nativeit

I've been anxious about this prospect. Having seen the rightward ideological lurch all over the world caused by immigration in the last 15-years, the relatively extreme mass migration that's likely as the planet gets warmer promises to be an existential threat to any number of societies. In my opinion, we should be looking ahead and tempering our attitudes for what seems increasingly inevitable. It's quite literally the least we can do, since the cessation of oil consumption has yet to make an appearance at the proverbial table.

I’m more inclined to agree with you, but the replies to this did strike me as darkly funny. These exceptions for the chosen in-group are some of the hallmarks of fascism, and this administration has leveraged several other popular tropes as well—fetishizing Greek/Roman mythologies, hobbling academia and the press, ethnic cleansing, Christian Nationalism, revisionist history, idolatry, eugenics, etc.. Fascism is a term I would have called absurdly exaggerated just a few years ago, but to the extent that the President and his administration are the leaders in both policy and diplomacy, I think it’s probably fair to level a judgement that their behavior is the contemporary set standard for the United States. This is a fascist country right now.

But I agree with you that nuance-free oversimplifications are likely unhelpful in any meaningful discussion.

These things don’t usually happen overnight, and for the vast majority of the public it will never be directly visible. It’s not like someone flips a “Anti-Antifa” switch and a bunch of ultra-starched uniformed troops start goose-stepping through Toledo. It’s a developing series of dynamic events, many of them will seem rational, justified even, but the result is concentrated executive power, a toothless legislature, a complicit judiciary, and a pliant mainstream press. I’m sure there are lots of people who will recognize these for what they are: an alarming number of dominoes falling towards a totalitarian dictatorship.

However the United States is a big, complex beast of a country, and the judiciary has not been fully captured, and neither has the legislature. All we need to do to stop this creeping authoritarianism is show up in-force and vote overwhelmingly against it this November. They will obviously try to confuse the issue with any close calls, and use such opportunities to assert dominion over local/state governments. We cannot let that happen. The best way to avoid such a scenario is to show up strong enough to make the results beyond question. That’s the ultimate test that we are still a nation of laws, and I am cautiously optimistic.

They didn’t sound like Claude; Claude sounds like them.

I’m usually very tolerant of others’ varying capacities, but 100% this. High-school level reading and comprehension shouldn’t be a hard ask for professionals.

I specialize in replacing all company I.T. with a subscription to “Reader’s Digest”. The cost savings are phenomenal but we currently don’t have enough data on how it affects productivity, that should come in Q429. In the meantime, we cancelled the company’s vision insurance plans, and replaced it with a subscription to the large-print edition of “Reader’s Digest”, and once again the vast reduction in overhead expenses has induced a lot of very encouraging enthusiasm. That Dave Barry is a hoot and a half. We expect to double executive compensation off the savings from these dual-thrust “Reader’s Digest” campaigns.

Good lord, just write the thing.

In my home city (Charlotte, NC), navigational aids have become so ubiquitous and relied upon (even among locals) that it’s made traffic patterns extremely predictable. During rush hour I find Google Map’s suggested routes function as markers for where all the traffic will be, and I can take the surface roads out of town with far less traffic and hassle than I could 20-years ago when everyone basically knew their way around.

This sentiment has been all over recently, or so it seems; Which makes me question whether I am reading propaganda, a genuine memetic idea, or a bit of both?

You’re not trying hard enough.

Yeah, because warrants have never been rubber stamped without proper oversight before. If we make these things normalized and routine, they will be abused. Don’t give them an inch.

> Wikipedia has become the infrastructure of its own demise: dwindling traffic means attention and donations no longer reliably flow back to the encyclopedia to keep it alive.

It’s too bad this will drown out the feedback from folks like me, who ended their longtime recurring donation because of their resistance to their employees unionizing.

Can’t wait for the “My Robotaxi went rogue, wrapped a chain around an ATM, and pulled it out of the bank’s wall all by itself and buried the cash out in the desert with no human interaction!”

What are all these presently dominant cultures that are so fragile that the mere presence of others represents an existential threat? Sounds like an excuse for xenophobia more than a sincere concern.

> …one of them at the other,

The origin of life is as romantic as I’d hoped.

I don’t need to edit my original comment, it doesn’t contain any mistakes. All six of the links across three comments are each distinct, separate posts going to either the same article, or others with identical headlines.

Cheaper? For whom? As a solo practitioner, I can no longer afford the workloads I was getting for $20/mo in January. Now the same plan being utilized at the same level for the same work hits its limits within a few hours, and runs out of tokens in less than two days.

Also:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49136070 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49096837 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46890333 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46870562

All of these are titled “LLMs Can’t Jump”

Also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49136070

Previous: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49162791

I’ve been instantly suspicious of all the reports of counties “allowing their Flock contracts to expire”, which doesn’t imply either “removing ALPR cameras” or ceasing potential 4th Amendment violations, more broadly. I don’t think any one of the agencies or public officials making these promises deserves any benefit of the doubt. Americans should be demanding robust protections and transparency from those who have been endowed by our democratic consent to wield the power of the state.

