Rather interesting timing after the US accused China of supplying Iran with high-res imagery used to support attacks on US bases, then a Chinese satellite mysteriously broke apart
3,628 karma · joined January 21, 2009
Adelaide’s climate anecdotally feels to be more humid in recent years (historically bone dry Mediterranean climate) and the seasons feel like they’ve shifted a few weeks forward.
The Kaurna (Australian Aboriginal people of Adelaide, pronounced Gar-nuh) apparently mapped seasons a little differently, with a longer summer that resonates with my experience:
https://www.bom.gov.au/resources/indigenous-weather-knowledg...
The Noongar people of Western Australia have a 6 season model that also maps pretty well to my experience in South Australia.
https://australiassouthwest.com/six-seasons-of-the-south-wes...
The parent comment suggested taking an experimental drug would mean they couldn’t give their children inheritance, implying that the government might seize your assets or something.
I firmly disagree with the “take the death” argument made here, but I do respect the intellectual integrity of committing to your argument at least, and suspect we just hold extremely different moral perspectives.
My general understanding is life insurance almost never actually pays out, and if it does it’s after a long fight and for less than you signed up for, and in any case should typically not be the largest portion of your inheritance.
That all aside, taking a risky but possible option that may mean survival, as a conscious and informed decision, even if aware it may void a possibility of a life insurance payout, doesn’t seem like a decision we have more right to make than the person affected by it.
Per the well-expressed article, I agree there's a problem that lies can be bundled as truth through elegance (and I have strong views that there are broader forms of this, as the author alludes to, effectively style over/instead of substance, for instance in our ability to discern capability through hiring processes or overweight our assessment of the merit of ideas based on who expresses them and how), but I challenge (1) the premise that many situations are effectively represented by a singular "truth", in which case the representation of truth may be relevant even if possible to game, (2) that style / aesthetic is pointless (it might be "useless" for a definition of utility, but I contest a philosophical perspective that sees humanity and culture best exemplified by reductionism and efficiency), and (3) that style and beauty cannot be truth itself (stare at a painting that moves you, listen to a favourite song or one of the great works, look upon a beautiful scene in nature, or experience any of the myriad forms of love, and consider how that resonates with truth as much as any proof; indeed this last point is one of the themes across pg's work that still resonates strongly for me despite feeling increasingly detached from many of his other positions over time, and is well reflected by his book title of Hackers and Painters).
Particularly when they know that people like the commenter above are making sure it ultimately “works” by covering the incompetence of their colleagues.
The comment you are replying to is in my view a superb observation of the challenge of maintaining quality against systemic pressures to appear to be performing.
Most senior leaders in organisations cannot (or care not to) measure quality. Few (outside big tech I assume but wouldn’t be surprised to also see overlook this?) are even usefully measuring benefits realisation tied back to activity (such as software releases).
What they can measure and are systemically incentivised for is “what does it take to get the approval of the next leader above me”, and most of the time a plausible report that the software has been delivered to/ahead of schedule is the real objective to achieve this goal.
That doesn’t mean morally motivated managers aren’t out there driving quality. But it is at odds with these org systems, at the detriment (or risk of detriment) of their own careers compared to peers who optimise more for what the system rewards, and at the expense of greater energy as they effectively have to hide their pursuit of better outcomes for the organisation under a veneer of performing as the organisation expects (that is, serve two goals simultaneously, one covert and one performative).
Something like this is a good exploration of the subject: https://spakhm.substack.com/p/how-to-get-promoted
This is perhaps the broader point, which is that to the degree economics acknowledges non-priced value it’s a hand wave to “there’s some economic surplus here otherwise these people wouldn’t reach agreement to exchange”.
But to the degree that senses of value are the motivating factor behind economic exchange it’s oddly absent from the discussion. I get the reasons: philosophical inquiries about value and aesthetics are a lot more challenging to work through than concepts of utility reflected by measurable actions, but this goes to the overall point about the limitation and overreduction of current mainstream economics, and the criticism of people like Graeber of its politicised and somewhat arbitrary intellectual grounds.
To the degree mainstream economic reduction is useful to support understanding that’s fine - it absolutely allows reasoning and insight in many scenarios, especially microeconomics - but to the degree that decision-makers double down on it (especially macro) despite it being incomplete or absolutely wrong in certain environments and contexts because it promotes certain power structures and power plays that is highly problematic, especially when people jump to its defence out of misplaced loyalty to a school of expertise.
