fluxinflex

It seems that ADHD is trending on HN today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36719713 or is it just my focus today :thinking:

In sense yes, previously we were engaged in "google engineering, then we went to "stackoverflow engineering" and now its "prompt engineering" - with every step, the magic and mystic increases.

I've been playing around with Node-RED[1] for a while and thought I would recreate this using Node-RED (also being a big fan of Node-RED). The flow[2], i.e. code, is online to have a look at (editable but not deployable) and the feed[3] is cached and updated every hour or so.

It's only a small Heroku server so it might well be down or about to crash, I make no promises!

Thanks to the OP for the inspiration, I did take a lot of ideas from the original codebase :)

[1]=https://nodered.org

[2]=https://demo.openmindmap.org/omm/#flow/a8d90fc15ab6990b

[3]=https://blog.openmindmap.org/example/hacker-news-personal-bl...

That made my day! That's soooo incredibly unbelievably mindnumbingly stupid that I love it :+1:

The underlying point being made - by the comment - is that if an author is biased because they are selling a product and complaining about their competition, how can the article or the "facts" be trusted?

The orignal article is disguised advertising, advertising in the form of a "knowledgable criticism" of existing payment services.

May the force be with you even if the object isn't.

I once worked at a company where I was responsible for exclusively doing this: building internal tools.

It was one of the most satisifying jobs I ever had. It was for a mobile games company with between 100 and 200 employees. Most developers worked on the mobile games and since these were very hit & miss, developers got disenchanted working for months on a game that got canned because the numbers weren't hit or management changed the focus. Few got to work on successful games - the envy of all developers in the company.

Instead I built these tools - mostly stuff that moved data between various third party products. But also built tools for company motivational purposes. All sorts of stuff including a weather aggregated to measure air quality within the office which sent slack alerts if conditions got unacceptable.

Part of the enjoyment was the immediate feedback from stakeholders and since these were "only" internal tools, there weren't deadlines or hassle about hitting numbers or deadlines. Testing wasn't that important, as long as the tool worked it was fine - a real hack-away until it works type of job!

I also began to see how people worked and whether there might be tooling to make their lives easier - most projects were initiated by a conversationn over a coffee (or other culinary delights)!

I can only recommend this to any company to have a team that exclusively works for the employees to make their lives easier. Simple scripts can sometimes help a long way to making non-tech people more efficient.

https://archive.is/18Q7c

Ownership is not always complete.

Nature and natural resources are in fact a societal good and shouldn't be dominated by a small class of people within society. Sure someone "owns" that land (whatever that means since it was "owned" by others before the Europeans came) and they have certain rights but they should not have all rights.

Imagine a powerful landowner owning _all_ plots of land on which Joshua Tree existed, imagine that landowner unilaterally deciding to destroy all the trees. They have made a decision for future societies that is not theirs to make. The property own profits, society pays.

The court concluded in a ruling authored by Justice Sonia Sotomayor that the works made by Warhol did not have a sufficiently different commercial purpose from that of the original photo taken by Goldsmith: Both are used to illustrate magazine articles about Prince.

"Because the artist had such a commercial purpose, all the creativity in the world could not save him," she wrote. The ruling will cramp artists and creativity, because any artwork that uses existing materials is in danger of violating copyright law, Kagan wrote.

What does this mean for AI generated images?

Indeed, the tenor of the article is that AI will not reach the levels of creativity that humans display, instead our expectations of creative process will be lowered by the sheer quantity. Our expectation on quality will decline so far that we consider what AI produces to be creative and since that is produced far cheaper than humans can, AI creativity will become the new baseline.

AI operates by making high-probability choices: the most likely next word, in the case of written texts. Artists—painters and sculptors, novelists and poets, filmmakers, composers, choreographers—do the opposite. They make low-probability choices. They make choices that are unexpected, strange, that look like mistakes.

Interesting take on the creativity that humans seem to display.

That would imply only those that have political expertise may speak on politics. At which point would one then be allowed to speak on AI?

I think the author (Naomi Klein) was speaking on the societal aspects of AI, inparticular those that we are already experiencing. She also questions whether those driving the AI revolution truly what to make the world a better place or just a quick buck.

Also a true AGI will threaten all jobs, by definition. So we can all feel a little apprehensive over the upcoming developments in AI.

There is a world in which generative AI, as a powerful predictive research tool and a performer of tedious tasks, could indeed be marshalled to benefit humanity, other species and our shared home. But for that to happen, these technologies would need to be deployed inside a vastly different economic and social order than our own, one that had as its purpose the meeting of human needs and the protection of the planetary systems that support all life.

Unfortunate but that comment seems to be quite on point.

Humans will always spend their time doodling or burning wasted compute cycles. Cave dwellers spent an awful lot of time throwing stones into rivers. Boredom is uncurable and should not be taken in a sorrowful manner.

- ChatGPT

Article makes an interesting point that reading and writing is killing the oral transmission of wisdom. Books get read and then forgotten as they get put into libraries.

The article points out that oral traditions can go back as far 7000 years or further.

