Star Trek, tech companies, and the death of futurism in cinema - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/adventures-in-consumer-technology/7e7dc993b4fd <comment><USER2> I guess I was watching a different movie, because I saw:

\- advanced handheld medical scanners and treatments

\- a genetically engineered human with super strength, health, and intelligence

\- suspended animation that keeps humans alive for centuries

\- artificial gravity

\- faster than light communication and travel

\- materials strong enough to maintain structural integrity after falling from space and plowing through a city

\- matter transference across light years

I think the issue here is that author only paid attention to the elements that seem familiar, and dismissed the rest as fantasy. Of course handheld communicators and tablet computers were once fantasy too.

<comment><USER3> The discussion here demonstrates the problem.

So lets take a moment and think about what we see vs what we do.

So if you take the Internet and extend it to its logical next step we've got 20 - 40gbits of bandwidth between everyone and everyone else.

We've got parallel rendering pipelines and physics simulation such that you can render a scene that is indistinguishable from reality to our poor brains, and then you can project all the moving pieces between any group of people.

So in a plausible future everyone is sitting inside a brain jar experiencing a 'shared world' in what is not unlike a giant World of Warcraft type experience, including the ability to do magic, conjure things out of thin air. While nutrients feed what's left of our bodies.

Is that exciting? Does that make for dramatic movies? No. But sadly it is the current path we are on.

<comment><USER4> What makes you think this isn't our present?

<comment><USER3> That isn't the question though, once you know you are living in a simulation what happens? This was a very interesting question that was raised in the TV show Caprica (a Battlestar Galactica prequel series). If you know it is a simulation then you can just do what ever the heck you want, reboot/restart when necessary. Doesn't make for interesting cinema or literature as the question of future value / future outcome vs present action / inaction is what creates tension.

<comment><USER5> The tension could come from others not knowing they're in a simulation. Oh, The Matrix.

As always, Gren Egan has done this stuff too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I had this very thought while in the movie theater. However, I chalked it up to being a re-launch of a franchise with a _very_ established lore and universe.

This isn't just a "movie about the future". It's _Star Trek_. With legacy comes baggage. I'm sure there's a small encyclopedia detailing the available technology at the time the movie takes place, as well as potentially canonical books, stories, graphic novels, etc. In this context, the writers have limited wiggle room in which to dream up "tomorrow's technology".

On the flipside, it's also a bit inspiring to see that some of that which was considered sci-fi less than a generation ago is now hum-drum reality.

<comment><USER7> Plus since it's (kinda) supposed to be a prequel to NextGen/DS9/Voyager it has to cram itself into that thin wedge between more futuristic than now and noticeably less futuristic than we imagined a decade ago.

<comment><USER8> Let's talk about this thin wedge (hopefully without spoilers). I understand that this is a relaunch of the series but I think they did it wrong. It probably would've been blasphemy to throw it all out the door, and 'historically' the same things can happen but they really should be ignoring everything from TOS.

Will we see VGER? The monolith from 'Voyage Home' (ST4) must make an appearance, right? I mean we have to assume that whales are still extinct in the alternate timeline. Will Praxis explode resulting in 'Undiscovered Country' (ST6)?

<comment><USER9> I think you missed the point of the reboot, Vulcan was destroyed, the time- line forever altered, this crew isn't going to re-live the events of the original crew.

<comment><USER8> Is that really true? Avoiding spoilers apparently this most recent movie has proved otherwise.

Vulcan being destroyed doesn't stop VGER and it doesn't stop the monolith. It probably does change the Klingons so maybe 'Undiscovered Country' doesn't happen.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I think Star Trek is a bad example, as it's seen as such a prime example of 'good' that it's hard for modern directors/producers to deviate too much from the original feel of the material (beyond modern cinematic tropes).

Prior to seeing Star Trek, I watched Oblivion, which seemed to me full of futurism -- it had a ship that had a novel (to modern cinema) ship design, 'drone' design, antagonist design. I think we live in a world that is quickly gaining the capability of creating our ideas, so those things that were fantastical in the 70s but trope today are not as easy to devine today.

I was just thinking the other day that I sincerely enjoy how Scifi is quickly becoming a mainstay of modern film, because it means more scifi films to invent some novel idea of the future. You really should not be basing your assumptions of modern cinema off of a _remake_.

<comment><USER11> I found Oblivion to be an homage to some of the best sci-fi over the past few decades (Moon, The Matrix, Independence Day), an effect that was ruined by the feeling that it took itself too seriously to _realize_ it was an homage.

In terms of derivative sci-fi, I think Oblivion really reinforces the author's point.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> In immigrant circles, we lament this notion that the first generation works its ass off, the second generation studies its ass off, and the third generation parties its ass off. I think that what we see in cinema is kind of linked.

America post-WWII worked and studied its ass off. Then it defeated the Soviets. You ask people today though, what they think of the future, and I think that the picture is bleak not merely because of the economic malaise, but because people don't know what to strive for.

In a competitive sense, who are we fighting? Our ostensible enemies are (1) the lunatic fringe of Islam and maybe also Christianity, and (2) China/India, depending on who looks more fearful in any given year, except the West also trades and intermarries with those cultures. I think the kicker is that Westerners don't even fetish after Chinese and Indians the way they used to.

Now in a purely constructive sense, what does the future hold? Well we've already seen that the tech industry simply isn't providing jobs for most people the way that manufacturing did. And why should it? Lets face it, our culture is not one that really values math or science or engineering. Most of you weren't popular when you were kids, am I right? It's not nice to hoard all of the pie, but it's not easy to share it on these terms either. The best programmers are supposedly 10x-100x better than the average ones, so even if more people did get into tech, they'd probably be discouraged and see it to be insurmountably difficult, and they might be right.

Tech has increased the productivity of workers in the West, but it has not necessarily increased the well-being of the average person, and that's what cinema was originally made for. It is a mass media. It caters to the common man, and the common man probably thinks better of the past than the future. I think it isn't surprising then that the latest Star Trek actually feels strangely like a retro-future, or that the tech in it is just shiny polished toys. I think that's the real danger here, that in tech, we will simply just relegate ourselves to making shiny toys for people, and all they do is consume. That's probably not the path to a healthy future for our society.

It may be instructive to look at a series like Firefly, or even BSG. When people are feeling down, they want to be empathized, and Firefly assuages that in a way. In the future, even if things all go to hell, some people will still make it out, by the ties they share and their ingenuity.

<comment><USER13> >but it has not necessarily increased the well-being of the average person

2000-2010 was the greatest decade in all of human history for upraising the standard of living of the human race as a whole. The attitude in this entire comments thread sickens me.

<comment><USER14> Human history is a story of people nostalgic for the past, believing things are going to hell, oblivious to improvements.

When I was born two big countries had nuclear weapons pointed at each other with the very realistic possibility of exchange. Everything we built could be eradicated in an hour or two. We are quite better off.

<comment><USER15> I'm reminded of a history class I had relatively recently. We were talking about the cold war, and the issue of modern terrorism came up. My history teacher made the point that, looking back, many people are nostolgic because in the cold war, the president could pick up the phone to the soviets and talk to someone rational.

I doubt anyone at the time thought that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This is a great point. I was wondering what about the new Star Trek movie made me unhappy, beyond the Michael Bay-esque explosions and off-topic banter between characters, the annoying contemporary compulsion to be "dark" and the fact that the plot was drawn out in crayons. This is it!

The original Star Trek blew my mind -- warp speed, teleportation, colored people on the bridge! Even TNG had the replicators and the AI computer and Data. What do we get now? Tired, topical tropes of terrorists and characters recycled from the Wrath of Khan. For a recycled franchise, there isn't anything mind-blowingly new.

<comment><USER17> You went to a recycled franchise expecting something mind-blowingly new?

It's an action-oriented big-budget Star Trek blockbuster - you go to see spaceships crashing into each other. Intelligent sci-fi rarely sells enough tickets to justify a budget in the hundreds of millions.

I don't really like the reboot either (wrong tone entirely if you ask me) but you can't say you could expect much after the first, right?

<comment><USER16> I actually didn't think the first one was as awful as this one. Perhaps it was because of the novelty.

<comment><USER18> Missing the grand thought experiment of an emotion-driven Spock, they just passed over the character development entirely.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> There's still a lot of ground to cover with the future. For one thing, everyone assumes minimalism. I can imagine a very lush future with ornate decoration. We could have a renaissance triggered by nearly cost-free manufacturing.

Another vision of the future might be excessively biological. Sci-fi authors have depicted bio-engineered worlds, but cinema doesn't seem to do much with the idea. An old favorite of mine in this area is 'Existenz' by David Cronenberg, but then bio has always been his thing.

Cinema can also do a lot depictions of the future that seem flat out impossible today. For example, imagine identity being fragmented such that people can simultaneously be and experience life in many places at once. I'm not sure how that would ever be possible, but maybe it doesn't have to be explained. It could just be a piece of technology that appears to as as magic, much like a teleporter.

<comment><USER20> TOS showed technology, but the technology rarely interfered with people being people as we know them from every day life. People in TOS had replicators; we have fast food.

The coming next generations of technologies may well remake our species is ways that make everyday experience difficult to understand and distracting to narrative story. They may be intellectually interesting, but it would be difficult in a movie. From third paragraph illustrates the point.