While I agree with you (quite firmly: it’s a great starting point to put on the table to challenge orthodoxy in this space), and think you’re agreeing with the parent comment, it is a fundamental tenet of mainstream economics and the political arguments of neoliberal (aka current mainstream) policy that [price == (market averaged) value], or at the very least [price ~= value].
Another interesting line of argument is to explore things that are valuable that don’t typically get a price: for example household labour, or love and friendship (at least directly: I’m sure a Friedman acolyte would reduce all relationships to exchange and reframe gifts and acts of love as investments).
As an aside for the parent comment: thanks for sharing this, it’s one of the top category of comments/quotes I’ve seen on HN in being useful, insightful, and challenging of conventional understanding in a way that improves understanding and future prediction.
http://mattmitchell.com.au/birthday-problems-friendly-identi...
Like imagine saying you need to spend thousands in proving to people that coffee is something that would help you get a pep in your step at 3pm on Wednesday to be able to get your morning latte.
Or to reframe this, why does everyone care so much, especially in an era when we’ve given up so many other values and multi-generational investments at times in a baby and bathwater sense.
The reason I ask is that your response leans very heavily into the importance of expertise and a specific form of knowledge, without showing the kind of subjective empathy for the experience of the people dealing with these challenges that I’m confident you have in spades given your profession.
And given your personal draw to scientific expertise (given your profession), and investment in building that expertise in yourself, and continued personal material and ego investment in that expertise being valued (and the school of thought that legitimises and makes that expertise worthy), as well as your clear intelligence and exploration and insights in this space, it seems an interesting question to ask whether in your deepest reflection there is any sense of conflict or tendency to bias, and how you consider if that shapes your views.
It also seems to be something that LLMs are remarkably strong at, of course threatening my value to society.
They're not quite as good at hunches, intuition, instinct, and the meta-version of doing this kind of problem solving just yet, but despite being on the whole a doubter about how far this current AI wave will get us and how much it is oversold, I'm not so confident that it won't get very good at this kind of reasoning that I've held so dearly as my UVP.
Off the cuff I can picture some Australians taking it more nasally at the top of the palate sort of yee-ah (think Steve Irwin), a more neutral yeehr with a hint of final r (but more clipped and mono syllable than an American accent), or even a yair that might push as far as yuhhh (heading towards a sort of hybrid of Californian Valley Girl and the posh British accent used in American media).
Bit of an exploration of the evoking Australian accent here: https://amp.abc.net.au/article/103321146
That doesn’t mean all organisations work this way (mythically, startups of old didn’t), nor that some leaders can’t manage this tension, but tension it is which means while these leaders will often achieve “better” outcomes (that is, “more good” outcomes with relevance to the area of expertise or craft they’re good at, often but not always with more empathy and better working conditions for those delivering), they’ll also encounter more barriers to progressing to and maintaining positions of power, face greater scrutiny, probably be confused why the organisation around them isn’t understanding or valuing their capability (and spend a lot of time translating to frames they do understand and value), and ultimately greater burnout.
However given the strong role SO2 can play in reducing global warming, and that there are even proposals to introduce more SO2 to the atmosphere to achieve the Paris objectives, like most things in our complex interconnected world it gets a bit more complex.
Of course one hopes there are better responses to the changing climate than reactively doubling down on polluting contaminants into the atmosphere when that has contributed to the current mess and we clearly have narrow and incomplete understandings of systemic intervention.
If you’re open it would be great to connect (email in my HN bio).
I hadn’t quite appreciated how long he’s been blogging for, nor that we was nearing 50 (the latter point gives me some inspiration in my mid-30s that there’s still time to contribute).
In terms of the article, and this doesn’t injure his main point, but I feel he has been overgenerous about how long the blogosphere has lasted (though there are of course still exceptions eg for me recently Ludic’s blog https://ludic.mataroa.blog/, some old gems like Rands in Repose ticking away, and more focused series like Patrick McKenzie’s Bits about Money).
To my mind it was well and truly done (in the way that it once existed) before Covid, with the absence of a resurgence during a period with so many locked down and online proving its end.
By that point there had already been the rise of walled gardens, the fall of Google Search, the rise of social media and influencers (and since the subsequent fall post-Covid), clickbait, smartphones as the primary browsing device, constantly online culture, attention exhaustion, (low quality) content saturation, etc. If the blog had survived all this LLMs adding fuel to the attention harvesting noise would almost certainly have sealed the deal.
On the whole “online” feels like it’s falling apart.
