Reddit is not all things for all people. There's a popular /. consensus that they hate the politics discussion. I don't give a rat's ass. I don't want to "dunk on liberals" or berate conservatives. I want to see new tools for my hobbies, rumors about upcoming product developments, discussion of technique or troubleshooting, etc. My joy in life is doing hobbies, not having "real discussions of complicated topics." That sounds like homework.

Usenet was an echochamber for like minded, technically-skilled individuals. It was great for Linux and programming and maybe some extremely male-oriented bands and movie genres, like heavy metal or star trek. There were barely any women and few who weren't computer enthusiasts. I don't want to talk to LARP-ers and tech workers. They're at my day job.

I want to hear from chefs, cooks, DIY-ers, artists, artisans, plant enthusiasts, dog lovers, perverts, people from far away, and people who are nerdy about thing other than computers, especially those I'd encounter naturally. I was able to get very specific advice on my specific niche interest in a very specific species of succulent houseplants and how to fertilize them...or how to fix my ailing blueberry bush. I get more joy from that than ranting about wokeness, the DSA, or Gen-Z or whatever assholes enjoy bitching about these days. There are subreddits that have art challenges that allow me share my drawings and painting of very specialized niche interest with a worldwide audience...something that would have been my dream as a teenager.

Reddit is not perfect, but if you can't see why it is so superior, then your interests extremely narrow and I feel sorry for you. I wish you had more that brought you joy in life than argument and controversy, for your sake as a human being, alone.

Reddit's beauty and joy is fully it's network and community. Their practices as a business are hit or miss, but I do applaud them for the bot/spam management. It's far better than I've seen on usenet, forums, or any other form of social media, especially X and facebook.

Nope, definitely not. I remember usenet well and used it often. It was nothing but a nerd echo chamber. It was great for autistic dedication to a specific male-oriented band or discussing Linux and garbage for anything more civilian. Also, the spam was legendary. Reddit's strength is their bot management and diverse network. My hobbies involve non-nerds, like chefs, artisans, artists, mechanics, DIY folks, as well as nerds. If my only interest was programming, sure, usenet is great. If I wanted to do anything involving arts and crafts?...it was desolate.

Some places do that. It doesn't help. Many countries have tried cash payouts that far exceed the diaper budget. Also, rich people tend to have similar numbers of kids to middle class folks. The main barriers to having more kids is housing and support. Most high paying jobs are in areas with expensive real estate, so having room is a massive issue, but even if we had enough housing, most parents can't fathom having a 3rd kid because having 2 is such a struggle today. You have to do sliding scale daycare and have LOTS of it, which you implied. In my area, most daycares have a 3-6 month waiting period. But daycare only helps the first 2 kids. You have to do more: free pre-K and afterschool programs to replace daycare once your kids get older. Even if you're wealthy enough to have a stay-at-home parent, the burden of the family gets overwhelming and most quit after 3.

Countries with great support networks have managed to raise their birthrate. The only proven way to raise the birthrate is to support the motivated to have 4 or more, including putting as much of the burden on the state to raise the kid, if the family chooses to. It's EXPENSIVE, but so is finding yourself in a nursing home in your twilight years with a massive personnel shortage of people to take care of you....as well as a lack of taxpayers to fund everything you depend on ranging from gov to basic industry.

That's only 1 variable. It's been tried to disappointing results. You can double everyone's salary and it will barely make a dent. If you've had kids and a working wife, you know how bad it gets. The good jobs? They're in expensive real estate areas....nearly everywhere in the world. So houses are hard to find, daycare is hard to find, and support is terrible once you have a kid.

Once people get a job in the city, they don't want kids. You can't make someone want them. All you can do is make existing parents have more. So you're never going to get every couple to churn out 3 kids, but you can make families of 1 or 2 have 3 or 5. However, support is the main factor. Work is a massive burden and even if your wife isn't working, many kids is a massive burden.

Data has shown that incentives don't make a lick of difference, but support programs have. Sliding scale daycare is 1 great way to get people to have their 1st or 2nd kid. However, if you want anyone to have more than 2, you need support for older children: sliding scale daycare for young ones and free afterschool programs for older kids.

Additionally, you need to alter the culture for parenting flexibility. That's tricky because the gov can only set rules for gov jobs. My job is great about it. I can step out during the morning or afternoon for a school event and make the hours in the evening. Jobs that are rigid and stuck in the past are a huge burden for families. Even if you have a stay-at-home mom, the dad needs the flexibility to be involved with his kids' lives if you want families to go past 2 kids.

