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Cancel culture.

>Let’s say you need to get your oven fixed—Alexa+ will be able to navigate the web, use Thumbtack to discover the relevant service provider, authenticate, arrange the repair, and come back to tell you it’s done—there’s no need to supervise or intervene.

This is a disaster waiting to happen. I don't trust an LLM to choose between two brands of dish soap for me let alone pick a contractor, schedule a repair, and make a payment. Even if there was a demo showing this working in a sterile environment, reality is so complex that something is certain to go wrong. Even the "simple" task of summarizing news had so many catastrophic failures that Apple had to pull it from the market.

Amazon is making bold claims about the capabilities of their voice assistant to sell their subscription service so that they can make the Alexa division profitable, but if any of their claims were real, they would be demoing rather than writing science fiction in a press release.

Arthanoson Studies correlating IQ to genius are mostly bad science

The ZIP code you're born in is a stronger predictor of all those things than IQ.

Arthanoson Viagra improves brain blood flow and could help to prevent dementia

50mg 3x a day, according to the study: https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/CIRCRESAHA.124.32432...

Seems high to me, but I've never taken the drug. I assume most people take it just a few times a week for it's intended use? Is anyone aware of research that shows positive benefits to health at recreational doses?

Arthanoson What if AGI is not coming?

"no major AI technology breakthroughs in decades.everything we are seeing is larger compute scaling." This is false. Everything from the transformer to advancements in state space models have been foundational breakthroughs

Arthanoson Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan's online rant spurs threats to supes, police reports

This comment is everything wrong with media literacy. It's absolutely worthwhile to cover highly public calls to violence of government officials by respected individuals with lots of power and the article makes it clear he personally did not send the letters. But denying that public calls to violence spurs actual violence is denial of basic cause and effect.

Arthanoson Maybe we could tone down the JavaScript (2016)

Surprised to see the top comments here so doom-and-gloom: "ah it was posted in 2016, I don't think anyone (but do wish) cares about limiting their JS usage anymore "

The tools we have available today to optimize JS and build for progressive enhancement are light years ahead of 2016 because the smartest minds in the industry have optimized for it. The rise of batteries-included server-side-rendered React apps like Remix and Next massively cut down on time-to-first-paint and React 18 makes it easier than ever to defer rendering of async or interactive portions of the page (e.g. the Like count, the reply form) in favor of getting static content on the screen as fast as possible.

Arthanoson Facebook, Twitter block the NY Post from posting

This post has a very odd tone, as if a private company enforcing their policy to remove unverified & leaked personal correspondence of a private citizen is some unquestionable moral wrongdoing that's apparently going to blow up. Surprised to see this as at the top, on HN.

National Review is a conservative wing-nut website trying to turn this non-story into fuel for their censorship culture war.

Arthanoson Self-Compassion Works Better Than Self-Esteem

Kindness and caring isn't a finite resource that has to be "earned". If you begin caring for others by default, you might find that mindset disappears.