mcpackieh

Countries should be left to handle their own affairs; that's the responsibility that is inherent to sovereignty. The premise of a global hegemon who babysits the world and enforces the rules (dictated by themselves and their allies of course) is an anachronistic leftover from the age of imperialism. If the rest of the world wants America to play world police (and for the most part, I don't believe they do) let them pay the American public for this service.

> Just over 81 percent of those self-censoring said they primarily held back their criticism of Israel, while 11 percent said they held back from criticizing Palestinians.

I read this article a while ago that I think had an interesting take on the matter: "Yes, Anti-Zionism Is Anti-Semitic. But It’s Still Protected Speech." https://forward.com/opinion/430307/yes-anti-zionism-is-anti-...

One one hand you have people saying that any criticism of Israel is antisemitic and should therefore be suppressed, and on the other hand you have people saying that indeed, any critics of Israel is antisemitic but it should nevertheless be permitted. I think this goes a long way to explaining the lopsided suppression of academic voices.

> Actual AI doesn't exist.

The word "actual" is doing a lot of lifting there. Artificial intelligence has existed for decades. Presumably you mean "artificial general intelligence", whatever that's even supposed to mean (it's subjective, and for many people it's a matter of literal religious faith that humans have something called souls which machines can never possibly emulate, and therefore "actual AI" is literally impossible as far as they're concerned.) Well anyway... if you want to say AGI, just say AGI. AI is more general than that and the term is well established to encompass a great many methods and kinds of systems. Many kinds of AI are very primitive and seem trivial today; they are nonetheless "actual AI".

Culling American military bases overseas would also reduce the risk of American politicians capriciously choosing to use those military bases as the staging points for military adventurism; the "War on Terror" was greatly facilitated by those bases. As somebody who thinks that 'war' was a disaster for the interests of average Americans, I would not be sad to see the means for America to wage foreign wars greatly diminished. I simply don't trust the American political system to be a responsible steward of that much global military power.

If you tell people the computer program that profiled them as a probable scumbag and denied them credit or a job was using methods from the 1980s instead of the newest neural nets, that won't change how they feel about it. Objecting to regulation of such systems because you think the term "AI" should be reserved for the newest and trendiest systems very "HN" and misses the forest for the trees. The EU is rightly concerned about the ways that computers empowered to make important decisions might impact people's lives might perpetrate injustice; that's what is important here. Not some whiny semantic nitpicks about what to call those programs.

"If-else rule-based systems" aka expert systems are an example of symbolic artificial intelligence e.g. "Good Old Fashioned Artificial Intelligence". Just because it doesn't use the newest most trendy methods doesn't mean it isn't AI, and even if you object to applying the AI label to these kind of systems, these systems are nevertheless valid targets for regulation.

"Good Old Fashioned Artificial Intelligence" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GOFAI

"In artificial intelligence, an expert system is a computer system emulating the decision-making ability of a human expert.[1] Expert systems are designed to solve complex problems by reasoning through bodies of knowledge, represented mainly as if–then rules" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expert_system

"Symbolic AI used tools such as logic programming, production rules, semantic nets and frames, and it developed applications such as knowledge-based systems (in particular, expert systems), [...]" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbolic_artificial_intelligen...

Developers don't need to test in every distro, or even all the most popular distros. All they need to do is test in one distro. It will probably work in most of the rest and linux users expect that if something breaks they'll be the one tweaking things to make it work. Sometimes you'll get bug reports from those users saying "I had to do X on distro Y for reason Z" and you can act on those reports, or not. It doesn't matter.

Honestly, linux users don't expect more. There's tons of proprietary software out there supporting linux in this manner and it works out fine. Linux users are easy to please. The hardest people to please are the developers with Windows/Mac backgrounds who mistakenly believe they're expected to test on every distro and rightly balk at that.

Shit entertainment channel masquerading as educational content. If you think you learned something from that video then why haven't you explained it yourself?

The simple fact of the matter is that there is no empirical evidence for life outside of Earth. My guess is that it exists out there somewhere, but there's no good basis for believing that life is as common as the Dark Forest hypothesis requires.

Shit take, "race" has nothing to do with it. Ethnic Russians living in other countries (of whom there are many) are not having their contracts terminated. People who aren't ethnic Russians but live in Russia (again, many people) are having their contracts terminated.

Both of these figures, Russian diaspora and ethnic minorities in Russia, are in the neighborhood of 30 million people.

It's a reasonably logical answer but it's not the simplest answer. The Dark Forest hypothesis assumes that life is so common in the universe that encountering and being existentially threatened by other life is a serious threat. But what reason is there to believe that life is that common? For Liu Cixin's books this assumption makes sense because it makes the story possible, but in real life there's simply no evidence to justify such an assumption.

I think that intelligent life might become reliant on interconnectedness, e.g. addicted to the internet. Assuming the speed of light limit to information transmission cannot be overcome, I bet intelligent life will tend to clump up instead of spread out, so that it can stay in contact with itself.

