john-radio

My assumption was that they simply have a contract with openai.

I know that's X's story, but why do you consider it "far, far more likely" for that to be true?

> what other unknown, better coordinated, better funded, interest groups might be doing this sort of thing on a massive scale.

There is no better-coordinated or -funded lobbying group than the military-industrial complex, which is, of course, all in on Israel.

Yeah, I think the root comment of this thread is talking out of his ass. Third-party trackers are not needed, and wouldn't make sense to use, to discern browser market share; browsers self-report their identity and operating system unless specifically configured not to. For example, my User-Agent string in my GET request to retrieve Hacker News is: "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.15; rv:120.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/120.0".

This comment is the slippery slope fallacy because the person responding to you has rightly pointed out that not every situation that's described as a "groupthink bubble" actually is one; sometimes it's just people not wanting to hang out with guys who drop the N-word "as a joke" or overtly support authoritarianism or whatever. Maybe the assholes getting shown the door in such situations always tell themselves that "Society is about to get torn apart by me getting treated this way" but thinking it does not make it so.

> I personally know FANG engineers with half a dozen years of high-profile work who had to spend weeks training coding golf and algo&data structures trivia before passing the first round of interviews, all because these trivia games bear no resemblance with real world software engineering. In fact, I will go as far as to claim that they serve more as ladder-pulling than actual technical assessments...

FizzBuzz is a trivial technical problem, though, not a leetcode medium or even an easy. I agree with you that you shouldn't have to grind leetcode all day in order to be considered a valuable software developer; but the existence of people selling themselves as "engineers" but who can't solve fizzbuzz would go a long way towards explaining how we got into this leetcode situation in the first place, because such a person would not be able to be successful as a software developer and they need to be weeded out during the candidate search somehow because they are around and they do want the job.

You've crystalized for me what I've always liked about this story, it implies that for some (horrifying?) reason the aliens are totally familiar with non-sentient meat.

> I assume the author doesn't have the resources to fight Firaxis in court over this anyway.

Bigger corporations than Firaxis have made that same assumption and lost. There was a great story recently about an Adelaide woman who represented herself in a suit against Google for years and finally won: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-10-23/janice-duffy-wins-12-...

> or just letting attrition nibble down their numbers without having to announce layoffs.

When you say it like that it sounds mean, but it's a pretty civilized way to handle downsizing if you ask me.

It's spectacularly well written, an engrossing read for sure.

How dare you tease us with that pornographic hypothetical?

I'd take that bet, given that Stallman is in fact still alive

It's not just a matter of buying one, if I recall correctly. There were a lot of customs issues with its non-obvious vehicle classification.

> The field of philosophy is already ripe with ideas from hundreds of years ago that an artificial intelligence can use against people in debates of free will, self-determination and the nature of existence. This isn’t the battle to pick.

Uh, wouldn't that apply equally to any other topic that has been argued extensively before, and to any tenable position on those topics? Like, I can make ChatGPT argue against your LLM sentience apologist-bot just as easily.

That helps, thanks! Not a good look for Sotomayor there either.

I'm not sure where you live, but try googling about the terms "free camping" or "dispersed camping" for your area. There are lots of natural areas (edit: in a lot of places) where you don't need a special permit to pitch your tent.

That link doesn't seem to support your claim at all? It only says that Sotomayor and Kagan were the subject of inquiries to universities as part of this investigation into the entire Supreme Court, not that they are accused of any wrongdoing.

I've never read anything more out-to-lunch than this in my life. Clarence Thomas is a signatory of this code of conduct; in what way has he avoided impropriety and even the appearance of impropriety while accepting hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of free vacations, housing for his family members, a six-figure recreational vehicle, free private schooling for his child, from straight up lobbyists such as Harlan Crow, on whose affairs Thomas would later rule without recusing himself or even disclosing the existence of these frank bribes that had to be dug up later by journalists? Every decision with Thomas's assent on it should be considered corrupt and legally invalid until proven otherwise.

I don't know whether Einstein meant "the intelligent few are more intelligent than the masses, collectively" or "individually," but it's not fair for you to say that one reading is "loose metaphor" while the other is completely straightforward; either interpretation is sensible.

> Perhaps it is possible for applications that have small set of requirements.

Well, for existing applications it is extremely difficult, not because Elixir lacks many important features that C# delivers (although I'm sure it does lack some, and vice versa in a big way), but more just because rebuilding any project that's had hundreds or thousands of person-hours poured into it, that's currently satisfying hundreds or thousands of business requirements which may or may not be documented, is a huge project with few rewards; the investment is huge and the return on investment is... I mean, being on {sexy new language} is nice, but nobody's paying you for that.

But that's not what the OP's job is talking about. They just got a different job using Elixir, and are learning the technologies the same way anyone else does, and they're excited about this instance of it enough to write about it.

Sure, but using ideas for the examples that are in fact bad ideas would strengthen his argument.

A lot of people have stories where they got no respect in their 20s at all, and then they made change X and into their 30s they started getting a lot more respect.

But another huge factor in all this is that 20-year-olds just get pushed around a lot, especially in our workplaces.

> Raking in absurd sums to tweak linters or buttons may not be the worst thing in the world, if it also didn’t lead these bored people to dream of becoming architecture astronauts by introducing absurdly complex tools to solve imaginary problems.

I'm forced to sit back and admire a sentence that's as well wrought, funny, and true as this.

Honest question, really - what do you actually like about it? I get that it's an amazing technological feat; it must be really wild to see your car just Knight Rider itself along. But... It's not like you can actually focus on other things, right? Is it really less stressful than just driving yourself there?

Wow, if that happens I can really see myself getting an iPhone. Haven't used one for must be 8 years now, but the disrespect from Google towards the open internet has been pretty galling, and the voice commands and speech to text are absolutely fucked, and the exclusive presence of uBlock Origin on Android (of all systems!) is the only thing keeping me on it at this point.

Your questions are really apt. At the end of the day, scammers like this are predators (and of course, the ones featured in these videos are just the tip of the iceberg; scamming rich westerners is a billion-dollar industry) but they are also victims, of the asymmetrical rewards of global capitalism and colonialism at least, but in a more concrete sense, a lot of them are victims of human trafficking who are being forced to work on these scams.

https://www.csis.org/analysis/cyber-scamming-new-destination...

When I was reading through kitboga's site earlier it said that they "make some light of a dark situation" which sums it up well.

I'm guessing they attempted to outsource the work of dealing with Kit's "customer support" to one of their more malleable blackmail/extortion/scam victims.

> Maybe an SEO professional would get attacked by a gigantic, prehistoric-looking reptile right there in front of me.

Props to the author for having the ability to bang out her damn essay without getting bogged down in every little rabbit hole. If she were prone to compulsively editing-instead-of-writing she probably would have found out that alligators are not just prehistoric-looking; they're prehistoric itself. They appeared "94 million years ago in the Late Cretaceous" (wiki) and in fact their clade, Crocodilia, is only surviving sibling clade of Dinosauria, and so crocodiles & alligators are the closest living relatives of birds.

The post that you're responding to doesn't make any claim about the law; it expresses that the defense that an AI company might be "unable to comply" with a command to remove user data is not an honest one.

"Idea", by the way, since you randomly misspelled it twice, I supply the correction in case you're a very proficient English learner.