core-questions

Why didn't you just ignore it and keep scrolling?

Doesn't work like that. If people who retain the values and views that formed the West (e.g. deep inquiry into all topics regardless of orthodoxy) abdicate all responsibility for weighing in when we see these values being attacked, how exactly is that going to help the cause?

Should we stop studying all forms of bias in computing?

Loaded question. Studying how ML systems reflect data is fine; but when ML systems give us results that accurately reflect real world data, but that we don't like based on our progressivist / ultra-liberal priors, there's a problem.

Statements an ML system can trivially tease out of a data set, like "women are more likely to do career X" or "this group is more likely to commit murder" or "this person is more likely to be hired for this position". When this reveals an uncomfortable truth that has been pre-ordained as offensive regardless of its basis in reality, we have a choice between rejecting the facts based on our priors, or updating our thinking to reflect reality. Sadly, the trend has been to do the former, and to punish anyone doing the latter.

Just go look at what Amazon had to do with their ML-based resume sorting system. It revealed that the best resumes (sorted by likeliness to be hired) were of Asian and White presenting males; which we all know to be true for their hiring, because we all know that that is the current demographics of the industry in general. Of course, such a system cannot be allowed to operate, even though the humans which continue to do the screening in its place will continue to apply the same selection rubric they have before. Nothing is solved, nothing is learned. It just gets chalked up to "systemic bias" without actually investigating any of the reasons for this (such as IQ distributions, access to technology, and whatever raw factors dictate people's individual and aggregate interests toward career selection).

In the sense that people with rhinovirus symptoms usually say "I have a cold", yes.

It seems it's best to think of "cold" and "flu" as totally informal terms with a wide range of possible meanings. I've had Actual Real Influenza twice and both times it knocked me on my ass for a week, lost weight, etc. yet I hear people saying "I have the flu" when they have mild symptoms and only miss a single day of work. Hard to take such a wide range medically seriously.

Wonder if India will ever go through a forced linguistic convergence like China did

Hahaha, of course they aren't. Really, you should be able to calculate how much they paid for your facilities need (square footage of your workspace, connection, IT equipment, etc) and it should be directly reflected in your salary.....

Almost implies you have _bad_ luck, then, if there's nothing at all you can ascribe to fortuitous chance.

My career was made by someone finding my resume in a trash can.

There is no reason to assume that what is being created will be any better than what precipitated it.

What legal culpability do they have accepting payments for organizations that run websites that allow people to exercise their constitutionally protected rights to free speech?

Looks like MS-DOS 5's Dos Shell

https://geekfolk.blogspot.com/2016/02/remembering-dos-shell....

Don't take a job serving the public if you only like some people and not others.

Seems like this logic doesn't apply to payment processors, web hosts, and anyone else who doesn't want to deal with free speech that they find offensive. Bake the cake, right?

A future where there are a lot more of 'them' than 'us'? Fine with me. Is that fine with you?

Not in the slightest, no. I prefer the average IQ of the world to not drop by a standard deviation - you think we'll get out of climate trouble when most people are functionally illiterate?

Well, we might, in the sense that we might lose the ability to manufacture things that produce significant carbon.....

The car problem is solved when I have a wide selection of used electric cars in the $10k price range that I can work on in my own garage. That's still a decade out.

I’d bet you that few cars run by fossil fuels will be sold in Europe or North America in ten years from now

Pipe dream. I'd take that bet. You'll have to weasel out with creative definitions of "few".... not everyone lives in the city, man.

Remember selecting more than one of something, and then being able to drag-and-drop it somewhere, or right click it and perform actions on the whole list?

Remember tables with sortable column headers, in every app?

Oh man. The web sucks so hard, and the kids working on it now are so used to it they don't even know how hard they've been fucked over. To think that in 2021 people still have to think about how to wire up a data table to some backend, thousands of people writing their own version of that every year....

I want to go to the alternate timeline where a major distro actually picked up the GNUstep ball and ran with it, and built out a full desktop based around WindowMaker. It's still faster and more fun than most modern desktops.

That is my preferred outcome

Mine as well, friend. I simply choose to live in a way where I believe this is also the likely outcome. You can pretend that this is an overdose of 'hopium' if you like, but I prefer to simply call this honest optimism.

In your eyes, am I one of those 'woke' people, who never created any value?

I don't know you, but if you spread climate doom all over the place, you may be cancelling out the value you've created in more material ways. The morale of a nation matters.

Put it this way: I have literally met people who say they do not want to have children because they fear for the climate future. There are even articles in publications like the Guardian, Time, etc. that advocate for people to lower their carbon footprint this way. Meanwhile, in other nations where nobody cares about climate, the birth rate dwarfs our own; what does that mean for the future?

