NikolaNovak

Fair warning; any links to specific cases (not the law itself)?

It is my limited understanding that as much as many of us groan at the notion of Spacex becoming "an AI-first company", markets in general, and Musk investors in particular, are slurping it up. Musk is very very very good at promising the sky. I don't think he can backtrack, he always digs in further - and it has historically worked well for him. He will drop AI only when the next big hype thing comes along and he hitches a ride on that train.

There's the internal reality and external perception.

As an outsider, it feels all levels of USA government are constantly fighting and going back and forth and back and forth over big topics like minority rights, marriages, religion in schools and public matters, funding, environmental concerns, police approach, rights and freedoms, spying, choices of utilities, etc.

Same for EU externally I imagine.

I feel "about a 8 floor building" would be a good ROM :)

I think parallel comment has a much better answer than I could provide - EU is a set of heterogeneous political units which each have multiple nested political units within. Given complexity of USA states rights and legislative bodies, vs municipal and county governments, and then vs the federal judicial executive and legislative branches, including a complete house and a complete Senate, all permeated at all level by two binary polarized parties, all within a single country, I'm not sure EU system is that different or suboptimal anymore.

Hi! Thx for sharing :).

I've read the "how revival works" section, but still have no idea "how the revival works".

("We've used ai" is all I got from both this intro on HN and the we pages I read, though possible I missed some section.)

Can you share?

I.e. Did you take original audio recordings and run it though some audio chain that optimizes the mix and volumes? Did you put the sheets and lyrics into ableton and recreate the music? Did you feed audio files into chatgpt and prompt "make it better"? Something else?

In the interest of transparency, understanding what happened here will significantly guide my own emotional response :). I appreciate the details of 5 core principles, but spending so much time on principles without actual detail on what got done makes me skeptical and even cynical, which may not be the intent. For example, I personally distinguish between a raw photo, edited photo, composite image, and AI regenerated image, and one of the things I'm trying to understand is the path / traceability from human to final audio file.

Thx!

That's implementation details though; one can absolutely think that "EU is a good idea" and "specific EU systems need improving" simultaneously, without contradiction.

It's like thinking "I like Canada and am a proud Canadian, though I think there's still a lot of inequality and many policies can be improved upon and we can certainly be more efficient".

What is "normies" in this context?

I'm neurodivergent, and on various nerdom bell curve tails, including know more than averga bear about technology societal implications and misuses, but I still wouldn't use that term; here in particular, it seems a strong pejorative for anybody who disagrees with your world view :-/

It is my limited understanding this is other way around - you plan your vacation, you get it approved, then on your vacation an emergency vote to reduce your salary is called and you automatically voted yes.

When I go into listening node, I listen. Actively and intensely.

Apparently it unnerves people. My wife coaches me to give occasional Yes,Go On, or UhHuh. But it's a conscious, learned, active mechanism for me. Intuitively, I'll tell you if we've weered off my desired conversation path and I'd ask the same courtesy. I've learned very late in life it's apparently an autism thing. Either way, I don't seek mmms and umms in real live people and I especially don't need fake ones in a machine :)

This is fascinating to me.

Whether that's due to my slight autism or massive nerdery, I don't want more realistic voice. I already switched to non-advanced voice in gpt, and I cannot imagine wanting the mmmhms, the yesses, the laughs, in my ai interaction. I want to ask a structured question and get a structured meaningful response. Informative and structured are really the KPIs. The umms and ahms of existing gpt advanced voice are annoying enough, the recent increased usage of first person almost a deal breaker (when asking for bike technique on lose surfaces yesterday, it literally gave me "back when I was learning bikes riding" story - eww).

Fascinating to see the architectural advances though, even when they deliver something I personally don't need :)

I don't agree with OP, and I'm willing to hear why you're correct in that assessment, but can you elaborate?

To be explicit about each other's assumptions, I think Race (however ill-defined or specific construct as it may or may not be), is not the same thing as Country, Political System, Culture, Religion, etc.

Understanding racists these days mostly use euphemisms and codewords, and it's a devil's work sometimes to figure it out, in the "Principle of Charity" sense, I read that post as being a critique of China's political and cultural systems in general, and their sport-league / development in particular, leading to specific societal outcomes. I could be extremely naive though but I'm willing to learn if you may provide more backing/thought for that?

I agree ; that's the principle of democracy :)

And it works both ways - people are allowed to care about something, express that, and others are allowed to not care about it, and express that :)

(in this case, as I mentioned in sibling comment, I care about the same cause as well:).

