blackbrokkoli

I had the exact same thought when reading the title and only came here to see if there would be clarification in the post body. No, it's just...a government.

This has to be peak tech-bro thinking. Also, it is obviously not the solution. What would prevent this, ahem, union from developing the same cancer US (and by extension) Western governments have right now?

The problem is at a societal level, which makes it so uncomfortable. If you discuss this, you are also discussing astronomical SF salaries, Move Fast And Break Things, Software Is Eating The World and all that stuff the HN community is very proud of.

So let's dicuss a not government-government instead! Also see the AM/FM dilemma (Actual Machines / Fucking Magic)...

Right you are, thanks.

I thought "this word is so absurd nad definetely not German, no need to translate it". And I was wrong. Leaving it up as a fun fact.

Fair enough.

I mean, it could be both, no? Maybe it was gradually adopted and changed from another technique. But maybe it is just one smart guy.

The interesting thing is whether the species (or even other species) will adopt this over the next 50 years, I suppose.

That is such a cool example of observable evolution!

I suppose there is no proof that they weren't always able to that to scale certain trees, but it's safe to say the advantage is really kicking in just now with scaffolding, lantern posts and birdhouses.

Back in school, I learned about the majority of the Biston betularia butterfly turning black at the oneset of large-scale coal industry and then turning white again after stricter emission regulations were implemented - but this is way cooler IMO.

There are so many things wrong with this comment.

First, it's unbelievable human-centric.

Furthermore, out of ~3000 snake species, only ~600 are venomous and only ~200 are dangerous to humans. That's 7%!

"Sinister" implies intentionally evil-doing, which is something only advanced primates are capable of (maybe corvids and some other mammals, not sure).

It's not even the most creepy/disconcerting kill mechanism. Apart from competitors like the Komodowaran (bites you and then stalks you for days while you are slowly dying from the cocktail of bacteria in its mouth), what about stuff like viruses? They don't even live, yet they are highly effective in an evolutional sense and very good at killing lots of stuff in lots of disgusting ways.

If you have a phobia of snakes, ok, but please refrain from turning that into some pseudo-intellectual wisdom...

That is an extremely simplified view of non-software.

Hardware standards shift because of an Apple PR camopaign. We stopped using zeppelins only after one disaster of several dozens made very public by live radio coverage. Non-Sufficiently standardized rockets explode because countries can't pick a measurement system. The auto industry in a country changes overnight because a dictator decides that the roadside to travel on shall be switched on a whim.

Just like software, infrastructure/hardware/whatever is an unfathomably complex web made from science, faith, half-knowledge, geopolitics, coincidences, rules, dick moves, physics and random tweets.

I don't think we are winning anything by trying to lift software onto some kind of pedestal of specialness in every regard...

It is meaningful, because a large part of crypto culture seems to be based around hand-waving and selling you an underdog no-big-government empower-the-people story

I mean the advent of business computing was very literally the systematic eradication of 6 million Jews.

IBM's custom designed punch cards and the absolute openness of census records (church books are rarely encrypted) was the only reason the third Reich was ever able to census all European Jews and then systematically deport them in any reasonable time frame.

That is obviously very different from new WhatsApp TOS, but this incredibly prevalent opinion of "Well, nothing really bad regarding privacy and tech did actually happen, right?" irks me a lot.

I mean you could also say "If you get thrown into jail unjustly and have nobody to advocate for you that just means that nobody cares for you at a person" and be right in the same way - that does not mean that this system is particular good and everyone should be proud of it.

Polemic metaphors aside, I don't think the relationship you propose (quality app > network > you get help) is very consistent or reliable. Say I make an app for soccer moms with millions of users - do you think I would get significant Twitter support from my customer base if my app went away? Conversely, don't you think I can get the radicalized 50 customers of my pro-genocide to scream very loud on Twitter for weeks?

This does not even touch on founders/devs who want to stay anonymous for whatever reasons and a lot of other edge cases. It is a shitty system.

I don't, and this is not really an Apple problem - you can see the same on YouTube, Steam, gPlay, Windows Store, PayPal, Facebook Marketplace and whatever else. But I agree with you: Stopping to view tech giants as some kind of godking would be a nice first step, as a society.

I mean, good for the app, but at this point this really makes my blood boil.

Each month, I use several hundred different "apps" (broader meaning)- how many of those are written by a two-person teams in Iraq or Kazakhstan who do not have thousands of monthly Medium readers? How many of your cache cleaners, debuggers, flashlights and mac utility managers are written by some kid in Northern England who never even heard of HN?

Every time somebody writes a "my app got finally restored :)" post hundreds or thousands of equally good and legit pieces of software get thrown into the abyss - and why? Because the author speaks no English, has no network, does not tweet enough. What a shitty reason.

In the long run, this makes the internet and tech culture as a whole more and more "Silicon Valley" and less and less diverse - and plain worse. Just because FAANG - the guys supposedly at the spearhead of AI innovation and diversity - cannot be bothered to moderate, except when there is a PR thread. I consider that quite the disgrace.