National morale is at an all-time low and this is in no small part due to people being sold a story at every angle that they have no future, no reason to hope, no salvation. Just consume, live in the pod and eat bugs, and hang on to watch the lights go out. Do you think that creates or preserves value?

How is it that immigrants and especially their kids are a fundamentally unassimilable mass

I didn't say this, but since you are perturbed, I shall address it for you, so that you can understand my own perturbation.

First, I come from the perspective (as a non-American) that the culture of my country, as it existed over the last hundred years or so, has value. It is a culture which proved itself capable of taming a wild land, from pioneers to industrialists to a post-industrial technological civilization. This was a mighty undertaking which cost many lives, all of which were spent in the name of a better future for their descendants. I am the inheritor of such a legacy, having descended from people that made their way West in the 1600s. I have the "privilege" of being the descendant of countless generations of farmers, most of whom did not own their land, going back to time immemorial.

Second, I come from the perspective of someone who is married to a child of immigrants, from a vastly different culture. This gives me a broadened base of understanding, I think, having visited her ancestral homeland several times and seeing the rapid pace of change there as Western ideas and methodologies are picked up, adapted, and even improved upon there. I am not against immigration, I am not against other cultures, and I am not against change in my own nation - within limits.

I would like to introduce the concept of "cultural carrying capacity": the rate at which new people can be introduced into a culture and be effectively absorbed by it. This absorption doesn't have to imply total assimilation; but it does imply the primacy of the host nation's original culture, in the form of its languages, its religions, its values, and its control over the great national project and destiny. This is not to say that such things should be unchanging, but rather to say that if I wish for the stability and continuance of my culture over time, preventing all of this from being deconstructed is a basic necessity.

If a nation brings new people in at a rate below the maximum carrying capacity, it will do fine. This rate is slow enough that new immigrants are able to integrate; they're forced to learn the language, their new friends and coworkers are primary native, and their lifestyle adjusts to be virtually indistinguishable (in public) from the locals. They retain their traditions, language, ritual, religion, etc. within their family and maybe with some fellow immigrants, but by and large they're the same as anyone else. Their friends are a diverse group; their political concerns are based on policies and projections, not group affiliation; their goals and desires can be expanded to include the nation at large, not just their identity group. This is the ideal case.

If you bring people in at a rate higher than the carrying capacity, this effect is diminished or stops altogether. People are able to find insular bubbles of their original population, they can continue to speak their first language, they don't need to adapt to the local area more than is required by law and interaction with institutions. They may form a political block, elect their own representatives, and force institutions to cater to their language and cultural needs.

Is this to the detriment of the locals? It depends on too many variables to name. What is clear, however, is that if you bring your culture with you and set it up here, you will also most likely set up the problems with your culture, as well. The mitigations in place to prevent violence and crime in the local population which have evolved over decades or centuries may not apply or work. Disruption in business, in organized crime, in politics, and within the leadership of institutions becomes the name of the game, never actually decreasing as long as the influx of new cultures is constant.

If we become a nation of people who hail from nations where corrupt politics are and have been the normal state of affairs for centuries, we should not be surprised when our own politics become corrupt. The same goes for whether fathers stay with their families, whether violence is used as a way to settle personal disputes, whether bribery is part of how law enforcement operates, and whether nepotism is the standard mode in business. We all know that there are many countries where all of the above are the normal state of affairs; we also all know that the West somehow threw off much of this, and was engaged in a cultural project of moving away from such venal operations, before the 1965 Hart-Cellar Immigration Act....

One need only look at the countless examples of cities like Minneapolis, formerly a safe midwest city full of White people, now the violent home to the largest number of Somalians outside their home country. It happens slowly, and then all at once... each step of the way lubricated by everyone's unwillingness to say what everyone is secretly thinking. Somehow, along the way, it becomes more beneficial to find ways of hiding the truth by changing the statistical rubric than it is to actually confront the situation at hand.

Now, consider that different cultures have different values around families and reproduction, as well. Immigrant families may have a far higher birth rate than the host population who have stabilized over time, particularly in the West where sex ed and birth control have been mainstays for 3 generations or more now.

If you bring people in at a multiple of the rate of the carrying capacity, as has been suggested (Canada to 100 million people by 2100 is a number serious people are suggesting, for example) the result will be the complete replacement of the host population with a conflagration of new cultures. Some people will do well in this vain, others will not. Some areas may be peaceful, some may be embroiled in total race war, or gang warfare between the fading vestiges of the native organized crime and newcomer gangs. The result is essentially unpredictable and unmanageable.

