hasbroslasher

> You're free to define experience differently but usually it devolves into defining unknown by unknown.

Many philosophers would suggest that we don't bother "defining" anything at all, strictly because of the tendency for things to devolve into a semantic death-trap. So instead, we just kind of take it for granted that everyone knows what an experience is, at a base level. For instance, it was an Experience to see Jimi Hendrix. However, I definitely have not had that particular experience. There are experiences I could have, such as the experience of going on a roller coaster, or going into space, and ones that I could not have, such as the experience that an anglerfish has when it eats. The question at hand is whether or not these experiences have anything to do with each other, whether there's a "Grand Unified Theory" of experience and consciousness that allows us to make mutual sense of these disparate experiences, or whether there's some limit to what things might constitute an experiment - e.g. the experience of being a rock thrown through a window.

> Experience = event that changes the model of the world you have in your brain

So if I don't have a brain, then I can't have experiences? What if we find aliens out there that don't have brains? Or computers? Are they a-experiential by nature of not having brains, or is it something deeper?

> Indeed, that's why putting meaningless arbitrarily defined touchy-feely words in physics is a bad idea

We're not talking strictly about physics, though. I doubt most physicist professors would not let you bring up questions like these in physics class because they are the subject of an entire field of philosophy. And while there is relevant science to our debate, there's a lot of "soft" arguments outside of the scientific worldview that you should at least read and consider. See Jackson's knowledge argument, Block's Chinese Brain, or Nagel's "what it's like to be a bat" arguments. They "touch" on the uncomfortable ubiquity of things that we "feel" to be outside of a purely scientific view of the world.

> We can deduce from that change that your internal model of the world changed to associate "buzz" with "food" so you experienced our experiment.

This is a bit off kilter. Do people with memory or learning disorders, then, not have "experiences" because they don't learn? What about those who are deaf? You're essentializing consciousness into "ability to learn by hearing and rationally deduction". Computers can take audio input and learn from it with very primitive machine learning models - does that mean that the computer is having experiences akin to our own human experiences?

My advice is to give philosophy its due course! Read up on the touchy-feely stuff because it can be profoundly interesting.

Parable: Company wants to move "into the cloud" and adopts AWS managed services or Kubernetes to recreate and re-platform existing and functional, though sketchy, on-prem services. "Agile coaches" and "Solution Architects" advise rewriting the old code because of its fundamental alien-ness in a cloud-only environment. So it's a rewrite. But of course, the re-write doesn't work, primarily because of fundamental misunderstandings about what properties allow software to scale across many machines, in many time zones, running processes 1000's of times per day. So it becomes necessary to either cut losses and re-write the re-write or decide to start iterating now on the crappy re-write to make it closer in terms of functionality to what already existed in the crappy on-prem systems - which begs the question of why you didn't just iterate on the original sketchy code in the first place.

There are times when rewriting does make sense - rare though they may be. I've only seen a few, and they always had to do with improving stability and reducing the potential for bugs. None of them required you to use the latest shiny to "completely reimagine what software could be doing for your business". I've helped to rewrite subscription-management systems that ended up noticeably reducing churn and cutting out spurious chargebacks from customers who couldn't navigate our bug-prone subscription service wasteland. But some refactors are so labor intensive that they amount to re-writes, even if you're using the same tools and languages. Some code is acutely awful and it needs to die for people to be able to go to sleep at night without having to drink a fifth of whiskey beforehand. Some atrocities don't need to exist.

But, again, if the reason for a refactor or rewrite is summed up as "we're bored and want to play with these new shinies" then you are in for it. If rewriting provides you with some sort of new business capability or fundamentally changes a business process drastically for the better, then go ahead. But in my experience, if a technology or paradigm is fundamentally "so much better than what we do now", then it should work so well with what we do now so well that it doesn't require fundamental rewrites of large software systems. So rewriting things in Python or C++ is great, or using Kubernetes instead of Lambdas or whatever is fine, but it's more important that these paradigm shifts can be incremental rather than a complete recreation of what already exists, that the gulf between refactoring and rewriting can be relatively small instead of two completely different processes.

