For most videos the speaker talks in a relatively constant speed throughout the video. I've been using Video Speed Controller on Firefox for years. Sadly, it's not actively monitored by Mozilla for security issues even though it has 100k+ downloads. It basically lets you change the speed by whatever increments you want with a key. If the speaker slows down, tap-tap-tap, you can speed it up. I don't really see the need for algorithms or AI to solve what's already almost-solved.
I don't get why this addon isn't included in Firefox to begin with. Maybe because it doesn't just work only on standard HTML5 video files, but has support for specific sites and their players, too? But I've seen several updates on Firefox (not about the addon) that are along the lines of "solved perf issues on $site". So it's not like Firefox is trying to be site-agnostic.
We just don't subscribe to traditional rest cycles (what Kagi Translate translated from "I should be sleeping right now, but I'm browsing HN" in LinkedIn Speak).
It's hilarious that em dashes and "it's not X; it's Y" and other trivial things are the best way for humans to spot AI now. Like if AI robots infiltrated us, at first we'd be like "ooh, he has long ears, he's a robot". And after a while the robots will learn to keep their ears shorter. Then what? When we're out of tell-tale signs?
Nitpicking maybe, but nicotine isn't the main thing that makes cigarettes addictive and it's not that bad by itself. Gwern has a long article on nicotine that's worth a read [0].
More importantly, why do you think society should make smoking inconvenient - more costly, more illegal or anything like that? If I'm not blowing smoke in your face, why interfere with my desire to smoke? If it's about medical bills, just let me sign a waiver that I won't get cancer treatments or whatever, and let me buy a pack of smokes for what it should cost - a few cents per pack, not a few dollars/euro.
If I can smell it, I don't really care if you're blowing it directly at me or not, it's still a pain. If you want to smoke in private in your own home and then wash your clothes after so no one can tell you're doing it, I guess that's fine, but I don't see why it also has to be cheap?
I admit I sometimes smoke near people, even if I try to move to the side. At bus stops I try to be 5-10 meters away from people, but often I don't do it and it inconveniences people. Sorry, truly. I will try to be more mindful. When I switched to e-cigs for a while a couple of years ago, I started noticing the smell of tobacco smoke. After I switched back to cigs, I stopped noticing it. Smokers don't notice it that much as they're around it often. It's not always smokers being inconsiderate, it's not realizing how it smells to others. If you let me smell the clothes of a smoker and a non-smoker, I wouldn't be able to tell the different if my life depended on it. Although I only smoke outdoors and wash my clothes regularly, so I hope my base smell isn't that offensive to non-smokers.
So yeah, this comment really reminded me to not light up whenever and "try my best" to walk a few meters away, but to really think if I'd inconvenience people.
On the other hand, if I'm alone on a street and you're walking towards me so I just pass you for a second, I can't imagine that the smell would be that bad from just a casual walk-by. When I'm passing people, I hold in my smoke till I pass them.
Even if I agree that smoking outdoors is inconsiderate and annoying to others, I could still do it at home or in dedicated areas (smoking sections in bars with good ventilation, ofr example).
> I don't see why it also has to be cheap?
If we agree on the previous points, then why not let it be cheap? Tobacco is cheap to produce. Most of the price of cigarettes is artificial, to cover medical costs and whatnot. Let's say I sign a waiver that if I get sick, I either pay through the nose or don't receive treatment at all. Would you be OK with letting me buy tobacco at it's original cost (no subsidies, no artificial fees)?
Or, as a thought experiment - let's say tobacco didn't have any smell and there were 0 negative effects of second-hand smoke. Like, you wouldn't know it if I smoked near you unless you saw me. Then what would be the justification in making smoking artificially expensive for me?
If it wasn't for the impact on offer people, I think you could handle it basically like sugary drinks - there's some benefit in discouraging it for health reasons but not as much benefit comparatively, so a more modest tax is all I could really argue for, yeah. (Like how nicotine gum is treated essentially)
Since the impact is mostly annoyance (the smell) and most restaurants are either smoke-free or offer separate enclosures, why tax it at all (besides for the smell)? I am reducing my lifespan by about 8 to 10 years with smoking, sure. But why should the government force me to change that by taxing it? Why tax sugary drinks or ban or criminalize drugs other than the caffeine, nicotine and alcohol?
