Internally, it’s important to understand that every ask should have a business goal associated with it. The thing being asked for is rarely (never?) the only way to accomplish that goal.
Great engineers focus on the customer or business need and find/propose alternatives that are possible.
Unlimited PTO works great for someone like me who regularly takes half day and full day PTO every quarter for various commitments/life stuff. But I’m also a guy and I have no problem asserting myself/spending my benefits. People who are a little less comfortable with that end up just parking on it and would do a lot better if they were given a set number of PTO days. The ambiguity hurts them in the same way not having set raise schedules and discussions hurts them.
Edit: folks, I can assure you I take a lot more than 10 days of PTO. I didn’t even say how many half/full days I take, you’re assuming a lot though I get my language could’ve been more clear there. I probably take between 20-30 days total annually. I am saying that because of unlimited PTO, it is very easy to just grab half days and full days as needed routinely and not worry about my overall count.
Yeah exactly. For some of us that is not a problem but for most people it seems to create issues. Company culture also plays a huge factor in that. Grey areas tend to hurt employees the most!
To be clear we still get federal holidays. So I net probably 30-40 days a year.
Again, the system works for me. But it is also a constant negotiation/workplace culture consideration, so I am not advocating for it writ large. I’m just lucky I work at a company that doesn’t put pressure on people not to utilize their PTO.
At my current job I get 25 days of PTO a year, with a cap of 30 days, plus company holidays (12 or so?), plus 5 days the entire company shuts down. I have to be careful not to hit my cap even taking 4 weeks of vacation because it’s still less than I earn. You have “unlimited” pto and take half of the vacation I do. If you ever change jobs you’ll get $0, while I’ll get a bonus.
You have it backwards. You’d benefit tremendously from fixed PTO that pays out because you’re taking fewer than 10 days a year. Its biggest benefactors are low-seniority employees who take 20-30 days annually.
Ok… but that’s a larger conversation about the US and PTO. I’m not saying it’s some amazing situation that is the envy of the world. With federal holidays I get about 30-40 days off a year. In the US that’s pretty good, unfortunately.
I’m just telling you it’s not less than 10 days and unlimited PTO system works for my needs. Ease off the gas.
It's more than that. Unlimited PTO in practice also results in people taking less time off.
Some people have to be reminded to take time off for themselves (like me in my early years), and without a predefined amount of PTO and an expiration mechanism, there's nothing stopping them from going extended periods without taking any time for themselves.
Most people grow out of that eventually, but their gems turn black before they fully advocate for their own work/life balance.
The other side to that coin is that when employees take varying amounts of time off, it becomes easy for managers to pressure anyone taking more time off to conform with those who take less (and sometimes none at all).
I’m taking it as a given that any sufficiently large social network is a gigantic propaganda machine of interest to domestic and foreign nation-state actors.
Entertaining the thought experiment where all the normies join the fediverse: now you’ve got a big juicy target maintained by hobbyists.
When it’s Lazarus Group vs Randall, the over-worked sys admin who stood up a node in his spare time, who do you think wins?
Social networks are cancer. Just ban the lot of them and move on.
You are worrying about domestic nation state actors, and you are calling social media to be banned by whom? Some mysterious administrative entity that is surely not a part of the domestic nation state doing the very propaganda you are railing against?
Surely the people with the power to ban the lot of social media don't have their own propaganda to shove down your throat. Surely they will only ban the bad ones where foreign agents spread dangerous ideas and keep the good ones where only upright citizens of their own country can talk about how great everything is.
They should be rattled. The US didn’t vote its way to independence from the England. Freedom never comes without a cost paid in blood, but people don’t want to admit that anymore.
How do you define social network, though? Is Facebook a social network, even though it includes a marketplace? Is HN a social network? Is Newgrounds a social network....? Seems difficult to stomp out effectively
We can come up with a definition and refine it. Maybe something like: algorithmic content suggestions trying to maximize engagement and time on app (leave out chronological + explicit follow).
Banning is not the way to go about things. India is always ban happy -> a competitive exam in a state? Take down internet in the whole state to curb cheating. Outright banning hard to deal with stuff sets a bad precedent.
You don't ban the users or the internet, you make it illegal to do shitty psyops on the public. They were making plenty of money on chronological friend feeds.
How do you ban psyops? Require every user register with a gov ID so there’s someone to go after? What’s a psyop vs a grassroots contrarian movement like LGBT used to be?
