mrzimmerman

“Make it illegal to…” that has never in human history prevented anything from happening. Cannot increase the risk? Of course, but laws do not stop humans from humaning.

Furthermore, doing any of the things you listed would isolate all legitimate network traffic as well as any undesirable traffic, fully shuttering all Chinese manufacturing businesses from global requests via the web. This hat would happen then? Phone calls, emails, and even physical mail would become the new norm and most of the Chinese economy would collapse under the weight of not being able to hop on a Zoom with a client that wants tooling made for its aluminum manufacturing molds.

So besides my point of the black market your hypothesis of total control misses all the other pressures that exist that make what you’re proposing infeasible on its face. Only a place like North Korea that is willing to be a pariah state is old be willing to take the economic and social costs associated with your proposal, and they’ve only been able to do that because their abominable regime was in place before the internet existed and they pre-built controls very late in the game.

Tl;dr simply because a country _could_ do something doesn’t mean it’s realistic for reasons outside of basic networking concepts.

I just finished making my way through that paper and honestly that was exactly what I was asking for. Realistic, creative, detailed in the right measure.

Thank you for posting this, and sorry for responding so much later with my thanks, but I very much appreciate you sharing it.

I may have missed it in the blog post here, and I generally agree the pace of development is being set by financial incentives and not safety or lack of harm, but has anyone in a high position stated _how_ models could cause human extinction?

I assume the obvious answer is “we plugged our military’s weapons control platforms into this model and it fired all the nukes” which is clearly enough. Is that it or is there some other path to global extinction someone is concerned about?

For the record, I’m not an AI fan person annoyed at naysayers. I actually find AI to be a monkey’s paw instead of the genie in a bottle most of the time when coding, and an intrusive feature I neither want nor use most of the rest of the time.

I ask because I see these posts and obviously an AI plugged into a network of doomsday weapons would be a huge problem, but then the author only talks about cybersecurity events and model misbehavior. Both things are valid concerns, but I would like to hear more concrete information from people who are voicing their concerns about what they foresee happening even if it is just lifted whole cloth from the movie War Games.

Can I ask how “top 10” is defined? Is it the most common, or perhaps the most destructive to the individual?

There are still great use cases for using JS to handle animations instead of CSS, such as creating novel, dynamic images or 3D models in a canvas element (particularly when you want it to be interactive in anyway) or to animate SVGs.

My understanding of CSS animations is that they are particularly optimized to run more efficiently and it’s also helpful that it runs outside of the JS runtime, which frees it from any errors in the JS or it adding to the CPU load that may already be chugging along on the page.

Additionally (and this is old info so it may be outdated), using things like `translate3D()` instead of just `translate()` in your CSS will engage the GPU to handle whatever your instructions are, making everything smoother and further unburdening the CPU. This is from my own memory of things I read more than 10 years ago, so it’s possible that even more CSS functions use the GPU at this point, but I’ve not looked it up since.

Anyway, tl;dr: there are performance benefits to using CSS instead of JS for animations.

I haven’t had my phone make noise in probably the last two decades. It’s always obtrusive to me and my phone is so often in my pocket anyway I can feel it vibrate or still hear it if it’s set on my desk.

I was diagnosed with ADHD recently and my doctor suggested turning of virtually all notifications on my phone, which has been life changing. I didn’t realize how many I just had going and how distracting they are. Some I’ve allowed to continue but set to silent so I can look through them later if I want to, but it’s nice to have the mental silence.

For me and my family, we only use AirBnbs when we’re traveling with another family or friends and we all want to stay in the same place so we can hang out and carpool easily. It can be cheaper compared to getting separate hotel rooms and if we’re traveling with another family with kids we’re much more likely to eat at the house 1-2 times a day.

If it’s just me or just me and the family, we’ll typically just get a hotel for all the reasons you mentioned. Less hassle about cleaning, points and such, no dealing with wacky policies from an over zealous host telling you how to use the A/C unit or something like that.

As far as the toilet brush, I think that maybe more a region or cultural thing, but I’m only kind of guessing. I saw a Reddit thread asking Americans why there aren’t toilet brushes in public restrooms (I believe the OP was Spanish) and they said it’s common courtesy to scrub away anything that may not have been flushed away. Again, only a guess.

Definitely. I thought this was going to be a single, semantically correct table that had some fancy use of the display property across the different elements to make them align differently (though that would help with the table headers).

I actually think this is probably the more practical approach, though I wonder what screen readers make of the mobile version compared to traversing a normal table structure.

Yeah, my assumption was that something in some layer of their application isn’t well optimized when asked to return posts from a subreddit that has “gone dark” in whatever fashions the mods chose to do that.

For example, maybe it causes reads from the database take a lot longer than they normally would, locking up the database or causing the process the crash (again, that’s just pure speculation).

That’s technically true of most domain names. Bing would be more accurately named “bingsearchengine.com”, Apple would be “applecomputers.com”, etc.

