I think you're advocating for better mental health care and rehabilitation of addicts, which I agree with. However, the idea that addicts will destroy their lives regardless of whether they stop using, or are forced to stop using, their drug of choice is an extremely dangerous statement. Many addicts get better by changing their environment and quitting/going to rehab/etc.

Furthermore, heroin != vodka in terms of how addictive it is for the average user, and that's partly why only one of them is legal for recreational use.

Controversies about decriminalization aside, harm reduction exists as a studied component in addiction, public health, and psychology circles for a reason.

For all of the naysayers in the comments, I think the author has hit on a palpable societal trend, at least in the US.

My leading theory is that the pandemic supercharged a lot of folks' individualist tendencies and/or nihilism, and we're seeing the decline in real time. To claim that the author is simply missing the incentives, bureaucracy, or other structural mechanisms behind enshittification, is missing the point, and they even allude to these towards the bottom of TFA!

Poking holes in the examples is similarly missing the point, but I know we love correcting people on the internet. Cunningham's law and all that...

Thanks for throwing in references like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_forest_hypothesis even though this was a silly response to the science fiction implications.

I found it an interesting read and hadn't heard the term before, but it's exactly the kind of nerdy serendipity I come to this site for!

> Perhaps we need a corporate structure between a non-profit and a for-profit

Maybe a co-op (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative)? There are also "for-profit" like businesses that are oriented around a different goal than just profits, https://good.store/pages/good-store-about-us comes to mind.

Notepad++ was a life saver in my early days of needing to open and edit large files without having the tech literacy or familiarity required to use an actual IDE. I was a Windows "tinkerer" for a long time before learning programming and getting into engineering, and I suspect I'm not the only one on HN who got started that way. It's probably the first editor I used with line numbers, tabs / multiple view panes in one window, and customization options.

I can't say I use it as often these days, but it's still installed on my PC at home and it's a reliable tool that I think back on fondly. Without it, I might not have "leveled up" to more advanced tools later on.

For anybody who's wondering, Nintendo doesn't _actually_ own Pokemon (a common misconception), but has a major stake in "The Pokemon Company", which does https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo#Subsidiaries

As such, I wonder if this structure makes it harder to sue over IP infringement. I agree with others here that patent infringement is a seemingly odd pick, but perhaps this also has to do with character design patents, since Palworld didn't explicitly use Nintendo's IP?

Should be interesting regardless to see what happens

That's a pretty grim outlook, but I honestly can't poke a "hole" in its logic.

Well stated, somebody's clearly done their reading on Marxist theory :)

I've been struggling recently with limitations on "managing upward" I've seen thus far in my career -- eventually incentives become aligned such that no "good" manager that represents their employees well to leadership and says "no" when necessary has stuck around very long. I suspect it's largely systemic but I appreciate the way you've highlighted why.

The only cases I've seen where incentives align in favor of the rank and file employee tend to be ambitious projects as "growth" opportunities -- but of course this tends to be more often than not in the form of "experience" rather than necessarily higher "pay". Good managers still try to proactively find opportunities and make sure the team keeps growing. Eventually you "fix" the pay part by switching jobs, but I do wish we had a better system where I could just be "loyal", grow expertise in a relevant area, and be fairly compensated without having to worry about basic things like healthcare.

anecdotal / N=1 here, but I've uploaded standard 7z encrypted backups to personal Drive without issue

> And similar proposals like the Negative Income Tax would cost far less money and have none of the presented downsides.

Most people file taxes once a year, meaning they would get this payment once rather than monthly, which makes a huge difference if living on the poverty line. Similarly, many people making less than the minimum for filing [1] likely don't file their taxes. This was an issue with the child tax credit as well -- you want to get resources to the lowest-income households, but doing that with tax credits means you don't actually reach those households, meaning you still have to introduce new programs to reach those people [2]. There were proposals to make that tax credit into a monthly payment but IIRC they did not pass before the child tax credit was ended in 2022.

