Padding

I agree.

The way most people seem to mean this is one in which it's trivially true, since work is unpleasant but necessary and family is pleasant but scarce.

There is work out there that people love and not only activities that you get compensated for qualify as "work". Similarly there's relatives out there that people do wish they'd spend less time with.

> I didn't think I wanted kids [...] but I have two

What made you change your mind?

If you strip away any social context (your parents, your partner, your neighbors), would you still opt for kids? To me it looks like a lot of people are nagged on by friends and family before having kids and then taken a lot more seriously afterwards, get more liberties and less questions asked at work, etc. And then .. well then just get on the hype train themselves. Looking in from the outside, it does seem a bit caving into peer pressure at first and suffering from Stockholm Syndrom later.

> It discourages risk-taking.

People can also regret not having taken a risk - so it works both ways.

But I think "regret minization" is more than just avoiding negative consequences. It's about not regreting a decision even if things go wrong - it's about being able to say "I'd do it again".

There's a joke about whether software engineers that write aircraft software would dare board a plane they've written software for..

I'm sure there's lots of places in skyscrapers and jumbo jets that the engineers in charge feel at least somewhat ashamed for, and are only there because they needed to "ship" and it was empirically shown to be "good enough" for practical purposes .. and then every once in a blue moon a plane crashes.

Similarly to how debuggers help us beat code into doing something "good enough" for practical purposes, but no one really understands what the code does anymore .. and then every once in a blue moon there's something like heartbleed.

Striving for perfection in a market context only sets you up for pain - since stakeholders rarely care about quality, they care about more money and less headaches now, consequences be damned. So everyone is just winging it.

> such an obvious power imbalance

you're implying that love is based on rational thought in the first place

.. supposedly lasts ..

(1) That it's a website specifically engineered around bringing you into the attention of anyone you've ever known

(2) That there are other ways of staying in touch with friends

(3) That given the situation, if everything is in fact true, it seems the wrong compromise has been made. Maintaining the safety of your family should trump being able to always have someone/something to chit chat with.

I love how this is a perfectly valid question given the context .. even if the phrasing may be somewhat off.

Back to topic, I'd think boobs (and other parts of the body that aren't part of the face) won't have much impact on prefrences.

Would you really reject someone because of their cup size, despite their pretty face? Similary, would you accept someone just because of their cup size despite their less-than-pretty face?

I mean sure there are people out there for whom this may be a valid concern, but it won't for the vast majority. So the question then really only is where you draw the line - what about asymmetric boobs and other body features?

> if they want to say, "because fuck you, that's why", they can happily continue to do so

Not if there are incentives for the algorithms to be subject to public scrutiny.

> And when the AI does reach human level (a long time from now), we may be no more capable of understanding its motivations

(1) You're implying they/it'll have "motivations" in the first place. My whole argument was about a lack of motives.

(2) There's a difference between understanding how a conclusion was reached and why it was reached. Example: You may not understand how your compiler decided that line X in your program is dead code, but you may still be capable of comprehending that it in fact is dead code.

Richard Dawkins paints a similar picture in "The Blind Watchmaker".

In some way it's ironic that with all that effort we've spent on AI so far, simple evolution may yet beat us to the punch as far as AGI is concerned. Makes you wonder about how irrelevant humans are in the grand scheme of things.

> I, for one, welcome our algorithmic overlords.

Just imagine a world where you'd never have to hear "because I said so" and "becasue fuck you, that's why" ever again. A world where for everything that goes wrong, there'll always be a clear way to fix it and some clearly identifiable someone liable for the mistake. A world where being handsome is no more an advantage than having blue as your favorite color. Etc.

Maybe it's not perfect, but it would most certainly take away power from people that don't deserve it. I can see why the "powers that be" would try to convince us that this is "dystopian".

This is a clear issue of having your cake and eating it too. Being a victim is irrelevant and shouldn't be a reason not to call them out on their stupidity.

True, but then again this is a moot point, since the person in question seems to struggle with distinguishing friends from arseholes, right?

It's all tradeoffs.

There are clear benefits to your IDE remaining unaffected regardless of how badly your program messes up.

Not to mention being able to get your code out of the IDE easily (for versioning, backup, deployment and whatever else). Or having code that is readable/understandable and deployable without an IDE.

> we don't want to be at the mercy of people who might not like us for some undefinable reason

I keep restating this, but people still hate bureaucracy. Go figure.

> Being happy and alive for 20 years

You're not thinking this through thoroughly.

Being "happy" can be achieved with anti-depressants and being "alive" can be achieved by essentially turning you into a vegetable.

You're happy and alive, yet I highly doubt this is what you had in mind when you wrote that line. You clearly want more than just being happy and alive. You also want to be free and an individual and have an impact on the world and all those other things humans want .. but sadly often times you can only have less and less of those as you grow old.

> Getting older and eventually dying is imho, what defines our humanity.

Maybe, but is that a good thing?

To simply "expire out of existence" is a big issue for "humanity". It's the main reason why there's no proper answer to "what's the meaning of life" - whatever you do during your 50/70/120/.. years of life you'll eventually end up just as dead as the guy right next to you. Congratulations!

Being immortal would allow us to get rid of crutches like religion and allow us to implement proper moral systems, since there would be tangible rewards to being "good" simply for "goodness' sake", since being good and being selfish would be identical - if you'll (eventually but reiably) suffer overpoputlation, pollution and even unemployment just as much as the next guy, you'll (eventually but, again, reiably) think twice about elbow tactics.

