dofm

Thank you so much for this! Definitely seems likely I just missed out on the joke.

I would guess that this is sort of an embedded joke about the use of British regional language/accents as a world building framework? A brief google suggests it is not from the books.

I am of the age/schooling/class background where people make this reflexive correction entirely unironically. I know several older people who do this, and I remember the cultural campaigns over the “ten items or less” signs in supermarkets.

Oh! If there is some running joke here that I missed then I stand admonished :-)

(Though it is a somewhat dangerous one to deploy without context)

Is there a clip? (I have neither the energy nor the streaming service to get into GoT)

It's profoundly annoying that it's correct, isn't it! Every time I wince at reading something that feels wrong I have to remind myself that it’s ultimately only wrong because of convention.

(I do occasionally slip, and correct its/it's, your/you're or they're/their/there in someone's comment, but only if that comment is aggressively or nastily calling someone else stupid.)

You are very much talking about late era StackOverflow there.

What marked it out originally (and was visible in some other less-travelled StackExchange sites rather later) was a culture of holding replies to a sort of account in the reply comments; people urging each other to make their replies better-sourced, less hollow, more responsive.

The goal of being non-duplicative alas ultimately is always going to lead to a culture that polices itself too hard. I am an LLM cynic but I think it’s possible that LLMs could actually help steer that process more gently, guiding submitters to likely answers but also helping them fine-tune a more specific, narrow, never-asked question.

My personal rule as a recovering grammar school victim: don’t correct nits if you’re not going to add some cool trivia or at least provide some gentle, kind way to navigate the same confusion next time.

Less/fewer is probably a lost cause, and a little bit of why is this kind of useless correction. If those who correct can’t or won’t explain why one is correct over the other, then it simply isn’t.

ETA: a fun comment below points me to a running joke I was unaware of; my apologies if this was an instance of it that I missed. I am not really a television person but this feels like a significant bit of cultural ignorance on my part.

If that was in the USA, it might have been the only way Nokia could get the carriers to sell the E61. It's hard to believe now but US carriers were aggressively against phones having wifi. It eventually arrived on major carriers as the E62 — without the wifi (and with out the VoIP if I remember correctly, though I may be misremembering)

It looks like one of those spam shooty game ads you get between Youtube Shorts.

Prince of Persia is a piece of contemplative, subtle, beautifully, artistically minimal motion puzzle art. God knows what that is.

Just one thing you could do is not drag Prince of Persia into this.

Please.

> Your dismissal is based on the person rather than the substance…

It's fully based on the substance of the point as well. DHH's view is not just wrong, it's wilfully misleading, on a topic of enormous significance, to further a bad faith point. He could have retracted or amended it when presented with the facts; he has not. So this is a problem of substance as well as person.

From there yes, I get to a point about the person. IMO it is a useful practical definition of madness to pretend that someone acting in bad faith can be trusted to do it only on a single divisive topic.

Given two people, one a manipulative antivaxxer and one not: are you saying you don't factor your view on their anti-vaxx thoughts into their recommendations on other fact-based topics?

For me, these people simply get deleted from my brain, as far as possible.

These are simple judgements about the likelihood someone's opinion on a topic I do not know about is going to be good. When I know that their other opinions are clearly wrong and held in bad faith, I am going to take that into account.

(Where religion comes into things is where it becomes mostly a question of personality.)

> Yes, the model of an OS running various off-the-shelf apps for various tasks will soon become obsolete.

Define "soon".

Banks in the UK have thirty million customers each. They have moved away from web interfaces to apps on well-controlled platforms.

Social media doesn't use the mobile web; it's not good enough.

Neither of these applications for a phone are simply going to surrender to agentic environments on a phone that de-emphasises apps.

They both have a need to fully control that experience, and yet they are polar opposites in terms of seriousness.

We can't even stop voice assistants acting on commands they mishear from TV shows, youtube clips, radio.

