Here in Denmark I hold no animosity toward Americans and none of my circle do. The current US administration on the other hand…

We've stopped hiring US citizens becuase they pose a national defense risk to the energy sector. I don't think anyone has any animosity toward US citizens here either though, but I do think you'd find some if you went to a local pub.

Who Framed Roger Rabbit is one of my most memorable animations due to the wild physics-defying reality it creates.

Distribution has always been monetized. What margin did a retailer take for putting your boxed software on the shelf? How about that magazine ad? Google search? And so on. Get over the idea that a platform should give you their distribution for free.

The problem comes when there is no way for you to own the distribution, pay nothing to the platform, and still be able to build on top of it. That’s the closed portion we should rally (legislate?) against.

There is an argument, similar to mine on distribution, that there is no inherent right that a platform should be open. That the extra utility that comes from being open should make the platform more competitive in the market vs. closed platforms.

The challenge is that with dominant platforms they are monopolistic. There is no chance for competitive forces to reward openness.

These two parts of the debate are often conflated, which hides what is truly troubling: dominant platforms controlling both distribution and access.

> Distribution has always been monetized. What margin did a retailer take for putting your boxed software on the shelf? How about that magazine ad? Google search? And so on. Get over the idea that a platform should give you their distribution for free.

As 'amelius said below, there used to be more platforms. This matters, because it made for a different balance of power. Especially with retailers - the producers typically had leverage over distributors, not the other way around.

> This matters, because it made for a different balance of power.

In actual practice, it just means that users get fucked from every side: You have 100 different "launchers", just like the 1000 toolbars in the internet's early days. You have to keep track of 100 different emails, accounts, recurring bills and all sorts of shit.

You'd have to be naive as heck to believe corporations fighting against a platform's monopoly are benefactors who want distribution of power and access for the benefit of users, instead of mobsters wanting a cut of each user's pie.

They don’t have to be benefactors (in an idealistic sense) to be useful in their presence.

100 crabs are easier to deal with (and way less likely to be dangerous for a human!) than 1 tiger, as it were.

The problem with these platforms is that there tend to be only a few of them, and regulation by the platform owner (inside their inner market) is worse than regulation by the government.

I love HN. And the Show HN graveyard is huge! Many a time I’ve searched, found a post I thought sounded cool, and it’s dead… sometimes in just a couple of months.

This is a hard truth. I looked at my own Show HN post history, some are definitely in the graveyard.

I love public speaking, think I'm above average at it, and am aiming to do more of it. Has anyone here tried Toastmasters?

Went to my local group last week and was pleasantly surprised with the quality of speaking.

Would heartily recommend Toastmasters - get's you lots of practice, encouragement and you can learn from some excellent speakers.

They do a variety of speaking formats. Exercise!

It is a shame you are being downvoted, as it is an admirable ideology: why should someone be (dis)advantaged by the accident of where they were born.

In reality though, 8 billion people hold a wide spectrum of beliefs. I would not want to live in a society with low taxation and low welfare for example. How can I live side-by-side with those that do? Of course, we all have limited choice to move if our society does not match our beliefs.

It also essentially defines who is asserting ownership over someone (from the sense of ‘who gets the body if they die?’ to ‘who is going to go to war with us if we do something they really don’t like to this person’). Not to mention if someone gets hurt and ends up in a coma or something, who is responsible for the bills?

Which may seem like hypothetical questions to the young or the inexperienced, but are very real concerns hidden behind a veil of generally maintained civility in most of modern society.

Plenty of the 8B people will take you up on that high taxation and welfare offer

They’re no more.

Since when? What have they been replaced with?

I went on the train between Hamburg and Copenhagen around 2007. Crossed on a ferry between Puttgarden (Germany) and Rødby (Denmark). Looks like this was discontinued in 2019 but I'm not sure what replaces the Hamburg-Copenhagen link. I'm glad I did it, it was definitely a strange experience to disembark the train on to a ferry and go and stand on the deck as it crossed.

> Since when? What have they been replaced with?

The Helsingborg-Helsingør train ferry was replaced (car ferries remain) by railway on the Öresund Bridge (from the 2011 TV series The Bridge) between the big cities Malmö, Sweden and Copenhagen, Denmark in 2000. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%98resund_Bridge

The Puttgarden-Rødby train ferry was replaced by a new longer but faster railway route via the Great Belt Bridge and Flensburg until the Fehmarn Belt Fixed Link is ready. https://www.seat61.com/trains-and-routes/hamburg-to-copenhag...

I went on this train as well back in the late 1990s. It was a surreal experience that you get off the train on a ferry!

Physical triangulation stations (trig points) for surveying and mapping.

Right. I’ve had a lot of success using structured output to force LLMs to make Boolean choices, like can they reply or not.

I think the pull will be hard to resist even for competent people.

Like the obesity crisis driven by sugar highs, the overall population will be affected, and overall quality will suffer, at least for a while.