> You cannot experimentally decide if atoms experience anything, the fact that they do or don't doesn't change any prediction for how they behave over time. It's meaningless, like wondering if magic exists but is actively hiding from us. Paranoia is that way.

This has so much potential to become a semantic death trap - but let me ask if you think even human experience could be experimentally tested? If you put me in a room, what could you do to see whether or not I'm "having an experience"? Would the mere act of placing me there be an "experience" or would it be a false positive? What does "non-experience" even mean? I don't see it as counterintuitive to suggest that normally inanimate things like rocks can have experiences - though their experiences are fundamentally different than ours. For instance, we will never be smelted, turned into concrete, etc. and rocks don't have memory or feeling apparatus like we do.. but they do "experience" reality on a very simple level.

> this sentiment is illustrative of the world that the internet has created. on the internet, you never have to deal with something that bores you -- you can always open a new tab and do something else.

Don't get me wrong, it's not that this is flat-out untrue, it's just that the repeated cashing-in on an old and reductionistic theories of current events is becoming increasingly transparent. It's akin to thinkers like J.B. Peterson criticizing postmodernism 10-15 years after the movement ended, and solely by repeating the arguments that ended it. It might be true or consistent or whatever, but the point is that it focuses the dialogue on a too-narrow set of theories about the world.

Even your own statement, "Internet bad, makes people incapable of dealing with boredom" is a trope that, regardless of its truth value, doesn't address deeper issues with human communication and entertainment. People essentially said the same things about TV's 40-50 years ago: "you don't have to be bored, just change the channel!"

Yeah, this is one tired trope. I'm especially bored of the "Facebook causes the rise of nationalism/fascism" rhetoric - I think it's pretty convenient to scapegoat the Zuck (who is an asshole, oblivious, naive, etc.) with something so complex and fueled by so many factors outside of the internet. "Russians made us do it because Facebook" is such a wonderful cop out because it means we can't really do anything to fix it, and it's totally not our fault. And we're addicted to such messages - that the terrorists hate our freedom, that poor people are just jealous losers, that scientists are moralizing assholes for telling us not to eat steak every day - and we even prefer these messages because they let us be the victim of the cruel outside world, rather than understanding how our own complacency, ignorance, or greed has worsened situations.

None of these articles place as much emphasis on the selling-off of our regulatory systems, the dismantling of election law, the homogenization of American thought in the televisual era, or the truly rampant epidemics of complacency, addiction, hedonism, and consumerism as possible catalysts behind a nation rapidly declining into total social schism.

In theory battery tech can fuel Industry, though the ironic chicken-and-egg of the situation should be clear. Obviously we should invest in updated, safer, more efficient nuclear tech, but the public image is so bad that we might as well use coal and spend extra money on carbon capture

This is some great advice in my opinion. Every project starts from a base - give it a shitty base, and you're always going to have problems. Spend the time to write an OK base that doesn't try to do anything clever but organizes code in a clear and sane way and you'll be reaping the dividends for years to come. There is nothing more valuable than, from day one, unit testing, organizing files in a clear way, preventing clutter, and starting writing basic documentation of how to work with your software. These simple cues will remind you and others of what the expectations are for your project.

As popular as it is to say "just solve the problem in front of you", no one actually does that. No one sits down to work on something with one problem - the sit down with likely hundreds, all vying to be solved. Average engineers will look at one, solve it, test it, put it in a text file, push it to prod, and say "look, done!" Good engineers will look at the whole class of problems and recognize commonalities that inform basic architectural and infrastructural decisions.

I think your point about the personal aspect of work is most relevant. I personally would be mortified to work at a company that was always in the news for various scandals and generally being full of shit. Not that I'd assume anyone who works there to be full of shit - just that I wouldn't want my friends making fun of me for working for the Zuck. Facebook just isn't cool anymore in my neck of the woods and there's no social capital in using it or working there as far as I can see.