I do like your first point, with respect to Star Trek. Certainly we can have both minimalism and exotic baroque lushness, sitting side by side.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I don't necessarily disagree with the article so much as view it as tangential to the movie's real problems. What I missed most was that grandly optimistic vision of humanity; the idea that we could transcend its baser, violent instincts and rise to become something nobler. Into Darkness seems somehow... smaller than that -- cops & robbers writ large. Of course, I guess that's true about a lot of the Star Trek movies, so perhaps this is just my nostalgia for the most philosophically engaging of the ST:TOS episodes showing.

</comment><comment><USER22> This article brought up a good point. But while Star Trek is a vision of the future from the past, there is plenty of SciFi out there from very talented people with extremely fertile imaginations that is just waiting for some young filmmaker to take a chance on and deliver us a new Star Wars or Star Trek type franchise. The books I have run across in that have been published in more recent years cover everything from hard scifi that could be a reality today with a ton of money and the will to engineer it into existence, to the really fun theoretical stuff out there on what could be...

I myself have a preference/hope to live in the universe that Peter Hamilton conjures up in Pandora's Star. Its everything that got me into Star Trek as a kid and so much more. That is just one of many books that give me hope for our near and distant future and what could be...even if a bunch of it seems as far from reality for us as iPhones were in 1969.

</comment><comment><USER23> I think we can see where the future is going well enough to know what it's going to look a lot less like the Enterprise and a lot more like the Borg.

It just doesn't make for good cinema.

<comment><USER24> Talking computers, ubiquitous tablets, massive electronic knowledge store all seem pretty Enterprise-y to me.

Beyond that, the Borg definitely make for good cinema.

Lots of wrong in that post ;)

<comment><USER23> > Talking computers, ubiquitous tablets, massive electronic knowledge store > all seem pretty Enterprise-y to me.

That's the present, not 100 years in the future.

> Beyond that, the Borg definitely make for good cinema.

Not if we're the Borg.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Of course when you take out convenient and safe space travel, it's easy to say there's nothing to strive for, technologically. Try having the same opinion while leaving space travel in the conversation, especially with FTL travel. And infinite non-polluting energy sources. And superior medical technology. And the end of hunger and poverty. And dozens of other innovations in the Star Trek world that are pipe-dreams right now. There's plenty left to invent and innovate. If all you focus on is furniture and hand-held devices then you're not thinking big enough, and you will be disappointed.

Personally, I think the fact that you didn't even notice the more world- changing advances in the background to be a credit to the movie; a world like that was so believable that you didn't even notice how far away it actually is.

</comment><comment><USER26> OP is not alone. I saw the trailer for elysium and immediately thought, Rendezvous with Rama ( 50 yrs old ). For me, part of the problem with envisioning a future that is so much 'more' than what we have today, on the order of how Star Trek was in the 60s, is a consequence of how much our scientists understand 'limits' today than they did then. Elevated freeways, and floating cars, simply aren't practical given our understanding of physics and energy. The most practical 'sf' that we've seen lately is about human simulation, and as far as the big screen goes, that's pretty boring. Also correct me if I'm wrong, but since the transistor, we've seen three waves of digitization, digitization of tools ( calculator ), digitization of human society/social interaction ( message-boards -> facebook ), and finally we are beginning the third and final stage, digitization of ourselves ( quantified self, implantable bio-tech ). This 'second renaissance' if you will seems to end with human virtualization ( after which no reasonable extrapolation seems plausible ).

From a SF big-picture sort of movie archetype, this stuff seems pretty tired, thin and boring. I think we are only beginning to understand the societal implications of the first two waves of digitization, and even the most hardcore dystopia hasn't yet captured all the avenues of the third. Seems to me, Hollywood can only make blockbusters profitable, and the type of SF that we are envisioning now is a lot more subtle.

</comment><comment><USER27> Reading the comments here, then most of the article itself, I couldn't help thinking "so what?" I like the older Trek and it was clearly impressively ahead of its time, but the new ones (despite the fact that I really enjoyed the reboot, at least the first film) aren't intended to be anything more than action movies with reheated characters.

On finishing the article... I'm closer to siding with the author. I don't know if it's the rational-rather-than-nostalgic way it's written or what, but it does make me feel like we're selling ourselves short, and it definitely wakens an old question: What _might_ the future look like, if it changes as much as we've seen things change since that venerable original series?

I don't think looking to the tech industry is fair; that is and always has been about business. But Hollywood is sticking to the safe franchises even more than they ever have with the advent of comic book movies (another thing I've enjoyed some of, but they've been done to death several times over). There have been some really good science fiction series in the last decade, but in the vein of this article, I can't really think of any that really pushed the envelope in terms of futurism with technology.

I actually find this a bit more inspiring than morbid, though. What could be coming? Childlike wonder, here I come! :)

<comment><USER28> When I try to think of scifi that really seems like "the future", I have a hard time thinking of any movies. But I can think of some novels that fill the role. The one that comes to mind most immediately is Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age, which revolves quite a bit around super advanced nanotechnology and AI. I could see a film adaptation of that being fairly awesome.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Of the recent Sci-Fi movies I've seen, I find that Ghost in the Shell feels the most like what I think the medium term future will be - Highly uneven distribution of ever more sophisticated tech and a much more gritty day-to-day existence.

<comment><USER30> Ghost in the Shell is the greatest thing ever. The same director that did the series did Eden of the East which is fun and near term sci-fi. But, also, Dennu Coil might be a series worth checking out. Nowhere near as epic as GitS, but it explores near term AR tech in a thematically interesting way (as well as being a neat case study in movie/show making (due to the whole AR thing)).

Disclaimer: I have not yet finished the series, it is animated, it does not seem to have the type of accuracy that GitS has (but still interesting!), it stars kids, and is somewhat family friendly.

<comment><USER31> If you like japanese cyber punk checkout

Goku Midnight Eye Cyber City Oedo AD Police

<comment><USER30> Thank you, will do!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I mention this alot to friends as well. We need new sci-fi concepts just like we need new super hero concepts.

Think about how outdated a bat signal is, why can't batman check for tweets?

<comment><USER33> The Bat Signal is more secure.

1\. It's inherently asymmetric (Batman can observe the message but messengers cannot observe him).

2\. It's highly unlikely to be forged.

<comment><USER34> 1.) Twitter is also asymmetric

2.) I'm pretty sure that what seemed like a good third of the sixties Batman TV show episodes involved Batman showing up to the Bat Signal only to have it have been a trap. (and yes, I consider the TV show to be the canonical Batman).

<comment><USER33> Fair enough on point 2. But he'd have to be careful about viewing his Twitter account wouldn't he?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> It's a movie set in an already defined universe, you can't just start adding new technology because we invented the cell phone. There's still a bloody lot we're missing, and just because those things are way above the comprehension of a non-physicist doesn't make them any less inspiring. It'll just inspire future generations to become physicists, to build things like transporters, artificial gravity, phasers, warp drives and huge spaceships. Just because we have tablet computers doesn't degrade the rest of the inspiration Star Trek still provides, and I think that's where this article completely misses the point. If you look at faster than light travel as a 70s idea, there's something seriously wrong with your view of the future.

</comment><comment><USER36> Perhaps it could be articulated as an obsession with the physical and technological. 70s futurism revolved around the amazing materials and electronic advances of the time. That continues today, but we have a much better handle on how that technology is shaping our lives. In other words, 'future-tech' is not futurism (any more).

There are other inspirations out there. Hannu Rajaniemi's maths/crypto heavy scifi draws gives us a glimpse of new ways to think about personality, privacy and culture. The Fountain's future parallel provides a very different view of a potential space traveller, and Isaac Asimov's collective work spans so many cultural diversions that have fallen out of fashion just waiting to be re- imagined.

</comment><comment><USER37> Spoiler Alert, HCI elements will plateau at voice control and touch displays. Why? Because the human body is what it is. It isn't going any further than that until it jumps to something matrix style, but that movie has already been made. Alien Computer Interaction however could offer some interesting opportunities.

Forget hoverboards and dick tracy watches, Star Trek still has plenty of imaginitive technologies that don't yet exist. Between cold fusion, warp drive, teleporters, transcoders, etc... there is still plenty of good tech to make an entertaining movie with.

<comment><USER38> [http://www.frontiersin.org/human_neuroscience/10.3389/fnhum....](http://www.frontiersin.org/human_neuroscience/10.3389/fnhum.2011.00072/abstract)

</comment></comment><comment> jack-r-abbit I think today's films still have futurism but we don't want to see it as that because they predict the future will be a burned out and destroyed Earth with us living elsewhere. And that is depressing.

<comment><USER38> Dystopias have always existed; a few decades ago it was nuclear holocaust, now it's ecological destruction, but visions of a destroyed Earth are nothing new.

<comment><USER39> Could the dystopian future : happy future ratio be a valid metric for how our society feels that society and the future itself is going? If so, then perhaps we, the general public, no longer (or infrequently now) see a happy future, but a dystopian one, at least in the next 200 years

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Apropos of nothing, Google Glass is remarkably similar -- right down to the design details -- to the navigation glasses used by the bad guys in in Star Trek: DS9. The resemblance is uncanny enough that I have to believe _somebody_ at Google was inspired by the show.