More money is not the main problem. It's a huge one, but the bigger issue is lack of resources. Daycares in my area require a 6 month application process. Spots go often. It's harder to get into daycare in some areas than many ivy league universities.

It's not cheap, but sliding scale childcare and LOTS of it, will help the birth rate, help families, and be a MASSIVE stimulus since nearly every dollar is paying for human labor for a segment of unskilled (no formal training) women, most of which are very young or very old. But even the programs for older go out to a diverse pool of individuals and are great investments in future citizens to build skills and a sense of community.

However, many gov have tried throwing money at the problem and hoping for the best. It's easy, but it just doesn't work well. It requires a lot of follow through since the resistance to reproducing is very complex and the causes are many and you can have infinite money. So long as you have a job or other responsibilities, it's a huge load. Reducing the load reduces the friction to the 3rd kid and beyond.

Put simply, you have to make it EASY to have kids. Nothing else really works.

They're massively popular and the best forum site I've seen for every interest of mine. There has NEVER been anything like it thusfar. I've never seen a site control bots as well as they do. Reddit has literally changed my life because it allowed me to engage in my various hobbies much moreso than I have been able to before with a diverse group of people of varying technical prowess. It's the king example of the network effect.

I am VERY happy with them because I have a long memory and remembered what it was like before them: having a login for each forum and the chaos of poorly-managed message boards...plus limited participation for non-technical interests.

The API had a lot more downsides for me and most users than benefit. Shitty websites were scraping Reddit and saving your old posts, including deleted one and monetizing them. Then every AI scammer was scraping it to build their models and contributing nothing in return. I am honestly happier with Reddit when it's used on their terms. I know abusers were a small fraction of the API users, but they really were ruining a good thing for lots of reasons.

Many think bananas perish too fast. If they want to GMO some more shelf-stable bananas, it will allow farmers to sell more crops and more people to enjoy them. There are countless benefits to produce that is more robust to transmit. VERY FEW of us live anywhere near where bananas actually grow. Now...if you've got some hatred for GMO foods?...fine...let's just label things and let the market decide.

I don't want to force you to eat GMOs if it's against your beliefs. However, don't scold those who are trying to do something good for humanity. I am fine with GMOs, especially if they're more nutritious or cheaper. I'd like to pay less for my fruit or ensure my local grocer makes a little more money selling them.

In Chicago in 2024, there were 586 homocides in Chicago and 6 fatal police involved shootings. When you live in a bad neighborhood you're 195x more likely to be killed by a criminal than a cop. Again...I don't want to be killed by a police officer, but the probability is MUCH MUCH MUCH more likely that I will be killed by a routine criminal.

So...they were a victim of a crime. The criminal happened to be a law enforcement officer. So you're advocating for less police? no police? I clearly stated that EVERYONE who lives in a ghetto or bad neighborhood wants BETTER police and often more of them. Whether or not your assailant was a cop, professional criminal or random mentally ill person, only privileged people in comfort can scream ABJECT STUPIDITY like ACAB or "defund the police". For the rest, the rely on the cops to protect them from worse people. And yeah, if someone is going to bring a criminal cop to justice, it will be some branch of law enforcement.

No one is saying police are perfect, and they should be held accountable for all crimes and every application of force should be appropriately scrutinized and investigated. However, you're comparing bullets and bee-stings. Both kill people. However, I'll wager you'd rather walk through a flower garden with buzzing bees than an active shootout.

You're absolutely correct. The hardcore rightwing nutjobs will twist the truth any way to ensure their narrative survives, even if it means completely denying reality, but there are many voters who are in play who are not hardcore. They're often not well informed, so they hear from their right wing nutjob buddy that the democrats want to bring communism and abolish the police...and their left of center friends scold them for not picking up the nuance of their horrible messaging and branding. Remember, the couch is always on the ballot. Lots just hate politics and stay home unless you motivate them.

The best parallel is UX. You can make your website idiot-proof and intuitive and compelling....or you can make it however you want and scold anyone who can't figure out what you had in mind....say that they're the problem because they're not smart enough to figure out your genius ideas....good luck with that if you want to actually win an election.

True, and they should be prosecuted as criminals. However, if your anger is directed more towards the police generally than the violent criminals they are hired to protect you against, I will be dollars to donuts, you're upper middle class and writing from a very safe neighborhood. Congrats to you! It's an accomplishment to be wealthy enough that you don't think about being a victim of violent crime. I didn't get there until my late 20s, myself. I couldn't help being born in poverty where I was much more afraid of the lawless than law enforcement.

