Every show or movie is a platform for the social commentary of the time. That's what a narrative is. This reminds me of the people who will say that Star Wars is not political.

No... it is. It all is. You can ask the creators, they'll tell you. Sometimes in the context of the modern day it might not seem like social commentary or political commentary because we take a lot for granted but, I assure you, at the time it certainly was, and it certainly still is.

This is not what I'm arguing.

Of course authors will inject their worldview into what they create. Of course stories will reflect fundamental aspects of humanity, and with that how people (and groups of people) relate to one another. This is all valid.

> Sometimes in the context of the modern day

The problem is that writers nowadays write *only* for the "modern day". Everything becomes "social commentary" for $CURRENT_THING, which means that the story becomes stale the moment that the powers-that-be move on and $CURRENT_THING stops being a thing.

Good stories are perenial and worthy of be retold, no matter who is in power at any given moment. "Malcolm in the Middle" is a TV show that has things that working class families can relate, no matter if they are living in 2006, 2026 or 2056. "The Wire" is a show with very clear social commentary, but the same story would be told whether you had a Democrat or a Republican in the White House. "The Boys" was a show that started with a perenial premise (what if gods were just as broken as humans) and by the third season it turned itself into a caricature of Trump's America. Guess which ones from these will be talked about 25 years from now, and which one is pretty much forgotten already?

>Good stories are perenial and worthy of be retold, no matter who is in power at any given moment. "Malcolm in the Middle" is a TV show that has things that working class families can relate, no matter if they are living in 2006, 2026 or 2056.

Is it? I’m almost 40, and I can’t relate to anyone who would decide to have that many kids at the level of wealth and quality of life that Malcolm’s parents were living. Hell, a family with 3 kids is pretty rare, much less one with 4 who end up with a 5th.

Also, with smartphones and other video surveillance, pretty much all the shenanigans the boys get into don’t happen in the future.

They don't have to be perfect but there's a Canadian version of Breaking Bad up on YouTube. It's minutes long, instead of multiple seasons, because Canada has universal healthcare. Or Romeo and Juliet. The story doesn't work after the invention of cellphones.

Some storytelling still works. The Land Before Time works because they're dinosaurs.

Saying a story is worthy of being told by measuring the verisimilitude of its plot devices has to be one of the brain-dead takes I've heard in a long while, if not ever...

Walter White was not forced to sell drugs. Breaking Bad is clear about it. He had access to money, his friend offered.

Walter White liked selling drugs. It was pride, ego and appeal of it all. That was one of the key things about his character. He was not a victim.

And in Canada that egotistic, prideful man would not have lost face by going to the public healthcare system. It would just have been a Tuesday.

Living in a ruthless place brings out the war lords among us. Let's not.

The blocker is experimentation and trials. Mathematics and code lives in "virtual" space. Virtual space is nice because everything is infinitely faster than real life.

It really doesn't matter much if AI can make the perfect drug instantly. We will still have to give it to humans, then wait, then observe. Perfect simulation doesn't fix this because the human body is not a mathematical model. It's not just that the human body is really complicated, it's that there are many bodies and how systems interact can't necessarily be predicted ahead of time.

And, even if you could perfectly predict how a drug will function for any arbitrary person, we'd never be okay with just that. No, we'd require cold-hard experiments to show it is safe and effective. There are many, many potential drugs that are, on paper, perfect. But, in reality, worthless.

It's close, the purpose of bureaucracy is better controls, auditability, accountability, and security. All of those not only take time, they are "made up" of time. There's a trade-off with efficiency, it's inherent to the problem. The faster you do something, the less chance you have to prevent catastrophe. So, if you slow things down, intentionally, you have a better chance of making the right decisions.

It's why approval processes exist. If everyone was perfectly aligned and made no mistakes, then we would never need approval processes for, say, customer data. We would just allow even the lowest on the ladder to access any data they want, whenever they want, no questions asked. And it would be fine, because they would only use it to make their job faster, no downside. But it doesn't work that way in reality. In reality, we have to purposefully slow things down so we get a chance to reflect.

> It's close, the purpose of bureaucracy is better controls, auditability, accountability, and security. All of those not only take time, they are "made up" of time. There's a trade-off with efficiency, it's inherent to the problem. The faster you do something, the less chance you have to prevent catastrophe.

