a2decrow

The average person is consuming, not inventing. Human superiority is based on collective intelligence, inventions made by a few exceptional people, e.g. the top 2%. The other 98% are just riding along, not adding anything useful. Take a look at the state of the earth and tell me that's how a supposedly intelligent species acts. The one fighting wars against itself to impose domination, the one justifying most cruel acts with the will of some higher power that is just another invention of mankind's mind. I could go on and on.

It's human nature to think they are superior to anyone and anything.

It used to be that the difference between humans and animals was one is self-aware, the other is not. Then science has proven that to be untrue and humans craved for other reasons to distinct themselves from their animal origin, which one by one are disproved as well.

Claiming something that hasn't been proven beyond a doubt to be true doesn't make it true. It's a thesis that could work out either way. There are plenty of humans that think with a firm believe that earth is the only planet in the universe with life on it. Then there are scientists that think living organisms need water to exist, despite there being organisms on this very planet for which that does not hold true. Water is required for life the way we know it to develop. Outright dismissing it as the only option is a sign of ignorance, not intelligence. The first counter-example would be Artificial General Intelligence, which is estimated to arrive within the next three decades.

Dismissing the possibility of something outright because it doesn't fit into ones thesis or world-view is a sign of ignorance, not intelligence.

It is impossible to transmit speech electrically. The 'telephone' is as mythical as the unicorn. Professor Johann Christian Poggendorrf, Germany physicist and chemist, 1860

Trying to teach them human inventions that are developed by and for humans and then calling them inferior when they don't succeed in using them to the fullest extent is pretty short-sighted. You can't teach every human every invention we ever made either. Some people suck at math, others excel at it. Are the people that suck at it now intellectually inferior to those that excel at math?

I also wrote taking it away, implying humans, not giving it to animals. Educate a dolphin all you want, I don't think you're going to get very far.

What you are describing is called education and technological superiority. Take one of those away and see what happens.

And whether the extinction of neanderthals and other species close to ours is due to intelligence or other influences can't be reliably proven. It's just the way nature evolved and it could have gone any other way as well.

Broad general intelligence? Yes. Field specific intelligence? Not even close.

Think about how dumb the average human is and then realize half of them are dumber than that.

Humans have become the dominant species for two reasons:

1. Our ability to reason

2. Our technological superiority

Many animals can rival or exceed the intelligence of the average human, but due to the fact that they're seen as "just animals" and that they can't communicate with us in a matter we understand (nor care about doing it) makes humans think they are superior in every way. Then, whenever scientific progression proves that animals aren't as dumb as they look, humans have to come up with new arguments to separate themselves from other species.

It's the typical arrogant and limited view of the common homo sapiens.

Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world. -- Arthur Schopenhauer

TFA isn't about honey badgers or their intelligence, but about the arrogant stance of the common homo sapiens on other species.

End of the day, humans aren't anything special. They're just another part of nature.

> is the best thing to happen to the web since ads.

Ads are the worst thing that happened to the web.

The first thing that came to mind:

Eagleson's Law: Any code of your own that you haven't looked at for six or more months, might as well have been written by someone else. (Eagleson is an optimist, the real number is more like three weeks.)

Writing documentation isn't so much a "how" problem, but a "why" problem. Most people writing code in their own time can't be bothered also writing documentation for it.

Writing code is fun (mostly). Writing documentation is not.

Their own ads of course fit the "standards" that they themselves designed. Any other way and they'd only harm their own business model. This is a defensive move against full-scale ad-blockers, nothing more.

There are other ways to monetize without (intrusive) ads. Produce quality content and people will be happy to support it. If your entire business model only revolves around ad-driven revenue and it doesn't work any other way, then perhaps that business model simply offers nothing of value.

Of course not. But even if they were, it'd be only for show. They wouldn't have a say in anything.

I think you're wildly overestimating the intelligence and awareness of the general population.

The media is and has been doing this for decades. If they do it in a totally obvious and outright manner, then yeah, everyone's going to notice, but if they do it in a more subtle way and push their agenda over a longer timeframe, most people won't notice that, or they'll only notice it when it's too late. It's not about brainwashing everyone. All you need is a critical mass and once you're there, you've basically won.

Most people lack critical thinking abilities and they're rather contend with having other people think for them. You don't notice this here on HN because the readers and commenters here are far smarter than the average person is.

Yes, but the number of species extinctions skyrocketed due to human behavior. Natural habitats are being chopped down, nature is being forcefully controlled and developed in certain ways and global problems like man-made climate change are threatening a vast amount of species on this planet.

Humans aren't the only species destroying other animals' habitats for their own goals, but they're the most destructive one by a great margin. To make matters worse, humans possess the means and should have the common intelligence to find a better way. But instead of working together and saving the planet with all living creatures on it, humans are too busy fighting wars in an attempt at imposing domination on others.

> If you mean humans, we don't destroy our habitat.

Right, we only extinguish species after species living on this planet along with us. Mass genocide of hundreds of billions of living beings. And why? Because there are only few humans that are comfortable with the idea that other species may be as important and capable as they are.

