serviceberry

I'm pretty sure that a good chunk of this article is generated by an LLM.

Governments try stuff like that pretty regularly (you can only buy certain things with food stamps, etc), but it's typically expensive to administer and inherently prone to abuse. Buy groceries with food stamps, sell groceries, buy drugs. On top of that, it's just inherently difficult to structure this in a way that's fair and useful to every person. If I inherited or built myself a nice rural home, I don't want a government-issue apartment - either instead or in addition to what I have. Do I get nothing? That's unfair. Do I get the stuff I don't want?

"Lump sum in cash" is the most flexible and equitable system. But then - and that's a major problem with UBI - you end up with people who spend it irresponsibly and then need help to survive. So you end up with UBI in addition to all the existing social safety nets.

I don't think capital has any special attachment to real estate specifically. It's just that we have policies that essentially require your money to be invested into something (because inflation); and we turned real estate into a safe investment asset through policies that create perpetual scarcity.

You can probably come up with policies that penalize real estate investments, but (a) it will just cause the investors to chase some other asset class, instead of redistributing wealth; (b) unless scarcity is addressed, it's unlikely that housing prices are going to drop. Landlords extract profits from the assets they hold, but they don't cause there to be fewer homes or apartments available.

The most hated companies [...] Johnson & Johnson, 3M

You're living in a serious bubble if you think people hate the company they most readily associate with shampoo or scotch tape.

Almost all "most hated company" rankings can be broken into two categories: the ones many consumers had direct negative experiences with (Equifax, Comcast) and the ones they were told by the media they should be upset with (Anheuser-Busch).

For better or worse, government jobs are perceived as something you get for life. That was part of the appeal: yeah, the pay is less than in the private sector, but they're unlikely to fire you even if you're not good or if the role no longer makes sense.

But that aside: even if we want to alter the deal, there are good ways and bad ways to do this. Jobs are important because they are a big part of your life and because you need one to pay the bills. So you should try to avoid "haha so long" / "oops, clicked the wrong button, come back" kinds of situations.

What's the damage to the society done by Disney holding the rights to Mickey Mouse? Like, if we're being honest?

Patents, sure. They're abused and come at a cost to the society. But all we've done here is created a culture where, in some sort of an imagined David-vs-Goliath struggle against Disney, we've enabled a tech culture where it's OK to train gen AI tech on works of small-scale artists pilfered on an unprecedented scale. That's not hurting Disney. It's hurting your favorite indie band, a writer you like, etc.

It's probably a matter of pragmatism. People are gonna use instant messengers, might as well recommend the least bad one. I've seen it in corporate environments too. If you have locked-down workstations, there's usually some list of free software that isn't officially supported, but doesn't require special approvals.

I'm guessing it's annotated by an LLM. Would be a lot of thankless work otherwise, so don't really blame the author, but it means you get the occasional nonsense summary.

Edit: yeah, the "methodology" page confirms this.

Note that this is gonna be skewed pretty heavily toward domains that have existed for most of HN's history, at the expense of any newer domains that had fewer chances to rack up points.

If you look at any 2-4 year period, the ranking tends to be quite different. Well, Paul Graham is there pretty consistently, but everything else changes.

More importantly, a lot of it was hidden from view. Your washing machine and laundry detergent might be not as good as 30 years ago, but... do you know that for sure? And when did that happen? Maybe you're just imagining it.

Your old home had a gas furnace, and then you bought new construction and it's all-electric. Did the government do this? Are you even gonna think about it when making an offer? Your bill is gonna be higher, but how much of it is just because it's a different home?

And even then... you get away with it for a while, and then it all of sudden becomes a political talking point.

You can run Arduino code on anything, since it's mostly just a bit of syntactic sugar around C. But I'm sure you know what I mean.

My point is that people who are attracted to Arduino are, by and large, not the kind of people who want to geek out about the inner workings of the MCU, and there's nothing wrong with that.

I used to say things like that, but come on: Arduino is targeted at hobbyists. More specifically, it's targeted at hobbyists who don't want to spend too much time learning hardware. If they did, they would be using a "bare" microcontroller better suited for their needs and costing one tenth the price. But they're not interested in microcontroller programming, they just want to get their art project done.

