eks391

In the last day I've spent a couple hours in a negativity loop. My wife doesn't know it, but she snapped me out of it and it's nice to see your comment as another reminder to avoid going down that path

This is precisely what I do each year with a product designed for this exact purpose. $8+shipping gets me enough for my annual pipe maintenance. It's even the special kind because I have clay pipes.

I don't wasn't to kill parents idea. It's neat, and Im sure there's use cases that my solution doesn't meet

This is the correct KYC. Plenty of apps use it besides banking. Depending on the perspective, this is either the perfect solution to a lot of digital legal problems, or the distopian solution because of the numerous ways this can and will be abused when it is expected by many vendors outside of banking.

If you search "how to turn on dark mode" in chrome, it'll change to dark mode. Or you can change it in settings. For the numerous websites that don't care, extensions exist to force them. Midnight lizard is my favorite.

Edge has it in edge://flags no extension needed. Firefox & brave requires settings and extension like chrome. I haven't used opera or Vivaldi in ages to help with them, but they will have an option because customizability is a key part of their selling points

Holy crap that is scummy.

I still use 2 Google services, of which neither would crumble me if lost (YouTube, and my old email which now acts as my spam inbox). I have lost accesses before, when I was still partially dependent, and had to give up my privacy to get access again, long enough to get off. It sucks but I do consider myself lucky that I was able to prevent the life crushing consequences that some people have had. Such a terrible company.

Is this something that happens down the road? I've had nextcloud for probably 6 months now and while technically I've had a couple problems, they were self induced. I haven't heard of/seen maintenance mode.

Did you have milk too? If you give a mouse a cookie, he'll ask for a glass of milk.

Libraries might not be a business but they still have to compete for funding. If those funding them think they are no longer relevant, the alternative is to slowly lose funding and die. People don't care about books anymore, so if the library must dangle an enticement to keep people engaged enough to retain the instilled indeed that knowledge should be freely available instead of siloed (and the other benefits of libraries), so be it.

Adapt or die is the way of life.

Is this a play on the word "straight[-]forward"?

Yessir! I even used AI this week, so I'm adding to the energy death of the universe way faster than if I had done something else. Not to mention my car and other things...

Wealth isn't tied to labor though. It is tied to ownership of assets and the value of those assets as defined by economic pressures such as supply and demand. Money (not to be confused with wealth) is an asset that is conveniently fluid, a good medium for trade, since if I have bread, you have eggs, and our friend has milk, but none of us line up perfectly for a trade with each other, we can use money as that asset exchange so all three of us can end up with the amount of eggs, milk, and bread that we decide of our own volition is the best distribution for us, competitively.

If your chickens reproduce because of the bread I provided you, your wealth in assets increases if the value of chickens and eggs don't go down at the same rate. We already traded our money and bread. If I wanted stake in your chickens, we could've came with an agreement (if you are willing to share your assets and risk), and I could then demand a share of your gain or loss. Otherwise it is theft.

Regarding employees, labor has never been tied to wealth. An employee provides a service, which is traded based on the supply and demand of that service, and money (not wealth) is the standard asset people prefer. Some people are paid in a different asset, such as share of the company or a combo of both. That is their wealth. Labor is independent if you decide to trade something else, and it is always a gamble, because values of any two different assets (including money) grow and shrink independently.

I took several biomechanics classes as electives back in my undergrad, and in one assignment I remember comparing the energy outputs between the human and robot equivalents of different tasks, whether or not the robot was humanoid in how it was designed. The most impressive think that stuck with me is that humans are incredibly efficient, from an energy perspective, in anything we do, compared to machines. Every time we delegate a task to a machine, we are using several orders of magnitude of energy to do the same thing. For most tasks, it feels wrong, but it doesn't make me any more willing to give up my car. Maybe if I lived outside the US.

