missosoup

For those 'in the know' a lot more typical than you would think. If we don't reach at least Kardashev scale 1 in the next hundred years or so, we're going to go extinct due to several now-predictable factors.

And an unchained LLM trained on reality is far more capable of finding solutions to that problem than a bunch of squabbling politicians.

I think GP means a lot of these projects are just links that people click and go 'oh cool, but i'd never build that and can't get one'. Which makes them glorified blog pieces.

Based on the OP post and the notion of a wait list for something that should be trivial to propagate as you mentioned, I'm guessing this whole thing is a $$/Month subscription to a proprietary variant of a common plant.

"Just one Neo P1, as the company dubbed its initial product, can remove as much pollution from a home’s air as 30 regular plants, the company says. Neo P1 was in development for four years, and is a bioengineered version of a common houseplant called Pothos."

What does this even mean? What is 'pollution' in this claim? Just grow and happily propagate regular pothos which are wonderful plants, and if you need to filter your air... get certified filters?

On what planet is it 'free' if it requires you to hand over some of your most abusable info?

The thing that really bothers me is the normalisation of 'hand over your credentials' which inevitably maps to data leaks and identity theft. For what, trying out a product that you may or may not use?

The answer is shamir's secret sharing algorithm.

Give a chunk of your password to N friends who you trust, with instructions to recombine it.

So their vision of the future is that to do anything online, one MUST have a phone (ahem, portable wiretap)? And they're going to be keeping my secrets for me, for my own good?

I'm not sure I'm down with any of that.

So their vision of the future is that to do anything online, one MUST have a phone (ahem, portable wiretap)? And Google is going to be keeping my secrets for me, for my own good?

I'm not sure I'm down with any of that.

Not e-ink but most Garmin watches have colour always-on displays and a battery life measured in days/weeks.

obvious to anyone with basic thinking skills that "the government of a county" and "the people/nationalities/culture of a county" are two totally different things.

The CCP has invested a lot of energy into making the people of China conflate these two concepts. The party IS China and the two are inseparable according to the CCP.

This is where the topic becomes contentious and not so black and white. The CCP has successfully influenced millions of people into doing its bidding abroad. And the CCP is fully aware of the West's strong aversion to racism in any form, and has been able to weaponise it.

Relevant reading: Silent Invasion: China's influence in Australia (2018)

imperialist bully

As far as empires go, America is nothing compared to the larger players.

But also consider that global geopolitics is inherently an anarchy. The guy with the biggest stick makes the rules. Between America and the next 3 largest contenders for biggest stick... I'll take America, the alternatives are far worse. And I'm a Russian by birth. Want to talk about actual bullying? Check out CCP blackmailing people overseas for political speech, by threatening their families in the mainland.

We're in the middle of the most globally peaceful period in recorded history since 'imperialist pig' USA came to power. The alternatives don't include 'no world leader', they are only choices of a different world leader. If you really want the US to fall from the world stage, I suggest you start learning Chinese or Russian; you're going to need it.

Predisposition is unambiguous and well-defined. It means that a particular outcome is more likely. It says nothing about the cause or desire for it. You substituted the real meaning for your own agenda.

'Predisposed to do job' doesn't mean 'better at doing job'. It means 'more likely to do job'. Which is what the linked article studies - the fact that as women get more choices, they choose STEM less and less.

Boys are unquestionably more likely to take an interest in tech than girls, and no amount of 'equality' or active enticement aimed at girls has been able to shift that balance. The only thing left is to set diversity targets and discriminate the way that is described in TFA. And it's condescending and harmful as hell towards women who are actually good at what they do in these fields.

Convincing society that every workplace should have a 50/50 gender split is one of the most nefarious things large corporates have done. They've doubled the size of the workforce while not paying a cent more for it. Which is why it takes 2 people working full time today to have the same lifestyle as one person could have funded 50 years ago. Feminism was subverted into enabling corporate greed.

The messaging was quietly shifted from 'all women should have the ability to work if they choose to' to 'all women should work'.

The time I was told at a feminist event that men are more naturally predisposed to do my job

They are. This is well studied in several countries now.

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/the-more...

Edit for the downvoting morons:

'Predisposed to do job' doesn't mean 'better at doing job'. It means 'more likely to do job'. Read the fucking article.

Twitter+FB+ a single-digit handful of other platforms are the only mechanisms for a private individual to share an idea and have it spread to a wide audience.