It's the same thing that happened with computers. Billions of people use them, but most just want to access Facebook or use MS Word, not learn OS internals. It's a different world from where we used to be 30-40 years ago, and that's fine. We design simpler, more intuitive products for them.

If a product meant for that group can't be used effectively by the target audience, I think the fault is with the designer, not with the user.

Because a lot of environmental movements aren't rooted in utilitarianism, but in deeper beliefs that the endless pursuit of growth is inherently evil. The basic idea is that tigers and wolves have as much right to the planet as we do, and we've already taken too much. Hence the degrowth movement, etc.

This is why many environmental activists see cheap, abundant energy as problematic. It would mean less air pollution or less climate change, but it would allow humans to "consume" more of the ecosystem.

To be clear, this isn't my worldview. But as with most other movements advocating for social change, the underlying ideology is usually more complex than it appears.

The author isn't posting angry rants about it. I think one can look at it as just a quirky collection. No different from cataloging the movies that feature the Wilhelm scream, and how many articles have been written about that?

Like it or not, "eyes glued to phone" has become a pretty clear indicator of distraction, and I'm fine calling this out.

This is not like work meetings: 99% of meaningful policy work is happening behind closed doors. The publicly-televised sessions is where people give speeches for the cameras and then cast votes with (typically) pre-negotiated outcomes. So, I don't think it makes a whole lot of sense to be upset if someone is browsing Reddit while an opposition politician is saying their piece.

If superintelligence gives you superpowers, then why isn't the world trembling at the feet of Mensa nerds? There are rapidly diminishing returns on "excess" intelligence. Life is constrained chiefly by resources. There's a baseline of intelligence needed to function in a modern society, but anything above that isn't necessarily all that advantageous.

Transport young Albert Einstein back in time to the Middle Ages? I don't think that would give you Special Relativity.

Did Slashdot really kill itself or was it just never ambitious enough to seek a broader base or try to foster communities?

It's still around, but there's one simple DAU measure we can look at: it used to be that stories would get 100-500 comments, and now they usually get 5-30.

But I don't think it's a good example of what the parent is complaining about. Slashdot didn't change to be more hostile, it was fairly hostile from the get go. It had a snarky commenting culture, fairly brutal moderation, etc. You'd be downvoted into oblivion for the most minor transgressions - like not hating Microsoft enough.

It just happened to be the only game in town for geek news. But then, a number of alternatives popped up - tech-related subreddits, HN, etc. I stopped using Slashdot not because of any redesign or policy change, but simply because I could get the same news elsewhere, with a lower entry bar to participate.

I think some of this is on the authors of reference texts, though. I often catch myself writing what I think is a very accessible intro to a particular topic, only to re-read it a month later and be mortified by all the logical leaps, niche terminology that's used before it's defined, and so forth.

It's really hard to spell out new concepts in a way that doesn't require the reader to make several passes to resolve all the nuance... but it's not necessarily a matter of how we learn, just how we write.

The parent's quip was that you can't rise to the top of the field. My point is that it's irrelevant.

Textbooks used in college coursework are usually written by academics, for obvious reasons. Plenty of independent learning / pop textbooks are written by "normal people" who aren't tenured professors.

If you read a few books on mathematics you think you're easily going to become one of the top mathematicians?

No, but so what? The guy behind 3Blue1Brown probably isn't one of the top mathematicians of his era. But he's having quite an impact. He turned explaining fairly basic math concepts in mathematics into a lucrative job.

And who wrote the textbooks you're referring to? Probably not any of the top 10 living mathematicians. That doesn't make the work less useful.

Is Linus Torvalds one of the top 10 computer scientists? He probably wouldn't describe himself that way, and respected academics mocked his work. The list goes on. I think this is compatible with the premise of the article: it's not about being best, it's about being better than the average bear - and then putting that knowledge to some productive use.

I cant work for someone who doesn't understand what I do.

But you already do. Unless you're working for a tiny startup, your CEO or the Board probably doesn't understand the specifics of your code.

You can't run a large company by making every person super-involved in every detail. You have layers of abstraction that make it possible to reason about an org of hundreds or thousands of employees. The Board trusts the CTO to oversee technology. Your CTO trusts your director / VP / whatever to run a large chunk of it. That person delegates a smaller part of running the company to your boss.