More apropos of the topic at hand: sure, the current version of Trek could be said to be lazy in its futurism. And futurism was certainly a big part of the original Star Trek. This is, after all, the series that gave us such geek staples as the replicator, the transporter, phasers, warp nacelles, and so forth. Even the "cell phones" used in the show were, back in the '60s, freaking crazy by the standards of their day. In a very real sense, yes, it's a crying shame that the new interpretation of Star Trek is not making the bold leaps forward that its predecessor did.

On the other hand, this new interpretation of Star Trek is an attempt at returning an increasingly greying, idiosyncratic, and narrowing universe to a broad audience. It's about mass appeal. It's about emotional storytelling. In some respects, I don't fault Abrams's Trek for not reveling in futurism the way the original Trek did. Abrams has very different strategic goals in mind.

</comment><comment><USER41> The latest Star Trek movie was meant as a prequel, so if the movie showcased advanced tech that's not in the original, it would look weird to the Trekkie purists.

<comment><USER42> > The latest Star Trek movie was meant as a prequel

It was a sequel to the immediately previous Star Trek movie, which itself was, by its own terms, later in _causality_ (though earlier in _time_ ) than the last appearance of Spock (or, for that matter, Romulus as an existing planet) in the earlier canon (and, also, later in both time _and_ causality than the most recent TV series.)

The latest Star Trek movie isn't a prequel to anything, since none of the pre- existing canon follows it in causal sequence, its a sequel (though an alternate-universe-earlier-setting-date sequel, for some of the earlier canon) to the earlier canon.

<comment><USER31> > The latest Star Trek movie isn't a prequel to anything, since none of the > pre-existing canon follows it in causal sequence, its a sequel (though an > alternate-universe-earlier-setting-date sequel, for some of the earlier > canon) to the earlier canon.

what? ;)

I think there is only one universe. But since it is infinite , there is an infinite copy of ourselves in different times ( since in different places far away from each other). So it is a prequel from the 2009 point of view, but a sequel from the old Star Trek P.O.V.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> I think we're tired, the future is here and it's exhausting. Doing the work of the present future is challenging and interesting but it wears us out. 130 years ago there were no airplanes, no telephones, almost no electricity, no production computers, no cell phones, no MP3 players, no CD/DVD players, no phonographs, no movies, no production cars. 130 years is just barely beyond the life span of the longest living human beings.

</comment><comment><USER44> I would argue that that's actually what the directors want, though. They want you to feel like the technology is something you can relate to. It makes you way more immersed in the film when you can relate to the emotions of the characters and their surroundings. If everything is too far futuristic, I think it doesn't allow you to focus on the movie's plot, but makes you over think small things. Things the director doesn't want you to spend time thinking about.

Also, I could easily see the opposite of this article being written if the movie was indeed doing what you asked for, from the technology and futurism standpoint. For example, if everyone just teleported everywhere (or something crazy like that), people would just call it ridiculous and fake. They would just complain that the movie doesn't relate to a realistic future.

I, personally, loved the new Star Trek, and thought it was incredible. I think they hit a great balance of innovation and futurism, but also still made it relevant to things we see everyday (iPhones, minimalistic designs, etc).

</comment><comment><USER45> > If we spent the last thirty years inspired by what we saw in Star Trek, > what's going to inspire us for the next thirty?

Futurism isn't lost in the Star Trek reboot. The tech seen in the new Star Trek movies, rather than diminishing futurism, serves to show us that the future that Star Trek introduced to us these past few decades is _just around the corner_. They are using devices we are now starting to see every day, and some tech that we can imagine our children using in the very near future.

Maybe that's not as exciting to some, but to have that mix of technology and design from the present day feels like a confirmation that a lot more Star Trek tech might become reality within our lifetimes :).

</comment><comment> question-all Obviously this person hasn't seen Continuum

</comment><comment><USER46> Is it possible, that we can only see so far into the future of technology because there is only so far it can go? We assume that we will keep up this rate of innovation forever and continue to evolve intellectually until.... what?

Perhaps the future holds something much more important for our lives than more advanced technology. Perhaps the future will be defined by a greater understanding of our universe through different means, through non technological means.

</comment><comment><USER47> Relevant William Gibson commentary: <http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-11502715>

      "In the 1960s I think that in some sense the present was
      actually about three or four years long," he said, "because
      in three or four years relatively little would change… The
      present is really of no width whatever."

Our sci-fi present is making sci-fi harder to write.

<comment><USER48> except that this article was written in 2010 (three years ago!), and not much has actually changed since then.

<comment><USER49> Except the tablet revolution, massive leaps forward in translation and speech recognition, an electric vehicle being named Car of the Year, multiple states passing self-driving car legislation, featherweight wearable computers that project an image directly onto your retina, a private company successfully docking a spaceship with the ISS, discovery of the Higgs Boson, large-scale entanglement in a quantum computer, a man jumping from a balloon at the edge of space while millions of people watch live over the Internet, an SUV landed on Mars via a sky crane, a computer crushing the world's best Jeopardy players, wireless video calls via a pocket computer...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> We went from big CRTs to flat touch screens. What more do you want? A flat touch screen is a pretty practical form, unlike a CRT, so it is kind of the reached target of an evolution imho.

Surely gimmics like screens in tshirts, glasses, and what not may appear as well, but a flat hard device simply is a good useful form.

I also never saw them charge their devices by plugging them in the wall. There's something that's pure sci-fi for us: actually long lasting batteries.

<comment><USER38> We're very far from the target of the evolution. The screen is still _physical_ , it's not even an in-air projection yet.

And having a screen is itself redundant when you have glasses with true 3D overlaying, where you can just make a screen appear wherever you want with the size you want.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> > If we spent the last thirty years inspired by what we saw in Star Trek, > what's going to inspire us for the next thirty?

I think video games, AAA and indie titles alike have got this covered for me. What inspires one man does not inspire another.

It's interesting that we don't see many portrayals of the future of the web or internet either, considering how large of an impact it has had on humanity in the past 20 years.

</comment><comment><USER52> Can anyone suggest a good, current futurist author?

<comment><USER53> Charles Stross and Greg Egan are two that spring to mind, though Egan's writing is quite heavy going.

<comment><USER54> The introduction to Toast has some interesting thoughts on issues faced by current futurists:

[http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog- static/fiction/toast/to...](http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog- static/fiction/toast/toast-intro.html)

(The intro in the collection, not on that page. Click through to whichever format...)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> I think theme of action movie is taking over sci-fi genre by the storm. Repackaging a legendary sci-fi movie into an action packed one does not give justice to Star Trek's reputation. I am not saying that action is bad but it should not be the most vibrant component but sci-fi, what this article trying to point, should be the one.

</comment><comment><USER56> I tend to have an opposite reaction -- I get annoyed with futurism that is unrealistic compared to how far in the future the story takes place.

Even Star Trek is completely unrealistic - it takes place less than 25 decades from now. There's no way we have space vehicles so advanced so soon.

(edit: even ignoring 'warp speed')

<comment><USER38> People alive today still don't believe we were able to get to the moon; what makes you so sure about your predictions?

<comment><USER57> Scale perhaps?

Moon is 380,000 km away. The nearest galaxy is 1×10^18 km away.

<comment><USER56> Scale for sure. Not just in terms of how far they were able to travel, but how big everything is and how many resources they would take to build, not to mention time.

Even if we knew exactly how to build everything in the movie, it would still take a TON of time to build it. Now start in the future and work backwards -- it's simply unrealistic.

That isn't to say that we won't have tons of things even 100 years from now that we can't imagine currently. I just tend to think the unimaginable is more easily attained than the evolution of those things already made.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> I see the point, the movie doesn't really push the envelope as much as it could have when it comes to future science. Signal to Noise would be a pretty awesome book to translate and see the tech. I'd say that would be the future that would inspire me to work in the engineering field.

</comment><comment><USER59> Star Trek isn't interested in predicting the future, because most of the stuff just beyond the horizon is either deeply scary or plays havoc with plots that depend on putting the characters in danger.

If you have a hundred backup copies of your mind all over the solar system, what do you care if one of you gets killed? How can you possibly write a plausible plot that includes a weakly godlike AI that doesn't involve it instantly solving any problem that faces the protagonists? How can current audiences relate to a world where the population of the Earth is 100 trillion, all of them running as uploaded minds on computers?

(Disclaimer, I'm not a fan of Star Trek: <http://bbot.org/badtranscript- startrek2.html> )

<comment><USER60> Read Altered Carbon [1] - this book addresses this question.

[1] <http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40445.Altered_Carbon>

<comment><USER59> For plot reasons, the world of Altered Carbon only lets you run one copy at a time, offsite backups are very expensive, (even though individual stacks are so cheap that literally every person in the world has one installed?) and the time between backups is 24 hours.

In the real world, there's no reason to expect any of these limitations to exist. It makes more sense for backups to be cheap(ish) and taken every five minutes.

SPOILERS:

Altered Carbon also addresses the nightmare scenario of state vector theft very well; if the bad guys have a copy of your mind, they can torture you to death, over and over, forever. But in the real world, the precise mechanism of capture used in the book would be unlikely: if you thought you were about to be kidnapped, you'd just suicide, (using a explosive charge in your brain) and let one of your backups figure out what happened.

