ChadNauseam

It's an interesting time when the bar has moved to "It’s not like diplomacy and war will end". But that is on the table. Nuclear weapons caused the end of wars as we know them. Great powers no longer directly attack each other. And AI is much more powerful than nuclear weapons, with an equal capacity for damage and a much greater capacity for good.

By the way, I donate monthly to GiveWell and the shrimp welfare project. Do you donate monthly to starving people? Most people don't, and the reason is simple: at the end of the day, most people just don't care that much about helping a starving person far away. They also don't care much about things like that, animals in factory farms, or earthquakes that kill hundreds of thousands. But ideally, we could find a way to empower people such that the minority who do care can make a big difference.

> Likely 10-1000x cheaper to implement than fully autonomous cars.

I think self driving buses would be awesome. I can imagine having smaller ones that come more regularly too. Add some amenities like a tracker that tells you exactly when to leave to catch the bus, and exactly when you'll reach your destination, and it would probably be an awesome UX.

But I don't know if I agree that it'd be 10-1000x cheaper to implement than fully autonomous cars. And the overhead of a car is huge, you need one driver for a maximum of 4 passengers and probably a mode of 1 passenger. The overhead of a bus is smaller, because one driver can carry 30 or 60 people. Arguably, you'd need less of them because busses carry more people, but for some reason the unit economics often doesn't work out like that IRL. It'd make more sense for a neighborhood to have just one xbox that everyone shares when they need it, rather than everyone having their own xbox that's idle 95% of the time, but that's not how it went. (Same for any other computing device.)

> if the were competent they could spend 6 month and few 100 million and build absolutely amazing bus transit system

$346 million gets you utility improvements and 2 miles of bus lane: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Ness_Bus_Rapid_Transit

They absolutely will. I'm a very social person but when I'm going home from a date with my girlfriend I always want a Waymo just because I don't want a 3rd person involved. And sometimes I'm having a bad day and don't want to have to make small talk. And it's nice that I can talk on the phone without disturbing someone.

Sarcastic and self-satisfied comments like this are uninteresting IMO. The GP comment is talking about reducing parking requirements for new development, and parking requirements are probably some of the least efficient use of land imaginable. But he shouldn't talk about that because it'd be better if every city all across america suddenly had public transit tomorrow? It's like if a city in europe was talking about setting up a cooling station in a town square during a heat wave, and someone condescendingly commented "god, I love how europeans will do anything but install air conditioning." It's just not that easy and one doesn't preclude the other

Yeah, something surprising to me was that I can't even add a custom MCP to gemini. It has tons of missing features.

Let's apply it:

- 25% planning & aligning with other teams

- 25% coding

- 25% testing/verifying

- 25% code review/rework

I'd say that thanks to LLM assistance I'm 10x faster at coding, code review/rework, and testing/verifying. (LLMs can partially automate testing/verifying too, and the code is higher quality now as well so less testing/verifying is necessary).

So that leaves us with:

- 92.5% planning & aligning with other teams

- 2.5% coding

- 2.5% testing/verifying

- 2.5% code review/rework

Obviously, that makes zero sense as a split. If you saw any organization doing that, you'd suggest having fewer teams, more silos, etc. Maybe you have designers produce code, instead of showing the designs to coders and having the coders implement it. Maybe you force all your engineers to dogfood the product that way they can identify issues themselves rather than needing QA teams to do it. And so on. so the last category, "planning & aligning with other teams", falls too.

I'm very thankful that you found the post interesting. I think false information is the main thing that causes two good people to end up on opposite sides. As a tangent, people are afraid of the potential for AI to generate false information (e.g. deepfakes), but I'm hopeful that it will also help people discover true information more easily. But anyway, I really appreciate the kind words.

I’d guess the ones developing the vaccine would rather you take the vaccine

I'd rather be overly charitable 10 times than not charitable enough once. It probably doesn't make me any friends to say it, but let me say why. A slight exaggeration of your view might be that some people are irredeemable mutants who need to be ostracized and can't be reasoned with. I won't stay quiet when I strongly disagree with someone, but I don't need to go that far. I think it's a manifestation of the same tendencies that lead to DHH's post.

I didn't intend to present myself as neutral. I was explaining why I disagreed with him. But I do agree with you - having seen the site guidelines, it makes sense why it was flagged.

The site is hosted with Obsidian Publish which looked exactly like this far before Gemini existed

DHH writes:

> When wolves get out of control, you shoot them. When gypsies take over public spaces, you deport them.

I think based on his choice of parallelism we can fairly guess he means it the wolf way. There's not a single sentence in his post that supports the other interpretation.

I don't think I shouted at DHH or shamed him. Where did I do that? Is there a way to write a blog post disagreeing with someone that isn't shouting and shaming in your eyes?

> Which is: If someone comes illegally to your country and ends up sleeping in parks, they should be deported.

