That’s depends on your job. If you’re a line chef or florist, then you probably don’t use Word much. But that doesn’t mean MS Office isn’t still heavily used in other industries.
I think our florist sent a word doc with the proposal details for our wedding arrangements. I wonder how many catering contracts and menus are designed in word also
Why not? If it is a small shop, Word has all the features both simple and intermediate ones (like putting shadows on images or removing background). So a 2-5 person businesses can handle their digital needs at very low cost.
The alternatives usually implement limited set of features (Google Sheets) and/or terrible outdated interfaces (Libre Office).
The problem is companies are increasingly looking at the economy as someone else’s problem. And that results in a race to the bottom as each business sees what the other does and then makes the same cuts to improve their own margins too.
What we’ve also seen in recent decades is a massive shift to people borrowing money to pay for luxury goods. This means that businesses can still continue to tank the economy because their profits are propped up by other people’s debts.
And in fairness, it’s not just consumer goods that are sold this way either. Entire businesses are run on borrowed money and suppressed wages with the hope that they win the “business lottery” and receive a massive buyout. Often they’re deliberately selling their products below cost price to boost their client portfolio and thus making it entirely uneconomical for normal businesses to compete on price.
And then we wonder why the economy is so volatile. The whole thing is held together by gum and prayers and the only people benefiting are those who are already wealthy.
> None of the above was possible just 20 years ago.
Most of those things were actually possible. In many cases they weren’t as convenient, but as a child of the 80s I can tell you that life wasn’t like the dark ages before we all got smart phones.
In any case, I don’t think anyone here is arguing against technological progress. What we’re saying is that big tech has been too powerful, and too unregulated, for far too long.
As a child of the 80s, who lived 20 miles away from a city, I can tell you that my life was pretty much dark ages before I understood that driving was not just something parents did; I could also do that. And that there were people with similar interests as me at the end of that drive! Took 18 years.
I grew up in a rural township 50 miles from a major city in the 1980s. We were never isolated and there were in fact a diverse set of peers my own age with interests and heritage all across the spectrum. Yes there were a few racists or religious zealots but 99% of the folks got along just fine.
My own lasting impression is that this is the “American experience” that is not dead nor impossible to recreate in 2026. We just all need to learn to be decent Americans again.
Probably a similar environment to me. Around the peak of stranger danger + inefficient means of public transportation. So the world can feel extremely small.
I agree that big tech is and has been too powerful and too unregulated. But it's not "making everybody miserable". The world is not just black and white and HN is too much of an intellectually honest forum to just throw around such blanket statements. Which is why I called it out.
I also didn't say the 80s were dark ages. I was also around back then and life was fun. But none of what I wrote was easy or possible 20 years ago. You can try to nitpick but the point stands.
>But it's not "making everybody miserable". The world is not just black and white and HN is too much of an intellectually honest forum to just throw around such blanket statements.
It's not making everybody miserable "yet". But the current rate of change suggest that is the goal, and that's where the alarm comes from. We had the term "embrace, extend, extinguish" used to describe their business last decade and they clearly want to extend that philosphy to the consumers over time too. Some parts of tech are already arguably at the "extinguish" stage as we speak.
>You can try to nitpick but the point stands.
I feel inclined to nitpick a nitpicker who rejects a statement "there making everyone miserable" with "yes, but not everything is miserable".
Most of the texts that matter are. Yeah you’re not going to find some random flat earth blog in the library, but equally, that’s a good thing.
However, I wasn’t talking specifically about libraries. The web did still exist 20 years ago. Wikipedia is more than 20 years old. And newsgroups have been around much longer too.
The web was also mobile accessible for more than 20 years (WAP, for example, was introduced in 1999).
There were also phone numbers you could ring who could provide quick searches for information look up. People are most familiar with them in terms of telephone directory services (eg ring an operator to ask for the phone number of someone else) but there were other general knowledge services too. In fact I used one once when my bike chain broke, I walked to a local pay phone, and enquired how to put a chain back on.
Even know, there’s a plethora of information at local government information and audit offices, which isn’t available online. most of which is store on microfilm. A friend needed to visit one office recently to look at historic maps to trace the origins of a public right of way (which is a legal public footpath though farmland in the UK)
Like I said before, we weren’t living in the dark ages before smartphones came along.
And most of the texts you can access at the local library aren't even at that local library right now. Libraries are part of a humongous network. If you're willing to wait a few days, there's an avalanche of material that you definitely can't instantly find on the internet.
> This post seems to be haphazardly proposing that big tech will inevitably make everyone's lives miserable.
Except that’s already happening. Through social media being engineered to be additive, advertising and user data collection being used to manipulate voters, AI bosses proudly claiming they’re putting people out of work, and games companies paying on the weak with loot boxes and other massively overpriced in game transactions.
And why isn’t there any legislation against these predatory tactics? Because big tech also donate millions to the very people we elect and who are supposed to serve the citizens.
