I am looking at a 4 room apartment in a very nice villa next to a small national park right now, for 560€, with a train going twice an hour 15 minutes ride to the town with my potential next job. (In germany)
So salaries there are lower, but so is apparently rent. Way less than 40%, more like 20%.
Yes, most cities are not cheap, but I am also not a city person so the place is in a remote village, but well connected. And no, not naming that concrete place as I really like to move there (again), but it is in western saxony so not that far from chemnitz (a town I don't like so much, the job itself is in a small town).
Ah, yes, as guessed: The region there is quite cheap - in Chemnitz there was a 2 room apartment for 350 EUR (including heating), fully furnished, at the city/castle pond: Excellent price, but the disctrict was not that great.
Commenting about downvotes usually does not help, but maybe they came because you said rents in cities are higher while I spoke of a place outside cities?
Don't take it too serious would be my advice, downvotes also sometimes happen by accident with a big thump on touchscreen.
Sure, I was just surprised :)
Its an online community and we should not put any attention in those, but I know the german situation very well, plus their current economic downturn
Ars has been going downhill for sometime now. I think it's difficult for a lot of these bigger publishers to be anything other than access journalism and advertising. I'm not saying Ars is fully there yet, but the pull is strong.
The comments section on Ars is particularly depressing. I've been posting there for two decades and watched it slowly devolve from a place where thoughtful discussions happened to now just being one of the worst echo chambers on the internet, like a bad subreddit. I've made suggestions over the years in their public feedback surveys to alter their forum software to discourage mob behavior, but they don't seem to be doing anything about it.
They don't actually publish the comments under the article, only a link. I've long suspected sites doing that are fully aware of how shit the comment section is, and try to hide it from casual viewers while keeping the nutjob gallery happy.
This goes back a lot farther with Ars. They done this for years because their comments section is driven by forum software. The main conversations happen in the forums. They are then reformatted for a the comment view.
So, their main goal wasn’t to hide the comments, but push people to forums where there is a better format for conversation.
The Ars forums used to be incredibly useful sources of information - many of their best authors "grew" from forum posters; and the comments sections on articles were quite informative and had serious comments from actual experts - and discussion!
Then the Soap Box took over the entire site and all that's left is standard Internet garbage.
Most mainstream news sites around here have by now hidden the comment section somehow, either making it folded by default or just moving it to the bottom of the page below "related news" sections and the like.
Hard agree.
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2023/06/meta-debuts-playstati... is an example I remember. The subject matter of the is not controversial (just another Game Pass like subscription), but the comment section is full of -- yes you've guessed it -- Meta BAD! There is absolutely no meaningful discussion of the service itself.
I mostly stopped paying attention to the comment section after that, and Ars in general.
HN has also been taking a turn lately. Part of it is a large influx of new users, part of it (I suspect) is just a growing disenfranchisement with the technology scene. I'm partly to blame for this as well. I've tried to stop commenting most of the time since my first and strongest response has just been to express my anger and frustration at the direction most technology is taking.
Philosophically I want to agree with you more but Meta is the informational equivalent of RJ Reynolds. They’ve facilitated crime waves (remember all of the hand-wringing about shoplifting which died down when the government went after Facebook marketplace and Amazon?), supported genocide, and elevated some of the worst voices in the world. Giving them more money and social control is a risk which should be discussed.
I realize it makes you uncomfortable but the harms are done whether or not you ignore them. That’s the problem: people can exploit that desire to be fair, “neutral”, say it’s “just business”, etc. for years until the negative impacts on society are too hard to ignore. Think about how the fossil fuel industry managed to get people to talk like there was a debate with two sides deserving equal respect and parlay that into half a century of inaction after the scientific consensus correctly recognized that there was a real harm being done. We’re going to look back at the attention economy similarly.
I think you're misunderstanding or misrepresenting them. The fight to have the most jaded or pessimistic take, the hottest flame, the spiciest rant, it's all so predictable and it's just a bunch of the same people saying the same things and agreeing with each other for the nth time. It brings nothing new to the table, and the posts that actually respond to the new information get drowned out or worse downvoted for insufficient vitriol.
Perhaps–it’s hard to tell from a single sentence–but I would recommend reading more than the first comment of that thread. The person at the top exaggerated how much it’s not talking about the service or competing options, and the people talking about Facebook are raising what is a reasonable point about privacy and data mining.
Evil deserves to be called out as evil. Why should we constrain the discussion to anything else about them? The absolute best thing they can do for the world would be to disappear, as soon as possible.
The switch to their newest forum software seems to discourage any kind of actual conversation. If I recall correctly, the last iteration was also unthreaded, but somehow it was easier for a back-and-forth to develop. Now it is basically just reactions-- like YouTube comments (which, ironically, is actually threaded).
Is HN really the last remaining forum for science and technology conversations? If so... very depressing.
They should get rid of the fairly extremely prominent badges of years-on-the-forum and number-of-comments. Maybe that'd help quell some of the echo down, because every comment section on Ars articles is 10+ year old accounts all arguing with each other.
Try reading Slashdot these days and it's the same story. I stopped reading regularly when cmdrtaco left but still check in occasionally out of misplaced nostalgia or something.. The comment section is like a time capsule from the 00s, the same ideas and arguments have been echoing back and forth there for years, seemingly losing soul and nuance with each echo. Bizarre, and sad.
