In a previous life I've employed contractors and software engineers to run a criminal website. Motivations for my guys were that it was well paid work that was technically challenging in order to evade enforcement agencies, and was 'fun' in that respect; they were "sticking it to than man (my service was regarded as moral by all my users & others); and there wasn't so much work about that they could pick and choose; lastly, I was a good employer because I had to be!!
His "A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace" was the most unintentionally comical thing I read at the time. Like his lyrics and prose it was woefully pretentious & leaden.
I also met him once. A more unpleasant, up his own ass, person I can barely recall.
Checks out. I could barely make it past the first paragraphs.
"Like very few Americans of my generation, I come from the physical world. ...earning a living from things I could touch and smell."
What is the majority of the workforce doing, then? People working in fast food, welders, plumbers, carpenters, laborers, people working in slaughterhouses, janitors, cooks, waitstaff, the people working at the grocery store and gas station, people that stay at home and take care of their children? All of them are demoted from reality? Can't touch or smell any of that? Poor struggles in the city don't count?
I forced myself through several more paragraphs before I let myself post, but could barely keep my rolling eyes on the text. "We, we, we..." We were the toughest, the hardest, the roughest. The unstated implication being that the rest of us soft, inner-city, fake Americans could never relate to the realness. Blah, blah, blah. How about some humility, things have been pretty tough and unfair and extreme and real for a lot of people in a lot of places. People have real relationships and peculiarities wherever they might live.
I don't know, maybe the article goes further than that, but I couldn't force any more of it down.
What is the majority of the workforce doing, then? People working in fast food, welders, plumbers, carpenters, laborers, people working in slaughterhouses, janitors, cooks, waitstaff...
While I think he's pretty obviously speaking to an audience of office workers, I'll point out that there's a significant difference between cooking or building something a thousand times per day and shipping it out versus seeing the ongoing function of something you made with your own hands.
I've worked in food service, and I've done metal fabrication as a hobby. I can say that I get ongoing satisfaction from using something that I've invented and built with my own hands, versus all those sandwiches and fried foods that I passed to customers.
I've occasionally lamented that I didn't pursue civil engineering instead of software. Most or all of the software that I wrote for companies has disappeared from the world. I believe that I would've taken great satisfaction from seeing a bridge or other infrastructure that I might've had a hand in creating.
No true Scotsman fallacy. Just because a cook does something multiple times a day doesn’t mean he or she can’t find pleasure in making each meal as high quality as possible.
And apparently he wrote the Declaration from a World Economic Forum 1996 in Davos, hanging out together with all those "Governments of the Industrial World" he was bashing out.
Great, anything else nonconstructive to add about the actual article, or you just felt like this was a good moment to try to put down another human for no reason?
Not sure what Gen Z people you've met, but everyone I've met seemed depressed if anything to me. But also, don't really hang out with kids, so probably just the few I've met.
I don't care about it being positive or negative, but at least make it constructive and at least make it on topic instead of just spewing unrelated nonsense, but I guess it's hard for boomers to avoid posting their typical knee-jerk reactions publicly.
> I guess it's hard for boomers to avoid posting their typical knee-jerk reactions publicly.
I use the phrase "there's a boomer in every room," to describe the phenomenon. Always taking up space, never knowing when to shut up. Always working out a way to make it about him. I'd say it equally applies to post author and the person you responded to. There's no teaching them otherwise, complaining is pointless, hence my response.
I tried getting any sota llm (GPT 5, Opus 4.6, Deepseek V4 pro, glm-5) to write a Metal 4 shader for a bottle usdz and none of them got it right. They screwed up the normals and textures , total mess. I tried it to do it in Metal 3 and still crappy.
I also remember being amazed, and did a forehead slap, when an old army bomb disposal man explained how, what I thought was an innocent device, was used by the IRA in bombs.
I did the same using the mlx version on an M1 Macbook using LMStudio integrated into XCode. I had to up the context size I ran it a against a very modest iOS codebase and it didn't do well, just petered out at one point. Odd. Pretty good chatbot and maybe against other code it'll work but not useful with XCode for me
I'm sorry, it's only for people I know personally. Also, it only holds minor Usenet hierarchies like the vestigial dk.*.
It's not too difficult to set up INN2, and it's easy to get an external feed. It uses minimal resources, and there is hardly any maintanance once it has been installed and configured.
Does anything happen in the dk. hierarchy anymore. Last time I check, probably 10 years ago, it was either spam or one crazy person.
It's a bit of a shame, I really want something like dk.city.copenhagen and dk.city.copenhagen.noerrebro to replace Facebook groups. That's probably never going to happen, it's seems like a missed opportunity.
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