consequence.
I now use it professionally fairly regularly and it’s an easily justified expense. I’ve already delivered things to clients faster because of it. Most recently I reasoned through prototyping a sort of minimal CMS experience using a self hosted CMS API connected to Next.JS, and had a viable plan and prototype at the proposal stage in as much time as I’d normally just do the research on something like this.
If it’s feasible to accelerate learning and research for real world work, I think we should seriously consider how it integrates with education rather than encourage kids to avoid it entirely. Of course, we don’t have that awareness in our education workforce in Canada, but I wonder if it’s harmful to discourage the use entirely rather than accepting it and ensuring kids are still producing the work that’s expected. If it’s clearly GPT regurgitation with hallucinations and no bibliography, the kid has still failed to deliver. If they manage to do their work faster with technology (the main difference here is that they haven’t googled bunch of stuff, frankly) then great, they’re still learning something.
And of course, the more you tell kids not to use it, the more they’ll want to (which I’ve come to love, honestly).
Maybe the solution isn't decentralization, but a non-profit approach like Wikipedia.
Reddit already functions entirely on volunteer labor anyways, adding venture capital requirements makes much less sense than a just-keep-the-lights-on non-profit model.
It may be a better way to go for a public forum like Reddit. Don't kid yourself though into thinking the non-profit foundation won't also be rife with petty politics, hidden agendas, and the usual crap. There will still be issues, and how to handle NSFW content is still going to be a big conflict.
| Don't kid yourself though into thinking the non-profit foundation
Those aren't the problems I was expecting to solve. Those are other problems that exist regardless of funding model, because they're fundamentally social problems.
A non-profit funding model simply solves the problem of venture capital undermining the core product in search of profits.
>A non-profit funding model simply solves the problem of venture capital undermining the core product in search of profits.
It also introduces a larger problem of shutting down entirely if they can't pay for server costs. That's always going to be a bigger problem than VC's.
Wikipedia only does so because it is bankrolled by universities and other institutions. And we should note that Wikipedia doesn't have to host videos, and has strict requirements on how to host images. I can't think of those places doing the same for Reddit.
Reddit worked for years without hosting its own videos and even images. For many years, it was hosting nothing but structured text and links to external resources (which was its original raison d'être, in fact; discussion about external resources).
HN chose to be pure text and not embed external resources, but this is just an editorial choice, it wouldn't cost more resources to add them.
| shutting down entirely if they can't pay for server costs
Keeping the lights on is never a guarantee for anything. VC funding can also run out. Being for-profit locks an organization out of crowd-sourcing, institutional grants and other funding sources that non-profits have available.
Very interesting point. It'd be a challenge to execute, but I'd be glad to see a non-profit that lets online communities discuss topics of interest, solve problems, and expand knowledge. Maybe something like that exists and I just don't realize it.
Sorry to make this about AI, but it'd also be interesting whether such a non-profit makes its data fully open--i.e., for AI companies to scoop up--or has more restrictive terms that forbid AI "scooping" without a separate agreement. Lots of tricky issues, trade-offs, and interesting incentives involved. There could be alliances with orgs creating open source models, for example. If anyone is working on a nonprofit like this or just wants to chat about it, please reach out.
The AI aspect is interesting, it could solve the funding issue. AI scooping requires a (paying) licence. Or, the paying licence would be restricted to closed-source AI models, and it would be free for open-sourcec models, thus making them much more competitive.
Codicat is doing that for Stack Exchange. I don't know anyone doing anything similar for Reddit. There are apparently some Reddit clones on the Fediverse, but I have my own dislike of the Fediverse model.
Flat and structureless are not necessarily synonymous. It's certainly possible to have a highly structured yet flat organization with clear roles and non-hierarchical decision-making.
Mind that this has its own set of benefits and disadvantages. Fewer deparmental turf battles, but very broad spans of control and/or highly autonomous roles.
An ant or bee colony is a flat structure with a strong central control, at least reproductively: the queen. This isn't an ideal comparison, of course, as the individual workers don't take orders from the queen (or anyone else), but instead respond largely based on instinctual behaviours and pheremone signalling (in the case of ants at least, I'm not certain of bees).
Flat structures may lack any leadership, or have various rotating or ad hoc leaderships. These are more akin to the structureless organisations Freeman writes of.
Moreover it is arguably the converse - organisations with a deep heirarchy and a lack of operational structure - that are most prone to predators. Individuals with narcissistic or sociopathic tendencies are attracted to positions where they wield power over others but have little to no accountability. This is why it's so important for misdeeds to be brought to light and justice.
An example is the UK political system, where it's clear who has "say", but the structure for dealing with quite serious misbehaviour is very outdated. Only today there was an article in the BBC about this: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-65856484
Well, the UK is actually not too bad on a global scale. Demagogues can cause some serious damage - Thatcher, Blair, Boris, Farage... - but are eventually discarded when they become irrelevant or their promised land fails to materialise.
Countries without a robust consensus-based governing process and an established process for removing someone from power - and that's most of them - are susceptible to strongman politics. Think Putin, Jinping, Erdogan, Bolsonaro, Saddam, Gaddafi, Tito, Kagame, Mugabe, Hitler, Mussolini, etc...
Outside of politics, wealth and celebrity are the obvious paths to unaccountable power. Jeffrey Epstein is an example of how a predator can get away with despicable behaviour without comeuppance for decades. Rupert Murdoch has frequently been at the centre of various scandals and serious controversies, and seems to have escaped pretty much unscathed by treating it as all part of the business.
The venture capital environment in silicon valley seems to have some of the hallmarks; we can see people like Holmes or Bankman-Fried trying to exploit the system to gain power.
Academia also springs to mind. It's surprisingly easy to get into powerful positions with very little skill/knowledge besides networking. I believe there's a real issue with toxic, abusive PhD supervisors in the UK and potentially the US, which is a classic consequence of heirarchies with little accountability.
It's well konwn that megalomaniac's thrive on vacuums of power or meaning, but that's not the most important aspect of Curtis' message imo. For me, Curtis explores how power applies highly abstracted narratives in order to disguise its mechanisms - Soviet or capitalist realism, for example. His frequent trope is how things suddenly "don't make sense" to the general public, and this is when change occurs.
But this doesn't feel too relevent to the discussion of whether an organisation can operate effectively with a flat structure.
