Yes, it's a very modern take on a recent problem.

I used VLC, Firefox (Phoenix), LibreOffice (OOo), MSOffice, paint, photofiltre, and notepad++ when I was a teen. They still work today.

The trending app ecosystem, the social network du jour and the JS framework fever seem to have given the impression to the new generation that there is not other way to do this.

It's not necessarily a generational thing. I grew up on DOS before Windows was common, remember v1 of OpenOffice and Phoenix and the birth of CSS and JS, and have been making webpages since before the div tag was invented. I bought and used many tools like Notepad++ and Ultraedit and Sublime, and used the heck out of Paint Shop Pro and some GIMP and the rest.

But many of those tools are quite a bit less powerful than the commercial subscription ones. Creative Cloud CC is very powerful when you use it professionally, as is IntelliJ. Worth it to me because I know the difference, having used both kinds of tools and payment models for more than 20 years. These days I make a little more money than I did back in the 90s, so I don't pirate or demand freeware and would rather pay for something sustainable and have it work well because my time is worth it.

Take IntelliJ for example. There was a big uproar when they moved to a subscription model, but their products have continued to get better since. The company would've gone bankrupt otherwise. Instead, their pricing is now both very fair and includes a perpetual fallback license, while their software still keeps improving. I am happy to pay for it because it adds tremendous value over VSCode or Notepad++ in my workflows.

Of course some FOSS software is still amazing. VLC is still the best player I know of. Audacity is still useful and I find myself using that more than Audition.

But other times the subscriptions just deliver better software that I'm happy to pay for.

>"Take IntelliJ for example. There was a big uproar when they moved to a subscription model"

They did not move. They still offer perpetual license. Otherwise I would not be using their products.

I don't where/when/how this myth started. If anyone from JetBrains is reading this, please asking you sales/PR/marketing team to make it crystal clear on your website so that we can kill off this silly myth that hurts your excellent brand.

>"...sales/PR/marketing team to make it crystal clear on your website"

They have, just not what you think unless your post is an attempt at humor:

https://sales.jetbrains.com/hc/en-gb/articles/207240845-What...

It's both isn't it? Subscription plus perpetual fallback?

yup. best of both worlds.

I actually do the same in with one of my products.

Many of those would be broken in various ways if they were not updated. For starters: VLC due to missing codecs, firefox not supporting newer standards. All the software you mentioned was most likely heavily updated since your teens.

VLC got popular because it was the first media player that would always play whatever you threw at it. But thinking back to those times, perhaps there was merit in those older players which stayed the same, but made you occasionally install a codec pack. It was a sensible separation between the "chrome" that was stable in time, and the decoders which were changing often to accommodate new and better formats.

On menial task, it's way more than 50%. For quick scripting, dirty parsing, PoC and plumping, this is about 300% for me.

However, for anything that requires me to think, it's 5% at best.

Don't take up the 50% figure as anything serious, I think it's just a way to state "if it is a such a meaningful boost in productivity".

Which it is, for a lot of tasks, because the vast majority of programming jobs are boring stuff outside of the HN bubble.

It's amazing how much of the world economy runs on csv uploaded to ftp servers.

Agreed with this. If the main bottleneck is typing, then Copilot can dramatically speed up the process. If the bottleneck is thinking, it doesn't help out nearly as much unfortunately.

I'd add that for me at least it's quite good at some small specific subsets of "requires me to think". For example, I do a lot of 3d rotations & transformations, and it's very good at figuring out the math of that based on the function name I chose etc. Most of those would take me a piece of paper and 5-10 mins, but it usually gets it in 1 or 2 tries.

But yes, mundane work it is best at. Some things I have found it made particularly easy:

- scraping websites

- file i/o

- "mirroring" things (I write a bunch of code for doing something on x axis, it automatically replicates it for y and z etc with the right adjustments, or cardinal directions, or arrow keys, etc etc etc)

It is indeed a cheap script boy for me as well

It does mundane work exceptionally well

Funnily, if it would have been Twitter, it would have been all the rage for a week.

