mnowicki

"Return to Monke", Indubitably

it'll just increase your "Potential Threat Level" on the one list that does exist. And they might SELECT * from homies_in_the_USA where threat_level > 5 or something, and you'd be on that list

I recall hearing that the NSA was able to get permission to collect/access certain data by having private 'hearings', and in one of these private hearings they ruled that these hearings don't need to be disclosed to the public.

I'm very fuzzy on the details, but basically the idea is that they can get permission to do things that we think are illegal, and make these things legal. The law is basically just a formality they have to go through to do what they wanted to do in the first place

Spending money on marketing MIGHT lower prices when looking at a single company.

For a market like pharmaceuticals where patients are prescribed by Dr's and are going to be subscribed one thing or another regardless, the lack of any marketing wouldn't really reduce the amount of volume in the industry as a whole, might just switch around which drugs/companies it goes to.

can't end worse than it did in our current system

Which word did they make? Was it "Mitochondria"? I bet it was mitochondria

My main issue with it is that we don't have complete data to feed into the formula to make a good decision. Some aspects of your job can't be quantified and entered into an algorithm.

It's the same as when project managers track how many commits per week each employee makes and use that as a metric for how much work they're doing - an exceptionally dumb example but it literally happens at a lot of companies. And for an algorithm such as this, I doubt they have much better/more useful data to feed it.

Humans have their own set of issues as well though, as you've mentioned. I feel that the problem stems from the way companies are organized with a single entity having full control over resources and decision making, as opposed to responsibility, resources, and power being divided among the people doing the work, in a self-organized and likely democratic way.

> If Amazon has leaned too far in the direction of automation without oversight, then we'll see other firms fail to adopt these same practices.

By "leaned too far" I feel like you mean they relied on it in a way that made them less profitable than if they had not, in which case I agree. But I think most of us are worried that they leaned too far in a way that ruins peoples lives unfairly, we are more worried about that than Amazons bottom line. As a consumer I'm totally fine with paying 10% more for my coffee machine or whatever if ending such practices prevents even a single person from having their life upended.

it's likely the video creator used youtube so they could create an audience much more easily. Or didn't have the technical know-how to host a video themselves. Or they didn't expect making their youtube video private in the future would be an issue, or any number of reasons.

It's much harder to imagine someone wanting to upload videos to youtube, and then considering the possibility that something might change in the future that makes them want to make their videos private, and then deciding they are going to host the video on their own instead. Unless it's a tech person or someone making extremely shady videos, this scenario is much more unlikely than the opposite

sure there are some people that get meaning from work, and who would have trouble finding meaning outside of work. But I can't agree that 'working for the man' and doing whatever you can do to get by is the best recipe for finding the most meaningful work for most people.

In some cases "working for the man" isn't bad and it does give people purpose, but in (imo)the majority of cases, it is bad because it prevents you from using your time to do something you actually find meaningful.

I think the few people who are able to find meaning in their jobs are either extremely lucky to have found what they want to do, had the opportunity to pursue it and succeed, and make a decent enough living doing it without the money aspect killing their joy - or they're the type of people who have just 'over-assimilated' to modern life and found a way to extract meaning from their work, but these people would probably be able to find at least as much meaning and happiness in something else if they grew up in a world where working wasn't expected to be almost your entire life.

Do you mean more productive so that you can return to work of some kind and accomplish more than you have in the past? If so, then even if your theory proves to be true, wouldn't you rather continue living happily instead of using that period of happiness to fuel more productivity even if it doesn't make you as happy?

Or by more productive, are you referring more to building more dams rather than working more?

if we hadn't done that already, then we'd have the opportunity to regulate the out of existence in the future - it's much different

In Amazon's case it's not using VC money to outcompete similar businesses, it's using their own money to demolish any competitors in the thousands of niche categories they sell products for. The diaper.com thing is the most popular example, Amazon tried to buy daipers.com, daipers.com said no, amazon sold their own diapers for such a low price they were losing money on each sale in order to put diapers.com out of business or nearly out of business. Forget how it ends, either diapers.com went out of business, or they had to sell to Amazon in the end for a small percentage of the original offer

that's interesting to hear, and I'll have to take your word on it for now, but I'm curious why(unless things have significantly changed in the past 6-7 years) inner-city schools are still horrendously bad. I've experienced schools in both the worst parts of Philadelphia as well as in middle-class suburbs of Philly, and the contrast is even more exaggerated than they make it seem on TV shows/movies that depict these types of schools.