Today, I live in an expensive neighborhood and can walk my dog at night and not be paranoid watching for people following me or emerging from dark corners or just random junkies and drunks looking for conflict. I can't remember the last time someone threatened my safety since moving away from Chicago. When I was in college, getting home after my night shift job was an adventure. It was a 15 minute walk and everyone who knew I did it, thought I was crazy for doing so. And yeah, multiple times, I had to walk faster to avoid someone following me. I got attacked in the subway by some teenagers for no fucking reason. I got mugged and jumped twice. I had to be careful not to make eye contact with the wrong person as I was walking down the street minding my own business. That's what life is like for many people in bad neighborhoods.

Anyone who has someone close to them who experienced stuff like that has a more nuanced opinion than "cops are bad." The people who live there? Like I said before, they want better cops...not less cops. They want to be protected from violent criminals. For you, they're clearly a theoretical concern, like bears and sharks for me. For someone who avoids them frequently?...crime is a massive issue and daily stress. Cops should be prosecuted for any crimes they commit, everyone agrees to that (even the unions say as much, in theory, although they clearly don't do it well enough in practice). There is lots of room for improvement. However, the last thing the victims of police brutality want is for the cops to disappear, because they're the vulnerable in society who rely on them.

Did you seriously just "ackchyually" us? It doesn't matter what it means to you. It doesn't matter what it officially means. My vote has never mattered because I've only lived in blue states. It matters what it means to people in swing states. He who explains, loses. I know exactly what you mean it doesn't fucking matter, the perception by those exposed to right wing media is that "Defund the Police" is a nicer way of saying abolish them.

Also, defunding really does imply reducing police presence and effectiveness, so perhaps that saying should be dropped entirely. It's failed messaging, at best.

Again, I'm not voting for a Trump 3rd term nor will I vote for a Republican for the foreseeable future....but hey, keep repeating "defund the police" and "ackchyually" anyone who uses the common definition instead of the one you think is best. It's a real winner politically!!!!

I'm the fucking messenger, dude. You're campaigning for the Republican Party and Trumpism, presumably unwittingly.

A difference between you and is that I was actually a victim of violent crime and lived in the ghetto on the South Side of Chicago for 5 years in the 90s and I grew up near an even worse ghetto as a child. I got used to going to sleep at night with the sound of gunfire. When I first moved, I naively asked someone why people set off fireworks every night. I knew a dozen cops by name just from my neighborhood and I knew another dozen from my student jobs. I only know a few now because I live in an expensive gentrified neighborhood. You must be fucking privileged to spout that bullshit. Now that I have a good job and expensive house, yeah, the police are a theoretical concern.

When I was living in Chicago and being violently assaulted for no reason on the subway once or mugged a few times as well as followed, they were people I was very glad to see. All Cops Are not Bastards. In my experience, even as a mixed race person, they're quite nice to you if you are nice to them.

Police brutality is a crime. Stalking people is crime. Some cops are criminals and need to be punished.

However, if I was living on the South Side of Chicago, I can tell you that everyone there who wasn't a criminal would tell you they wanted more cops and better ones, not less. They don't want them defunded...maybe augmented with social workers?...sure, but everyone who lives around crime eventually needs a cop to save them or prosecute someone who committed a crime against them. They hung out at White Hen a lot (like 7-11) and I'd make conversation with them when I saw them.

If the police are enemy #1 in your mind, you are QUITE ignorant of the ways of the world. The police are not perfect and have a LOT of room to improve, but they're not your enemy. Only those who grew up with silver spoons in their mouth have the luxury to say stupid shit like ACAB. For those of us who relied on them to keep us safe from FAR WORSE people...we were glad they were there...wish bad cops didn't do shitty things and want to see them held appropriately accountable, but we WANT effective police who follow the law.

Once you experience violent crime for yourself, you'll find your simplistic thinking as cringe as the rest of society does.

You're welcome to your opinion, but every cop I know today or have met would not condone this. There are approximately 737,000 full-time sworn law enforcement officers employed in the United States, according to recent Statista data. So a few assholes doing 1000s of searches, thinking they wouldn't be held accountable doesn't seem like a conspiracy to me. It seems like a few shitty cops thinking the rules don't apply to them.

Also, fuck off with the Defund the Police talk unless you're actively campaigning for a Trump 3rd term. Police who commit crimes need to be held accountable, just like citizens. You don't punish the entire police force. The same people that are victims of police misconduct are the most dependent on them to keep them safe from far worse criminals.