The bigger story is the way tech companies sucked the oxygen out of journalism. This started with capturing a growing chunk of ad revenue but then became editorial control as everyone started picking headlines, writing styles, and publication schedules to please the tech companies which control whether they receive 80% of their traffic.
Everyone writes like Buzzfeed now because Twitter and Facebook made that the most profitable; Google/Twitter/Facebook need a constant stream of new links and incentivize publishing rapidly rather than in-depth; and Facebook severely damaged many outfits with the fraudulent pivot to video pretending they’d start paying more.
Many of the problems we see societally stem back to people not paying for media, leaving the information space dominated by the interest of advertisers and a few wealthy people who will pay to promote their viewpoints.
They helped monopolize the industry. Willingly destroying the utility of RSS for end users is a prime example.
> Google/Twitter/Facebook need a constant stream of new links
Yet people can't understand that "AI" is just a tool to rip off copyright. For almost _precisely_ this reason here.
> we see societally stem back to people not paying for media
The problem is there is not infinite bandwidth for media. If a free option exists people will gravitate towards it. The real problem is that media sales people and media editors are allowed to be in the same room. We used to understand the value of a "firewall" in this context.
It has nothing to do with the people. It has everything to do with those holding the profit motive. They'll willingly destroy useful things in order to tilt the field in their direction. Social problems rarely have a distributed social cause.
Like the good old days where most markets had multiple papers which had to keep readers subscribing, when broadcasters had to follow the Fairness Doctrine and had a push to more moderation because they couldn’t pick and choose their audience.
It was by no means perfect but I think it was better than now where people getting the illusion of information with little accountability for selection or accuracy.
As to the Iraq war, I will note that the media had extensive debates at the time. Ask anyone who was there and outside of a handful of hard-right outlets, the reporting noted that all of the justifications were unverifiable and coming from the same two governments, and plenty of people questioned that. Again, it wasn’t perfect but I think the answer to “the NYT should’ve fired Judith Miller sooner” is that the NYT should have more rather than less competition.
> I think it's difficult for a lot of these bigger publishers to be anything other than access journalism and advertising
Maybe this is exactly the issue? Every news company is driven like a for-profit business that has to grow and has to make the owners more money, maybe this is just fundamentally incompatible with actual good journalism and news?
Feels like there are more and more things that have been run in the typical capitalistic fashion, yet the results always get worse the more they lean into it, not just news but seems widespread in life.
Assuming it was "just" about banning infinite scrolling. Not saying it is a good idea, but right now I cannot think of a legitimate use case where you would need it, unless your goal is engagement.
I've seen it used in non-addictive ways for search results (both specialized[1] and generic global search engines) and portfolios (for showcasing work progressively not merely constantly appending content to the end of singularly viewed work like say news sites do now), off the top of my head.
[1] Eg: printables.com (for open source, 3D print files)
But they ain't infinite (I assume). Maybe long, but finite. That is a big difference as it still gives meaning to the scrollbar. Infinite scroll is endlessly adding new content so you simply cannot scroll to the bottom.
Technically, infinite scroll is of course finite, too. Unless it adds newly created content, but if you count that as infinite then logs can be infinite too.
That's exactly why you don't write legislation to ban infinite scroll but 'addictive' design. Then it's ultimately up to the courts to decide, and they have the necessary leeway to judge that journalctl -f isn't addictive but TikTok is, even if they both use a version of infinite scroll.
The reason the entire concept of 'Westerners' exist, is because empires who became dominant in the aforementioned dimensions conquered, subjugated other peoples on the continent, or others were forced to adapt to their standards to avoid the same fate.
In a couple hundred years these populations in many ways were quite indistinguishable from their conquerors, as they adopted their customs and ways of running society.
Many of these conqured peoples while becoming Westernized culturally, didn't escape the yoke of their conquerors until much later.
This process was repeated in Latin America.
I know there are a lot of politically motivated people are interested in simple stories of the virtuous locals versus the evil West, but the same story played out pretty much everywhere over different continents and timeframes.
I'm not sure if Romes conquest of the Gauls was any less brutal than the Spanish conquest of Mexico.
"I'm not sure if Romes conquest of the Gauls was any less brutal than the Spanish conquest of Mexico."
Likely not, but both Rome and Spanish are usually considered "western" civilisations. But the Mayas did conquer too (and partly sacrificed the captured).
Spain still uses the Roman Law and save for the Basques (which are the cousins of Iberians) the 95% of the culture it's Western. The 5% it's just pre-Roman folklore (Basque, Celtic, Celtic-Iberian and so on) which survived Romanization and Christianization. But, even when being fully assimilated, I can always find some older Iberian substrate surviving in the North of Spain and the French Basque Country, some social behaviour predating Rome and the Catholic Kingdoms, such as the concept of the communal assemblies in towns and villages found all over in Spain.
From these arrangements between the people and Kingdoms the concept of Fueros (some kind of agreement/constution between the villages' ruling and the King) was born and if some king was about to rule a Kingdom, he/she was prompty required to respect them 'by the grace of God' AKA 'respect these scrolls or you will be kicked from the throne faster than a drunk knight falling off from a horse'.
The middle eastern cultures where better at that and that wasnt enough. Its in the ability to peoduce institutions which then produce a tech/power gradient that allows exploitation.
Keeping cultures artificially alive that can not do that is artificially prolonging inevitable change.
Google probably did parse these messages as well-formed before inspecting them and deciding to drop them based on the lack of this field. The RFC imposes no mandatory obligation to deliver messages just because they are well-formed.
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