mannykoum

But being able to maintain an old car IS the expectation. Not being able to repair and prolong the lifetime of a car, find parts, not allowing third party equipment and mechanics to repair them, not being able to resell it many times...these are all recent anti-consumerist behaviour by either car manufacturers or tech companies.

can ask for obscure things with subtle nuance where I misspell words and mess up my question and it figures it out. It talks to me like a person. It generates really cool images. It helps me write code. And just tons of other stuff that astounds me.

It is an impressive technology but is it US$244.22bn [1] impressive (I know this stat is supposed to account for computer vision as well but seeing as to how LLMs are now a big chunk of that I think it's a safe assumption)? It's projected to grow to over US$1tr by 2031. That's higher than the market size of commercial aviation at its peak [2]. I'm sorry if I agree that a cool chatbot is not approximately as important as flying.

[1] https://www.statista.com/outlook/tmo/artificial-intelligence...

[2] https://www.statista.com/markets/419/topic/490/aviation/#sta...

Sorry for being pedantic but they are using an en dash (–) not an em dash (—) which is a little strange because the latter is usually the one meant for adding information in secondary sentences—like commas and and parentheses. In addition, in most styles, you're not supposed to add spaces around it.

So, I don't think the comment is AI-generated for this reason.

Isn't that the definition of the rule of law? When operating a society under the rule of law, morality is meant to define the framework of rules and regulations by which we live our lives. If the law is immoral then there should be a mechanism to change it—as is the case here.

Musk has achieved great, incredible things. That’s just indisputable fact. We should celebrate the good and debate the bad.

This is the kind of statements that are not a helpful framing of the debate. Musk alone hasn't "has achieved great, incredible things", I can try and dispute this. Why celebrate the good while debating the bad. Instead we should question the good and verify the bad. It should the expected behavior towards anyone in a position of power. Musk being in one of the highest positions of power in the world does not make him more vulnerable...

Any potential integration with Latex ? not sure exactly how that would work; it would be nice to either embed d2 code in a block and make the rendering part of the latex compilation. Similar to tikz.

I guess for now I can use d2 and then insert the generated svg but I would like sth closer to that holy grail of version-controlled documentation where you type and everything is magically done in one step and you store no data in the repo.

This is pretty cool! You can even add a birthday reminder; or even a name-day reminder if you're greek and my father who's kinda obsessive with these things.

Kentucky Route Zero has been the most intellectual of journeys I went through in 2020-2021. This game almost requires that I put it down every now and then to ponder and think. It calls for a glass of wine in a quiet place at 3am. I wish my friends would play it so I would have someone to discuss with.

He doesn't seem to ever provide any evidence for his claims other than a repeated "I work in the display industry"..

As a Greek who's lived abroad and has taken a jab at a bunch of different languages, I always talked to my friends about how easy it is to understand most Greek words even if I've never heard of them before. Yes, there are a lot of etymological roots that change + exceptions but it is a lot simpler to make out (or make up) words than it is with other languages. Especially, ones that have a complex genealogical history like English. For example, chicken, turkey, poultry, bird are all different in English but in Greek you can find the word for bird in all of them (κοτόπουλο, γαλοπούλα, πουλερικά, πουλί). Btw this is also why I think that Greek is a relatively easy language to learn (but there isn't much material to get people started unfortunately :( )

TIL that a word I've been hearing and saying since I was 5 does not mean what I thought it meant and it's still baffling me haha made my day really

If you speak Japanese.

I have heard that it is fairly hard for foreigners who don't speak the language. I am still considering moving there but more so due to neo-orientalist tendencies and less because I think it's a good idea...

Hahaha, I love the fact that someone made a Captcha solver. Proof that if Google truly wanted to test for "humanity" they would design something different.

That is definitely a factor. More complex social systems provide a degree of distance between you and the rest of the community (how can anyone keep up with having a sort of relationship with a few million others).

What is present in rural areas is a sort of respect and fear of exclusion (I think these two are reciprocal). But it is not impossible to have that on a local level in a large city. Having lived in both London and New York (similar population size, vastly different population density) I've seen this happen. In Manhattan specifically there is little respect for neighborhoods—comparatively—while in London residents care for their boroughs. Some direct actions that might have fostered that are simple things like community gardens/allotments which are very common in the UK.

that's my humble opinion, I'm not an expert in human social behavior.

Wholeheartedly agree. In parts of society where our distorted ideas of "productivity" and "success" are absent, people share more freely. The island where my family is from comes to mind (Crete, Greece). There—in the rural areas—people were able to deal with the 2007-2008 crisis a lot more effectively than they did in the cities—esp. compared to Athens. What I observed is that if someone didn't have enough, the rest of the village would provide. There was a general understanding that that way the people with less would get back on their feet and help contribute to the overall pool.

To me, it seems as less of a sociological anomaly and more of an example of the quality of production outside the established competitive norms of capitalism. There are multiple such examples throughout history. The gift economy wasn't born with FOSS development.

There is a lot of literature on the subject of cooperation, especially from anarchist philosophers (i.e. Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, Kropotkin).

You are right, life in New York isn't exactly close to that in other US cities

What made my post-college mental state so much better (as well as my friends' quality of life) was that I forced my flatmates to cook with me all the time and we would have people over for lunch/dinner like I used to do back home, in Greece. Our stomachs and wallets are still thanking us to this day.

For context, I studied in the US and moved to London for work right after graduation.

We had a similar course at Columbia (half semester, 1 credit). The professor was good and the information pretty useful; very similar material to this one. The paradox was that for the ones who knew the significance of such a course, well, we had already learned most of these things the hard way. Maybe our other CS profs should have advertised the course as an optional requirement to get people interested early instead of their junior/senior year.

yeap it's all his doing :) HN just helped make that work visible which isn't that easy (even within the HN community)

Drinking or not drinking beer during the times you should be productive is a matter of self-discipline and I doubt it has any direct relation to productivity.

Disclaimer: I work in a private office in a London WeWork and the free beer is a nice to have, even if it wasn't a consideration while picking an office.

Me too. Discrete math was mainly combinatorics w/ an intro to probability. Then, probability theory was a separate requirement and, in addition to a Linear Algebra/ODE combo class, we had a CS theory class that covered Set theory, Proofs, Graph theory, TMs, etc. Most of these also had Math or Stats dept. equivalents.

These were our —typically— freshman/sophomore year CS classes (although I took a couple in my junior year) so I guess every school defines their requirements differently.