darthoctopus

What is definitely being argued unironically is "it doesn't matter that humans are sentient", and I would still consider that misanthropy

this kind of overt inevitabilism is complicity in the death of good writing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firehose_of_falsehood

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flood_the_zone

Can we finally stop having business people forcing product decisions on us? Microsoft's recent history suggests not… and I fear the facade of empowerment by LLM will only make things worse in the near future.

You have not heard any of the many, many excitable AI maximalists in the media address this reality, the bits vs atoms barrier, because they have no response that can preserve their intense attachment to the idea that the world is about to change forever. So they resolutely ignore this basic reality: most of the world is not computers. Most of your life is dependent on technologies other than computers. Inconveniently, we also have few arenas of human endeavor that are seeing rapid development other than in computing.

I suspect stark wisdom of this nature will, unfortunately, not find HN to be fertile ground. At the same time, I am glad these other arenas, few though they be, still exist.

subtlety is dead on the internet of the lowest common denominator, and that enabled by AI assistance is very low indeed

wanting to be good at something is not exactly the same as being interested in getting good at something, which carries the additional, nuanced, connotation of investment (or willingness to invest) towards this goal.

e.g. many people want to live an active healthy lifestyle, but fewer are actually interested in doing so.

don't want to put in the human time and effort to do so

In most circles, that is "not that interested in getting good at it".

Who is forced to use it? Just use X11, as you said (many times) you do already.

I can no longer use GNOME on X11, and the decision to remove support was a deliberate one. Users are definitely being forced.

Why is that not going to happen next time?

Because this shortage isn't natural, it's the result of OpenAI flexing monopsony power to deprive everyone else for its strategic gain. Unlike an organic shortage, there is no compelling reason for otherwise excess capacity to be built, since this artificial shortage can end as arbitrarily as it started.

Lest we forget, this memory shortage was deliberately engineered [1]. Thanks, OpenAI.

[1] https://www.mooreslawisdead.com/post/sam-altman-s-dirty-dram...

what _is_ that reason, out of curiosity?

I think you may have fundamentally misunderstood what a technocracy is: it has nothing to do with tech companies whatsoever. From literally the article that you have linked:

The technocracy movement proposed replacing partisan politicians and business people with scientists and engineers who had the technical expertise to manage the economy.

I would absolutely love for this proposed blocker to happen, but I have zero faith in it actually happening given the user-centred nature of this feature and the user-hostile origin of Mozilla's funding situation…

every one of these things that make the deal "good" for OpenAI is a direct result of negative externalities for everyone else: competitors, consumers, and people who wouldn't care otherwise.

Indeed, I find it very hard to take the article seriously given that every one of the notionally decentralised trends it's described has propagated on a very small handful of highly centralised platforms. For that matter, it's very difficult for me to imagine how these trends might have spread in the first place without access to large-audience virality directed by algorithmic recommendations precisely enabled by such severe centralisation.

that is the point of Luddism! the original Luddite movement was not ipso facto opposed to progress, but rather to the societal harm caused by society-scale economic obsolescence. the entire history of technology is also powerful business interests smearing this movement as being intrinsically anti-progress, rather than directly addressing these concerns…

Throughout Europe, though not in America, there is a third class of men, more respected than either of the classes of workers. These are men who, through ownership of land, are able to make others pay for the privilege of being allowed to exist and to work. These landowners are idle, and I might, therefore, be expected to praise them. Unfortunately, their idleness is rendered possible only by the industry of others; indeed their desire for comfortable idleness is historically the source of the whole gospel of work. The last thing they have ever wished is that others should follow their example.

Ahhh, how times have changed indeed!

perhaps read the actual first paragraph of the article? the whole point of it is that, whether we call it that or not, our privately run reputation scores (including but not limited to credit scores) functionally are social credit scores --- except we've been boiled frogs, and should take some time for self-reflection before engaging in knee-jerk reactions to China's other failings (which I'm not denying btw) whenever social credit is brought up.

Did you even read the article? Here is the situation in China:

Here's what's actually happening. As of 2024, there's still no nationwide social credit score in China. Most private scoring systems have been shut down, and local government pilots have largely ended. It’s mainly a fragmented collection of regulatory compliance tools, mostly focused on financial behavior and business oversight. While well over 33 million businesses have been scored under corporate social credit systems, individual scoring remains limited to small pilot cities like Rongcheng. Even there, scoring systems have had "very limited impact" since they've never been elevated to provincial or national levels.

Compare that to the situation with, say, credit scores in the US --- wholly run by an oligopoly of three private companies, but fully ingrained into how personal finances work here. At least a publicly run credit score would be held accountable, however indirectly, to voters and the law; and its safety might be treated as a matter of national security, rather than having Equifax and Experian leaking data like clockwork.

that is the point --- precisely because the usual mechanisms of enforcement do not apply, there will be no accountability for Apple.