If the idea is to make everyone be healthy, live as long as possible and be productive for as long as possible, why not ban dangerous sports, too? I'm "the government" for my dog and I don't let him do anything dangerous or stupid, but he's a dog and we're people. With the supposed free will and agency we all like.
>But why should the government force me to change that by taxing it?
Because the government ends up paying for the medical treatment of a lot of smokers when they're older. And it's incredibly expensive. You can say you won't rely on government funds, but there's no way to actually opt out of Medicare for life or sign up to never be guaranteed stabilization when you show up at a hospital.
Nicotine is also notoriously addictive, which weakens the "my choice" argument.
>Why tax sugary drinks
That's totally a nanny state thing. Personally, I would mildly support it. But it's not a hill I'd die on.
>or ban or criminalize drugs other than the caffeine, nicotine and alcohol?
Hard drugs cause blight. People don't mind so much if they see a soda can on their street, but if they see a used needle they'll move. And again, any society with a safety net has an interest in preventing common causes of people falling into it.
>why not ban dangerous sports, too?
It hasn't proven to be a big problem at the population level. Hell, public health experts would love to have that problem, because it'd mean more people were exercising.
> Because the government ends up paying for the medical treatment of a lot of smokers when they're older. And it's incredibly expensive. You can say you won't rely on government funds, but there's no way to actually opt out of Medicare for life or sign up to never be guaranteed stabilization when you show up at a hospital.
That's why I'd get a tattoo on my chest, if necessary, saying "Smoker!". I know that most of the price of tobacco is insurance for medical treatments. Not Medicare, as I'm not in the US, but similar. I am OK with tattooing "DO NOT STABILIZE OR CARE FOR AT ALL - SMOKER !!!1".
> Nicotine is also notoriously addictive, which weakens the "my choice" argument.
I am an adult human who participates in society and has chosen to smoke. Please treat me as an adult who has made a (bad) decision and is willing to suffer the consequences.
> sugary drinks... nanny state
Same with any drug.
> hard drugs...
People who abuse hard drugs to the point where we need to save them or others from them are most often uneducated or poor (and living in a poor neighborhoods, with all that it brings). Believe it or not, I know several people with PhDs in things like physics and biology who regularly take "hard" and/or "soft" drugs besides alcohol and nicotine. Only one needed intervention after ~10 years and it was because of pre-existing psychological issues that led him to abuse the drugs. I and lots of people I know who lead normal lives can list more 3- or 4-letter abbreviations of stuff we've tried than a HN comment will let us fill. Or maybe I'm exaggerating a bit, not sure, but you get the point.
If you look at a poor neighborhood, you'll see a lot more people with drug problems. Not because richer people don't do drugs, but because it's not an escape plan, it's not some random impure thing you get and because it's done within a safe place. It's a social issue, not a drug issue. Work on solving poverty and education, not on making us drug users feel like criminals for trying new stuff or on making our drugs more expensive. Whether it's legal like alcohol or nicotine, or illegal a psychedelic, a benzo, weed, an opioid, a dissociative or anything else, it's a drug. I am an adult. Let me experience my adulthood like I want to. You don't take drugs and that's fine, but please understand that you have no fucking idea what you're missing if you're doing it correctly. Literally anything you've likely experienced, like romantic relationships, climbing mountains, orgasms and so on, is categorically and qualitatively different from the amazing things you can experience on various drugs.
I drink, but I acknowledge and care about the health effects. I care more about how it makes me feel. Don't assume everyone who smokes or drinks alcohol or takes another type of drug just doesn't care. Why don't we ban dangerous sports like rock climbing or BASE jumping or MMA while we're at it?
Regulating content that makes people enraged seems like a slippery slide towards regulating any kind of "unwanted" speech. I get regulating CSAM, calls for violence or really obvious bullying (serious ones like "kill yourself" to a kid), but regulating algorithms that show rage bait leaves a lot of judgement to the regulators. Obviously I don't trust TikTok or Meta at all, but I don't trust the current or the future governments with this much power.