I will be first in line to cynically complain about inappropriate topics on HN, but why do you think this particular post is irrelevant?

Software culture is partly hacker culture, and Facebook is probably one of the most visible showcases of this culture - and therefore somewhat worthy of discussion on HackerNews, wouldn't you agree?

You could probably write a book about that, here is my favorite:

Illegally using Facebook log data to breach the accounts of journalists who he did not like.

This made me laugh, thank you. Do you have source on the WW-1 detectors? Sounds intriguing!

> Predictions are vague by their very nature and this is a hell of a lot clearer than Nostradamus & co.

Humanity has literally only one way to gain knowledge about the world: Making a testable prediction and then testing it (The Scientific Method).

Just because other people used their authority to make even worse arguments does not mean these are good.

"MOSTLY RIGHT" seems to mean "a pilot project around silicon valley (or in a big Chinese city) exists".

I've visited a dozen countries and I've never encountered an AI system to prevent interpersonal violence. AI gunfire detection system seem to exist solely in a certain country with a tendency to tack startup solutions onto deep-rooted societal issues.

This is a recurring theme throughout the article. The average hospital runs on Windows XP, not a sci-fi network of smart-watches.

Virtual artists are somewhat respected for sure, but AI-generated art is a niche for nerds. I say "art" you think Picasso, not Google Labs.

No, no one passed the actual Turing test yet. The public discussion was doomed from the start, since Turing himself published several variants. This led to an explosion of (mostly dumb IMO) variations that are much easier to solve - which are getting solved.

Honestly, the original predictions are written badly. They are full of bullshit words (many, some, there is) making them not really quantifiable. Also, they contain an implied focus on US tech centers, which allows the existence of a single PR-stunt pilot project as a reason to answer "Totally Right" to anything proposed. Maybe I just don't the point, but this smells like pseudo-intellectual reasoning for "amortality will definitely be achieved before I die, see?"...

Very cool!

Small Feedback: The "Show HN" tag does stand out a lot - giving it the vibe of something like a site administration announcement or an error message. Maybe you could consider toning it down a bit?

Otherwise, great work. Let's see if I can replace normal HN :)

This is such a tired argument.

Sure, politics is in everything down to the design of the armchair you are arguing from. That however doesn't fucking mean that all papers shall be considered equal?

Do you think you would be able to differentiate the value of a census statistics from a 2015 paper written by the state of Nevada from a 1930 census statistic paper from Nazi Germany? Excellent!

Because very obviously there is a line where science crosses into bullshit. Sure, the line is multidimensional, ever changing and very blurry. As you say, from finance to family everything factors in and there is no true objective way of doing science. That does not however mean we as humanity can get away with defeationist pseudo-enlightenment by just giving up every analysis of nuance or motive.

What Google is doing here is not in the territory of science anymore - you can and should argue that - and should be treated as such. The price of freedom is eternal vigilance, whataboutism won't cut it.

Edit: grammar

Yes, and that is ok.

But then nobody should call whatever they are publishing "paper". Because if you "research" with a PR-directive, it is literally not science. If they want to "research" like a corporation, kick them out of Google Scholar and scientific discourse, right now, please.

I don't see the rebuttal.

The article seems to be only about what the best way of selling your company is (whether or not you technically sell).

There isn't even anything in it about just running your own company indefinitely.

And the article does not mention "user" or "good software" once, staying only within an economical framework ("how to get rich") - which is literally the point of GP.

If only there would be like...some incentive...for people to optimize their webpages towards usability. Like if we image a...giant monopolistic search engine...rating pages along certain parameters?

Maybe Google should just build something like this if usability is in their interest. Someone pitch this idea to them!

Soo my styling would be split 37% / 63% between my business logic and CSS files, with one million Medium posts telling me how to hack that weird combination from hell into specific looks? That sounds truly horrifying!

I said it before I will say it again:

The new thing, and the key point here is scale.

You can discuss persuasion or cognitive bias away until everyone gets an aneurysm, sure. Some example: You can't not communicate. So even not persuading is persuading. What if the presidential candidate would just not give a scheduled speech? How do you communicate information objectively? Casual language creates bias, so does scientific language, simple language, passive language, active language. "Cognitive Bias" might as well be called "Cognition", since it is just how the brain works. You have to think "tree" immediately when you see one, even before you validated that all leaves are real and that the whole thing is not a projection on an transparent screen. Otherwise you can't function.

But: Big tech throws us in a situation where a small group of people influences our perception on a massive scale. Facebook changes a sentence on their homepage and a billion people read it. Youtube raises some parameter (yeah I know that's not how AI works) by 0.01 and the political opinion about the Grenfell tower disaster changes ever so slightly - for 30 million people. Google's filter has a tiny hole and some troll broadcasts wrong medical information about gout to 200k people.