Aside from the Spectrum, the Amstrad CPC (CP/M!), at various times a secondhand BBC Model B and then later the family PC, I wrote complex programs for a Sharp PC-1246 (because I had the cassette interface).

https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/1421/sharp-pc-1246/

This was the very opposite of unsatisfying. I don’t recognise this idea that computers sucked.

AI-assisted coding is, to me, way more soul-destroying than hitting the limits of a simple home computer. In most regards I feel like I have reached the end of my interest in computing, and the pivot I had in mind — teaching - looks like it has been joy-deadened too. Nobody is going to want to learn how anything that is not AI actually works, tech people insist that AI will replace (they say augment, they mean replace) teachers and trainers, politicians seem to be listening, and non-tech people now increasingly resent technology.

I barely recognise the industry I spent my life in; I do not recognise the evident enthusiasm for a world that is abandoning a whole, transformative pedagogy in favour of the programming equivalent of games consoles: button pushing vibes.

I am not at all of the opinion that AI has no value, though it does not have anywhere close to the value people insist it must have for me. I am learning, trying to find an ethical angle on it that doesn’t make me feel uncomfortable and exhausted by the hype.

But it is the final nail in the coffin of the joy of tech work for me, and as a single middle-aged man I perceive this as life changing and very likely life-shortening, in the way that psychologically unhealthy things are a health risk for older adults: unless I find something that gives my work life a sense of connected purpose again, I figure I will be gone before the Spectrum makes it to fifty.

So yeah, no. No.

Fundamentally if I could have got the same outcome from an LLM as the “author” of an AI-generated piece, I value their effort at zero.

The more generative AI content there is in a piece, the less value it has per word.

Deep down our brains seem to know this, too.

LLM content is smooth, without novelty or surprises or shared amusement, and in text we have not summoned up ourselves, we are looking for that as a proxy for connection with the author.

I have used this analogy before but it’s like a rollercoaster without jerk or jounce; there are no thrills or interesting quirks for our brains.

So much so that when you see an AI-assisted piece of any length that has human-written sentences in it, they tend to stick out more, even before you have fully read the text, whereas the LLM words scan past so easily.

The thing that brings this home for me is that the final output of an LLM very rarely makes me chuckle at whimsy or weirdness, but the more disordered thinking traces more often do.

A gentleman is someone who can play boogie woogie on the public piano but doesn't.

I am not sure that this is the case.

The app had access to data about the friends of its participants.

AFAIR that included attributes that were set “friends-only”.

And playing boogie woogie on public pianos in airports and railway stations. (Should have gone with this, it’s so much worse than karaoke)

Also karaoke.

It doesn’t harm people. It’s just cringe.

Need a "website is Claudish; skipping to next" one-pager.

Do they really not understand that their website uses the most definitive form of design slop?

A friend of mine phrases it as getting sunburn from browsing Expedia.

> Imagine the implications of a human shaped robot?

Now imagine an army of those that can't function without access to a couple of cloud providers.

That simply won't happen. It's a massive vulnerability both in terms of downtime and poisoning, and it's a problem in terms of latency.

Serious robotic compute will be much, much closer to the robot. If not we're all screwed.

> London was 97.7% white in 1960.

I don’t actually believe this statistic, as an aside, but if we stipulate that it is true, it still doesn’t remotely mean 97.7% “ethnic English”. That’s a radically wrong implication.

It’s a little closer to DHH’s point about the percentage of British people (the Welsh, Scots and Northern Irish are not simply “ethnic English”).

But it’s still very wrong. At that point it was a ninteeen-hundred-year old working international port city, it has had a large population of Jews of European descent for centuries (the first large community being so notable that they were discriminated against in Magna Carta, after all), various displaced populations after WWI and WWII, a very large Irish population, thousands of Italians, many Dutch.

In the 1800s French Huguenot refugees and their immediate descendants made up perhaps ten per cent of the population of London (figures vary, considerably, could be 3% or nearer 15% depending on the boundary definition you choose and that at the time of their arrival the UK had no formal immigration policy so no exact numbers — but over 200,000 settled in mainland Britain). A truly astonishing number arrived and the city simply made room. But they didn’t leave; they assimilated. Same thing happened with Dutch exile craftsmen.