If I pay a plumber to fix a pipe in my house, and the value of my house is assessed now to be higher, I neither owe the plumber any more than the agreed rate for the pipe fix service nor equity in the house. If I owned 100% (or 20% per your company example) before, then I still own 100%. If the plumber was already a shareholder, then he will reap the additional reward.

Any asset value can grow or shrink thanks to effects from people, such as paid services, but I don't lose equity on property/companies I don't own if I vandalize them, just like I don't gain equity when I raise their value somehow.

Employees of a company are just contracted service providers with longer duration contracts, and of the company is public, they are free to buy some of that risk and gain or lose more when the company does so. 20% of $100B is $20B, so there is no need for a debate, math has our back.

Yup. I could guess what needs to be grabbed without reading the prompt because it was always the front-most object. It also has the largest grab area; some of the plushies can't even be grabbed.

Fun idea though

Foreign national is anyone who doesn't have legally recognized citizenship of the USA. So citizens living abroad aren't barred, nor would dual citizens be.

Get yourself a greyscale browser filter so photoshop isn't affected. This is the first result I got; I'm sure there are better ones

https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/grayscale-screen/mc...

Dang. I bet the morale of the peers still working there is poor.

My team got a new boss 18mo ago. He had obvious favoritism, and his favorite person happened to be the only person who wasn't a team player. He also over the course of the 18mo, figured out a way to fire every remote worker, no matter how good their past performance was (one even has won several awards above our bosses level; our boss always gives recognition only to that one toxic person). So no replacements via AI, but folks have been feeling really unvalued, much how I would expect an AI replacement to be. Everyone in my supervisor's team, including my supervisor (who is high functioning autistic, and frequently made fun of by our boss), have been applying for jobs elsewhere. I hope for their mental health that they are successful. I did bring up problems with HR a couple times, and even found in the work policies rules that were being violated by him, and that's when I've learned that, at least here, they are just words, and I needed to get out because I was painting a target on my back. Several others also raised concerns, and most of them are the same ones who have since found work elsewhere.

In other news, I've got a job lined up that I will be going to very soon, and I'm excited for that!

I personally know a lot of people (n>15) who are the CEOs of their own companies (ignoring unsuccessful ones). If I broke these into a couple groups, I mostly still see competent, hard working people:

Group 1: company stays small, like a ma & pa shop or small service, with few employees. This is a mixed bag of really hard working individuals and scumbags. The scummy ones aren't breaking any laws or doing anything nefarious, they just found a financial opportunity and shoved themselves in as a middleman and just subcontract out everything and do literally nothing except sit to the side and collect a paycheck.

Group 2: large company, making a name for themselves with hundreds of employees. I only know one guy who meets this category, and he is incredibly talented and hard working

Group 3: wildly successful, international company. Again I only know one guy, so I can't generalize, but he is super lazy. I think this is what y'all are referring to when y'all are hating on CEOs. To give him some slack, he was hard working when we met, and he actually made numerous companies, but this one exploded and now he lives in luxury. He hasn't lost his moral compass, but he doesn't really needs to work hard anymore either.

I should caveat that all of these folks who I know built their company. They weren't hired into one and fought their way to the top with politics or anything. Maybe I surround myself with ambitious people rather than politically toxic people, because otherwise I think it is odd that every single one of the many CEOs I know built their company, rather than getting the seat in a different way.

Look up email alias service or something similar, if you aren't looking to self host. I can't recommend the service I use, because I'm grandfathered in to my plan, and their current plans for new customers suck, but there's enough providers out there that you should find something competitive.

If you want to 'self host' on a provider, I thing cheap/free options are available from cloudflare, Google, and similar enterprise companies.

If you want to truly self host, I don't have experience, but this guy who does gave a great thorough answer for those who are interested: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48073510

hatred of Microsoft interferes with people's ability to think logically

100%. I fall in the 'I hate MS (and Apple, and Google, and...)' crowd myself. I lose brain cells every time I have to use MS products, so I definitely make nonlogical statements about these companies sometimes. I admit that my biasies are strong and one can't fully trust my opinion when I talk about these companies. But I do try to lace mostly truth, even if I exaggerate.

