Yep I would agree as a patient. My current doctor types so slow that 6 out of the 10 short minutes in an appointment just disappear while he types. Even with other docs who can touch type, it will free them up to focus completely on the appointment and reduce the hours they spend charting afterwards.
The modern US conservative party really does seem to believe only in that one principle and nothing else. They will pardon actual sex traffickers like Andrew Tate and worse as long as they're on their side. They will defend any action at all by Trump, no matter how vile or illegal or stupid or wrong. It's not a sleight of hand if its true.
Go read a few months worth of the National Review.
Many prominent conservative thinkers are not particularly big fans of Trump. They like portions of his initiatives and policies but not him as a standard bearer, because he does dumb, ill-principled stuff at odds with conservatism.
Peggy Noonan of the WSJ can't write two sentences without letting you know how much she disdains Trump, e.g.
A few annecdotal voices dont change reality; american conservatism is poisoned, and must be rejected by all sane/moral humans for multiple generations.
I guess I should clarify it to the modern US conservative party. I know there are a few dissenters even there, but 95% of them vote the way he wants and of course we could have impeached Trump and many cabinet officials long ago if they voted that way. They unquestionably enable this administration. I think its fair to say they represent the conservatives broadly, certainly they are the people the nations conservative citizens elected and continue to support.
>Peggy Noonan of the WSJ can't write two sentences without letting you know how much she disdains Trump, e.g.
This is the functional equivalent of a fictional character named Neggy Poonan saying "I really hate the Nazi's, but you know if I don't vote for Hitler the other guy will win"
I think everyone I see writing anywhere whether these comments or substacks or just talking to in real life, we all pretty much agree on why we're sad. Its the same 5-6 reasons. We all know. There are much deeper analyses showing trends that started in the 1980s that took away our power too.
It's just that the government does not properly measure any of these things and doesn't work for us anymore. We've all been trained to constantly ask WHY things are broken and argue about it but never take any real action to change them. Trained to pretend a protest on a weekend and a post on FB is the height of activism, to forget what really collectively demanding and creating change looks like. The number of atrocities committed by this government weekly is insane, all anyone talks about is keeping up or not keeping up with the news, no concept at all of collective power to make them accountable. Let's just wait 3 years and hope the next government does that - while history clearly shows they will not, and cannot in many cases given the law.
1. Breakdown of community & support structures. Isolated, atomized society. Few friends and family, weak relationships between them, dating market accustomed to infinite choice.
2. Power increasingly shifting to capital over labor, leading to tougher and exploitative work conditions, lower wages, tougher job markets etc. for labor. Also affects us as consumers dealing with oligopolies or monopolies. Somehow we saw a world where a ton of us worked remote, it worked at least 80% as well in exchange for huge worker benefits, but its going away because we don't have any power and no one is looking out for us. Now we have massive inflation and I don't think anyone believes that a big chunk of it isn't just greedy opportunistic price gouging. Every single thing I see about any job in any field, its about how they are losing power, getting more work for less pay, jumping through more bullshit hoops, field is turning from being run by practitioners to being run by psychopaths in PE firms. This is even in medicine, like people who directly help people everyday feel their job lacks purpose because of the amount of paperwork, huge overwork and under-staffing in general coming down to centralization in the health care system, increasing oligopolization and insurance power - same power shifting from labor to capital.
3. Absolute breakdown of government institutions, regulators and justice for powerful people. Epstein files - actual child abusing pedophile billionaires, lawyers, senators all face no consequence besides maybe losing a very cushy job. President pardons all kinds of corrupt buddies. What kind of clown believes in a justice system when this happens weekly? ICE officers kill or abuse victims without consequences. Can't build a single train line in the time China built millions and millions of miles. Congress gridlocked for a decade now. Perception that government is completely ineffective, and not at all accountable to us or working for us. Its linked to point above as well, with capital being more powerful than government, or in bed with them in many cases.
4. Higher exposure to negative news, media algorithms, social media etc. It's all been covered before. Fear and anger sells. Billion dollar companies with 1000s of very smart employees trying their hardest to addict you to their app, which makes your life worse. Seemingly constant state of emergency or crisis, one crisis to the next.
I read the article after writing this, I think the author had very similar points. I think most complaints roughly come down into these buckets and root causes.
The only missing piece is the understanding that this will not fix itself anymore, the will to collectively agree on the bad actors, organize, take back power, enforce consequences.
Yeah I feel like papering over the physical aspect actually misses the main motivation for columnar storage in the first place, which is to more efficiently store some types of data and perform OLAP queries on it.
There are lots of leaked emails showing Zuck is creepy. Recent one I saw where he is directly in the conversations about targeting teens/children. There's a twitter account [1] that posts emails from tech execs that have come out in legal proceedings - it shows the people at the top are very much informed and driving what happens in their companies.
If you use something like an iPad, you can also do all your reading on one device - substack, blogs, books, newsletters, audiobooks etc. You can also just continue reading on your phone at any time if you end up in line, in transit etc. which helps me read more.
Age of Empires 4 also does this. It's very cool and saves a lot of space, but it does have some significant downsides at least the way its implemented there - you can't rewind replays, and they become unwatchable when the game updates significantly.
But things really are different this time. Computers and software were nascent industries with lots of room to grow, lots of software to build in previous transitions. Today software and technology companies are the biggest in the world. Every industry uses software. Getting your web app, mobile app or game discovered is actually a huge problem today because we have so much software. There is not infinite demand for software, or for anything else, even if it seems that way in the early days.
The Olde Days were custom code for a business doing business things (only they could afford a computer, and some universities), then there was a Cambrian explosion of software sold by individuals or small developers to many (80s and 90s), then we've moved to large companies and SaaS.
I think we're about to cycle back to "custom code" except now it's for everyone, by AI - you don't need to find the to-do app of your dreams; you can code one for yourself in a fever-dream.
The era of "write Wolfenstein 3D in a few months and make millions" are gone, but they've been gone a long time already.
Or - there was a HN discussion on this half year or so ago - there's consolidation again, and there will be AI, but no code. Domain expert talks to the AI, perhaps with an expertised intermediary. AI spins up a whole new 'software platform' for the customer.. internally. Offers all the UI that is needed to work with it.. still 'in the cloud' i.e. in AI data centers. Customer happy, devs less happy.
This is so dumb. LLMs have some patterns they copied from people, so now people need to stop using those patterns? Not to mention 10000000 famous books, stories, speeches, essays, comments and more are flagged by these stupid tools.
These kinds of tools only narrow the scope of our expression and over time can suffocate the entire written language into a single flavour of corporate approved not-slop speak. Yes AI writing is bad, but sometimes the cure is worse than the disease.
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