masterphilo

There are other places to discuss sensitive topics

Curious to hear about those other places.

This article is trying to make an excellent point (emphasized in the second half of the write-up), but the claim that "DID probably doesn't event exist" is untrue, and but I'm sure the author only meant as click-bait.

DID does exist, the problem seems to be the willingness of many psychologists & medical professionals to broaden the definition to encompass much of the phenomena we see on Tik-Tok.

Could it be that all young kids are extremely impressionable, and without a consistent culturally-enforced set of values (especially regarding identity), it's perfectly plausible for many of them identify (at the personality level) with a number of influencers that they follow on that platform? And how is that ultimately affecting their general mental health, even if they are not outwardly unhappy?

The highlight to me in this article is how pandemic loneliness + crypto frenzy has made this type of victim a lot more common today.

You can't do anything about crypto over the short-term, but I hope the loneliness aspect of this gets reduced as people slowly go back to their pre-pandemic lives.

This is just a case of false equivalency. Smoking and car-usage are completely different phenomena and the one should not be used make judgements about the other.

You're going to have to do more than that to convince me & others why car usage is that bad, sorry.

Personally, I'm too confused to be even cynical about it. I don't know anything about Van Jones other than what I see on TV, but that by itself cannot explain why Bezos felt he deserved the "award".

Copilot, as far as I know, also does not seem to factor in the greater context of the application/code you're in when auto-completing these tasks.

To me, this is a huge part of modern-day development. It's not only about producing functionally correct code, but also code that integrates well and is semantically relevant to the broader context of the application itself.

That doesn't mean Copilot's input will have no value, but it just means that developers will generally need to refactor that code in a way consistent with the app they're building.

It seems strange to assume anything truly "philosophical" when the main topic of the book is something as practical as software engineering/design.

Even if he did try to shoehorn a few bits of metaphysics in, most of the book would've had to lean more on the practical side of the domain.

I must be on a different planet because he didn't sound that way to me at all. Even his "village atheist" comment that parent had a fit over completely slipped by me until he pointed my attention to it just now, and it doesn't seem like the kind of thing the author meant in bad faith.

I quite enjoyed the ideas discussed in the article, and even though it is steeped in religious undertones, you don't have to be religious to understand his broader point, I think.

All I'm saying is that the charge of "antisemitism" is too heavy and the author's post didn't sound that way to me, but since I'm not Jewish, I'm not going to press this point this further at the risk of sounding too insensitive or privileged.

If you'd like a Jewish perspective on this, here's a comment made by someone who claims to be Jewish that basically echoes my sentiments -- that the author of that blog post was naive and got carried away in his rhetoric, instead of being an actual antisemite: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27385448

I read the blog post and while the author's tone was a little bit harsh, I really doubt it can be called anti-semitic.

I guess that's why they re-assigned him and he wasn't fired. You probably don't want a "head of diversity" to be controversial in that way.

Does anyone really believe that these giant companies actually care about the so-called 'woke' values being foisted upon them?

Once companies realize that getting political is no longer a virtue (and by 'virtuous' we mean anything that increases their bottom line), we'll slowly start seeing sanity crawl back to the workplace. I'm glad to see some companies clearing that path.

This kind of attack is growing beyond what I've imagined, and is quickly becoming the more significant epidemic of the world today. As soon as Colonial Pipeline decided to appease the attackers, it paved the way for more targeted infrastructure attacks, since the earliest ones were so successful.

I don't work in cybersecurity, but I wonder if this problem is merely a symptom of the lack of proper security standards that have been running these industries for years, or whether this is a new type of vuln that was just "discovered" recently and no one has any idea how it works.

Conversely, there are foods like bread & pasta, which you'd think are part of a Mediterranean diet, not included in the list. I think that list should be renamed to something like "Low-carb Mediterranean diet may prevent..."

Dupe of: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26730813

Thanks. I guess years of browsing HN have made me immune to the significance of the lolz.

Egypt is being puppeted by China

Sources? And depending on your definition of "puppeted", it looks like pretty much everyone on the world stage is "puppeted" by China.