Because it's Apple, everybody will have forgotten and forgiven tomorrow.

..And the headline would have been "Elon Musk created decoy labor group.."

Yet, he has the courage of expressing those opinions without sarcasm, on his own public account, and later own admit to change his mind, while being a very exposed figure.

And you use a throwaway.

Without sarcasm?

You have to start reading about Gates before he spent millions to wash his reputation and adopted a disguise of philanthropist to buy a stairway to heaven. Anything before he left Microsoft, with the corruption scandals, the insults, the patent trolling, and so on.

It's getting harder and harder to find though. I should have saved offline compiled files.

I think there’s a legitimate line to draw between “bastard does capitalism” and “philanthropist post capitalism”. Bill Gates could have laundered his reputation just fine without committing to give away the majority of his wealth.

The foundation is not meant to give away Gates money while he is alive.

It's a way to be able to keep investing his money without paying taxes.

It only spends the legal minimal amount for charity, 5% (way less than taxes that would go to build roads, hospitals and schools). The rest is invested in a portfolio that, by the magic of being in a non profit, can make billions without paying any tax.

Since he directs the charity, he can therefore move the capital where he needs it to, including founding Monsanto and weapon makers, which he had to withdraw from after people noticed that it was quite the opposite of the claimed foundation mission.

That's why most billionaires have some kind of charity: they keep all the power of their money, get good PR (which given that the wealth gap makes people grumpy, is a great shield) and they optimize their finance while people defend them.

The PR operations worked well: most people on the internet now believe that Gates is a good person. A statement that would have made anybody smile in the 90'.

> It only spends the legal minimal amount for charity, 5% (way less than taxes that would go to build roads, hospitals and schools). The rest is invested in a portfolio that, by the magic of being in a non profit, can make billions without paying any tax.

To clarify, 5% of what? Of capital in the non-profit? Of revenue generated by the non-profit? Something else?

You finding his opinions “mild” doesn’t make them so, and half of your friends are probably not billionaires with a lot of power and influence in the tech industry.

If you want to defend Paul then do so, but most of this comment is just hyperbolically complaining about how he is criticized.

Quite the opposite, I think it shows that what you call a red flag, they analyzed seriously before making a judgment. And now that they have more data, they change their mind about their conclusion.

It's the sane thing to do.

There are a lot of things that happened where I could see both sides of the debate. As usual, a lot of outrage on Tweeter was more about the reflex of it than something really meaningful, the Tweeter files were underwhelming and I didn't find anything in the new Twitter that I thought was completely bonkers.

But this ban on link is, indeed, in my book, a bad move. And it will also make me reevaluate the past Tweeter drama in the light of this decision.

I always was of the opinion that eventually things would settle down and Twitter would go on its merry way.

But I'm not so sure anymore. I don't think I'll leave right now, but I'm not giving the benefit of the doubt to any of this anymore.

Are you talking about Paul Graham or Elon Musk?

Edited for clarity.

If you ever visited China 20 years ago and now, you may have noticed the change in openness, though.

The first time I went, I was confined to limited areas, and had to be followed by a state appointed guide for my entire trip. I couldn't kiss my girlfriend in the street, it was considered bad behavior.

Now, I can just go alone, and where I please, and demonstrations of affection are not as frown upon. Women also seem have more freedom than before.

China was always a dictatorship, but I would say it looks more free that it used to be, at least from my very limited external point of view.

Now, China is still corrupted, with massive informational control. And it also became terribly polluted, and under systematic automatic surveillance, so I'm not sure it balances out, but it's not like there is an objective scale to those things.

Waning traditional norms happened all cover the world, including in the west. I don’t think globalization was the driver.

I would think that something happening all over the world would hint that globalization may be a factor.

It might be a factor, but it probably has more to do with decades of exporting western values via media, Internet, etc.

I travelled freely in China fourteen years ago. I paid cash everywhere. Nobody had a smartphone. I didn't feel surveilled. From my limited perspective it seems much less free now.

For some people, 4chan is one of the best places on the internet.

