[hellerve]

I think the downvotes are coming in because you are carrying out a fundamentally different argument.

The article argues that people used to be more intellecutally capable when they were younger and it diminished with age.

You are arguing that each generation used to be more intellectually capable than the one before, and that that is diminishing.

I’m not trying to accuse you of anything, but it seems like you didn’t actually read the article you were commenting on. Is that possible?

[EGreg]

Yes, it is possible. This is a good criticism :)

I somehow think the downvotes may be related to something else, though.

[seper8]

Yeah, the shameless self promotion without providing any value yourself.

[EGreg]

On the contrary. I provide a ton of value, for free, in the form of:

Identifying the actual roots of the problems people post passionately about, and clearly explaining the underlying mechanisms that lead not just to this problem but many others they might not realize are related

Researching for years the best ways to fix it, going out of my way to have substantive discussions with some of the top problem solvers across multiple fields, and publish the videos up publicly

Spending over a decade on actually writing the open source software, hiring people, creating jobs, without asking anything from any of you

And making it freely available as open source, with documentation, all without taking on VC funding or any of the actual profit-taking and extracting rents that goes on here with “software a service”

In literally every way I can, I try to contribute value without taking in return.

So you could not be more wrong, and if you’d click the links you’d see that. But you’d rather not even look, because in your capitalist mind, sharing the result of decades of work and over $1 million spent on free open source platforms for the world is “self-promotion”. You’d rather see another startup extract rents for a simple product built around tiny feature, funded by venture capitalists who want to have an exit by selling shares to the public, who will demand more rent extraction and wait for even further enshittification of platforms and society. It’s pretty amusing to me.

I currently enjoy staying relatively almost completely unknown, and seeing the reaction people have to the most straightforward application of the above solutions to their own problems. Because I think that even on HN, many people are acting very irrationally and groupthink dominates, and while millions of people actually use my software, 99.99% have no idea who I am, and I get to see how human groups react to form instead of substance. This is btw why we often can’t have nice things, at least not unless the solutions, like bitter medicines, are presented wrapped in candy for organizations. We are a generation of children living on an ecological credit card, one of the most spoiled in history, but think we know better than everyone else. So I kind of enjoy seeing the irrationality as a form of entertainment although on a global ecological scale, it’s sadly quite scary.