Why is Larry Lessig plugging Palantir? - <AUTHOR> http://labels-kill.blogspot.com/2013/06/why-is-larry-lessig-plugging-palantir.html

<comment><USER2> Ah, is this where the hacktivists start eating their own for no better reason than that they don't sufficiently hate the infidels?

This is a notable example of killing the messenger in fact; Lessig talks about using tech proactively in order to aid privacy and accountability, references a company that happens to have the technology to do it already.

Even if you don't like the company (Oh no, their board member knows this other board member! Oh no, the CIA was indirectly involved years back!), that doesn't invalidate the message. It's this kind of intellectual dishonesty that I didn't even dream computer hackers could actually fall victim to, before my rude awakening. Or I don't know, maybe it's the chemtrails eating my brain and Dr. Lessig was really a CIA plant all along, who knows?

<comment><USER3> Actually, it's not just the company but rather Lessig's message itself that bothers me. Read my other comment here for details.

Nobody is suggesting any direct link between Lessig and the CIA, but the ties between Palantir and the surveillance program is becoming obvious.

Use Occam's razor.

      * Palantir was funded by the CIA
      * Palantir is exactly what the NSA PRISM program needs
      * Palantir also had a PRISM product
      * Palantir had been associated with the surveillance program in recent Anonymous leaks (right? during the HBGary scandal)
      * Facebook (which is known to participate with PRISM) & Palantir share Sean Parker
      * Facebook/Google/etc have already denied association with PRISM by factually true but evasive statements. Same with Palantir's recent statement.

More debate here: [http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/06/23/1218189/-HBGary- Pal...](http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/06/23/1218189/-HBGary-Palantir- Prism-Facebook-The-Industrial-Surveillance-Complex#)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> [http://www.theverge.com/2013/6/29/4478748/california- license...](http://www.theverge.com/2013/6/29/4478748/california-license- plate-reader-database-palantir)

Throwing more light on the controversial use of police license plate readers, a new report from the Center for Investigative Reporting reveals the development of a new California database under development with the help of Palantir, a Silicon Valley firm whose data analysis technology is in wide use by the US intelligence and defense communities. According to the report, the company is party to a $340,000 contract to build the new infrastructure. The project is being spearheaded by the Northern California Intelligence Research Center — an office set up after the 9/11 terror attacks to enable police and intelligence agencies to share data.

The new database will collate records coming in from 14 counties across the state, will be able to handle at least 100 million records, and will be accessible to both local and state law enforcement, according to the report. It also notes that license plate records will be held by the new database for two years, regardless of the data retention policies of local law enforcement agencies. The database's total size is unknown, as is the identity of the government organization that administers it. However, LA Weekly wrote last year that a precursor to the new California-wide database in use by Los Angeles police had logged more than 160 million data points.

Despite their undeniable effectiveness at identifying stolen vehicles ("100 times better than driving around looking for license plates" in the words of one San Leandro police officer), license plate scanners have come under sharp criticism from privacy groups like the EFF and ACLU, which sued the LAPD and County Sheriff's Department in May for access to a week's worth of records from its license plate readers. Since the devices permit automated scans of some 14,000 plates during a single shift, privacy advocates argue that strict data retention policies need to be put in place to stop a useful law enforcement tool from turning into a comprehensive database of citizens' movements. And while the Supreme Court ruled last year that warrantless GPS tracking violates the Fourth Amendment against unreasonable search, automated license plate readers don't face the same legal restriction.

</comment><comment><USER5> This article conveniently left out Palantir's reply to the HBGary email leak. [http://www.thetechherald.com/articles/Firm-targeting- WikiLea...](http://www.thetechherald.com/articles/Firm-targeting-WikiLeaks- cuts-ties-with-HBGary-apologizes-to-reporter/12767/)

They can't even do what Aaron Barr was asking of them.

Please approach this article with some level of skepticism. Especially after the last round of discussions[1] we had surrounding the bogus connection Palantir was alleged to have with the NSA. (Due the naming of an internal project which shared the name "Prism").

[1][https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5839305](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5839305)

<comment><USER6> >They can't even do what Aaron Barr was asking of them.

For that matter, they can't even do what Lessig was gushing about:

>>there's a company called Palantir who's built a technology to make it absolutely, make you absolutely confident that a particular bit of data has been used precisely as the government says it's supposed to be used. You can find out exactly who's looked at it and for what purpose it's been used at. So the point is there's a way to build the technology to give us this liberty back, this privacy back. But it's not a priority to think about using code to protect us.

Wha? There's always been code that can tell you who accessed what and when: the problem is trusting it to be set up right, not the technology.

Anyone know what the actual Palantir accomplishment is?

<comment><USER7> Palantir is tool for doing link analysis and importing structured, semi- structured, and unstructured data. It has a great UI for exploring data and a great UI for manual tagging of data. It has excellent logging capabilities, but I'd argue "data has been used precisely as the government says it's supposed to be used" this is impossible since once a person knows a piece of information they can use it in anyway that they'd like.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Ah I have a thought about this. I have noticed for some time that Lessig walks a strange line on the issue of IP (intellectual property) and freedom & privacy.

Lessig believes IP is necessary & requires architectural changes to the internet to protect it. He is in favor of government monitoring to protect IP as long as it is done in accordance with the law, and he proposes a flawed mechanism (P3P) to protect your privacy.

\----

Disclaimer: I haven't had the time to scrutinize this guy. I'm merely writing down the ideas that have been crystalizing in my head the past year or so while encountering his books, talks, and such. I'm all ears to criticism.

\----

First, consider his stance on IP. There is no denying, as evidence in reading over his book "Free Culture" ($16.00), that while he sees existing IP laws as having gone too far, IP must exist in order to protect the monetary incentive of the creator. While many people blindly agree with this justification for IP laws, it's worth mentioning that many disagree, and also that he fails to weigh the evidence of whether IP laws actually promote progress in art and science. For Lessig, it is an assumption.

Second, consider his book "Code".

Page 140 under "Choices" he writes, _" I've argued that cyberspace will open up at least two important choices in the context of intellectual property: whether to allow intellectual property in effect to become completely propertized..., and whether to allow this regime to erase the anonymity latent in less efficient architectures of control. These choices were not made by our framers. They are for us to make now"_. Here, I am paraphrasing, he is saying we have to choose between having complete trusted computing in handling our internet activities in order to prevent piracy, or we have to monitor internet activity and lessen our anonymity. His solution, on the same page, is to ensure pseudonymity, which is exactly what the NSA claims. Yet any hacker worth a dime knows the flaw in claiming that the NSA's methods ensure pseudonymity.

Next, page 158 he writes, _" It might be said that the principle ... is to ban all of these inoffensive and invisible searches. Perhaps that should be done. But ... imagine substitutions that protect the same value without sacrificing the benefit these technologies might bring."_ Here he is defending blanket monitoring, as long as it is modified in some way. His idea of this modification is on page 160: _" What is needed is a way for the machine to negotiate our privacy concerns for us, a way to delegate the negotiating process to a smart agent."_ and the mechanism that he proposes is _" P3P, ... an architecture within which users can express their preferences and negotiate the use of data about them"._

Sure he admits that P3P has unresolvable problems. But his next sentence doesn't sit well either. _"... Imagine an architecture, tied to a market, that protects privacy rights"_ ...

The problem with all of his suggestions is that they simply don't work. Either Lessig is ignorant about the nature of information, or he is deliberately suggesting red herrings to problems of the kind of NSA surveillance. You can't fix that with a P3P or a market. You can't even fix it well with encryption unless you're using Perfect Forward Secrecy. I'll give him the benefit of the doubt, but still... if you connect the dots, you may find that at worst Lessig is an apologist for the surveillance state, and at best offers no real solutions to the problem of internet privacy.

It's also worth noting that while Lessig associates with Aaron in many ways, their roots could not be any more different. Aaron started within the law, helping creating things like RSS and Creative Commons, but over time he became more of an activist, and condoned more aggressive tactics of information freedom, as evidenced in his Guerilla Open Access Manifesto (2008)... _" We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with the world. We need to take stuff that's out of copyright and add it to the archive. We need to buy secret databases and put them on the Web. We need to download scientific journals and upload them to file sharing networks. We need to fight for Guerilla Open Access."_ On the other hand, Lessig staunchly supports the IP system, and fails to propose a system that Aaron would agree with.

\----

\- EOM

<comment><USER8> Thanks for an informative post, but this bit is a little irritating:

" ... While many people blindly agree with this justification for IP laws, it's worth mentioning that many disagree, ..."

Would you also agree that many people agree with the justification and many people blindly disagree with it? Or is anyone who agrees necessarily blind and all who disagree farsighted?

<comment><USER3> Oops you're right! Of course there are intelligent justifications for IP. Blindness goes both ways.

<comment><USER2> One major unintended consequence of strong IP is that it provides the _backbone_ behind copyleft projects like GNU. With weak IP it would be as if all software had BSD-alike licenses. To give people the freedom to have the source to the software that drives their _essential_ computing gear requires some type of strong IP regime to enforce the requirement to share-alike.

As technology becomes more important, the availability of source code correspondingly becomes more important. Right now there's a fairly strong social pressure to open the source, but it won't always have to be that way either.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Palantir stores an audit trail that shows exactly where each piece of data comes from and who has accessed it. This allows citizens, courts, regulators, etc. to see precisely how data is being used.

These features are a deep part of the platform (i.e. they can't be turned off) that powers a lot of the other features (entity resolution / de-resolution, for example). Say what you want about the people collecting the data and the data they are collecting, but civil Liberties and privacy protections are an inseparable part of Palantir.

<comment><USER3> >> Palantir stores an audit trail that shows exactly where each piece of data comes from and who has accessed it. This allows citizens, courts, regulators, etc. to see precisely how data is being used.

