oska

You could make a case for using Windows in the 90s (and yeah, I did; the last version of Windows I used was NT in the 90s). After that your time was much better spent on learning and using Linux (downloadable for free).

Visual Basic is a whole steaming pile of crap and you would always have been better learning to use non-corporate, non-proprietary languages and development stacks than wasting your time on that. And calling Office "the number one productivity desktop publishing software" only shows that you have fully drunk the Kool-Aid. More 'office productivity' has probably been lost to Microsoft Word than any other text-processing software on the planet.

You can't resign from a position you never held or a game you never entered into

Yes, I've always disliked this saying. People have agency. They can always refuse to play the game (and that is precisely what many great people chose to do).

1. There is no such thing as "Artificial Intelligence" (but yes, machine learning and LLMs are real and powerful things)

2. Calling LLMs 'AI' is part of the grifting hype that has been wildly prevalent in the US corporate space. It's very natural and also very good that there is now backlash to and scepticism around all of the hype that is has been generated over the last 5 or so years

windows, office, Visual Basic

This is all (Microsoft) junk and so I wonder if you actually benefitted from this 'piracy'. And of course, it's well known that MS turned a blind eye to such 'piracy' in lesser developed countries, as they knew that they were gaining a future paying customer base.

I prefix many of my LLM chat sessions with this line

Chat rules : no sycophancy or over-agreeableness

(But even with that rule it's still necessary to be discerning about the responses you get and to push back against points made, or words used)

Second, intelligence isn’t in fact a perfect commodity

We have got very far from Cicero's coining of the word 'intelligentia' (from inter legere, a 'reading between' and hence discernment) when people talk about 'intelligence' as a commodity

People have been decrying the 'cheapening' of the word intelligence for over a century now, going back to Psychology's adoption of the word and coining of nonsenses like "Intelligence Quotient". "Artificial Intelligence" is just the latest degradation of the original humanistic meaning, and now people aren't ever bothering to prepend 'artificial' to their idiotic use of the word

I completely agree with you, and it's strange to see you downvoted on a technical forum

Technology is what has always precipitated political change

yet he's worshipped in the tech community

Maybe for those who are younger and who mostly know of Jobs posthumously but Jobs was a highly polarising figure through the 80s, 90s and 2000s and there were many ppl who would never buy any Apple product because of the Jobs personality behind it (including when Jobs wasn't actually in charge; it was still a company built in his "Walled Garden + Salesman Hype" image)

Here was my parsing of the submission title :

With Wall Street’s help, you’re about to be forced to buy stock in SpaceX

Yes, true, so why was it flagged ?

(paulkrugman.substack.com)

Ah, ok, that's actually legit. Krugman is not worth reading on any subject, even when he's right (at least in the title).

The Buddha famously thought out loud with a good buddy, while pursuing Enlightenment under the Bodhi tree

Gentle suggestion for you to read the guidelines again

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

It's my opinion that t-shirts with something printed on the front have never been and will never be cool, so I don't struggle with this choice at all

Yeah, it's sad to see classic Australian brands caught up in this debasement process

Pretty decent video released today by Wall Street Millennial that looks at the profitability of SpaceX (as part of looking at 'Terafab') :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSJi1oQFQzs

I don't know if Southern Lebanon town names were removed or never there. In either case it seems quite odd that the southern part of Lebanon has been left so void of labelling.

Perhaps the submission title could be changed just to reflect this seemingly odd paucity of town names in S. Lebanon only on Apple Maps?

This is such an excellent comment (along with SoftTalker's reply) and made me think. I've long rejected the term "intellectual property", along with the delusional/fraudulent term "artificial intelligence" (as opposed to real things like LLMs and machine learning) and "money laundering" but hadn't previously stopped to think about "identity theft". Now I have.

I believe that it's really important to consider the validity of terms that are heavily adopted and pushed around and whether you should use them yourself or call them out as intellectually vapid/dishonest.

But then your comment history reveals enough about your intent.

This is really poor form, and against the HN guidelines.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Financial privacy is a complicated subject, could you perhaps agree that there is a use for transparancy?

No, because I don't believe in income tax or capital gains tax. I do believe in government taxes but they should be made on land holdings (Georgism) and on corporate activities, not on individuals' financial status (their earnings & capital).

The Government IS the public.

How can you say this (and seem to believe it)?

The Government is answerable to the public and should serve the public. But conflating the government with the public is simply bizarre, to my way of thinking.

Governments should be transparent as much as possible, yes. But that doesn't mean being necessarily transparent with sensitive information that they know about members of the public. Only with your (bizarre to me) conflation of the public with the government would this make any sense.

asshattery in your twenties is largely irrelevant to your trustworthiness in your sixties

Do people believe this? I certainly don't. How you behaved in your twenties is a good measure of the sort of person you are and will be for the rest of your life, albeit that you will (hopefully) mature and change some of your opinions and behaviours. So yes, you will have changed but you're also still that person you were in your twenties.

because in 2024 their boss told them

I am not commenting on your specific example of DEI but I want to make the general point that you are always responsible for what you do, irregardless of whether you were told to do it by your boss, or commanding officer, or whatever.

So again, I don't care about the specific example you used but if something is 'in fashion' and you go along with it, including at work, then you are ultimately responsible for that choice. Because it is always a choice, including being a hard choice that results in you losing your job.

Yes, Cisco & Sun Microsystems are the better comparisons

Every organism must have an immune system which is essential to (but does not guarantee) their survival. Just the same, a society has xenophonia as its immune system. That does not make it 'bad', even though it can produce very ugly effects.

I do not agree with your expansion of xenophobia to the behaviour of a people outside their own country. I do not agree that xenophobia is objectively bad. I also do not agree that "the xenophobia of Japan was the seed for a fascist genocidal rampage" and I doubt that many, if any, historians would agree with such a simplistic assertion either.

Since you seem to have a very closed mind on this subject (i.e. xenophobia == bad, bad, bad) and further discussion seems pointless I'll leave it here.

I am very aware of the history of the Japanese with the Ainu, the native Okinawans , and in Korea and Taiwan (and in other countries, as I have said).

The broader point that I am making, outside the specific instance of the Japanese which you seem to want to fixate on, is that xenophobia can be a useful social trait, to avoid a society being overwhelmed by a foreign ingress. This could work just as well for the Ainu, the Okinawans and the Koreans (and I'm sure they exhibited it too, but unfortunately weren't in a position to act on it strongly enough to defend against colonisation/vassalisation).

I'm very aware, of course, of the horrific crimes that Japan carried out in China and other countries in the 1930s but that is not xenophobia. People going outside their country (to do whatever) are not affected by xenophobia. Xenophobia is a fear of people from outside the country, within that country.

Native cultures (however you want to define that) have always shown some curiousity and openness to visitors from outside the culture but that is balanced by some level of xenophobia too, that ramps up as people inside the culture feel that they are being overwhelmed. Both aspects of openness and shutting out are natural traits in any homogenous culture.

When xenophobia is a useful social defence :

They were most successful in Japan, creating about 300,000 converts until their activities induced a wave of xenophobia and they were either expelled or killed.

I am immensely glad that Japan was not colonised early on like the Philippines to their south unfortunately was.

Of course there is. The whole thing is a cult, designed to pull in suckers.

Do you see Sam Bankman-Fried getting reinstated?

I don't and I see Sam Altman as a greater fraud than that (loathsome) individual. And I don't think Sam gets through the coming bubble pop without being widely exposed (and likely prosecuted) as a fraudster.

Justice should be blind