I think that the crowd on HN tend to enjoy learning, and thus wouldn’t find it pointless to read.

I wonder how it compares to electric car usage, or street lights in the USA.

How much value are the Voyager's providing us at the moment, in terms of scientific data?

It's invaluable as we don't have any other probe at that distance.

As a man who lived outside western society for many years, I often received comments about my looks and mannerisms.

Did I cry like a baby, no. I made jokes about their looks and mannerisms. It's called banter.

There is a line that should not be crossed, but someone making one off comments on the out of the ordinary shouldn't be classed as harassment.

That's your perspective though. Others' perspective is that it is a form of harassment, and reactions like yours are toxic masculinity, a feminist catch phrase, of ignoring our issues and feelings. Yet for all the hate for toxic masculinity, as a gay guy all I see is that straight guys are still forced to uphold those traits in a bizarre way. Yes, be violent she says now, but only to those who insult me.

> Have you listened to the latest the latest Joe Rogan episode with Musk.

Because those two don't have an agenda at all...

And the mainstream (leftist) media doesn't?

I listened to both and JRE definitely pointed out some fucked up and verifiable systemic issues with the Democrats that you wouldn't have even noticed if you only listened to MSM.

There are some left leaning media outlets, no doubt. But there is nothing, NOTHING, that compares to the propaganda machine that is Fox. Nothing.

> And the mainstream (leftist) media doesn't?

Let me introduce you to my friend, Rupert Murdoch. Once you two are finished talking I don't ever want to hear you conflate mainstream media with leftist influence again.

I haven't. Any good examples that you can remember?

"Seems to be guilty" is a very different thing than a Fortunate Son who is an adulterer who was found guilty on 34 charges relating to the hush money, his two defense suits against Carroll are under appeal and who knows what sort of things happened when he hang out with his buddy Epstein. Jack Smith is still fighting to get the insurrection case going. America voted a criminal into office.

Anything real or just made up things?

Harris and Biden did not incite an insurrection. Harris and Biden did not get impeached for withholding funds from Ukraine as Trump was impeached for doing. Harris and Biden are not convicted felons. "The Harris camp seems to be guilty of many of the things they accused Trump of," is nonsense.

While I don't think react is the best frontend framework, it has become the industry standard and therefore is the most peaceful approach to building apps in 2024.

We've come to expect zero customer support from the likes of Facebook and Google, but why does that need to be the norm ?

I didn’t say that you should have zero customer support, but I don’t think the level system is the problem. It’s a problem when the levels don’t properly escalate stuff they don’t understand. But you just can’t have every support case go directly to the developers because 90% of support cases are stuff developers can’t help you with.

It’s like saying every person in a hospital should directly go to the operating theater. The 10% people needing urgent care would like it but it’s a very inefficient way to use the time of the staff. That’s why you have a reception (Level 1) that’s triaging cases and checking if you even need a doctor.

> It’s a problem when the levels don’t properly escalate stuff they don’t understand.

This is the real human psychology trap. By definition, L1 doesn't understand anything it can't handle.

Unfortunately, at many companies L1 is also yelled at for escalating too many cases.

Consequently, the internalized message for L1 to not get yelled at is "Juggle the ticket you don't understand convincingly, until the customer abandons interaction from frustration."

A few anti-patterns I've seen in most support shops:

1) Bad KPIs / no post-hoc sampling and review. Without regular, random, higher-level sampling and classification of how tickets were handled, there's no signal that support is technically botching a large % of incoming tickets.

2) Disincentives to escalation, even when it's a true positive escalation that should be. IMHO, support should be incentivized to escalate true positives.

3) Failure to upskill support agents and build mix-of-expertise within the support function.

4) To 3, failure to pay support for the value they're creating. In a sane world, a few of your highest skilled support people will be paid like developers, because they are.

The exception being that the triage is a queue-based system, and eventually it actually handles your case: you show up at the hospital, describe your problem to a human being, and you're assigned a priority in the queue pertaining to the specialist that needs to see you. If you're not dying you might have to wait a few hours, but you can rest assured that you will be looked at by an expert -- even if you're a hypochondriac.

If your case is an emergency, you can cut through all the queues and go straight to the operating table.

Whereas most L1 support systems are either non-existent; a FAQ loop that gets you nowhere; or a Dialogflow/GPT chatbot with 0 reasoning skills, no technical knowledge, and limited domain knowledge (really just a more convoluted version of the FAQ loop).

If you're lucky, after some digging you might find a hidden link that lets you talk with a real human being.

These systems are deliberately set up to massively increase the effort required to get to talk to a technician, as those are a limited resource and companies don't want to spend money on stuff that would actually improve their internal processes.

And if hospitals worked like this then the majority of people showing up for any problem whatsoever would die before receiving care. This is not how triaging works.

Both Facebook and Google provide customer support. I think people are just confused about who their actual customers are.

Hint: It's the advertisers.

Sounds like you have not bought ads. No, they do not provide support there either. Maybe if you buy tons of ads, but not for smaller advertisers.

Still a tiered support system: last year I started a side project and I wanted to advertise on Google. Created the AdWords account, with all the legal documentation and everything, it got banned in two days. All the support I could reach was bots. Luckily I had some friends at Google who could escalate internally....

I bet they still have a level system for the advertiser support, there’s no way an actual developer reads the first message. Maybe for very large customers they have a dedicated support line, but not for a small business advertising on google.

One thing is customer support and the other is user support. There is few to none of the latter.

Regarding the former, my company pays for google workspace and an agent happily answered our questions about the recent less secure apps password phasing out process.

Either way, it would force us to re-think our practice of broadcasting into space.

Perhaps, though I would think that finding life in our solar system does not necessarily mean life will be outside our solar system. As in did something happen in our solar system to spark life. Also, I think the ship has sailed on not broadcasting into space.

The risk of getting sued prevents companies from using pirated software.

The big players might just pay the fee because they might one day need to prove where they got the data from.

I think this is a good point to consider.

Let's imagine an inexperienced developer comes across a problem in an open source library, that has an existing issue raised in GitHub.

Are tools like Copilot and ChatGPT good enough to walk them through setting up the dev environment, fixing code and testing the fix. Maybe, but not without many prompts from the dev.

But how is that different from someone StackOverflowing their way through the problem.