wouterjanl

Interesting take. If AI indeed takes over the thinking, could the next scarce resource be, humanity? I’d argue that strength is already taken over by the machines, at least in societies where thinking is already the dominant competence. What can we not get from AI? Friendship, empathy, connection, affection, mutual understanding? Like being real. Being present. Maybe time has come to invest in getting really good at all of that

Funny, I had a similar idea this morning in the shower. I was thinking about how distributed digital infrastructure could be achieved in practice. Running some music streaming and photo server on an old laptop at home that I access via tailscale has proved surprisingly smooth. I feel there is some future in empowering users by giving them access to a cloud on hardware that is actually owned by the user. It would be a way to achieve absolute digital freedom, no lock-in and if done in a secure way privacy friendly. Hell it's the OG idea of the internet! The question is how to bring this to non-technical users. I know many people who are getting sick of paying each month both to Apple and Google for storing their ever growing pile of pictures. This solution of course does imply some sort of lock-in as your tied to a subscription and it's probably quite the hassle to get your laptop back. Also the fire hazard seems like a legit concern. I nevertheless do hear some music here.

I believe one of the reasons I keep coming back to hackernews is the absence of ads and the near complete focus on content. Shout out to those who work in the background to keep it like this. It would be interesting to hear from dang or other insiders how evident it is that this website is adfree. At some point there must have been someone who probably raised the idea that money could be made by injecting an ad or a tracker here or there. The article uses the example of the print version of the New Yorker, as a way of how things can be. From interviews with David Remnick, the editor, I learned that it has been mostly his vision to decrease the ads in the print and making up the lost revenue by increasing the subscription fees. It’s these people we need to save the media landscape.

Thank you for sharing this and making it open source! I appreciate that when clicking the link you end up immediately in the tool. I saved it. This surely will be useful at some point.

Allow me to use this post to give big kudos to the maintainers of Strudel for having put together a brilliant set of official docs. I found them incredibly well put together and hence really useful to learn. I have played around with Strudel many evenings and I am always amazed about how intuitive Strudel is to create beats and sounds, to the point that I prefer to create music in Strudel over the established DAW software. I would love for there to be a good bridge between producing sounds and beats with Strudel code and structurering and mastering an entire track. This is missing in Strudel since it’s clearly build for a live coding environment. Any tips from users about ways or tools to make this bridge are always welcome!

I do not think Hiroshima existed in isolation. I totally agree that the Japanese empire and the Third Reich committed horrible war crimes in WW2. If there's anything I lament, it's how it seems so hard to feel empathy for the traumas of the real people who die in war, whatever side they are on. The New Yorker piece we are commenting on describes mundane lives of normal people. These were not people who were beating someone or someone's children to death. Sure, many if not all Japanese were supporting a regime that was responsible for immense crulety, and sure, I do understand how that affects our ability to feel empathy for them (it's maybe similar to how I feel less empathy for a fan of a rival football team mourning a game's loss compared to a fan of the football team I happen to support). I understand this way of thinking, but I choose to rebel against it. Because we talk about losing real lives, real suffering - and what citizenship of which empire or nation state should be so crucial that it cancels out a person's humanity? As you write yourself, "war is terrible". It really is. Call me naive, but I dream of a world where that sentence is not followed by a 'but', but by a period.

Here’s an extraordinary piece that focuses on the stories of the ordinary lives of the real people surviving 64 kilo enriched uranium exploding above their head yielding a blast of approximately 15 kiloton TNT which caused a fireball with a diameter of 370m that had the same surface temperature as the sun (source: Wikipedia). And here we are, the intellectually curious people of the internet, above all interested in offsetting these tragedies to some other suffering statistics. Why can’t we help but look away from human suffering inflicted by war, even if there’s a moving long read focusing on real people presented to us? And who does this thinking serve?

Towards the end of the piece, the author describes a science professor who, together with his son, lays buried under the rubble of his house after the blast. He ultimately survives but reflects about laying there, thinking: “It was my first time I ever tasted such a beautiful spirit when I decided to die for our Emperor.” How fascinating this is the spin you give to such a traumatising experience. Are we really nation state citizens first, human beings second? Could speaking about the fate of the people of Hiroshima in terms as ‘necessity’ and ‘justified’ be a symptom of the same thinking? How do we get out of this?

As you ask why this is here. Copied from the guidelines of this site: “What to submit? On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. (…) anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.” So it’s fair to say that this site is about more than entrepreneurship and tech.

I don’t understand, what kind of marketing do you think this is? I’m OP. I setup the blog a while ago but only for the first time I thought of something that was actually worth writing about. Something needs to be the first post! I’m sorry you found it boring.

Good points! Totally agree that people care less than you think, and it’s very healthy to live your life without thinking you have to please everyone all the time. The nuance I tried to make, but I was perhaps not really clear, is that when people talk with each other, people have the chance to make sure a message comes across so that it does not offend a person. That chance for nuance is lost when people post on social media. Not that people do it deliberately, it’s just that social media is designed to be focused on the poster rather than on how that message makes certain people in the audience feel. And I do believe people are bothered not to offend someone, and that they are less likely to do so when you actually talk.

Really cool stuff. It felt strangely real. Impressive!

Excellent essay. I loved the way you made it interactive.

It's a pretty small, straight forward web app. Think: python backend and a vanilla html / JS frontend, served over flask. The frontend is mostly in one file, so maybe it's not the best test case for crossfile reading, but still very happy with the user experience!

I just tried it out in the context of a small but messy side project. It did exactly what I asked for. The easy of use is a bliss. Impressive!

Living without appetite. I get it can help some people with losing weight. But doesn’t it sound a tad sad too? Isn’t desire one of the most complex, beautiful emotions?