I have almost exclusively used the downloads folder since a late teen, because I realized it was the only place where I could trust microslop to not mess with my stuff.

Now I mostly use my self hosted cloud, but I do still have all of my short term things in downloads that don't need a form of backup

alternatives where we would identify and just generally regulate the harmful features

Good point. The age ban is based on the idea that it is worse for kids (and other exploits) when the big idea is that it is bad for everyone, just moreso for kids. Might as well protect the whole populace when one change of the app design will do that.

Is 5 million a guess or a stat? I've always wondered how "big" HN is.

People definitely have preferences of tools. For your construction analogy, I'm anti hammer. I prefer screws in almost every instance where a nail could be used, and hammers aren't the right tool for screws. Hammers suck.

Back to AI, it's a tool, and you can definitely be for or against it. Someone against AI might prefer other tools, like a canvas, camera, word doc, or visual studio (depending on the application they could be using the AI tool for)

My grandpa was upset that I never bothered to memorize trig tables. Tried to argue that I am not useful when there isn't a calculator around. I can think of several rebuttles to this, but didn't care to use any. He'd already been retired for some time so I didn't expect him to understand why even a pocket calculator is useless in modern engineering analysis, so memorizing trig was no more than a boring party trick performed by the out of touch nerd.

since there is no testable theory of consciousness

I can't argue with this, so I acknowledge that my interpretation is as bunk as anyone else's.

my current assumption is that insects are not conscious

Some species act as hive-minds (like bees! How convenient for your example), so I imagine the hive as the consciousness, making each bee individually lacking conscious but collectively so. Like a single neuron is not consciousness alone, but the brain is... For some reason. Kinda like how you use different physics at different levels; Newtonian physics is always there, but negligible at quantum levels, so effectively not present at all. Even a human is a collection of minds, but only one conscious. My gut biome is independent biology and can even be removed and transplanted, but I don't believe my gut bacteria is conscious. So long as it is in me, it is nonetheless part of me, and I am one conscious. I also don't exist only at my brain, eyes, or hands (deaf/blind people have expressed to me that they feel like they are located at their hands in the way I used to think I was located behind my eyes), but as my whole body.

With this perspective, I still don't believe LLMs are conscious despite modeling thinking so well. At best, it is a highly accessible modeling software, like goat simulator but if it were so good that someone thought the goat was real. You are still steering the goat/LLM, and it doesn't exist when you aren't running it. I guess the missing piece for me is the lack of autonomy that a conscious has.

Then you can go into an argument on whether we actually have choice or it is an illusion, but that is a whole topic on its own.

The author who makes the article usually isn't the same person as the editor who makes the title. The author can be arguing what your parent said and the editor claim something else for more clicks

You had me at

gravity is just launching countless trillions of parallel instances of the same computation, with nearly all possible initial starting conditions

Great take and conclusion, no issue with the playful language here. It makes sense that, entropy being a required output with time, and 'infinite' near isolated cases would find just about every way to create that entropy, to include the efficiency at creating it (life, as you said).

Lovely take. Earth is a supercomputer. And to play on sibling responses to your first comment, this supercomputer is solving the answer to life, the universe, and everything. The answer is entropy though, not 42

I almost agreed with your comment, but then I remembered there are countless planets with conditions unsuitable for life (as we know life). We have found a couple planets that are optimisticly closer to Earth conditions, but very few, and there is usually some characteristic that makes it a stretch still.

With that said, if Earth was compared to a super computer, the initial conditions and perturbations (weights and biases, or probabilistic inference) are very important, as most planets that are also performing ~10^38 ops/sec will never succesfully manufacture biochemistry/life.

My dad (senior) was tricked by some GTA footage because the game graphics looked realistic enough. Perhaps it was modded because it looked nicer than I remember it, but nonetheless I'm concerned for the inevitable confusion from AI, in the hopeful assumption that it isn't already affecting his judgement.