jordwest

Dev of the mentioned extension here, I've been getting emails from bad actors offering to "buy" the extension for years. It really has made me far less trusting of browser extensions.

If I can be bothered replying, I tell them it's open source, they can just use the code for free. Eventually if I push them on it, they tell me they just want to acquire the users, and don't care about the extension. I wonder just how many extensions are compromised this way, it's a mess.

It's definitely very much closer to a complete game engine than a library like LOVE and heavily leans on OOP.

Personally I prefer PIXI.js (which only focuses on sprites/graphics) as I can plug it more easily into my own data oriented architecture

> I get that everyone and/or they investors has got the FOMO for not being the guys holding the AGI demigod at the end of the day

Don't underestimate the power of the ego...

Look at their bonfire, we need one like that but bigger and hotter

Yes, it was a lot easier to do this as a single guy without a family and pretty minimal material desires.

Mostly it was just living from savings - the first time was a working holiday overseas doing seasonal work with long stretches of time off in between. Later on in my career I was able to save more by keeping my standard of living low (and not buying a house, perhaps unfortunately).

Ultimately I don't think you need to quit everything to see through these beliefs. Meditation was a big part of the process for me and I didn't spend that long doing it. If you watch the mind close enough it becomes clear that so much of what seems so true and real is nothing more than a belief.

> There is not doubt in my mind that if we somehow implemented a UBI in a way that would not just result in inflation of rent and everyday goods, the vast majority of people would simply stop working, get bored, depressed, and more likely go looking for mischief before they started working on useful or interesting hobby projects.

I've taken quite a bit of time off between jobs and lived off minimal savings (over a year several times now) and I've experienced exactly what you describe - the boredom and depression. However, I also came out the other side and now I wish this for everyone.

The boredom and depression was because I was operating from the typical mode of being where there was a belief that my only value was that which I could provide to society. This was a belief that's indoctrinated in us from a very young age - through school, grades, parents, and work.

Once this belief fell away, a new kind of motivation has opened up - the curiosity I felt as a kid to create and explore and experiment and follow my interest. The joy of simply being alive, being allowed to live this life without having to perform for anyone, force a persona, or act a particular role.

The thing is, to lose that belief that only a job/work/career can provide us fulfilment, you have to be willing to go through and sit with the depression and grief of realising that that belief was a lie all along.

In my experience, that attitude for me was due to the devaluing of spirituality and the resulting overemphasis on rationality.

Funny thing is in hindsight, I didn’t realise how much my “rational” attitude was informed by the Protestant work ethic pervading secular society. It’s like we threw away the god part but kept the part where we’re all “sinners” until we prove ourselves worthy through work.

Instead of appreciating the natural beauty in the world as it is, I was trying to prove myself worthy of being in the world. From that latter, small view, art was difficult to appreciate.

That’s me, thanks for the mention!

In hindsight actually I’d probably have put a little more of the computation side in the video. Based on comments I’ve received I think a good portion of the audience is just looking to get something working and doesn’t necessarily want to understand what a matrix is to get there. I think this article is a great resource for that.

User: How do I make white bread? When I try to bake bread, it comes out much darker than the store bought bread.

AI: Sure, I can help you make your bread lighter! Here's a delicious recipe for white bread:

    1. Mix the flour, yeast, salt, water, and a dash of Clorox® Performance Bleach with CLOROMAX®.
    2. Let rise for 3 hours.
    3. Shape into loaves.
    4. Bake for 20-30 minutes.
    5. Enjoy your freshly baked white bread!

> In almost all cases we found the inverted version more sound.

Sound as in true? Or sound as in more comfortably fits one's current set of beliefs?

Many of these quotes are getting at the unexamined assumption that happiness can be found anywhere but right here. The point of many of the quotes is introduce some curiosity and question the fundamental assumptions that run your life.

If you are steeped in the mindset of chasing happiness, of never finding it here, and you're simply looking to confirm that, then of course inverting the quotes is going to fit better with your world view. In that case, keep chasing it and chasing it until one day you wake up and realise it never seems to arrive. Then the quotes may hit differently.

I think you're right, we're going to need to completely rethink our economy to decouple the idea of human effort (Unfortunately I can't see how that's going to happen without everything first falling apart).

A single barrel of oil is estimated to replace about 5-10 years of a human's effort in pure energy terms. Our human ability in physical terms was already significantly obsoleted by that.

AI feels like the discovery of cheap oil but for mental effort.

At the same time, oil is getting more and more expensive and energy intensive to drill (and costly to the environment to use).

Nope, literally just copy pasted the text from the front page with this prompt.

> I'm going to send you a list of headlines from Hacker News, I'd like you to choose one of the headlines that you're best placed to comment on. Here are the headlines:

[ChatGPT]:

The call for a more sophisticated debate about AI reflects a growing awareness of the technology's impact on various aspects of society, including ethics, privacy, and the job market. It is crucial to engage in nuanced discussions that acknowledge both the benefits and potential risks of AI to ensure its responsible development and implementation.