> Oh yeah, I really doubt this - I know a lot of older people and most of them would not want this trade in.

20? Maybe. but How about being in the body of a 30- or 40-year old again? I can't imagine any 70-year olds not wanting to have a more "hassle-free" body, all other things being equal.

> makes live unworthy

Talking about live being "unworthy" is a slippery slope, but there nevertheless is an argument to be made about quality vs quantity of life .

I don't have the reference (and the exact numbers) at hand, but in "Happiness Hypothesis" (the Book) the author mentions a survey where people got to express their preference between "living x years of life and then dying to some tragic accident" and "x+y years of life, but y years spent in a wheelchair, because of some tragic accident". The results were rather mixed with the shorter life being more popular choice.

And, by the end of the day, a chance at higher-quality life in exchange for possibly less total life is also why things like armed robberies exist (even if not every robber things of it like that beforehand). I'd also argue the same is true of people opting for high-risk jobs, but there's also a sense-of-duty aspect to them, so it's not quite as clear-cut there.

Your friend clearly has her priorities straight. One would think that if someone really had a good reason to not be found online, the first thing they'd do would be to not be in FB rather than use some fake name.

Then again, maybe things aren't quite as dramatic as incinuated :>

> Yeah. Its a turd.

I bet that would've been a valid verdict for the first search engine way back then too, compared to all the neatly organized catalogs. Or the first android compared to the iphone.

Personally I'm still amazed that something like Glass is not only possible but can fit in a $1500 budget.

> $1500 . For "Google Quality".

Establishing that pricepoint is a monumental achievement by my account. It's well withing the grasp of us mere mortals and the way hardware prices tend to evolve will fit comfortably in any "why not try it" budget within just a few short years.

Novelty stuff like this usually costs one or two orders of magnitude more..

I completely agree. We should drive more women into suicide.

> No one is paying for C# and Java directly

No one you know.

Suppose some large and wealthy entity has trouble running some money-making legacy application that happens to be running atop the JVM. Who do you think will they call to fix their issues asap?

.. Which is why there's a lot of interest in having the people working on the JVM on your payroll ..

You need to keep in mind that "magic" is only sufficiently "advanced" (or rather obfuscated) technology, but omeone somewhere said something along the line of "Things that work as if by magic also break as if by magic" .. I've been looking for the reference ever since.

It's a complex issue.

Basically, while you are in theory free to move money around as you please - for yourself or as a service to others - doing so in large quantities will get you scrutinized. If uppon scrutiny there is any doubt as to from where the money came or where it went, you'll be flagged for "money laundering". Once that happens the "authorities" will essentially go with a haircomb through anything and everything you've ever done, and then, uppon dicsovering that you are in fact not a criminal, keep on looking until they actually find something to justify all of that effort they just wasted on you.

> Desertification, increased sea levels causing flooding, higher atmospheric CO2 causing ocean acidification that will kill nearly all life in coral reefs sans jellies, etc etc.

Yes .. or Maybe .. but that all still sounds preferable to an ice age, if kaybe is right, right?

> Global warming probably isn't inherently bad if spread out over enough time, but large temperature fluctuations within a few centuries doesn't leave time for non-human species to adapt.

Eh, I don't know about that - you're not wrong but I don't think this is a relevant/useful consideration given that

(1) given that reasoning "spread out over enough time" everything and anything will work out fine

(2) in the long run (or rather the "even longer run", considering the first point) we're all dead anyways

> global warming is just as bad as a new ice age, which, extrapolating from the past, would be about due by now, if not for mankinds influence

So global warming bought us all a huge chunk of (comfortable) time? Why is it a bad thing then?

This can't be real.. 'PERL itself stood for "Precision Entry and Reentry Launchings"'

Indeed. You'd think of all the people out there, the ones on HN would be a among the first to recognize an abstraction when they see one..

The "speed of light" isn't an intentional speed limit like the ones we have on highways. It's a mental cruth we use to describe a certain relationship that the elements forming our reality partake in .. Hence you can't reason about the "speed of light" having a different value the same way you could reason about a highway speed limit being altered in one direction or the other.

For "relatively small" values of "fail" .. like everyone else. It's just that "relatively small" for Google is still pretty huge in absolute numbers.

I bet Google too can't fail in crucial/major ways like failing keeping google.com online..

No.. Government is not about picking a better bully than your neighboring nation and beating them into submission.

What government provides is a practically viable method (kludge?) to reaching consensus on issues where other more reliable methods (like science) fail to do so.

Should "we" build up an army and enslave our neighbor nations or should we rather build up and industry and fabricate something all of them want to have (but can't produce themselves) and sell it to them for horrendous prices? Both alternatives have the same effect, but which one is "better"?

Science can't provide conclusive answers here .. so what do we do instead? In the past we'd ask some designated mastermind deriving his legitimacy from god or a certain bloodline and such. These days we tend to vote on who that mastermind should be or create institutions that allow for more direct control by the nations subjects.

But nothing of this has to do with picking a bigger bully. How big of a meanie you (as a nation) want to be is entirely orthogonal to being a government (or a democracy).

What difference does freedom make if society is engineered accordingly so that anything but the party line will be lost in the noise? Other than for possible riots, bloodshed and long-term sustainability, is that in any way distinguisable from a "non-free" form of government?

Besides, freedom is only necessary for democracy, not sufficient. So his points all remain valid.