Anonymity online seems the ultimate double edge sword. I prefer privacy over government prescribed safety.
I know I'm in the crazy minority but I'm over anonymity at this point. I want to know who's a real person and sincerely who they claim to be.
The harms of trolling, scamming and societal mis/disinformation, for me, outweigh whatever benefit exists in anonymity. I've never assumed I was anonymous from the government anyway so really, we're just anonymous from one-another. Seems like a classic method of divide and conquer now that I think about it.
All that said, I have no idea how to safely enforce ID'ing without some kind of authority (goverment or ideally something else).
You investigate and punish groups found to be running psyops, simple as. No need to automate the whole process with ID checks, these organizations make and spend money so the tracks are there to find. If suspected drag them into discovery and gather evidence like you would for financial fraud or criminal conspiracy.
They are often in other countries, and there are much worse crimes to focus attention on with a limited budget. This does happen and should more often, but it’s far from a full solution.
Sure, let's just give the state a pretext to jail anyone espousing opinions they don't like for running a psyop. Surely no government will abuse this power and brand anyone in their opposition as a psyop bot army that needs to be removed from the internet.
If they want to they'll do that under any pretense they can get away with. See the current administration declaring intent to treat pro-LGBT speech or anti-fascist speech as indicative of participation in terrorist groups.
You just can't let a government get this bad, and the set of rules and procedures you need to reign in a tyrant are pretty different from the ones you need to keep a system stable and functioning under normal operation.
Right now you can in fact express pro LGBT or anti fascist opinions despite the administration's efforts to stop you precisely because there are no such regulations.
Had a previous US administration thought that the US is a stable and functional democracy that can be entrusted with such a law, you will be in trouble.
It's not for a lack of laws granting the necessary powers; anti-terror laws passed in the wake of 9/11 allow for basically arbitrary use of warrantless surveillance and specifying any enemy as a terrorist. The reason this admin hasn't been successful in vindictively prosecuting its enemies is because they've only captured the Supreme Court, not the majority of the legislature. It's up to judges to interpret the law and decide if it's being applied appropriately. If you write an anti-psyop law it's far from impossible to make clear in the text what sort of organization it is meant to apply to. That's the case for all laws. Where it breaks down is when the legislature changes its interpretation standards. And at that point any law can be interpreted to mean anything and rule of law breaks down, so it doesn't really matter what laws you have or don't have on the books.
Exaclty, the main problem is that they are deciding what content to serve you. They are often mixing posts from accounts which I don't follow with posts from accounts I follow without asking. Then thr are pushing auto-play and infinite scrolling. It would have been a completely different experience if they just showed posts from people I follow and showed them sorted by date.
I'm sorry if my comment came off dismissive, I was just remarking the idea of banning social media seems like we're going down the wrong alley. I like other commenter's ideas of outlawing the underlying tech. I'm more-so just asking how to make a distinction between a post on Reddit (commonly called social media) and a post on Stack-Overflow (not commonly referred to as social media). Discord vs Teams...etc.
I think user 0x5FC3 correctly identifies the root of the issue, and any (if implemented) regulation should be based on the algorithmic serving, but I hold a firm belief that you cannot and should not try to outlaw math. From my first glance at this issue, it seems tricky
It still reads like a bunch of deflection, which is the usual response from industries from big oil to fast food to tobacco to pharmaceuticals.
Delay delay delay and continue reap the profits in the meantime by making people talk in circles instead of addressing the problem. Let Q4 figure it out, just keep the Q2 gravy train rolling.
Also, nobody is trying to outlaw math. That's just a silly hyperbolic talking point.
Mate understand I am not the industry trying to deflect, I am a human asking how to clearly define 'social media' to encapsulate all of the sites we consider 'social media' without damaging perfectly fine applications, or if we can come up with a better solution than 'ban it all'.
HN is usually pretty good about brainstorming as a group on topics like these, and I value the insights of others.
I'm a SysAdmin. I'm not about to write the law, just trying to partake in the discussion
Also, the comment I referred to was quite literally talking about banning the use of algorithms to serve content. I'll ask you what that is, if it's not banning math?
Saying “ban social media” is a lot like saying to solve lung cancer we must “ban cigarette lighters” when lighters are actually quite useful outside of smoking cigarettes and banning lighters doesn’t really fix the problem.
