dachris

Hopefully it doesn't get implemented, but obviously they could force OS providers to implement this in Android and iOS.

Power wants to stay in power.

In a healthy society, citizens should always be wary of those in power and keep them on their toes, because power corrupts (and attracts already problematic characters).

Not driveling when they get thrown some crumbs or empty phrases ("child safety", "terrorism").

It is, but cui bono. I know that local software companies in my city had meetings coordinating the local software dev wage level. There's no reason to assume something like this isn't going on at a larger scale too.

Yes, perfect AI content has multiple issues, that need to be addressed differently

- treating certain content in the same way that drugs are treated. Lots of countries are already moving towards age restrictions for social media.

- some kind of hardware-provided signatures for images and video, anything else must be assumed to be generated

Will be interesting for kids growing up - the peer pressure is now already very high to have smartphones, to be on Whatsapp, Instagram, TikTok, this will only get worse.

Maybe if I have kids I will found some Amish-like community with only 90's tech (only half joking).

I've also seen elderly people whose time was past (very old, bed-ridden, lost their partner) go into into what's basically hunger strike in the nursing home. They said "I'm not really hungry today", eating very little, getting thinner and thinner until the end.

It's now legal here, but family, religion and tradition can be obstacles to assisted dying.

In case you don't want to leave that way, you have to prepare ahead of time. There's different legal means in different countries, e.g. advance directive covers the case where you can't decide yourself anymore.

That, or the fast road to dictatorship. Escalate until you declare martial law, never to be revoked. The end.

The Ghorman massacre in the recently aired season 2 of Star Wars Andor is the playbook version of this.

I don't think the US is there yet, but the direction seems about right. As you say, step by step.

It's a nice graph, I think the most well known one is in "Stocks for the long run" [0]

I'm more concerned how it will grow over the next n (lets say 50) years.

Somehow, it doesn't really fit into my head that there will be another 7 doublings of money invested stock market over the coming 50 years (as others have commented, 10% annually is doubling every 7 years).

Reality is complex of course, there's inflation, there's taxes, dividends don't grow the stock market cap.

Still, I would assume less growth due to several factors. The last few decades have seen several tailwinds that can't repeat in the same way:

- falling corporate tax rates globally [1]

- falling interest rates [2] (since 1980, until 2020)

- rising P/E ratios (partly in response to falling interest rates) [3]

- demographic expansion [4]

- improvements in diversification (index funds, theoretically you need a lower risk premium than when investing in individual stocks)

And I'm not sure that headwinds coming from environmental degradation of many types are already priced in.

I still think that stocks will do better than bonds (there's a risk premium [5], those are real assets, there's innovation and growth), just be cautious about assuming that the future will mirror the past.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stocks_for_the_Long_Run

[1] https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/global/corporate-tax-rate...

[2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/DGS10 (choose max in the time scale)

[3] https://www.multpl.com/s-p-500-pe-ratio

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population

[5] https://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar/ ERP currently at about 4.4%

Context is king.

Start out with Typescript and have it answer data science questions - won't know its way around.

Start out with Python and ask the same question - great answers.

LLMs can't (yet) really transfer knowledge between domains, you have to prime them in the right way.

It's amazing, yes, and at the same time, it makes perfect sense.

(Somewhat) similar mechanisms are at work whether you're pulling together stars into a galaxy, hydrogen gas into a solar system or water towards the drain of your bath tub - a pull towards the center, the centripetal force, slight variations producing "artifacts".

Thanks for the pointer to bounded rationality, and the well-chosen words "are not capable of doing anything about". Yes, the doomer attention economy and also most media in general constantly bombard you with useless information, making decision-making very hard. What's the most important concern? The likely collapse of the pension system (here in Western Europe)? The war in Ukraine? Climate change? Trade wars? Pick you poison.

I'd add to the "mental health" recommendation to go low on such information, as it is mostly noise and non-actionable.

Awareness that in the long term, the tides might change, doesn't fall for me into this category. It's just a basic fact of life that it easily forgotten in the busyness of day.

I also share this kind of existential angst. The future is unknown - yes, such a scenario might come true. As might nuclear war, a truly deadly pandemic etc. And yes, there is too little done to mitigate the potential impact. And lots of unknowns.

However - don't let it drag you down. Think about what you can do, personally, as a person that has agency, to mitigate the potential effects for you, for your family, for your community.

And the answer for me, personally, is the same as for many other of these issues - stay in good health both physically and mentally, keep in touch with the people around you, have a buffer (financially, resources, time), raise awareness of the potential impact. And don't be a doomer, acknowledge that you might be wrong - because you would have been (up to now).

Why is this such an issue with crypto?

Wealth status is often very well known for public figures and entrepreneurs. People are driving around in $200k cars.

Is it due to the liquidity of cryptocurrencies that $5 wrench attacks work better?

Except that everyone with a fusor can feed the gold atom a neutron which converts it to unstable Au-198 that decays to mercury. Fun times when you can (theoretically) transmute gold to mercury with stuff you can order on the internet.

Unfortunately, in the end, bad health is likely to come get you anyways, you just have a higher likelihood of more and more healthy years.