The whole point of each layer is to abstract away some of the underlying messiness. They exercise professional judgment for day-to-day operations and provide a clean interface that provides health signals, requests resources as needed, etc. And I think what many folks miss is that it doesn't stop with their boss. It stops with you! Your boss generally trusts you to make design and implementation decisions and is expecting you to provide a reasonable interface to that. If your boss has a reasonably-sized team but is spending their day writing code, then honestly, why are they in a management position to begin with?

Perfect in what sense? Kickstarter is useful if you're thinking of doing something capital-intensive and need money and customers beforehand. This comes with downsides: deadlines, shipping, cranky customers, etc.

This is a hobby project and there's nothing to suggest that the author wants to get in the business of selling toasters for a living... or that it would be wise for them to do so.

The same reason why text LLMs show exaggerated emotions (enthusiasm about your questions, super-apologetic tone when you dislike the answer, etc).

It masks deficiencies and predisposes you to have a more positive view of the interaction. Think of the most realistic and immediate ways to monetize this tech. It's customer support. Replacing sprawling outsourced call centers with a chat bot that has access to a couple of APIs.

These bots often interact with people who are in some sort of distress. Missed flight, can't access bank account, internet not working. A "friendly" and "empathetic" chatbot will get higher marks.

Venture capital bets on returns. It's not about some objective and eternal value. A successful investment is just something that another person will buy from you for more.

So yep, a lot of time, they bet on trends. Cryptocurrencies, NFTs, several waves of AI. The question is just the acquisition or IPO price.

I don't doubt that some VCs genuinely bought into the AGI argument, but let's be frank, it wasn't hard to make that leap in 2023. It was (and is) some mind-blowing, magical tech, seemingly capable of far more than common sense would dictate. When intuition fails, we revert to beliefs, and the AGI church was handing out brochures...

The practical trade-off is that it is very, very difficult to secure a modern browser. Major vendors employ large teams of full-time security engineers and still ship vulnerable code with regularity. Companies such as Brave don't, but they get the benefit of getting many of the Chromium security features for free. Ladybird won't.

The thing that works in your favor is that Ladybird is very niche at this point, so unless some well-resourced adversary hates you specifically, it's unlikely that you'd be targeted.

I don't know why you're being downvoted, it's a reasonable question. The lithium cation is the bioactive part and the smoke will produce it when the particles are dissolved in water.

But the basic answer is that lithium is fairly ubiquitous in the environment and it has biological effects only at fairly substantial doses. I think the usual therapeutic dose is above one gram of lithium carbonate per day.

The most likely product here is lithium hydroxide, which is caustic. The smoke also contains more dangerous substances such as carbon monoxide and hydrogen cyanide from burning plastic. So, I'd wager you'd be dead or seriously injured long before you feel any cognitive effects.

Lithium also doesn't bioaccumulate, so any small amount that gets in your body will be cleared fairly quickly - probably within a day or two.

In essence, I'd stay clear of the smoke, but not because of the mood-related effects.

Right, but the argument here isn't that humans domesticated wolves, but that wolves self-domesticated themselves (i.e., humans tolerated adult wolves in close proximity).

I find the self-domestication theory quite plausible for cats, but I'm having a hard time accepting it for wolves. Why would human tribes tolerate wolves in close proximity?

Small cats are largely harmless and get rid of pests. Wolves compete for the same food sources, kill children, and are otherwise a nuisance.

Granted, selective breeding of captive animals also doesn't jibe with what we know about the Stone Age, but we don't know all that much.

The corollary is that if you find that post, say something. Drop the author a note, leave a comment. No one else does. For every YT celebrity, there are thousands of people posting good content on the internet and not knowing if it's being seen or appreciated by anyone.

People prefer ads to paying.

Eh. Spotify has 250 million subscribers. Netflix has 300 million. Amazon Prime has 180 million. Heck, there's something like a million people paying Twitter for a checkmark, and half a million paying Reddit for nothing at all.

People don't seem to be opposed to paying for online services. They were just never given choice. I have no doubt that publishers prefer ads because it just lets them extract value "for free" - which is probably why you're increasingly seeing ads in paid services, too (Netflix, etc).