That’s not evidence. It’s as baseless as the other side’s arguments. You’ve just heard it on HN enough times and are parroting it. I assure you that there’s not a person on this website that hasn’t read essentially your exact comment 100 times. OP is saying that one nerd’s reckoning doesn’t constitute evidence.
Exactly. The home office debate is a great example of motivated reasoning - many people really like the personal benefits of home office which makes them look for things which confirm their view (with the bar for "evidence" being very low).
The more passion you have, the more ridiculous form it takes. In normal debates, intelligent people usually admit that there are various trade-offs, and there are different POVs which might favor one trade-off over another. But in the home office debate, pro-HO seems to take a position that RTO cannot have any true, valid benefit, there's no real trade-off to be made, and therefore it can be explained only by ulterior motives or some conspiracy - usually hyper-controlling managers or this real estate conspiracy.
It does feel like a debate that is mostly qualitative, and from two different sides (employee and employer).
My anecdotal experience has been that most employees I speak to are pretty clear about certain elements at the individual level but vary along many key axes: home office allows them to focus OR is too distracting; they miss the office culture OR hate the inefficiency of office smalltalk; they thrive on in-person connections OR thrive in focused isolation. There is also the topic of commuting, which most people don't love doing.
Employers should largely be motivated by more quantitative thinking, although in practice this varies and the metrics themselves are notoriously difficult to quantify.
Don’t forget the biggest interruption of all … the commute, sometimes 1-2 hours or more per day, just to get to the office and take advantage of the “benefits”.
I don't start working on something hard just before leaving home, like I don't start before a meeting. It's the surprises that really tear up the workday.
"Interruption" is only one side of the coin, there's usually a reason why somebody is interrupting you and not being able to interrupt you (=not get an important information) will often cost a lot for their productivity.
I think it heavily depends on the person and type of work. I'm SWE and for most daily work I don't mind getting interrupted - I'm able to get back to work without a problem. It's only if I work on an extra difficult problem which requires very deep focus, I go somewhere quiet, but that's less than once a week.
I think having deep work to do is the biggest sign that a team has found a good use for me. It's how tech companies build competitive products. Commodity work should be automated; Moore's Law already paid for doing that.
> It’s intended to be a safety tool. A way for people in unstable, potentially violent, domestic situations to quickly leave the page.
An upsetting but nonetheless incredibly interesting abnormal UX problem to solve. I appreciate seeing this much thought being put into things like this.
Just a reminder that AI tried pivoting to much more clear-cut legitimate piracy, presumably because they got bored or something, and certainly put ‘donations’ toward that effort.
IA is an incredibly valuable resource, but let’s not put them on a pedestal.
heh, if they went 100% "we're operating our service from international waters and won't be taking any DMCA requests" i would donate $1000 on the spot (anonymously, of course, but entirely serious).
What's "legitimate piracy"? As a reminder, the scheme was designed to work exactly like typical lending libraries. Publishers were unable to show any harm, and the only evidence available proved they actually benefited from better sales thanks to the Internet Archive. Authors were clearly benefited.
https://www.techdirt.com/2024/09/05/second-circuit-says-libr...
But I agree, no need to put them on a pedestal. Nobody is perfect.
That's unfortunately exactly what happened though:
> He unveiled the National Emergency Library, a vast trove of digital books mostly unavailable elsewhere, and made access to it a breeze.
This good deed backfired spectacularly. Four publishers claimed “willful mass copyright infringement” and sued. They won. On Friday, the publishers said through their trade association that they had negotiated a deal with the archive that would remove all their copyright books from the site.
There is no evidence that, under the NEL, more digital copies of books were borrowed than physical copies were (un)available in the closed libraries. I've not re-read all the materials from the lower court recently, but IIRC publishers didn't even bother to argue this point. Did you find any place where the judge relied on this?
> Both sides filed motions for summary judgment. Judge John G. Koeltl ruled on March 24, 2023, saying the National Emergency Library concept was not fair use, thus the Archive infringed copyright by lending full ebook copies without the waitlist restriction.
Yeah, that's incorrect. I've fixed it now. A better summary is lower down:
> Judge John G. Koeltl held that the Internet Archive's scanning and lending of complete copies clearly constituted a prima facie case of copyright infringement and that the Internet Archive's fair use defense failed all four factors of the "fair use test". He rejected the Archive's argument that their scanning and lending of complete books was "transformative" in the sense of copyright law.
I've just skimmed the ruling again and I don't find anywhere a statement that the number of copies in circulation for any individual book was a deciding factor. Instead the judge stressed the total number of books involved.
> Although IA has the right to lend print books it lawfully acquired, it does not have the right to scan those books and lend the digital copies en masse. To hold otherwise would be to ignore the teaching of the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in Google Books that there would be a “strong” claim for copyright infringement if Google had distributed digitized copies of complete books.
Because language is rarely if ever prescriptive. It evolves organically and without much rhyme or reason beyond “because that’s how things went”. The fact that you think that software neckbeards, err, greybeards, are somehow exempted from that is a hilarious example of ‘tech exceptionalism’ brought to its natural conclusion.
…yes, well, it’s quite common for people to pay others to do things that they could do themselves but would rather just do something else. That is kind of how the world works.