No, but a good first step would be to widely acknowledge that the problem is hard. And thus is not solvable by a quick fix of a type "let's ban <something>". Otherwise we will keep trying quick fixes and local optimizations that will be just as quickly subverted by the deep pocketed incumbents.
> now you’ve got a big juicy target maintained by hobbyists.
You'd have a much larger number of targets which makes things somewhat more difficult for those looking to exploit them since they'd have to track down the various platforms and navigate a variety of systems each with their own rules and culture. Fewer of them would allow ads at all and none of them would match facebook in terms of being as easy to weaponize. "Pay us to attack this platform's userbase" is a core part of facebook's business model.
You'd also be much better off when the people maintaining the system are hobbyists because they actually care about the platform and moderation. That's a massive improvement over facebook which does as little as they possibly can, only enough to be able to claim that they do "something" at the next congressional hearing, while still making sure that they can actively censor what they want. Moderation on major social media platforms seem to frustrate the efforts of legitimate users more than spammers and scammers.
I'd put my money on "Randall, the over-worked sys admin" over the half-assed AI moderator bots employed by Musk and Zuckerberg
Randall’s eagle eye friend and fellow US-based sysadmin notices attacks on his own server, reports it to his congressperson, and the fed stands up protection for the whole fediverse in short order.
The government in the US will prevent others from immediately physically infringing on your rights, say to brew beer. So they’d help us online too even at the expense of corporate platforms right?
What exactly would you like banned and how would you define what should be banned and what shouldn’t?
I assume you want FB and Insta banned. What about Reddit? YouTube? Hacker news? Discord? X? Dating apps? Snapchat? WhatsApp? iMessage? Gmail? Just curious where exactly you draw the line, and how you’d implement the ban.
Oregon decriminalized drugs in 2020 and the experiment is widely viewed as a failure by both sides of the political spectrum. The Democratic legislature rolled it back four years later.
It doesn’t necessarily follow that it’s impossible to have a legalized or decriminalized regime that works, but it is non-trivial to get right.
Its meaningless to decriminalize using it, since it does not give big benefit of replacing narco terrorists producers with pure, controlled stuff from legal pharma companies.
The world is obviously better of without drugs, but given that is not going to happen, the question to decide is: is the world better of with drugs from legal pharmacutical companies, or (somewhat) restricted access to drugs through an illegal system?
Decrimininalizing drug use is the worst of both worlds: you get more drug access, but it still happens through the illegal system and benefits narco terrorists.
If you don't want to put drug users in jail (you cannot reasonably fine homeless people), you can offer drug courts and diversionary programs.
You need the federal government to do what it did with Marijuana (which is still federally illegal), to be able to try the other choice.
You slip such a confident assertion in there seemingly without justification. Do you think (for example) that the world would be better off without alcohol? I certainly don't. Everything has downsides; that doesn't on its own justify eliminating it. It's analogous to the adage that the most secure computer is the one encased in a block of cement so as to render it entirely unusable.
I believe the world would be better of without alcohol for consumption, yes.
The only real benefits are not being the one outside the group, and the downsides include liver damage, social damage, massively higher risk for falling, drunk driving,...
More to the point, alcohol would never be permitted if it was invented today. Marijuana might.
You left out the most important benefit IMO. People enjoy the effects it has. Instead you're making out like it serves no purpose.
> More to the point, alcohol would never be permitted if it was invented today. Marijuana might.
Isn't that circular reasoning? We know the world is better off without it because it would run afoul of the current regulatory regime. It would run afoul of the current regulatory regime because we know the world is better off without things like that.
Nope, parents didn’t drink either; but you do you.
Perhaps you’d be able to cope with life better if you weren’t so dependant on self medicating with harmful intoxicants and threatened by any statements against them.
You 100% have a religious or moral compulsion to make these comments. Just a heads up, it comes off as really assholish, and I'm guessing it's making your social interactions worse, unless you live in a monestary.
2020 was famously a period where the pandemic and the opioid crisis were causing death and despair all over the country, but somehow that became the excuse for backpedaling on decriminalization in Oregon before there could have even been effects to study, not to mention before there was time to study those effects. They even recriminalized drugs that have never been associated with overdose or addiction, like psychedelics. Basically, they did the bare minimum necessary to be able to say "we tried it and it didn't work" with a straight face.
Don't fall for it.
You should probably be more worried about the flame retardants in the rebond carpet pad. Better these days, but older installed stuff had non-trivial PPM.
Great engineers focus on the customer or business need and find/propose alternatives that are possible.
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