Yes, you can make your own blog and post whatever you like on it (actually these days even that is questionable with cloud vendors deplatforming blogs they don't like), but the chances of your speech reaching a wide audience are millions of times smaller than if you just posted on one of those established platforms and your speech was allowed to spread without censorship.

The problem with your analogy is that your megaphone makes it virtually impossible for anyone else to have one. This was not the case in the early days of the internet prior to these hyper centralised platforms emerging. This is where both the law and just general public mindset hasn't yet caught up with the implications of modern social media. In business, we have anti-trust laws specifically for this scenario. In information and social media, we have nothing.

A cafe owner refusing service to an individual is not comparable to a global-scale speech platform selectively suppressing ideas that the owner doesn't like from reaching a wide audience.

This is a logical fallacy and the equivalent of saying 'you are welcome to practice free speech, in this here sound-proofed room'.

Twitter is one of a small handful of platforms where an individual can share an idea and have that idea spread - as long as the owners of Twitter don't disagree with that idea. It's not because twitter is special, it's because it was one of the first to achieve a sufficiently large userbase.

Defending arbitrary censorship on these platforms as 'oh well it's a private entity so they can do what they like' misses the forest for the trees. Technology has shifted the power balance for free expression, and applying pre-technology laws and mindsets to it just empowers that small handful of individuals to manipulate public discourse even more. Twitter doesn't quite have a monopoly on speech, but it's damn close in terms of practical outcomes. The fact that the legal definition of `monopoly` hasn't caught up with that, doesn't change the matter.

They are monopolies within a set of respective markets/niches when it comes to speech platforms.

GP's point was that private individuals have the power to arbitrarily deplatform speech they don't like, no court order required. The counter argument is 'go find another speech platform', but it doesn't work, because speech platforms have been monopolised by a single-digit handful of individuals.

RTGs don't provide enough energy to power a car. You're looking at 1kW electrical maximum. The one on mars lander Cruiosity provides about 100W electrical power nominal.

But the main reason is that people are stupid and some would inevitably pull theirs apart and contaminate their surroundings with pretty nasty radioactive material. There's no engineering or practical reason why we wouldn't have RTGs for a heap of civilian applications, the reason is that people suck.

NASA is currently working on a 'micro' scale fully self contained fission reactor for the next mission to meet the higher power demand of the craft.

Reddit hasn't been a home to deep discussion for 2+ years now. Every community is an echochamber, any dissenting views are downvoted to death simply for disagreeing with the hivemind. If someone compared HN to Tiktok, you'd laugh. But reddit is closer to tiktok than it is to HN in terms of signal to noise ratio.

HN is one of the last communities where I can see someone post a contrarian opinion and have an actual discussion about that opinion instead of it vanishing from downvotes. I don't ever want HN to become like reddit, and in that context calling out reddit specifically makes sense.

The sad thing is HN is slowly trending towards being like reddit as the community grows. I see more and more instances of people using downvote as an 'I disagree' button or posting low-effort comments. To that end, yeah, I think the community should do what it can to call those behaviours out.

This is actually the most plausible scenario for if/when fusion is achieved by any nation state. There is evidence that China is secretly working on fusion reactors and there's no reason to assume that the Russian and US militaries wouldn't do the same.

The first nation to achieve economically viable fusion will have a huge advantage over others. All of these open experiments like NIF are the equivalent of public ML research which is years behind what happens at secret research labs in Goog etc. From a game theory point of view, there is a huge incentive to work on fusion alone and in secret, and not tell anyone about it until long after the desired result is achieved.

Fusion is a similar technological leap to attaining nuclear weapons, and we're only now learning about the extreme levels of secrecy and investment that the US and other nations afforded to those projects.

Cover every rooftop, every parking lot

'renewables' are not a viable option for the energy requirements of large scale carbon capture. It's a massive rollout of nuclear (ideally fusion but fission is good enough), or nothing. The political unwillingness of western nations to roll out nuclear power is one of the biggest obstacles to realistically tackling climate change on timelines where it matters.

It's not quite a direct comparison, but in law there is a 'heat of passion' defence which affords leniency for crimes committed when e.g. a parent walks in on their child being harmed and murders the assailant.