At a personal level, if I want to hear a point of view I never heard, or that is a blind spot for me about a specific topic, it's one place where I can find it.

If I need to find extreme arguments against my own point of view, or total opposite passionate takes on something I'm sure about, it's one place where I can find it.

It I need to be surprised, if I'm looking for deviant creativity, if I want to learn something weird and new or be taken out of my comfort zone, it's one place where I can find it.

In that sense, 4chan is, paradoxically, one of the most genuine, purest human forum experience you can get. And yes it's terrible because of this. It's insulting, full of bullshit, hosting plenty of people with dangerous ideas.

But that's also its value.

I don't want to live in a world where people can only write things I could think about, or things that would not hurt me.

You keep saying "it's one place where I can find it."

But it's not the only place. Nor is it even a main place. Nor is it a place to find high-quality versions of any of these things.

There are far better places to find opposing, passionate points of view. Far better sources for creativity and weird things, far better places to find a wide range of views.

The way you write, it basically sounds like you're mistaking 4chan for the internet as a whole. Trust me -- if 4chan disappeared, there's still practically an infinity of things written that you couldn't think about.

Hell, forget the internet, you'll find an awful lot of them just in a research library. Especially from roughly the 1930's to the 1970's, artists, political theorists, and psychotherapists were coming up with a lot "edgier" stuff and ideas than you're probably even remotely aware of, just to pick a few areas.

There are other places on the Internet where enough trolls hang out that they started a far-right political movement based on a tripcode shitpost?

In fact, forget engaging with human beings -- try a library?

>4chan is, paradoxically, one of the most genuine, purest human forum experience you can get

This is unimpeachably true, imo. There's something equal parts magical and horrible about unfiltered humanity, especially after living in digital mind-prisons where we have to be careful about not angering our advertiser jailers while self-aggrandizing and posturing on a feed instead of actually talking directly to people, all of us anonymous and shed of baggage and upvotes and reputation.

I still believe this, even after I stopped using 4chan cuz edgy teen humor gets old after a while and the horrible parts of it start being unhealthy. :p Modern "social" media makes me miss it sometimes though.

Not your role to tell other people what they should read.

For a website that's been consistently documented as a breeding ground for extremism and linked to multiple mass killings, you'll need something more concrete than "some people love it."

Most terrible things at least some people love. That doesn't mean they're not terrible.

Edit: comment was edited with more detail while I was typing

4chan being public, it's very easy to survey, even automatically.

Either the mass killing didn't really originate from it, or it did, and the authorities never acted on the very easy to find messages to prevent it.

So either we just rewrite history, linking the horror to something easy to blame, in which case the medias are not doing their job, or the authorities pretend something that is both easy to access and out of their control, in which case they are not doing their job. In all cases, somebody is either incompetent or dishonest.

But as a concerned citizen, I think having a honey pot such as 4chan should be considered a national security asset.

Of course, it's likely this has nothing to do with 4chan, and everything to do with people needing an easy answer to a complicated problem, or scapegoat.

>Either the mass killing didn't really originate from it, or it did, and the authorities never acted on the very easy to find messages to prevent it.

You describe the messages as "very easy to find" but I'm not convinced that's true. Identifying threatening content, understanding which may be genuine and which are "for the lols", cross-referencing against other posts and data sources to de-anonymize and evaluate the threat level of specific individuals...this is a tremendous amount of work requiring complex solutions.

It's all technically within the capability of the authorities, but would require massive investment to support this at scale.

You could do something like give the cops live access to back-end data to make some of that easier, but I don't think most *chan defenders would be much of a fan of that.

Information being public isn’t enough to make it easy to act on.

To use an extreme example. The US government as a whole had plenty of information to stop 9/11, but the US government isn’t a singular hyper intelligent thing that can automatically correlate any information it receives with any other piece of information it receives. It’s limited by being made up of people and sharing information isn’t free.

Similarly a firehouse of 99.999% junk information isn’t particularly useful for police action. This is why the massive array of cameras in say London does a poor job of preventing crimes and 4chan posts are’t useful for preventing attacks.