Why is celebrating one of the oldest civilizations in human history, their own nation's history, considered "awful"?

I thought the whole thing looked beautiful. I hope to visit someday when the area is fully developed.

I suspect your complaint was targeted at Sisi's management of the country, in which case this is a complete aside.

Folklorists have pointed out that the set of stories recorded from the storyteller have a number of story tropes more characteristic of European rather than Middle Eastern folk tales.

Interesting, could you give us an example of these characteristics?

Islamic and European societies during the period of these stories were different in unique ways, and for that reason I'm not exactly sure how those characteristics were more similar to the one rather than the other.

But most companies are incapable of the kind of equality and empowerment necessary to achieve agility, so they will force the terrible cargo cult version upon us.

I would argue that most companies cannot afford to give that kind of "empowerment" to most developers, especially if these companies rely heavily on masses of junior/inexperienced developers. So they figure a strong management layer is necessary to properly direct the project's goals.

Now I'm not saying that's how it should be, but that's the reality of the software talent market today.

You're right - it definitely wasn't close by the metrics of the bet itself, but to me, it was close enough to a degree that I found hard not to emphasize.

What struck me most was that all of the foundations for the kind of collapse he was describing - economic (income inequality) as well as environmental - became much more obvious after the COVID pandemic hit. So while he wasn't right that 2020 will be the end of civilization, does that really mean that our civilization (in this case, the West) isn't heading in that direction?

Great read, and a close call!

Like other people mentioned, the fact that Sale's predictions were even remotely close to what we're experiencing today should be hair-raising.

What I took from Sale's argument was that "Technology" is not an absolute good, and without a framework of life on which most people on this planet can adopt to guide our use of tech, it will be the end. Hopefully, it will only be the end of this current iteration of civilization.

I read your other comment under the submission, and suddenly this makes more sense. It's possible there's something these companies know/aware of that we don't, or that the government is secretly involved in it somehow. What I know for certain is that it's extremely rare for all the FAANGs to gang up on a company like that simply because of differences of opinion.

I agree, but conservatives have been complaining about the phenomenon of shadow-banning on the platform for years, and this was pretty much confirmed after the Twitter hack last year. To allow conservative views but reduce their visibility is just a more subtle form of censorship, reflecting a left-leaning bias. I don't think Twitter or Facebook would even bother denying any of this at this point.

Parler may have just ended its own business, I think. They should have pivoted to be a free speech alternative to sensible conservatives, with sensible moderation, and market their product as such. As it is, no one wants to do business with a company that openly allows neo-nazis, anti-semites, and lately, criminals, on their platform, and no one with a brain would even want to be on such a platform.

I'm open to a Twitter alternative that is lenient on conservative views, as long as it has the right sort of moderation. And I really hope this alternative learns from Parler's mistakes.

This is an incredible list, thank you for taking the time to create it!

Maybe I'm missing something, but you don't have to accept heavy-handed police-driven violence to understand that it's important for the police to be able to do their job better. Not to be more violent, but to be better policemen. If that involves using facial recognition to be able to detect threats of rioting and violence, then so be it, as long as that technology is used in accordance with laws and regulations protecting your civil liberties. Why is that wrong?

There's common interests between the nations and modern technologies have helped facilitate the exchange of both goods and ideas, but I doubt if we can call ourselves a "global civilization" just yet. That would mean some sort of world government, which we definitely don't have. And to me, that just means that the rules of the game haven't changed at all.

Could you clarify?

One possible explanation mentioned in the article is that "they're using the dead bodies of their prey to mask themselves in the scent of their local prey species". Seems a lot more likely than a tactic to strike fear into the hearts of their enemies...

But isn't Society just the result of the social contract between its members? and part of that contract are the ideals and goals that the society has collectively agreed to uphold and preserve. It's the condition of admission into the society, if you will. So in fact, any organization of human beings cannot exist without some sort of judgementalism and bias, even if minimal.

I also agree reverting back into traditional notions of privacy is not an option. The only options for someone worried about the implications of mass-surveillance on their livelihood will be either to remove themselves from society altogether, or to migrate to other mass-surveilling societies where their lot there is easier to bear.