For example, some teen got radicalized with racist and sexist content. That's bad in my opinion, as I'm not a racist or a sexist. But should racist or sexist speech be censored or regulated? On what grounds? How do we know other unpopular (now or in the future) speech won't be censored or regulated in the future? Again, as much as I'm not a racist or sexist, I don't think the government should have a say in whether a company should be able to promote speech like "whites/blacks are X" or "men/women are Y". What's next? Should we regulate speech about religion (Christians/Muslims/atheists are Z) or ethics (anti-war people or vegans are Q) or politics or drugs or sex?
The current situation is shitty, but giving too much power to regulators will likely make it way shittier. If not now, in the future, since passed regulations are rarely removed.
At least in the US the government can't regulate speech (for the most part). But what we could do is regulate recommendation algorithms or other aspects of the overall design in a way that's generalized enough to be neutral in regards to any particular speech. And such regulations don't need to apply to any entity below some MAU or other metric.
Even just mandating interoperability would likely do since that would open up the floor to competitors. Many users are well aware of the issues but don't feel they have a viable alternative that satisfies their goals.
In theory I'm OK (kinda) with regulating the "overall design" somehow, but I don't see how it's going to work. Forced interoperability is a (very?) good idea, as it's really general, but it also doesn't address directly what the article and most comments talk about - the rage bait. I just can't imagine regulations (or "laws" or whatever the correct term is) that deal specifically with the algos that push rage bait that can't be later abused, if passed, to deal with other unpopular speech. And it seems like people want some laws to directly deal with that - the bad types of speech or algos themselves.
To clarify, I use "rage bait" as an example phrase, but it includes algos that only promote engagement at any cost and other things that aren't outright dangerous, but we think are dangerous. Not, like I said, CSAM or yelling FIRE or telling people to kill themselves.
Interoperability sidesteps the issue by giving users the choice of which algorithm (or algorithm provider) to use. The majority might or might not agree with that approach - for example obviously tobacco has not been left purely to the individual's judgment in the west.
Agreed, you can't regulate speech in a targeted manner while also not doing so. You're forced to find some common aspect much more general than "rage bait". Perhaps prohibiting the targeting of certain metrics? Or even prohibiting their collection in the first place.
> You're forced to find some common aspect much more general than "rage bait". Perhaps prohibiting the targeting of certain metrics? Or even prohibiting their collection in the first place.
Can you elaborate, give some ideas, examples, etc.? What metrics? How can you define them in a consistent, safe way?
We're talking generalized metrics. I have no idea which ones - I wasn't claiming to have solved the problem. The point is that if you can identify a general characteristic that is being used in a way which disproportionately contributes to a particular outcome then you can filter on that.
Estimated user age is an example of a metric largely unrelated to concerns regarding free speech. I doubt it has much relevance to the problem we're taking about here but hopefully you can imagine that prohibiting the targeting of ads or the curation of an algorithmic feed based on that metric would not be expected to unduly disadvantage any particular sort of speech.
> The point is that if you can identify a general characteristic that is being used in a way which disproportionately contributes to a particular outcome then you can filter on that.
In a non-adversarial political context where we trust the government and the future ones, sure, but I think without any strong guardrails, we could enact a law that's good today, but will be exploited in the future.
For targeting minors with any kind of political speech - I'd love it if it wasn't legal. But that brings its own can of worms. There's enough discussion on HN on the implications of age verification, whether on how it's done technically (privacy-preserving or not (ZKP or just shady 3rd parties); FOSS or not; on the ISP, OS or app level, etc.) and whether the mere precedent could trigger additional issues down the road.
