saint_fiasco

The nerds have reason to believe that if their community accepts new people, eventually they will be excluded from their own community by the most popular newcomers. That's the whole reason they started their own exclusive community in the first place.

I wouldn't want to live life like a Sentinelese tribesman, I think the uncontacted tribes in Sentinel island would be happier in the long run if they integrated to the global community. But I understand why they don't.

Learning those prompting skills was very useful for you, but in the context of schools it's a lot more difficult to make the investment worth it.

Schools are slow, by the time the teachers get around to teaching the sophisticated techniques you use today, those techniques will be obsolete, the new AI models will require completely different style of prompts.

As for critical thinking and reasoning, those are even harder to teach. How can teachers teach what they don't know?

Your kids were raised on those before predatory people and unscrupulous corporations learned how to take advantage of them at scale.

To protect against those, you have to make kids super-early adopters like yours, make them use tech that is ahead of the curve relative to the mass market, or go the other direction entirely and have them a couple of levels behind the curve so they are not targeted.

I actually didn't initially think of the parent's objection nor your rebuttal. This is why I like reading HN comments.

Isn't Democrats retaliating just the status quo for them?

Democrats have been picking on the poor tech billionaires ever since the Cambridge Analytica scandal, when they were thought to be at fault for getting Trump elected.

I suppose that could be solved with a delay. Limit internet archive for articles that are less than a week old.

There was also the point about lack of granularity and follow-through.

The government has the power to ruin your whole life, so it's reasonable that they have high standards of evidence to ruin your life. But if they can't secure a conviction they do nothing, they'll let you open another NGO and apply for another government grant as if nothing happened.

A business has the power to inconvenience you by refusing to do business with you. That's less ruinuous than what the government does so it's OK that their standards of evidence are lower.

But perhaps there should be something that the government can do in between nothing at all and ruining your life. Otherwise the same frauds will happen again and again.

My bicicle got stolen a long time ago and I never recovered it. The perpetrator was never caught.

From this we can conclude many things. Maybe the thief was very crafty. Maybe the local police are incompetent. Maybe everyone is trying their best and the job of going after bike thieves is very hard.

But you cannot ever convince me that an appropriate conclussion could be "your bicicle didn't actually get stolen". I saw it. I can't identify the thief, there will never be a conviction, but don't tell me it didn't happen.

A conviction in a court of law is very important to be able to confidently say "so-and-so has committed fraud". But requiring a criminal conviction just to be able to say that fraud has happened is lunacy.

Near the end of the book Winston finds out that he was watched much more thoroughly than he thought. They read his private diary and carefully put the same mote of dust on top of the cover so that Winston wouldn't notice it had been opened.

Sounds very hard actually. If you asked me to spend a significant fraction of Bill Gates' money I wouldn't even know how to begin.

How would you do it? Do you have a way to earn his trust, a service to offer him that he values a lot, a way to steal from him, or anything like that?

Melania apparently managed to do it with true love and kindness. Are you capable of sincerely loving Bill Gates for a period of several years, or fake it in a perfectly convincing way for several years?

Supposedly Richard Stallman's secretaries knew how to code their own Emacs macros.

I don't expect any LLM to empower people as much as Emacs can, but they will definitely empower more people in total, just because LLMs are easier to use than Emacs.

Professionals are doing what I am doing, only inside companies. They make custom software that solves ultra-specific problems of that one company.

I don't quite understand the obsession with shipping fancy enterprise b2b saas solutions. That was the correct paradigm for back when developing custom code was expensive. Now it is cheap.

Why pay for Salesforce when you only use 1% of Salesforce's features? Just vibe code the 1% of features that you actually need, plus some custom parts to handle some cursed bespoke business logic that would be a pain in the ass to do in Salesforce anyway.

You won't see it because it's mostly personal software for personal computers.

I've got a medical doctor handwriting decipherer, a board game simulator that takes a PDF of the rulebooks as input and an accounting/budgeting software that can interface with my bank via email because my bank doesn't have an API.

None of that is of any use to you. If you happen to need a similar software, it will be easier for you to ask your own AI to make a custom one for you rather than adapt the ones I had my AI make for me.

Under the circumstances, I would feel bad shipping anything. My users would be legitimately better off just vibe coding their own versions.

Maduro was offered some sort of limited amnesty and safe conduit before.

Pardoning a different drug dealer can be a way to show Maduro that they were serious about the offer, that they really would have gone easy on him.

What if you fail for whatever reason and don't finish college? Then you spent a bunch of time and money for essentially no benefit.

College will always be worth it for people who are smart and driven and hard working. But a lot of people who are not like that are nevertheless encouraged to go to college because that's what everyone does.

The change in attitude towards college by the new generation is probably a reaction to the excesses of the previous one, when even mediocre students were encouraged to take a risk they were not prepared to even evaluate, let alone take.

How do you know it's not still punished? You didn't find that article through Google.

Maybe they are still being punished but linkedin and nyt figure that the punishment is worth it.

I sometimes share interesting AI conversations with my friends using the "share" button on the AI websites. Often the back-and-forth is more interesting than the final output anyway.

I think some people turn AI conversations into blog posts that they pass off as their own because of SEO considerations. If Twitter didn't discourage people sharing links, perhaps we would see a lot more tweet threads that start with https://chatgpt.com/share/... and https://claude.ai/share/... instead of people trying to pass off AI generated content as their own.