What are you blabbering about? What you suggest is impossible.

Are you talking about this "immutable audit log" technology? ([http://www.palantir.com/wp-content/static/pg-analysis- blog/2...](http://www.palantir.com/wp-content/static/pg-analysis- blog/2009/07/Privacy-and-Civil-Liberties-are-in-Palantirs-DNA.pdf)) That's nothing more than marketing speak powered by research papers that have proven to be insufficient. See: [http://www.informatik.uni- freiburg.de/~accorsi/papers/imf09....](http://www.informatik.uni- freiburg.de/~accorsi/papers/imf09.pdf)

Also, see slide 11 and 12 here: [http://www.slideshare.net/Nbukhari/audit- trail-protection-av...](http://www.slideshare.net/Nbukhari/audit-trail- protection-avoiding-a-false-sense-of-security), and then read this: [http://www.std.com/~cme/non-repudiation.htm](http://www.std.com/~cme/non- repudiation.htm)

Immutable audit trails and non-repudiation without specialized devices (blackboxes) are a lie. It is impossible to create a bulletproof auditing system for access to sensitive data, especially when you're talking about the kind of surveillance that the NSA is doing with PRISM.

I suspect that when government officials cite the "transparency" and "auditability" of NSA PRISM, this is what it all boils down to -- marketing talk from Palantir etc.

<comment><USER10> It is really too bad people are criticizing Lessig, or he thinks he is being critisized, because "Palantir is a bad company, or that it has done bad things, or that it has been funded by bad people".

That's not the first thing that comes to mind when I read "technologies that could give us, and more importantly, reviewing courts, a very high level of confidence that data collected or surveilled was not collected or used in an improper way."

That's incredible!

<comment><USER3> More people need to know about this. I think people get lost in his prose and lose the gist of what he's really trying to do.

<comment><USER10> What do you mean by "what he's really trying to do"?

Anyway, I'm pointing out that he's making/repeating a technically incredible claim. I'm ever so slightly surprised and saddened that scrutiny of that claim isn't the focus here.

<comment><USER3> He's using the issue of copyright to condone the current direction of the surveillance state, and he is offering red herrings as "balancing" compromises.

Yes, I agree with you. I think it is because we are among the first to find it, sparked by that blog post. This seems to be the technical crux of the debate.

<comment><USER10> I doubt his aim is to condone the current direction of the surveillance state, but perhaps pursuit of "balance" plus technical credulity helps achieve the same.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> What is the significance of Barrett Brown being a young white male? I didn't see any obvious reason for the author to mention either his sex or race.

<comment><USER12> Subtext: "Yes, a young white male, just like Constant Reader probably is. Yes, that's right. _You._ What happened to him could have happened to _you_. This wasn't racism, or sexism, or any other form of institutional oppression. Be afraid."

It worked on me, I have to say.

<comment><USER13> "That's right. You." ?!

This is such a saddening comment.

<comment><USER12> How so? Someone asked about the dog whistle, and I translated it. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the poster, etc. etc.

<comment><USER13> I see. The dog whistle hadn't registered with me until I read your comment, so I probably attributed some of my distaste of it to you. Sorry.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> To suggest that Palantir systems are not used in all kinds of defense, law enforcement, and counter-terrorism operations is to deny reality. Lessig, being of such stature in his field, surely knows who they are and what they do. Why he mentions them by name not only in the Moyers interview but also in an article one can only speculate. Via twitter he says he plugs "ideas, not companies" but didn't address if he knew what other business Palantir gets up to.

Can anybody show evidence of the "audit trail" Palantir uses to ensure citizens know what's being done with their data by NCTC, FBI and others?

<comment><USER3> The the government's claims of transparency and audibility of the NSA's PRISM program is analogous (if not directly related) to the claims of Palantir's. Search for "immutable auditing" below:

[http://www.palantir.com/wp-content/static/pg-analysis- blog/2...](http://www.palantir.com/wp-content/static/pg-analysis- blog/2009/07/Privacy-and-Civil-Liberties-are-in-Palantirs-DNA.pdf)

But even with such an audit trail to the core, it is known that it isn't sufficient:

[http://www.informatik.uni- freiburg.de/~accorsi/papers/imf09....](http://www.informatik.uni- freiburg.de/~accorsi/papers/imf09.pdf)

I wager that for any given system that touts immutable audibility, there is a way to hack around it. Privacy through automated means is impossible. At best it is a kind of DRM that the NSA can easily work around secretly if it wanted it. What we should be advocating instead is Perfect Forward Secrecy in our internet architecture, and the dismantling of PRISM and related data centers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Let me try to phrase that in a way a politican would say that:

"Those on the extreme ends, commonly referred to as conspiracy nuts, would say: That's exactly what we expect Lessig to do after attending Bilderberg Conferences. But to those I say: Lessig is a honorable citizen, with strong believes in freedom and democracy. Somebody who would never shill as a pseudo credible mouthpiece for defending questionable public-private partnership."</comment>


Portable Synthesizer OP-1 - <AUTHOR> https://teenage.engineering/products/op-1/overview <comment><USER2> Nice product but I have to ask - why mini USB?</comment>


Hack on Lush website exposes credit-card details - <AUTHOR> http://www.zdnet.co.uk/news/security/2011/01/21/attacks-on-lush-website-expose-credit-card-details-40091520/ <comment><USER2> Third time this story has been submitted, all from different sources, no comments of substance as yet:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2128701>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2127498></comment>


Photorealistic renderer in JS - <AUTHOR> http://renderer.ivank.net/

<comment><USER2> Despite slowing my browser to a crawl, that's pretty damn impressive!</comment>


The Best Programming Fonts - <AUTHOR> http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2009/05/01/top-10-programming-fonts/

<comment><USER2> Number one is Arial? Way to blow all credibility right up front.

<comment><USER3> The fonts are listed in alphabetical order.

But still, as stated in the article:

"It can be a little difficult to distinguish between uppercase i / lowercase L and nested single/double quotes but that can be said of many proportional fonts."

For source code editing, I'll stick to a monospaced font myself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I guess platform/rendering engine difference should be taken into consideration when choosing the "best" fonts. Same font is usually rendered very differently on different platforms with anti-aliasing on. For example, Monaco looks fantastic on Mac, but just so-so on Windows/Linux. (Though for bitmap fonts this seems not a real issue.)

</comment><comment><USER5> Don't use Vera, use DejaVu. It's the same font, but with many more Unicode characters. (λ looks much nicer after I made the switch.)

Link: <http://dejavu-fonts.org/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page>

</comment><comment><USER6> Terminus. LispM font.

Smoothed blended TrueType programming fonts are for clove-cigarette-smoking nancy boys.

</comment><comment><USER7> How about the X11 "fixed" font and my favorite - "terminus"?

Fixed, by the way is the font you see when you start xterm in most environments. Hold Ctrl and the RMB while the mouse cursor is in a xterm window and you can see it in different sizes

</comment><comment><USER8> I am a big fan of Anonymous, it is currently my emacs code font.

<http://www.ms-studio.com/FontSales/anonymous.html>

<comment><USER9> +1 for Anonymous. It's a great font to use on OS X, especially if you're using light font on a dark background, as OS X tends to render the fonts much heavier and blurrier with antialiasing. Anonymous remains fairly crisp.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> It's not mentioned, but I _love_ Pragmata[1]. It's expensive, but gorgeous and very usable. And I stand by what I said about it earlier: <http://twitter.com/yan_i/status/1442859670>

[1] <http://www.fsd.it/fonts/pragma.htm>

<comment><USER11> Wow. 90 euro for a font is pricey.

It looks nice. What makes it better than the other programming fonts? or is it a general feeling when you use it?

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> ++ for Dina. It's an excellent programming font and looks great even at 8pt. It allows you to see much more code per screen.

</comment><comment><USER13> Arial? I've tried using non monospace fonts for code. They've never worked out for me.

<comment><USER5> I think it might be dependent on what language you use. In Perl, alignment is very important, as you have a lot of code that looks like:

       my $foo = Foo->new(
          named_initargs => 'go here',
          and_also       => 'here',
       );

(There are various technical reasons to avoid this style, but I think it looks too nice to avoid.)

As a result, a non-monospaced font would be a nightmare.

However, perhaps if you are using a language where everything is positional (Java, C), then maybe it doesn't matter:

        Foo foo = new Foo(args, go, here,
            and, if, you, run, out, of, room,
            perhaps, they, can, be, written,
            like, this);

Note that the only alignment is the initial indentation; one space is always as wide as another space, so a variable-width font won't mess anything up.

Obviously if you are using Haskell or Python, you will care even more about alignment, and hence will want a monospaced font. You will also want a monospaced font in your terminal emulator, as most console apps depend on all glyphs being equally wide.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Espresso Mono gets my vote nowadays. Prior to that, I was using Consolas for the prior year or so.

I _think_ I used Monaco or Inconsolata before that. Can't really remember.

</comment><comment><USER15> I used to like Monaco, but its parentheses are kind of annoying if you program in a lisp like language, or if you need to nest a lot of parentheses. Now im using dejavu sans mono.

</comment><comment><USER16> my favorite programming font (and I think it is a pity that the article doesn't mention it): Envy Code R ([http://damieng.com/blog/2008/05/26/envy- code-r-preview-7-cod...](http://damieng.com/blog/2008/05/26/envy-code-r- preview-7-coding-font-released))

I just love this font! it's such a beautiful piece of font-design and I only can recommend you to try it out!

</comment><comment><USER17> I like triskweline <http://www.netalive.org/tinkering/triskweline/>

</comment><comment><USER18> inconsolata

droid-sans mono

<comment><USER2> Both great!

I would add Envy Code R: [http://damieng.com/blog/2008/05/26/envy-code-r- preview-7-cod...](http://damieng.com/blog/2008/05/26/envy-code-r- preview-7-coding-font-released)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I'm perfectly happy with Courier New. Most editors on windows use it by default and I never felt the need to change it.