That doesn't enrage me, in fact I agree with it. But no one in this story came illegally to Denmark. I'm not sure what gave you that impression. And I read DHH to be saying that more people than just the specific ones sleeping in parks should be deported.

Note: I meant "I read a sentiment along the lines of 'gypsies should be deported'", I didn't mean to imply he said those words literally

Fair enough. If it's against the rules, I won't post things like this on hacker news anymore.

I think it's hard to do significant harm with bad cooking advice. Unless the advice was absolutely terrible like "eat only raw potatoes". But that's pretty rare. On the other hand many people can think of someone who was harmed seriously by bad medical advice. Steve Jobs is a famous example. (I'm the author of the article)

> believe deportation is morally wrong in certain cases, that is, the law can be selectively broken.

I (the author) do believe deportation is morally wrong in certain cases. For example, there are laws governing which people can be deported and for what reasons. Deportations that violate those laws are morally wrong. What I spent the whole article arguing against was the idea that people should be deported even when the laws say their deportation is illeagl. (It would be illegal to deport the vast vast majority of Roma in Denmark.) The other thing I argued for in the article is enforcement of the law against people who break it.

The people DHH is taking about are EU citizens with a legal privilege by default to live in Denmark

Can you explain how that's analogous to what he thinks we should do to wolves? Does he think that we should only shoot the wolves that are causing problems and leave the innocent majority of wolves alone?

If he said "Foreigners who refuse housing should be deported." I would agree. Can you show me where he said that? I read "gypsies should be deported"

I don't know the rules for what does and doesn't get flagged. I tried to write it in a respectful way without resorting to personal attacks.

Why would a reasonable person not read it?

I just visited theguardian.com to see their cookie banner. The banner says this:

> Your Privacy (`x` button to close the tab)

> US residents have certain rights with regard to the sale or sharing of personal information to third parties.

> Guardian News and Media and our partners use information collected through cookies or in other forms to improve experience on our site and pages, analyze how it is used and show personalized advertising.

> You can opt out of the sale of all of your personal information by pressing

> <button>Do not sell or share my personal information</button>

It's 3 sentences, plus a button that says "Do not sell or share my personal information". I actually don't even think this is GDPR compliant, because my layman's understanding says that GDPR consent must be presented as opt-in, rather than opt-out. (I guess they are going for CCPA/CPRA compliance?) But anyway, I would think that a reasonable person could be expected to notice a button that says "Do not sell or share my personal information" and then click it, especially when it's portrayed prominently at the bottom of the page.

nvrhi looks really cool. However, I think the vast majority of use cases today do target web. The main exception is software which is too big to be quickly downloaded. Almost all other software benefits so much from web distribution that it's crazy not to do it. For example, in another comment I shared the game I made with webgpu. Because it's a website, someone here may play it. If you had to download a binary instead, I don't think anyone here would give it a try.

This resource taught me WebGPU a couple years ago. I can recommend it. It's the best WebGPU tutorial I've found. (The Rust one is quite good as well.) I used what I learned to make this simple game: https://alexpop11.github.io/Spec-Hops/ (space to drop bombs) and I have eliemichel to thank for that!

We can take a simpler example. Let's say someone conjectures that all linear maps are isomorphic if they have the same domain and codomain*. A counterexample is easy to find, but true insight would be to notice that all linear maps with the same domain and codomain that are not isomorphic map some non-zero elements to zero. That is much more interesting than just finding a counterexample. Although, that isn't to say that finding a counterexample is not very interesting.

*statements only apply to maps whose domain is finite-dimensional

Grace Hopper is the goat but I'm not sure she would have immediately come to mind for me. Actually, if someone asked me to name any hero of mine, irrespective of sex, I don't know if I could quickly name someone. Is it really a huge indictment?

Parakeet, probably the most popular model for handy-style transcription, doesn't include a "text-to-speech LLMs" or any other form of LLM

> For homelessness, it's things like shelters, free meals, needle exchanges, etc. Make the life of the homeless easier without actually getting them into permanent housing. The actual solution to eliminate homelessness is to build more housing, along with financial arrangements to incentivize ownership and make it possible.

I love the idea of building more housing, but I think a lot of homeless people have an income of literally 0, so wouldn't they be homeless regardless of how cheap housing is?

> For many construction projects (like say CAHSR), it's performing endless studies about how to build the project without actually building it. Some level of design is necessary for successful outcomes, but many agencies go around in circles with proposals and reports and environmental impact studies and voter referendums without actually having anyone actually pick up a shovel and start moving dirt.

Environmental impact studies are required by federal law for projects receiving federal funding. It's not CAHSR's fault that they have to be done. You then have to go through the process of acquiring land along the track, which you probably should do before people start moving dirt (it's going to be pretty embarrassing if your track has a hole in the middle where someone refused to sell their house).