billiam

I sure hope the community is working on these APIs now for Linux, with pressure to come on M$ and Apple.

Maybe you should be asking yourself what you did to piss of this corvid? They have been shown to recognize faces.

Straw man argument. Teachers are important but don’t have impunity to use deadly force.

Exhibit A for why we need to rewrite sovereign immunity laws and get them out of union contracts, at the same time professionalizing how DUI is enforced. If we made the punishments like they have in Europe, the incidence would go way down.

these dramatic and colorful massive specimens are perfect for an art museum, but as a recovering mineralogist I feel like the true beauty of the world of minerals in Earth is shown on the microscopic level, where you can see both the incredible order and incredible randomness of the (mostly) crystalline solids that make up minerals. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thin_section

There is an idea that minerals are these inorganic substances but fully two thirds of all minerals identified were originated from direct or indirect interaction with living things on Earth. In fact a recent hypothesis holds that minerals have evolved since the formation of the solar system very much like living things, getting more and more complex via selective processes. See https://hazen.carnegiescience.edu/research/mineral-evolution

This seems like a classic straw man argument. Plutocratic oligarchs have been making the argument that private monopolies are better than representative democracy at basically any societal function for decades without any actual data.

This seems like a classic straw man argument. Plutocratic oligarchs have been making the argument that private monopolies are better than representative democracy at basically anything for decades.

Just pointing out that this silly exercise was mostly powered by nuclear reactors in France that (besides fission) transmute Uranium into Plutonium.

This site is becoming the Buzzfeed of tech. Better moderation please.

Clown take. The use of Signal or any app on a non-secure device by SecDef for what we know he messaged about in his office is absolutely a primary national security threat. Firing offense for any senior Pentagon official dealing with highly classified traffic. Nothing to do with politics.

Afloat like Weekend at Bernie's. I lived through multiple efforts to prop up the corpse while making sure it would never ever be as good as Chrome.

New headline: AWS RDS is not CockroachDB or Spanner. And it's not trying to be.

The demographic time bomb that is the Russian population (human capital, to use an inhuman term) has been recognized since the late 80s. I am surprised how much that productivity along with health has plunged in the last decade. It is not as some suggested a lagging indicator of the aftermath of the Soviet empire but the continuing collapse of the Russian empire, of which the Soviet Union was just a phase. Despite the best intentions of would be autocrats in the West to pump it up, Russia is transitioning from a pretend developed nation to a much smaller developing country on a large land mass.

If dominance wasn't at least enhanced or supported by owning the browser engine, Google wouldn't be doing Chromium.

As is the jury selection process, especially in low population areas. And jury instructions from the judge. This seems to be a particularly egregious example, and I think on appeal this will will be corrected.

If you are a federal employee that got an email from these scumbags, look at who is extending this "offer." Trump, who has stiffed everyone who ever did work for him, and Musk, who still is being sued by lots of Twitter employees especially execs, for their unpaid severance. They are the most untrustworthy people ever to serve in the federal government.

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fingers crossed!

I just can't fathom the lack of self-awareness of people who championed Ross Ulbricht's cause, seemingly because he looks like them, codes like them, and sat in the same public library they frequent or became associated with a techno-libertarian identity. Hundreds of drug and gun dealers are sentenced every week, some certainly unjustly. Where is the outrage for them?

Wow, Paul Graham just kinda set the standard for cognitive dissonance on HN. In short, sins of elision, omission, and exaggeration in this post and elsewhere in his absurdly entitled world make it clear that he is himself the prig here.

and this is why I can't read HN at work anymore........

I have increasing confidence that when AIs finally destroy the Internet the delivery vehicle will be the file format that was created, as the Internet itself was, as a form of digital paper.

I think the rare Earth hypotheses get it backward, it all looks unlikely when you only have one data point. I think that complex life finds a way and it all looks like a six cushion bank shot in retrospect.

This is more of a hypothesis than a well-rounded and evaluated theory. I could argue that rather than the viscosity of seawater the isolation of hydrothermal vents during the Snowball Earth period was the primary driver of eukaryote evolution and diversity. Isolation makes evolution speed up, and homogeneity slows it down in general. Fascinating to think about it though.

The mental model my kids have for work is that typing or even thinking is itself a finished product. For my generation that idea of a conscious action of saving your work on a computer made me think more about what I was doing and how I was doing it. But I am an old.

In our current panopitcon, lies work. Turns out if an entertaining man lies again and again into a mechanism (the Internet) that endlessly amplifies and repeats those lies for free (paid for by all of us with our attention), you can win.

Please. The International Seabed Authority has been almost entirely captured by the same mining interests that are trying to perversely argue that only by destroying the last effective carbon sink on the planet can can we save the planet. After all, the only reason we had to kill almost every whale in the world in the nineteenth century was because we needed all that oil for lamps forever, since there was no prospect of a better lighting technology ever being developed. We will manage to find or replace these metals without hoovering the deep ocean.

Don't know any particulars but the real problem here is the misaligned incentives that come from the rather incestuous relationship between founders, investors, and their friends in most companies steroidally pumped-up by VCs. What about the customers and what they want? VCs typically over-rotate on founders they talk to and obsession with comparable companies. Reading between the lines here the real story of a fire sale to Airtable (in some trouble of its own) might have to do with burnout but also machinations with another portfolio company from a lead investor.

As the emails make clear, Musk reveals that his real goal is to use OpenAI to accelerate full self driving of Tesla Model 3 and other models. He keeps on putting up Google as a boogeyman who will swamp them, but he provides no real evidence of spending level or progress toward AGI, he just bloviates. I am totally suspicious of Altman in particular, but Musk is just the worst.

The article is actually a great illustration of how far ahead of machine learning humans remain in their ability to collaborate and make intuitive connections (the AI contribution was minimal). Which LLM is going to say, hey this pattern looks like the birds out my window, or the problem I worked on years ago and never got anywhere, or I must send a competing LLM a preprint of my paper?

Cheer up. It's not real. Generative AI is going to force us to confront what makes us human and the real world real, and learn to love it all over again. Sure, a lot of people will be lost in digital realms. Some might even like it. But I think that many will embrace the messy, imperfect, poignant realm we live in.