HN user

hyperion2010

3,210 karma
Posts0
Comments797
View on HN
No posts found.

Annoyingly? Ironically? The best technical implementation of this law would be to make it possible for the "device owner" to tell the OS to set a flag that the user was under age. Never send the age, never send anything else. Just have a global variable indicating that the user is under age that can be accessed by the browser.

Now what would happen after that?

First oses would have to implement the above in a way that could not be bypassed, pretty much impossible if the child has access to the device.

Then you would need to require that websites honor that token or any similar token no matter how it was implemented ... https MITM etc. good luck with that.

Finally once all the implementation and enforcement hurdles are complete every website out there would immediately know that the user browsing was a child and all the trackers and ad networks on the web would immediately start targeting those users because children are marks.

Now you need even more laws and regulations to protect the children from being targeted by advertising companies, and good luck with enforcing that.

To me, the Hyperion Cantos present a vision of the future that is incredibly hopeful. The path along the way may at times be bleak, and I find the handling of the TechnoCore to reveal echos of the great chain in a work that otherwise seems to totally reject it. Despite those and a few other shortcomings the Cantos are essential guides for charting our way toward a distant future that is filled with warmth, love, and compassion rather than the cold empty void of hate. To receive such a vision is a rare gift. Thank you Dan. Choose again.

Linking my comment from (checks notes) 9 years ago on this. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12781933

To extend the though there, the main question is not if, not when, but how long it will take. Do you bet on 90 years, 90 months, 90 days, 90 hours? Even if the change happens over 90 months (about 7 years) is that enough time to rebuild major shipping ports, forget resettling a substantial portion of the human population.

Implicitly assuming that there is some well defined state that can be recovered when turning it back on. That's not how the real world works, and historically what revolutionaries fail to fully realize is that the trajectory out of a period without government is extremely unlikely to wind up in the state that they desire, much less one that was "stored" or "defined" by a set of per-existing laws.

I'll add a 4th rationale: 4. It will create work for countless developers which is completely consistent with the python core value of disdain for other people's time.

If this pep were implemented I suspect it would result in forcing thousands of not tens of thousands of people to spend hours modifying perfectly working code and destroying the ability to run old scientific code without modification. Extremely effective industrial sabotage if it were to be accepted.

It is hard for me to articulate how much peps like this reinforce my desire to never start another python project. Even if this pep is rejected the fact that there are people who would put in the time and effort to write and submit such a PEP tells me that they will do it again, and eventually they might succeed.

Most people

We'll I'm used to not being most people, but I'd much rather be able to produce a single identical binary for my users that works everywhere than the platform specific nonsense I have to go through right now. Having to maintain different special build processes for different platforms is a stupid waste of time.

Frankly this is how it always should have worked except for the monopolistic behavior of various platforms in the past.

Riven 2 years ago

Fascinating to compare the take on storytelling/worldbuilding articulated at the end of the article to a game at the complete opposite end of the spectrum, Dwarf Fortress which has the explicit aim of being a story-generating tool, but creates worlds sort of as an accidental byproduct. What would it take to be able to generate a puzzle game with the kind of depth seen in Riven using a generative tool like Dwarf Fortress? A deeper question might be, is there any generative process that would produce the complexity of Riven without an explicit desire or demand to create such complexity. The complaints by the author in a sense echo the utter impracticality of creating such complex puzzles. Most of the time the practical solution is just to have a key, but that leads to boring bog standard gameplay. Maybe a virtual civilization that only allows initiates that demonstrate a certain persistence and curiosity, but how do you weed out those that simply follow the instructions that others have given? Well, if you have the ability to generate a whole new set of equally challenging puzzles that can't be rote memorized and copied, maybe that is sufficient.

Nurses wear inside of wrist to simplify taking heart rate, or at least they used to back when you actually had to count it yourself. Divers wear inside of wrist to avoid having to do an awkward posture change and instead just look down.

No need to take the bet, reality is already there. Miku is the endgame for idols. Forever young. Will never have a boyfriend. Always follows the script, or not when the team managing her decides they need a little drama. etc. etc. etc.

This is why I introduced the concept at the beginning of royalties for AI work. Ultimately AI is not an alien brain generating texts or images from its own imagination. Neural networks and large language learning models input real people’s intellectual property and output that intellectual property when prompted by someone using the program. The novelness of the output is merely how the IP is reformatted to fit the parameters of the user’s prompts.

The crux of the argument is this paragraph. But swap out AI in that paragraph for "writers who have read the classical western canon" and suddenly you realize that no one has original ideas, and that the idea that somehow humans are uniquely capable of being the primary causes of their own thoughts and owe transitive credit (and royalties!) to the great authors of all time, or their estates, is madness.

The threat is the even further enclosure of the commons and the expropriation of culture by corporate interests who actively seek to destroy common culture by preventing the very people whose participation in a now privatized "culture" enables corporate profits, from ever earning a cent because they do not "own" the "IP" to the characters that they love and that are only common because they are a shared element of a common culture. It is absurd. If media corporations had to compensate whenever someone mentioned a trade marked character because it counted as advertising then let them keep their "culture" private. Until then, they are the beneficiaries of billions of dollars of stolen advertising and stolen culture.

I was playing Stellaris recently, and a few months later started a rewatch of Babylon 5. The inspiration is striking. B5, despite all its shortcomings, represents a vision of the timeless nature of politics that is in a way distinct from e.g. TNG. Furthermore the characters have a level of depth and complexity that force one to look in the mirror and ask hard questions about what it means to be a good person in the context of titanic forces the we could easily dismiss as being beyond our control.

I'll drop my Quake II anecdote here. Quake II was the first FPS I ever beat (at least I think I beat it). I did it over a week in the summer when visiting a friend out of state (never would have been allowed otherwise).

When I started, I had only ever played the original DOOM, so I used those controls, and lo and behold they worked, and I thought nothing of it. At some point as I was playing along, my view suddenly became locked to the ceiling and I was thoroughly confused and stuck. Turns out I had bumped the mouse, and managed to figure out that mouse look was a thing after extended fiddling with the system to try to determine the cause and get back to killing badguys. Needless to say, the game got quite a bit easier after that.

There wasn't internet, neither I nor my friend knew what mouse-look was, we had never seen anyone play a true 3d fps. It is hard to imagine how obscure and alien the interfaces for games are because of how pervasive the knowledge has become.

Glad to see the source code released!

I have had a long standing suspicion that the proposed attentional mechanism is the same reason why nagging someone almost never actually helps get something done, because it shifts their attention away from the actual activity and toward a negative social interaction.

Far better to restructure the environment so that the person can get the work done. In the case of traffic deaths we have really good data that says that you should change the structure of streets and roads so that people instinctively drive safely.

More accurately the concept of the soul has been used for thousands of years to _deny_ rights to others as part of the great chain of being.

Despite historical rains these reservoirs are still not back to their historical average levels. I'm guessing they will continue to rise as water flows down hill following the storms, but it is hard to get a sense of what is going on because the first derivative is not displayed.

I love the point in there that it isn't actually xorg vs wayland, it is xorg vs dbus. Wayland is so deficient that basically everything has to depend on dbus if it doesn't want to use X. This framing clarifies the issue substantially, because whatever people think about wayland, they might have some slightly different opinions about dbus.