</comment><comment><USER20> I've been happily using Proggy Clean for a while. It's even surprisingly readable printed at low point size.

<comment><USER21> Proggy is nice if your screen is 640x480 and CRT, but I think LCD screens and font smoothing has made that font irrelevant.

<comment><USER20> Mm, works nicely for me at 1280 x 1024 a monitor. Also quite reasonable- looking printed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Grunties's comment FTW. "monospace good, non-monospace bad, all other considerations irrelevant. Next?"

<comment><USER16> that's the same thought I had when I saw that Arial was the first item on their list. I once tried to use a non-monospaced font, but that lasted only a few seconds. it just doesn't fit!</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to set up a home storage backup strategy - <AUTHOR> I would like to backup all my files (photos with family, music, etc) in a way that is:
 * local first
 * relatively easy to maintain
 * optional backup to remote cloud.
I've been searching around and I think that the best option is something like a Synology NAS.
What are your experiences setting up and maintaining local backup strategies? <comment><USER2> I've meant to write this up for my beta users for ages. Here you go: [https://photostructure.com/faq/how-do-i-safely-store- files/](https://photostructure.com/faq/how-do-i-safely-store-files/)</comment>


US admits: French surveillance revelations raise 'legitimate questions' - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/21/us-french-surveillance-legitimate-questions

<comment><USER2> How exactly does the US have access to French phone records, to the extent they can record conversations, and full content of SMS messages?

I would presume all those systems would reside in France, or the EU at the very least? So who is providing them this information, or given them unfettered access to them? And why has nobody noticed until now?

</comment><comment><USER3> Ok, so how exactly could the US do this without French government access to circuits? Of course this was probably done with the French government's permission. And no one is asking to what extent the French government itself is engaged in this kind of activity.

</comment><comment><USER4> EDIT: Aaaaaaaand this article is already well on its way to the third page.

>The two presidents agreed that we should continue to discuss these issues in diplomatic channels.

Because those channels are safe ([http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/21/mexico- condemns...](http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/21/mexico-condemns-us- nsa-hacking-presidents-emails)).

>According to the paper, the documents show that the NSA was allegedly targeting not only terrorist suspects but also politicians, businesspeople and members of the administration under a programme codenamed US-985D. The paper said "French interests" were "targeted on a daily basis".

>Le Monde said the unpublished Snowden documents it had seen showed "intrusion, on a vast scale, both into the private space of French citizens as well as into the secrets of major national firms".

I'd like to see one of the members of the EU institute an embargo with the USA for a few weeks, just for kicks.

<comment> mh- _one of the members of the EU institute an embargo with the USA for a few weeks_

I don't think that would affect the US materially; can the same be said for the would-be embargoer?

<comment><USER4> On the European side, I'd like to see some of our allies show some backbone and at least pretend that they're genuinely outraged. Sever some treaties, kill off some contracts with US businesses, something, _anything_ to demonstrate that they take their own sovereignty and culture seriously. Of course, they're all in on the game too. For all their indignation it's really just showmanship.

On the other hand, if Mexico were serious about an embargo, that would have significant impacts. More so on Mexico, but it would still affect the USA materially.

I suppose over the past couple months, this whole debacle has cemented my opinion that everyone that matters --in terms of their supposed indignation and objection to all that has been revealed-- is already the USA's bitch. The only groups with balls enough to snub the USA are the ones that already have little to lose.</comment></comment></comment>


Tell W3C: We don't want the Hollyweb - <AUTHOR> http://www.defectivebydesign.org/no-drm-in-html5? <comment><USER2> HTML DRM consists of two parts. The first part is EME (extended media extension) that defines the API how a browser interacts with the CDM (the actual implementation of the DRM)

The EME is what is being standardized. The CDM is what is up to the platform provider (or any plug-in provider) to implement, such as Google, Sony, Microsoft etc.

There are a couple problems with this.

1) The actual DRM functionality will not help keep people from having to deploy on flash/silverlight because the technology is ladden with proprietary licenses and NDAs. Ordinary web developers will not be able to make use of "HTML DRM"

2) Since the CDM requires to do some user specific encryption/restriction, the CDM will be able to uniquely identify each web user regardless of privacy settings, cookie blockers etc. You will not have control over what the CDM does, it will sacrifice your privacy on the web, absolutely. This is a supercookie on steroids.

3) Due to the CDM having to be provided by third parties as a proprietary blob, this will make it harder to support the DRM on free/libre/speech/beer implementations such as Firefox, Linux etc.

4) It will decrease compatibility of video on the web by fracturing already fractured video support (the codec wars) into the even more fractured DRM format wars.

5) Because the CDM is a proprietary blob, there is no scrutiny, code review and control over what it does. Fiascos such as Sonys rootkits and a host of security exploits in shoddily written proprietary DRM blobs are inevitable.

6) Companies like Google, Microsoft and Apple will use the DRM to gain leverage over their competitors by intentionally denying them compatibility to consume videos of services they created.

7) Companies like Netflix, Amazon etc. will use the DRM to gain leverage over their competitors by denying them the ability to produce videos compatible with their DRM implementation.

8) And finally DRM will be used by everybody implementing it to rise the barrier of entry for companies in the entire market, as well as to exclude innovation.

<comment><USER3> Actually, it's even worse. EME does NOT define how a browser interacts with the CDM at the moment. That's precisely why some people are objecting to it in its current state.

EME defines how script in a web page can ask the browser to talk to the CDM. How the browser actually does that is up to the browser and CDM vendor. There is no requirement that any CDMs expose any sort of standardized API that browsers can use to talk to them.

For example, given the current proposal Microsoft can ship a CDM on Windows that only IE can talk to, Google can ship a CDM that only works in Chrome, etc.

So in its present state the setup can be trivially used to lock out third- party (and especially open-source) browsers: just don't let them talk to any CDMs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm actually a bit conflicted about support for DRM schemes in HTML5.

I absolute loathe DRM and I wish every damn publisher of every damn type would come to their senses and actually sell DRM-free digital products.

However, there is one case where some form of "DRM" does make sense, and that's actual renting - or more specifically, the popular case of "catalog subscription" (ala Spotify, Netflix and so on). You're clearly renting access to a catalog of goods in this kind of model, and therefore it makes sense that you'd want to stop people from permanently acquiring copies in such a scenario, especially if you're selling actual DRM-free downloads at the same time (in my ideal digital store where it makes sense they would offer both of these side-by-side). The catalog subscription model has some clear value to it, and I'd hate for it to disappear due to "technical unfeasibility".

As such, I would at least prefer for most of the tech / architecture to be based on HTML5 stuff instead of closed plugins like Flash, Silverlight, Widevine and so on. I can't really think of a good solution to this, unless you got the big wigs at various publishing outlets to accept that to do HTML5 streaming, you can only make downloading the rentable versions inconvenient for regular versions (instead of being able to use a heavy-weight closed DRM plugin), but I'm afraid that could be quite challenging. It has worked for Adobe and webfonts, though[1], so maybe there's hope. Forcing HTML5 to be DRM- free could eventually lead to this direction.

[1] [http://blog.typekit.com/2009/07/21/serving-and-protecting- fo...](http://blog.typekit.com/2009/07/21/serving-and-protecting-fonts-on-the- web/)

<comment><USER5> > As such, I would at least prefer for most of the tech / architecture to be > based on HTML5 stuff instead of closed plugins like Flash, Silverlight, > Widevine and so on.

It's not really based on open stuff. EME isn't DRM, it provides a way to talk to a DRM service (probably a hardware DRM in most cases). They are creating a false-sense of "open standards" when this thing still won't work in Linux and most not-locked-down platforms.

<comment><USER6> Unfortunately, this sort of problem is basically unsolvable for Linux (and other such "open" platforms). Either you get a proprietary blob that implements a protection scheme, or you simply don't get the functionality being promised.

Objecting to efforts to make the situation better for HTML5 experiences on other platforms because it won't work on Linux is, honestly, pretty selfish. It _can't_ work on Linux, so you're basically saying since it can't work for you, it shouldn't work for anyone else too. And that's just dragging down the state of the web to the lowest common denominator.

<comment><USER7> > And that's just dragging down the state of the web to the lowest common > denominator.

Or up to the state of most openness?

<comment><USER6> Leaving out functionality because Linux can't support it isn't dragging anything up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> There's a pretty lively thread over on Reddit: [http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/1asm1x/tell_w3c_...](http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/1asm1x/tell_w3c_we_dont_want_the_hollyweb_drm_in_html5/)

</comment><comment><USER8> A dark future for HTML. I can't really describe the melancholy I feel when thinking about this. In 10 years, we'll be reminiscing about how the web was once an open platform, and we'll kick ourselves for having said at the time, "I hate DRM...but then again, I do like netflix!"

</comment><comment><USER9> The W3C requires at least two implementations before standardization can happen, right? Theoretically, if both Webkit and Gecko refused to implement it (or, more diplomatically, "indefinitely deprioritized its implementation"), would this be DOA?

<comment><USER10> Google and Microsoft are supporters and working on the spec,

[https://dvcs.w3.org/hg/html-media/raw-file/tip/encrypted- med...](https://dvcs.w3.org/hg/html-media/raw-file/tip/encrypted- media/encrypted-media.html)

Which makes two implementations, I am afraid. Unless we can convince at least one of those to stop.

<comment><USER9> Right, but it's Apple, not Google, who holds the keys to Webkit. Not that I presume that Apple is so benevolent (naive much?), but it wouldn't be the first time that Apple has outright rejected a Googler's patch (I can't remember the link now, something about Dart integration). Obviously Google could always fork the whole project for the sole purpose of implementing DRM, but what a fiasco that would be!