This happens a lot in London’s history: https://refugeeweek.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Historyof...

So he is wrong (and IMO ought to have known some of this) and you are not at all on the right track either.

People just have no grasp of the nearly unique reality of London as a historical melting pot. By 1960 its diversity was eclipsed by American cities like New York, Chicago and Philadelphia, but this idea that London was somehow traditionally “ethnically British” to the point of being a quaint monoculture is fully crackers. Just not true. The difference since 1960 is just more visible because we started adding more literal colour from the Commonwealth.

A place worth visiting for Brits who don't believe this and tourists who are interested:

https://www.londonmuseum.org.uk/docklands/

Super-cool museum space dedicated to London as a port city.

It’s not the same, though. I just addressed this in a reply to a sibling comment.

Aha, the common HN tactic of expanding someone’s argument until it appears ridiculous and then attacking that. But I will bite.

It tends to only be when someone is egregiously wrong or (as in the case IMO) acting in deliberate bad faith on a topic of massive public concern, like this. Because these people are a waste of psychological resources.

I totally write off proselytising antivaxxers who I think should have reason to know better, I tend to write off climate change deniers who should know better, and yes, I tend to write off educated people who mislead with statistics to create intellectual cover for xenophobic, bigoted thugs and their antisocial campaigns.

This is not an exhaustive list, but it’s a good one. Other people who get written off tend to have a nasty streak on a topic of some divisiveness. For example I am not religious but not anti-religious; I am anti being deliberately or loudly cruel, posturing or nasty about it either way. People who are like that can be like that, but they will not get to tell me about their professional interests as if their awful behaviour is just a quirk.

YMMV, but I am now middle aged and I don’t have the time for this anymore. Freedom of speech isn’t without consequences for loss of respect. If you think my position awful or lily-livered you are fully within your rights to let it colour your judgement of my opinions on technology.

2.5% I meant to write there. And I know this because I just found that 2.5% elsewhere that I meant to write 0.75%.

School is now distant enough for me that I have reached the brain fog age where I cannot be commenting on internet things intermittently while writing documents…

I am slightly abusing/overstretching the concept, to be fair; other commenters are not wrong to remark as such. But still.

Touché. I mean it has almost the same meter. I get that you're disagreeing with me, but have my compensatory upvote.

Yes. I am broadening the definition of "media" and "publication", maybe, though it is posts on his own publishing platform and performances at his own breakaway conference.

But if someone misrepresents deliberately on a topic of polarising importance, why would you spend any time listening to them on any other topic?

I would (still) listen to him if I did not know he wrote stupid wrong things on other topics in bad faith.

Of all the teachers I have ever had, at school and university, I can think of only three who struggled to add value to the original material. One was in the middle of a nervous breakdown (of a kind that genuinely would not have been out of place in the John Hughes movies of the day, but that contributed to him passing the following summer); the other two were in the middle of significant crises of different forms.

So that's about 0.75%.

The rest were either competent, good or amazing.

(Then again, one of the remainder was internationally famous for being a (self-acknowledged) media whore and while I know he added value it wasn't always to the subject at hand)

> Concerns with his politics aside, I do think there's a truth to what he's talking about here

One thing the AI era has changed for me is how easily I spot Gell-Mann amnesia, of which this is an unfortunately strong example.

His politics, even putting aside their nature, are framed with deliberate misuse of facts and data; why would he be someone to listen to in any depth on any other topic?

This is such a terrible implied indictment of the schools you attended that I feel sad for you.

Not sure the US Department of Education did much that would influence this either way, except if the AI was being used to correct income-disparity effects on education.

It doesn't mandate curriculums, choose technology, anything like that? Only recommendations.

They might have been able to monitor its effects but they wouldn't have been able to direct its use or non-use; that's not what they did.

Essentially it was/is an anti-discrimination organisation, making sure that states gave an education regardless of wealth/race/status.