And that’s without discussing the indirect costs of big tech from data centres ruining the lives of local residents, to independent stores getting screwed by knockoffs from Amazon and cheap Chinese stores.
> seems to have no issue with Google hosting their email.
That’s a pretty weak counterpoint. In fact it’s basically what we call an “ad hominem attack”. What you’re doing is arguing about the individual rather than discussing their points directly.
It’s like saying “you can’t be worried about climate change because you own a car.”
> It's hard to take this too seriously (even if there is some legitimate worry here)
If you think there is legitimate worry the you should take their points seriously. It would be contradictory to do otherwise
All shells do. Even alternate shells like Murex and Nushell.
The problem isn’t that they can’t, it’s that writing context aware shell completions is hard because every tool does things slightly differently, and typically completions are not done by the same people who wrote the CLI tool to begin with.
So you end up with a thousand edge cases where stuff isn’t 100% correct.
You’ve fallen into the common trap of conflating reaction time with observable alignment time.
Reactions are about responding to one off events.
Whereas what you’re describing is about perception of events aligned to a regular interval.
For example, I wouldn’t react to a game of whack-a-mole at 50ms, nor that quickly to a hazard while driving either. But I absolutely can tell you if synth isn’t quantised correctly by as little as 50ms.
Thats because the later isn’t a reaction. It’s a similar but different perception.
Pressing a key to trigger an action that you will then send additional input to is an entirely different sequence of events than whack-a-mole, where you are definitionally not triggering the events you need to respond to.
I'm not talking about latency (though I don't fully agree with your statement but I've covered that elsewhere). I'm talking about the GP's comparison of reactions vs musicians listening to unquantised pieces.
You simply cannot use musicians as proof that people have these superhuman reaction times.
But here we're talking about not being able to notice whether calc.exe opens in less than 300 milliseconds, not how fast we can react to it opening? It's the same thing with audio latency (and extremely infuriating when you're used to fast software where you can just start typing directly just after opening it without having to insert a pause to cater to slowness)
No it's not the same thing with music latency. For one thing, music is an audio event where as UI is a visual event. We know that music and audio stimuli operate differently.
And for the music latency, you can here where the latency happens in relation to the rest of the music piece (be the rock music, techno, or whatever style of music). You have a point of reference. This makes latency less of a reaction event and more of a placement event. ie you're not just reacting to the latency, you're noticing the offset with the rest of the music. And that adds significant context to perception.
This is also ignores the point that musicians have to train themselves to hear this offset. It's like any advanced skill from a golf swing to writing code: it takes practice to get good at it.
So it's not the same. I can understand why people think it might be. But when you actually investigate this properly, you can see why DJs and musicians appear to have supernatural senses vs regular reaction times. It's because they're not actually all that equivalent.
On the average consumer hardware at launch, 95 and XP were slow, memory hungry bloats. In fact everything that people say about Windows 11 now was even more true of Windows back then.
By the end of the life of Windows 95 and XP, hardware had overtook and Windows felt snappier.
There was a reason I stuck with Windows 2000 for years after the release of XP and it wasn’t because I was too cheep to buy XP.
I don’t think that’s fair. But i do get how others might read into that too.
Personally i read it more like “this project avoids having any political stance.” Similar to the HN guidelines on politics.
However i do agree that it’s better to remove that message and have no comment on politics, than to comment so visibly that you’re unwilling to comment. Even if you read charitably into the message, it’s still just a distraction on valuable page real estate.
Having a period / full stop as the EOL punctuation rather than a semicolon is a nice idea. But personally I think the idea of a line terminator is antiquated.
Using square brackets for strings feels superfluous when you have to quote the strings anyway. Was there a reason for this design?
I don’t like the “stop” keyword either. Is that doing anything special that the ‘.’ punctuation isn’t already doing? If so, that should be clearer.
Using whitespace to reference objects instead of ‘::’, ‘->’ or ‘.’ is also counterintuitive. However at least this is just familiarity issue; at least just so long as tabs and multiple spaces don’t break the method calls. Otherwise you then have an easy way to introduce hard-to-spot bugs.
Iteration syntax is weirdly terse compared to the verbosity of the rest of the language. I’m not saying the syntax is bad, but it feel jarring at first when compared to the design choices of the rest of the language.
On the positive side of things, it’s nice to see someone experimenting with language syntax. There’s definitely aspects I do like there too.
1. ‘stop’ reads like a change of execution flow (like ‘continue’, ‘break’, and ‘return’) rather than an ASCII control code. I appreciate you’re taking that from telegraphs but I wonder if you’re better off using the control code name (LF) instead?
2. Interesting. Have you got any examples of this? Every example I’ve seen thus far has been
It was a little surprising because usually with languages that lean heavily into English keywords (eg the Pascal/Algol/Basic derivatives) you’d see these control flows use keywords like FOR. Heck, even C-derived languages do too.
