lamontcg

If this proposal was to add toxic positivity and optimism bias as a psychiatric disorder, I'd be on board with that.

The duct tape people are generally drowning under all the work they're doing, and they'd be fine to keep doing other productive stuff.

There's always going to be duct tape stuff around, and you don't want the people who can actually fix widgets to wind up running around with their hair on fire applying duct tape to keep it running without any time to fix widgets.

And when there's too much duct tape jobs going around the widget fixers may take a look at it all and decide they don't get want to get stuck with applying duct tape once all the duct tape appliers are fired, so they just skip to some other job.

You're always going to have some duct tape.

More than half the SCOTUS is corrupt and bought off, and the Republican Party in congress is just rubber-stamping what Trump wants. I don't have a lot of faith in the word "unconstitutional" anymore.

This thread is literally doing nothing.

Nobody is going to stop using grammarly extensions to post to HN, nobody is going to be able to detect its usage.

This thread just lets a certain kind of people put on their best condescending hall-monitor voice and lecture other people about how they should behave.

And the rule is arguably less useful than speed limits and will be broken about as often (at least speed limits have a very real link to physical safety via kinetic energy).

Really kind of weird with all these people who think it is just fine for services to take over accounts of people.

Of course, they can literally do whatever they like, it is their platform.

But it would be nice if everyone considered what it would be like for a platform to just arbitrarily nuke their account one way or another.

There's probably a lot of "well they wouldn't do that, I don't have a valuable named account, and I'm a user in good standing" but in reality they can do it for whatever reason they like and there's no actual guardrails--so anyone's account is equally at risk if they decide to.

I spent years doing it.

Well good luck detecting it.

I don't personally use AI/LLMs for any informal writing here or on reddit, etc. But I think it is pretty weird to be overly concerned around people, particularly ESL, who use tools to clean up their writing. The only thing I really care about is when someone posts LLM regurgitated information on topics they personally don't know anything about. If the information is coming from the human but the style and tone is being tweaked by a machine to make it more acceptable/receptive and fix the bugs in it, then I don't understand why you're telling me I need to care and gatekeeping it. It also is unlikely to be very detectable, and this thread seems to only serve a performative use for people to get offended about it.

Books and newspapers have had editors for centuries. It is just code review for the written word.

[It looks like MS Word 97 had the ability to detect passive voice as well, so we're talking 30 year old technology there that predates LLMs -- how far down the Butlerian Jihad are we going with this?]

So exactly like reviewing a code change from an outsourced development team in another country?

You can hire expertise off your competitors.

Being able to Greenfield something new is a tempting pitch to use to poach employees.

And first to market often doesn't win, or else WebVan would still be doing grocery deliveries. We tend to overstate the first-mover advantages because we more easily remember the cases where that turned into lasting dominance while forgetting all the companies that died to first-mover disadvantages.

Yeah, if you turn it all into buttons and settings in the actual settings menus, someone else is going to post a long rant about how the settings menus have a million confusing options that nobody uses...

Mine also isn't anywhere nearly as confusing as his by default, so this smells like a power-user-has-power-user-problems-and-solutions rant...

LLM usage is not very likely to "dry up".

What is more likely to happen though is that it doesn't take multiple $10B of datacenter and capital to build out models--and the performance against LLM benchmarks starts to max out to the point where throwing more capital at it doesn't make enough of a difference to matter.

Once the costs shrink below $1B then Apple could start building their own models with the $139B in cash and marketable securities that they have--while everyone else has burned through $100B trying to be first.

Of course the problem with this strategy right now is that Siri really, really sucks. They do need to come up with some product improvements now so that they don't get completely lapped.

This is Meta claiming in their internal communications that they plan on doing it while people are distracted with other concerns.

It isn't really "rhetoric", they're talking like they believe this actually happens, this is strategy.

And I tend to agree with them that things like attention and political capital are ultimately finite resources.

I've found that the "we can do two things" and "we can walk and chew bubblegum" line of argument to be simplistic and just wrong (and pretty incredibly patronizing). I think the world works exactly the way Meta thinks that it does here.

It might blow up and turn into a Streisand effect, but more often than not this kind of strategy works.

Much like how people think they can multitask and talk on the phone and drive at the same time and every scientific measure of it shows that they really can't.

Yeah, I still remember when I flipped from Linux to Mac at home. In my case it was a long time ago when I got a 4k monitor and couldn't scale the display text/icons and so couldn't read shit on it, and setting up a multi-monitor setup with Linux with different display resolutions was completely impossible. It worked in a few buttons with Mac. Digging into the issue on the Linux side there was some developer just yelling into the issue that people couldn't see 4k resolution, so there was no point to buying that hardware and everyone was just making a purchasing mistake with 4k monitors. I'm sure it has been long fixed by now, but that's the social problem which is waiting there. It won't be that issue, but there'll be something else like that...

Yeah, apparently I should have been explicit that I was talking about air strikes and not occupation.

We aren't going to occupy Iran.

Comparing this to defeated nations in WWII is also a massive stretch, I almost can't believe people seriously think that is a parallel situation.

There's a lot of propaganda out there to dissuade people from thinking that this looks a lot like Libya at best--and that is assuming that decapitation airstrikes can even make the regime fall (which I doubt).

So adjust the work schedule.

If people want more time in the evening, get up earlier and go to work and go home earlier.

You can even shift school/work schedules throughout the year.

Has there been a regime which has collapsed due to an external strike like this where it hasn't resulted in some decades long civil war nightmare?

I can't think of any time when bombing the shit out of a country and killing their leader has actually worked.

