HN user
I would consider myself a Stallmanite, I guess. I use a fully 100% Libre software stack/OS/Firmware where possible - but Libre JS was just a little too unusable too me. When you are running a 2.4Ghz Core 2 Duo - it runs SLOW!
Complete aside, check out that Sharp A521! Nowadays that is verging on cyberdeck territory.
In a previous job, I did the math for shipping goods from Melbourne to Perth here in Australia via freight train. It worked out to be 1 litre of fuel per ton moved 500km. In imperial, that is 1 ton at 930MPG! That efficiency is mind blowing but it does rely on a lot of goods to be moved to gain that scale efficiency.
This is where the last mile problem comes in. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_mile_(transportation)
Franklin would also be puzzled that there would be many people that are nutrient deficient despite calorie abundance.
There are a few acquaintance over the years that have been involved in various sectors of social media and various 3 letter government agencies. The one thing they have always said is, just assume they doing to most morally questionable things to get data - they just won't public admit until it is absolutely vital to do so.
Slightly off topic but I did like one of them being so frank about Linux and open source. They worked for a while with the NSA, all they said was "Linux has 100 million lines of code. You have to fooling your self to think we didn't slip in hundreds of backdoors onto that thing". The same can be said of almost any other system though.
I have long suspected that the gaslighting thing of "it is just subconscious coincidence" is just a very neat cover for these things. There might be a slight influence but it is nowhere near as powerful an effect as they would like you to think. With advertising swaying people, they can move a few percent of people a few percent in one direction but it doesn't really target individuals effectively in guaranteeing results. Only as an aggregate.
Yep, did the same thing with "Smoked Salmon". I went a step further and decided on this without speaking it about 2 months in advance so that I can get a clear baseline on ads I was getting.
On talking lovingly about smoked salmon, it took 2 days for it to turn up.
I have also seen it happen with folks talking about Jeep for instance.
This is one of those things that I agree with the ideas behind it. Free Libre software and all of that BUT in trying to deal with this via a web addon considering the scale of, the internet, It feels like there is no way this could ever achieve its goals. I mean how much JS out there doesn't even have a license explicitly defined on run time?
And when you run it that is exactly what happens. It assumes the worst and the vast majority of things do not work. All it really does is slow your browser down to an absolute crawl as it tries to do its thing. I just ended up with Noscript and making a few exceptions where needed. It is a much better middle ground than this.
I wonder if they would have gone down the path of many bands in the late 60s and have those long spoken word poetry stretches. That said, thanks to things like that I do love how often you see Michael Moorecocks name popping up.
I ask myself the same thing almost everyday and then that one really cool thing comes along. Yep pretty much mental gambling in the same way other social media is. I got rid of all of that, HN is my last hold out for now.
That is the big question with LLM's. How can we tell what is being fed in is original content or just the output fed back in like a recursive fractal?
When you see numbers it does make you wonder if the premise the Subprime Attention Crisis (Tim Hwang) is much more realistic than we think.
But when you think about the amount of industries advertising covers, it might still be tame. Hard to tell from the outside and even the inside on this until it is in the rear view mirror.
Yeah, some poor phrasing on my behalf.
I do hope that those working in these companies actually building the tools do care. But unfortunately, it seems that corruption is an emergent property of complexity.
If there is any dishonesty, I would wager it is a case of it can double the battery life in low power scenarios. Can go twice as long when doing word processing for instance. Can potentially idle a lot lower
I think it was Paul Thurrott on Windows Weekly podcast who said that all these companies don't really care about privacy. Apple takes billions of dollar a year to direct data towards Google via the search defaults. Clearly privacy has a price. And I suspect it will only get worse with time as they keep chasing the next quarter.
Tim Cook unfortunately is so captured in that quarterly mindset of 'please the share holders' that it is only a matter of time.
* rolls up newspaper * * bops on nose * No! Bad dad joke! Don't do that!
This is why there are SO many translations of the Tao Te Ching. Some are very mechanical, others miss the point entirely. And then there are those one where it is almost like Poetry, they went beyond just the immediately presented content.
To that I would recommend the translation of it by Red Pine (Bill Porter), not only is is a wonderful translation but it does so much to add additional context via others commentary on the chapters through out the ages.
Not surprised at all. Even if it did not start with this intention, one has to suspect that with enough time it will become compromised.
About the only way to even vaguely keep your email private is to use a self hosted server with GPG keys. And any lapse on security updates for that thing and you could be compromised almost immediately.
Beyond that I cannot think of anything more one could do.
I have always treated email as something to travels in the clear. My current provider (Fastmail) is compromised by authority. The Australian Privacy Act 1988 by being based in Australia and it gets caught up by PRISM as the servers are run out of New York.
1 maybe 2KB of storage for the IP addresses of an individual for a year. Of course they are doing it even if accidentally.
Privacy does not protect you from the state. Privacy is good enough to protect you from the public.
While I get what you are saying, that is a little too black and white for the entire field. Privacy can be used to shield whistle blowers from the state.
Pretty much. While it is mandated here, there is nothing stopping others form doing the same.
On my end it is just a manner of optics. The money being put aside, I never see week to week thus it just seems like an added bonus even though it is really just a part of the pay cycle.
This is one of those areas the Australian government has done ok in. Mandatory superannuation retirement funds. 11% (?) of all pay goes into this fund to be invested. Thus you can pay off the house and have an investment fund at the same time.
You can withdraw from your fund if you have a hardship but it is generally considered best to not touch it.
I managed to escape, but like a cult it also meant leaving behind a lot of folks that wouldn't come with me.
The age old question, "Who will watch the watchmen?"
I really appreciate works like Death of Stalin that are more than happy to move things around in the name of entertainment. It isn't a documentary so it has the freedom to get creative and hit the key notes rather than pure accuracy. They also just said "No need to have Russian accents, the audience is smart enough to just go with what you have."
When I see things like this I am always amazed at how we manage to squander our potential.
When I see the best in people and then see the silly loops and squiggles we get ourselves into it is like playing Chopsticks on Mozart's piano. We know it could do so much more. I mean, we are free to play chopsticks and that is fine, but ultimately in focusing on the short term despite being aware of the long term, it eventually gets taken out of our control and the base ecosystem has its way with us. It is better to show restraint now rather than have it forced.
Never liked Eric, but Google had such a clear direction and vision under his leadership. Pichai, feels like the accountants are running the business. It is ONLY about the next quarters results.
Even Bill Gates has admitted that a big part of their success was just sheer luck. There were many competitors that were pushing far better technology than they had but simply could not get a foot hold in the market.
Just the other day on here I mentioned BeOS/Haiku OS, the tech vision on that thing is astounding but it simply did not pan out into any sort of market success. Same with parts of Commodore, IBM, NeXT. MS did capitalize and manipulate the market to assist themselves and keep competitors out, but just becaused they won doesn't mean they had the best technology.
This should be the perfect forum to ask this question considering the whole mission of Y combinator.
He and his orbiters have done real an irreparable harm to the Internet
He and his orbiters have done real an irreparable harm to the ecosystem by pushing such intense compute systems unthinkingly.
He used violence to get attention on the ideas. What this did was stifled his goals by decades all for his own selfish gains. Did more damage than good by his own definition of success.