HN user
A really, really good podcast I listened to recently:
https://changelog.com/news/web-developments-lost-decade-LWao
Amal sits down for a one-on-one with Alex Russell, Microsoft Partner on the Edge team, and former Web Standards Tech Lead for Chrome, whose recent post, The Market for Lemons, stirred up a BIG conversation in the web development community.
Have we really lost a decade in potential progress? What happened? Where do we go from here?
And then you can still use SyncThing[0] to share things. Depending on what you're doing of course, and how friendly the applications you use for it are to being used that way.. but if it's all in the browser and email profiles and a bunch of data files, you're golden. Getting used to that "lifestyle" has been the biggest leap in joy of using computers since SSD, for me personally.
[0] And/or FreeFileSync or similar for manual operation: I don't want e.g. browser profile data to be synced while the browser is in use, and running the sync manually is no biggie at all.
This does not exist in a vacuum.
Other people say, and I think this is a widely used rationalization, that fundamentally the tools we work on are "mere" tools; This means that whether they get use for good or evil depends on the person who ultimately buys them and so on.
There's nothing bad about working in computer vision, for example. Computer vision may very well some day be used to heal people who would otherwise die. Of course, it could also be used to guide missiles, cruise missiles for example, to their destination, and all that. You see, the technology itself is neutral and value-free and it just depends how one uses it. And besides -- consistent with that -- we can't know, we scientists cannot know how it is going to be used. So therefore we have no responsibility.
Well, that is false. It is true that a computer, for example, can be used for good or evil. It is true that a helicopter can be used as a gunship and it can also be used to rescue people from a mountain pass. And if the question arises of how a specific device is going to be used, in what I call an abstract ideal society, then one might very well say one cannot know.
But we live in a concrete society, [and] with concrete social and historical circumstances and political realities in this society, it is perfectly obvious that when something like a computer is invented, then it is going to be adopted will be for military purposes. It follows from the concrete realities in which we live, it does not follow from pure logic. But we're not living in an abstract society, we're living in the society in which we in fact live.
-- Joseph Weizenbaum, http://tech.mit.edu/V105/N16/weisen.16n.html
Yet all living beings in earth are descendants of same cell, as far as we know. So if the above can happen once -- even if only "needs" to happen once, why would it not occur more than once, and lead to different "lines" of life, so to speak?
It may or may not be overcome by additional data and compute.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Power_and_Human_Reaso...
Deciding is a computational activity, something that can ultimately be programmed. It is the capacity to choose that ultimately makes us human. Choice, however, is the product of judgment, not calculation. Comprehensive human judgment is able to include non-mathematical factors such as emotions. Judgment can compare apples and oranges, and can do so without quantifying each fruit type and then reductively quantifying each to factors necessary for mathematical comparison.
The book caused disagreement with, and separation from other members of the artificial intelligence research community, a status the author later said he'd come to take pride in.
I've seen an example where asking the exact same question word for word lead to the opposite outcome (one was a really racist rap, the other was a really good rap against racism).
So, how do you know that posing that problem N times will not lead EVER lead to a solution like "it would not more appropriate to chop up the owner and THEN clean the room, since people living in them is the main source of dirt and disorder in apartment rooms, resulting in less frequent need of cleaning"?
Because it's looking okay-ish so far, most of the time, or because you know for a fact that it's impossible to get such an answer?
You think this is the result of how much the average person can be trusted? Trash on the streets or urine in a phone booth are one thing, but this hits a bit different:
equipment vandalized but nothing taken from the sites
Bust just out of curiosity, how do we make it so people can be trusted, so that then "society works"?
I hate software bloat and thrown away milliseconds, but even then I realize that our visual cortex is really good at noticing movement, but hasn't had any experience in the last millions of years with stuff just popping up out of nowhere or teleporting. I know nothing about usability but just from knowing that, and my own experience, I can't dismiss any and all "useless" animations out of hand. There was a time when we couldn't afford them, now it depends.
Maybe this would be a useful way to look at it: if the average disorientation caused by instant change (which also depends on whether the change is predictable, makes other things change position, etc.) takes longer to recover from than the shortest animation/fade you could come up with, have a transition.
(but even then it doesn't hurt to gate all of that behind a global configuration option, IMO, and if you want to be really fancy make it a float, not a boolean)
It is everyone being complicit in this act that demonstrates to you how worthless you are that destroys you.
And that's why any generic, vague rules to supposedly "prevent bullying" or "fix the environment" will be used by "everyone", before you can blink. Just think of https://medium.com/@rebeccarc/j-k-rowling-and-the-trans-acti... and how many are complicit in that, paying lip service to being against what they do with their hands. Humans are very good at this, always have been, also see organized religion.
What really gets me is that even those few people who are in high enough positions in big enough companies to have material benefits from "capturing" customers and making everything "sticky" and as pushy as possible... all of them in turn are customers of dozens, hundreds, thousands of other companies that make their life more complicated than it would need to be, with the same motivation. I would say people, all of us, are having a way worse time than we even know, because we don't have a somewhat sane world to compare to.
Because we're so out of our minds with desperation, we don't know any better. All we know is fake fodder and buying shit. That's how we speak to each other, how we express ourselves, is buying shit. What, I have a dream? The peak of our dreams is a new app for our Dopple, it doesn't exist! It's not even there! We buy shit that's not even there.
-- The Black Mirror
I think it's not so much about them talking to each other, it's about shutting them off from the outside.
The last time the Islamic Repubic cut off the Internet in Iran, they brutally massacred 1500 people, just 3 years ago. I beg you please save my people (crying while typing)
-- https://twitter.com/AsingleNight/status/1572930406709530624
We are covered in blood, don't forget us, they want to suffocate us. Please be our voice.