Except that the trade off is frequently a false dichotomy. Some of the best and most effective controls are automated systems. The audit logs from a computer are dramatically more likely to be accurate than ones filled out on paper by hand. A pressure relief valve doesn't get the flu and then have someone filling in for them who isn't as experienced at doing it manually.

The slower you do something, the more likely you are to miss something important because you exhausted your time/resources on something unimportant, or that the process gets burdensome enough to cause the people on the ground to bypass it in its entirety.

It's also common for the output of a process to itself be critical for safety, security, health, etc., and then any delays to the process make its output unavailable when its output being available can be a matter of life or death. This one is especially hard to see in a bureaucratic environment because people frequently aren't aware of everything which is downstream of them that they could be holding up.

It's fine if everyone realizes they are rough sketches, specs, or prototypes. But programmers have hubris, developed through many years of writing shitty code they have to burn to the ground. Other professionals often don't have that hubris. The power of writing code goes straight to their head. Programmers are trying to write the least code possible to do what they need to do, because they know every single line is a liability. A company liability, and a personal liability, because they're the one that will have to fix it when things go wrong. I think people who are not programmers don't always understand that, and they are extra isolated from it because ultimately they don't maintain or fix their stuff. Some other poor soul does, so out of sight out of mind.

Even managed solutions are just mitigations, the "problem" is coding. Computer programs can do anything. This was gated before by knowledge, only coders could effectively write software, including malware and poor-security software. Now anybody can write software.

The corporate computer is a locked-down environment, the set of actions you can perform are limited. They ideally should be the actions you need to do your job, and nothing more. Any method of writing and executing code breaks that wide open - you can now do anything, given enough time and effort. Now the time and effort floors have fallen, too.

Claude Managed Agents might prevent the agents themselves from doing something nefarious, sure. But that was never the draw of AI. The ideal use of AI is doing the least amount of stuff with AI, and the most amount of stuff with code. Asking AI to sort my email? That's good, but writing a program to do that is better. Asking AI to do statistical analysis of my trades? Again, sure, but it's even better to write a program to do that.

There’s also levels to censorship, like the chilling effect the other commenter noted.

Apple, evidently, does not want you to say these things. They can’t outright ban phrases due to optics, so they do this instead.

It’s the other way around. Apple don’t want to suggest offensive phases and have it look like they wants you to say those things.

The middle ground here is to not suggest anything at all. Because they’re either pushing people to say something or preventing them from saying something.

The HN crowd forgets that average people don’t know how technology works. Everyone I know would see this as a good feature.

Give them the same position as the people who implemented that feature and it would most likely come out worse.

This should be a preference then, just like in video games where profanity can either be shown or hidden in multiplayer chats. Then it makes the user aware this exists as a feature and gives them control over it.

My rule of thumb in software is: if there's enough of a dispute on how something should work, it should probably turn into a preference available to users. It's adds scope, but it respects user choice in places where it matters.

Building software long enough I've realized that the valuable part is your vision of it. The opinionated part. There's no toggle to allow p0rn in the app store, and that's good. We can argue about user choice, but undeniably even if such a toggle existed, more users would fall into addiction. Environment matters more than "self control" or "discipline".

I agree with you (on certain types of software), and I also don't see Apple as the be-all and end-all or assume that its opinions are always right. This is just my opinion based on my lived experience, both as a user and as an engineer.

Basically everyone in the US even kind of wealthy or with any political power owns property. When you own property, the best move in your self interest is to not build more property. Many upper-middle-class peoples wealth is held entirely in their property.

There’s basically no political will anywhere to make it easier to build.

Yes, but not because advertising lets people know about Coke. The people who still know about Coke would be the same after a year, I imagine.

The mechanism of how advertising works seems to be not that. I think repeatedly brand exposure does something to the brain and decision making that we don’t fully understand.

Familiarity, I think.

Exposure breeds familiarity, which breeds desire, I think.

Even if all you hear is an occasional ad about the company, you might get curious and research them yourself.

Yes this is C, C is not strongly typed at all and the type system is very primitive. NULL ptr is the return value you should probably use if something goes wrong. But you can’t, say, return a sum type with the result and an error. It’s not uncommon at all to use magic sentinel values in C to indicate error conditions.