Obviously the students who are raised in these high-crime areas and surrounded by a community that's significantly harsher are going to be harder for teachers to manage, and I do think this is a very big part of it, but there are some things that clearly aren't related to that(such as equipment and the quality/quantity of staff)

Have you ever met a person who eats rice and ramen and whatnot all week so they can make it to their next paycheck(s), and eats next to nothing before pay day because they literally just don't have money to buy food to eat. You want them to quit their job(s), and what, figure out something else in ~4 days before they have 0 dollars left for food & electricity & rent & internet(if they have it at all).

I know a couple people like this, and I know there are many out there in this situation with several kids to worry about. Maybe your aware of this and were referring to people with disposable income and savings, but those people don't really need to do something else because apparently things are working out for them better than the vast majority of people. I don't want to assume too much but this comes off sounding really badly.

Never-mind the fact that these low-paying jobs exist and someone will have to do them, therefore some percentage of the population will be in this situation, often despite working several jobs and dealing with a lot more than most of us have to on top of that. I don't see how anyone can have this view without also implicitly stating that some % of the population are necessarily just not good at doing things and deserve to live through that kind of struggle because of it.

Yeah not to sound like a "deep" 15 year old but I think being able to function in our modern society is much more unnatural than the behaviors associated with ADHD. But since is the society we're in, having it really is a disability.

TL;DR: "we live in a society"

Good point, I'd also like to add that just because an analogy doesn't apply 100% when you try to push it as far as you can, doesn't mean it's not a useful analogy. If you could push an analogy all the way and still have it apply 100%, then it wouldn't be an analogy, it would just be the thing.

Hey guys, I have an idea/suggestion for you guys; you might already be doing this or it might just not be a worthwhile idea, but it sounds useful to me:

Your addon/extension should track the amount of time spent on each of these time-waster websites, and allow the use to render graphs showing how their usage over time has changes. Perhaps even allow them to set goals(e.g less than 30 mins a day max, and under 2.5 hrs per week max) and visually show how close they are to their goals via graphs and other visuals.

Not only would it show users how much your extension is helping them, it would also provide them motivation to use it more, not to mention giving you some nice looking visuals to use for marketing

I agree with your point about finding better ways to spend time, but I also think that any LESS time spent on facebook and the like is a VERY positive thing. And despite being skeptical when reading the first few sentences of the original post, I think his app actually sounds like it does something valuable.

That was the best explanation I've heard about this, before reading this I was questioning if I had aphantasia

HN flamewars are the most tame and civil form of communication that takes place on the internet, pretty much anywhere you go is going to be worse than that

they don't need to know the formulas or mathematical logic behind physics, but 5 year olds do have a working model of physics in their head. And AI wouldn't need to know the actual formulas either, but it would need some working model that owuld allow it to differentiate between those

I'd argue that under the current system, the people who are unemployed are those who tend to be less motivated in general.

I'm not sure about your specific country though, I'd guess it's true in all countries(the majority of unemployed people aren't the kinds of people who write software in their free time) but I'm not sure and I'm interested in what you think. I also wonder, if UBI were implemented would it still be true that the motivated, creative people would be the ones who continue to work anyway? I think a larger portion of unmotivated people would drop their jobs and live off of UBI, but there would still be a sizeable portion of people leaving their jobs to pursue creative projects. I myself would definitely quit and start working on my game full time, I did it before without any kind of financial safety net and made some progress, but of course had to go back to work before getting close enough to completion. Having UBI would be life-changing for me

What about this type of scenario, is this something you could see playing out:

People receive UBI, more people are able to move out and buy/rent an apartment or house, landlords are getting more applicants and apartment buildings start filling up, some landlords increase price to compensate for increased demand, average rent for an area goes up, the rest of the landlords increase their prices to match the market

I thought it was a deliriant

> Full disclosure: I like Yang.