> What if most jobs are automated and people everywhere turn to violence to keep themselves occupied?

This will be a slow, step-by-step process where the media will be working against the general population.

Truckers are going to be among the first ones to be replaced with self-driving vehicles. Quoted from The Second Intelligent Species: How Humans Will Become as Irrelevant as Cockroaches (Marshall Brain)

In addition, the mainstream media outlets will not cover the protests of truckers, or the force used against them, to any great extent. To the general, TV-watching public, any attempt at a trucker riot will be largely invisible, or will be marginalized as a nuisance. And any truck drivers who do appear in the media will tend to be selected to be the loudest, most extreme people possible. Therefore, when the general public looks at these extremists, teamsters will appear to be crazy. All truck drivers will be stereotyped with this “crazy” label, and the truckers will lose public support.

This is going to repeat itself until there are almost no human jobs left, if any. The rich will get richer and the poor will be stowed away, out of sight.

Every time I try to educate friends or family about it, I get the tinfoil look and they call me paranoid. Same with strangers when the topic comes up.

The most common (pretty much only) answers I get are that I'm nuts or that they don't care. And this is in Germany, a country where data protection laws and privacy are usually valued and cared about. But recent development over the last few years has shown that it's really just a small subset of the population that cares.

"First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Socialist.

Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Trade Unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me."

Not sure if you're sarcastic, but that's literally all I get from there. Spam and brute force attempts.

The IP addresses fail2ban unbans are banned again 2 to 5 minutes later.

Android is not FOSS. The Android Open Source Project (AOSP) is, but that excludes all the closed Google apps upon which more and more Android apps rely on. Almost every smartphone ships with Android, not AOSP, therefor there really isn't a FOSS smartphone market.

> Privacy will be an issue, and increasingly so.

Do you really believe that? The way I see it, most people just don't care. At all. Else they wouldn't sell their souls to private companies (e.g. Facebook and Google) without a second thought and we'd see more outrage against government surveillance that's being pushed in nearly every country all over the world.

Firefox is unlikely to gain much of a market share with only privacy-focused changes. People care about ease of use and especially performance. FF lost a lot of market share due to its horrible performance, compared to Chrome.

I don't care at all whether people want to sell their lives to a company. If they want to use Facebook, they're free to do so.

What I care about is Facebook creating a shadow profile on me, even when I explicitly go out of my way to block them.

If it would only affect those people that are on Facebook, I wouldn't give it a second thought. But it doesn't. It also affects those that want nothing to do with it, in part through the people that are using it, and that is the major reason for all the Facebook hate.

You can remove it from public view and remove your ability to log into it, but you can't remove any data. Facebook was never designed to "delete" that data, hence all you can really do is permanently disable your account, with the illusion of having it deleted.

Norway.

Let me ask a counter question.

How much innovation in other countries was stifled because of the way the US companies operate?

And to get back to Google and Facebook, these two companies are building walled gardens not unlike the way ISPs in the US operate. They either force the competition out or buy them. They do everything in their power to keep you inside their bubble. In a few years down the road, we may just end up with only the services those companies offer and no alternatives to go to, because everything that threatens their dominance will be suppressed with everything they got.

Just like the US ISPs are doing it and the US government is doing it.

The US getting some of their own medicine certainly isn't a bad thing. Maybe it'll wake them up.

> This would, IMO, signal the end of the internet. "Look up www.google.com" "which one?"

I'm not entirely sure if you know how DNS works.

You do realize that not all technology originates in the US, yeah? The US isn't the center of the world. You don't have a monopoly on technology or IT and in fact, most of it wasn't even conceived in the US or by US inventors.

You need to get off your high horse about "US-America being the greatest country in the world" because it's not.

And to answer your question, no, I don't use Google, nor Youtube and especially not Facebook. I go out of my way to explicitly block them all to protect my privacy.

I fail to see how this affects IANA or root DNS servers in any way (not to mention that IANA can be replaced by a non-US entity if it really comes down to that).

As for those companies, they'll work the same way as before outside the US internet. Regrettably, because the world would be a better place without them.

If this forces non-US Americans to use US IT company services less, there are less angles the US government can use to spy on the rest of the world. Plus, data protection laws in other countries (especially European ones) are far more restrictive.

I don't think there's any reason for us non-US-Americans to care at all about the US internet. Just like we don't care about pretty much anything else that's happening in the US.

Thanks for pointing it out.

It's one of the downsides of autism that understanding the intent of other people can be hard or impossible, so I'm always grateful for hints like that.

They don't have any legal authority to spy on everyone either. Didn't stop them and after it went public, did anything meaningful happen about it?

Our German chancellor, Angela Merkel, went from "this is unacceptable and can't happen under any circumstances and there will be repercussions" to "please don't do it" after the Snowden leaks went public.

There is little political backslash and no legal one. The spy agencies (NSA, CIA, GSHQ, BND, #insertanotherhere) do whatever they want with little to no oversight. And if the public finds out about it, the first move is to legalize it by law and continue as before.