bshepard

Public goods are not the same as socialism.

The continued existence of socialism after its complete moral and intellectual demolition in the 20th century is profoundly depressing. Let us not walk on the road to serfdom, please! Remember Hayek! Remember the Khmer Rouge! "Socialism" is the antisemitism of foolish intellectuals.

I am happy to see how much collective negativity there is to this kind of pointless, time wasting, inaccurate, cringey computer generated boilerplate. Maref, whoever you are, please consider actually writing your own words, not outsourcing them to an algorithm that cannot and will not ever be able to create readable prose.

It would be nice if there was a systematic way to stop AI written content from appearing on HN: the writing is excruciating to read, and there is (obviously) no reasoning involved. It is a form of cognitive pollution, and should at least be culturally strongly disincentivized, as writing makes you smarter, makes you think. Oy!

Very conventional, and perhaps good, advice would be to publish useful material adjacent to your problem, educational content that can lead to your solution/app. You might also try working with an LLM to generate less conventional marketing notions. You might also read "Hey Whipple, Squeeze This" to learn a bit about copy.

LLMs surely can help with language learning, but when they write posts like this, the zombie/body snatchers/borg effect is so strong as to be unreadable. Just write it yourself! You can do it! It will be better, please please stop generating bad boilerplate language with these fascinating algorithms, PLEASE!

Perhaps the real mass psychotic delusion is the delusion of mass psychotic delusions in.others.

The problem is that "the problem" is not clearly stated. There is surely climate change, but what it means and what we should do and feel about it is very unclear and contested. What is clearer is that certain intellectuals have used 'climate change' to get power via fear. Whether this power is warranted or not must be debated. Even if warranted, fear is a dirty, but traditional, way for clerics to assume domination.

German culture is more about extreme anal attention to details and correcting others than Young Werther! In other words Prussia won, not Weimar.

Anxiety over commodification is very, very old, and tends to miss the upsides of commercial society. Intellectuals, by our nature, focus on problems -- often to the point of creating problems where (perhaps) there were none before. Happily "dopamine fracking" will probably not metamorphose into another menacing sounding anti-commercial phrase. There are enough already.

If you are sympathetic, or even curious, about the advantages of commercial society Deirdre Mccloskey's bourgeoise trilogy is an excellent place to begin.

Who is "they"? Rabelais? Mozart? Alas many of us humans DO find poop to be funny, forgive us fallen shit stained beings.

What are the human rights costs of a human rights regime constituted by unelected bureaucrats seeking power over society via moral posturing?

It is less exciting than religious fundamentalism!

This is untrue, the book is filled with incidents of motorcycle maintenance. Perhaps you have not read it? The second chapter centers around a complex issue involving a piston seizure:

"“I remove a glove with my teeth, reach down and feel the aluminum side cover of the engine. The temperature is fine. Too warm to leave my hand there, not so hot I get a burn. Nothing wrong there.

On an air-cooled engine like this, extreme overheating can cause a “seizure.” This machine has had one-in fact, three of them. I check it from time to time the same way I would check a patient who has had a heart attack, even though it seems cured.”

This is an inaccurate paragraph which should have been edited better:

"When Europeans began to draw on ancient precedents in the Renaissance, they did so loosely and freely, and each country did so in its own way, such that French, German, Spanish and Italian Renaissance styles are highly distinct from each other. These national renaissance traditions continued in various forms for over three centuries. There was then a brief period of international neoclassicism in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, after which European architects mostly returned to their national idioms. "

1. Renaissance architecture began in Italy, and was copied internationally, with variations, but it still forms a single international style, as did the Gothic and Baroque. 2. This account leaves out the Baroque completely, another international style with high unity and some level of difference. 3. Some damage gets done with these crude reductions; we lose sight of our cultural heritage and replace it with a crude inaccuracy.

The AI writing patterns here are obnoxious on both a sentence by sentence level and at the level of overall meaning and content. Because a machine wrote this, lacks human intelligence, so is not worth reading.

It would be worth thinking harder before moralizing.

I wish this was written by hand and not created by an algorithm that recycled cliches and presented single data points as decisive. But...it's 2026?

Because the international order is fundamentally anarchic, while domestic orders are (supposed to be at least) nomic, structured by law and rights. Yes, there are attempts at creating international law, but these amount to treaties more than a structured, visible, governing law.

"It’s November 28, 1660. Europe is in the early stages of transforming from the Middle Ages into something new"

This is a grotesque misrepresentation of European history! By 1660, universities had existed for more than a half millenia, had redeveloped lost roman engineering capacities and invented world-shattering new technologies.

Oy!

"You have not discovered a potion for remembering, but for reminding; you provide your students with the appearance of wisdom, not with its reality. Your invention will enable them to hear many things without being properly taught, and they will imagine that they have come to know much while for the most part they will know nothing. And they will be difficult to get along with, since they will merely appear to be wise instead of really being so.” -- someone wise, or was he?

I would advise those to read the book and grasp the argument before 'rebutting' it.

On a more conceptual angle, Landrebe and Smith's "Why Machine's Will Never Rule the World" clarifies the limits of computation w/r/t complex dynamic systems.

Here is the core argument: "an artificial intelligence that could equal or exceed human intelligence—sometimes called artificial general intelligence (AGI)—is for mathematical reasons impossible. It offers two specific reasons for this claim: 1. Human intelligence is a capability of a complex dynamic system—the human brain and central nervous system. 2. Systems of this sort cannot be modelled mathematically in a way that allows them to operate inside a computer.

Human civilization is built on the creation of shortcuts. Insulin is a shortcut for T1 diabetics to avoid death.

This is meant primarily for Thai people, but there is also a history of foreigners making it very large in Thailand.

location: EU

remote: yes

willing to relocate: within EU

technologies: institutional dramaturgy: meaning, I'm a

generalist who can inform you about other, usefully related contexts.

email: b.shepard@udk-berlin.de

From the Book of Disquiet: "I see life as a roadside inn where I have to stay until the coach from the abyss pulls up. I don’t know where it will take me, because I don’t know anything. I could see this inn as a prison, for I’m compelled to wait in it; I could see it as a social centre, for it’s here that I meet others. But I’m neither impatient nor common. I leave who will to stay shut up in their rooms, sprawled out on beds where they sleeplessly wait, and I leave who will to chat in the parlours, from where their songs and voices conveniently drift out here to me. I’m sitting at the door, feasting my eyes and ears on the colours and sounds of the landscape, and I softly sing – for myself alone – wispy songs I compose while waiting."

Questionable title: if you consider the impact of economic growth/specialization on human freedom - from exceedingly unfree agricultural and domestic work towards much freer (but still, of course, not wholly free) forms of symbolic labor, then the world is still getting more and more free every day, but on an level unseen by existing media, which tends to focus on state/politics as this generates agitation that leads to revenue.

Of all places, hacker news might be the optimal space to find others interested in the radicalization of wokeness; that is, pushing past 'spoke woke's use of essential identities and alliance with the carcereal state-NGO complex....towards a wokeness to the completely performative nature of social life, and with that wokeness, a sense of the undeveloped possibilities which open up beyond the confines of essential attribution - that is, the current system of singularization where individuals are forced into coercive classifications, name, gender, age, wealth....

it seems worthwhile to note Graeber's extremely loose relationship with aspects of reality that didn't fit his very narrow political stance -- said post if about another book, but it's likely that the bullshit jobs work has similar flaws: https://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2013/01/the-very-last-david-g...