ileonichwiesz

> Would you ever be tempted to make such a claim (that everyone is close to the same in ability and effort is the main determiner of success) about athletes?

Well yes, absolutely. People don’t do quadruple axels on the ice because they were somehow born with the ability, they can do it because they practice figure skating every day for years. Innate ability (or in this case, let’s be honest, mostly genetics determining body shape) certainly makes the difference between becoming an Olympic gold medalist and just being very good at the sport, but you need to get very far in the field before it truly holds you back.

I don’t have a lot of experience with high-level professional sports, but I’m a classically trained violinist, and I’ve seen first-hand how a lot of the abilities that many people chalk up to “talent” (sense of rhythm, perfect pitch, composing music) are just skills that can be learned. Some students might need to practice more than others, sure, and some might reach a higher ceiling, but I firmly believe anyone can reach a high level with applied effort.

“I don’t have the talent to paint so I won’t learn to do it” is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

That’s exactly what we do at the Fortune 500 company where I work, and it’s surreal.

In my first year I didn’t know any better, so I tried to set myself some actual objectives (learn to use XYZ, improve test coverage by X%, measurable stuff that would actually help).

Fortunately my manager showed me how to do it correctly, so now my goals are to “differentiate with expertise” and to “empower through better solutions”.

Every year I open up the self-review, grade myself a 5/5 on these absurd, unmeasurable goals, my manager approves it, and it disappears off somewhere into the layers and layers of ever-higher management where nobody cares to look at it.

I’m not denying this has been the case for some people. I myself have switched to pretty much exclusively wearing trousers from my favourite tiny brand that cuts and sews them <100km from where I live, and I’m privileged enough to always try to choose quality over price. But quality products have been getting much harder to find in the past years, and I was under the impression we're mostly outliers.

Looking at my family and friend group’s spending habits, it feels like everything is purchased either from Temu or from one of those super-low-price-super-low-quality stores that have been taking Europe by storm these past couple years (i.e. Action, Tedi, Pepco). It’s kinda maddening.

Just like the tide of fast fashion caused people to seek out local-sewn clothes made from high-quality materials, right? Right?

Quality isn’t a differentiator if the market is saturated with indistinguishable garbage. Everything is made in sweatshops out of the cheapest plastic available, and I don’t see why software isn’t next in line.

> How well do LLMs handle handwriting recognition?

Pretty well for neat modern handwriting, but much worse for cursive or messier writing. They also really struggle if the text is at an angle. I have some recent experience with a project where we tried to use LLMs to digitise handwritten specimen labels from the 19th and early 20th century, and the success rate was far too low to proceed with that approach.

Hallucination was also a common problem, with the output often replaced by a similar (but more common) name or word.

I’d assume you could improve the results by using a model trained specifically on handwriting data sets, grounding the model, or using existing purpose-built OCR tools - but frankly that’s above my pay grade.

The thing is that taking an interest in baking a cake doesn’t actually feed anyone. If you’re not going to spend your time baking (i.e. actually get involved in politics, to drop the metaphor), then what’s the point?

My wife is a biologist, and as I understand biology on an academic level is just near-constant arguments about seemingly basic terms and concepts.

Life, species, gene, organism - we don’t actually have consistent definitions of what those are. Biology is the science of fluid spectrums, so any rigid classification you’d propose breaks down at the edges.

This is the problem with all of those „gadget but repairable” companies. It sounds great on paper, but the low adoption rate means that parts are hard to come by, the products get discontinued all the time, and your local electronics repair guy has never seen one of those before.

The army of faceless delivery gig workers can’t exactly pick and choose. They deliver the food or they get banned from the platform and replaced by the next guy.

I remember reading that early systems could be defeated entirely by putting a pebble in your shoe, but I’m sure they’ve improved a lot since.

Very true! As I remember, Google+ was a step towards figuring out this issue - instead of a general Facebook-style „Friends” that includes all sorts of different people you know (or once knew), the idea was that you’d have multiple „circles” of acquaintances that you could post to separately: family, college friends, coworkers, etc.

Of course that didn’t really pan out, and the social network itself collapsed under its own weight within a couple years without ever reaching widespread adoption. It’s interesting though, because I think it really was ahead of its time - these days I just have multiple different groupchats that I text, and that’s basically the same thing.

I think some of this is caused by the non-obvious mechanisms of how interactions on these platforms work.

When you replied to a thread on a phpbb forum (or when you reply to this HN thread), your reply „lived” in that thread, on that forum, and that was that. The algorithm wouldn’t show that reply to your dad.

I remember liking a comment on Facebook years ago, and being horrified when some of my friends and family got a „John liked this comment, join the discussion!” notification served straight onto their timelines, completely out of context. I felt spied on. I thought I was interacting with a funny stranger, but it turned out that that tiny interaction would be recorded and rebroadcast to whomever, without my knowledge.

Similarly, commenting on a youtube video was a much different experience when your youtube account wasn’t linked to all your personal information.

If you comment on a social media post, what’s going to happen? How sure are you that that comment, however innocuous it may seem now, won’t be dredged up 8 years by a prospective employer? Even if not, your like or comment it’s still a valuable data point that you’re giving to Zuckerberg or similar. Every smallest interaction enriches some of the worst people in the industry, if not in the world.

The way I speak, the tone I use, the mannerisms I employ, they all change depending on the room I’m in and on the people I’m speaking to - but on modern social media, you can never be sure who your audience is. It’s safer to stay quiet and passive.

> And it's not even worth it... none of those kids will be a professional sportis/musician, it's just wasted time...

I can’t agree there. The point of extracurricular activities is to teach the kid new things and expand their horizons, not the (admittedly highly unlikely) possibility that those activities will become their career.