<comment><USER10> Google doesn't need to officially fork WebKit, it can keep these features in Chromium and not push them into WebKit - like many other features, including the one you mentioned (Dart support that Apple rejected). But Chrome is still a major implementation, it doesn't have to get into WebKit or not (for standardization purposes that we are discussing here).

<comment><USER9> Thanks, I wasn't sure what was considered an "implementation" according to the W3C.

In other news, azakai, you work for Mozilla, correct? Have they issued an official statement regarding this?

<comment><USER3> Chrome certainly counts as an implementation. You just can't count Chrome and Safari as two separate implementations if the actual code is in shared WebKit (but you _can_ count them if the implementation is unshared code, for what it's worth).

As for Mozilla, no official statement yet, though there have been some public comments from Robert O'Callahan on the EME spec.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It's hot HTML's job to fix broken business models.

<comment><USER12> They are being pressured by businesses that want to support those broken business models like Google. Youtube is a great example - _thousands_ of people are now living their lives off youtube ad revenue, yet you can get a simple addon for any browser to download the mp4s.

DRM isn't necessary, old media just wants total control. I seriously think if we just play the battle of attrition, they will die off soon because they can't compete in an on-demand get-what-you-want information free era.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> If DRM is inevitable, I'd take a properly implemented DRM that's been through community scrutiny than another Sony rootkit fiasco any time.

<comment><USER14> How would you like hooks in your web browser for the Sony root kit?

That's what's being proposed at the W3C.

<comment><USER15> Please, that's hyperbole. Sony rootkit and the DRM present in Flash/Silverlight are worlds apart.

<comment><USER16> Actually the description is apt -- the proposal is when a web page loads then a binary blob (that has OS-level hardware access) will be invoked. It would be as simple as including a highly-insecure JS file rather than installing a browser add-on/plug-in/extension/whatever.

The security risks cause me imagine EME news that makes the recent Java 0-day news frighteningly tame.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I think DRM makes sense sadly because otherwise it'd be as simple as 'right click, save as' and you'd have the contents of a movie. There'd be little incentive to subscribe to Netflix past a month. Rdio too.

Simple anti-copying provisions that are still defeatable, though through effort, help incentivize the migration of those channels. And that's what I really want. I want Hollywood to feel comfortable using the web, because then more open alternatives will emerge when it's a level playing field. (IE watching TV is watching the web.)

<comment><USER18> No, this doesn't make sense in the slightest.

Fact 1. If I want a movie or song without paying for it, I can get it.

I don't need any more facts, this "solution" doesn't solve fact 1's problem. It simply breaks the internet. So what part of creating a burden that doesn't solve a problem make sense?

<comment><USER15> How does it break the internet anymore than Flash and Silverlight do right now?

<comment><USER18> I have the option to not use flash, or silverlight. When built into a specification, that option is absent.

<comment><USER19> Not really, you can always disable that option in the browser or use a browser that doesn't implement that part of the spec.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I don't know what the solution is here, but I'm worried that if we don't implement this solution, the web will fall even faster out of favor to native apps.

I'm talking about mobile.

Right now running flash or silverlight on your desktop is no big deal. This "solution" is unnecessary. But on mobile we have a real problem: the only way for anyone to deliver encrypted media is via a native app, which is exactly what everyone is doing. That comes at the expense of the web. So now we have an entire generation of users growing up on apps (netflix, hulu, spotify) because those content licensing deals require DRM.

The desktop is fading. If we want the web to stay relevant as everything moves to closed ecosystems, this may be a necessary evil, because the web+EME is infinitely more open than the an iPhone/Android app.

</comment><comment><USER21> There is more information at the EFF page [0] linked in TFA, although not quite the same "call to action".

[0]: [https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/03/defend-open-web- keep-d...](https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/03/defend-open-web-keep-drm- out-w3c-standards)

</comment><comment><USER22> Isn't this going to be necessary for a site like YouTube to be able to fully switch off of Flash?

<comment><USER23> Currently YouTube doesn't require Flash Player for the overwhelming majority of its videos. It's a bit unclear whether they are still using RTMPE for some Hollywood stuff (as they were a year or two ago), but if you go to <https://www.youtube.com/movies> the free movies work perfectly using all free and open source client software, with no Flash Player.

Most (or all) of YouTube is implemented as FLV or MP4 files delivered over HTTP. You can watch this in action by using software like youtube-dl.

So apart from the purported, perennial Hollywood threat to boycott things, the empirical answer with regard to the existing YouTube seems to be no. (Though maybe there is still some RTMPE lurking somewhere on the site.)</comment></comment>


How I Got My Stolen Laptop Back Within 24 Hours Using Prey - <AUTHOR> http://dougvs.tumblr.com/post/9923567875/how-i-got-my-stolen-laptop-back-within-24-hours-using <comment><USER2> As an entirely personal note, I like the tone of this particular account. The author avoids the moral and legal morass of identifying someone who has not (yet) been convicted of a crime, and the article appears to focus on describing what happened and how he recovered the laptop rather than attempting to punish or shame the alleged thieves, vigilante style.

Refreshing.

</comment><comment><USER3> As an existing Prey user (for my Android phone) I'm left wondering what time remains before the tides turn on this kind of service, living in an age where a burglar can successfully sue for hurting themselves on your furniture while rummaging through your belongings, it couldn't be long. Here's a related article from last week: [http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/08/absolute- sued-for-s...](http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/08/absolute-sued-for- spying/) wherein an unwitting supply teacher bought a stolen laptop, only according to the judge to have had her privacy violated by the company attempting to recover it.

That example aside, it doesn't require contrived thinking to fathom scenarios where an "anti theft" feature of a conveniently placed (extremely cheap, mass produced[, say 5 years from now]) phone might be intentionally used to spy on someone. Compare and contrast with existing wiretapping laws and consider how similar these services already are (at least in my mind).

It's also vaguely interesting that this user installed Prey and almost forgot about it, i.e. here Prey is basically your typical "crapware" that a tech friend might clean off the laptop along with accumulated toolbars and suchlike.

(Sorry for the fragmented English, somewhat inebriated)

<comment><USER4> _living in an age where a burglar can successfully sue for hurting themselves on your furniture while rummaging through your belongings_

Do you have a source for that? Frankly, I don't believe it.

 _wherein an unwitting supply teacher bought a stolen laptop_

She bought a two year-old laptop _from a student_ at an 'Alternative' school for _$60_. It had its serial number removed. Good luck to her in convincing any jury that she didn't knowingly receive stolen goods.

The judge did't rule that her privacy was violated, only that "a reasonable jury could find that they crossed an impermissible boundary."

<comment><USER5> It seems the 'burglar sues for hurting themselves' theme is a popular one. I've heard it a few times from various friends and sources. As far as I can tell it tends to be miss-represented, or non-existent.

One of the common ones is the 'fell through a skylight' version, which is apparently sort-of true according to this: [http://overlawyered.com/2006/09/the-burglar-and-the- skylight...](http://overlawyered.com/2006/09/the-burglar-and-the-skylight- another-debunking-that-isnt/)

In this case it was vs a school, and the case was settled before it was decided, which is as much a side-effect of the structure of our legal system as anything.

While I'm sure some questionable verdicts have caused unfair rewards in cases such as this, I have to imagine that it is very rare, or that the cases are actually much more complex than they appear on the surface.

It reminds me of people who laugh at the 'stupidity' of McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit ("well duh coffee is hot!"), where the more detailed information shows the reasonableness of the case (McDonald's coffee was dangerously, excessively hot, the plaintiff was in the hospital for eight days for third degree burns etc).

[https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Liebeck_v._Mc...](https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonald%27s_Restaurants)

I feel this is an interesting flavor of urban myth.

<comment><USER6> What people don't realize about hot liquids - a cup of boiling water is more dangerous than a hot stovetop.

People panic about children touching hot dry things, like hot plates or coals. A hot coal (with no flame) isn't a huge danger, as the outer layer of skin on their hand will evaporate, creating a protective layer of gas. And the pain will make them pull back. It's still possible for things to go badly, but the risk is smaller than people may think.

On the other hand, a saucepan full of soup (or worse, oil) can easily kill a child if it splashes all over them. The hot liquid sticks to skin and clothes, transferring large amounts of heat (thus cooking multiple layers of skin).

So while a cup of coffee sounds safe (due to it being a familiar hazard, and people incorrectly assuming that < boiling point = not so dangerous), it's really really dangerous. Put it in an easily crushed paper cup, and hand it to a grandma in a car, and you are just asking for trouble.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've read a couple of stories like these and still wonder if thieves tend to format the hard-drive or not.

To avoid that, I created a "honeypot" account which is automatically logged in on my machines (OS X), so at least the machine seems usable without reformatting (and Prey remains effective).

Any other similar tips or things to take care of to secure a Mac in particular?

<comment><USER8> I wondered about this as well. If I were professionally stealing laptops, my first instinct would be to disconnect power/battery, then boot from CD and image the HDD for later identity theft. From there a reinstall would be in order. All the theives seem to just open it up and start using it.

I also password protect my laptop. I wonder if I shouldn't to encourage immediate use for information gathering.

<comment><USER9> if they were smarter, they certainly would not end as thiefs ;-)

<comment><USER10> Not necessarily, but maybe if they were smarter, they wouldn't be caught thieving :)

<comment><USER11> I certainly wasn't!

Oh...

<comment><USER12> If I found a laptop I would:

1\. PC... pop out the BIOS battery to clear the BIOS password, re-flash the BIOS, DoD wipe the harddrive and install Windows fresh.

2\. Mac... pop out the battery, wipe the PRAM, DoD wipe the harddrive and install OSX fresh.