The ‘ability to learn’ idea may not be so novel, but I am not sure if I agree with calling it ill defined or it having an agenda for more inclusivity. Generally, in schools, at least from my experience, it will still mostly be abstract thinking and memory capacities that are measured. Curiosity, and the ability to turn that curiosity in new knowledge, also broadens the mind (in addition to abstract thinking and remembering things), which can be an enormous quality that is highly valued on the job market, arguably more than what is mostly measured at schools. I think that’s the point the author tries to make.

So by your measure, would Hacker News be spam for websites and blogs?

Can we imagine it?

The lottery of life gets you born in a place that from one day to the other witnesses the arrival of foreign soldiers speaking foreign languages. They roll in your strees in big trucks with big guns always loaded.

They came for the War Against The Axis of Evil, they say.

Whatever, you think. You try to continue living your life. You grow up, enroll in university, fall in and out of love, graduate, marry, give birth, build a career, establish a family.

You almost forget about the foreign soldiers with their guns always loaded and their War Against The Axis of Evil.

One day you come home from your job and are met by the screams of crying family members who mourn the bodies of multiple of your nieghbours and family members. It could have been you. Instead it's your parents, your best friend, your partner, your kids. You learn they were cold bloodedly shot through the head by the foreign soldiers with their big guns always loaded. They were unarmed, civilians, innocent.

Meanwhile, no one gets punished. No one takes responsibility. Investigations die a slient death. It was the War Against The Axis of Evil, the foreigners say.

Can we imagine it?

Article 5 (f) of the EU AI Act, fresh from the press (published two weeks ago), prohibits "the (...) use of AI systems to infer emotions of a natural person in the areas of workplace and education institutions, except where the use of the AI system is intended to be put in place or into the market for medical or safety reasons". [1]

Penalties consist of fines up to EUR 35M or 7% of an undertaking's turnover, whichever is higher (article 99, §3 AI Act).

The prohibition will apply only from 2 February 2025 (see article 113 (a) AI Act).

Not a day too early, arguably even too late. Governments of the world, follow suit!

[1] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=OJ:L...

To appreciate the peculiar beauty of cycling you need to understand what it is.

In the middle of nowhere, festoons are hanging over the streets of a small village. It's a long forgotten village, except for today, when for around 10 seconds, it becomes the stage of a show in which the nation's biggest hero's and antihero's participate.

The noise of the television helicopter coming closer is the sign for the butcher and the baker and their customers to leave their shops and head for the street. Here they line up next to the village's grandads and grandmothers, who are firmly holding the hands of their grandkids, equally excited, eagerly awaiting the caravane of sponsor cars and police bikes that signal the head of the race.

There is nothing quite like the vivid brush of colors of the jerseys of a peloton rustling by at 60 km/hour. The whoosh of two hundred times two 25mm rubber tubes rolling over asfalt, a peloton displacing itself through air as one giant organism, the sound of shifting gears, the shriek of someone hitting the brakes, a shout perhaps to warn for a pothole or the odd street furniture. A sunray hitting the large sunglasses covering most of the faces of the riders, the rest of which give away a familiar mix of concentration and nervousness. The same questions racing through the minds of all the riders. "Did I train enough?" "How much will I be able to suffer today?"

Vamos!! Alé alé! Cries from the spectators at the side of the road, transcending any language, the grandma and the grandkid equally loud. Support, not for a particular team, less for a particular rider. Encouragement that is as much destined for the champion, feeling the pressure, chasing a new record, as for the anonymous rider who tries to make him or herself believe that if everything falls into place, it is possible for him or her to sneak away and grab an upset victory. It has happened.

A rider at the back of the bunch, looking for distraction, his legs hurting more than they ought to, spots a kid at the side of the road and throws his bottle at her feet. Rare will be the moments in her life that she will feel equally much at the center of the world.

Ah, the beauty of cycling. Maybe I misunderstand what it really is.

Moving story. Beautifully told. I distil two lessons.

1. It's worth going through a bit of awkwardness to thank people or tell them what they mean to you while you still can.

2. Never go out on the water (or more generally engage in risky activities) alone.

Also from his blog:

« I am a husband and father. The reason I was born was to become my daughter’s father. I was wise enough to notice and appreciate at the time, the slow ecstatic joy my child’s early years were giving me. So too have her later years. I will die happy. »

Beautiful.

https://misterirvine.wordpress.com/about/

Interesting concept! I wanted to try it out but I’m missing Hindi in the list of languages you can learn. Curious about why the languages that made the cut did so and if you plan to add more languages in the short time?

On topic, this is a really cool New Yorker story making a case against story telling

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/07/10/seduced-by-sto...

You should watch the documentary. The first minute of the documentary is literally footage of a hearing in a sharia court.

The internal Netflix comparison of the ideal show with a ‘gourmet cheeseburger’ is one that stuck. Really interesting read on the company Netflix has become now.

Incredible reporting. The mission of these men reminds me of the main character in Hemingway’s ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls’. Crazy to think this is going on right now.

Thanks for the clear and detailed response! It's what I feared it meant. It's a pity they need to use such deceptive language, I find.

I really liked notion as a product. This is kind of a wakeup call for me that using the cloud pretty much means giving up control - and not just theoretically.

I am wondering the same thing. From their website: "Your data is encrypted at rest and in transit." (see: https://www.notion.so/help/security-and-privacy). I am not really sure what that means.

Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo.

A beautifully written, immensely moving, very funny novel with a really nuanced but profoundly important message.

It’s essentially a call for empathy.

I thought of myself, a white male, as progressive and very aware already of the issues of gender and color in our societies’ power structures. This book made me very humble. It made me look at the place women, and women of colour in particular, have in today’s society in a completely different way.

Just give it a go guys, just the reading experience is worth it.