I think in that sentence the fog isn't really that important, it's just an excuse to tell you about the surroundings.

The speaker is probably standing near city limits. There is some sort of dock or shipyard down the river, there is some green nature stuff up the river. The river might come up later as a reference for other locations.

Have you ever accidentally clicked on a YouTube video and then had your recommended videos turn into pure garbage for a little while?

It doesn't have to be a high stakes situation, sometimes small annoyances can add up

Couldn't the constitutional court have acted before the election took place? Forbid that candidate from running in the first place?

The reason this looks sketchy in the first place is that it happened after they saw the election results, and one gets the feeling that if another candidate won they would not have annulled it.

Most of the country works in the service sector. It's not like I'm some kind of out of touch elite.

The ones who are most hurt by tariffs, most affected by higher prices, are the working class. Sure, the workers of the specific industries that are lucky enough to be protected, the ones with the most persuasive lobbies, will certainly benefit. But every other worker will be a little worse off.

If you are concerned about the people who got hurt by globalization, maybe the government should collect money from people like us and spend it on people like them. They can set up the tax in such a way that rich people pay the most.

But if you use tariffs to help the people who got hurt by globalization, you cannot set it up in such a careful way. It's a blunt instrument that hurts productivity across the board and increases the prices to the end consumer. It becomes an implicit tax that poor people pay the most. An actual explicit tax would hurt much less.

I don't disagree, you can definitely build more industries with tariffs and protectionism. I just don't see the point.

I'm a consumerist at heart. As long as consumers get to consume, it does not matter to me whose industry is doing the producing.

I get that your foreign suppliers can turn on you and raise prices. I think the money you make during peacetime by not putting tariffs will let you buy more weapons and bribe more allies so that the foreign suppliers don't try anything too awful with the supply chains. Stockpiles can buy a lot of time to restart industry in an emergency or at least find a different foreign supplier.

Take a look at Russia, they are sanctioned by half the planet and they still keep going on a reduced industry because they had huge stockpiles of tanks, artillery and so on. Imagine something like that but with a military that doesn't suck. Nobody would even dare try a sanction.

From a national security standpoint this can be deadly in a hot conflict.

What about a cold conflict? How much do the tariffs and protectionist policies cost in the middle to long run?

For example, the Jones Act costs billions per year and has been going on for a lot of years. How many additional aircraft carriers and submarines and so on could the US have bought with that money?

The subsidy is already a tit, the tariff is tat

Why is someone else subsidizing the price of a thing you buy bad?

The subsidy is doing you a favor by reducing your input costs, or freeing up your work and capital to produce something else.

Wouldn't that lead every other business to stop investing in additional infrastructure in that state ever again?

You shouldn't suffer at work if you can work without suffering.

This sounds like I'm being pedantic because no one would never be in favor of suffering for no benefit, I'm arguing against a strawman.

But in the context of babies suffering, it might surprise you to learn that doctors used to give zero thought to their suffering at all, believing that they don't become conscious until they grow a little. Apparently when they screamed in pain it was like a mechanical autonomous response to a stimulus, not real human pain.

They weren't just being sadists. Applying anesthesia is always risky and if you can get away with not doing it then it's sometimes worth engaging in a bit of rationalization to ease the conscience.

They should probably allow companies to keep doing what they are doing now as long as they call it "rent" instead of "buy" in their marketing materials.

Normally this honesty would cost them money because their competitors would have better (more persuasive) marketing, but a law could force every company to be honest at the same time so that the relative ranking of each company does not change.

The short term effect of pain is that it is unpleasant. There is no need to appeal to long term effects when someone is clearly suffering right there and then.

Being forced to do rote exercises sometimes makes you creative. Solve a thousand trivial multiplication problems and you will spontaneously discover lots of shortcuts, patterns, intuitions that can warn you when you make a mistake and so on.

A common issue I notice when people discuss the terrible state of math education in the US is that teachers demand that you solve a problem a specific way, such as multiplying two-digit numbers by drawing base-ten blocks and applying the distributive property.

People who are good at doing multiplication in their head think the method makes perfect sense and don't know what all the fuss is about. But I believe that those people learned how to apply the distributive property "by themselves". That is, by adults forcing them to multiply two-digit numbers over and over until they developed an intuition of the distributive property by necessity.

When people who didn't go through countless drills are taught the base-ten method directly, they have a harder time understanding it. So ironically it is the students who "mindlessly" drill trivial computations over and over that are more prepared to have a "true" understanding of the distributive property, while the ones whose teachers believe drilling is for chumps and try to just explicitly show them the true distributive right away, they end up memorizing the words of the distributive property without understanding it.

That's the part I say went out of fashion. The scientific consensus used to be that a stimulus can subconsciously influence you for a while. Like if you saw an ad targeted towards old people you'd subconsciously fix your posture and walk with a straighter back for a little while after you saw the ad.

Those studies failed to replicate, but some people still believe in them because they are so intuitive, they seem to match their personal experiences. Like seeing kids go hyperactive after eating candy because candy reminds them of Christmas and Halloween and birthday parties and other occasions in which they are allowed to play and be noisy.