<comment><USER60> I also thought that the book didn't go into the deep effects of having sleeves and backups, as simliar as Star Trek doesn't go into full effects of transporter technology (terrorism of non-warp stations/planets via transported explosive/poison would be unstoppable - forcing the development and pervasiveness of passive transport shielding - think faraday cage)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> I agree with the author. We should not be content with just silly iPads! Silicon Valley please start thinking "actual future" and give us some replicators and holodecks. Especially holodecks.

</comment><comment><USER62> I guess i'd hold up the culture series, and the diamond age as my vision of futurism. Those are both decades old though.

Any suggestions for something written after, say, 2005?

<comment><USER60> Does it need to be written after 2005? Fire Upon Deep/Hyperion-Endymion/The Matrix (all 90's works) all posited Humans vs. AIs as a central theme, and I'd say that's another interesting take - has all sorts of frankenstein's monster implications, creator/creation contrasts.

In case you're wondering about more recent Sci-Fi, I googled it, and here's a good listing of interesting concepts:

[http://io9.com/5929436/10-recent-science-fiction-books- that-...](http://io9.com/5929436/10-recent-science-fiction-books-that-are- about-big-ideas)

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> Iain M Banks, Culture - commonplace AI of human level and above in form of drones and larger entities. Pretty please.

</comment><comment><USER64> In the opening issue of the National Review, William F. Buckley said the magazine "stands athwart history, yelling Stop". When their political antithesis ended in the early 1990s, the book that probably best summed up the establishment intellectual view of the time was one which said we were at "The End of History".

I think comments such as these bookending the Cold War speak for themselves. The tendencies of monopoly capitalism have been written about for over a century. Romney's slam of Tesla is part of all that (please don't say Romney was against Tesla due to government breaks - it's more difficult to name a large company not getting government subsidies than one which does get one, including Romney's own Steel Dynamics). The Democratic party is so near this position as well to be almost indistinguishable from the GOP.</comment>


Ask HN: What do you think about personal development and tech? - <AUTHOR> Hi all. I've been reading and applying a bunch of stuff from personal development/self-improvement lately. Honestly, at first I thought it was lame but I've gotten real productive lately. Things like scheduling the night before, journaling, exercise, setting goals for myself, doing things out of my comfort zone, etc. It's basically changed my life.<p>Any other devs feel this way? Do you guys do self-improvement things too? I'm thinking of making a site or a blog or whatever medium works because I suffered from lack of motivation, depression, etc in some of my years as a dev. Something like good programmer habits or things we can take from other fields, not just personal development. <comment><USER2> I'm also a big believer of self-development strategies / tricks. However, I don't think it's necessarily the acts themselves that are so life changing but rather the mindset that you're going to do whatever it takes to be better is what's so powerful.</comment>


The Agony Of Choice - <AUTHOR> http://jacquesmattheij.com/content/The-Agony-Of-Choice <comment><USER2> See "The Paradox of Choice":

[http://www.squeezedbooks.com/book/show/19/the-paradox-of- cho...](http://www.squeezedbooks.com/book/show/19/the-paradox-of-choice-why- more-is-less)

[http://journal.dedasys.com/2006/02/18/maximizers- satisficers...](http://journal.dedasys.com/2006/02/18/maximizers-satisficers- and-programming-languages)

</comment><comment><USER3> Good points, I got into programming at about the same time and was discussing the same question the other day with some colleagues. Conclusion, the best web languages at the moment are the ones YOU know well. Unfortunately for me this means PHP until my Python skills are a bit better :)

</comment><comment><USER4> Choosing what problem to work on is much harder oftentimes than solving it.

</comment><comment><USER5> " . . . it never hurts to learn more languages." This is the problem of too many choices, It does hurt to learn a lot of languages. Each of us can only master a few languages. The exact number varies from person to person, but it is a fairly small number. The alternative is the proverbial "Jack of all trades, master of none."</comment>


Ask HN: What should all freelance programmers know about freelancing? - <AUTHOR>

What should I know as I get ready to dive into the world of freelance programming? I'm going into web development specifically, but I'm sure a lot of your advice applies to any kind of freelance programming.<p>Must-dos? Pitfalls? Hurdles? Surprises? Things that are worse or easier than you expected? <comment><USER2> This post pretty much covers it...

[http://blog.silktide.com/2011/07/why-we-gave-up-web- design-a...](http://blog.silktide.com/2011/07/why-we-gave-up-web-design- after-10-successful-years/)

The most important thing that I think you should know is that this is a REAL business with all the pros and cons. You are entering a world where you have to pour in your heart and soul to really make it work. I have been doing this for 4 years and I feel like I'm just now starting to figure out the business side.

The technical side is EASY. Programming in Python is EASY. Running a successful business is HARD.

If you go into this half assed, then you are going to be wasting a lot of time and potential in earnings. There is a huge number of people who seem to get into freelancing as a sort of a holding pattern (sustenance) while they try to figure out something else that they really want to be doing. This is fine if you can be honest with yourself, recognize it for what it is and exit soon. Otherwise you will get sucked in and your life will always be in this holding pattern (never quite willing to go "all in" with your business but never really doing what you really want to be doing.)

Think about the opportunity costs. Many people going into freelance web development don't really want to be doing that. You are trading dollars for hours which will never make you rich or even be enough to get you off that treadmill.

Personally, I enjoy it, but you have to ask yourself if you will also enjoy it. If not, don't waste your time. Think about the other unlimited ways that you can make money as a web developer.

</comment><comment><USER3> One thing I've had happen with a couple of freelancing engagements I thought were promising is them wanting me to quit my day job and work full-time for them. I'd work for them for a couple of months, and then one day they would drop the bombshell that they really liked what I was doing but they wanted me full-time or not at all. I tried to convince them that it's better for everyone to have some of a good thing than none, but it didn't work, and the relationships ended quite abruptly.

Two cases don't make a trend, but be aware that this can happen and it sucks when it does.

</comment><comment><USER4> No matter how well you know someone or how friendly your first meeting is, have them sign a detailed contract! You will have clients flake on you or try to take advantage of you. It's nice, for example, to be able to say "I didn't hear from you and couldn't get a hold of you for three months, so, according to the contract you signed, you've forfeited your deposit and our agreement is void. If you're ready to begin, we'll have to negotiate a new agreement."

</comment><comment><USER5> The main thing to understand is that customers are going to try to get as much for free as possible. Everyone is trying to get a deal these days. It's important to stay firm and hit your deadlines as much as possible. Also, I would charge for phone time because that adds up and customers will want to chat it up forever!

</comment><comment><USER6> Some people will ask for the "friendship price", because they have seen a distant relative of yours on the other side of the road or something like that. It is generally less than the normal payment.

</comment><comment><USER7> Tips for successful freelancing: <http://typicalprogrammer.com/?p=111></comment>


Messenger.com Now 50% Converted to Reason - <AUTHOR> https://reasonml.github.io/community/blog/#messengercom-now-50-converted-to-reason <comment><USER3> Looks like Reason has the same PATENTS license as React, for those wondering:

[https://github.com/facebook/reason/blob/master/PATENTS.txt](https://github.com/facebook/reason/blob/master/PATENTS.txt)

<comment><USER4> This is one of the better patent grants out there. If a company intends to use patents as a weapon, then Reason is not for them. Of course, if FB sues you first and you counter sue, the grant does not terminate. Seems fair.

I wish they go one step further and say, if you sue or threaten to sue anyone (not just FB) over patents, then the grant terminates automatically.

<comment><USER5> By "use patents as a weapon" you mean "ever plan to enforce patents against Facebook"? That's quite a stretch.

Still, folks more knowledgeable than me on this topic say it's not a big deal: [https://firstname.lastname@example.com/react-facebook-and-the- revok...](https://email@example.com/react-facebook-and-the-revokable- patent-license-why-its-a-paper-25c40c50b562)

<comment><USER6> Many people around these parts reject software patents as immoral, because software is just applied mathematics and mathematics should not be patentable.

So yes, any use of a software patent offensively is malicious.

<comment><USER7> Software can ve very far from mathematics. Your argument applies to algorithms, but personally I don't think that React falls under the category of algorithms (it _may_ use algorithms, though).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I've heard that Reason is essentially what Jordan Walke (React creator) was trying to make with React. Maybe that's wrong, but he's the head of this project and it looks great. Also props to FB engineering for having faith in him with React and this.

Wondering if Reason will take off and what it will mean for languages like Elm or ClojureScript.

<comment><USER9> Yes, the first prototype of React was written in SML; we then moved onto OCaml.

Jordan transcribed the prototype into JS for adoption; the SML version of React, however great it might be, would have died in obscurity. The Reason project's biggest goal is to show that OCaml is actually a viable, incremental and familiar-looking choice. We've been promoting this a lot but I guess one blog post and testimonial helps way more.

There's inevitably gonna be a bit of doubt at the viability of Reason at first; but to make an argument from authority: Jordan and the team made ReactJS take off even though everyone hated it at first (browse the first HN/Reddit threads; they weren't rosy). I was there to witness it too. I'd like to say we're rather experienced at handling the social aspect required to make such project take off potentially, at least. Technically speaking, deferring to OCaml is a safe bet.

