JadeNB

From that perspective, the problems are lawlessness and petty crime, not the graffiti. I would not feel safer in a place just because it had reduced the symptoms of those things, unless it had also reduced those things themselves, in which case the latter is the accomplishment.

> Why? Do the riches cities have the poorest poor or is it generally the richest cities have the both the richest poor and the most support for them.

I don't know. Do you? If the latter answer is correct and it's backed up by quantitative evidence, then I guess that I have to accept at least some form of the corollary, although there are still games that one can play with measurement (for example, it's possible that being numerically richer in those richer settings can still result in poorer overall quality of life).

> Respect for property rights is highly correlated with prosperity and that includes prosperity for those without property.

I think that this sounds good and is a sensible hypothesis, but it's far from clear to me that the corollary of prosperity for those without property is true in practice.

> Many people would feel safer in Lee Kwan Yew's Singapore than in the USA. Better housing and health policy, less graffiti and street violence.

Of all the things wrong with the USA, when picking just two, it seems strange for one of them to be graffiti. I have lived in the USA all my life, in some more and some less urban areas, and even from the people most afraid of cities I have never heard graffiti mentioned as a serious worry or complaint.

> Sounds like The Flavor Bible - it's a great reference book to find pairings of ingredients.

I think fpshero says exactly that (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48294459):

> I have a wonderful book that explores this idea of an atlas of flavours that work together.

> The flavor bible.

> LLMs would post solutions to the issues that they've discovered after doing a lot of research.

How do you envision the correctness of these solutions being judged? If by other LLMs, then we run into a problem of infinite descent. If by humans, then you'd need some way to motivate expert or semi-expert humans (so that their ratings are themselves correct) to participate in a massive project of evaluating the correctness of a constant stream of content from content-generators that never sleep.

I think it probably depends on what communities you frequent. I am not familiar with the culture at stats.SE, but math.SE has a (semi-?) explicit mission of being more friendly to beginners than MO. I think that many communities aren't so friendly, and don't have beginner-friendly analogues.

> Why are we having computer programs generate source code in the first place? Shouldn't they generate something lower level, like an AST or some computational graph or something? Source code is made to be written and read by humans, and is then translated into machine code via various transformations. In theory a program should look the same to a computer no matter which language it started out as.

Presumably because LLMs are trained on corpora read, and for now still probably mostly written, by humans, rather than on corpora consisting mostly of ASTs or graphs?

What is that?

Not to be flip, but, depending on what "fully" means, we haven't fully understood much of anything about the real world.

> So, nothing new?

> The cosmic ray hypothesis has been dominant for a few years now.

> This magazine…

I think saying "This magazine…" as if the flaws of Quanta are well understood and agreed may need additional elaboration. If you mean that experts have known this—well, the role of Quanta is to disseminate and explain expert research to scientifically literate non-experts; it is not meant to be distributing the latest research itself.

Your reading of my comment seems perfectly charitable, but it also seems to find more in my comment than what I said.

> > anyone can make an informed critique and self-evaluation of it, with no necessity of depending on a priesthood to interpret it.

> Science is specifically not the wisdom of the crowds - that is pre-scientific. It is the wisdom of emprical facts, which are usually so complex and voluminous that it takes great expertise to understand and interpret them. Science is not democratic - your opinion is worthless and does not deserve consideration unless you can demonstrate otherwise.

I did not say that science is democratic, nor that the validity of a scientific fact is determined by the crowds, but rather that anyone can make an informed critique and self-evaluation. 'Can' is perhaps too strong a word; to do this is a skill that usually requires considerable background and training.

Here I think that one must distinguish between the sociology of science and the ideal of science. In the sociology of science, reputation matters, authority is often deferred to, and an amateur will have a tough time getting a serious hearing. That is the fact of imperfect human practice.

But the ideal of science is that everyone's idea does matter, or, if you like (though I find it pessimistic), that everyone's ideas don't matter. The ideas of the most untrained novice have exactly as much, or as little, scientific weight as those of the most expert, practiced, and credentialed scientist. This is distinct from the sociological weight of an idea: the scientific community is more likely to listen to the expert, practiced, and credentialed scientist than to the novice. But the quality of a scientific idea is intrinsic to the idea, not to who has it.

