Wow, I think I might just have a fundamentally and axiomatically different worldview from this guy. American society is oriented almost entirely towards productivity, to the detriment of all else. The owner class has made it their personal mission to squeeze the population for all the productivity they can. It required government intervention to end, for example, slavery and child labor. Billionaires, especially the "productive" ones, are actively hollowing out the country for their benefit. I think it is astronomically rare, if not impossible, to acquire One Billion dollars without unethical behavior.
I cannot comprehend the connection between productivity and democracy that he tries to draw here. So there is some nebulous productivity score, and if you have a negative number, then democracy is over? Nobody can vote? What happens? And being a good person is stapled exclusively to productivity? The only value a person brings to the world is whether they've been "net positive"? This is a remarkably narrowminded conception of personal virtue, discounting relationships, classical virtues, etc., and instead crunching it all down to whether you're in the black or the red when the accountant calls.
"The unproductive rich are in cahoots with the unproductive poor to take from you." is a genuinely bonkers thing to think. Cahoots? Are they communicating methods to steal your hard earned "productivity" from you, or what? The "unproductive poor" are a downstream effect of a society where productivity is tied to whether or not you can stay alive.
Additionally, (but not centrally) this whole piece has a call-to-action tone to it, implying that, now the author has weighed in, everyone has to get a grip and start acting right. "Private equity, market manipulators, real estate, sales, lawyers, lobbyists. This is no longer okay." Alright everyone, I'm putting my foot down! Annoying, but not a core problem.
The strange thing is that I agree with the end goal. Yes, there is a rent-seeking/email-job class of society that adds no value. Yes, manual/physical labor should be treated better. Yes, productivity is largely desirable, and society would benefit overall if we produced more. But he gets to these conclusions in such a strange and stilted way. Overall, I really dislike this blog post.
My experience with Haskell has been the same. The GHC provides stellar feedback, so the LLM is almost always able to bang the code into working order, but wow is that code bloated.
My waybar just shows the time in the center, my network status, and my battery health. It’s very minimalist. I went without entirely for a while, but I missed having the time there at a glance.
Niri is pretty, but I find sway to be faster. Hotkeys and instant switch is just better (for me). I will continue to experiment, but sway feels more productive currently.
You can disable animations in Niri, which makes switching instantaneous. Since switching from sway to niri (with a minor detour via hyprland), I found that Niri's scrolling tiling matches much more closely how I work with windows.
As a side note, I found that Niri uses less battery for me than both sway and hyprland.
niri's nice too. I used to daily drive it, but I don't remember why I stopped using it. Nowadays, I just WM hop, I've used Hyprland, labwc, and Pop Shell with GNOME so far, but dwl looks promising to me.
Thanks! It's interesting how easy it is to move the goalposts on product vision. It has come such a long way since the beginning, but I still wake up every day thinking about how much more I feel compelled to build.
Neuralviz is definitely surreal but I wouldn’t call it shitposting. It’s hand-written satire scripts with gen-ai video (honestly quite well done if you go through a bunch of them).
> The whole point is mainly one about being honest about WHY we have to work 40-60 hours a week so we can stretch to afford a million-dollar starter home, two luxury cars, designer clothes, and IG-worthy vacations.
I have never met a single person of my generation for which this holds true. If this is the perspective that the author is trying to refute, fine, but I cannot say that it is a common one.
> $200,000 in savings would give you $10k a year in interest income to live on at current rates, for instance.
Come on. Most Americans will never see $200K in their life. [1]
Okay, but we are reading this on HN. Anyone working for the past 10 years in tech should have that much saved up easily. If for the past 10 years you put just $400 a month into SPY and did nothing else, you'd have about $95,000. About 126k for QQQ. [0]
And I don't think most people can't afford to save $400 a month. Lots of people save that much.
I didn't mean to assume anything about the whole world, but we are talking about ourselves here, so our situations matter to us. I read the article as a thought experiment that is available to me personally and many others, even if it isn't practical for literally every human being.
One might argue that everything we produce lends itself to some kind of consumption. Moreover, not all actions lead to tangible "products", but they can lead to useful results and experiences. Sports and games are an example.
Perhaps production tends towards consumption but not the opposite. If I make music I'll probably listen to it. But I can easily listen to music without making it.
And agree sports are an interesting example. It kind of fits my mental model of consumption in many ways: something you do that's primary effect transforms you. Watching TV, playing a game, etc. The effect being something chemical that is satisfying. I guess with sports or exercise the internal change is more physical (muscle, endurance, etc) vs chemical. Although I suppose you are acting on the world as well - you are scoring a point or advancing a position. It's just more ephemeral (ends when game ends) and arbitrary.
Im sure even just in terms of chemical reactions there is going to be a clean split between stuff like playing video games or watching TV vs. sports, building something, etc. Dopamine vs... ?
This opens an interesting possibility for a purely symbol-based legal code. This would probably improve clarity when it came to legal phrases that overlap common English, and you could avoid ambiguity when it came to language constructs, like in this case[1], where some drivers were losing overtime pay because of a comma in the overtime law.