Now I’m not saying the syntax is bad. In fact part of me rather likes it. But it definitely surprised me.
Similarly the IF conditions surprised me with their tenseness. Though i do like their syntax too.
Regarding the fizzbuzz example, why do some conditions have TRUE while others do not. Eg
1. I guess this is just personal taste, we can add aliases if you like. lf (lowercase seems nice). Smalltalk itself uses brk. Could at both. Personally I love the 'touch' of history, makes it seem like there is continuum in tech somehow. But that's just personal taste as well.
2.
['the word 'Hello' has 5 chars']
['I say: "Hi There!"']
['In xoscript we use [' and '] ']
this is not allowed:
['this causes a '] parsing error.']
3.
It's all just message passing.
- {} * x is just message * with arg x
- yes it's a function, which is an object, and it has a method called *
- Smalltalk uses times: { ... } times: 101.
- True is an object
- (i = i) yields True, so you can send a messages to True
- continue/break only work with True
- , means: continue talking to object (True)
If what you’re just concerned about people “baring themselves on camera” then they can continue to do that without emigrating to America and it would still affect your culture. The internet is global after all.
Also, it’s going to take more than a few thousand immigrants a year to affect the culture of a country as populous as America.
The internet is global, but having folks in our midst who make a living that way has more of an effect on our culture than if they are just on the internet.
I actually worked in the adult industry earlier in my career so have a better insight than most. and I can tell you that these models are just normal people like you an I. They aren’t interested in corrupting your children nor throwing wild sex parties in public spaces.
Just because they don't have ill intent doesn't mean the fact that some of the most highly paid members of our society being sex workers sends a message about what kind of skills and assets are valuable, and which aren't as valuable.
Unfortunately that ship has already sailed and immigration wasn’t the reason.
It turns out that American citizens can work in the adult industry too and it’s not just immigrants who are capable of earning money from getting naked on camera. ;)
> They aren’t interested in corrupting your children nor throwing wild sex parties in public spaces.
RFK Jr., the current top health official in the US, is not interested in harming children either, and thinks he is doing a good public service: what is the reality though?
Last time I checked, “cam girls” don’t run the country. So I don’t think you can make a comparison there.
Plus the issues with JFK Jr are specific to him. It’s a bit of a stretch to imply that his view points are in any way related to his exposure pornography. That is unless “brain work” is some kind of euphemism I’m unaware of ;)
> One's intentions and the results of one's actions can be two different things.
Those articles mention just as many positives as negatives.
Porn isn’t inherently bad. It’s like alcohol, exercise, and other past times: moderation is the key.
Humans can get addicted to any kind of behaviour. The absolute worst thing you can do is make a topic a taboo because then you cannot keep people safe. This is as true for pornography as it is for weightlifting.
And frankly, hadn’t you got better things to do than worry about what consenting adults do in their private lives? It’s all a bit silly and prudish don’t you think?
i mean you said it yourself, the internet is global. those few thousand can have impressions of hundreds of millions. whether they do their cam shows abroad or local matters little. it's the inherent incentivization approved by a government that leads to deeper cultural erosion. if you're in a poor country with no access to education, and your only way into the US is porn, then that's what will ultimately win, rather than incentivizing higher education, etc. And before an argument is made that this will just be a way to get in and then those folks will go and seek PHDs and be productive members of society--i have a bridge to sell you.
If a person immigrates to the USA due to success with onlyfans, are they not productive members of society by virtue of having taxable & disposable income from the fruits of their labor? They don't need a PHD to be productive anymore than a soccer player, mentioned earlier. In reality we already have American citizens in the US paying for their college degrees via onlyfans.
Sex sells and everybody knows that. Why should the government use antiquated-at-best moral codes to discriminate against people who will increase the global influence of the country? Cultural exportation and exploitation have been key to US soft power for nearly a century.
crack also sells, amongst many other things that are inherently horrible for broad modern society.
> Why should the government use antiquated-at-best moral codes to discriminate against people who will increase the global influence of the country
this is a very loaded statement that assumes that everyone is in agreement that proliferating and rewarding cam models is some kind of inherent good. there's nothing antiquated morally with simply not rewarding it. i'm not stating to ban it outright. there's always use in it at the long tail of society
> The problem with social taboos is rarely a moral one, and usually more that people feel embarrassed or scared to be open and honest.
And usually that stems from others being unreasonably judgmental.
You're using broad sweeping statements to argue with a point that I'm not even making.
First off, you're only assuming I'm making this argument because I don't have an interest in adult entertainment. I just don't believe it needs to be shoved into every facet of society. The industry certainly _does_ exist in the long tail, because there's literally nothing interesting in it aside from the fact that people use it to get off and move on with their lives. It's like taking a dump. Everyone does it, but I don't need to sit around a dinner table discussing it as if it's some high brow art. And I certainly don't want people to be treated extra specially because they excel at taking dumps.
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