I have no problem with immigration, friend, but I do want the culture that built my nation to continue to have a strong, permanent presence. I do not want the high-trust culture my ancestors sacrificed to build frittered away so that we can check a diversity box on some form; I do not want to be told my ancestors were evil, and watch their statues be torn down, and watch their legacy be wrecked by someone high on Marxist idealism that knows nothing of what it actually takes to build upward. Yet, those people are more protected by the institutions our ancestors built than I would be if I tried to counter-protest them.

Alas, nobody in power feels this way, even though a massive section of the population does. Democracy has failed us, because it refuses to address this need. The result may be anger that spills over into violence, or it may be a slow and whimpering defeat. I think the latter looks more likely at this stage; the pathological altruism my people are famous for, a game-theoretical advantage in isolation, will be our undoing in the long run.

The COVID response showed that governments (not all) can take drastic action when needed,

If this is our rubric and measure of good governance, why don't we all just become fascists already? At least in that case we could pretend to be unified and proud of what we're doing, instead of this chaotic, bungled, arbitrary response that takes hints from authoritarianism without getting any of its benefits.

There are no technical or economical hurdles that stops us from strongly mitigate the climate change.

This statement is absurd. Do you have some magic wand that is going to solve the car problem, or the international shipment problem? Have you got some secret battery technology that you aren't letting on about, perhaps one that doesn't require extremely expensive rare materials to produce?

Remember, as you drive your Tesla around, that nigh-indentured Chinese workers essentially engaged in mining actions arguably worse than classic colonialism in Africa are responsible for providing you with your "clean" vehicle, which will probably never make up for the emissions created in its production....

Pity that most of this is still fuelled by oil, in one way or another; shoving that oil energy through several intermediaries does not actually decrease entropy.

It's like the use of oil to make fertilizer to grow corn to make ethanol to supplement gasoline; would have been better to just burn the oil to start with, economically, environmentally, and in the long term politically, too. Corn subsidies in America wrecked the Mexican corn production market, resulting in waves of illegal immigration as poor farmers who don't know how to do anything else moved north to continue to ply their trade in a place where it is still profitable.

Too many cleantech projects are catabolic: consuming more energy than they produce, while spreading the blame and consumption around and giving people a way to claim carbon credits. Might as well just call them 'carbon indulgences' for all of the emissions they actually save in reality.

Only an economist could pretend that someone who owns a bunch of land doing nothing has an invisible commodity of carbon the government allocated for them to emit, that can be sold to a factory somewhere else that is actually emitting carbon, and pretend that it is somehow helping the environment to shuffle those dollars around.

Somehow, production processes continue; with the exception of those that shut down, only to open elsewhere in the world where there are fewer regulations on environment and labour. The result is a lose-lose, where we no longer have the ability to actually decrease emissions, no longer have any of the economic advantages of the emissions, and of course no longer have any way to ensure the people working in those facilities get a living wage or any of the other benefits of the labour laws our ancestors fought for.

Go ahead and take a CleanTech job, just remember, there's a 95% chance it's a circlejerk that doesn't accomplish anything at all in the real world besides spreading the problem around and grifting off of it in the process.

Yet another media piece we can safely put in the rapidly growing pile of material designed to drive a wedge between White people and Asian people.

You have to understand that this is a deliberate attempt to push Asian people who actually have successfully established themselves and their families in the West into taking part in this new Woke Mob. These articles do nothing to actually address the issues Asian people face here, which are often minimized away by people across the spectrum as simply being 'microaggressions'. The goal is purely to create anti-White sentiment amongst 2nd and 3rd generation children of Asian immigrants who are growing up more privileged than their parents and are in a prime position to be fodder for this movement.

Reject this. The fact that people of Asian descent have succeeded so well even _despite_ the fading vestiges of racism that persist in the West is a very, very unfortunate truth that many seek to bury. It's a problematic fact, because it shows that in reality, work ethic and intelligence have far more to do with success than prejudice does, at least within the last sixty years. The only way to bury this reality is to blow every possible incident out of proportion and drive a rhetorical wedge in between the races, for divide-and-conquer purposes.

There are valid racial issues that need to be aired out and addressed between White and Asian people, issues that can and are being solved generationally; all of this effort will be thrown out if Asian people give in to the media's push to skew everyone possible toward an anti-White style of rhetoric.

I'm actually totally willing to believe that ML for medicine is a great application. When I go to a doctor for a non-emergency issue, what am I doing other than describing a bunch of symptoms, and then the doctor looks within their memory to see if it is something they know about, or if they need more information to be sure?

Hell, my doctor fires up some kind of Doctor Google, proprietary paid system, and searches for things all the time. It doesn't even offend me, damn knows that's a huge component of my job as well. Extending that to inputting a formal description of my symptoms and narrowing down the results doesn't seem like a bad move.