Assuming that Earth was very average is a very rational place to start, but the reasonability of this assumption changes when we look elsewhere for life and fail to find it. Earth being average was once the basis for people assuming that other planets in our solar system might have intelligent civilizations; that has been almost entirely ruled out now (maybe there could be a civilization of space squid under the ice of Europa?) And we've failed to detect any radio signals that indicate life elsewhere in the stars near Earth. There's still a lot of searching left to be done, but each time we look and fail to find anything we should be updating our priors.

Education and healthcare are more expensive to provide over huge areas with low population density. Particularly with healthcare, the government has to pay professionals to live out there and those professionals serve fewer people than they could in high density areas.

> Until your country actually implements laws like these and Hacker News starts complaining that it is "business hostile" and "stifling innovation".

Literally, so what? I don't understand your point. You can't be under the impression that all laws must be popular with all people, so what does it matter if some ancrap libertarians complain about it? This shouldn't stop the implementation of such laws.

A solution to what? The Canadian government runs very efficiently when you consider their geographic handicap.

The UK on the other hand has a serious problem with bureaucratic inefficiency. Their geography favors efficient services, yet they can't do better than Canada? That's a problem.

Yet the Canadian government provides services across Canada in huge areas with extremely low population densities. This is incredibly inefficient, which is the point.

Now consider the area over which Canada must provide services, and the intrinsic inefficiency that entails..

Indeed, trying to overcome bureaucratic inefficiency by raising money is like trying to beat cancer by eating sugar.

I remember people saying this about XP to Vista, then 7 to 8, then 8 to 10, now 10 to 11... If you're on 10 now then you've gone through this cycle several times already; Microsoft is slow-boiling frogs and it seems to work for them.

Suppose I trust Valve to be well run for as long as Gabe Newell is around to control the company... how long is that? He's 61 years old, and even if he isn't inclined to ever sell the company he could still kick the bucket with no warning. The man is not exactly a paragon of physical fitness.

I know there is this meme among gamers that if anything ever happens to Valve they will release all the games they distribute from DRM but this doesn't make any sense because, except for Valve's own games, they don't have the legal right to do that; whoever comes into legal possession of Valve wouldn't allow it. The fact that Steam DRM is weak and easy to crack, presently, is a bit more comforting but even so I'm not interested in paying for a product that is even nominally under DRM. So I buy games without DRM, from GOG/etc, or not at all (I don't pirate software, simply because that's too sketchy for me.)

They probably should try that then.

Yeah, I've bought a lot of software that gave me a digital download with no DRM/bullshit. I've bought a comedy central special this way too, as well as dozens of albums and books. It's a perfectly agreeable arrangement, but some companies don't want to sell me a clean no-bullshit product and so I won't buy anything from them at all.

The Rossman quote is very apt. If the "purchase" of a file won't give me ownership of the file, then pirating the file isn't theft.

When it comes to Sony, even buying physical media in a store sucks. I'll never forget that Sony deliberately used music CDs to infect people's computers with malware.

You give money and your personal information to an advertising company. The advertising company then does god knows what with your personal information and gives some of that money to some of the 'creators' that you watch, in a way that isn't transparent to you. Who is getting how much money? Do the 'creators' you value get most of that money, or does it go to some clickbait crap you click on in a moment of weakness? You don't know.

What you should do: starve the advertising company (you shouldn't be donating money to support "the platform" which is a trillion dollar for-profit corporation!) and donate directly to the people who ask for it and deserve it.

The Swedish model works so well that the majority of Telsa workers in Sweden aren't striking...

If they did they'd bring Tesla to the negotiating table in an instant because there would be no way for Tesla to continue doing business otherwise. They'd have a choice between negotiate with the unions or have empty factories with no workers, which is no choice at all.

Okay, fair. I should have said: "thinks using fingerprints [to unlock their keychain] is actually a good idea"

I read on HN a week or so ago that the majority of workers at the swedish Tesla factory aren't striking because they prefer the stock options offered by Tesla to what the union is offering. But apparently the company offering a more attractive deal than the union is considered "union busting" or something. Sweden sounds weird.

Cathedrals? Bah, nonsense. Go into google street view and slap down a marker in any random town with buildings built a few decades ago on in the American east coast. Downtown in a random town, not in a modern suburb or commercial park. You'll see humble regular buildings, built for regular people to live or work in, with decorative trims and fancy brickwork.

Here's one I found in seconds: https://www.google.com/maps/@42.2537582,-73.7922474,3a,30.7y...

Look at the brickwork around the windows on the house with the blue door. It's no cathedral, just some random building in a random small town nobody has ever heard of. The builders obviously cared to make it look nice anyway. If you go down the street you'll see many other buildings like that. Not all of them by any means, many of the others are plainer, more utilitarian, and many of those are obviously newer. But to say that "Regular living/working places are produced as cheaply as possible to meet the requirements. Both then and now." obviously isn't true. Some were built as cheap as possible then. Many are now. But many then were deliberately built to be nicer than was required.

NoLsAfterMid's comment betrays an entitled attitude (e.g. "Linux should want this because I want this"), he doesn't seem to actually understand how or why things get done in the area of Linux. Linux itself doesn't "want" things, Linux itself cannot want to support particular use cases. Either somebody who wants something supported does it themself, or they pay somebody else to do it.

Make sure to store them very deep underground down a mineshaft, so random cosmic rays don't ever knock a few atoms loose.