What it means for Elm/ClojureScript: [https://reasonml.github.io/guide/what- and-why#dont-like-reas...](https://reasonml.github.io/guide/what-and-why#dont- like-reason)

We've explicitly listed Elm & ClojureScript on our Why page as good alternatives to check. I've personally used both. The world is big enough for more of such languages.

<comment><USER10> Hold on, what's the history of react ? and why sml ? Note that I love SML, I'm just extremely surprised about the whole thing.

<comment><USER9> Honestly I believe modeling such thing in JS as an initial iteration would have drastically changed what ReactJS is today, and likely for the worse. No proof of that, aside from the fact that iterating it in SML gave the rather paradigm-shifting ReactJS we know today.

Can't speak for Jordan but I'm guessing that the answer is "it just felt right". So you can consider ReactJS as a manual program extraction from SML.

I'm not sure whether the original one was ever fully finished. I think there was a blocker from the React reconciler that SML couldn't solve in its type system? It needed GADT and existential, which is why he moved onto OCaml. Related: [https://drup.github.io/2016/08/02/difflists/](https://drup.github.io/2016/08/02/difflists/)

So in a sense, we knew for a while now that ML would work out, somewhat demonstrated by the real-world usage of React. The technical merits are there; the social ones, definitely not. Thus Reason, which you can view as ReactJS finally going back to its root through ReasonReact, and with the social aspect properly being worked on.

<comment><USER10> Anything else that started as an sml project ? was react always a Fb project or was it a personal thing from Jordan that caught the eye of a Fb manager ?

<comment><USER9> Not that I'm aware of. Though it'll be a shame if React is a one-off. Can't comment on the rest.

<comment><USER10> Thanks nonetheless

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> > external get_internal : map 'a 'b => 'a => Js.undefined 'b = "get" > [@@bs.send];

I like languages that are readable. This is starting to look like codegolf. [https://github.com/reasonml-community/reason-react-hacker- ne...](https://github.com/reasonml-community/reason-react-hacker- news/blob/master/src/JSMap.re)

<comment><USER12> readability is a function of familiarity

EDIT:

Sorry, I just don't like when people share shallow and negative thoughts about projects that take away from meaningful discussion.

Why is the OP comment shallow? Because obviously _some_ people find it readable which would suggest that it is familiarity that is the problem -- not some universal quality of the language.

<comment><USER13> Readability is determined by more than familiarity.

<comment><USER14> do you have examples in mind that are orthogonal to familiarity?

<comment><USER13> Language design. Even if you're very familiar with Malbolge, other languages are far more readable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm really excited about reason. The front end community is adopting functional programming (concepts) at breakneck speed. I think this opens us up to more advanced type systems, and generative testing (property testing, say).

These are exciting times.

<comment><USER9> Pretty much. The goal of Reason is to make some weighted compromises* in order to allow folks (like you?) to have an easier time convincing your colleagues that OCaml's a good bet, disregarding their past experiences with similar languages. For example, being scarred by FP assignments back from university is one of the top feedbacks. If we show that ReasonReact allows folks to write apps just the same, plus a familiar syntax that makes the first tries easier, then you yourself can skip over all these bikesheddings and help your colleagues further.

* Having a different syntax isn't without cost for the existing OCaml community, but so far most have been very supportive

<comment><USER16> > being scarred by FP assignments back from university is one of the top > feedbacks

It's funny, seeing awesome FP assignments in SML and OCaml is one of the few things that makes me really want to go back and do a computer science degree. Alas, it seems like functional languages are disappearing from universities one by one these days, only to be replaced by Python or Java.

<comment><USER9> You (and I) are definitely in the minority here. "Go back and do a computer science degree" is probably the opposite wish of lots of software engineers, in terms of quantity.

From what I know, there are at least three classes in some universities (forgot the names) whose professors/TAs told me they were teaching Reason to decent success. Reason's also used in this users study: [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1708.07583.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1708.07583.pdf). Reason removes the unfamiliarity part in order for them to get to the core of the research, which is still done in OCaml.

Don't lose hope! =)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> It fills my heart with joy that the javascript community is adopting so many functional paradigms and languages.

I come from a heavy haskell background, and don't have a lot of ML experience so gave been betting on Purescript recently. But reason seems really nice. Good luck with the port! A success for Functional Programming

</comment><comment><USER18> I just discovered messenger lite after uninstalling the main bloated battery sucking messenger app and I'm sad they chose not to release it in my country. It's fantastic! Also messenger.com really needs a lite browser app version for phones and to improve their browser version of Facebook. They're really out of the loop in my opinion. Since removing all Facebook apps, including instagram and going to browser app only I've increased my battery life significantly.

</comment><comment><USER19> Based on the roadmap [1], they are about to change function call syntax to be more like JavaScript. It seems like good stuff, but beware unstable language.

[1] [https://reasonml.github.io/community/roadmap](https://reasonml.github.io/community/roadmap)

<comment><USER9> The transition will be seamless and already planned, no worries.

Btw, for more justification on the syntax change, I've written a short answer here: [https://www.reddit.com/r/reasonml/comments/6v2olv/new_syntax...](https://www.reddit.com/r/reasonml/comments/6v2olv/new_syntax_after_pr_1299/dly4aa7/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Over the last 8 months or so I've found Messenger.com get slower and less stable. Killing browsers or tab processes, or having to refresh the page because it's become unresponsive, has become more and more common.

This could well be completely unrelated, but it has been one of the driving factors to me moving more to WhatsApp's web interface.

<comment><USER21> Try out eul:

[https://eul.im](https://eul.im)

It's a native desktop client for Skype, Slack, Facebook, WhatsApp and many others. It's only 4 MB, it has minimal CPU usage, and it can handle hundreds of thousands of messages without lag.

Facebook support is coming tomorrow, WhatsApp is going to be supported next week.

<comment><USER22> Interesting find. It opens an embedded browser window to OAth with Slack, but after that closes nothing happens to the main window (i.e. the account never gets added).

Incredible how it has a seemingly from-scratch cross-platform UI without framework bloat; but it doesn't seem to work...

<comment><USER21> It should work. Right now there can be a ~10 second delay for very large Slack teams.

If you still get nothing after 10 seconds, could you please submit a bug report via the built-in '?' form? If it's a public team, please include the URL.

Thanks

<comment><USER23> I am having the same issue. Once I log in to Slack nothing happens in the main window. My team is very small. I submitted a bug report as advised. Thanks for the nice work!

<comment><USER21> This has been fixed in v0.22. Can you try again?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> For those wondering, Reason is basically transpiled to very similar OCaml, with some focus on platforms like the web. I think some folks at Facebook might be interested in Reason becoming to them as Java is to Google.

<comment><USER25> The site states

> Powerful, safe type inference means you rarely have to annotate types, but > everything gets checked for you.

Why did they create a new language? Isn't this what they made Flow for? Or does Flow rely heavily on annotations? I did not follow up the development of Facebook's projects recently. This is the first time I have heard of that.

<comment><USER9> Ocaml's two decades old. We're doing the very opposite of inventing a new language. I'm on the team and I personally am not capable of creating a language (not to mention recreate an entire ecosystem?) at the same level as OCaml.

<comment><USER26> Does the Reason team contribute code upstream to OCaml or is the language more of a hard fork starting from OCaml?

<comment><USER27> Reason is basically a syntax transformation from a JavaScript-like syntax to the classic OCaml syntax. Thus, they can sit on top of any existing OCaml compiler (e.g. ocamlc, ocamlopt, BuckleScript) without having to fork anything. The Reason team is working hard right now to build up a community around ReasonReact. On top of their upstream contributions, they are generating massive publicity and goodwill towards OCaml the language itself.

<comment><USER26> Cool. I didn't realize Reason was so loosely coupled from the underlying OCaml compiler.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Hello! Reason team member here.

With that kind of exposure comes some pretty negative snarks & unrelated criticisms that are hard to counter in a post/tweet. I've left a few replies on this thread but I'll still try my best to answer the questions here =) (but before that, please do give [https://reasonml.github.io/guide/what-and- why](https://reasonml.github.io/guide/what-and-why) a look).

<comment><USER28> I have to admit this is the first time I've heard about Reason. Could you help me understand the reason for it?

Is this because Microsoft has TypeScript, Apple has Swift, and so now Facebook has Reason to keep all your application in your more/less proprietary format?

Further, if you already have React, then why not write everything in React and then just extend it with the features you've built into Reason?

Pardon if these aren't clever questions, but I'd love to understand the big selling points here. Thanks!

<comment><USER9> Hey! It's weird: it's not the first time we get questions like yours and I'm not sure where such confusion comes from! Reason and React are two things. Reason's a syntax on top of OCaml, the programming language. ReactJS' a UI library. Messenger.com _is_ written in React, lots of which are, specifically, in ReasonReact, which is Reason bindings for ReactJS (the rest, plain ReactJS).

Reason's open-source, as well as ReasonReact([https://github.com/reasonml/reason- react](https://github.com/reasonml/reason-react)). Using BuckleScript the OCaml-to-JS compiler, we compile to normal JS code with minimal runtime.