Anyway, I'd love a society where everything is perfect, but I'm afraid of what might actually happen. With a benevolent god as a permanent ruler, I'd be happy with 100% prosecution rate against all kinds of littering, hate speech and whatnot, but in reality random crimes are easier to evade than a law passed down by a malevolent government, so I'm strongly against any kind of overreach. (Because the law tomorrow could be one we must evade if we want to resist an unethical government). Someone will likely chime in with "but complete and massive overreach has never happened so far", to which I'd reply - we're close to the point where technology will let the ones in power grab that power absolutely and forever if we them grab too much in the beginning.
> where we trust the government and the future ones
Has never and will never exist.
> we could enact a law that's good today, but will be exploited in the future.
Sure but that's how pretty much all legislation works.
> I'd love it if it wasn't legal. But that brings its own can of worms.
It's probably fine as long as you include the clause "knowingly and intentionally". That doesn't imply age verification or anything else, merely that you act on information that you have and are aware of (and that you not intentionally design systems to work around that).
Also note that I never said anything about underage users. My example was targeting based on estimated user age. So in that example the age is estimated and it is illegal to target anything based on the value. (Of course to avoid a very silly loophole you'd also need to disallow targeting based on verified age as well.)
> I get regulating CSAM, calls for violence or really obvious bullying (serious ones like "kill yourself" to a kid)
I’ve reported videos that look like sexual exploitation, videos that call for violence and videos that promote hate (xyz people are cockroaches) and all I’ve gotten is that “it does not go against community guidelines” with a link to block the person who created them. So any concerns of “where do we draw the line” are in my opinion pointless because the bare minimum isn’t even being done.
I agree with your CSAM and explicit calls for violence examples - they probably should be regulated. But a few comments ago in another thread someone didn't like me calling people in the workplace who annoy me with their mindless chit chat "corporate drones". My post could be construed as promoting hate. Where do we draw the line from "cockroaches" to "drones"? Do I have to call a certain "protected class" drones for it to qualify as hate speech?
What if I didn't say anything bad about a race or a sex, but said:
> I have coworkers that pester with me with their small talk about the weather every time I see them. I hate those fucking cockroaches.
That's in bad taste, sure, but should it be regulated? You may know I obviously don't hate-hate them (they're just annoying, but most of them are good people) or actually consider them cockroach-like in any meaningful aspect (they're obviously people, but with annoying tendencies). But would a regulator know the difference? What about a malicious regulator who gets paid by (ok, this is a silly example, but bear with me) the weather-talking coworker lobby to censor me? In many not-so-silly examples a regulator could silence anyone for anything (politics, sex, drugs, ethics), as long as it uses a bad word or says anything negative about anyone. I don't want to live in such a society. That much power would be abused sooner or later.
I'm sorry but are you saying it's hard to figure out what to do so let's do nothing? Banning racist and sexist content is not a slippery slope. It's just banning racist and sexist content, slope is only slippery because the salivating mouths of these social platforms grease them.
Also, I don't think people are advocating censorship, they are advocating not promoting assholes. You can have your little blog and be racist on it all you want, but let's not give these people equivalent of nukes for communication.
> are you saying it's hard to figure out what to do so let's do nothing?
I'm fine with doing something, but the current "something" seems slippery.
> Banning racist and sexist content is not a slippery slope. It's just banning racist and sexist content, slope is only slippery because the salivating mouths of these social platforms grease them.
But what is "racist", exactly? See why I think it's a slippery slope and why it's ill-defined:
1. We could agree that "Let's go out and kill/enslave all the $race/$gender" is racist, but that's bad if we switch $race to any group, as it's speech that incites violence.
2. What about "$race is genetically inferior in a way (less intelligent, less athletic, more prone to $bad_behavior)"? I honestly think most differences in race/ethnicity is due to environmental factors, but what if there actually are difference in intelligence or anything like that? Should we ban speech that discusses that? Black people win running races and are great at basketball. They're prone to certain diseases, as are Caucasians or Asians. So would you ban discussing that? Or would you ban blindly asserting that $race is $Y without some sort of proof?
3. What about statements like "There are way more male bus drivers because X"? Or "men are better at Y, but women are better at Z"?
What do you think the definition of racism and sexism in this context should be? I think the line is where we incite violence towards a group, but not about discussing differences that may or may not be true.
