It never bothered me a bit. Used to watch them on my 55" TV before we gave it away. Now they're even sharper on my computer screen! :)

Plus no more buffering or streaming artifacts.

If I can generate the site myself with an LLM, it's a lot less compelling. Maybe just share the prompt in that case.

I still find the old Internet in a few ways. Mastodon, Signal group chats, quiet local (geographically) or private Discord servers, RSS, email, XMPP or IRC if I feel like it. Definitely use uBO. I sometimes even surf Neocities.

Stay away from "algorithmic" social media and all 24-hour news—if something important happens, it'll show up on the HN RSS feed.

If you want to stay politically active and informed, subscribe to political activist newsletters and write your congresspeople.

I don't understand. Your comment seems to imply that the Internet has no effect on the ability of groups to organize?

Very cool. I love that, as someone steeped in digital programming, such solutions would not have occurred to me. It's a good argument for breaking out of ones shell now and then.

Not quite. If you abolish copyright, then some place like Google or Amazon will be the only one who will make money. Authors will get zero, relatively. The second you publish your book, Amazon will instantly republish it and collect 100% of sales.

Instead, shorten the length to 25 years or so. We simply need copyright to not be extreme. And zero years is still extreme.

You don't need to abolish copyright, you just have to limit the scope to the economic mechanism that actually matter for authors: reproduction and distribution of the reproduced works. Removing all of copyright except that combined right will still give authors the ability to license under the terms they find reasonable and viable, without harming any of the consumer abilities that we've come to expect.

15-25 million is too small a number in this context. We're taking about 8 billion people suspectable to a new virus or collection of viruses far more lethal than polio. :(

But they have been trained on data that was created by people who do have motivation, and they tend to mimic their training.

> If you don't think the problems are real, make the case to the voters.

Let's say we could demonstrate the problems aren't real beyond any shadow of a doubt. Do you think that would change votes appreciably?

I called it quits about 8 years ago (I'm 55), mostly due to the fact that I couldn't get excited about anyone's "next big thing". Got into teaching, which was a new, rewarding skill to work on mastering. (I've still got a long way to go--what a challenging field!)

But of course I am teaching CS, and now it's just a nightmare of trying to figure out how to teach it. We have a lot of people saying we still need to teach the basics in addition to AI-assisted, and we have a lot of people saying to just teach vibe coding, and a lot of people saying just teach SE and no coding. And we're just trying to do the best we can for the students, while wondering if the field even has a sensible future.

(Anecdata: universally, my hired grads have told me they are incredibly grateful to have gotten through college before LLMs hit the scene.)

And it's a pisser, because teaching CS was great. I get to try to optimize learning and talk about what I love? Heaven.

I think I'm in this category of software engineer in terms of how much I love the work:

Requirements gathering: 5%

Functional spec: 5%

Design doc: 20%

Programming: 65%

Deployment: 5%

And engineers who were here:

Requirements gathering: 20%

Functional spec: 25%

Design doc: 25%

Programming: 5% (or 0%!)

Deployment: 25%

are having a much easier time with this transition. Unfortunately for me, programming is also the most fun to teach.

I have a lot of other interests outside of CS, one of which would actually pay money (GIS). Not sure how to get paid for dualsporting, hiking, bicycling, geology, visiting museums, writing (I do get paid grocery money for this), hand-coding, or reading. But I'm open to suggestion. :)

Hey beej71, I'm 41 and I love advice from people with more life experience than me.

I also love teaching (not particularly great at it, but not the worst) and taught SALSA dancing for a few years. The money was okayish (enough for myself but not to feed my children) but I LOVED being around ppl.

I wasn't talented in dancing but my talent in programming really made me happy (and well paid), so that kind of sucks. Definitely same as you, I'd even say programming can be my 90% of joy and effort (in a bad way sometimes, but I manage to talk myself into dialing it down)

I can't imagine the hell teachers are going through, especially coding, with AI.

Luckily I have a lot of weird interests and some can pay well (for example, I've had a decent success teaching people how to lose weight doing intermittent fasting, imagine the randomness of my interests)

What is your next plan?

I wasn't joking on becoming a yoga teacher, as cliché as it sounds, because I did it and quite successfully so (I was young, handsome, and single back then, and my classes were PACKED. I'm still handsome but the other two are gone. People paid cash so I had a lot of bills in my home lol)