Here's why we made it: [https://reasonml.github.io/guide/what-and- why](https://reasonml.github.io/guide/what-and-why)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I can offer a contrary datapoint: As someone who has never used this language before, so has never seen its error messages either before nor after, it took me far longer to parse and understand the "after" error message than the "before"; I immediately saw _is not compatible_ and understood, while the more verbose message doesn't have anywhere near the same clarity --- "But somewhere wanted" made me do a reparse, and I'm still not completely sure what it's trying to say, or what "somewhere" is. Even the "before" is unnecessarily verbose to me --- I'd prefer something more like this:

        Error:%s:%d:%d-%d: incompatible type: expected %s, found %s

_Display the error-ing line(s), right inside the terminal._

 _Seeing that you 'd usually focus on a single error rather than trying to get an overview of all errors_

IMHO these are not good changes --- chances are that many errors have a common cause which may be far away, and fixing that will make them all disappear. This encourages "code tunnel-vision", making small patches to "fix" each error ("the compiler says the error is here, so I must try to fix it here somehow"), which in the long term can cause massive duplication and decrease the overall quality.

Then again, I don't use JS so maybe the culture is very different, but the "gradual increase of verboseness" seems to be a common trend among other languages, that I strongly disagree with. Writing in six words ("We've found a bug for you!") what could be expressed in one ("Error") does not help anyone except possibly the most noobish of programmers, which one should hope to learn and thereby advance from their level anyway; unless you treat your developers as incapable of learning and disposable, it is counterproductive --- or perhaps I should say un-Reason-able(!) --- to optimise for the extreme beginner at the expense of the experienced.

/rant

<comment><USER9> You're reading the wrong blog post btw; this is about messenger.com adoption.

Happy to discuss that other blog post somewhere else (discord.gg/reasonml)

<comment><USER16> To be fair, it's very hard to tell your blog posts are actually separate posts, and not just headers for different sections. Yes, there's the dateline, but otherwise it's indistinguishable from a longer, multi-part blog post.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I've been using messenger.com to great effect for the past couple of months. I can justify completely blocking facebook.com most of the time while still being able to talk to people

Highly recommend

<comment><USER8> You can actually use Messenger with a deactivated Facebook account - <USER2> cool if you just don't want to bother with Facebook at all.

<comment><USER30> I'm not that woke yet, there's still some friends whose updates I like to see

Time boxing my FB usage at least stops the "scroll forever" behavior I used to have

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> It's great that Messenger is being worked on. I wish they'd also work on improving the UI instead of spending time tacking on half-baked features, but that's probably a discussion for another time and place.

I _have_ noticed fairly recently that searching chat histories is much faster and more reliable than it used to be, so that's a plus.

</comment><comment><USER32> I'm a heavy Messenger user. Love the service. I mostly use it on my iPhone and iPad and those apps work well (I wish they had SiriKit integration...). I use the web interface when I have to, but I would really prefer a full native client for macOS as their web client routinely stops getting notifications and cannot make voice calls in Safari. The Windows 10 client is also painfully underdeveloped but at least it's not bound up in a browser tab.

On topic, ML is a neat language family but I just couldn't get into it when I tried F# back in the day. I'm a Clojure fanatic through and through but the more projects using functional languages the better, even if it does use static types!

<comment><USER33> On a related note, their App on Android is shit, utter shit. I have a budget Moto G and my phone lagged till i uninstalled messenger. And on top of that, Facebook won't let me access messenger from their mobile website. Firefox used to work for me, but it doesn't anymore. Have to resort to mbasic.facebook.com.

So much for mission of connecting the entire world, Zuck.

<comment><USER34> I've got an old 2013 Moto X, and I've recently started using Messenger Lite on it. You'll likely need to manually install the APK, because it's not available in the Play store for the US market, but it's definitely a lot faster.

[https://www.theverge.com/2017/5/18/15659414/facebook- messeng...](https://www.theverge.com/2017/5/18/15659414/facebook-messenger- lite-how-to-install) [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.facebook.m...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.facebook.mlite&hl=en)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Are there any plans for polishing the backend experience?

The progress for front end looks very promising, however as someone that likes the look of Reason but isn't interested in front end I found getting into Reason with the native toolchain was no easier than OCaml.

</comment><comment><USER36> Great to read such quick and informed replies by chenglou and spicyj from the team.

</comment><comment><USER37> wow first time I hear about reason. So would that imply facebook would end up ditching Flow for reason instead? Cause reason is basically a replacement for JS+Flow right? Am I understanding this correctly?

</comment><comment><USER38> Can someone give an overview of what Reason accomplishes and why people would use it? The github page doesn't do much in the way of that.

<comment><USER39> Try giving this page a read: [https://reasonml.github.io/guide/what-and- why/](https://reasonml.github.io/guide/what-and-why/)

</comment></comment><comment> sid-kap Since I upgraded my google-chrome-stable version on my Linux machine to 60.0.3112.78, I've been getting a "Could not display composer" error where the composer should be on Messenger.com. If someone on the Messenger team sees this, could you please look into this issue? (I submitted this issue through feedback but didn't hear back from anyone.)

<comment><USER40> So now they have 11 issues this year.

<comment><USER9> That section's still in JS

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Is this representative of Facebook's language direction? Away from (their flavor of) PHP and towards OCaml/Reason?

<comment><USER42> Pretty sure it's only being used on the front-end. Even their more established project React isn't used on the server.

<comment><USER9> Right. Though the Ads thing the post mentions uses Reason natively (aka ocamlopt). Not on the server, but as a tool for the front end.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Messenger.com is really buggy, I've had a `Could not display composer` error message for months every time I open the page, so I can't type anything into it. (just double checked and it still exists). Unfortunately, seeing how slowly facebook responds to bug reports I haven't even bothered.

</comment><comment><USER44> I wonder what would be the quality improvement if they switched to Typescript and TSX instead of Ocaml/Reason?

</comment><comment><USER45> I don't understand. This is just a landing page for the app and not an alternative web interface

<comment><USER46> It is a web interface on desktop (and possibly some mobile platforms?)

<comment><USER45> Ah okay. tried it on my android device and just got a link to the play store.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> I would really like to know about what tech stack the Windows 10 apps use.

<comment><USER48> Just curious -- why specifically? I personally never used the app.

<comment><USER47> I'm using it and it's very slow and looks and behaves like some weird iOS port.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Is this a good thing?

<comment><USER27> [https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/6z6kje/half_of...](https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/6z6kje/half_of_facebook_messenger_codebase_now_converted/dmt9pbv/?st=j7ewwxqv&sh=9244b99b)

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> does messenger on the web and mobile, use the same code base, or are they completely separate?

<comment><USER51> They're separate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> Oh great, more JS frameworks.

</comment><comment><USER53> For a moment I got really scared that this was a new framework that everyone was going to [have to] migrate to.

<comment><USER51> I hope you don't ever feel like you _have to_ migrate to anything we release! Even inside Facebook, there's flexibility in what tools you use and you're free to choose any tools that get the job done.

<comment><USER53> I'm still using Gulp ;-)

I meant more as the webdev community, everyone seems to love to throw a ridiculous amount of time and money away by switching to a completely new stack—for apparently no reason—every 6 months.

About 80% of the devs I know spend hours on tooling and force users to download a ridiculous amount of JavaScript to use React with projects where the dashboard is a list of messages sent via a contact form, where the only functionality is to mark as read.

I React cool? Sure, and I use it. Do I have to use the same tech as the biggest site in the world for my super-small projects—like most people do because that's what you do? Probably not.

Am I stuck in the 90s and force a page refresh every time? Nope, but I spend days learning something—and of course part of my job is learning new things—but not 80% of the time, and it's not cool to make existing projects obsolete after 6 months.

I just think the whole thing is getting a little big ridiculous.

It was probably more ranting than not about your project, I apologize :-)

BTW, if you work at Facebook, can you explain why creating Yarn vs. improving NPM..? They seem to do the same exact thing in the same exact way from the user point of view, with Yarn being a lot faster and with better command naming.</comment></comment></comment>


Luxim LIFI plasma light bulb more efficient than LED/CFL - <AUTHOR> http://www.treehugger.com/files/2008/04/luxim-plasma-lifi-light-bulb-led-cfl.php

<comment><USER3> Unfortunately, there's apparently an ongoing patent dispute between these guys and Ceravision, both of whom claim to have invented the technology.

</comment><comment><USER4> Why does everyone compare with LED's? For bulbs in actual production - <USER2> a lab - CFL's easily beat LED's and produce better light to boot (better color).

What is it with this obsession with LED's?

I saw an LED lamp for sale in a store and one thing was conspicuously missing - the panel on the side that told me how many lumens it produces. There were very excited about the watts, but wouldn't say how much light it makes. And probably for a good reason. (And isn't that panel required by law?)

<comment><USER5> I just finished an industry analysis for the light bulb industry in the US. The LED technology is advancing at such a fast rate that although they are prohibitively expensive now, in 5 years they will cost less than CFLs and provide higher quality lighting. The big three light bulb manufacturers (GE, Philips, and OSRAM), which make up 95% of the US market, are buying LED firms like crazy. LEDs last about 10x longer and use 1/10 the electricity of CFLs as well. CFLs contain a small amount of mercury which will help speed adoption of LEDs.