-- https://twitter.com/dokhtr81/status/1572907289774006272
It's heartbreaking, and I for one do not intend to let it go. Enough is enough.
https://twitter.com/AlinejadMasih/status/1572273975639642114
This includes not wanting to support or do business with people who look the other way as people get slaughtered. I'm not in Iran, I'm dealing solely with things that enter my ken and therefore become subject to my judgement.
I can't go to a museum, admire the bravery of, say, Sophie Scholl, and then go "ah yes, but at the end of the day it's not really anyone's business", and you cannot both have the dignity of a person who accepts the responsibility they have just by virtue of being human and shut yourself off.
At the end of the day, it's just a rationalization for kicking away the ladder. You don't care what happens to them as long as it doesn't happen to you or people you love. That is what it is, and all it is.
Hacktoberfest is an October-long celebration to promote contributions to the free and open-source software communities. In 2020, participants were encouraged to submit four or more pull requests to any public free or open-source (FOS) repository, with a free "Hacktoberfest 2020" T-shirt for the first 75,000 participants to do so. The free T-shirts caused thousands of frivolous pull requests on FOS projects. A large volume of pull requests made by users amounted to counterproductive changes to code, including: changing project names from "My Project" to "My Awesome Project"; changing bullet points to dashes; and in some cases, even breaking working code
:/
An OS is not a destination, it's a medium if you will. A better comparison would be being blasted with ads no matter where you go.
I am not "life". Considering something humans do as "bad" is kinda like the cultural equivalent of an immune system. I don't judge a parasite for trying it on with me, because there is no utility in it. Use those resources for fighting back harder instead.
No one's (at an aggregate level) getting Room 101ed from it.
Start a political party that has enough success to threaten the status quo. Be Assange. Be Snowden. Talk is cheap.
The older dictators fell because they could never supply their subjects with enough bread, enough circuses, enough miracles and mysteries. Nor did they possess a really effective system of mind-manipulation. In the past, free-thinkers and revolutionaries were often the products of the most piously orthodox education. This is not surprising. The methods employed by orthodox educators were and still are extremely inefficient. Under a scientific dictator education will really work -- with the result that most men and women will grow up to love their servitude and will never dream of revolution. There seems to be no good reason why a thoroughly scientific dictatorship should ever be overthrown.
-- Aldous Huxley
When I made it with WebGL (with no clue what I was embarking on, I just wanted to try it), I ended up with 8 substeps. Looking at it now it confuses the hell out of me, but IIRC it had to do with with checking each cardinal direction both ways ("both ways" meaning both "do I want to swap positions with this other pixel", and "does this other pixel want to swap position with me").
edit: I don't have a good video of this atm, but just to demonstrate it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rItnlDmGALU
it's not visualized in the video, but the pixels also have temperature, and materials a sort of stickyness (basically sand that takes longer to form into a pyramid), that's about it.
Copy and paste this code into your website where you want this animation to appear
Sorry to go on a tangent (I think your project is awesome!), but this is why I love the web. So much.
Telling people to be witheringly ashamed isn't "throwing a tantrum". It's giving them their chance to repent before getting cut off. It's THEIR job to clean their house, not that of critics.
https://twitter.com/DigiEconomist/status/1477420461122375683
Some statistics to start the year:
During 2021 Bitcoin consumed 134 TWh in total, which is comparable to the electrical energy consumed by a country like Argentina.
Related CO2 emissions were ~64 Mt; enough to negate the entire global net savings from deploying EVs.
It happens when I cut something with ctrl + X.
Not to me, because in the software I use the thing gets actually deleted once I paste it somewhere else, not before. It's more like tagging the thing(s) for moving to a location to be disclosed later.
Apple Silicon comes with Apple software. It's worthless to me.
correct me if I'm wrong
I don't even remotely have the expertise for that, if applicable others would have to do that. But thanks a lot for elaborating!
I often upvote articles I find interesting enough I want to see a discussion of them on HN. To me it doesn't mean every word of an article is perfect and above criticism, it just means it's IMO interesting and of substance enough to warrant discussion.
In this case I took my time fully reading it before posting it, but not being a biotech person I posted this here also because I was interested in criticism of flaws I would have no chance of not overlooking. But just flagging it isn't that. It doesn't tell me this article is bad, it tells me too many people aren't acting in good faith, so that raises the question why that is.
Trying to turn it around on others by speculating on what they might have done (i.e. why they upvoted it, if they read it), doesn't change what was definitely done (i.e. flagging it without any substantial criticism).
This discussion instantly garned upvotes, not one substantial argument against the article, and was flagged off the front page.
At least this person has a reasoning and stands behind it, that's heads and shoulders above the tactics of those who want to bury this.
How do they keep people from talking about something they'd rather not talk about? Why would they need to? Espcially since people tend to just scream "conspiracy theorist!", flag it off HN etc.
So, what is the call to action here? Stop researching gain of function entirely?
I'd say it's this:
We need to decide whom to believe: the people with a lot to lose and their not-very-parsimonious or plausible-sounding explanations, which receive almost all the media attention; or the people with expertise and parsimonious explanations who don’t have a dog in this fight.
So in your mind there's either professional endurance sports, or everybody is getting "weak and fat"? And of course, if everybody is a professional athlete, stuff like plumbing, growing food, medicine, all these things will still just grow on trees, correct? Or is your point that we won't be weak and fat since we won't even survive birth?
Either you just wrote without thinking about it for one second, or you actually think that. I'm not up for exploring either option, and there is no third.
All pro endurance sports could end this instant, forever, and humanity would be fine. Humanity will not be fine if some of the points raised in that comment keep getting ignored.