I think this + your comment below are some of the better arguments I've heard for a positive side to 4chan.

> Either the mass killing didn't really originate from it, or it did, and the authorities never acted on the very easy to find messages to prevent it.

I worked with law enforcement to build new investigative tools for them. They are woefully unequipped to handle a lot of proactive investigation on the Internet. I would absolutely argue the latter.

> it's likely this has nothing to do with 4chan

Our tools of communication absolutely effect our thinking. A tool of mass communication effects or collective thinking. This is why the line for protected speech is such a challenging topic.

We've agreed that threats of violence violate the law. We've agreed that spam should be banned even though it violates no law. I think it's fair to argue that extremist content shouldn't be given a platform for recruitment. Because that platform is invaluable.

How to prevent that is a separate issue. I'm personally a fan of removing flagged content from search results while still leaving the posts, but that's just one approach.

> The only challege is that you don't want to allow speech you disagree with.

I'm absolutely for speech I disagree with our find offensive. That's how our culture evolves, how new ideas are tested and either adopted or discarded.

I'm adamantly opposed to speech that is a call for or a deliberate incitement of violence.

> Banning extremist content is the road to serfdom

Let's be clear about what we mean by extremism, because blanket statements like this lack any nuance and are incongruent with how any government or institution had interpreted free speech.

Is banning spam the road to serfdom? Is banning direct calls to violence the road to serfdom? Is preventing doxxing our revenge porn?

Extremist content is only concerning when it results in real-world violence. At that point, I am unable to opt out (i.e. not visit the site) and therefore am forced to have an opinion and react.

And, to be clear, there is a big difference between an extremely unpopular ideology and a call to violence for that ideology

"Most terrible things at least some people love. That doesn't mean they're not terrible."

4chan, as a website, is far more varied than you think at first glance. Most people only hear about 4chan when "something happens", and with the news cycle, that's pretty much always bad things. For example, an anonymous 4chan post solved a 25-year-old math problem[0]. It's unfair to paint a whole popular website by the activities of some of its users on one or two of its discussion boards.

There are some boards dedicated to sharing anime porn. Others, discussing technology. There's one for discussing favorite toys, one for wrestling, and another for the Hasbro show My Little Pony.

[0] https://www.wired.com/story/how-an-anonymous-4chan-post-help...

I think this is true, but the balance has shifted dramatically and will likely continue to do so indefinitely. It used to be that the broad range of opinions and personalities balanced out /pol/ when you were visiting other boards, but it really is getting to the point where every board I visit is skewed by at least some amount of antisemitism, conspiratorial thinking, christian fundamentalism, or pro-nazi thinking. The most amusing thing to happen lately on /pol/ has been their struggle to cohere a consensus opinion around the war in Ukraine. It might be the first broad division I've seen there in a while.

I think that's a fair challenge. There are a bunch of sub-communities.

I'll admit that one of my biases, either for our against a site, is how thoughtful the people in charge are. Even though the communities grow organically, they're inevitably influenced by the controls put into place by the site owner.

When the professed attitude is"I don't give a shit, pay me", I don't think the owner will effectively respond to the extreme cases

It is not clear that the optimal amount of terrible things is 0.

It may be that what is lost by constraining the madness of humanity is greater than what is gained. It is not clear, but there are people who would fight tooth and nail to see the madness, and the value they find within it, remain.

Personally, I do not want to live in a monoculture of mutually-acceptable perspectives.

> It is not clear that the optimal amount of terrible things is 0.

Totally fair, but there's a lot of options between "monoculture" and "total free-for-all"

I also think your discounting that many cultures are unable to exist in free-for-alls. There isn't a clear line from "fewer boundaries" -> "more diversity". There's a sweet spot that allows the maximum amount of freedom for the most people, and that isn't laissez-faire

Also fair, but then I would draw a line at the maximum amount of freedom of expression which still does not usually result in the extinction of cultures/subcultures (I say usually only because things come and go, some rate of attrition should be expected).