Look, you're having an emotional overreaction to misdeeds by police officers. However, if you're going to say "defund the police" I'm going to tell you to fuck off....that stupid shit helped get Trump elected. That makes people think democractic voters and liberals are a bunch of children with no common sense. There are a lot of people who never liked Democrats, but also don't like that diesel is $6.50 a gallon and that we're definitely not winning this war in Iran at the moment and the "dept of war" doesn't appear to have a clear plan. Some are finally seeing that "yeah, trump IS as corrupt as everyone said." Many votes are in play this Nov. Not as many as there should be, but there are folks that are curious as to what it would be like if grownups ran the gov and are considering not voting Republican... If they think the choice is more trumpism or nuts saying "Defund the Police" then you're really not making the alternatives compelling.

If you want to defund flock?...there's a reasonable argument there. However, I think you'd be a lot less smug and confident if it was your car that was stolen and the thief would have been caught if the cops could use an automated license plate reader, but were forbidden to because some dipshit stalked his ex. I don't know the right answer. I don't like cops committing crimes and stalking women. Apparently the ones in this report are having some sort of accountability, which seems good on the surface. However, I also want people harming me and and my family or stealing our stuff easily. I want to make life more difficult for criminals. So I don't think the answer is "Flock for everyone without a warrant or due process"...nor is it "No one can use surveillance technology in law enforcement ever!" The right answer is somewhere in the middle, IMHO.

If you were in Silicon Valley?...that tracks. Same with Seattle and probably a few other major cities with then current tech stalwarts. If you lived in middle America, the jobs sucked. They paid OK, but they were constantly laying people off. It was a high stress, low-security environment. Most programmers didn't work for tech companies, they worked in industry implementing software.

Most companies looked at software as an expense and few saw it as an investment and were eager to cut it whenever they could. They knew they needed it, but they wanted to have as small of crews as possible. My sister and all her friends were constantly getting laid off. The ones who remained were perpetually insecure.

When I entered the workforce, the greybeards would also tell stories about how they were mistreated. I was smart enough to move to a better city, but even in a tech city, it definitely scarred the generation before me. In the 80s, there were many, especially in Middle America, who got jobs for major corporations writing software. They loved it and were good at it...and they were laid off within 5 years or their company closed down and recessions were more frequent then for tech workers, so they often were competing in a saturated market. Quite a few just gave up and went into teaching or something else.

When I entered the workforce, the greybeards I met?...I am confident they couldn't get work outside the industry without a LOT of fundamental changes to everything about them. Now they're generally smart, so I am sure they could pivot to real estate, teaching, or whatever your choice of backup career is if they really really really put their mind to it, but it would be anything but smooth or pretty.

The job market improved DRASTICALLY after the dot-com boom because even the biggest idiot MBAs could clearly see technology as an investment with a clear line of sight to growth and not just an expense, which probably isn't paying for itself. This led to programming being a good choice for a career and not something you suffered through because you loved it.

You don't remember the 80s well. Programmers did smaller scoped work that accomplished less. It was much harder to do back then and their tools were limited. it wasn't their fault. However, it wasn't fun. Languages that managed memory, like Java...as well as easier programming languages, like JavaScript and Python attracted a lot of people who enjoyed coding. It brought in a lot of scientists and creative individuals that wrote amazing stuff. The majority of code before 1995?...those SHITTY text-based indecipherable client server apps that you saw in insurance companies, hospitals, and car dealerships. They SUCKED, did very little, and were so hard to use, you had to train EVERYONE who touched them for several days just to figure out the esoteric convoluted interface.

OK, so you didn't mind the ancient text-based client/server apps?...well they crashed often. GUIs were usually worse. Did you forget having your apps crash DAILY? Windows crashed daily and as an early Desktop Linux adopter, I can say the OS didn't crash much at all, but everything I ran outside a terminal did. So I suppose it's faster to restart Netscape than Window, but still...today? I only have 1 app that crashes often : Oracle's SQL Developer....a total piece of Larry-Ellison-grade-grift-and-garbage. Beyond that?...nope, thanks to frameworks and memory-safe languages...or just programmers getting better at their craft, crashes are very rare in my daily life. I never have to save my work often thinking my IDE or text editor or e-mail program will crash any minute.