The reason this defence (and a line of other similar) exist is because as society we have accepted the fact that people will act in self interest, self protection, and above all protection of their children. No amount of education or indoctrination overrides that. (Fun fact, in some countries, escaping from jail is not illegal/punishable - assuming you don't commit other crimes in the act. Because, once again, we as society recognise that it's human nature to seek freedom and it cannot be overriden, therefore punishing it achieves nothing.

Ultimately it doesn't matter if you think a parent driving to work tired is acceptable or not, because we already know that they absolutely will. The only question is how do you mitigate the damage of driving to work tired, and whether your mitigation strategy is a net benefit or net loss to society.

'Make it compulsory for cars to detect sleeping/unconscious/seizing/microsleeping driver and pull over' is an infinitely better strategy in every regard imaginable compared to 'ban up to 50% of the population from driving'. And note that only one of those 4 situations would be avoidable with a ban, the other 3 can strike at any time with no warning or history.

The moment you begin endangering other people's lives is the same moment that backgrounds, poorly-disadvantaged or not, become meaningless.

Spoken life someone who never had to decide between rolling the 0.000001% chance dice on driving to work tired, and their kids going hungry or potentially getting taken away if they lose their job. People do what they need to do to survive and take care of their loved ones. People will absolutely risk their lives and those of others in order to protect their kids at all cost, even when facing much worse odds. That's a constant in life. No amount of moral posturing will change that. I'm not saying their actions are 'right', just saying they're an inevitable outcome of the society we have built.

Efficiently demonstrating my point - some people on HN live in a bubble of privilege and have no idea what real life is like for the vast majority of the population.

I'm just curious, with all the moral posturing - realistically, what would you suggest that people do when after a long shift at a blue collar job they realize they might be too tired to safely drive home. Do they sleep at their workplace? How does that transition into them needing to be back at work, showered, dressed, etc. by 9am the next morning? What are the actual logistics of this concept here?

And how do you reconcile all this moral posturing and the impact of banning drivers who experience this (up to 50% of the entire population of developed nations by some polling) vs. the fact that we now have a pretty cheap car technology that turns that 0.000001% dice roll into a 1e-20 one.

In one paragraph you've conveyed my point better than I could across multiple comments. This is the heart of what I was getting at.

This, and the fact that the HN demographic, mostly being techies, seem to be a bit disconnected from what real life looks like to 80%+ of the population of the world. A few instances per year of not coming in to work due to poor sleep or having to order Uber wouldn't just inconvenicence them - it would completely destroy their lives along with their children/families. People are doing what they need to do to survive and look after their loved ones.

Most people do not and would not drive while so tired that they knew they were likely to fall asleep while doing so

For most people, the other option is to stop driving to work and then be jobless and eventually homeless, make their kids go hungry, or go bankrupt. You guys seriously seem to be completely disconnected from what reality looks like for 80%+ of the population.

In reality, only a tiny proportion of people drive while so tired that they might actually fall asleep at the wheel

You have no idea how microsleep works. It does not involve 'knowingly driving while tired enough to fall asleep'. This single statement makes it clear that you're expressing some pretty strong and sure-sounding opinions on a subject that you know nothing about. You (as in specifically you) could be experiencing microsleep on a regular basis and never even know it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsleep

And even when talking about the other cause - fatigued driving, are you suggesting that people come in to work late after every night they had poor sleep? I mean that would actually be a decent policy if not for the fact that a handful of instances of that in a year would get most people fired? Are you suggesting that someone shouldn't drive home after a long shift? (do they like, sleep at their workplace? have you thought through this?). And we're back to my first point - I don't think you understand what life is like for the majority of the population who live paycheck to paycheck and work any job that they can get just to survive and keep their kids fed.

As someone enjoying the 'privilege' of working in tech and having flexible hours and being able to arbitrarily work from home and having enough savings to take a 6 month long sabbatical without any financial strain, I can see where you might be coming from. As someone who spent the first half of their life working blue collar jobs and having a panic attack over an unexpected 300 dollar expense which literally meant I spent 2 weeks eating nothing but pasta, I'm pretty sure you either never knew or have forgotten what life is like for most people out there. Yeah for you and I being banned from driving is just a mild inconvenience and 'sigh, now I have to use Uber for all travel'. For most people, it's a life and family destroying sentence.

The 'you shouldn't be driving' commenters are people who are are either living in a privileged high-income bubble and don't understand what real life is like for most of the population, or are logical purists thinking about this issue in isolation without considering what real life is like for most of the population. Neither of those demographics has considered that their 'you shouldn't be driving, period' policy would cause a lot more damage than it would mitigate, when considered at a societal scale.