Damn this thread is so civil. I can't say that would have been my first guess on how it would turn out while posting the parent comment. I believes it shows that people can talk about extreme things in an intelligent matter, and that we can be better for it.

Obliterating the places where those extreme debates happen would not give us this opportunity.

> consistently documented as a breeding ground for extremism and linked to multiple mass killings

Like churches? Maybe the problem is that 4chanism isn't a recognized religion.

Extremism is so relative and not universal that I can guarantee that the use of edgy language and some aneurotypical behavior is the least weird and destructive thing going on in our world right now.

For instance, antinomianism isn't just tolerated in the United States, it's taught and embraced at a level that the people who believe it don't even know the word for it. However, there's nothing more extreme or terrifying than people who live under the belief that nothing matters in life as long as they fulfill the mission of their faith because their true and eternal reward only comes after.

From those oddball Christian big game hunters seeking to prove that "God gave man dominion over animals", to companies that don't care about pollution because not producing to the limit of their abilities is wasting a gift from God, to the Hobby Lobby family funding ISIL by buying up ransacked early Christian artifacts, to child brides and arranged marriages in sleepy little towns across the country, there are people who are brainwashed into believing they're in a fight or die battle for their souls over things as non-controversial as celebrating certain holidays, bodily autonomy and consensual relationships, having equal healthcare access, upholding separation of church and state, or ensuring access to quality education.

On the other side of that coin are people who believe everything is okay as long as you or someone else is paying for it. It's a different type of religion and no less cruel or violent.

Not that they're harmless, but I'm not afraid of Pepe memers. I'm afraid of raising my family near a future Superfund site, that kids are growing up being better prepared for mass shootings than to succeed in college, and for anyone nearby when some cave dweller opens fire or sets off a bomb at a women's clinic.

Websites don’t create extremists. Broken social structures and fabrics create extremists.

No amount of 4chan posts will cause a healthy person to become a violent extremist. And no amount of censorship can stop the rise of extremism. It can at best impact the precise expression of it. It won’t stop people from committing acts of violence or believing insane ideologies, it will just change the content of their manifesto. At worst it can accelerate their rise, as extremists become further convinced society is unjustly persecuting them.

> Websites don’t create extremists. Broken social structures and fabrics create extremists.

I mostly agree, however our methods of communication are fundamentally part of our social structures. I don't think they can be extricated from the actions that we take. If a website's infrastructure encourages and promotes extremist dialogue, that is, in of itself, part of the broken social structure.

> No amount of 4chan posts will cause a healthy person to become a violent extremist. And no amount of censorship can stop the rise of extremism.

I think this lacks nuance. 4chan absolutely won't take a healthy person to an extremist. But extremist content absolutely takes mildly unhealthy people and 1) radicalizes them, and 2) gives them a social infrastructure to support extremist behavior. This is why YouTube blocks ISIS recruitment videos.

It's a contradiction to believe that both "freedom of speech matters" and "regular consumption of extremist speech has no impact".

I would even say that it gives a very unique opportunity to study extreme groups, the sociology of extremism, and specific extremist topics, in real time.

We used to have to refer to historical material for that.

Now we can see it unfold in a sandbox.

If you are an historian, an economist, a psychologist or a sociologist, 4chan is something that deserves a look.

No you don’t. People are so afraid to acknowledge the existence of extremism and people plotting mass killings. If you didn’t have a place like 4chan people might think everything is fine, perfectly fine, in this corrupted world.

>"Most terrible things at least some people love. That doesn't mean they're not terrible."

https://youtube.com/watch?v=_2UvaZonz1c&feature=shares&t=69

I love George Carlin, but that video isn't related at all to the text you quoted.

Whether I chose to engage with something is independent from whether it's terrible or not.

The point I'm guessing that your trying to make is that I can choose to not visit the site, and therefore it shouldn't be censored in any way (even though I didn't actually call for censorship).

If that's what you're arguing, you have to address 1) whether the site itself amplifies extremist behavior, and 2) if it does, whether random mass killings events is worth having 0 moderation.