> Also, I don't think people are advocating censorship, they are advocating not promoting assholes. You can have your little blog and be racist on it all you want, but let's not give these people equivalent of nukes for communication.
I think restricting a platform (or anyone or anything) from promoting someone IS censorship. If it's not censored, why shouldn't I be able to promote it? This honestly feels disingenuous - like "we pretend that the racist isn't censored and can have his little blog, but it's illegal to promote his little blog".
> I'm sorry but are you saying it's hard to figure out what to do so let's do nothing?
That seems more reasonable than the alternative, which is to make modifications to a complex system which you aren't sure what the outcome will be. You're more likely to cause bigger problems.
That is far-IR, thermal stuff, Near-IR, 700 nanometer-ish is right below red in human vision.
Camera sensors can pick up a little near-IR so they have have a filter to block it. If that filter was removed and a filter to block visable light was used in place you would have a camera that can only see non-visable light. Poorly, the camera was not engineered to operate in this bandwidth, but it might be good enough for a mask. A mask that does not interfere with any visible colors.
> Poorly, the camera was not engineered to operate in this bandwidth
At least for cheap sensors in phones and security cameras that engineering consists of installing an IR filter. They pick it up just fine but we often don't want them to.
Keep in mind that sensors are inherently monochrome. They use multiple input pixels per output pixel with various filters in order to determine information about color.
The sensitivity to red light decreases quickly at wavelengths greater than 650 nm, but light can still be perceived if it is strong enough, up to around 780 nm.
Many so-called near-IR LEDs may actually be somewhere around 750 nm, so they are still visible on a dark background, even if they are perceived as extremely dim.
On the other hand, there are many near infrared LEDs around 900 nm and those are really invisible. Near-infrared LEDs around 1300 nm or around 1550 nm are also completely invisible.
An invisible near-infrared laser beam could become visible due to double-photon absorption, but if a beam of such intensity as to cause double-photon absorption hits your retina, there are more serious things to worry about.
I remember reading some people can perceive some near IR, but mostly that near-IR LEDs actually leak some red themselves due to imperfections in manufacturing or something?
From ~04:10 till 05:00 they talk about sodium-vapor lights and how Disney has the exclusive rights to use it. From what I read the knowledge on how to make them is a trade secret, so it's not patented. Seems weird that it would be hard to recreate something from the 1950's.
I also wonder how many hours were wasted by people who had to use inferior technology because Disney kept it secret. Cutting out animals and objects from the background 1 frame at a time seems so mindnumbingly boring.
The lights are relatively easy to get. iirc (it's been a bit since I watched their full video on the subject[1]) the hard part to find was the splitter that sends the sodium-vapor light to one camera and everything else to another camera.
It would seem to me to be relatively easy to build something like that if you're okay shooting with effectively a full stop less light (just split the image with a half-silvered reflector and use a dichroic filter to pass the sodium-vapor light one one side.
The splitter would have to be behind the lens, so it would require a custom camera setup (probably a longer lens-to-sensor distance than most lenses are designed for too), but I can't think of any other issues.
At the end of this video they link to another video from a year ago [1] (this is the same link as the comment you were commenting on, whoops), where they recreate the sodium vapor process with a rig with a beam splitter, one side had a filter to reject sodium vapor light and the other has one to reject everything but sodium vapor light, and then a camera on each side.
The Disney process had the filter essentially built into the beam splitter, but afaik, nobody knows how to make that happen again (or nobody who knows how, knows it's a desirable thing). Seems like the optics might be cumbersome, but the results seem wortwhile.
Also, you need still need careful lighting, you don't want your foreground illuminated by sodium vapor, but I wonder if you could light the background screen from behind (like a rear projection setup) to reduce the amount of sodium vapor light that reflects from the foreground to the camera.
We know how to make dichroic prisms (Technicolor used them when filming, as did "3 CCD" digital cameras), but I imagine that to have a sufficiently narrow rejection band for the sodium-vapor prociess, you would need to be smart about where you place the prism, since the stop-band of a dichroic filter changes with angle of incidence.
