notlenin

sorry for the stupid question, but what is "the former" and what is "the latter"?

Did you mean I acknowledge the sentience of plants but not animals?

I believe that all life might be conscious, but life that is "very different" from me I have a hard time imagining what that consciousness might be like. For animals, especially mammals, I can easily imagine what they must be feeling and empathize with them. I can understand that a cow feels pain when hurt, because the cow is very similar to me. A plant might also feel pain when hurt (even the grass I step on might not appreciate me walking on it), but I'd have a harder time empathizing with that.

from the article I linked: https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-indus...

Early tinkering with the idea of using heat to create steam to power rotary motion – the core function of a steam-engine – go all the way back to Vitruvius (c. 80 BC -15 AD) and Heron of Alexandria (c. 10-70 AD). With the benefit of hindsight we can see they were tinkering with an importance principle but the devices they actually produced – the aeolipile – had no practical use – it’s fearsomely fuel inefficient, produces little power and has to be refilled with water (that then has to be heated again from room temperature to enable operation).

Apart from the use of steam pressure, the aeolipile shares very little in common with practical steam engine designs and the need to continually refill and heat the water reservoir would have limited its utility in any case.

honestly, I don't know.

Sentience is consciousness. I can't imagine what it must be like to be a plant, the plants existence is too different from mine for me to imagine it.

It would be like trying to imagine life in a 12-dimensional space - I'm a human, with a human consciousness, living in 3-dimensional space, that makes sense to me.

I can empathize, and to a certain degree imagine what it must be like to be a dog or a cat or a cow, because they're very similar to me in how they work. They move, they eat, they poop, they reproduce sexually. They have similar mammalian feelings and similar DNA (well, more similar than the plant).

But for all I know a plant, say the spinach I had a few days ago, could be just as conscious, albeit in a way that I absolutely cannot comprehend, and my ripping off the plant's leaves to eat them may be, to the plant, every bit as painful as someone ripping out my lungs to eat them.

common misconception:

https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-indus...

As we’ll see, the Roman Empire was never close to an industrial revolution – a great many of the preconditions were missing – but the idea that it might have been on the cusp of being something like a modern economy did once have its day in the scholarship

If you can't keep it in your chapel then you're an evangelist and your morals are fundamentally no different than the colonizers of old.

disagree.

Colonization is done by force, evangelism is, in theory, consensual.

If I tell you "hey, have you tried the Emacs text editor? It's great, I love it, I recommend it to everyone looking for a great text editor, if you'd like I can show you how to set it up", that's not the same thing as saying "I claim your computer in the name of King Stallman, use Emacs or die".

I do science and mathematics, and I am 'religious' - I believe in God, which I define simply as the universal consciousness - in other words, I believe the universe has a soul.

Much as how Erdos talked about 'proofs from the book', I believe that mathematical and scientific truths exist 'in the mind of God', ie, the universal consciousness, which, by definition, is aware of everything, already knows the truth that we seek, and the process of mathematical and scientific discovery is therefore simply a process of learning more about God. The flow state that one enters into when working is, in my mind, a sort of communion with the divine, which leads to the creation of great work.

This is similar, in my mind, to Michelangelo's quote about "seeing David in the marble and setting him free" - the statue already existed in the universal consciousness, and this consciousness guided Michelangelo into bringing it into being.

The proof of $THEOREM exists, your job is to find it, and the universe will gently nudge you in the right direction.

But obviously, that's just my opinion/point of view.

You could just as easily believe that the universe is not conscious, and truth is discovered simply by a combination of luck and effort, and that would probably work just as well ^^

1) okay, I'm fascinated by the 'fighting in a foreign civil war' thing, can you expound on that?

2) this may sound weird, but I do think that if you want to be a good parent (and please note, I don't actually have kids yet, so ignore this advice if it doesn't ring true) is finding ways to get your 'alone' time despite family responsibilities. I'm also an introvert, but my 'recharge' time is stuff like meditation and solo-programming and math time, so that's pretty easy to do, just set aside a few hours a day to recharge my batteries so I can be fully present for my family the rest of the time, I can see that fighting in a foreign civil war isn't exactly the type of thing you can fit into an hour in the morning before the kids wake up, but if you have similar introverted activities that recharge you that can be more easily done alongside family life, I would argue that you'll be doing your family a disservice not to do them- they deserve you at your best, which means you should give yourself time do fully recharge yourself so you can be there for them the rest of the time.

aren't plants also sentient?

Isn't all life sentient?

If not, where do you draw the line? "It has eyes and bilateral symmetry and an endoskeleton looks vaguely human-like so I can anthropomorphize it"? "Only members of the animal kingdom are conscious"?

to be fair, you can get "good" meat - factory farming is awful, but not all meat is factory farmed. You can eat happy animals, for example pigs that spent their lives outside being pigs, hanging out with their pig friends, and near the end of their pig lives had to go be eaten. If you believe plants are conscious too, that's probably more ethical than eating Nutella made with palm oil from forests that were completely massacred to harvest that oil (and even if you don't, the animals in those forests probably didn't enjoy their natural habitat being destroyed).

In fact, I've had the idea floating around my head for a while now for "fully ethical" meat, where you don't even kill the animal, just wait around for it to die of old age. Depending on your views on euthanasia, maybe if the animal gets like cancer or something and is evidently suffering, gently kill it to put it out of its misery because that might overall reduce suffering.