Even better would be tying something like HealthKit or other data sources into the system. Need to make a food log or a bowel log or whatever? Why _not_ use an app and actually get structured data some system can make sense of?

Here's the thing: gate-model QPUs are a decade or more off from being applicable to this problem. Quantum annealers, on the other hand, are basically neural-network machines in a box, so if you want to apply quantum computing to this problem, IBM probably isn't the vendor to go with. Their QAOA work doesn't look like it's any better than using an actual annealer, to boot.

In the future, the Cleveland Clinic will also purchase a 1,000+ qubit IBM next-generation quantum system for installation at a data center in its home town.

LOL, they better actually hit some of their targets to get past 53 qubits if they want to live up to this bullshit hype.

For all IBM has been talking about their QC work, they still only have a measly handful of noisy useless qubits that can't do anything worth writing home about. It would be hard to believe that a medical company would want one, until we remember all the back-room deals and nepotism inherent to the American medical industry. Years' of people's insurance payments frittered away on a magical machine that won't do anything to help anyone's medical outcomes compared to spending the same amount of money telling Yanks to stop shoving fried sugar into every hole.

Right now it seems like we'll end up with the same outcome of running Proxmox but we'll spend quite a bit of time getting up and running with Kubernetes

This is 90% of shops. The reason people are deploying k8s is not because they _need_ it, it's because the devops working there want to get k8s under their belts and onto their resumes so they're more hireable long-term. It's a feedback cycle.

We hired a new guy and all he wants to do is tear out everything I have spent 3 years building - after I was denied being allowed to use Nomad or K8S three years ago, due to rational arguments around its complexity and our needs. Of course, he wants to replace it with k8s. No respect for what has been built, no appetite to help me go after the low-hanging fruit that would get us 80% of the way to k8s deployment speeds without having to significantly re-architect anything. Nope! Gotta be CLOUD NATIVE!!!

TBQH from what I have seen it's overengineered and only makes sense to use when someone else is running it for you. Then you just consume it as a cluster and don't worry about what's inside the black box. This makes sense for younger Zoomer devops who have never even touched VMware or any on-prem servers and think everything is always clouds all the time.

IMO, you should write up two alternate timelines: the one where you spend a few months getting K8S to a POC stage, and the one where you spend that same time tuning the deployment and management of your application in its current habitat. Probably the kinds of features and reliability you can deliver in the latter case will be far more appealing once you actually lay them out. Don't play in the "k8s ideal utopian state vs. actual current state" fight, play in the "k8s expected early outcomes vs. maturing current model" fight.

They both look like boring electric razors. The dashboard looks like someone awkwardly bolted not one, but two ipads onto it. Nothing looks like it's actually designed to fit together, it's a clash of styles with no flow.

Gross. Can we just get a normal looking, Corolla-price-range EV for normal people already? I don't give a shit if it only has 50km range and no luxury features whatsoever.

This isn't how people comment on HN, friend. Fact checkers? Go back to Facebook.

Does this imply that there's a whites-only dorm?

I did really well on test 1 and 3, and on test 2 I got _every single one wrong_. Like, not even one right by accident.

I think I found the 'same vs different' dynamic really difficult compared to discerning the two types.

On the other hand, no hacker is going to be able to compromise my network via this device, so maybe this truly is a better path forward for IOT devices?

But on the other hand, your network has already been compromised, in the sense that you have a connected device within your home that you cannot control at all, that connects to the internet as long as it has power and can do whatever it is programmed to do...

Maybe for a sleep apnea machine this isn't catastrophic, but consider this Ubiquiti hack that's in the news; it wouldn't surprise me if the security situation around medical stuff isn't any better than with a networking company, after all.

Me, I want to control what's connected in my house. At least a little.

Mazda has also said they will be decreasing the importance of an infotainment screen and focusing on having quality switchgear. People who actually _enjoy driving_ like these kinds of touches; in general, in the segments Mazda competes in, they have some of the most fun offerings available.

For people who consider a car to be a status symbol that transports them from place to place, it's not the ideal choice, but I'm glad there's some variety. Otherwise, we'll all just be driving electric jellybeans with an iPad awkwardly bolted to the dashboard.

Let me tell you, you don't want to know what I really think about these people. Put it this way: there is indeed something Epstein, Stallman, Weinstein, and many others have in common that seems to enable them to get away with whatever they want to do for ages before it catches up to them.

At least in the case of RMS he's still a net good for the species, in a utilitarian sense, even with what we know of his misdeeds. I won't defend them, rather, the way I look at it is that there was undoubtedly going to be someone of their ilk harassing women, and at least this one has also done something meaningful to go with it. At this point of civilizational decay, I will take what I can get.

Is this some GPT-3 spam or does it just read like it?

Hard to get better advertising than an article like this, really.