<comment><USER13> I miss the old firmware PowerMacs. You could reprogram the firmware to lock the boot sequence with a password. Unlike BIOS the firmware was NVRAM so popping the battery and resetting the PRAM wouldn't change much. The only way to get past the firmware was to replace the motherboard.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> mike-cardwell I have Windows installed on my laptop with a passwordless account, purely as a honeypot OS. Ubuntu is my main OS and it's hidden. I have Prey running in the honeypot OS. My laptop has a built in GPS unit which Prey is happy to take advantage of, so I should get a more accurate location reading if my laptop gets nicked than this guy.

For more info on how I set things up: [https://grepular.com/Protecting_a_Laptop_from_Simple_and_Sop...](https://grepular.com/Protecting_a_Laptop_from_Simple_and_Sophisticated_Attacks)

</comment><comment><USER14> Love these stories - but, although I have Prey installed, my account is passworded and full-disk encryption is on too.

So I guess it would be a reformat for the thief and no Prey for me?

<comment><USER15> Yeah, if it's impossible for a thief to use the computer then Prey is useless. It's why I have a guest account on my computer: if someone steals it, I want them to be able to get it online so that I have some chance of recovering it.

<comment><USER14> Just checked, and you can't use Guest accounts if FileVault is on (makes sense of course).

<comment><USER16> Thats a problem i have as well, filefault 2 is great, but the end user/thief wont be able to report his location via a prey app. There is got to be a workaround....

<comment><USER17> The easiest is to make two installs of OSX on the machine. The first has full admin access and prey running. The second has full disk encryption and locked down.

Default boot into the first partition. If the system is stolen they will reboot and you can track. Because it has full admin they are less likely to reinstall.

<comment><USER18> That doesn't seem very practical.

<comment><USER19> It is if you make a habit of leaving your laptop laying around unlocked and enjoy writing blog posts to that effect.

Oh, but for actually using the computer? Yeah, somewhat impractical.

(My worry is not the $1000 I sunk on an easily-replaceable chunk of plastic wrapped around my data. It's my data. So my laptop boots up to "type the encryption key", and if you don't know it, you have to erase the disk and install your own OS, keeping my data safe. I'd rather my private data stay private than to take a picture of someone stealing my laptop. Also, my laptop never gets stolen.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I love the idea but I have been trouble actually getting the software working (network issues connecting to server during install and now also their control panel):

Says 'down for everyone'.

[http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/http://control.preypr...](http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/http://control.preyproject.com)

<comment><USER21> I'm having this issue as well, it's not just you.

<comment><USER20> I'm really happy to hear they are getting a lot of attention, and I hope they make a paid service with an SLA - I'd happily be charged a yearly fee knowing that it was keeping their servers up and my computer might stand a chance of phoning home.

<comment><USER22> check out lojack for laptops, if you want something with a guarantee.

since it embeds itself in the BIOS it will survive hdd replacements and os wipes, too. I have it on my thinkpad, and it's survived numerous hdd replacements and os wipes. the only downside i can think of is that it doesn't support linux.

<comment><USER18> You can easily wipe the BIOS.

<comment><USER23> Sure, but it's unlikely a thief would.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> He left all that in a parked car?

The faith people on the other side of the Atlantic put in strangers astonishes me every time. Leaving the keys to your car inside the car, leaving the front door open go against the most basic sense of responsability I've been taught, to the point that I feel uneasy the whole travel when I have to leave the car unlocked while on a ferry boat.

L'occasione fa l'uomo ladro - Opportunity makes a thief

<comment><USER25> It's weird to me that you WOULDN"T feel secure doing that. I grew up in a rural community where you left your car keys in the car and the door unlocked. It wasn't uncommon to see $100,000+ pieces of farm equipment sitting out in the field with the keys still in them.

To me it seems odd that you would tolerate having to lock everything up.

<comment><USER26> I will observe that farm equipment vs electronic equipment usually have a huge difference in physical size. Also you seem to be referring to motorable farm equipment.But i assume they don't have a very good speed.* *- I may be wrong about the speed limit part.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I am questioning these "discoveries" about prey - from their FAQ

       My computer/phone was stolen but Prey wasn't installed on it.
       Is there something I can do?

       Not much, since you must install Prey before the actual theft takes place.
       If Prey isn't installed (or if it wasn't correctly set up)
       there's no way we can track your device to see where it is. Sorry!

</comment><comment><USER28> Prey looks cool, but... a non-ssl sign-up/login? Ridiculous!

<comment> mike-cardwell The login/signup/control panel all used to sit on "control.preyproject.com". I wrote a HTTPS-Everywhere ruleset for it at the time to force it onto https. It seems to have moved to "panel.preyproject.com" now though. https does exist there, but it's not redirected to by default.

Anyway, I've just wrote an update for the HTTPS-Everywhere PreyProject ruleset for this and requested that it is pulled in to the main repo. It's currently sat here:

[https://github.com/mikecardwell/https- everywhere/commit/aa9f...](https://github.com/mikecardwell/https- everywhere/commit/aa9f2f70f7c69b19c30feb1ead4462a8b8f92adf)

But they're usually quite quick to pull in my rulesets.

<comment><USER28> That's good news, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Site must be busy. Taking forever for me to get registered.

</comment><comment><USER30> I like this product but what are the odds of this story being a hoax just to promote it.

<comment><USER15> Given that Prey is free, open source, and has been around for quite a while, I think that it's fairly unlikely that this is a hoax.

<comment><USER30> Good point</comment></comment></comment>


Offer HN: Business Plan Review for Indian Online Startups - <AUTHOR>

I am CEO of RailsFactory, building web applications is my passion and I have worked with quiet a few startups as founder, advisor, consultant, employee etc.
I am active in open coffee club, techmeet and other techie/entrepreneur/startup groups/events in chennai, India.
if you plan to startup in india for online applications, software products, SAAS apps. I can review your business plans, alpha/beta versions, make frank suggestions, provide references etc.
I am willing to sign NDA's if you need them <comment><USER2> Would be great if you could review <http://grexit.com> and let us know your opinions on it. We're based in Delhi.</comment>


It was tough to start a " 2D GameSprites" website - <AUTHOR> http://www.taabi.com

<comment><AUTHOR> New Sprites Up !</comment>


Show HN: HTML5 Web Push Notifications for trending HN stories in Chrome - <AUTHOR> https://hackernews.onesignal.com/

<comment><USER2> A friend of mine made something similar: [https://github.com/yankee101/HNDN](https://github.com/yankee101/HNDN)

<comment><USER3> What's neat about this though is it doesn't require any installation. If the Web Push Notifications API has been used properly, it should even support Firefox and IE if/when they support the new API.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep :)

We'll update this page to support other browsers once those browsers implement the new Web Push APIs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> is there any privacy issues with this? I'm thinking no since it doesnt seem to require any installation and it just sends push, am I correct?

<comment><AUTHOR> Nope. It does use HTML5 service workers, which are sort of like cookies that can run code. But, like cookies, they're limited to actions on the hackernews.onesignal.com domain and they can be removed at any time.

<comment><USER2> Wow, this sounds wonderful and scary at the same time. This would be an excellent attack vector for running mosquito [0], if you can find the relevant exploits.

[0]: [https://github.com/koto/mosquito](https://github.com/koto/mosquito)</comment></comment></comment>


How Projections for Linux Smart Phones Mislead - <AUTHOR> http://www.linuxpromagazine.com/Online/Blogs/Off-the-Beat-Bruce-Byfield-s-Blog/How-Projections-for-Linux-Smart-Phones-Mislead?utm_source=Linux+Update&utm_campaign=Linux_Update_100_Pi-Top_2015-12-16 <comment><USER2> well, there is still none. So even the most conservative projection of "one" would have missed.</comment>


Why Startups Shouldn't Use Technical Recruiters - <AUTHOR> http://jaredblake.posterous.com/why-startups-shouldnt-use-technical-recruiter

<comment><USER2> Just find a better recruiter.

<comment><AUTHOR> True. But the problem with the recruiter still exists because they just need to give you candidates consider. There may be recruiters that do a better job at qualifying their candidates, but the paradigm is still the same.</comment></comment>


There Is No Cure for Burnout - <AUTHOR> https://elladawson.com/2019/11/18/there-is-no-cure-for-burnout/ <comment><USER3> I can't say I'm a fan of the classism, racism, and sexism in this article. It creates and reinforces repeatedly the trope that burnout is an unavoidable but uniquely millenial problem; that "white men" from Gen X and before don't get burned out.

Fuck that; anyone and everyone can and do get burnt out. Isolating yourself based on your race, class, and generation will not help you get better.

That said, I will take this article as it is - a release valve being pushed. I wish the author the best on her wellness sabbatical. I have been there, and I can only hope that she is able to find her way past this obstacle.

<comment><USER4> As a white man I feel you're being extremely sensitive here.

You've taken a small part of the article seemingly out of context. The author is talking about well meaning but ultimately useless advice from those with the financial means to support themselves indefinitely while they travel or relax. While a generalisation, the ability to build up a cushion of 'fuck you money' tends to correlate with being from a generation with higher job security, (in the UK) free higher education, no dependents to support, etc.

I don't know when everyone got so sensitive to understanding their own privilege vs other people. I'm in my third month off and have been travelling for the last month as well without having to work. I'm exceptionally lucky, I have no dependents to support, free accommodation at my parents, etc, etc. Instead let's imagine I'm a care leaver or my parents had caring needs or I had a child to support or medical/student debt or whatever it might be, I'd have continued to endure burnout until it likely killed me.

Certainly my life has its own challenges, depression, health troubles etc, but compared to most people I've won the lottery.

Anyway, that aside, I hope you're doing well and staying burnout free!

<comment><USER3> > the ability to build up a cushion of 'fuck you money' tends to correlate > with being from a generation with higher job security

With all due respect - this stability comes from age, not generation. I have a stable life now. As someone born in the late 70's, I have a house, a stable job, and a 401k.