That said, Native Seed Search is a non-profit here in AZ (Tucson, specifically) that works to maintain a seed bank for native plants from the Southwestern US:

> Native Seeds/SEARCH (NS/S) is a nonprofit seed conservation organization based in Tucson, Arizona. Our mission is to conserve and promote the arid-adapted crop diversity of the Southwest in support of sustainable farming and food security. Native Seeds/SEARCH seeks to find, protect and preserve the seeds of the people of the Greater Southwest so that these arid adapted crops may benefit all peoples and nourish a changing world.

You’re not wrong that the domain or group name could be more specific, but at the same time the context is understood when you’re down at their brick and mortar location or buying seeds from them as myself and my family do.

That’s definitely true but I don’t think it’s that simple. I love some of the apps that are iOS native and how their preferential treatment makes everything work with security I trust.

BUT, I still prefer Google Maps, non-Safari browsers, Spotify over Apple Music, Feedly/my browser over Apple News.

I agree that it’s problematic that apps made by the OS developer receive preferential treatment, but I haven’t personally found that to mean that the experience is better than third party apps.

I’m guessing it’s a thinly veiled reference to the fictional idea that if you steal less then $1,000 worth of valuables in CA you won’t be prosecuted. It’s constantly brought up by people like Charlie Kirk (who tweeted it as early as three days ago.)

For the record, that isn’t true, it’s where they set the threshold for a crime being treated as a high class of misdemeanor or felony (I can’t remember which) and how stiff the sentence is. I live in AZ and our dollar amount threshold for the same types of crime are actually higher than California’s but no one tries to say that you can “walk out of a CVS with $X and there’s no penalty” because some people are just looking to tear down CA, not actually discuss policy and it’s impacts.

I think the difference there is that you can model a cargo ship to show that it will float, how it will do it, what configurations float and which don’t, etc. With LLMs like GPT we know how they work, but it’s hard to know that when it’s actually running and doing things, making it hard to predict what the outcome will be or perfectly understand how it came to the result it did (disclaimer: I am not an AI/ML engineer and this is just my personal understanding which could be wrong).

I think a lot of the annoyance felt around here is the tendency to apply human attributes to LLMs. It’s not to say that Chat GPT isn’t fulfilling the definition of “reasoning” on some level, even if it was found to fully meeting definition. I think it’s more the leap to the conclusion and that a lot of Hacker News readers are rankled by the leap lacking research and facts to back it up.

Anyway, it’s all really a philosophical discussion anyway since the definition of “intelligence” and “reason” are soft terms even when applied to human beings. We can usually hand wave it away as “intelligence is when humans do it the way humans do it”. Now that we’re on the cusp of creating actual artificial intelligence, I think we’re all finding those soft definitions cumbersome and are struggling to refine them as a society, which I think is a good thing. I also sometimes get rankled at someone asserting that some AI example has some human attribute, but mostly I think it’s an important part of that larger discourse about how we define these things, and that is a good thing in my mind.

And that isn’t being said here. Frustration with a person’s family is one comment, discussions of the cultural problems on the south in another (denial/defiance), but regardless of someone’s tone thousands of miles away the problem is still there and the source of it is not the tone or words used by individuals from far away.

I’m not really sure how this relates to the problem. People may be awful or cruel sometimes, but that doesn’t force civic leaders or individuals into making bad policy/personal decisions.

Furthermore, a lot of this is an explicit problem. Poverty is high in the south and poverty correlates strongly with less access to healthcare, or healthcare avoidance to avoid the cost.

Excellent question and not one I’ve bothered to solve, and you’ve pointed out a gaping hole in my backup plan.

If I had to decide now, I’d say setting up a server that pulls my email in with IMAP and saves it to a backup drive. Of course that means making sure spam and marketing emails I don’t want aren’t backed up, so maybe I mark them somehow as back up targets?

It’s an excellent question and I don’t have a good answer. And it’s worth pointing out that emails are just as important as photos when you think of correspondence from friends, family, business contracts, attachments, links and their contents, etc to forever. The network effect is very real and I’m not sure how to handle all of that.

Are any of those processes user facing or in contact with users doing interviews with users or something similar? Or I guess given your experience: would you say they’re useful internal processes?

I was thinking about bureaucracy today and how the word is often maligned but the processes can actually be helpful or harmful, depending on how the humans involve implement it. Anyway, I’m curious on your perspective about the effectiveness and purposes of the internal processes you saw.

First: Friendly reminder to everyone to back up your data and then back up your backups to a separate location.

Second: I’m the person in my family who wakes up in a cold sweat worrying if our photos are backed up properly, or my music collection. I’ve got a handful of backups at the house that I double check periodically to make sure they haven’t decayed, and some stuff backed up to some cloud services. I’ve been talking to some family members and close friends about building some simple home lab raid devices that we can use to back up our stuff locally and to one another’s locations.