Also, pardon my asking a possibly stupid question out of ignorant curiosity, but if you're vegan for ethical reasons, why not eat eggs? My stepmom had some chickens a while ago, they lived lives that seemed pretty happy, they hung around the backyard eating stuff on the ground + the food we gave them, relatively free to move around (we did put up a small fence to keep them away from the dogs and cats, who did not exactly have a stellar track record of veganism, but they were free to roam inside that safe space) they laid eggs, because there was no rooster around to fertilize the eggs the eggs weren't going to go anywhere... did us eating those eggs hurt anyone?

we may see change come from the southerners with guns who eventually decided they had been deceived by the people they voted for.

er... last time southerners with guns revolted, it didn't exactly end well... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Civil_War

As we are apparently electing malicious narcissists with dementia to our highest office, a more precipitous decline seems reasonable

To be fair, the current political dysfunction can probably largely be reduced by switching the electoral system from 'first past the post' + electoral college to something like ranked choice or proportional representation.

In political science, Duverger's law holds that in political systems with single-member districts and the first-past-the-post voting system, as in, for example, the United States and United Kingdom, only two powerful political parties tend to control power.

By contrast, in countries with proportional representation or two-round elections, such as France, Sweden, New Zealand or Spain, there is no two-party duopoly on power. There are usually more than two significant political parties.

and that way the presidential election does reflect "either the will of the Democratic Party elite or the will of the Republican Party elite" (ie, the extremes of the two main parties), but something closer to the will of the people.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger%27s_law

For any given alphabet A, and for any positive integer n, the set of strings of length n over A is a finite set, with (number of characters in A)^n elements.

The set of all strings, of any length over A, is an infinite set, because it is the union of all sets of strings of length n for each positive integer n.

So if you don't know the length of the password, there are infinite possibilities. If you do know the length of the password, there are only finite possibilities.

Which would in turn imply that there is an infinite amount of information in knowing the length of a password - the complement of the set of n-length strings over A in the set of strings over A contains an infinite number of elements, which you can safely exclude now that you know the password is part of the finite set of n-length strings over A.

Not to mention it was conducted almost a year ago

false. The article is from 4th of March 2026, less than a month ago.

yes.

It is also worth noting that in some cases, government and business owners have diametrically opposed interests - namely governments can nationalize companies (and if I'm not mistaken, some governments, like the Nazis, did, or would use the threat of nationalization to make business owners do their bidding with no regard for the interest of the business owner)

er... if you'll excuse me confirming the "HN is the 'well actually capital of the internet' stereotype"...

If you look throughout history, you'll see that before the advent of what we'd call 'modern states', most people who got their paycheck from 'taxpayers' did not see themselves as working for said 'taxpayers'.

Example: Pharaonic Egypt. Alexander's Empire, Bourbon France, Tsarist Russia, or more generally any kingdom, empire or any sort of duchy/earldom/county/etc where you have someone (the King, Tsar, Emperor, Duke, etc), whose job it is to lord over the peasants and take a cut of their work, not because they are an elected public servant doing the will of The People, but because they believe God Almighty has decreed that living off the wealth of others, and occasionally wasting large amounts of that wealth on building palaces or waging costly wars is what they were born to do.

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

as such, if you view the modern state as "basically an oligarchy masquerading as a democracy", then the police are not in fact working for 'Joe Taxpayer', but are just playing the same role that medival knights played for the Kings of France - they are the armed force of the extractive state, whose job it is to keep the peasants in line via violence so that they can continue to live off the fruits of peasant labor.

In August [2022], it was announced that Andreessen Horowitz had invested in Neumann's new residential real-estate company, Flow.

source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Neumann

they're going to pioneer "AI flight" :D

I feel like part of the secret to being that type of CEO is that whatever your business is, you can spin it into something "oh my god, much wow".

Like it won't be just "vertically integrating pallet construction", it'll be "a heartwarming revolution in the construction of pallets, now with AI and blockchain".

Kind of like how TFA mentions that Milton's new SyberJet will "pioneer AI flight".

not 100% true - I know some friends that would like a website, just they haven't found the means to get one. Even WordPress can be somewhat complicated to setup sometimes.

you could have started a war with your neighbors using only sticks and stones - indeed, much of human history is people starting wars with their neighbors using weapons that we today would call primitive.

But now you can start a very destructive war with your neighbors. Thanks to modern technology, you don't have to bother beating your neighbor to death with a wooden club, you now can annihilate them, and basically anything in their immediate vicinity, from a comfortable distance :D

“Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - ll of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.”

- Brian Eno

happiness is very linked to unexpected surprises.

I personally have been experimenting what basically amounts to a Christian version of Bhakti Yoga [0]

basically "wow, thanks God/Jesus, this is wonderful, I love you, you're awesome, thanks for X, Y, Z, etc". If you can stay in that mood of gratitude and occasionally add in a lil "and if I could get an A or B that would be great, but no worries if not", and... in my belief system/experience, the desired outcome happens somewhat effortlessly :)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhakti_yoga

yes, strong agree.

I'm personally happiest on two heavy lifting days with snatch, cleans and front squats, and then just lots of walking, handstands and some empty barbell work at home on other days.

I've tried to go harder, but doing heavy snatches 4x/week just exhausts me without increasing strength.

One is that when I have something to say about my day, there's nowhere to say it; no one on HN cares whether I fixed up the blinds or cooked pork steaks. I hang out in an IRC chatroom for that, but sometimes nobody's around for hours.

I really recommend keeping a journal to help with this.

I've been living alone for the past decade+, and journaling is a great way to express things that matter to you but others might not care about.

Also, learn to be friends with yourself. Don't be afraid to talk to yourself sometimes, it helps :)

unless you don't have unlimited compute, at which point you need other ideas

https://arielche.net/bitter-lesson