It is a well known process, Not a lot of general use so costs are not low, but not nearly as high as the original disney prism, I would guess around a 1000 USD for one. As far as I can tell any well equipped optics laboratory could make a beam splitter with whatever frequency gate they want.
I have no idea about that specific company I just picked it after a search for "beam splitter"
After I saw that video on the sodium vapor illumination process I was curious as to what if you could instead use near-IR light as the mask illumination. In theory you would have a perfect mask(as in the disney process) and no color interference. I found that frequency gated beam splitters are a fairly common scientific instrument.
As for the IR idea, I wonder if there's something like a crowdfunding/crowdsourcing site for ideas where the person who had the idea doesn't really want to do it, but leaves it open to others to try. You said you "don't really have the budget to try it out", but let's say even if you had the money, it wouldn't be a priority for you, as you're not an expert or you have better things to do or whatever. Is there a place to just shout ideas into and see if any market-oriented entity would take it upon themselves to try doing it? Besides forums full of ideas like "tinder but for X" and such crap? Because, imagine if your idea really is a great one. A couple hours from now it would be buried in HN.
Even if it had been patented, patents from the 1950s would have long expired. In fact, patents from 2005 would have expired - the US patent term is only 20 years.
Didn't know that, thanks. Although 20 years seems too much for some things, especially computer-related fields that move much quicklier than other fields. But now pretty much everything depends on or runs on computers so 20 years seem too much. I don't know if I phrased it correctly, but I mean to say that before computers, things moved much more slowly. Even a century for a patent would've been fine 500 years ago, but now almost every field has been changed by computers in the past few decades and will change even more rapidly. Letting 1 company have the advantage for 20 whole years now is much more impactful than it must've been before.
Yeah, that's just nonsense. We used sodium vapor monochromatic bulbs in my high school physics class to duplicate the double slit experiment.
I suspect the real reason is that digital green screen in the hands of experienced people is "good enough" vs the complication of needing a double camera and beam splitting prism rig and such.
I will never go back to the office. There are enough jobs around, even if they pay less. Hell, to live a comfortable life I could work at a job that pays 5x less than what I get paid now (not that much), even though I'll have to sacrifice some stuff. But I'll have to sacrifice luxuries, not my time or mental health.
Personally, I see it like this:
Option 1 - at home:
* stay in my comfortable air-conditioned room in my underpants on my comfortable chair at my comfortable desk or bed,
* surrounded by foods and drinks I like (I a minifridge in my room, it's awesome), and being able to quickly put something in the oven,
* picking my nose or scratching my ass wherever I want to,
* going to the bathroom whenever I want to (maybe with the laptop if I have to be available),
* listening to music on headphones or speakers,
* being able to communicate to and pay attention to family and pets for a few minutes here and there (no, this doesn't mean I'll waste my work time walking the dog or talking with people, but it means I can actually take a minute or two break and have an actual life),
* smoking on the balcony whenever I want to (a 4 second trip),
* alternating between lying on my bed or sitting on my chair or standing or running in place or dancing,
* having my breaks in my most comfortable place - home.
--------
Option 2 - the office:
* wasting time traveling - driving sucks and the public transportation sucks, for different reasons (and no, I won't relocate just to be close to the office, what the actual fuck, I love my house),
* having to look presentable,
* having to make idle boring chit chat with corporate drones who want to socialize,
* sharing a bathroom,
* having to choose between listening to the office background noise or wearing uncomfortable noise-cancelling headphones,
* having my breaks... in the office (and no, the office PlayStation or ping pong tables don't cut it),
* having to prepare food for the next X hours, then having to eat it or reheat it at the office,
* being able to attend to my house in case of an emergency (fire, floods, robbers, family or pet health issues and so on - yes, they absolutely come first),
* being subjected to cameras and other security theater, as if any employee couldn't wreck the company if they actually wanted to.
If you want me in the office, prepare to pay me a lot more. You won't and I understand. It makes no sense.
--------
As for productivity - I work hard because I feel obligated, because it's my work ethic and because I don't want to cheat or let people down. If I don't like what I'm doing, I quit instead of "quiet quitting" and doing the bare minimum.
