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>Concise Go code has a high signal-to-noise ratio.

A few lines later:

  // Good:
  if err := doSomething(); err != nil {
      // ...
  }

"Tell me, how many lights you see?"

BrainViruson FTX's collapse strands scientists

It's unreasonable to expect researchers vet someone who promises them $500K? In what insane world does this statement make any sense? It's not just common sense, but also necessary for keeping track of conflicts of interest.

BrainViruson FTX's collapse strands scientists

>SBF was treated as the king of crypto by the mainstream for whatever reason.

I think the reason is getting more and more obvious with every passing day.

His father and mother are professors of Law (and Business) at Stanford. (The mother is also one of two founders of Mind The Gap.) His aunt is a dean of Columbia University's School of Public Health.

https://showbizcorner.com/sam-bankman-fried-parents

His brother was running a lobby group called Guarding Against Pandemics. FTX's head of policy and regulatory strategy was a Commodity Futures Trading Commission commissioner under Obama.

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/11/14/former-ftx-ceo-sam-bankman-f...

And that's not the end of it all, there are many more interesting connections.

BrainViruson Sam Bankman-Fried tries to explain himself

>It this real? Is he really THAT stupid?

No, it's media damage control. Gets you to think about unverifiable stuff like personal motivation instead of what his company actually did.

It revelatory that VOX interviews him instead of investigating him.

BrainViruson FTX's collapse strands scientists

Does it strand legitimate scientists or does it indicate that there is corruption in science? From what I'm hearing, this whole FTX thing reeks of clever, politically connected fraud and money laundering:

https://odysee.com/@Chris_Martenson:2/the-deeply-troubling-f...

BrainViruson Psychological and psychiatric terms to avoid

>Nevertheless, the attitude-change techniques used by so-called “brainwashers” are no different than standard persuasive methods identified by social psychologists, such as encouraging commitment to goals, manufacturing source credibility, forging an illusion of group consensus, and vivid testimonials

Ok, let me get this straight. You openly admit that brainwashing techniques are now routinely and knowingly used in "casual" settings, but you want me to stop using the term, because it's so routine and because it never was never long-term effective. Faulty reasoning at best, manipulative bullshit at worst.

BrainViruson Wikipedians are rebelling against “unethical” Wikipedia fundraising banners

Wikipedia is one of the worst things that was ever launched on the web. Many people say that it's reliable, except in cases of controversy. That's a spin. A more honest way of describing it is that it's a system designed to accumulate trust by providing people with trivial information and then spectacularly fail them when the information is critically important for some society-wide issue. The failures aren't unfortunate mishaps, they are inevitable by design.

BrainViruson Myocarditis after Covid vaccination: Research on possible long-term risks begins

There is no such thing as "mild" heart damage.

Moreover, clinical myocarditis and pericarditis are only tips of the iceberg:

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

People who have no significant symptoms can still have troponin in their blood, indicating damage.

BrainViruson Behind TikTok's boom: A legion of traumatized, $10-a-day content moderators

It's almost as if building a hypercentralized faux-communication system that tries to encourage mindless behavior and doesn't have any notion of locality is an inherently bad idea that will always lead to misery and suffering. Hm. Nah, that's can't be true. That would mean a lot of things I've read on the internet recently are lies, which is completely impossible. Yeah, I think this is just a sign that people suck and we need more centralization to control them. If we tied all TikTok accounts to some kind of social credit score, that would probably fix everything.

BrainViruson State of CSS

The reality is that W3C and Mozilla do not matter anymore. I'm not saying this because I like it, I'm saying this because it's the obvious state of things. Google controls the standards and protocols for the Web.

BrainViruson We Become What We Behold (2017)

Yeah, US was a very trusting society until it started using money, cars and converted to individualism. If only we could go back to our Communist roots. /s

BrainViruson Abuse prevention is tradecraft

That's all nice and well, but I no longer can tell the difference between Big Tech's "Abuse Prevention" and abuse. They need transparency not because it's going to make their job easier. They need transparency because literally millions of people hate their companies and don't have one iota of trust in their internal decision-making. Big Tech workers might think all those people are morons and can be ignored indefinitely. In reality, it simply doesn't work this way.

BrainViruson GitHub Copilot investigation

A lot of really good points.

>Sure, we use the word "learn" to describe what they do, which is one word that we also use to describe what people do. But ML models are always wielded by people or corporations for particular purposes.

This is extremely important. "Learning" in machine learning is an aspirational label, not a descriptive one. People who claim otherwise either drank too much of their own Kool-Aid or are simply dishonest. This isn't just "wrong" in some taxonomical sense, this is dangerous in a very practical way. Conflating machine "learning" and human learning will inevitably lead to various kinds of sabotage of human learning.

BrainViruson Never pay for online dating (2010)

>Why does no government anywhere run a non-profit dating site from tax-payer money when this is becoming the most popular way people are meeting?

Sounds like a great idea. I nominate NSA as the host organization. You wouldn't even need to bother creating a profile, they will just use all the surveillance data to find you the best matches.

https://crossdysfunctional.tumblr.com/post/109024982557/fund...

BrainViruson An ‘everything app’ would be bad for liberal democracies and free markets

Maybe. The real question is how many people in tech saying this would say the same thing without that Tweet by Musk.

BrainViruson 12,000 Facebook employees, 15% of its workforce, may lose jobs amid quiet layoff

>They will tell you that Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp are pretty important to them.

Drugs are important to drug addicts. That's not a reason to praise the dealers for their business acumen.

Facebook and Instagram are exploitative as fuck.

BrainViruson Stripe is PayPal circa 2010

The article is full of misrepresentations, some of which were already pointed out. One I have to point out myself:

">People really, really, hate Peter Thiel and Elon Musk. So much so that they will refuse to give my small business money if it goes through Paypal on the off chance that those two guys might get some of it."