<comment><USER4> LED's do NOT use 1/10 the electricity of CFLs. Besides being not true, that also violates the laws of physics. CFL's use appox 3 times the theoretical best efficiency possible - so at best a different bulb could use 1/3 the electricity of CFLs. And that's the theoretical maximum, and not likely to be reached.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> How is this different from an arc lamp / high-intensity discharge lamp as used in spotlights and car headlamps?

<comment><USER4> Quite different. HiD lamps use a strong electric current to heat up and excite a plasma. These use radio waves to heat up the plasma.

There is no cathode or anode.</comment></comment>


A Senseless Conversation - <AUTHOR> http://sites.google.com/site/asenselessconversation

<comment><AUTHOR> Posted a couple of years ago and generated some discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3628887](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3628887)

I felt it was relevant again due to the recent Eugene Goostman controversy.</comment>


How Riot Games shares its Worlds competition worldwide - <AUTHOR> https://technology.riotgames.com/news/engineering-esports-tech-powers-worlds <comment><USER2> Incredible insight into the scale of modern esports. My understanding was they were moving to public cloud for most players but it seems that competitive invitational tournaments require higher standard. JPEG-XS bitrates also look very impressive ;)

[https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-payload-rtp- jpegxs-02](https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-payload-rtp-jpegxs-02)</comment>


Ask HN: Thought experiment: What is the best city/country to hide from COVID-19? - <AUTHOR> I'm a remote worker, who can work from anywhere in the world. I also have a weak immune system. That makes me wonder:
Which country / city would you choose to hide from COVID-19 - assuming that it becomes a global pandemic? And why?
What we are looking for is probably the sweet spot between 'likeliness to spread there' and 'availability of high-quality medical support'.
My picks so far: Singapore Australia New Zealand Hawaii
Any thoughts? <comment><USER2> Just stay away from people. You can literally do that in your own home. The virus cannot travel very far in the air, so you won't be infected unless someone in your home is infected.

You can have food and other supplies delivered. If you're worried about the packaging or delivery person being infected, you can potentially sterilize the packaging and wear an N95 mask when dealing with deliveries.

Going elsewhere runs the risk of you being infected during transit.

</comment><comment><USER3> China. By the time COVID hits your zone, the chinese will have it contained. Plus, most of the expertise fighting the virus is there.

</comment><comment><USER4> Madagascar, before they close the ports

<comment><USER5> Or Greenland.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> St. Louis, Missouri for two reasons

1\. It has some pretty decent hospitals

2\. Who actually wants to live in STL?

source: I lived in STL

</comment><comment><USER7> Huon valley, Tasmania you wont be going hungry :)

</comment><comment><USER8> South Pole or Easter Island

</comment><comment><USER9> Mars, but then you have other problems... lol...

</comment><comment><USER10> St. Helena.

</comment><comment><USER11> Elko, NV.</comment>


"SPDY does not clearly outperform HTTP over cellular networks" [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://conferences.sigcomm.org/co-next/2013/program/p303.pdf <comment><USER2> I did the original study at Google on SPDY over mobile networks, which was a small-scale lab study. Since then, we have collected data from millions of Chrome Mobile users which shows that SPDY does tend to outperform HTTP on cellular, but of course there are many factors involved - the content of the site, the network conditions, etc. I haven't had a chance to get this data into a form that can be shared, which I really need to do. Still, the authors of this CoNext paper did a really nice study. I hope we have more to share on this in the future.

<comment><USER3> Some recent SPDYv3 vs HTTPS performance numbers from various Google properties: [http://blog.chromium.org/2013/11/making-web-faster-with- spdy...](http://blog.chromium.org/2013/11/making-web-faster-with-spdy-and- http2.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm not a fan of SPDY at all. HTTP was simple to implement and understand. This is neither. And it matters. The small gains in performance are not worth the complexity.

<comment><USER5> SPDY is just HTTP, just like TLS is. TLS does not replace HTTP: it wraps HTTP. Same thing for SPDY.

As a developer you never deal with SPDY. You just deal with HTTP and HTTP headers. SPDY is just a configuration option in your web server. There is no complexity to deal with, it just works.

<comment><USER6> TLS is not HTTP. TLS is a layer below HTTP and largely a black box to a client or server implementer (as it should be, as it's very hard to get right).

SPDY is a replacement (or, in the inevitable future where http/2.0 effectively is spdy, an upgrade) for http. There is no way to write an http client or server without wildly divergent code paths.

* Note: When I say client or server I mean at a low level. I don't mean an app server running on a library that implements the http part.

<comment><USER7> How many people write Internet-facing HTTP servers, though? Usually even if you're writing a webapp framework, appserver host, or HTTP library, you'll stick Nginx in front of it.

There are a lot of security and DOS concerns that you have to worry about when exposing a server to the public Internet - it's usually best to let mature software handle that and proxy to your custom stuff, particularly when the mature software is already open-source.

<comment><USER6> How many people write anything? This kind of reductive reasoning would basically leave everyone in the world writing software that can fit nicely in a UML model generator.

It's entirely reasonable to ask if complexity is worth it on every level. Many of the greatest successes of internet protocols have come through making things as simple and modular as possible. This doesn't mean SPDY is terrible necessarily, but "no one ever needs to work with it" is a clearly wrong answer to a criticism that it's overly complex.

<comment><USER7> I guess my point is that as projects mature, there are usually fewer serious options on the market, and those options do more, and so it makes sense to capture a lot of the complexity inherent in the problem within those few pieces of software rather than force all users of that software (which are numerous) to deal with it.

Perhaps there are simpler solutions to the problem, but if they make things slower for end-users, that's inconveniencing millions to save effort for dozens, which is not a particularly good trade-off.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Twitter seems to have an opposite opinion: [https://blog.twitter.com/2013/cocoaspdy-spdy-for-ios- os-x](https://blog.twitter.com/2013/cocoaspdy-spdy-for-ios-os-x)

> However, we have measured as much as a 30% decrease in latency in the wild > for API requests carried over SPDY relative to those carried over HTTP.

> In particular, we've observed SPDY helping more as a user's network > conditions get worse.

</comment><comment><USER9> Isn't SPDY encrypted by default? Why would you assume it _should_ outperform the unencrypted HTTP? Is it because Google made that claim, or why?

Either way, security at the application level on the Internet seems quite broken. We need easy to implement strong security at the Transport and IP levels. Google (or IETF, rather) should be experimenting with a CurveCP-like protocols to encrypt all the packets on the Internet to replace TCP. That's what I'd really like to see.

<comment><USER10> The problem is plenty of boxes (esp. consumer-grade NAT stuff!) drops any IP packet that is not TCP or UDP, hence introducing anything at that layer is as hard as introducing IPv6 (i.e., it might happen, eventually, maybe). This is why Google's QUIC is layered _on top of_ UDP — as UDP is a thin enough layer (on top of IP) it doesn't add too much bloat.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I really don't see the point of stuff like SPDY and WEBP/WEBM. They're just google doing what Microsoft did in the 1990s, setting their own proprietary 'standards' instead of working to improve things.

<comment><USER12> _I really don 't see the point of stuff like SPDY and WEBP/WEBM._

The former is generally more performant that HTTP, and the latter also offer benefits versus other options.

 _They 're just google doing what Microsoft did in the 1990s, setting their own proprietary 'standards' instead of working to improve things._

This is dangerously wrong, for two reasons:

1\. These are open standards. They're not proprietary. 2\. What is "improving things" if not proposing open, alternative standards which solve existing problems?

<comment><USER13> you know what else offered more benifits?

WMA over MP3, WMV over AVI.

<comment><USER14> And both are proprietary.. moreover you're mixing formats and containers

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I think QUIC is supposed to address this: [http://blog.chromium.org/2013/06/experimenting-with- quic.htm...](http://blog.chromium.org/2013/06/experimenting-with-quic.html)

<comment><USER16> My understanding is QUIC is being used as a proof of concept for protocol experiments - it may be pushed towards standardisation or the the lessons from it may be pushed into other protocols

<comment><USER17> Isn't that how SPDY started out?

<comment><USER16> It is but talking to some of the Dev Advocates at Google, they're pretty open that it could go either way - some of the things the QUIC guys have learnt about speeding up TLS negotiations is going information HTTPS stuff (can't remember the exact details)

Where QUIC may come into it's own is as as a replacement protocol for things like WebRTC.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> It doesn't matter if SPDY offers and technical improvements or not to our good, robust and lasting protcols HTTP.

It's Google who is promoting it and all the "hip" hackers will rally for its cause.

<comment><USER12> That's a _non sequitur_ \- SPDY shows markedly improved performance over wired and 802.11 networks. The underlying problem discussed in the paper is down to TCP's interaction with cellular networks, and just happens to particularly punish SPDY somewhat more than HTTP.

That's something that can be worked on and indeed there's a recommendation for improving it. I'd hope something like this would be included in HTTP/2.0, or at least in a subsequent revision.

<comment><USER18> Since SPDY was created with DSL MTUs in mind[1] and optimized for them _only_ (unlike plain HTTP which was transport neutral and lasted almost 20 years) I don't find it hard to believe that if you look _anywhere_ outside Google's test-matrix you will see the benefits of SPDY tapering away almost instantly.

[1] Basically, the test was: will one web-request (including all of Google's tracking headers) to google.com or any of its adwords/analytics beacons exceed one TCP packet and cause possible TCP reassembly-issues or not when using regular consumer-grade DSL MTUs?