Regarding personalities? Yeah, obviously not every programmer is socially dysfunctional in the 80s. But every one I met?...definitely so. My sister would let me visit her office when I was 12 and I thought it was the coolest thing going to a big city office for a big company. All of my sister's friends? They had cool toys, but were tough to be around and hold a conversation with, even when you thought they were super cool and I was into everything they were into. Even as a young child I met them and said to myself "I love that you have all the cool video games and electronics and a really fast car, but I can't see you ever getting a girlfriend with that massive belly, your girl arms, your ill-fitting t-shirt and gross beard that looks like it needs to be washed...and certainly your personality can't be helping."

Many were cool, I am sure, but let's be real, well over 75% would not have thrived in other industries. It would take a LOT of adjustment for them to thrive in sales or healthcare or any environment that required more interaction with people than machines.

There are many smart people in the 80s that could have been programmers, but unless they were in a few tech cities, they chose medicine, research, finance, law, or accounting for better pay and job security (layoffs were very common back then...software was seen as a nuisance overhead expense more than an investment by most outside the tech business).

I think the office is better with some diversity. Not just gender/racial, but background and thought patterns. I don't want to go back to gatekeeping and making programming for the hardcore only. I will thrive. I'm good at my job, but the people I enjoy working with the most will probably find something else less stressful/hostile.

Counterpoint, Until the late 90s, programming was the domain of the autistic and severely mathematically inclined. In most areas, the pay sucked, and their output sucked even more. It was a hostile environment everywhere but in the bay area and Seattle...maybe a few others. My (much) older sister was a COBOL programmer...her life sucked. She was grateful to be laid off with severance and start a career elsewhere. Hearing about her experiences made me recosinder a programming job...I was great at writing code, but didn't want to live her life. Luckily the dot com boom pulled me back in.

Would you rather have the software of today or the software of 1995? Let's be real, most programmers before the internet couldn't find good work outside of working with programmers. They lacked the soft skills to work anywhere, but in front of a computer, FAR away from customers.

The programmers today certainly aren't as hardcore as those in the 80s, myself included, but we make MUCH MUCH MUCH better stuff. Plus I like diverse work environments. I've even got Asperger's and my version of hell is being trapped in a room full of hardcore autistic engineers who obsess about micro-optimizations (which happens to be a passion of mine).

We don't want shitty programmers, but we also don't want to scare off creative people with options. There's a nice balance. Plus it's nice to have at least a few coworkers who aren't white or Asian. We want to hire passionate people who put a lot of love into the craft.

AI is really killing programming. It's simply not fun. You write something by hand and put love and good work into it and you feel like a dinosaur failing your manager telling you to have Claude write it all...with a sense of guilt wondering "did I take longer than Claude and waste money?"

Then I do the opposite and have Claude write something simple (which is what my bosses want us to do). Today, it was writing a unit test for some underloved code I inherited. I wrote the skeleton and 1 test by hand to show Claude how it's done and told it to replicate the pattern for the other 16 endpoints. It took nearly all day, probably cost a ton of money and the output is SHIT. I keep refining things and pointing out mistakes and it just creates this indecipherable convoluted mess. Now I'm doubting myself. I had a simple functional project...here is an input, assert the output....why is it 10,000 lines of Java? I had to go helper method by helper method and tell it to use extremely common annotations in the classpath which we use elsewhere than write it's own bullshit.

Each minor optimization like "on method fuckMeUpTheAssWithABroomSideways(), the try/catch isn't needed. Use @SneakyThrows instead"...something an IDE plugin can do in 5 seconds, takes 10 minutes on Claude Opus 5.0. It'll copy and paste it's own code to an insane degree. It's SOOOO stupid that it makes me doubt my sanity and eyesight. Surely Claude isn't STUPID enough to copy/paste a boilerplate function into 5 classes within 1 single session?!?!....These 5 methods must be different somehow. "I" must be wrong because there's no way an AI can be THIS stupid..... Nope, I was right, so I told Claude to stop it....another 15 minutes to change 1 method to public, delete the 4 copy/paste and statically import the new remaining method 4x.

So the final product is of poor quality, took longer than it would have taken me to write it myself, and I feel ashamed to release it. But my boss is happy with me and thinks I did the right thing.

AI certainly hasn't made my life better. I can't recommend this career path as enthusiastically as I used to. When people ask me today, I tell them. "I really have no clue if your kid should become a programmer today. He/she needs to figure this out on their own. " But regardless, it would be nice to have coworkers who were talented enough to choose software development over other options...not just the duds who couldn't make it anywhere where human interaction was required.