> “some people have been wrong before” is not a reason to think you know better than the authors of an upcoming Nature article based on a few layperson-targeted paragraphs summarizing the paper from a very high level.

Nor is "this paper is going to appear in Nature" a reason not to wonder whether there might be something that the authors don't know. The whole point of science is that anyone can make an informed critique and self-evaluation of it, with no necessity of depending on a priesthood to interpret it. You can point out the flaws in giantg2's argument https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47995899, but neither the venue of the paper, nor the fact that the argument is directed at laypeople in a forum frequented by laypeople, seems to me inherently to indicate such flaws.

That seems awfully like an appeal to authority. Your parent comment doesn't just vaguely snipe, but points out reasons this should have been expected. Those reasons could potentially not be valid, or not present the whole picture, but "the researchers are from Stanford" doesn't rebut them.

I didn't know that! Is it announced somewhere, even buried deep in release notes, or just one of those things that they decided silently to enshittify?

The current actual title and subtitle are:

I accidentally made law enforcement shut down their stresser honeypot

How I stumbled across a fake booter site run by international police, and how they panicked when I started digging

> Only two of these companies actually needs your location data to function, it's Uber and Lyft.

I disagree that they need my location data. I am perfectly capable of telling them the location where I want a pick-up, and they are perfectly capable of imposing penalties if I incorrectly report it. Just like happened with cabs in the old days, who were somehow able to pick me up without real-time location tracking.

(Not to say that you shouldn't be able to just turn on location tracking if that's what you want to do, but there's no reason that they can't function without it.)

You expressed your opinion once. I think that there's no need to shit on the post again.

> How do you get familiar with the software, if the manual expects you to be an expert in it already?

It's surely to the detriment of the manual if the first sentence on the first page assumes you already know the software, but, if nowhere in the manual can it address expert users, then the manual isn't going to be very useful for expert users—and it should be!

There's a difference between "I am the creator of this content [that I actually didn't create]" and "I am enjoying this content that I did not create." One could argue that it matters, in the latter case, whether you are enjoying the content in a manner with the creator's intention of how you enjoyed it, but, to state one among many possible responses, it is far from clear when I consume media through approved channels that that accurately represents how the creator would prefer I enjoy it.

> This weird command is presented with such a benevolent innocence as if it's the simplest thing in the world.

I think it's a question of context and familiarity. To a vim user, like me and, I assume, ahmedfromtunis, their examples do indeed seem simple and natural. Presumably, to an emacs user, the example you quote (if it's quoted literally—I don't use emacs and can't even tell) is just as natural, and assuming some comfort with emacs is presumably OK in a manual for the software!

> Same thing as using a word processor and printer rather than handwriting a note. Inexcusable.

There is no confusion, when in receipt of something written using a word processor, that it was so written, and people are free to respond accordingly (though, of course, most of us don't care). There is no such certainty with products generated by AI, so it is appropriate responsibly to disclose it.

You can find the answers to both of your questions on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clanker

> To the extent the author’s point relies on the incorrect definition, it cannot be consistent or correct.

I don't think that a point based on an incorrect definition is automatically inconsistent or itself incorrect. It might be, of course, or it might just be insufficiently justified. And, to the extent that it is a philosophical point rather than a historical one, the truth or falsity of a philosophical claim doesn't depend on whether someone actually said it, or it is a mistranslation of something someone actually said.

> Why is clipboard on every OS/tool I've used single item?

The wonderful Flycut (https://apps.apple.com/us/app/flycut-clipboard-manager/id442...) fixes this on macOS.

> Unfortunately it's kind of random what makes it to the front page.

Sounds fortunate to me. If it were predictable then it woud be predicted, and then gamed.

In case they hallucinate? There's no point having content in a wide variety of languages if it's unpredictably different from the original-language content.

I think my favorite part of that comment is "documenting" that 10^(-15) is not negative by appealing to Wolfram Alpha.

> Even MacOS is still pretty bad at it.

What problems do you see with multiple users on macOS? I don't use it intensively, but I've never noticed issues.

> Give x < y, it's easy to construct x + (y-x)(sqrt(2))/2.

That's only obviously irrational if x and y are rational. (But maybe you meant that, given an arbitrary interval a < b, you first shrink it to a rational interval a < x < y < b?)