Every time one of these things happen, the world shakes. Dozens die or survive. Demonstrations form and elections swing. Opportunities are wasted and ideas surface.

I am not arrogant to actually propose an easy solution to this, and I don't think there is one. Just be aware that "I can always go and stab someone" is not a good argument when you are discussing a fully automated drone swarm with kill authority.

Got to love a passionate opinionated essay with that kind of depth!

I definitely took away a lot from it, but I do not quite agree with their rather rigid duality of "this has end-user programming" and "this has not". Like they give Hypercard as an example of end-user programming and then imply that there was no end-user programming software in that space afterwards.

If I look at a particular niche, it looks more like a...multidimensional sine wave?

Look at writing code for example:

Text editors add configurability and plugins and customizability until they are indistinguishable from an IDE, and a bloated one at that. Some startup makes the next minimal editor and here we go again. Alternatively, the disgruntled dev goes back to vanilla vim. Cue a long vimrc, cue plugins, cue neovim. And so on.

Notice how all of these merging and splitting branches trade-off toolchains, embodiment, convenience, automation and a hundred other factors defining whether you could call it "end-user programming" all the time.

The same thing can be said about Browsers, E-Readers or Games. I think it is important to be aware of the complexity so you can add sensible improvements to the infinite iterations instead of thinking that we are just one cool invention away from the glorious goal of end-user programming.

Well thanks for the interesting background info on some of these points, but what is your conclusion here?

I readily admit that I just brainstormed to support my initial association, so not all points are going to hold their water. But you seem to agree to a direct relationship of free market and feudalistic traits, so do you actually agree, but wanted to introduce nuance?

Uh, the US in comparison with Western Europe?

Student loans, house loans, car loans, payday loans. Food deserts, prison standard of living. Social mobility in general. "Right to work", worker protection. At-will firing. Non-existing safety nets. Days of vacation and parental leave. Average savings per capita.

Most of the above are absolutely more feudalist (not sure about the neo prefix). Some of these are literally unimaginable at the other side of the pond.

We can actually. That is what sleep labs are for. I don't know if this exact setup has been done, but there is a lot of stuff like making people cram for an exam and then varying their sleep opportunity.

If you mean that you cannot literally make people sleep: No, but you can manipulate consistently by just setting sleep opportunity and then measure the actual sleep time on top of that to draw conclusions.

No it won't.

I mean, maybe this one will, but the research regarding sleep duration is very, very sound. We are talking upwards of 50k people. Effects of sleeping too little are tightly and consistently associated with Alzheimer, cancer growth, bad emotional control, mental disorder episodes and heavy machinery accidents.

I would say sleep is where cigarettes were in the late fifties or early sixties:

Researchers and people who deal with the matter professionally already know too well how severe effects are. Ask for example ER-doctors in countries with summer/winter time, who are preparing for heavy load every time the switch makes people sleep an hour less. Yet, the vast majority of people, even quite knowledgeable ones, deny any negative effect of missing sleep, caffeine is freely available in children's products and sleep-deprived truck drivers flatten family cars every week like clockwork.

I see the article more as a broader metaphor for the AI hype. Take, I dunno, video recommendation.

Sure, YouTube itself proably built insane stuff in their engine you could never replicate with classic methods (ignoring whether the YT algo is any good).

However, if we are just talking about the Vlog of your real estate company, you should probably A/B-test whether your viewers prefer order by time or clicks and implement a decent title search bar. And kick the consultant hyping you up about ML out, now.

So my takeaway is that is not about whether AI is never useful or about 2D steering, but about using the right tool for the right job.

And building on that, I have to give the author probs to demonstrating an alternative solution to I problem wich I would have definitely solved via AI.

I am pretty sure you could write the same article with the roles reversed.

That in itself does of course not take away from the article, but I am catching some negative undertones how Japan is "behind" or "unable to change" because of their society. I guess you could even open the bottomless barell of a discussion about racism, but my point is just this:

Seeing "them" as "behind" is a bad way to think about it and prevents true understanding.

Family staffed restaurants which revenues are 90% regulars remake their website and the agency slabs a 4MB hero image on their "landing page". They of course don't need any of that. Only clicks the website gets are people checking the opening times or showing their friends how grass-roots it is. To literally quote the article "Once a precedent has been set for things looking or behaving a certain way then everybody follows it, regardless of whether there is a better solution."

Consider the memes about the weird distorted discolored vector graphics everything tech now has [0]. Consider JIRA managers talking about a 4 second loading target for web pages. We are actually subconsciously aware that "our way" is just as random, weird and wrong, we just like to default to "ours=the way".

Fun article - definitely made me think - but IMO the real takeaway is: The Overton window of design is arbitrary and way more influenced by what $IMPORTANT_PERSON said in 2003 than by logic or sense, and we are not there yet.

[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/starterpacks/comments/jwsagt/big_te...