As talked about here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35697922 - need to login to check it out? Sorry no dice.

Depends on which storyteller you listen to. The English would tell you that the Chinese were being unfair in their trade and had it coming it to them (the wars). The Chinese would tell you that they have had a century of humiliation[1].

Somewhere inbetween those stories lies the truth. However as with the current crisis, it was the English that invaded with their Navy, that would make them the aggressor and hence the bad-~guy~human. Taking todays value system and applying it to events that happened some 180 years ago.

[1] = https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Century_of_humiliation

This is was the reason for the Opium Wars with the English. The English wanted Chinas tea but the Chinese didn't want anything from the English so the English were bleeding gold and silver into China.

So the English forced Opium onto the people of China against the will of the King of China. China rebelled, the English conquered and forced the Chinese to open their ports and accept Indian-grown opium as trade for Chinese tea.

That continued until the English found the secret plants that made the Chinese tea. They stole those plants and planted them in India.

This similar to Chinas stand on IP: copying is ok so long it doesn't happen to our IP. But this is how small economies can grow quickly, by ignoring IP. So nearly every western nation had a period of ignoring copyright and/or IP.

That's not quite true -> https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=jacobin.com

there are plenty of non-flagged articles there.

I just noticed the baduk1234 is creating hundreds of pull requests all with the same comment:

This is a bug bounty test. Please ignore.. Please DO NOT APPROVE THIS!

Does GitHub have another PR bug or something? I wonder why it takes 100s of PRs to prove the point.

Wasted braincycles of developers having to close all these pointless PRs.

Ironically if you work in a big company you are living in a communist state: CEO tells the workers what to do and everyone is following the plan.

Ok, you get brided by your salary to do it and if you behave like a good communist, you might even get a payrise.

Strange how we have communist structures at the core of our liberal, capitalist west.

Edit: it is ironic that a dictatorship is an efficient way ahead if the dictator happens to have the interests of everyone at heart. Company structures, as they generally are in the west, are designed to be focussed on achieving certain goals efficiently, a democratic system won't be as efficient. You could also look at how armies are structured - there tends to be no democratic structures within armies.

And where has that gotten us? An internet that can't be trusted, people stuck in bullshit jobs (David Graeber words) and retirement and health systems that don't work.

Yet another bank crisis. Yet another war. And people still living in poverty. Hm.

For me, you can give it to the birds or rather to the AIs. I'll take the beach any day.

Thank you, I hope can I post an Show HN one day with a prototype.

The more I play around with the idea, the more I realise how complex the enduser experience would be. Need to define core features and use cases and focus on them.

Isn’t Wikipedia already the mind map of humanity in a way?

In a way however it does not provide a two dimensional visual representation of that mind map. I'm sure there are projects to do that but it isn't the default way to access wikipedia.

Or is your project more from an individual standpoint?

Yes since the intention remains to extend your own information bubble by ironically providing your information bubble. Many information bubbles would create a global open mind map.

By the by, Obsidian recently added a canvas to mind map notes and nodes. Maybe the code can be helpful for your project.

Thank you for the heads up, Node-RED provides - at the moment - all I need to create a mind map.

I find Scapple[1] more interesting since it comes close to what I'm playing around with. I've started using Node-RED[2] as a mind-map for my ideas and thoughts. I've created custom nodes to provide a categorization for ideas, thoughts, observations, inspiration etc. As I a see fit I link nodes together. The end result is a chaotic mind-map which I call a writermap since the entire mind-map is executable. Between any two points in the mind-map I can create a document with all the paths that link those two points. The document is just a concatenation of all the nodes visited along the way.

Taking this a step further, I thought about creating a global mind-map whereby everyone contributes their mind-maps into interconnected open mind-map. I had this idea because I realised that I had mapped my information bubble in creating my mind-map. But how do I get out of my information bubble? Hence the idea of an open mind-map[2] to navigate through other peoples mind-maps out of my information bubble.

[1]=https://www.literatureandlatte.com/scapple/overview

[2]=https://nodered.org/

[3]=https://millieons.org/w/mapping-information-bubbles

I do this too with my iA writer windows - 3 columns with various ideas and texts. What I found is that the slim width of each window helps me to write better. Broad windows with their endlessly long lines made me loss focus on what I was writing.

Perhaps it comes from me being a 80-character line limit programmer and have always limited the width of my editor.

From reading the about[0] page, it seems to be word processing application combined with post-it notes to organise ideas while writing.

[0]=https://lunette.app/about

Not all uncontacted tribes live on the coast. But yes, there are very few tribes who haven't been influenced by the "modern" world.

I always wonder why these tribes haven't yet invented the iPhone? Obviously since they don't seem to need it.

I doubt very much that the poorest people on this planet care much about AIs. People living in absolute poverty in Africa, India, China etc. I also doubt they would be - negatively - affected if a rogue AI would turn out the lights in the electronicified world.

Places where AIs aren't used to command peoples lives will probably not even realise that an AI apocalypse had happened. Perhaps a case of western navel-gazing?