>I think “when you buy a product, be it a game, a house, a car, a computer, a tractor, washer, TV, it should continue to operate without rent-seeking behavior” is the best type of straightforward, uniformly-applicable pattern of regulation one could hope for.

This is why I love Hacker News; I feel you genuinely believe this - that designing and enforcing the law around digital property rights is the easy, straightforward, and the priority/important law :).

(I don't disagree! I'm a computer geek too, this stuff is important and visible to me as well. But let's have awareness of a) the actual complications around crafting and implementing laws around something so massively complex and constantly changing, and b) where the actual priorities for vast majority of people in the world may be:)

Yes; and to make it extremely politically explosive, I do enjoy observing American politics and seeing each side (there are, brilliantly, two, because there ARE only two sides to every story and they neatly correlate with each other 100%:) massively enlarge the government, apply massive new restrictive regulations, but one side claims they don't do that because of somewhat specific types of massive government regulations and enlargements they do :)

At its best, a government law/regulation/policy is people saying "Ouch, that hurt, let's not do THAT again!", or "Oooh, I like this, this is good for us, let's do more of THAT please!".

At its worst, its self-preserving bureaucracy run rampant.

Any oversimplifying platitude like "I'm against big government!" or "I'm against government regulation!" so tremendously lacks specifics as to be worse than worthless.

And this is an extremely complicated issue which a tiny minority of people care about that'd be ridiculously over-complicated to implement with huge difficulty in tracking and enforcing! But because where we are, it resonates with us, and we on Hacker News feel it's an obvious and easy policy to apply :). You know, unlike the minor issues of war and peace and hunger and poverty and economics and minority rights et cetera :)

100 internet points and tip of a hat to you sir :)

Absolutely. I've done the inflation calculator and I'm painfully aware of my lower effective compensation / purchasing power.

Not in all / not anymore. I'm in Canada a 300k IT/consulting company and rated top performer several years in a row. No raises last couple of years, before that it was 0.49 and 1% respectively. This year there was zero salary increase for anybody in our branch.

One of the first fun usages of LLMS by my non-technical friends back in days of chatgpt 3.5 or so, was impersonations: write this in style of Snoop Dog, create a bedtime story in style of Dr Seuss, explain this like Carl Sagan, etc.

So how come today, even people who do content for a living, not necessarily programmers but writers and "influences", just generate default LLM-style content? I see exactly what triggers you in the github writing linked, and it feels so easy to fix even using AI itself.

It's at the point where I'm like "if you can't even bother to rewrite or mask or ask LLM to give it some personality, why are you asking me to bother reading it" :-/

I agree with you on the social aspects 100%.

But still, I have a soft spot for the Golden ages of engineering well before my time - like many, I'm an apollo program geek. No matter how many documentaries I watch, books I read, websites I peruse, schematics I try to figure out, it is still beyond astonishing to me that we flew to the moon with 60s technology. I'll continue reading about it for rest of my life and be incorrectly melancholic about the simpler days of engineering :).

While the 747 isn't my kink, it'd adjexent enough thay I think I can understand it - I imagine it's similarly fascinating to think of massive intercontinental airplane designed by slide rule , then flown across Atlantic without computers or gps or ils or any other amenities.

More expensive and breakable and inefficient and polluting and just insane as it also may have been :)

As I said, I have a kindle :).

I'm specifically wondering about the X4, which is the size of a phone, meant to be attached to the phone, but it's not a phone and crucially no backlight. Does it specifically fill a situation for people who don't want to carry a phone but will carry this? Or, for people who might carry x4 and a smart phone, why read on the x4?

Thx!

Question to X4 owners - what is the benefit over a smartphone?

I have a kindle for beach and travel as a good compromise size; I use my 10" tablet when I really settle in for reading, or when I read technical books with graphs or books with photographs etc. For my adhoc reader I use kindle app on my phone. What is the unique selling point of something like X4? I notice it attaches to the phone which seems bizarre, phone feels like a functional superset, so I must be missing something - is it battery life or less distractions or something else?

Thx! :)

Fascinating!

First, to your point, I'm Not a googler or ex googler.

That being said, for what little may be worth, No company I worked for would be ok for me releasing unauthorized code to official public report with official logo and company name without some approval / discussion / disclosure, at whatever appropriate level that may be m. I'm curious, On your previous team, did your manager know and approve of open source publications? Team mates? Did they have names like "Google Hangouts X" and accompanying logos etc?