But I didn't have these things at 20 - I was fighting to keep my head above water from month to month after coming off being homeless and jobless. I didn't have it at 25, I had been fired and was couch surfing in CA. I was just starting to get stability at 30 - I had enough experience to get a steady job and enough money to start saving, even after paying bills and debt. It took the next decade to get to where I am today.

Age has re-inforced to me that TANSTAAFL is more than a programming idiom. I've put a lot of directed effort and energy into getting a stable life. Like my parents before me and their parents before them.

EDIT: I'd also like to note that my job security is virtually identical to the rest of my colleagues, a number of whom are in their early 20's. My only advantage over them for stability are the skills I'm honing to keep myself useful to this (and other) companies.

<comment><USER4> That's a fair point and a flaw in my response.

It's more based off the UK too where job security was higher and previously unemployment benefit was more generous and more widely available. There's still a difference here, from the UK the common mass redundancies of tech in the US seem bizzare and likely to increase work related stress.

I still think the author is using "older white male" shorthand to point out that we need to structure society and the economy in a way that protects all people from burnout and provides access to the tools and treatment to recover from it to all. Rather than assuming all people are sufficiently well off to take 6 months to do a Jack Dorsey style Buddhist retreat. I'd hope that the readers are capable of enough nuance to understand that what is meant is an elite rather than react to perceived racism, ageism, sexism etc. It just seems like the mirror of widely derided sensitivity of those on the left but even more bizarre because it claims racism against a group holding power (again in the UK, US, Australia, Canada, most of Europe, excluding the Roma, whoever else, but having to caveat to this extent swiftly makes language unworkable)

<comment><USER5> >"older white male" shorthand to point out that we need to structure society and the economy in a way that protects all people from burnout and provides access to the tools and treatment to recover from it to all.

That "shorthand" is going to inadvertently open the possibility of the reader to drawing broader and less exact conclusions than if the writer were more careful in their choice of words.

Using "older white male" makes it sound like the goal is something that's already broadly available (and just being artificially limited) rather than a thing for people with riches or worked hard to get it. They're therefore statistically older, having worked to get into that position and probably only have access to limited doses unless they've been phenomenally successful.

>Rather than assuming all people are sufficiently well off to take 6 months to do a Jack Dorsey style Buddhist retreat.

What's the goal here? How big is the gulf between Doresy's adventure and "protect[ing] all people from burnout and provid[ing] access to the tools and treatment to recover"? Outside of fully automated luxury space communism, next to nobody is going to have the resources to not only not work for six months, but to also hand over all their regular day-to-day responsibility like taking care of family, paying their bills and making sure the house didn't burn down.

<comment><USER6> > next to nobody is going to have the resources to not only not work for six > months

Why not? We're richer than we're ever been. What happened?

<comment><USER7> Rent, debt and inequality. There is much more wealth, but it's concentrated in places that are expensive and distant from traditional safety nets and social support networks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I left my job as a physician 5 years ago. Of course it was a hectic life, but the hours and pressure wasn't as bad as my lack of control over my life. Everyone thought I was crazy to leave without something else lined up already, but I knew if I stayed I would die. Just as she says in this article; not suicidality, but rather some odd sense of existential doom.

I'm still angry. Angry at every imposition anyone dares to make on me. Angry I essentially wasted 13 years of my life following a societal program rather than being brave enough to figure out what I actually wanted from the start.

Like the author, I'm also not sure if there's a cure for burnout. Five years on, I'm still living a sub-poverty lifestyle off of odd jobs and creative pursuits. Whenever I get an urge to do something more involved, I get exposed a bit again to the world of registrations and resumes, licenses and HR departments...and I lose all motivation again.

But I don't think it's a problem. I don't think of my burnout as a defect. More as a wizening up to the view that most of what I hussled myself over was bullshit, and it was right to leave and not look back. I'm just sorry it took me so long to start living for myself.

I'm sure I sound spoiled and selfish. I don't care. Just be glad I left before you or a loved one had the unfortune of having me as your doc.

<comment><USER9> "funny" I do feel similarly cheated about my studies (computing) and the missing information about adult life that totally change my view about job/career.

I'm also a bit schizophrenic about computing. At my current min-wage job, I started thinking and writing some code (some topic I never done, on a new platform mind you). I'm both happy and unhappy about it.

Back to burnout, this brainless job I have allows me to wander as I see fit without stress. It's a freedom of creative thinking without pressure to be compared to the forced burden of juggling with things I wouldn't enjoy in a mainstream programming job. Even for a big check I'm not sure I'd be as peaceful as I'm now at times (it's not stable yet).

I also keep intellectual and creative pursuits on the side. Somehow I decoupled financial duties and intellectual growth. I can read about mathematics and electrical engineering on my own pace, and it's often a joy. The lack of pressure and the choice of topics I find interesting is a much better and much more natural energy source.

Do you think about keeping medical pursuits on the side ? maybe not as a physician. I don't know, joining a lab, going to conferences.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I think I had a burnout at home. It was just too much: 90% to 100% job, 3 kids, house, and the constant feel of (self?) pressure to make it all better, always be prepared and such at home. My wife and me separated almost a year ago, and since then share the care of our kids by 50/50\. She works a lot (80%), I work a lot (90%). It only works because the kids go to school, I can work from home 2 days and we have grand parents that help when in need. I just feel so free and unleashed. She too. And the kids are fine as well. Finally no one is putting any pressure on me at home except for myself. I have such a great time with the kids and I really enjoy it. And I still love my job, as I always did, working more or less 8.5h a day.

Anyway what I wanted to say is, that you can also have a burnout at home. I was such an emotionless dead guy. I'm not sure there is no cure, and I agree that whenever I feel this "pressure" again in a new relationship (not that I had many), I feel like I'd like to run away and stay single. Which makes me sad. But on the other hand I rarely was as happy and free as I am now.

Edit: Bookmarked this article and will certainly read it. Thanks for sharing such stories.

<comment><USER11> There definitely are things you can do, but in my experience when you feel this way it is really hard to do them.

I've been reading and listening to a few things that are helping me. One thing I've been learning about recently are the body's responses to chronic stress, such as the release of cortisol in the body, and the long term damage that can do. And about allostatic load, which helps explain how it gets perpetually worse as time goes by.

The author's experience is real of course, but it doesn't sound like she is an authority to discuss if it can be cured or not.

<comment><USER12> Would you mind sharing sources?

I'd be interested in reading what you found on those topics.

<comment><USER11> Rick Hanson has been a life saver. He is a psychologist with lots of meditation practice. [https://www.rickhanson.net/](https://www.rickhanson.net/)

Also I've really enjoyed Heart Math. That book is where I learned about the physiological explanation of stress. And it has exercises that have helped me in moments of aniexty. Like waking up at 3am with worries and stress.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> There is no "immediate" cure for burnout. Burnout is the result of environmental stressors, but once it sets in it's like a broken leg. It takes time to heal. The _textbook_ cure is rest, effectively abdication of your responsibilities, and you could be right again after a few months, but as the author points out not everybody can be so privileged. In my experience, and that of others I've spoken with, recovery can take about 18 months if you can _radically rethink your attitude to work_ and reach out to colleagues and _solicit their support_. If you're going to be trying to shoulder this all on your own and expect to go around day-to-day with your same (perhaps maladaptive) attitude to life as you did before you will find recovery a lot harder, and perhaps that's what she means by "no cure", but to me that's akin to wanting to repeatedly hit your own leg with a hammer, hoping that taking a load of pain killers will help you get by ...

I would contend that if you must continue working, as it is for most people, perhaps changing jobs isnt the best idea - it is after all considered to be one of the most stressful life events (see _holmes-raehe_ ) and is not to be taken lightly.

But we have to appreciate that not all workplaces are amenable to open displays of personal vulnerability. Which is truly sad.

The sunscreen song comes to mind: _"leave before it makes you hard"_

But nevertheless, don't give up hope, you can find human kindness in the unlikliest of places, but first maybe you have to be kind to yourself <3

<comment><USER14> I think the only way to catch you breath while running is to pace yourself correctly.

Keep a strict routine of just enough 9-5. Find a low stress app / tech stack to maintain. Leech off others when you need to. Don't code at home. Make sure you try to eat well and drink a little less. See family. be with people. Don't play WoW ;) Work is just something we do to let us have other things.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I went through a 4-5 year period in my late 20s working 60 hour weeks while _also_ doing grad school and independent research for 60 hours a week, not getting enough sleep or taking enough time for physical and mental health. It was ultimately very damaging; it left most of my personal relationships and social life in dysfunction. While I made it to the field and work I wanted to be in, I burned out quickly. When obstacles came up, rather than being able to give bouts of dedicated, strategic effort to navigate them I often ran headlong into them.

It's not something that can be undone, because it becomes both a benchmark and a scar. Any period of concerted effort can seem inadequate because you know you're capable of more, while also inducing anxiety because becoming very involved in a task reminds you of that trauma, even if you know you're now disciplined about not overextending and stepping back when you need to. Often this results in the classic burnout symptoms of giving too much time to work, accomplishing less than you would with less time, and perceiving what you do accomplish as even less than it is.

Being fully absorbed in a challenging problem for weeks or months on end by making sacrifices elsewhere in your life can be an exhilarating and fulfilling experience, but it's no different from extreme distance running or olympic lifting. It's only fulfilling and sustainable if it's done with proper preparation, long period cycles of high and low difficulty, caution, rest, and recovery. And if it isn't what you're doing with most of your time.

<comment><USER9> Your analysis is very well worded. Do you think you could not readjust your internal compass to value partially limited efforts (efforts that you said you considered were under your maximum capabilities) so that you take a long time averaging view on them. Sure you could go 99% and destroy yourself but no human should destroy himself[0] so it's totally acceptable to chunk your work into "good enough for now" and keep going at a smaller pace.