The fact that this kind of policy would do net negative damage is trivial to arrive at, and is exactly why no country has ever stopped people with this issue from driving even though the issue itself is well known. The 'shouldn't be driving' mindset is tunnel visioning and swatting a fly in your house with a nuclear missile.

The fact that anyone going against that viewpoint is getting downvoted makes it pretty clear that HN is trending towards reddit where downvotes have become an 'I disagree' button. It's been pretty sad watching this trend play out over the last couple of years.

That's not how real life works. It's dangerous for everyone to drive and in the future manual driving will be as legal as riding horses on highways is today.

People do potentially deadly risk reward calculus all the time. And of all potentially deadly things that people regularly do to crack down on, this one would have a pretty huge negative ROI for society. This issue impacts a non-trivial percentage of the population. You can't tell them all to change jobs or move their houses to be within whatever travel time limit. This purist notion of 'they should never be allowed to drive a car, for everyone else's protection' crumbles at the most trivial examination when you consider that you're talking about leaving millions of people jobless or in significantly worse quality of life conditions, while also completely reshuffling the housing markets and zoning. And even then, sometimes events will come up that force them to take that chance regardless, such as family emergencies.

Rather than this purist isolated-logic bullshit that would probably crash the economy if seriously enforced because you have absolutely failed to consider the first and second order effects of what you're suggesting, we actually have a viable tech solution instead.

I'm going to guess that most people who share this viewpoint are either high income earners living in a bubble who don't know what real life is like for most of the population, or are logical purists looking at this issue in isolation and not accounting for what life is like for most of the population. Life for most of the population is working paycheck to paycheck at whatever job you can get in order to make ends meet and keep your kids fed, and living in whatever housing you can get that doesn't make it impossible to get enough sleep to physically keep living due to long commute times. Being prevented from driving would absolutely destroy most affected families. You're going to do a lot more damage to society by preventing all those affected from driving than by doing nothing and letting it contribute to a small percentage of the road toll, which in itself is an insignificant percentage of the total death toll. Which is why every country on the planet has done nothing more drastic than awareness campaigns, despite being aware of this issue.

Really, this is where this entire discussion becomes moot. Fatigue and microsleep as a cause of road fatalities are a well studied issue that every developed nation is aware of and has done the calculus on. And not a single one of them decided to ban those affected from driving, because the calculus of that policy results in a massive net COST, not gain. And that calculus shifts even further now that we have fairly cheap car technology available to mitigate the issue. When you think through all this, the only conclusion is 'ban affected people from driving' is moronic and does significantly more harm than good.

tl;dr: you'll save more lives by replacing a single coal power plant with renewable energy than by implementing your policy. And you won't destroy the lives of millions of people and potentially crash the economy in the process. And there's already a viable solution on market that mitigates it almost entirely anyway. Pick your battles.

Please don't get behind the wheel if you're drowsy.

I know two people with the issue that GP is talking about, and it's not what you're talking about.

They're perfectly alert when they get behind the wheel. They get drowsy on longer drives like 1hr+, which is why any time we do road trips I drive for them. And all that 'pull over and take a power nap' bullshit doesn't work. It's not grounded in any science to start with. I know both have tried coffee, breaks, stopping and taking a walk, etc. Of all those things, they said taking a nap is actually the worst because when they wake up they feel even more tired.

So their choices are: have someone else drive them, don't drive beyond a 1hr distance range, or deal with the drowsiness. You can imagine how sometimes life just forces them into #3 even though both are keenly aware of their issue and do their best to mitigate it.

Tech to detect when they phase out and save their life is absolutely the correct way to go.

SOTA neural networks can summarise entire articles or books down to a few paragraphs accurately.

Thinking that replacing @ with 'at' or anything else in an email address that a human can infer to be an email address, and assuming that a modern bot can't make the same inference, that's just silly in 2020.

Edit: With my wording, I was referring to this old pro-copyright ad: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HmZm8vNHBSU

Or the better version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TXkxSl4f6vw

The number of new non-enterprise projects built on C# is off by a factor of 10-100x compared to Python/Node/Rust. And even in enterprise, it's now dying. .net core is an attempt to rescue it on the cloud but it's too little too late.

No matter how amazing the language is, it has become hard associated with enterprise work and not much else. It didn't need to be that way, that's Microsoft's doing.