At least for the more prominent terminal emulators i expect they probably devote a great deal of attention to security. They are developing the most commonly used interfaces for linking the most numerous, varied, and/or critical systems on the planet.

I knew Apple was lost when they dropped the “Home” button, just after spending a $1B to build a Palo Alto headquarters in the shape of the “Home” button.

I always wince when I think about the amount of energy and assets required just to get to “Step 1: Baby talks”.

Now we’re sitting at “Step 2: ??”, desperately hoping to reach “Step 3: Profit!”

I make a very small (relatively) salary as a self-employed IT consultant and support provider, but I still take ~$25 each month to split between the organizations and charities I find worthwhile. For a long time, that’s included a $3/mo recurring contribution to Wikipedia (or WMF, really). I have long believed Wikipedia to be a vital source of free information, and a surprisingly effective and enduring community that’s bent towards truth.

I still believe that. But I do not ever want to see my very limited charitable contributions be spent on anti-worker programs, so I’ll be ending my recurring subscription today, and for the moment I will simply add it to the the contributions I donate to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who voluntarily recognized their worker’s union, as WikiMedia Foundation should.

Some of the largest unions in the world are for teachers, police, and government employees. I’m not sure why you would think a for-profit company is uniquely subject to its staff unionizing?

I’m in something of the same boat, although I don’t particularly care about my own stars and what not, for me it’s just a rather effective place to find open source projects to use/contribute towards (along with hosting for my own projects).

I have found running GitHub mirrors for my own projects hosted on a private Forgejo instance works well enough, but the fracturing of GitHub will inevitably cause more difficulty in discovering others’ work. I suppose that opens opportunities up for either federation, or at least aggregation (Sourceforge has been doing that already, although I find its interface a little clunky).

I had a rather extreme form of this existence in my late-20’s, it was the first time I had ever really experienced such a thing (circa-2011). I’d never had any pathologies in the past, and this was shortly following an unexpected violent encounter. I spoke with a psychiatrist, and it was diagnosed at the time as post-traumatic stress disorder.

I wonder if maybe there’s something of a swelling ocean full of people suffering from low-level PTSD, even just from the trauma of staying alive and well in a society that you feel increasingly untethered from, as if stuck in place while the universe expands farther in every direction. The arriving tide of midlife crises for a generation of Palahniuk’s “middle-children of history”, those who had the wherewithal and luck to avoid serious addictions and hereditary alcoholism, but who still can’t really afford to be sufficiently medicated under a doctor’s supervision, either. So we resort to the permanent morphine drip of distraction, mainlining dopamine via headphone IVs.

The bottom half of a socioeconomic bell curve that’s being aggressively flattened, as if there were a pandemic of mediocrity and wasted potential. Stuck between a misspent youth, and an increasingly uncertain future.

TLDR; I think this is a very good first step for a lot of like-minded somewhat damaged folks. I ultimately took a similar approach—mindful meditation with breathing exercises—to treat my own PTSD, it worked better than Xanax to tamp down the anxiety attacks.

P.S. - Anyone who points out my em dashes can go sit on dem dashes. This comment was boutique, artisan, 100% organic bullshit. No memory prices were harmed in the making of this comment.

I’d personally prefer if nobody verified me ever, and people stopped asking for it altogether. It’s not a compromise, because nothing about this is pragmatic, necessary, or for any benefit of society—this is yet more creeping authoritarian control, and I’m absolutely floored how readily everyone else bends over for it. I say no. Fuck no. I will sabotage and obfuscate every aspect of this at every opportunity.

The people clutching pearls and screaming “what about the children” can deliver universal healthcare, child care, parental leave, and free education FIRST, and then I will extend a modicum of trust for their overriding “concerns”. Until then, I’m gonna treat this as the bad faith power grab that it very clearly is.

Now I’m imagining the horrible 19th-century style psychological torture where they take some Victorian orphan—an infant tucked away with a tattered stuffed animal, confined to a cheap facsimile of a domestic home within the corridors of a dank sanitarium full of tuberculosis, leprosy, the clinically insane, and floors of hysterical women receiving lobotomies—and they raise that child from birth to do nothing else but write Bash scripts.

Some would call it “cruel”, and I do admit: Bash can be a frustrating language...but these are the unspeakable things we do in the name of progress.

Is it? I thought it was making chunks that consist of 2-3 words, assigning coordinates and weights to them, and performing fancy maths and statistics with them. I wouldn’t have thought the binary data would be particularly useful in that effort?

I’m just a sysadmin with very little in the way of higher maths or computer science under my belt, so I genuinely don’t know how “correct” my mental model of things are.