Just a note: they do "read" your messages, for example to suggest Spotify music to you. Not sure if that's still a thing, that came out around the same time I stopped using FB.

https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/14/16143354/facebook-messeng...

I'm not necessarily advocating for socialism, I'm just suggesting that the USA government spends more on incentivizing technological innovation in areas that have real payouts for humanity. It's almost a tautology that if you started offering government jobs at $100k a year and funding to work on interesting, novel problems, you'd attract a whole lot of people who are bored and disenfranchised with adtech or high finance.

I think thesis is absolutely ridiculous: "we need a group of new businesses to rise up and make money off of solving tech addiction"

There's not a lot of money to be made in stopping people from self-abstaining from pleasure. If someone wants to quit drinking alcohol or smoking cigarettes, then they can do so without having to pay for much (assuming they're not vulnerable to D.T. health wise). And while there's marginal amounts of money to be made off of nicotine patches or AA literature, these products pale in comparison to the amount of money generated by the alcohol and tobacco industries.

1. Yeah, sure we have a lot of minds working on AE, but are you really going to argue that working on Farmville is even comparable to the task of establishing the infrastructure and social changes needed to make AE universally solvent? No where am I saying we need an Ah-Ha moment. We need people who can work and proper incentives from the supposedly smart people who run the show in government and industry.

2. If you're unfamiliar with the environmental problems and inefficiencies present in our current food system, I implore you to do some research and get back to me. Decentralized, high-efficiency, urban food production is going to become more and more necessary as human populations continue to move into cities and global warming reduces crop viability in much of the world.

3. I don't understand how "establishment of large scale infrastructure" is a blocker to what I'm saying. Large scale infrastructure means you need smart people to design and build things to make a goal possible. You need "large scale infrastructure" like railroads to ship goods across the U.S. but when that was a need in the 17th century no one was grousing about how much work it was going to be.

4. Say what you will, but a system of distributed C02 scrubbers powered by alternative energy is at least a feasible way to prevent a Hothouse Earth scenario. Better than just accepting climatic doom through inaction.

5. Social democracy doesn't mean we become out-and-out Marxists, it just means that maybe we reconsider government in relation to what people need. Germany is a social democracy, USA is a democracy where people go without clean drinking water. Talk about a false dichotomy.

I believe Western imperialism has something to do with it... While it's true that capitalism has improved outcomes for some nations, it's also true that capitalist exploitation in Africa and South America really messed up the way their world works. It's made it so that free markets had something to fix later on, not fixed a pre-existing problem with these countries.

People can choose what to believe and all, but it's pretty hard to look at things like the African slave trade or Diamond mining in Zimbabwe or Sierra Leone and find anything but capitalism and imperialism run amok.

This person is saying is that our economic system incentivizes profit, not that it mandates it for every agent. So while a few relatively well-off, well-educated, and principled Googlers can quit over perceived injustice, many people either can't economically justify such a choice, don't know enough to know that there's a problem with their work, or simply don't care and take the money over morals.

And furthermore, when was the last time you saw someone held to account for their job title? I've done that and every time it results in me alienating someone, because no one wants to lie to themselves and be forced to answer that they work at Raytheon because they think that's the way to do good in the world.

As far as "the price paid" that you mention: the price is not paid in any way. The price is being put on a high-interest credit card and we're paying the minimum. Someday those cans we've kicked down the road (carbon emissions, pacific garbage patch, destruction of ocean ecosystems in general, deforestation, economic inequality, desertification, etc.) in order to sell more plastic trinkets will come back to collect on our outstanding balance.

I completely agree. It's not tech's fault at all - tech companies prey on our basic neural hardware as much as fast-food companies do, as much as predatory banks do, and all for the same reason: to generate capital.

Luckily, I think I'm starting to see more people waking up to smell the societal rot that tech has helped foster, and people are becoming more motivated to fight it. I'm just waiting to see if tech folks can mobilize to push for causes like socialism during my lifetime. That would be the ultimate "Revenge of the Nerds" story line at this point.