I guess what strikes me negatively and mutes my empathy is the "zero lessons learned" part of the tweet:

>"I think the cause was that Workspace and certain leaders (and projects) were afraid of being disrupted"

I'm not quite silicon valley enough to use the word disrupted unironically, and certainly not self-unaware enough to proclaim that as the one and only reason for my misfortunes. I hope they and any family they have are ok. I feel if they had actual grievance with the firing, they should've gone through appropriate legal remedy. Twitter drama is just a zero-win game to me :-/

Keyboard, printer, mouse, joystick, scanner,color calibrator, steering wheel, game controller , everything I bought recently other than external ssd was usb a. Even, shockingly, a nice Scarlett audio interface!

More to the point, anything I'd want to plug in to a gaming machine, is usb a.

My best friend is the great optimizer.

In magic the gathering I had dozens of decks trying different things. He had a single deck that he kept tweaking to within the millimetre of perfection.

In overwatch, I would play different characters to experience different parts of the game and try different strategies. He played single character for years, with 10 times the hours in that char than I had in all of them combined.

Heck even in real life, he was a Java developer for decades whereas I was a type of fleeting sysadmin specifically so I could play with different toys in the stack :).

Now, this is a bit side Venn diagram, he'd never be rude on an online game (he does have offline opinions on the meta :). But it let me understand people who have fun in a very different way than I do :). He doesn't see boredom in playing same way over and over (and over and over), I think he sees it as professional athlete being focused and honing their specific craft.

We can disagree on that. But I did list other common superstition forms to not get bogged on an emotionally charged item; everybody is used to their superstition, and nobody thinks it impairs them. Key point - Egyptians didn't either :)

I actually think "not impaired by superstitious beliefs" is somewhere between "less than 1%" and "zero", myself sadly included. For "severely" we have to set up some definitions and thresholds.

Atheists range from 4-6% in USA, I think less than 1% in India, to a nice round 0 percent in many other countries where they'd basically be beaten up for this. I think word "tremendous" is appropriate when we are talking about 95+%

Outside of the "so mainstream and prevalent we don't even consider it" superstitions (which, remember, were all the historical ones we may dismiss now, thousand years later), we have horoscope and astrology, psychics, and people who think wearing same socks will help them on a winning streak, and everybody hesitant to talk about good or bad outcomes less they "jinx it". Maybe you're from Germany or Scandinavia and your daily experience is different?

But again, the thread started about biological differences and I will agree that there are little to none between ancient Egyptians and modern humans.

In terms of cultural values, sanctity of life, freedoms and poverty and lifestyle, I do think some things have improved. We can debate numbers as to how much.

Understand that as a Canadian, and not knowing where you're from, you unfortunately find me at a cynical time as we watch our southern neighbour work so very very hard to dismantle much of the progress we are discussing here very every effectively, so it's just difficult to put one's mind in historically optimistic mindset :-/

Romans had educated intellectuals who had some progressive and scientific ideas, and the less educated masses who had less progressive and educated ideas. This seems to describe today's world well. And we still LOVE to attack the "intellectual elite" for having progressive, scientific ideas.

>"assessing everybody else a biologically stupid or smart"

Again, welcome to reality, meet some racists. They make the majority of population :O

More seriously and in the spirit of HN: Because a lot of people, per the original post, assume ancient people were fundamentally, biologically, less intelligent. Couple of reasons:

1. We teach people about evolution and Neanderthals etc, but it's hard for most of us to grasp the time scales. People conflate "Egyptians 5 thousand years ago" and "australopithecus 5 million years ago".

2. As many many people do today, we also conflate circumstances with inherent - like we've seen several times in this very thread, because people 5k years ago they didn't have technology or knowledge of today, there's subconscious assumption they weren't fundamentally as intelligent as capable.

Original post had a simple and specific claim: Egyptians 5k years ago were biologically equivalent to humans today and their intelligence was just as high. Raise them in modern society and you'd get the same bell curve.

That claim alone is mind blowing to many.

How so?

We have access to different data points today. But the way I read the original post is that human mind as such did not meaningful change. If you took a Roman or Egyptian embryo from 5k years ago and incubated it today, you'd have a modern human. The fact that many people back then had crazy ideas, is orthogonal to the biological argument at hand - and that's before we look at amount of people with crazy ideas today, many of which are largely the same.

Basically I think we have to pick a lane on whether we are talking biology, vs culture, vs knowledge and accumulated data.

If that's sarcastic, good one :)

If genuine, I'm puzzled. In the current world we have a tremendous amount of people who hold various superstitious beliefs as well as spend tremendous amount of time on their genealogy. And nepotism never went away. I agree those are "bad ideas", but don't see how they differentiate us from people 5k years ago?