Like, 'like like'? Or just 'like'?

Are they implying that a storage drive with bits organized to store specific data(say an mp4 file, or the meaning of life) will way more than a drive with randomly arranged bits? If not then aren't they just measuring whatever mechanism is used to physically represent the bits, and not the information itself?

And if so that does seem quite unbelievable. Wouldn't that mean that if you had 2 tiny harddrives that both stored the number 3.14, one harddrive happened to store that number after randomly assigning the bits and one harddrive purposely had 3 digits of PI saved on, the one that was purposely storing the number would weigh more?

Very well said. I have a question though, what is it that causes the 'manager' to push all of their responsibilities onto the developer lead? Just laziness, or is there some external pressure also being placed on the manager?

Just want to reiterate: “In this case instead of the wrong person arrested for the murder, nobody would be arrested and the case would go unsolved.” Are you suggesting this would be worse?

also, I don't think the air crash investigation analogy works well here, as pilots aren't as incentivized to fly in a way that is dangerous and likely to result in a crash. I assume more crashes are purely accidental or due to mechanical failure, where with law enforcement the concern is that wrongful arrests are due to overzealous and/or badly motivated officers.

I believe time is intrinsically linked with our experience of consciousness, maybe consciousness in general.

Sorry for the armchair philosophy, this is a topic I like to think about.

We know that time is the 4th dimension, all things exist in 4-dimensions and we just experience one 'slice' of this dimension at a time. The concept of something having 'not happened yet' really means 'we haven't experienced it yet' - it'd be like saying that the house 5 blocks away isn't on fire 'yet', simply because we haven't walked 5 blocks over and seen it yet. If we were able to move through time as freely as we move through other dimensions, then a house that catches on fire 'tomorrow' is really on fire 'now'('now' really isn't the right word here, but I don't think a better one exists) - we just have to walk down the street into tomorrow and see it.

In this way, we also exist as infants and as old men and women at the same time. We experience on infinitesimally small slice of ourselves at a time, each slice being a moment in time. Why don't we experience this all at once? Our body IS existing in the past and the future and the now, we are all tasting our 60th birthday cake right now, but we don't experience it yet.

There are two possibilities: Consciousness is the one thing that exists outside of time, such that instead of existing throughout our whole lifespan consistently and experiencing our whole life at once and constantly, we move through time experiencing one moment at a time, and maybe move into and out of time via birth/death. If you start thinking about memory this gets very interesting(as does the other possibility) in so far as memory is represented by the physical state of your brain and memory stores 'past' events. Basically implying that for some reason the 4D shape of your brain is such that on the 'future' side of your brain there are neurons arranged in such a way to describe what the state of your brain is on the 'past' side.

OR, consciousness does exist within 4 dimensions as our bodies do, and we ARE experiencing our entire lives at once. I don't know about you, but for me it FEELS like I'm only experiencing this single moment right now. But that doesn't mean I'm not also experiencing every other moment right now. At this moment in time, my brain is in a certain state(in terms of neurons and neurochemicals), that state encodes my memories and feelings that I have at this moment, personally I think that state encodes all the qualities of my consciousness, but I know this could be argued. So if I were experiencing all moments at once, then this moment would feel exactly like it would feel if this were the only moment I was experiencing. I would also be experiencing moments in the future, and in those moments this moment would be just a memory. So how do I know whether I'm experiencing those other moments as well right now, this current moment clearly feels unique to me and it seems like the only moment I'm experiencing, but maybe that's how all moments feel. Maybe there is a different 'me' experiencing every other moment right now, and I happen to be in this moment typing this message BECAUSE this moment IS the one where I happen to be sitting here typing this message. The me that's eating my 60th birthday cake is also doing that right now, and not thinking about the nature of consciousness, but maybe has a vague memory of this moment because the physical structure of my brain encodes 'previous' brain states as memories in 'future' brain states for whatever reason.