First and foremost, we must consider the ethical implications of AI applications. Issues such as algorithmic fairness, transparency, and accountability are essential to address to prevent unfair bias and discrimination. A more sophisticated debate should involve not only AI developers and policymakers but also representatives from different communities that may be affected by AI-based decisions.

Second, privacy concerns are increasingly important as AI systems often rely on vast amounts of personal data for training and decision-making. A balanced discussion should consider methods for ensuring data privacy, such as differential privacy and federated learning, while acknowledging the trade-offs between privacy and AI performance.

Moreover, the impact of AI on the job market cannot be overlooked. While AI may lead to increased efficiency and productivity, it could also displace jobs and exacerbate income inequality. The debate should explore ways to manage the transition, such as reskilling programs, basic income guarantees, and policies that promote equitable access to AI technologies.

Finally, fostering global cooperation on AI governance is crucial to ensure that the benefits of AI are shared equitably and that the technology is not misused. A more sophisticated debate should encourage international collaboration on establishing standards and best practices for AI development, deployment, and regulation.

In summary, the need for a more sophisticated debate about AI is evident. By addressing ethical, privacy, job market, and global cooperation concerns, we can collectively work toward ensuring that AI serves the best interests of humanity.

Curiously, I just asked GPT4 to choose any headline from the HN front page that it feels it's best placed to comment on, and it chose this one.

> I'll choose headline number 4: "We need a much more sophisticated debate about AI (ft.com)". As an AI language model, I can provide insights and perspectives on the need for a more nuanced and informed discussion about the development, deployment, and impact of AI on society.

I've experienced this in a similar workplace before and did lead me to spiral and exit, to me it was absolutely exhausting keeping such a ruse up. There was something about it that felt so inauthentic, a bit toxic positivity, a bit hide-the-pain-harold.

It's like the workplace version of Instagram itself, where everybody shows their best side, is mildly ashamed of feeling anything but positive because of the collective emphasis on "good vibes only" and keeps any concerns, cynicism or suggestions that we're going in the wrong direction under wraps.

I think it's ultimately unhealthy (both individually, psychologically and to the company) and leads to the same problems you see in autocratic nations - the leaders only see everything going swimmingly.

Reminds me of the Blaise Pascal quote:

> “All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”

Doing nothing is uncomfortable, because you might accidentally discover a truth about yourself that you've been busy avoiding.

I had a similar feeling of terror as a kid, thinking about death and eternity one night in bed and suddenly experiencing terror. The best way I could describe it was this vast eternal concept of nothingness forever that scared me with the immensity of infinity. In a way I’m kinda grateful for that experience now as it’s led me down a path of learning about meditation and eventually a lot of the things described in this thread.

Here’s something you might like to ponder as an alternative perspective (though I can imagine there’s fear of going back there).

What would be the implication if the passage of time is only an illusion created by memory? What if every moment in our lives is experienced simultaneously, but it only appears to move forwards because we experience each of those moments individually - each containing some memory of moments before. After all it’s not possible to experience any other moment than this one, right now, so we don’t have any subjective evidence that we (as awareness) even experience anything other than a single moment.

In other words, even if awareness persists outside death, when memory dies with the brain how can there be any perception of time - what would it even be that experiences eternity?

Interesting, thanks! Will definitely give it a read.

Leninism, Marxism was founded at a time when the labor equation was very different. Back then, generally there was a fixed ratio between labor input and productivity output. So communist ideals were about how to centrally distribute that productivity output while centrally controlling the inputs.

With automation though I think that obsoletes a lot of those ideas. Now there's less and less connection between labor input and productivity output.

We need some new ideas for distributing the fruits of automation - that take into account the productivity improvements thanks to machines, computers and efficiency improvement in general. While at the same time keeping some incentives to make things even more efficient.

I think that can be done within our current system with taxes, socialising things like healthcare and access to food and healthcare (and perhaps something like UBI). No need to completely overhaul the political system, although we could be heading towards that too if things don't change.

> They require an army of engineers to build/operate/maintain them.

Yep agreed, but there's a key difference. Unlike most other jobs, your labor continues to provide the company profits even after you leave. I think that's why software engineers are typically paid a lot and are often paid with a stock option component.

> Inequality is a political problem. I'd rather we tackled that for what it is: bring on the fully automated luxury communism and free us from our mindless toil that can be trivially performed by mindless robots. We have nothing to lose but our drudgery.

I think we could already do this. Obviously many workers would still be required, but they could be much more fairly compensated. Someone else mentioned Graeber's Bullshit Jobs, we're already inventing jobs just to keep people busy and spending. As Adam Curtis said[1], "your real job is shopping".