I’m not enough of a network engineer or server admin to know the best way to set it up, but I’m hoping we’ll figure out a simple, cost effective way to handle it. I’m hoping it’s a fun project either way and we can all avoid entropy for just a bit longer.

How was Credit Suisse bailed out? It seems like they were closed and sold, as happens with a bank that fails.

Bailouts, by 2008 standards, would have been giving money to Credit Suisse so they could continue operating and avoid the fallout of their bad choices.

Honest question, how is (in the case of SVB and Select) making sure depositors don’t lose money while the bank itself is closed and assets sold off, holders of it’s debt (those who lent money to the bank), and those that owned the stock all lose their investments?

I understand the 2008 bailouts were actually giving money to the banks that were/are deemed “too big to fail” and allowing them to more or less operate as if nothing had happened (outside of regulation changes), which seems on its face inflationary. But that’s not happened in this case, correct?

Again, honest question if I seem to be missing something.

I also live in a “right to fire for whatever” state, often referred to as “right to work” which really means the right of employers to ignore union agreements and compensate individuals less if the individual agrees to it. It’s already illegal at the federal level to force someone to be part of a union and states like ours just work harder to make sure we don’t end up collectively bargaining for better conditions by controlling the supply of our labor of which our employers are the consumers (literally basic market economics and nothing more).

Your statement brings to mind this quote from Martin Niemöller, who was sympathetic to the Nazis until he witnessed the escalation and reach of their beliefs:

> First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist. > Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist. > Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew. > Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me. > —Martin Niemöller

I can’t tell if you’re against minimum wage laws or not but I’ll say regardless that minimum wage laws show a boat in worker income and small employment effects:

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...

Honest question: how many Norfolk Southern ads have you seen? Even just a ballpark number.

This is such a naive perspective of the world. The company should care equal parts about the the needs of the people who consume the product and those who produce it doing actual work.

The idea that a company can produce a product without caring about the quality of how the product is produced is laughable in any Econ 101 classroom. Additionally there are plenty of models of businesses in the US and Europe where the labor force is included in business decisions.

Your idea that the people making a living from building a product want to destroy it and their own livings, are some how not aligned with the customers—who want a good product and will return if it is good—is completely without logic or knowledge of market economics.

Sure, some people act and think like that. But at the end of the day executives and the C level have no obligation other than returning as large a profit as possible to investors.

Additionally, it’s a straw man argument to say that everyone who is being let go currently at a time of record profits is just being a lay about. It’s easy to say until it happens to you, and it shouldn’t. People—our neighbors and fellow humans—deserve better treatment than to be cast aside to make the stock price rise again.

Some people have been hard at work on products that were never great, but the direction they took came from leadership. That’s as much a strawman argument, but it belabors the point that making broad judgements on a group is the wrong way to go about taking a position.

Couldn’t agree more. Our interests as employees is far different from management and the C-suite. Don’t forget that board members currently have a legal obligation to provide value to investors and no obligation to do the same for their employees.

It’s one of the reasons we see layoffs during a time of record profits. It’s easy to turn humans out to boost the profit margin and the stock value.

It is a fair point (I think your tone is what has set people off, and for the record I didn’t enjoy it either). The real question, in my opinion, is what does humanity do in general with our fellow humans whose labor is displaced by some form of automation? And that fully includes all of us here on Hacker News.

Do we prevent the lose of income to people by forming a collective bargaining group (guild, union, co-op—whatever you’d like) to prevent the job loss and maintain income? Do we tax the owners of businesses who are using large amounts of automation so that the profits are shared with larger society? Do we let the market figure out it out?

It’s an incredibly difficult and complicated question and I don’t have a good answer. But I do personally believe that the people who will be hit hardest will be average people: ourselves and our neighbors and we should consider how we want to react to that fact sooner rather than later.

Exclusivity is a two sided coin. Speaking as someone who dealt with the Teamsters Union at a few expos myself, it can be very annoying to not be able to carry your own boxes, or plug in a new power strip. Honestly, it’s maddening.

The flip side (for me, personally) is that I believe that the conference hall would charge me the same fee with the same restrictions, pocketing a large majority of it. It’s no different than going to a stadium and spending $60 on two beers and a hotdog while the person behind the counter makes a fraction of the sale but cleans the space, warms and hauls the food, handles the sale, and puts it together and gives it to me.

So again, there is pain with the teamsters in a convention space (specifically in this context), I fully agree. But if I’m going to have to pay too much for a service I’d rather it went to working class families with stable jobs in the area I’m visiting and doing business in.

Except fields requiring expert knowledge (and in this case can cause injury or death) it’s very good that there are licensing and regulatory bodies that prevent any old person or group from wandering in and participating. No one dies if a script isn’t very good.

If the studio has a contract with one of the guilds in Hollywood, the labor is still covered regardless of geographic location. Georgia has a LOT of tax breaks for film production costs which is what makes it attractive for studios.