Even if some tech were presented, people would just nitpick and quibble, saying the tech wasn't actually revolutionary, didn't truly have a net negative impact on quality of life, didn't truly have a net negative impact on employment, or the timeframe of the latter two.
Personally, I'd nominate gunpowder, DDT, leaded gasoline, and nuclear fission.
The written word is how people interact with LLMs. Clarity and precision in writing results in more effective prompting of LLMs. It is just as possible that leaning heavily AI writing will be seen as a marker of not being natively skilled enough at writing to prompt LLMs effectively because of the GIGO principle.
How this submission got negative votes is the oddity that people are trying to figure out. Regular users can't downvote, and I don't see a reason why it'd be a moderator action for this post, so I'd assume some bug/edge-case in vote handling.
No other /newest submissions (current or that I've previously seen) have negative score. I checked a bunch of your submissions (using https://news.social-protocols.org/stats?id=48104663) and none appear to have ever been negative.
It's possible that this issue was happened to be caused by a bot, but what you're describing as a regular occurrence ("Down always comes first") is probably a misrecollection about comment downvotes rather than submission downvotes - or about reddit which does have submission downvotes.
There was a poster on HN a while ago that recommended¹ the Drok USB volume knob because it can be reconfigured to send keystrokes or mouse actions. Just Google for "configure drok usb volume control knob" for instructions. I reconfigured mine to send mouse scroll events for scrolling through documents.
Reading material is not eligible for Show HN submissions according to the separate guidelines for them at https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html . Probably doubly so since it's not even something created by the submitter.
There's rather a big difference between reverse engineering already working code and forward(?) engineering working code from nothing so that confidence seems misplaced.
The writing was on the wall for "don't be evil" when Google started the process of acquiring the much reviled DoubleClick back in 2007, nearly 20 years ago at this point. That's longer than most people reading this have been in the tech industry; a generation has never seen Google be anything other than increasingly extractive and monopolistic.
> "I love Connections but the basic thesis (there are hidden connections between disparate developments in science and technology)..."
Good grief, no. The basic thesis of Connections 1 was that humanity has become fatally dependent on technology (the "technology trap" he speaks of), that that dependence continues getting deeper and deeper, and it's hard to predict what technologies will emerge or where technology will take us, possibly utopia but just as likely a living hell, and finally that we don't even have the option to stop digging ourselves deeper and deeper into the technology trap because technological advancement can't be stopped because its emergence is unpredictable. Re-watch just the first and last episodes and they will terrify you.
Connections 2 and 3 were indeed scattershot because people liked Burke's charming mannerisms and didn't want to think about the ever more complex and ever more fragile panoply of technologies that individuals, even the technologists themselves, can neither understand nor control that is all that stands between humanity and its extinction.
Better still, like a well-written essay, there is closure to the series. All the ends left about in the preceding episodes are drawn together neatly in the final one.
"The point about all this technological pizazz isn't the gee-whiz high-tech stuff. It's the secondary effects of using it. Take say what this chip could do to change the pattern of work. With this you could have telecommuting, that's where you work at home from a screen and you never go into the office.
Great! No more rush hour. But what does that do to the public transportation system and the taxes it uses. Or to the car manufacturers and their workers' jobs, and the rest of the economy that depends on their output?
Or to the concept of the city itself, with its support systems and businesses. Or to the downtown properties where maybe your pension fund's invested.
Not to speak of working at home day in and day out and what that might do to a marriage. And what do you get out of work when it's only you? What would be the effect of isolating and fragmenting the community like that?
“He who fights with Windows should see to it that he himself does not become Windows. And when you gaze long into ntoskrnl, ntoskrnl also gazes into you.”
Seriously, is it really a victory if you have to adopt the architecture of your sworn enemy?
To quote Linus Torvalds from 1997: "I don't try to be a threat to Microsoft, mainly because I don't really see MS as competition. Especially not Windows - the goals of Linux and Windows are simply so different."
He got less humble later on when momentum started building behind Linux. To quote Linus Torvalds from 2003: “Really, I'm not out to destroy Microsoft. That will just be a completely unintentional side effect.”
