danaris

With Roko's Basilisk, if you believe in it, the most rational thing to do is to put forth every effort to bring it into being. Because if you don't, then you will be one of its targets when it does, inevitably, come into being.

(I am not a basilisk believer. I think this is all absolute horseshit. But to understand someone's motivations, one must think like them.)

Various courts have already invalidated clauses of click-through agreements that no reasonable person would expect to find in such an agreement.

Terms of service are not an absolute "I'm rubber you're glue" type shield against all possible accusations of wrongdoing, however much companies would love us to believe they are.

The water can be a closed system.

But that's more expensive to operate.

So most of them don't do it.

Show me actual statistics that a supermajority of new and proposed datacenters either are currently using (for new), or plan to use, with clear financial projections for how (for proposed), closed-loop cooling systems, and I'll consider conceding this point. Until and unless someone can do that, you can point to the option of such systems until you're blue in the face, but it's meaningless.

You don't seem to understand how renewables actually work.

The idea that you need so many batteries to store enough energy to last the entire winter indicates that you don't comprehend how good solar panels are in 2026. (...Or 2006.)

The idea that renewables are unpredictable in anything remotely resembling the same way as a casino indicates you don't comprehend how renewables have ever worked.

It's true, we don't have 100% control over the output of renewables the way we do with fossil fuels*. But that doesn't mean they're unpredictable enough to cause meaningful problems for grid-scale renewable energy. And if you think that solar panels don't produce power during the winter, well, for one thing, you're going to have to explain to my parents just what was offsetting huge chunks of their energy bill the last several Upstate NY winters.

And...batteries are getting better and better. Give them a few years, and it won't be at all unreasonable to store a season's worth of energy, at least for a house, and probably for a town. (I have no idea if the way they scale makes it significantly harder to do that for larger areas and larger storage volumes.)

* If we have the fuel. And that's a large and growing "if".

> The main problem of renewables is that it is intermittent and that fact remains to be solved.

It is solved.

Grid-scale batteries are being mass-produced today.

It will continue to get even better, but it is reasonably well solved even now.

Exactly. And the dangerous mindset tends to be worse than just "more money quickly": it's far too commonly "if this can't become the next Facebook/iPhone/ChatGPT, it's not worth doing." The only options are "take over the world" or "fail"; there's no room (in many people's heads) for a product that makes a decent, steady profit and continues to do so over the course of many years.

I think we're running into (or at least pretty close to) a Two Guys Fallacy here:

There's still a strong libertarian streak in HN posters, in a variety of ways.

However, there are also (mostly) different posters who have more vocally shifted the site's Overton window to the left.

These days, I find it fairly common to, for instance, make a comment that points out the very obvious problems the Republican Party has created in recent years, get downvoted to -3, and then upvoted to +5 (or vice versa), all within a few hours. This would suggest that there are contingents of posters (or at least voters!) in both camps.

And much of that assistance is not a guarantee: they'll have to jump through a number of hoops to get it, and making a single mistake on a single form, or having one non-liquid asset that's too valuable on paper, may mean they get disqualified. At best that means they need to start the process again; at worst it's all over and they cannot be considered, at least for a certain time period.

It is, simultaneously, important to know about that cliff, because it's real and it causes untold hardship, and really, really dangerous to view poverty as a road to "easy money" in the way your first sentence (likely inadvertently) implies.

But "employment" is tracked as a binary, not as a "number of jobs someone is working".

So if person A takes 3 jobs just to get by, there are fewer jobs left for person B. (Not quite 2 jobs less, because it's not perfectly zero-sum, but generally at least 1 job less.)

So while I certainly wouldn't make the claim strongly, as I don't have any data, it would at least make sense for the lack of living-wage jobs to increase unemployment rates.

...What? Opposite ends?

The Shift key is right next to the / key.

The Command key is one key away.

Even on laptop keyboards.

I can trivially chord Cmd-Shift-/ with my right hand.

> Keyboard shortcuts for those menu items are what most people will learn -- save, print, cut, copy, and paste will be the common ones that a lot of people will know.

I would say that it's true that the keyboard shortcuts for those items are the ones most likely for people to learn, but not true that most people will learn them.

I've spent 15 years in (tech support/programming for) academia, working with genuinely very smart people who use computers every day of their life, many of whom are actively looking for better ways to use those computers in their teaching and research, and 9/10 of them go to the Edit menu for Copy and Paste every. single. time.

To a large extent, I believe it's a holdover from the earliest days of the Mac, when the mouse was brand-new, and many developers had to essentially be forced to even support it, let alone treat it as a first-class interface device.

I agree that it would be nice if Apple would have more keyboard navigation available by default now than they did then, but given that it is readily available for those who want it, I don't really see it as a huge issue.

The "few" I'm talking about are the politicians who pushed for the referendum, and the politicians and media execs that cheerfully portrayed it as if Brexit was going to cause Europe to give the UK everything it wanted with zero drawbacks or tradeoffs, as if they were still the Mighty And Unchallengeable British Empire.

And in any case, the point of my post was the "suffering", not the "few".

> (kind of funny those legal arguments never came up BEFORE it could even be put up for a vote, again showing the level of confidence on display)

Actually, IMO, it shows one of the weaknesses of our legal system.

The courts can't rule on something that someone's talking about doing. They can only rule on actual legislation.

It would genuinely be great if there were a formal legal process for writing a bill, submitting it to some particular court (maybe the top state appeals court?) for review, and only after that review letting it be voted into law.

Hm, which is worse: An entire country of millions of people suffers from the shortsighted actions of a few with reduced quality of products, increased prices, worse access to other countries, and a host of other problems...

...or we have to listen to some people whine?