Just saying: you can and should find a job that aligns more with your moral interests. I worked at a socially meaningless music startup for the last couple of years before moving into a job in Alternative Energy. While I still don't have all the control and can't instantly change the world at will, I do know that my time spent at work directly improves work in my field and that every good job I do is a good job for wind energy in general, which is one of our few hopes for doing something to fix climate change.

It's true that ultimately there aren't a whole lot of morally "good" things you can do with your compsci degree at the moment. You can work in adtech or building corporate software, ecommerce, etc. to sell plastic trinkets to people and raise your company's stock price. Or you can do ML, which will probably hurt poor people in the near to mid term and probably contribute somewhat to the more Orwellian aspects of modern life. Or you can do some third thing: some kind of applied tech a more physical engineering discipline (energy, spaceships, robots, etc.) that might or might not do anything for the common man.

I get really bummed out that there are so many smart people coming out of the US education system who go to work for Wall Street or in adtech/ecommerce roles. We have the brains and energy and passion to solve alternative energy, vertical farming, asteroid mining, carbon sequestration, and social democracy overnight but our system deliberately misallocates resources to projects that generate capital for the already wealthy instead of promoting one iota of social good. Here's to hoping this is a start of that bigger, necessary change.

This guy completely (intentionally) misses the point to mislead the reader. He does nothing to address actual concerns of organic food enthusiasts like:

1. GMO food is a monopoly owned by a couple of megacorps who claim rights on the seeds of their food and charge farmers "royalties" for growing them, even if they themselves didn't plant them. This is exploitative, ethically dubious, and the result of intense lobby by the genetic engineering industry.

2. Conventional farming usually doesn't give a damn about soil erosion, crop rotation, or any kind of sustainability beyond year-over-year profits. This creates harmful environmental externalities that organic farms have to avoid in order to get their label. While some conventional farms might TRY to do SOME things better, organic foods must do all of them in order to be certified organic.

3. GMOs homogenize crop genetics and provide a vector for a dystopian future of agroblight, where one crop affliction could cause billions of people to starve.

4. The conventional farming industry makes every attempt to lie, mislead, and control the conversation through power and influence (e.g. this exact article). They have an incentive to discredit organic foods as tin-hat woo, to hire scientists to produce whatever kind of study they want, and to inject authors into the public conversation to shape people's perception of the industry. While organic foods companies often resort to equally crappy measures (scare mongering), the end is considerably less bad than the harms of conventional farming as we know it today.

> While I dislike most postmodern philosophy and a good chunk of Foucault's, the core of the article is based on the concept that if you can define how pieces of an industry are named and grouped, you will hold power over how that industry developes.

I'd say there's plenty about postmodern philosophy to dislike outside of this, but I also don't think that this take from Foucault is inherently postmodern. The concept of the "true name" in Abrahamic mysticism is humorously really closely related to Foucault's taxonomy - if you know the true name of a spirit or demon, you can control it in the same way that you can control the image of your business through taxonomy.

This is like 3 Foucault quotes and the rest is an overview of Alphabet, AWS, and other tech firms. It would've been interesting to hear about how his other theories relate to the business world. Not that the article isn't correct in some sense, but the connection to the man's writings is pretty barebones. Low new information density here.

Anecdote: I've discovered features with Alexa on accident before. I was watching Jeopardy at my parents house and someone yelled that Jeopardy was on, and Alexa was like "let's play Jeopardy!" and booted up a game for us. I would have had no idea that Alexa could do that if it weren't for the fact that it's.. uh.. constantly listening to everything that goes on in your house.

What the hell is this? "There are two kinds of people" reductionist nonsense with some "10x engineer" nonsense AND some "you should let people play video games at work" nonsense thrown in to boot?