<comment><USER19> If they want to save a bit of bandwidth, how about removing this HTTP header?

> P3P: CP="This is not a P3P policy! See > [http://www.google.com/support/accounts/bin/answer.py?hl=en&a...](http://www.google.com/support/accounts/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=151657) > for more info."

I can't believe they're still adding that...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Hey Ilya: Is it possibly in the works to merge QUIC's UDP and magical error correction into whatever SPDY doesn't have that QUIC could complement it with, maybe eventually abandoning QUIC and just going full-force on a further- supercharged SPDY?

Thanks for lowering my bounce by the way..

<comment><USER3> Short answer, yes. Longer answer, there are two ways QUIC can succeed:

a) QUIC makes headway on its own, delivers significant perf win, moves to IETF and becomes a standalone protocol in the long run. b) TCP and TLS leverage techniques & lessons learned from QUIC.

Either way, the users will win. It's too early to tell which of these paths it'll take.. But I do know that both TLS and TCP groups are paying close attention to QUIC and there are already discussions on how to improve performance based on some of the ideas being prototyped in QUIC.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Why did they take the effort to produce an entire paper, over a research question that has a simple logical answer?

The research question (sort of): Is SPDY, which was designed to make HTTP work better on connections with more bandwidth and not worse on less bandwidth, increase performance on connections with less bandwidth (and not really related more latency)?

Their answer (sort of): no, as designed SPDY only increases performance on connections with more bandwidth, and performs similar to HTTP on smaller bandwidths.

Their conclusion (sort of): TCP is not very suitable for transmitting data on high bandwidth (relatively) high latency connections, we should use a different transport layer protocol.

What your reaction should be (sort of): No shit sherlocks, that's exactly what everyone thought 15 years ago and only now the idea is picking up steam, with HTML5 including SCTP in the spec, and Google working on the QUIC effort.

<comment><AUTHOR> You're wrong on all counts.

First, the results aren't obvious (nor the underlying reasons). In fact Google published results a couple of years ago that got massive amounts of coverage suggesting the opposite ([http://googledevelopers.blogspot.com/2012/05/spdy- performanc...](http://googledevelopers.blogspot.com/2012/05/spdy-performance- on-mobile-networks.html)). I've worked on TCP optimization of mobile networks for the past 3 years, publicly criticized Google's study when it came out, and still the results of this paper are somewhat surprising to me.

Second, the underlying issue isn't the latency or the bandwidth of the cellular connection. It's the unpredictability. In fact, the Google study was using dodgy methodology where they assumed that a cellular connection could be modeled simply by bandwidth throttling + delay.

Third, it's absolutely not true that everyone has been thinking that replacing TCP is the solution, even if its problems in the cellular context have been acknowledged. If anything, the opposite, nobody has been thinking of it as a viable solution before QUIC. The deployment problems have just been too big -- but Google is in a unique position to fix that.

<comment><USER21> Ah, I did not know Google was actively positioning SPDY as a good solution for mobile networks, I missed that.

I sort of want to defend that I counted the unreliableness of cellular as lack of bandwidth, but you're right if that's really wanted to say then I should have said it much differently. But do you really find it surprising that in the light of unreliability SPDY would not perform much better than plain HTTP?

To your third point: I wasn't saying everyone said it was a viable idea. Instead I say that only recently, with SCTP in HTML5 and QUIC people are beginning to think it might be a viable idea. But everyone has known for years that TCP just isn't suitable for the modern web, and if only we could, we would have substituted it with SCTP long ago.

<comment><AUTHOR> There are factors favoring SPDY, such as fewer roundtrips thanks to pipelining, or header compression removing the uplink as a bottleneck. There are factors favoring HTTP, such as being less vulnerable to head of line blocking, higher effective congestion/receive windows, and a smaller reduction on the effective congestion window from a single packet loss.

Without testing, it's not at all obvious which set of benefits is actually more significant in the real world. But if I'd had to guess, I would have expected a reduction in roundtrips to be the dominant factor. So yes, I'm a bit surprised.

<comment><USER21> Alright, makes sense :) Thanks for responding.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Anyone else find it strange that they tested 3G (UMTS) instead of LTE?

<comment><USER23> I'm in an American city with a population equivalent to Reykjavik. I spend about 80% of my time on 2G and the remainder on 3G. The number of times I've seen LTE I can count on my fingers.

<comment><USER24> That'd be ~120,000 (according to Wikipedia). In case anyone else didn't know that off the top of their head.

A better analogy for Americans would be Springfield. You can almost just pick one: IL, MA, MO (OH is a bit too small).</comment></comment></comment>


From the Seabed, Figures of an Ancient Cult - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/01/science/archaeology-phoenician-israel-shavei-zion.html <comment><USER2> Why is their belief system referred to as a "cult"?

(We already know the answer, of course: A "cult", in the author's definition, is any belief system with no direct lineage to dominant super-cults -- or that it to say: "major established religions" \-- of the modern era. Most of which are or have been at one time or another just as nutty and barbaric as the author presumes the beliefs of this particular seafaring community to have been).

<comment><USER3> Cult was originally just a "system of religious beliefs and rituals". The dismissive meaning of cult is a relatively recent interpretation and not universal.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do you say "No" when you're the right person for the job? - <AUTHOR> I'm very much a jack of all trades, working as a Product Manager which is the job I didn't know I wanted until I got it.
What I like most is the variety of responsibilities I have. I'm better at doing a large number of things than a large number of people are at doing those things. I'm not amazing at anything except that. I can learn quickly to do something up to a relatively high standard.
I'm passionate about doing things right and when people ask me to help them on X and Y, I genuinely want to because I think/know that I'll do a good job, even if it's outside my normal tasks.
Sometimes I feel like there is no one else I'd trust to do those tasks right and I feel like that may be the main problem. I like helping people too obviously.
So at the end of the day I find myself genuinely thinking that all the things I'm working on should be on my shoulders. In reality I get burnt out because the things that matter to me don't move enough, I just don't realize it in the moment.
Are there any tricks to figuring out on the spot whether you should take on a task or not?
My title is a bit of lie, it should read "when you think you're the right person".. <comment><USER2> > Sometimes I feel like there is no one else I'd trust to do those tasks right > and I feel like that may be the main problem.

Delegate small things to others. Build trust. Delegate larger things. Depending on where you sit in your organization, doing everything yourself will not scale. Your colleagues, at some point, will need to execute on your behalf.</comment>


The Form Is Never Neutral - <AUTHOR> https://tinyletter.com/lmsacasas/letters/the-convivial-society-no-18-the-form-is-never-neutral <comment><USER2> I know you make some effort a few paragraphs in, but if you could provide the slightest context for what this page is, right at the top, that would be very helpful. I still have no idea what I'm reading.

> _I 'd describe what I'm doing as wrestling with the question of the meaning > of technology as way of getting at the moral significance of our tools._

Tools have no moral (as in _morality_ ) significance, I'd be prone to say; at least not any more than other organs.

<comment><USER3> Tools have to have other moral significance. If they didn't, no one would ever make a value judgment or propose a law regarding a tool.

The moral significance of a tool may be complicated, multi-faceted, highly controversial, or heavily dependent on subtle specifics of the context. In the midst of such complexity, I think it is very tempting to say that the tool itself has no bearing on the conflict and all that matters is the humans who wield it. But I don't think we can get away with this simplification.

So what then? How should we treat our tools? How _can_ we treat them? It seems this thread goes quite deep... Sigh, I should really get into the habit of trying to write out my thoughts in a personal notebook.

<comment><USER4> >Tools have to have other moral significance. If they didn't, no one would ever make a value judgment or propose a law regarding a tool.

I object to this kind of reasoning.

Does a rock have moral significance?

Isn't it illegal to hit someone with a rock and kill them? So by giving thought to that possibility, I have shown that a rock does have moral significance?

Tools simply enhance a users ability to affect the world around them. And fundamentally something that only enhances cannot be be morally bad because it can simply not be used.

<comment><USER3> The moral significance of a rock might be minor. It isn't most people's first choice for a murder weapon. If I saw someone carrying a weapon-sized rock, I might somewhat suspicious, but I wouldn't be seriously alarmed, like I would if they were holding a gun or knife.

> Tools simply enhance a users ability to affect the world around them.

Some tools are very general. It's hard to imagine faulting the tool, as it is so useful that it isn't an serious option to abandon it, even if some people use it for bad purposes.

Other tools are not so general. A straight-forward example may be high- explosives. They can used for good, but those situations are very specific and easily recognizable. If high-explosives are found outside of those contexts, the moral significance is obvious. There is a decent chance that someone has bad intentions. A very clear and compelling explanation would be needed to resolve the matter.

Most tools are fairly benign. Or the beneficial usage significantly outnumbers any malicious examples, especially in common contexts. But I don't think means that all tools are by default neutral.

At risk of belaboring the point, here are two more examples:

* Utility knife: (1) When camping: good (2) In an elementary school: bad

* Cameras: (1) 99% of the time: good (2) In the public showers or changing room: bad

In the above "bad" scenarios, I would say the tool itself takes on a negative moral significance. Obviously, there can be caveats -- e.g. you might be filming a movie -- but you get the idea. I'm curious what you think of this.</comment></comment></comment></comment>