All I can think of is examples of blowback.

Interestingly, I've got a truck with a dead engine that I'm considering if I should yank it out and replace/rebuild it... Never done that before and don't know how to do it...

Kids these days just don't appreciate security through obscurity...

I got a pretty nice 120Hz ultrawide dell for cheap at one of those surplus shops awhile back.

> Most people, when they turn the tap on, they don't know where the water comes from.

Yeah, but at some point you need a plumber who at least has a passing understanding of where it comes from, and more importantly knows how to fix any problems you may have with your plumbing and its connection to municipal water/sewer.

And there needs to be someone employed somewhere who understands the whole municipal water supply and sewer system and how it is engineered and all the problems that it has.

Also, it is good to have the intellectual curiosity so that you could at least take a stab at it off the top of your head, and you wouldn't be averse to learning about it, if it suddenly became relevant to your life.

And there is a difference between the person who will hit a high priority "bug" in their life and will grind on it until they get it fixed, learning whatever they need to in the process, and people who just get stuck and try to avoid the problem.

As an example from work, I've been dumped into an open source codebase that I had zero familiarity with (keepalived) and found a missing ntohl() bug that affected Solaris/sparc servers (explaining quite nicely why it didn't affect Linux once the bug got found). And I did this when we were shipping keepalived in our product, fixing it under an extreme time crunch, and rescued a large contract with a Bank. This wasn't even a product that I was actively working on as a developer anymore either, but the devs on the product weren't familiar enough with C hacking.

I get the feeling that "kids these days" would just say "I dunno, Solaris is just cursed".

And that is an out of date, overly specific technological problem, but you can probably update that with any of the popular blog posts on this site where someone digs into some highly specific problem to find some incredibly detailed problem resolution. There's still people doing that. The stories are fairly popular. But it is weird to see so much "I don't need to know, and I don't need to care" sentiments on "Hacker" News in response to the (admittedly AI generated) title article.

That's kinda the whole point.

SpaceX can use an optimization algorithm to hoverslam a rocket booster, but the optimization algorithm didn't really figure it out on its own.

The optimization algorithm was used by human experts to solve the problem.

Not really. Pretty sure I read recently that Newton appreciated that his theory was non-local and didn't like what Einstein later called "spooky action at a distance". The Lorentz transform was also known from 1887. Time dilation was understood from 1900. Poincaré figured out in 1905 that it was a mathematical group. Einstein put a bow on it all by figuring out that you could derive it from the principle of relativity and keeping the speed of light constant in all inertial reference frames.

I'm not sure about GR, but I know that it is built on the foundations of differential geometry, which Einstein definitely didn't invent (I think that's the source of his "I assure you whatever your difficulties in mathematics are, that mine are much greater" quote because he was struggling to understand Hilbert's math).

And really Cauchy, Hilbert, and those kinds of mathematicians I'd put above Einstein in building entirely new worlds of mathematics...

Sometime around 1992, I wrote a college essay on how the Internet was going to wipe out ignorance and enable true democracy...

I'd like to get a look at SpaceX financials. I'm pretty sure their margins are thinner than you might expect, Starlink is less profitable than you might expect (but quite necessary to fund the launch cadence of Falcon 9) and that Starship blowing up over and over has been funded entirely by the US taxpayer and that they'd be insolvent without that.

People are kind of missing the fact that you can draw a line from slave catchers and slave patrols to ICE. You don't have to go through Germany.

Yeah, I think it is a bit more subtle of an issue than this flamewar always descends into.

There's people upthread arguing that every cellphone in the country is on IPv6 and nobody worries about it, but I'm certain there are thousands of people getting paid salaries to worry about that for you.

Meanwhile, the problem is about the level of trust in the consumer grade router sitting on my desk over there. With IPv4 NAT it is more likely that the router will break in such a way that I won't be able to access the internet. Having NAT break in such a way that it accidentally port forwards all incoming connection attempts to my laptop sitting behind it is not a likely bug or failure mode. If it does happen, it would likely only happen to a single machine sitting behind it.

OTOH, if my laptop and every other machine on my local subnet has a public IPv6 address on it, then I'm trusting that consumer grade router to never break in such a way that the firewall default allows all for some reason--opening up every single machine on my local subnet and every single listening port. A default deny flipping to a default allow is absolutely the kind of security bug that really happens and would keep me awake at night. And even if I don't go messing around with it and screw it up myself, there's always the possibility that a software bug in a firmware upgrade causes the problem.

I'd like to know what the solution to this is, other than blind trust in the router/firewall manufacturer or setting up your own external monitoring (and testing that monitoring periodically).

Instead of just screaming about how "NAT ISN'T SECURITY" over and over, I'd like someone to just explain how to mitigate the security concerns of firewall rulesets--when so very many of us have seen firewall rulesets be misconfigured by "professionals" at our $DAYJOBs. Just telling me that every IPv6 router should have default deny rules and nobody would be that incompetent to sell a router that wouldn't be that insecure doesn't give me warm fuzzies.

I don't necessarily trust NAT more, but a random port forward rule for all ports appearing against a given target host behind it is going to be a much more unusual kind of bug than just having a default firewall rule flipped to allow.

It is going to die because it won't ever be perfect enough, while Google will win because the vastly more important problems with Google's control are just the status quo.

It really seems like all the complaints about firefox are mostly ego-deflection.

People know it is wrong to stay on Chrome and empower Google to the extent that it is, but they're stuck on that workflow and don't want to change, so they find nits to pick about firefox and get very LOUD about that. Then it becomes Mozill's fault that they're still using Chrome, and you can't blame them for anything.