I mean, this whole thread is basically suggesting that 23 years later, improvements to Linux and self-sabotage by Microsoft are going to possibly destroy (or atleast, start to cause some bleeding) to Microsoft (in the gaming-market).
This isn't Linux looking to destroy MS, this is mostly Valve understanding the requirement for an OS that won't be able to become predatory to them and their business model in a single system update.
Personally I used to be a Linux zealot back in the early 2000s, then I actually learned to program C++ and dove a bit into OS architecture... I realized why Linux on the desktop always sucked.. Not because of some dastardly conspiracy by Microsoft, but because of the very basic fact that server people and vendors held the developer purse strings and they drove the engineering decisions.
Let's take a simple example.. to send a network packet to a different machine, you just call into the Linux kernel, which dispatches your stuff directly to the network card, and you're done. Pretty simple. However if you want to send a message to your neighboring X11 window, you have to go into the kernel to do IPC, which then somehow dispatches your message to the server process, unblocks and schedules the message pump in X11, which finds your window, then once again you go back into the kernel... then your target process is scheduled, so on and so forth.
Wildly inefficient, yet Linux never got proper good IPC merged (until binder), low latency audio sucked, and none of this coordination logic or audio processing got in the kernel.
Why? Because servers don't need that stuff and some server engineer isn't going to know or care about your use case, you're just small fry, and none of the stuff you do is worth taking on technical risk or slowing down server workloads.
The goal was to be able to patch and fix the systems I was using, and swap out bits and pieces as I wanted. And that seems to be less and less possible on Linux these days, as you have these tightly vertically-integrated stacks where everything depends on the latest version of everything else.
We are so far removed from 1997 that this statement means nothing.
> the goals of Linux and Windows are simply so different.
So different that Windows muscle memory works on most main stream Linux UI's, Many (most?) Steam games run on Linux, and now we have Windows in the Linux kernel.
Does Windows muscle memory work? The vast majority of shortcuts are completely different for the casual user, and for the power user, there's no regedit or control panel and other such things.
Be that as it may, it means that the muscle memory (or more accurately, the mental model of the system) is gone. I've long held the belief that power users or knows-enough-to-be-dangerous users have a harder time switching for that exact reason.
A control panel (or cross-distro YaST) would be very welcome in the ecosystem I think.
> muscle memory (or more accurately, the mental model of the system)
That's not "more accurately", that's just a completely different thing. When I'm on Mac, my muscle memory is thrown off. I'll be typing and my ctrl+s, alt+tab, win+4, ctrl+left* all cause wildly unpredictable (to me) things. I'm currently using Linux, and all of those things work how I expect (with a tiny asterisk on win+#). When I want a control panel, I press the windows button on my keyboard to open something functionally equivalent to the start menu, and open System Settings to get something functionally equivalent to the control panel.
I have no doubt that I could learn the deep differences between Windows and Mac over time, but the initial muscle memory causes me stress before I get to that point. When I switch to Linux I don't have that stress, and so I've been comfortably learning those differences.
* - save, switch to the previously in-focus window, switch to the 4th program on the taskbar, move the cursor one word to the left
... in case of the registry, you were also talking about replacing a unix philosophy system (each application has its own standalone config file) with a windows like monolith (everything goes into the registry).
Tbh it's not even muscle memory, how often do you edit config files?
WSL 1.0 was doing something like that. Doing syscall translation in real time. Eventually edge cases forced them to abandon that architecture and now it's just a VM.
What is the purpose of achieving victory? Is it to produce the software that works better or is it to stick your fingers in your ears and lalala the loudest?
Not really, in the drunken happiness to have games, Linux users keep forgetting those are games developed on game studios that the only place there are GNU/Linux installations running are their MMO servers.
It is no different from arguing how Linux is getting better GameCube games with Dolphin.
Also Valve is only as good as its current management is still around, eventually like any other company time will pass, and new warm bodies will take other decisions.
There's a hidden unproven assertion that LLMs are net positive technological progress. Leaded gasoline was effective at improving engine performance, asbestos was an effective and low cost insulation, DDT was a very useful insecticide used in immense quantities, and thalidomide was an effective sedative. LLMs may yet join them.
Personally, I'd nominate gunpowder, DDT, leaded gasoline, and nuclear fission.
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