Anyways, this strange "2 kinds of people" logic never fits in the real world. My old manager was a hacker by this guy's understanding, and he did both roles well. And not all "hackers" are actually all that good at actual software engineering - they might be interested, interesting, different, etc. but they don't ALWAYS ooze productivity and talent. People exist on a spectrum that stupid blog posts like this eschew in favor of punchy, compact worldviews that appeal to people ("managers") who don't have time to understand people personally.

I think there's a lot of hate in this thread for the bot concept. Yeah, most of these text-based bots are bad and useless. Expecting to chat with a computer over text and get meaningful results is a big request, and without the best of the best NLP researchers, you're not going to get anywhere.

However, I do think there's some truth to this article - the rise of digital assistants in Google Home, Amazon's Alexa, Apple's Siri, is, in a sense, the rise of the chat bot. You can text them and they'll do things. You can talk to them and they'll do things. You can even get them to schedule a haircut for you[0], as Google recently demonstrated. I think these bots are semantically identical to what we think of chat bots as doing. If you would've told me 3 or 4 years ago, that people would willingly let a "bot" into their home that listens to everything they say and talks back, I would've been skeptical, to say the least. Now, even my hippie roommate has one of these things. I still don't get it, but to claim that "bots are dead, long live humans" misses the mark about how fast speech to computer/computer to speech tech is evolving. Watch the video and be... amazed:

[0]https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/8/17332070/google-assistant-...

So yeah, the idiot VCs missed the mark - this isn't going to be a consumer revolution, led by a few scrappy start ups, one-man teams, and dreamers. It's a revolution in data collection, human-computer interaction, and AI that's already been taking place behind the scenes at Apple, Google, Facebook, and Amazon for years, and will continue to as long as they hold the tech world's best AI talent.

r/iamverysmart - funny screenshots of the Dunning-Kruger effect and people generally thinking they're God's gift to intellectual life.

r/holdmyredbull - extreme sports cousin of "hold my beer". Other fun ones in this circle include "hold my juice box" and "hold my fries". I tend to think of watching someone go skydiving without their own parachute as universally interesting, ymmv.

r/AskReddit - Good survey of the current human experience, usually leave here with a feeling that your questions about the world and lives of other people aren't as unique as you though. Sometimes it's banal/off topic, though.

r/ELI5 - "Explain like I'm 5" usually contains layman's questions about science, maths, history, and other sometimes unapproachable with great responses from people who know their stuff. Almost always leave here with something new to think/talk about.

r/ProgrammerHumor - I'm a programmer, but even some of my non-programmer friends can enjoy the jokes over here.

I actually disagree with this. I find that customized Reddit leads to the same feedback loop/conveyer belt feeling that made me quit Facebook out of annoyance with always seeing the same ideas propagated out again and again. Browsing Reddit without an account lets you avoid the urge to comment on things and also turns you on to loads of new things that you otherwise might not've found on customized Reddit. Granted, I still have an account I use sometimes, I just get more enjoyment out of the front page when I don't have any control over what I'm seeing.

A mass conspiracy is a kind of a disingenuous characterization of classist/racist oppression. The Ku Klux Klan is, by definition, involved in racist conspiracy - they are famous for meeting together to plan and execute racist acts of violence/oppression. People who work at Microsoft are obviously not involved in planning violent attacks against poor/brown people, but are often still involved in a much more complex and convoluted racist/classist conspiracy.

When large companies, e.g. Wal-Mart, donate to political causes, they often contribute to ones that will help their bottom line. No matter how benevolent Google and Apple might seem, they and some of their employees and executives DO provide money to political campaigns that do some of the following:

1. Prioritize issues irrelevant to limiting race/class oppression to the top of their talking points. For instance, Hillary Clinton is memorable to voters not because she provided a good solution to widening income inequality, but because she held feel-good positions about immigration and LGBT issues. That's not to insinuate economic/racial issues are the ONLY thing worth caring about, but that they should be a top concern for those who want to eliminate racism and classism from our society. The effect is that by voting for such candidates (who often quietly fall more towards the center, economically), you perpetuate inaction on income inequality.