The leading apps and sites are buggy and broken with little innovation in years despite obvious low-lying fruit yet still dominantly crowding out (or buying out and shutting down) challengers, websites are a mess of instinctual clicking past popups like your relative’s malware-infected WinXP desktop you had to fix up at Christmas, almost everyone seems to be an influencer cynically pumping out low quality noise that the algorithms seem almost determined to elevate over unloved crafted quality content (and we still don’t seem to be reaping benefits of AI to sort through this), US politics contextlessly infects nearly every platform and channel globally (thankfully usually not here except when relevant), the subscription sites have bait and switched after hooking us all in and continue to turn the screws, the “gig economy” and “disruptors” have done the same continuing to damage broader society with their externalities while skirting the purpose of established laws and norms and now raising prices to higher than what they displaced, our democracy is challenged by the inability to know truth accelerated by the overwhelm of targeted noise (and old media has just as much guilt in monetising then selling out the fourth estate while governments are now racing towards totalitarianism in an attempt to put the genie back in the bottle), attention span and ability to think as humans is being fundamentally reshaped in ways that most consider damaging, digital has accelerated (or at least coincided with) the society-consuming and society-destroying elements of capitalism over the last 50 years as it “cleverly” works out how to turn anything and everything (quality, brand value, trust, institutions, connections, spare time, relationships, attention etc.) into $ and destroy them in the process, and it all seems to have turned into walking through a crowded alleyway of people shouting and fighting and exploiting and vying for your attention and and and and.
The fall of Rome analogy feels figuratively rather apt, because it certainly has a sense of that, and maybe this cozyweb is a nice hideaway answer from all this (I haven’t quite found my online cozy place yet).
For those who haven’t seen it and find any of this resonates (especially as a Millenial), Bo Burnham’s Inside brilliantly talks to this all, and he’s the first I’ve come across to really do so.
Is anyone else talking about this in a way that’s helpful, or at least helpfully relays the problem that’s emerged upon us?
Separate observation, that comment trail in the article demonstrates everything about the corporate failure case that is our modern tech stack. If the most enthusiastic early adopters are getting immediately dismissed by the hypercare teams, what hope do the rest of us have. Where is the Netscape/Phoenix/Mozilla/Firefox for Desktop OS? When did we become so complacent about device monopolies?
Oh how I yearn for a world of Geocities and FrontPage over Admiral anti-ad-blocker and GDPR cookie popups.
Only 50 years ago the thought of apes being conscious was considered largely naive, yet alone dogs, contrary to the experience of most owners with a close relationship with their canine companions. Come 2013 and a group of scientists much like in the attached make the argument that dogs, and other animals, share traits of consciousness (https://gizmodo.com/brain-scans-show-that-dogs-are-as-consci...).
The needle seems to have moved continually since in the direction of “human consciousness is likely to sit on a continuum of consciousness with other life”.
Given this I’m inclined to take this argument at face value. As to what that means and what we should take as moral guidance from the view is a broader question (I feel it sits a bit closer to the thinking of the recently passed Daniel Dennett, or David Chalmers).
But it seems evident that whatever we take to be associated with consciousness is shared across other forms of life. Even plants seem to react to anaesthetics, and demonstrate behaviour consistent with emotional experience. If you spend time with life you tend to observe similar things across all forms.
Sure you can reduce it to pure stimuli reactions, but you can also reduce all humans to philosophical zombies with the same arguments. I’d argue the trend of evidence is suggestive of broad consciousness.
In this spirit, I’m interested if we’ll see this property extend beyond life to other systems, and not merely AI - if we reasonably argue that we have consciousness, but “we” are a system composed of cells and bacteria, that is we are effectively a macro system composed of more micro systems within us, why doesn’t a city or a planet or a solar system have some element of consciousness? Is the energy we feel at a sporting match an emotional, and conscious, expression of the communal human group present at the game? And if not, why not?
I’ll also say, which I feel is a pariahable comment in 2024, that with 18 years of dev exp through the cycles of Web 1.0, 2.0, everything being a SPA, server-side rendering craze, and then wherever we are now, I just don’t get the hype around React for 95%+ of the scenarios it is used for. It is just so much more harder to get things done, to maintain them, to skill up. The complexity just feels superfluous. Like the Weekend at Bernie’s situation that is “agile methodologies” these days, my gut says this current world of tech must be far more shaped by economic and organisational factors.
By contrast, on face value alone, something like Svelte feels so much closer to how programming used to feel.
Whatever happened to leading the free world?