I used to suffer from social anxiety due to the need to outperform everything. After personal grief I realized I owe nothing to nobody and it made my brain infinitely more focused about my internal pleasure and sanity rather than external constraints. I'd rather be nobody and smiling than suffering. It made me balance things and put limits on things. I still value being active and working good and hard but only to an extent.

[0] I'm not talking about absolute freedom to destroy yourself if you ultimate think it's your desire.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I think the cure just takes a long time, maybe years, if we assume work place burnout is basically the same as athlete burnout from years/decades of overtraining: you develop terrible endocrine imbalances from habitually frying your system.

The "cure" is to take it easy and pay attention to sleep, nutrition, stress levels, and perform easy exercise... and know it could take a really long time to change your endocrine profile.

<comment><USER17> Alcohol is a big one, at least here in the UK. From my observations many people, including plenty of middle class professionals with families, live their daily lives in a temporary state of non-inebriation between drinking sessions. That they prefer this to reality says something pretty depressing about the average person's life in an advanced economy in the 21st century.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'm in consulting. And I can't count the times where I told people to say no to the client! (learn to say no)

But they can't... Some just can't say no to save there life.

Some just want to work looong hours.

And some are just too nice and avoid conflict.

Its frustrating, especially they could work on long term valuable stuff..

<comment><USER19> I think there's two kinds of situation this occurs in. There's the "not yet learnt" kind where people don't know what they can deliver, over-promise, and end up in an awkward situation.

There's also a trickier, structural situation that I think is more common. If managers don't have real ownership of their client relationships, they learn they become effectively unable to say "no". If they try, someone else will say "yes" instead.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Loads of psilocybin and a strict daily regime containing both low-stress & high-rest did wonders for me. Having a budget of hours for when "allowed" to crunch and burn at things even returned most of my eagernes and enjoyment within a short timeframe.

<comment><USER13> Stinky plant based substances can also help counteract getting stressed over things you don't need to also!

<comment><USER20> And the things you do need to (...)

<comment><USER13> if you didn't do it, it didn't need to be done!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> My experience is that there is.

I tend to be really intense about my job, and as a result I've left almost all of my jobs due to burnout, usually related to frustration that my dept isn't prioritizing what I feel is important to be successful, and that my time isn't well spent.

I recently went through this at my current gig, despite having good pay, good manager, and as close to a non-toxic environment as I think is possible. In other words... I couldn't easily scapegoat the org. The problem probably had to do with me. So I tried a new thing: to actually salvage the gig and fight to get my needs met instead of throwing my hands up and abandoning the whole affair.

It took a few months of failed compromises before I resorted to being totally upfront about it. I tried to ask for things like "one sprint on, one sprint off" and hearing that "we don't have bandwidth" until I finally said "look, i'm not having a good time, my productivity is on the floor, i have no morale and things that should take 10 easy minutes take a miserable week. i'm gonna take a month, and when I come back, i'm gonna work on other stuff (with a large, thorough doc of what "other stuff" should be: the intersection of things i find valuable/interesting + would also be valuable to the team).

Management was on board this time. I think they could tell that I was pained enough to walk if I had to, like most of the people in these stories. We also have a new engineer that unlocked some bandwidth. They asked me to move my month off to December instead of November, but greenlit my new work effective the next sprint.

The turnaround was astonishing. Overnight, my output went from unusually low to unusually high. I wake up excited to work on stuff, and care enough that I can be self-directing without needing to be fed tickets or have a PM prioritizing goals. My demos hit heavy, I feel great about my job, and I haven't even taken the vacation yet. I'm still taking it, but it no longer feels like I'll have a breakdown if I don't.

Point is: sometimes burnout comes from feelings of helplessness, arbitrariness, lack of autonomy, and misalignment of personal and company goals. Then you get bitter, and fatigued by constant bitterness, and the hole deepens until you can't see a way out anymore.

But if you can recognize whats got you down, come up with a viable alternative, set and defend boundaries on your time, and fight for them with adult conflict resolution skills... that crippling dissatisfaction is VERY actionable.

"Burnout" is a catch-all term for many nebulous forms of psychological fatigue. The idea that there's no cure for any of those things is pretty silly to me.

<comment><USER22> This is an amazing example for the "autonomy" part of self-determination theory. And it shows how intrinsic motivation relates to mental health. It also shows to some extent "relatedness" and "competence" part of SDT.

Other than that this post shows a potential issue that many people with burnout face: adult conflict. Without conflict one's course of action is to change themselves. With conflict, one can change their environment. This (probably) only works in a healthy environment like the parent described.

<comment><USER21> It wasn't mentioned in my post, but the "relatedness" aspect was definitely a big component. I felt like I was letting myself down by not working on what's important to me, but I felt like I was letting the team down by being ineffective in my regular "keep the lights on" role, and so _everyone_ was being disappointed. I disliked the work, but I still like my team, and didn't want to be responsible for making their jobs harder. One of the goals here was to remove that conflict of interest.

SDT is interesting – I hadn't read anything about this before, so thanks for the keyword.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Most of us don't have any choice and have to continue to work - burned out or not. I've found that burnout comes and goes in waves though. It doesn't necessarily take changing jobs to help resolve it. Sometimes, it's just a matter of putting one foot in front of another for a while and just staying afloat until something sparks and work becomes interesting and fun again and not sheer drudgery and anxiety.

<comment><USER13> I think part of what it takes to innoculate yourself is recognising it for what it is, and knowing the signs so you can at least put it in its place and manage it.

Symptoms are physical, emotional, behavioural - author touches on some of these, but for me its noticing I'm being continuosly negative about things, raised heart-rate and breathing, locking myself away from people or not being able to sleep at night. Ymmv.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> > Don't talk to me about burnout without addressing universal healthcare and > worker's rights. I just don't want to hear it (or read it, or listen to it, > or buy it, or watch it).

That is the real issue: people can't give up their jobs because there is absolutely no way they can afford the health care. The healthcare system in the US is completely broken. This absolutely must be addressed, which is a major point in her post.

</comment><comment><USER25> >I didn't do my laundry for four months and I ordered Wendy's delivery twice a week for most of winter because I was psychologically unable to pick up groceries.

Sounds like more of a serious case of actual clinical depression.

<comment><USER26> Exhaustion caused by chronic stress - general adaptation syndrome (formerly neurasthenia, now "other neurotic disorder") and depression share many features, but the treatment is different. (Likewise PTSD.) Dysautonomia is related, maybe a feature that would be tractable pharmacologically.

And probably harder as it's less understood. Nobody really knows how adaptation to stress works, much less how to fix the terminal exhaustion.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> This isn't a cure but it helped me and the author mentions their job having to be on Twitter a lot.

The constant churn of social media (esp Twitter) is not a place for sanity or calm and is absolutely a recipe for late nights wasting away when your brain can only handle repetitive tasks with quick endorphin hits (railroad tycoon was cited) or random mobile games.

When success is how quick you respond to the latest with something witty or anything at all, rather than considered substantive discussion you will not be able to quiet your mind.

Get off Twitter if you can. Logout of Facebook. Have a friend change your passwords. Avoid the "news". Some good can come from it, but this is step one. It is an addiction, and must be treated as such.

</comment><comment><USER28> Your mileage may vary, but regarding effective life management, I found the Mark Manson's book _The Subtle Art Of Not Giving A F: Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life_ to have more truth in than the title may say.

<comment><USER29> Seconded. A funny yet surprisingly instructive book. His concept of "VCR questions" (about the importance of processing emotions) was really eye opening for me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Spot on, the best cure for burnout isn't a cure at all, it's prevention.

<comment><USER31> But preventative means limit my potential

<comment><USER32> Your potential to do what? Trade happiness for money? Because that's how this works.

We're totally sold on the idea that more money means a better life. More. More. Always more. Always wanting. Always lacking.

Happiness isn't in more. It's in everything. You just have to have the time to find it - and time is the crux.

You only live once; time is your most precious and finite commodity. Each day that passes is irrevocably gone - and as morbid as it may be, you don't know which will be your last. I have had friends drop dead in their 20s and 30s both out of the blue, and after agonising illnesses.

If your work makes you happy, great. If your work is gently or not so gently killing you, and you are persevering for some abstract goal of "more", you are taking a dangerous wager - your precious time against the chance of making it into the 0.0001% - the idea being that if you win, then you won't have to work. That's fundamentally the bet we take when we venture into a career.

There's a shortcut. Don't work any more than you absolutely have to to keep the lights on.

I left my business a few years ago after a decade, withered and broken, mentally and physically damaged. I do as little contracting as I can get away with to cover my living expenses, which I've dramatically cut by moving off grid in a cheap country. I have so much time to read, to work on projects and hobbies, to just stand and stare at the river running by.

I used to stand in the shower, weeping, and think about how I would kill myself.

Now I weep only with happiness.

Life doesn't have to be a slog.

<comment><USER33> No prospect, no future.

You seem to be waiting for death.

<comment><USER32> No, I'm living life. If you measure your entire worth through your position in a corporate hierarchy, sure, no future.

Life isn't about how much stuff you have, but that's for you to find out - most only discover this just before they die, if ever.

<comment><USER33> I have little care for such things.

Human interaction is different - as is doing things with other human beings. Hobby, work, paid, volunteer - doesn't matter.

You seem to be living a recluse life. I find that concerning

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Pacing, life is a marathon not a race.

</comment><comment><USER35> _But my primary motivation—the one that finally overrode my aversion to risk and pushed me to give notice before I could line up another job_

I quit my job a month ago or so, citing burnout.

They one thing the majority of my co-workers couldn't wrap their heads around was that I had nothing else waiting for me and made a point out of it. Some said they envied me, because they didn't have enough savings to pull something like that.

And this made me think, because not having anything lined up beforehand was my rule which I broke for the first time by applying to this company, and in hindsight it was a bad move.