As an intermediate alternative between a hardware keyboard and a graphical symbol picker, I use an .XCompose file with contents that look like this:

    # GREEK
    <Multi_key> <g> <A>    : "Α"   U0391    # GREEK CAPITAL LETTER ALPHA
    <Multi_key> <g> <a>    : "α"   U03B1    # GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA
    <Multi_key> <g> <B>    : "Β"   U0392    # GREEK CAPITAL LETTER BETA
    <Multi_key> <g> <b>    : "β"   U03B2    # GREEK SMALL LETTER BETA
    <Multi_key> <g> <D>    : "Δ"   U0394    # GREEK CAPITAL LETTER DELTA
    <Multi_key> <g> <d>    : "δ"   U03B4    # GREEK SMALL LETTER DELTA
    <Multi_key> <g> <E>    : "Ε"   U0395    # GREEK CAPITAL LETTER EPSILON
    <Multi_key> <g> <e>    : "ε"   U03B5    # GREEK SMALL LETTER EPSILON

    ...

    # Math Symbols
    <Multi_key> <i> <n>    : "∈"   U2208 # IN
    <Multi_key> <f> <a>    : "∀"   U2200 # FOR ALL
    <Multi_key> <t> <e>    : "∃"   U2203 # THERE EXISTS
    <Multi_key> <a> <n> <d>    : "∧"   U2227 # AND
    <Multi_key> <o> <r>    : "∨"   U2228 # OR
    <Multi_key> <less> <parenleft>  : "⟨" U27E8     # MATHEMATICAL LEFT ANGLE BRACKET
    <Multi_key> <greater> <parenright>: "⟩" U27E9   # MATHEMATICAL RIGHT ANGLE BRACKET
    <Multi_key> <d> <d>    : "∂" U8706 # DEL
    <Multi_key> <n> <b>    : "∇" U8711 # NABLA

why is this downvoted? the specific cities (notably in Arizona) that have taken deliberate action on this are exceptions proving the general rule that light pollution is demonstrably less of a policy concern even compared to the notorious American disdain for walkable infrastructure.

this is not a conclusion that he jumps to! all that is stated is that there is a mapping from every pair of points on a curve to a set of 3D coordinates specified by their midpoints and distances. there is no requirement for uniqueness here. in fact, the whole point of this is to turn the search for an inscribed rectangle into the search for two pairs of points on the curve that have the same midpoint and distance --- this is stated just 1 min 15 seconds after the timestamp that you point out.

given the audience here, there's almost certainly an element of denial of complicity in this

This is valid (if somewhat obscure) notation for decimal dates in particular, see e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Now_Foundation

There's healthy skepticism about vaccine side effects, and then there are these antics:

On 11 January 2023, Bridgen had the Conservative whip suspended after tweeting about COVID-19 vaccines: "As one consultant cardiologist said to me, this is the biggest crime against humanity since the Holocaust." Bridgen claimed the tweet had been moderated by staff members, which was denied by a Conservative Party spokesman.[84] Prime Minister Rishi Sunak called the comparison "utterly unacceptable".[5] Two days later, Bridgen issued a statement saying his tweet was not antisemitic, and apologised "for any offence caused". He said he was taking legal advice about action against those who had labelled him as antisemitic. Bridgen further contended that he asked "reasonable questions" about the side-effects of mRNA vaccines, and had "received huge support from ordinary people, medical workers [and] those who have experienced vaccine harms themselves".[85]

In March 2023, Bridgen posted tweets promoting a conspiracy theory claiming that COVID-19 originated at Fort Detrick.[86]

On 29 February 2024, Bridgen referenced capital punishment as an appropriate response to "crimes against humanity" regarding the vaccine rollout.[87]

is pissing certain people off your primary consideration in deciding how you educate your kids?

thanks for the script!

The private sector funds most global research and development, and many of the results of such work are not published in peer-reviewed journals. We at Nature think it’s important that journals engage with the private sector and work with its scientists so they can submit their research for peer review and publication … But this goal will not be achieved in a single step. It will require a process. And that requires engagement and dialogue between all stakeholders.

I can understand this line of reasoning if the researchers involved needed convincing to publish their results in peer-reviewed journals at all. But this is Nature we're talking about, and more likely than not I imagine the incentives work the other way around. As it stands, the AlphaFold team gets to use a Nature publication to lend their work the veneer of prestige and credibility, without actually being held to the same standards of openness that are demanded of us ordinary mortals. As far as I can tell the uproar is about this specific double standard, and to the extent that this editorial doesn't really address this, I think it misses the point.