2. Directly support racist/classist legislation. Giving money to (or voting for) a campaign that opposes a drastically higher Federal minimum wage law directly supports income inequality. Giving money to a campaign that will not support deindustrialization of prisons, drastic improvements in education in low-income areas, or healthcare for all directly supports income inequality and institutional racism. Giving money to a presidential candidate who insinuates that minorities and immigrants are criminals, similarly, directly supports institutional racism.

Now, even if you are one of the "good" ones who only votes for Bernie Sanders, etc. you may still be the beneficiary of racist/classist laws that your company seeks to uphold, implicating you in this conspiracy. For instance, Amazon's political funding that opposes higher Federal Minimum Wage means that they have more money to pay Data Scientists and Marketers and Front-End Designers, hence their ability to hire you. And if you're a good employee, your work will enrich both you and your employer, and some of this cash will flow back into the cycle of supporting racist and classist legislation.

So we (assuming readers of HN are largely well paid FTE employees) are left in a situation where it's REALLY hard to escape our connections to this conspiracy. We can choose to work at places that aren't Amazon or Google (often for less money than they'd give us), we can try extra hard to make our individual efforts efficacious, we can vote with our dollars, we can support other non-political causes to lessen racist/classist oppression, etc.

TLDR; this is what people mean when they say "all White people are racist" - not that you're personally going out there each day and doing all that you can to make black people's lives suck, or purposely waking up and thinking "how can I take more money from the disadvantaged today?". But rather that you benefit implicitly from systemic racism and classism and don't do a whole heck of a lot to fix it. My involvement (and some of your involvement) in perpetuating racism and classism is much higher than I'd like to admit and it's really hard to fully disentangle myself from the privileges that my race, class, upbringing, and place of residence have afforded me so far in life.

The costs of calling the police to your own restaurant are wayyyyy higher than you seem to be thinking. Everybody in the building will remember their time at your restaurant as "that one time the police showed up and took that guy in who was screaming the whole time about how the hostess is lying and he's a father of a family of four, goddammit!"

Even in the best case, where the cops show up, talk to the guy, cite him (or something) and leave, something like touching/grabbing a staff member or making inappropriate comments is going to be really hard to catch or prove in a court... Having your manager go up to the table and calmly tell him that it's time to go is going to be way less likely to disrupt other customers.

And last, what restaurants have you been to that have CCTV? Fast food, definitely, but I don't remember the last time I sat down for a nice meal out and noticed security cameras on the walls. This produces an atmosphere similar to calling the cops into your restaurant: you're implying that people who go there are sketchy enough to deserve being surveilled or brought in by the authorities at any point.

While I agree that there is a lot of hype around data as an asset/product, I think the author's being a little glib about its value. Clearly, in the current moment, targeted advertising is a huge trend, and I'm a little curious at which point the author thinks this will settle down. In the past few years all of the major tech giants have rode a wave of "data is power" to the top of the market, while companies who have struggled to do so effectively have fallen comparatively short. Targeted advertising has been shown in many studies to be more effective than traditional marketing and as a practice it necessitates the collection of large amounts of personal data.

And sure, there are costs to leaking personal data and then getting sued, but a lot of companies anonymize their data as a practice AND can't really be held accountable to consumers AND even if you do get sued, it's likely not enough to put a company like Google or Facebook anywhere close to going out of business.

It's reasonable to suggest that there will be some kind of government intervention into specific practices surrounding data acquisition, but I think a full overhaul or ban on personal data collection is unlikely: the moneyed interests simply value this data too much to allow for (American) politicians to disrupt its influence on their stock portfolios. Couple this with Congress's inability to act on numerous problems it faces and the fact that most current Congressmen and women (and their constituents) really don't consider this a top-tier issue and you've got a whole lot of reason for things not to change course. For data to become a real "toxic asset" there needs to be a dramatic sea change - it's not as much of an inevitability as the author suggests.