Are we all "running on fumes" to such an extent, that no-one can afford a few weeks without a job?

<comment><USER6> After some unpleasant life experiences, I've made a point of __always __having savings to be able to survive and keep a roof over my head for a year if the worst were to happen. (And lower my spending when I don 't.) Sadly, it looks like the situation has gotten so bad that most people can't even do _that_...

<comment><USER35> _I_ don't have that. Even worse: almost three years ago I got to a point of having almost zero money, but found a job soon after.

I promised myself that this year it'll be different - we'll see.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> "I'm afraid that there is no cure for burnout. After all, you can't untoast toast."

Well said.

</comment><comment><USER37> Reads like an extremely discriminatory hitpiece. Gross.

</comment><comment><USER38> One thing I've seen is people get used to working 60-80 hour weeks at university. But you can't keep doing that your whole life, you have to learn to work a regular weeks as well.

Also and people assuming promotions is always a good thing. You don't have to always want to be the boss.

</comment><comment><USER39> > If there is a cure for burnout, it's voting, and unionizing, and > redistributing wealth.

I couldn't agree more.

</comment><comment><USER17> So many words, yet so little said.

</comment><comment><USER40> The author seems to me to be blaming society and her former employer for her own failings. Perhaps if she were smarter about how she performed her job duties she wouldn't be so overwhelmed, unable to do even basic chores like buying groceries or going to the gym. And if it really was the fault of her unreasonable employer/boss, she could have applied to other jobs. Or maybe she should find a different industry, or develop useful skills that are in enough demand in the economy for her to dictate a better work environment. By blaming everything and everyone but herself, she has set herself up to fail. It's not the patriarchy or capitalism that is the cause of her issues-- it's her own bad choices and even worse ways of grappling with the fallout of her bad decisions.

<comment><USER26> Nice example of prevalent victim blaming. The mentally ill person expected to cure themselves? Really? If you consider her to be setting herself for failure, why did nobody help her before it was too late?

There are very strong social pressures on staying working. Be the hero to buck them, see what your spouse thinks if you have one. Or friends - <USER2> you're considered a loser.

And the key thing is that switching jobs requires patience and actual work to not land in the same or worse hole. Even then, when truly exhausted, you might be unable to hold on in the new place.

Develop useful skills? Taking say up to six years with what money and energy? Then getting hired while being older this many years, quite a challenge.

What's your solution? "Stiff upper lip?" Boundless forced optimism? Job hopping? Just being rich? Having actual friends? (but not everyone is so lucky)

Even psychologists have problems dealing with this thing.

<comment><USER40> Calling it "victim blaming" presupposes the existence of a victim in this scenario. But there is no victim-- her own actions are the cause of her problems. This is not an example of someone getting assaulted on the street corner by a stranger and saying "well, they shouldn't have been by themselves in a dangerous area late at night, it's their own fault." No one put a gun to her head-- she isn't an indentured servant, or in a prison work gang. She lives in one of the freest places in the world (and in human history), with the best economy in decades and the lowest unemployment rate in recorded history. At some point you need to take ownership of your own destiny.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Why is the link to Helen Peterson's article a mailto?

</comment><comment><USER42> I've noticed a trend recently. Someone will write a very long article about some problem, without mentioning politics once. Then, at the end, they'll assert that the answer is to remake society from the ground up. This is the template:

 _5000 words of bitching about some problem that's always existed_

...

Ahem. And that is why we must dismantle the White Supremacist Capitalist Patriarchy.

<comment><USER5> I see it too. It's like the correlation vs. causation error, but less rigorous. More like coexistence vs. causation.

Now that you've caught this trend, you'll start seeing the more generic form of it everywhere.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> What great writing this was.

</comment><comment><USER44> Hold up, there's some really bad perspective on this. While I would say there's no immediate cure for burnout, it is absolutely curable.

When I first learned to program, I dived into freelancing. I lucked out and in about 3 weeks, I teamed up with two design firms that needed a webdev. I was working ~18 almost everyday. No exaggeration. I was single and this was right after I lost my job, apartment and my life collapsed. So, I was on the kick of getting it all back. It was work, coffee, sleep. I literally drank 2-3 pots of coffee everyday and had to chug beer to fall asleep. Wake up, all over again.

BTW, not a healthy lifestyle, in case you didn't realize.

After a year, I was done. I would literally stare at my emails piling up and just not move. Just blank stare for hours. I had zero focus. Not, oh I'm going to watch a video or check reddit kind of "zero focus". I could barely function. Any task I needed to do, like brush my teeth, I couldn't think about long or hard enough to get up and do it. That, I learned is zero damn focus.

Fast forward about 2 months. Lost all those contracts and contacts for obvious reasons and got into really bad depression. Now, I was "trying" to cure my burnout and was getting no where. Meditation, soothing music, motivational videos, whatever. None of it was enough to get me "work" functioning again for more than 15 minutes without me wanting to just go jump into front of a fast moving truck. Oh, but I can't do that because I lack the motivation to even go out there to kill myself. That's how bad it was.

Until, one Friday, Steam sent an email about Borderlands 2 was free for the weekend. I didn't play a video game in like 2 or 3 years at that point. I thought, "Fuck it, my weekend isn't going to be productive anyways since I'm burnt out and probably going to die in this apartment only to be found because they want to collect past due rent."

I didn't think of "working" at all. Just played, non-damn-stop that entire weekend. Didn't drink coffee or alcohol, mostly by accident because I was focused on the game.

I fell asleep at a decent time Sunday. Monday I woke up, did all my morning hygiene properly, like an adult. I then sat down and made phone calls to contacts that didn't suffer from my burnout phase. Got working again. I tried getting 7 hours of sleep every night and went from 18 hours working to only 10 max for the first few months (had to pick back up on finances). Eventually I forced 8 hours of sleep on myself over time. One of my best decisions.

You need to have fun people! I don't play video games much anymore. I like reading, woodworking, nature photography, writing, watercolor painting (I suck at it, but it's fun) and literally walking on the beach. Bars and generic social meetups are fun too. I only work more than 8 hours a day if it's a real, super emergency. I restrict my coffee intake to 3 mugs max per day. No caffeine the moment it's 5pm, no exceptions. Even if there's a crunch. My sleep is important. I only allow 2 all nighters in a 30 day timespan. No exceptions.

While I feel for Ella in the article, but you can't blame the economy or capitalism for the fact you don't take care of yourself. It's not a political issue. It's a "be an adult" issue. One that many have to learn the hard way, like myself. But blaming others is... well... stupid. Yes, there are drawbacks to standing your ground about this. Again, it's about being an adult. Nothing about gender or race. Be an adult. Yea, I didn't get certain contracts, especially one from a FAANG (Fuck them all by the way, they're the cause of this overwork bullshit plaguing society), because I have very strong stipulations how I work. If I'm requested to work after MY 5pm, I charge double, instantly. Don't call me. I don't check my work email. If you call, I charge you a full hour, at double rate, even if it's a 5 minute phone call. Email me and I'll get to it 9am the next day. Unless you take me out to dinner to chat work. But I'm an expensive work date.

If you're in a burnout phase. Here's what I recommend.

A. Do something drastically fun or relaxing. Pure pleasure and don't even think or worry about working. For at least a day. I think a weekend is best (obviously) but at minimum do 24 hours. This is the first "small fix" to get you started.

B. You need a hobby. A relaxing and/or fun hobby. No, you don't instagram or facebook what you're doing. It's FOR YOU and you only. I recommend something constructive. But whatever it is that you find enjoyable and somewhat challenges you(not crazy important). Do it.

C. Work/Life balance is about doing responsibilities and still having fun. Life isn't all about "constant" improvement and work. Relax, have fun. Get your work done sooner so you can have fun sooner. Don't get your work done sooner just so you can give yourself more work to do.

Hustling is good in spurts, especially when you're young and can handle it. Cutting your teeth is good. But you still need to realize that life is more than that. If you're hustling so you can "hustle more", you're doing it wrong. You hustle so you can enjoy life more. People bitch about the boomers. Yea, but you know, they did protest against the stiff all work corporate culture of their time and brought in the sexual revolution. Millennials are a generation that focus on all work/career along with public image for their social media feed and are really under-sexed.

Go get laid, have some fun and remember you work so you can enjoy life more. You don't life so you can work more.

</comment><comment><USER45> This is coming from a lady pitching for redistribution of wealth and universal healthcare. She also takes her time to attack men as the only ones who can receive a cure from something most everybody faces at one time or another. I'm sorry, I've been burned out for years but this sounds more like a mental illness than occupational burnout.

My thoughts while reading this are... can you imagine if she had a family to support?

I think the cure for burnout is time off and thinking about all the things you do have and not about how unfair the world is. It's always been that way and always will be. Millennials are burned out at a much higher rate due to the fact that they are the most entitled generation entering the workforce.

If it's truly occupational, I think one should find a new job. To quit with nothing else lined up except a dream, that's just irrational behavior. The world owes us nothing and our ancestors had it much much worse.

Also, she hasn't even had 3 months off. The general rule is at least half the time you've been burned out to truly recover. At least that's what I hear from people who we're actually able to recover, the ones without children to feed. For this guy, it's not a reality. I have to grind and it's just the way it is.

<comment><USER46> > This is coming from a lady pitching for redistribution of wealth and > universal healthcare.

So someone sensible then?</comment></comment>


xMEMS Announces World's First Monolithic MEMS Speaker - <AUTHOR> https://www.anandtech.com/show/15894/xmems-announces-worlds-first-monolithic-mems-speaker <comment><AUTHOR> Whenever something that sounds too good to be true, I ask, what are the trade offs?

Or is this really revolutionary?

I have no idea why Macbook's speaker are more prone to crackling. But MEMS speaker should not have these reliabilities issues.</comment>