Most children won’t become historians either, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t teach history at schools.

> Your peers are now way more aware of child abuse, kidnappings, murders, than your parents were.

They’re technically more aware of those risks, sure, but any of those crimes are less likely than ever before. This increase in awareness and anxiety isn’t based in data, it’s based on sensational lies and myths. Those lies cause strong feelings and get eyeballs and clicks, and so they spread really well through our fractured media ecosystem.

Nearly all child kidnappings are performed by one of the parents, and there’s no confirmed case of a child ever dying from poisoned Halloween candy.

I’ve been getting back into movies this year and my 2018 laptop has reached the stage where it’s no longer useful as an everyday tool, so I’m turning it into a home media server.

I’m only a couple days in, and I’ve already learned so much about networks, containers, codecs, ffmpeg, and so on.

At that point you just open up the back of the TV and drive a screwdriver into the WiFi chip.

The people you mentioned are also wealthy and have access to a level of healthcare far beyond the average person.

Agreed. If immortality was discovered tomorrow (or at least some sort of anti-aging treatment), there’s no way it would become available to a regular person. All of us would still age and die, but we’d be ruled forever by ageless ghouls.

> Plus it raises all these difficult questions about the philosophy of mind and theory of personal identity - is the backup actually you? Or do you die, and you are survived by someone else who isn’t you but thinks they are?

You don’t need sci-fi mind backups for that. How certain are you that when you go to sleep tonight, the person who wakes up tomorrow will be „actually you”? How certain are you that all your memories were lived by „actually you”?

The answer, I suppose, is that we don’t know what „actually you” even means, how consciousness works, or why you’ve even got a (seemingly) continuous internal experience.

A lot of institutions, even crucial ones that we all depend on to manage important aspects of society, have barely started adapting to this newfangled fad called the internet. Maybe they’ll figure out what to do about generative AI somewhere around 2060.

If you’re going to get into forgery of historical memorabilia there’s probably easier targets than Superman comic books, no?

In that episode a bored Mr. Burns hires Homer as his „prank monkey”, paying him with loose cash to play cruel pranks on others and humiliate himself. Homer eventually regains his dignity after refusing to ruin the Thanksgiving day parade, even for a million dollars.

I think “using technology” is just too broad, and a distinction needs to be made. Screen addiction doesn’t just mean using a screen.

You’re right that it’d be pretty much impossible to refuse to engage with any modern technology these days (unless you lived in an Amish community or something similar); but obviously there’s a huge difference between responsible use of tech where useful or necessary (and for fun, too, in moderation!), and lying in bed mindlessly scrolling through Tiktok and/or watching cable tv for hours every day - which I see a lot more people doing in the past couple years.

> Urges of all kinds (never wanted to slap someone and didn’t?) can be overcome with an only a little discipline.

Okay, but where do you think that discipline comes from? Is it an inherent quality that a person is born with? I’d argue that it’s not, and it’s something that needs to be learned and exercised. Many people didn’t get the opportunity to learn it (yet?), and I don’t believe it makes them somehow inferior.

> Sure, maybe some people really do have thyroid problems; but this idea that overweight people are somehow not responsible for their own condition is ridiculous and dangerous.

You’re not wrong, but I think you’re missing the bigger picture. These are systemic issues, and solving them on an individual level can only go so far.

People are responsible for their own health, but we also live in a world where billions of dollars are spent on marketing and lobbying to get them addicted to junk food and make it the easiest choice. It’s still a choice, but the game is rigged.

“Just decide to stop” may have worked for you - it worked for me, too! - but on a societal level you need societal change. A lot fewer people smoke today than just a couple decades ago - not because everyone has individually somehow built up stronger willpower, but because of legislation that made tobacco harder to market, more expensive, and forbidden in many public spaces.

Smoking used to be an unavoidably pushed part of life, too. It was linked to strength, manliness (or femininity actually, depending on the target market), independence, etc. Tobacco company mascots loomed over us from billboards, and told us on TV that cigarettes make a person cool. Untold billions of dollars were spent on marketing literal poison, using every trick in the book, and it worked. People smoked all the time, everywhere - at the dinner table, on planes, at their desk at work. People burned their houses down because they went to sleep with a cigarette still in their mouth.

Just because something feels like an unavoidable part of life, it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s true - it could just mean that that giant advertising companies convinced you that it is. I wonder if in a couple decades we’ll look back at screen addiction the same way we look at tobacco now.

> taking it out has different social implications

It definitely does, but in my experience a standalone camera is usually better received than a phone.

I think it’s got to do with the implication of easy shareability. Pointing a phone at someone always brings to mind the idea that the photo can be sent anywhere within seconds. Are they going to post you on their instagram story? Are they going to send it to their friends and laugh about you?

The friction to sharing photos is so much higher with a standalone camera that I think a lot of people feel much more comfortable with one pointed at them.

Then again, that same friction quickly becomes a problem for the user - I know I’ve lost a lot of my photos just because I couldn’t be bothered to connect the camera, transfer the photos, organize them, back them up etc.

> You don't become addicted because of luxury.

The definition of a luxury is “Something that is not essential but provides pleasure and comfort.”

I’d actually argue that you can only get addicted to luxuries. You wouldn’t say you’re addicted to food, water, or shelter because you need to have them every day.

I guess it’s time to pop it open and do one of those classic “how I rewired this thing to work how I want” HN posts.

> Consider: this is the worst they will ever be.

This is probably what people in the 18th century thought when they saw that digesting duck automaton [1]. Technological progress isn’t a magical linear thing that always leads to things getting better over time.

There’s some very hard problems to solve before the promises made here can be made true, and it’s not a given that they will or even can be solved. Building the robot was never the hard part.

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