This looks like pure spin. I don't know of anyone who refuses to use PayPal because of this reason. (Thiel and Musk are not running the company anymore.) I know a lot of people who refuse to use PayPal because it has some kind of directive to ban people for wrongthink. There are countless instances documented on ReclaimTheNet.org [1], and those are just the ones involving people of notoriety.

[1] - https://reclaimthenet.org/page/2/?s=paypal

There is literally a campaign of people closing PayPal accounts in protest of company's behavior right now. (That $2,500 fine proposal was the last straw.) Guess what? Many people see "errors" when they try to close an account. Dark patterns everywhere.

In short, if you choose to use PayPal as a sole payment method for your business, know that you are alienating a lot of potential customers.

BrainViruson WebVM: WASM virtual machine in browser with networking via Tailscale

We keep seeing more and more abstractions, but unfortunately they are the wrong abstractions. We need working process isolation, not endless VMs inside other VMs. We need a logical layer on top of TCP/IP, not crazy complicated VPN schemes. Etc. This is completely obvious to some people, and seems completely incomprehensible to others. Unfortunately, the companies with resources are mostly staffed with the latter.

BrainViruson Rex: The World's Smallest PDA [video]

https://www.thelightphone.com/

BrainViruson Watchman: Execute a command when something changes

This command seems like a no-brainer that should be in all OSes by default.

It's mind-boggling that most systems don't have a standard tool for observing file changes. The only language I know of that has a platform-agnostic API for this is Factor.

BrainViruson The Illustrated Stable Diffusion

https://jalammar.github.io/images/stable-diffusion/article-F...

Can you say with a straight face that this image (from the original paper) was intended to explain rather than obfuscate?

BrainViruson Fandom Acquires GameSpot, Giant Bomb, GameFAQs, TV Guide and Metacritic

You're asking tech bros who get paid $250K/year running those very scams you've just outlined.

BrainViruson AI Hyperopia

>That logic suggests Microsoft should simply never sell development tools

You employ faulty economic reasoning here. Most MS tools are not unique and aren't even best in their class. In cases where they are close, MS charges a lot of money for the privilege to use them.

To put it in simple terms, if Copilot worked as advertised it would cost significantly more than VS enterprise. At some point of usefulness the logic related to selling vs using it internally would work exactly like I described. This is why many companies develop their own software and don't sell it at all even if they could charge for it.

BrainViruson AI Hyperopia

Imagine that you are a CEO of Microsoft. Someone in your company invented an AI tool that makes an average developer much better at coding (more productive, etc.). As a reminder: you company is a software company that itself employs tens of thousand of developers. What would you do?

a) Downplay the tool. Use it internally to completely crush competition by writing amazing software. License for exorbitant price to a select few partners, who will also crush their competition.

b) Hype it up as much as possible and license it to anyone who's willing to pay $10/month.

I think the rational choice is obvious, which also makes it blatantly obvious that Copilot is not seen as any kind of competitive advantage by Microsoft itself.

BrainViruson AI Hyperopia

I hate this meme. Essentially, an arrogant and condescending straw man argument.

Here is what really happens. People who are not familiar with programming assume that some mental faculty is necessary to solve a particular problem. Indeed, it is required for a person to succeed at the problem. That mental faculty is often general and can be applied to other tasks. It's some aspect of what we consider general intelligence.

Instead, software engineers look at a problem and solve it by changing its representation to fit the capabilities of a pre-existing algorithm. The solution has nothing to do with mental faculties in the general population. The solutions ends up being specific. If you want to apply it to another problem, you need to transform that problem into some clever representation as well.

People notice the lack of generality and say "no, this is not what we had in mind". It's an entirely reasonable sentiment.

BrainViruson Boom! Antitrust Bill Passed

Yeah, the article seems to be more about promoting a certain political meta-narrative than actually analyzing the bill. Parts of it are misleading and it doesn't link to the actual bill, which any normal blogger would do within the very first paragraph.

BrainViruson Microsoft bakes a VPN into Edge and turns it on

Redesign the rules so that trolling is not rewarding. Yes, I know, it's hard.

BrainViruson Red Dead Redemption 2 fan with 6k hours on Stadia begs for character transfer

They deserve it for supporting shit like Stadia. It's one rare case where smug, annoying assholes who are cheerleading the destruction of personal computing (and, if you pay attention, the slow abolition of private property) are facing some negative consequences.

I used to think that politely warning people about obvious consequences of their bad decisions it a reasonable way to go. That if you are eloquent enough and logical enough they will see the dangers. ("If you use this service right now, Google will control your games in the future.") That was a naive and stupid view. Most people have no imagination whatsoever. They are physically incapable of imagining a shitty situation directly caused by their own decisions and actions. They need a real-life example. Well, this is it.

BrainViruson Can brown noise turn off your brain?

I think a lot of people here need to read A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century. Too many simplistic "hacks" are being proudly discussed without thinking about higher-levels issues and consequences. Yes, you might trick yourself with a noise generator. However, you should ask yourself why there is a need for trickery in the first place.

BrainViruson A Reflection on the Small Web

I'm not sure I like it. This Small Web stuff (and other similar movements) is close enough to plausibility to capture people's time and attention, but far enough from reality to inevitably fail without making a dent in the awful state of the Web today.

Here is something you should think about. If Small Web actually worked, we would be discussing this on Small Web right now. Do think about what this statement actually means before dismissing it as yet-another-negative-HN-comment.

This means, for starters, that I would gladly use another platform to discuss your ideas, but none of the websites from various "alternative web" movements have any plausible solutions for people collaborating with one another. Which indicates a kind of lack of high-level, systemic thinking that is absolutely essential if you want to change anything at scale.