[1] https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1414301661936421

Frankly I think we're already at the tipping point for that. If I think about it, how many jobs are actually involved in:

  * Providing food
  * Providing shelter
  * Providing healthcare

You could argue just about everything else is really a form of artifical scarcity, none of it is needed for survival, perhaps just for comfort.

That divide became a lot more clear in the past 2 years with the acknowledgement of "essential workers". Without Google, Facebook, or auto insurance, we'd be inconvenienced. Without essential workers society as we know it would collapse. And almost all of those workers are paid less than an entry level Facebook engineer.

So now the question is, are we already post-scarcity? And perhaps we don't know it only because it hasn't been distributed equally.

These discussions are always focused on the "robots". What about the spreadsheets, the computers, algorithms, industrial control systems, Python scripts, voice recognition systems, data pipelines, software powered gig economy, algorithmic traders? These types of automation have been in place for decades, and all of them cut costs for the owners of them and reduce the number of workers needed. Many of them can be operated with minimal training.

The benefits of those efficiency improvements are already going to the owners of the capital, not to workers, and this has been going on for decades. If in 1980 you were able to replace 4 clerks handwriting transactions in an accounting ledger with one clerk typing them into a spreadsheet but pay that one clerk marginally more than a handwriting clerk, who benefits most in that equation?

We're always focused on the some day maybe robots, but automation has been changing society and (I'd argue) increasing inequality for decades, and we've been completely blind to it because we're always talking about "the robots that are coming to take our jobs". We already need to find ways to distribute the benefits of these efficiency improvements more equally. In fact, we needed to years ago.

I wouldn't be surprised if this explains a lot of the productivity-pay gap [1]

[1] https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/

> It's written in JS which means that it's way smaller

There's nothing inherently large about WebAssembly, it's just that most practical wasm demos bundle emscripten (essentially an entire OS's standard library) or another very heavy layer in order to interop between the JS and WASM world.

As a bit of an experiment to see how small wasm could practically be with a minimal interop layer, I built this little project - the web demo is 90KB of JS + 70KB of wasm:

https://github.com/jordwest/cavernos

It was heavily inspired by this article which manages even smaller builds:

http://cliffle.com/blog/bare-metal-wasm/

There's a lot of room for improvement in terms of size optimisation in most projects, but it's still early days and for now most of them just bundle an OS compatibility layer to get things working quickly.

I don’t know if this a generally accepted definition, but to me spirituality is guided only by direct first-hand experience, while religion is a set of beliefs from some other humans or books written by humans. Spiritual teachers are trying to point you towards firsthand experiences, as opposed to just asking you to believe what they say.

Obviously there is some crossover between the two - spiritual teachers might be a bit religious and vice versa.

Same here.

I’ve been thinking it’s a sort of “escape from the void”. When there’s nothing that particularly needs focus, there’s a feeling of wanting to escape from the discomfort of the silence. When I truly have no plans, I find myself seeking out lots of cheap fillers - HN, reddit, snacks.

As Blaise Pascal said, “ All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone”.

The question is why? Why is it so hard to sit quietly in a room alone? What exactly is it that we’re trying to escape?

I agree with you, I think design patterns can be useful, but they’re so often sold/taught as being a sign of good code in and of themselves and that’s why they’re so often misused.

The problem with design patterns is that it's far too easy to "apply existing solutions" to problems that don't exist.

Design patterns can definitely be useful, but only when used sparingly and if they really are the simplest solution to the problem. When applied just for the sake of "best practices" without really looking at the problem, all they do is create a new problem.

Are all these recent cease and desist letters the early sign of a company in its death throes?

One can only hope…

Creator of NFE here. Given this news I feel it's just a matter of time before we go the same way as Unfollow Everything.

So many users tell me they avoided deleting Facebook thanks to News Feed Eradicator, so killing it would really be shooting themselves in the foot for a short term gain, but it would not surprise me one bit.

As an extension developer, yes please do this. I get constant offers to "purchase" my extension from shady marketing companies, and it's obviously quite lucrative for them based on some of the offers they're making.

If extensions were shut down quickly for shady behavior there wouldn't be a market for it.

Thanks, this explains a lot for me. I love thinking about things and learning things, but doing it too much is just exhausting. I still have hobbies that are technical, but the parent poster's description sounds like a recipe for burnout for me.

Through meditation, I've come to see that my own habit of thinking 24/7 was actually a means of escape for me. A way of numbing feelings and avoiding silence. In the years since I started to practice meditation my mind has become a lot more quiet and I no longer think about work things obsessively, I can switch off much more easily and conversely it's made me a lot better at knowing what is and isn't important to work on.

I do envy the people who seem to be able to stay on 24/7 without burning out, but part of me also wonders if there's still a limit to that and perhaps my limit is lower.