A good friend of mine lived healthy, and still went hiking in their 90s. Yet, they had a stroke and are now bedridden.

If you just drop dead after having had a nice live or go through months or years of frailty and bad health, it's all in the cards.

If the internet would go offline "for real" even for days, all hell would break lose. It would not be as bad as electricity going offline, but it's in the same category now. No credit card payments payments (food, gas), no logistics. Prepper stuff.

The real scenario long-term is that quality content like Wikipedia could either be taken offline, be poisoned by AI or taken over or censored by authoritarians or corporations or interest groups. Like social media and parts of the normal internet already.

So archiving is good anyways.

To your actual question - quality non-fiction e-books would be valuable. Wikipedia is a superficial skimming of human knowledge, lots of the real stuff is in books (think medicine, agriculture, algorithms, engineering etc.).

Practically, a home WIFI has a very limited range, so just handing out sheets with instructions to your neighbors would work. And for a wider mesh network, you'd need to make do with whatever evolves in that scenario.

That may be the very long run. Taking it strictly, Russia never had real democracy. And they are trying hard to export that model.

There's this board game we played as kids - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scotland_Yard_(board_game) where you move around the London public transport system chasing Mr. X (everyone always wanted to play Mr. X) - it was really funny

The paperclip maximizers are already here, but they are maximizing money.

One recent HN comment [0] comparing corporations and institutions to AI really stuck with me - those are already superhuman intelligences.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43580681

Migrated a small-ish project from ASP.NET Framework (.NET 4.8) to ASP.NET Core (i.e. .NET 8) including EF6 to EF Core last year. Even though it was pretty smooth sailing (the application was already using MVC), it was still a few weeks work.

Rewrite queries that are not yet supported on EF Core, create some new DTOs, create drop-in replacements for stuff that isn't there anymore, create plumbing to connect some old stuff to some new stuff. Figure out what's the new replacement for XYZ and use it correctly to not break anything. Replace nuget packages that are not maintained anymore or have so few downloads that they are a supply chain risk.

You need to test every endpoint, every query in your application.

And in the Microsoft World you're still pretty ok, overall, it's quite stable.

God forbid you put your money on the wrong web framework (not even talking frontend) in the Java space. There's still Tapestry/Struts/Grails/JSF/GWT/Play etc. applications serving your request out there. Saw some banking website with ".do" urls recently (indicative of Struts).

Unless we get superhuman AI that can do such migrations all on their own, those zombies might have a longer working life left than lots of developers. Many companies just can't afford to upgrade - there's so many systems built over decades that just do what they should do. Why shell out tons of money to just get the same functionality?

I wouldn't go that far (there's still the possibility that things change for the better for whatever reason), but those 60%-70% of the US in global stock indices really do look like single country risk now.

Refreshing to see the negative number/percentage displayed in green though.

Europe somehow is often a bit lagging behind the US - in good and in bad - the obesity pandemic is also just really starting to show here as well.

Scammers upped their game here also in the last few years and especially months.

No week in the local news without a love/crypto/elderly scam going into the 10s to 100 thousands.

Especially in the last few months, in my social circle, scammers really increased in density and quality - fake email accounts, AI calls, real people "you opened a crypto account with us" and "it's your niece Mary" calls.

The fragmentation of Europe might really help here - no one in their right mind will pick up on a call from another state anymore (or some people, even an unknown phone numbers are off limits, for that matter).

Yes, highly recommended - beware, it's 4 long books (which is a good thing), with 1+2 and 3+4 belonging together. And the trees are called Tesla trees ;-)

As well as uranium glass beads, which glow under UV light and are measurably radioactive.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_glass

I'd probably not wear those as jewelry.

Yes, the market reaction so far has been very tame, considering that the stock market is supposed to be forward-looking, and there's another 4 (or at least 2) years of the same behavior, policies and politics we've had for just 7 weeks.

Extrapolate that 30 times out in the future, even leaving out feedback loops and nonlinear systems.

I've thought about this for some time now, and am surprised I haven't seen this voiced more often.

The way almost all societies have allowed themselves to be completely dependent on a few providers is mind-boggling.

Someone else 10,000 miles away has the kill switch for your phone, your credit card, your brokerage account, your TV, likely your HVAC if you're into home automation, maybe your car.

Google site:bogleheads.org elderly scams - the list goes on and on ...

I've also got elderly relatives, and even with their pensions secure (European-style pension system), there's lots of people going after their money. Trying to prepare them for encounters with online and real world scammers is an ongoing process, e.g. by recounting the cases that I read in the news to foster mistrust.

I've lost count how often an elderly family member (who is still sharp as a tack fortunately) told me that the "police", "your beloved niece", or "Microsoft" called them.

The real exception is Norway with its https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_Pension_Fund_of_Nor...

A friend of mine has an e-bike with regenerative braking using a rear hub motor.

It seems to have a recovery efficiency of about one third.

We once went up about 1200m in altitude difference, where it was completely empty. After having gone down again, it had recharged enough to work normally for the remaining 20km of our trip, driving in flat terrain.

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