It's much, much easier to get "in the zone" at home, to not burn out, to have time for myself (traffic + actual breaks) and to be happy.
Edit - just to sum it up - it's my only (AFAIK) life and I'm not spending 10-11 hours a day on work. That would leave me with 5-6 hours of "me time" and I'd be too tired to enjoy it.
Edit 2 - similarly, I won't put up with bullshit like:
* installing anything on my personal devices (except things like FOSS TOTP 2FA stuff I can control),
* leaving the camera and mic in my work machines intact (we all know how secure stuff is and how much we can trust corporations),
* taking drug tests.
That said, if you're willing to pay me 50 times what I currently make, I might return to the office with a suit, smile under the cameras, take drug tests, sit on my chair all day and discuss the weather with coworkers on the elevator. I'd be happy to do it for 3 or 4 months.
So? I wouldn't say it to their face. Who cares if I (a random person online) say something bad about no one in particular to a bunch of random people on the internet?
Can you honestly say you don't know people you'd describe, to yourself, at least, as corporate drones? Or maybe as boring, as squares, as idiots, as retards and so on? I bet you do. I bet everyone does, and everyone, including me, is the idiot in someone else's life. That's normal.
He who is without corporate drones in their life can cast the first stone.
> So? I wouldn't say it to their face. Who cares if I (a random person online) say something bad about no one in particular to a bunch of random people on the internet?
You're just revealing your true colors, that's all.
> Can you honestly say you don't know people you'd describe, to yourself, at least, as corporate drones? Or maybe as boring, as squares, as idiots, as retards and so on? I bet you do. I bet everyone does, and everyone, including me, is the idiot in someone else's life. That's normal.
I don't feel contempt for them (which is what calling them "drones" is). Feeling contempt for people like that is a jerk move.
That's subjective. I don't agree about "drone" for example. I see it as a largely neutral descriptor that can skew slightly positive or negative based on context. Particularly "corporate drone" to me refers to an office worker with a long term stable job at a megacorporation. Such a category can easily carry either a positive or negative connotation depending on the speaker.
> There isn't, but that's not what we're talking about.
Says you. Your original response was ambiguous so I included that.
> I see it as a largely neutral descriptor that can skew slightly positive or negative based on context. Particularly "corporate drone" to me refers to an office worker with a long term stable job at a megacorporation. Such a category can easily carry either a positive or negative connotation depending on the speaker.
That's a massive stretch, dude. And the scenario here is pretty clearly one guy with a stable job at a megacorporation judging another guy at the same megacorporation .
>> There isn't, but that's not what we're talking about.
> Says you. Your original response was ambiguous so I included that.
Maybe my original comment, but that's not what you responded to. By the time you chimed in the context made it clear.
A feeling is not a move, though. What I do makes me a jerk, not what I think or feel. Telling the drones to fuck off would be a jerk move, but I don't do it.
> My org [...] is all-in on AI with the goal of having 100% of our code AI generated within the next year.
> People who disagree at all levels of seniority have been made to leave the organization.
So either they're right (100% AI-generated code soon) and you'll be out of a job or they'll be wrong, but by then the smart people will have been gone for a while. Do you see a third future where next year you'll still have a job and the company will still have a future?
"100% AI-generated code soon" doesn't mean no humans, just that the code itself is generated by AI. Generating code is a relatively small part of software engineering. And if AI can do the whole job, then white collar work will largely be gone.
I agree, but it seems like if we can tell the AI "follow these requirements and use this architecture to make these features", we're a small step away from letting the AI choose the requirements, the architecture and the features. And even if it's not 100% autonomous, I don't see how companies will still need the same number of employees. If you're the lead $role, you'll likely stay, but what would be the use of anyone else?
I don't get why this addon isn't included in Firefox to begin with. Maybe because it doesn't just work only on standard HTML5 video files, but has support for specific sites and their players, too? But I've seen several updates on Firefox (not about the addon) that are along the lines of "solved perf issues on $site". So it's not like Firefox is trying to be site-agnostic.
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