You are talking about what is.

Shimman is talking about what could be.

Responding to "hey, we could make our workplaces better by making it possible to elect our bosses rather than having them imposed on us as absolute dictators within the workplace" with "but you can already choose your boss—all you have to do is abandon all your coworkers, your salary, your routine, and likely your home and geographical region to go pick a different unaccountable absolute dictator" just shows that you aren't even having the same conversation that shimman is having.

And the worst part is you don't even seem to recognize it.

You got yourself into an extremely lucky position one time, and now that's made you think that's a viable solution for everyone who has problems with their bosses—and that anyone who thinks otherwise is just "not bringing value".

The only possible way to make our workplaces systemically better is by collective action. Unions. Workplace democracy. Stronger labor protections.

Everything else is just crab-bucket mentality.

There are very few accessibility features that increase usability across the board for everyone.

If they did, they'd just be called "features".

Disabling high-contrast display makes the colors more aesthetically pleasing.

Disabling large-print text allows you to view more text on the screen at one time.

Do you think that the way a jury trial works is that they call the jury into the room, show them a few screenshots, and then immediately say "right, time to give your verdict!"?

If this were ever to go to a jury trial, both sides would get to present their evidence, which includes explanations of how Luanti is different from Minecraft.

If you were correct, then basically every accusation of substantial similarity would be upheld in court because apparently juries are morons and they don't get given the full facts.

However, you also have failed to provide any support for your assumption that this would go to a jury trial; the article doesn't mention any kind of trial. DMCA notices are adjudicated by the platform owner, with very little transparency, and certainly no jury of peers. If it doesn't get resolved by the counter-notice, then maybe Luanti will sue (Microsoft? Google? Tracer.AI? all of the above? who knows!), and maybe it would go before a jury. But given how lawsuits in the US go these days, that's pretty unlikely. Odds are if there is a lawsuit, it will be settled before a jury ever gets selected.

Do you understand what the difference between "creation" and "release" is? And which one actually involves inspiration...?

Yeah; notice that "on behalf of": Microsoft isn't even the one filing this, they've outsourced their enforcement and may not even have known about this before it blew up.

It favours large copyright holders, with deep pockets and ranks of lawyers on retainer, over small copyright holders.

That's...straight-up false. Unless you have some source for this, you're just lying here.

Yes, it's inspired by Minecraft. The screenshots are of voxel-based survival crafter games you can build with their platform. The textures are not Minecraft textures. They are similar in style, sure, but that's not remotely the same thing. You can't copyright a general visual style, nor can you copyright a game genre.

To call this anything but "baseless" would be hilarious.

Benefits which are laborious to apply for, many who should don't qualify, structured to make you feel ashamed of having them, and getting cut repeatedly by the GOP.

It means we live in a world (especially in the US) where if you aren't earning money, you die within months. Unless you are one of the tiny fraction of people who have enough wealth to live without an earned income—like the heads of all the LLM companies are.

Anyone who has enough wealth to maintain roughly their current standard of living for the rest of their life, and still works in a job with a 6+ figure compensation, is doing it out of greed.

No, I'd get distracted by a cool rock, or something, and lose track of my gazelle.

This is absolutely untrue.

Sure, there are autistic and ADHD traits that are primarily a problem because of the structure of our modern society.

But just you try being severely ADHD, and ending up with your yogurt going bad on the counter and growing mold because your clutter blindness made you not notice it was there for 3 weeks. Or you start reading a good book, and 10 hours later you realize that you haven't had anything to eat all day, and neither has your cat. Or you just literally cannot force yourself to do basic household chores, and because you're undiagnosed you don't know why, and your roommates/significant other just decide you're lazy and selfish and kick you out.

There are plenty of neurodivergent traits that have never been net-positive, regardless if they have some specific evolutionary reason for existing. (We don't even know that they do; they may just come along for the ride with the other traits. We don't yet understand the neurophysiology of these conditions well enough to say to what extent they're just knock-on effects of something deeper.)

There is no actual "news" about that, because it is, and always has been, bullshit.

People talk about it every time Apple releases a new major OS update with UI changes that make macOS and iOS look similar, or a new laptop form factor, because it gets clicks. It's basically the new "Apple is Doomed!" (Which, in case you weren't paying attention to the tech press pre-2010, was the perennial narrative around them—and yes, it did take years after the runaway success of the iPhone for the stories to stop.)

This is an extremely common fallacy I've seen lots and lots of people fall into with respect to LLMs. In nearly every case, they use the fact that "some humans can't do X" to claim that LLMs are, in fact, basically conscious/human-like/AGI already.

This is deeply untrue, and is highly likely to lead them to bad conclusions about what we can and should do with LLMs.

> I know people who are like that too.

This is part of the problem being described. You are part of the problem.

"Some people are bad at X" is not comparable—is not even in the same category—as "LLMs are fundamentally incapable of X".

Every human (at least to a first approximation) is capable of understanding, of learning, of remembering things, of doing math, of counting the number of "r"s in "strawberry".

What you are observing is that some humans are careless, do not take the time and effort to understand, or have internalized the idea that they're "not smart enough" or "not the type of person" who understands things like <whatever>.

That has nothing remotely to do with the fact that LLMs have no consciousness, no self-awareness, no cognition, no understanding. At a fundamental level.

You are indulging in a Black And White Fallacy here.

UBI doesn't mean no one works. It means no one has to work just to live.

And even if you want to ignore the actual scholarly research on the subject (which is ample), we have plenty of examples of people who would never have to work a day in their lives, and yet they still do so, sometimes even despite millions of people actively hating them for it: the very wealthy, particularly those who inherited generational wealth.