[1] https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/who-needs-to-file-a-tax-return [2] https://www.vox.com/22588701/child-tax-credit-accessibility-...

Thanks for linking this. It's very "discoverable" but I probably wouldn't have found it, or realized it existed, without reading this comment.

I think so. My company's new refresh policy is "buy your own recycled corp device from us and we'll install all of our tracking software on it so you can use it as a corp device" (the _worst_ kind of BYOD imaginable). So, I'm probably using the initially "free" Intel Macbook until it dies, I do, or my job does.

This author strikes me as one of the greatest "counter examples" for our hiring system. They sound more useful and experienced (IMO) than myself and most coworkers I know, and I think most companies would be lucky to have them. Dark times we're in... darker times ahead.

> How do we try to exist when we need income, but almost all jobs have become impossible fantasy roles overloaded with divergent tasks trying to cram 5 departments worth of concurrent work into single people? Is it time to rip up our tech industry membership cards and just leave all the roles to overworked amateurs who only know the broken world since they haven’t ever seen a functioning company with professionals in single-purpose professional roles? I don’t know anymore.

Nailed it! I think the cynical answer here is obviously "yes". This was a problem 10 years ago and continues to get worse, not better. After layoffs and outages and enshittification, it all seems to be "holding together", so I'm truly not sure what the "breaking point" is. Probably social revolution or labor camps (half kidding).

> The tech roles at most companies are completely busted it seems. I didn’t sign up to be a “software servant” to non-technical product teams who just define tasks and priorities for actually capable people to implement every day. Somewhere along the way the entire industry lost its heart and now most companies are more interested in “playing company” instead of actually carving out created creative contraptions? There is a thing called “Engineering-led management” where, imagine this, the people doing the work are also the ones defining the product and talking to users and defining requirements while implementing features all themselves. You can’t create good products if you have less capable “product idea people” controlling implementation capability. Office Space wasn’t supposed to be our destiny.

This was probably my favorite part. As one of the "5+ years at <big tech corp>" people, this is inescapable in my experience "from the inside". I'll also note I don't make $5-10k per day like the author assumes, nor do any of my peers, even the "extremely highly paid" ones. The peak is mostly $2-4k per day but most people make 0.5-1k per day. I highly recommend http://levels.fyi as a reference for these types of data points.

- or not, from comments they seem to have a bit of a "reputation" in the redis community. I don't have time to figure out how veritable these claims are. At a minimum they sound experienced and talented enough to get into one of these high paying tech firms they seem to not be able to get into. I don't think it's indicative of an "individual problem" in the current environment.

> Somehow, only Apple has seemed to be able to solve this Herculean problem.

Bit of a stab in the dark here but I would assume ARM has at least something to do with this? Tablets, phones, etc. get standby a lot better than x86 systems seem to. My pre-M1 Macbook Pro does not handle standby well but my partner's M2 Macbook Air lasts for forever and handles sleep etc. well. The lower power consumption in "standby mode" on ARM seems like at least part of the picture for why Apple gets this so much better. I bet it's part of why Windows is trying to release their ARM variant and have been working on it for 10+ years

Thanks, I'm a bit new to this entire concept. Do troy lbs also exist, or is that just a term when measuring ounces?

The fact that "worth their weight in cold" typically means in the single-digit millions is fascinating to me (though I doubt I'll be able to get there myself, maybe someday). I looked it up though and I think this is undercounting the current value of gold per ounce/lb/etc.

5320814 / 180 / 16 = ~1847.5

Per https://www.apmex.com/gold-price and https://goldprice.org/, current value is north of $2400 / oz. It was around $1800 in 2020. That growth for _gold_ of all things (up 71% in the last 5 years) is crazy to me.

It's worth noting that anyone with a ski house that expensive probably has a net worth well over twice the price of that ski house. I guess it's time to start learning CUDA!