ookdatnog

Writing a text of decent quality used to constitute proof of work. This is now no longer the case, and we haven't adapted to this assumption becoming invalid.

For example, when applying to a job, your cover letter used to count as proof of work. The contents are less important than the fact that you put some amount of effort in it, enough to prove that you care about this specific vacancy. Now this basic assumption has evaporated, and job searching has become a meaningless two-way spam war, where having your AI-generated application selected from hundreds or thousands of other AI-generated applications is little more than a lottery.

I don't think "deprecated" is the right terminology here. Nowhere on the Khronos Group website can I find a statement that OpenGL is considered deprecated. Not on the landing page for OpenGL (https://www.khronos.org/api/opengl) and not in the OpenGL FAQ (https://www.khronos.org/opengl/wiki/FAQ).

I think the term "deprecate" implies some level of actively discouraging use that is simply not happening with OpenGL (and that was/is for sure happening with Python 2). Specific platform vendors may deprecate OpenGL on their platform (as notably Apple has done), but that does not mean OpenGL is deprecated by Khronos Group.

I think it is, and if you don't want to take my word for it, John Carmack thinks the same :)

There's an old video [0] where he talks in-depth about his explorations of functional programming. It's perhaps a bit more about Haskell than about SICP, but in it he's also quite enthusiastic about what a veteran programmer can still learn from this book.

[0] https://youtu.be/1PhArSujR_A?si=OD8pGYsoGC7RXPVG&t=125

Of course you can. For instance, if you would reply to the request by insulting the physical appearance of the one making the request, that would be rude.

I would respond to your request with "no" instead of ignoring it.

Saying no isn't rude. Ignoring that someone has spoken at all is, in most cases.

Regardless of hierarchy, responding to a request by ignoring it is pretty rude.

> They make lots of money

Will they though? Last I heard OpenAI isn't profitable, and I don't know if it's safe to assume they every will be.

People keep saying that LLMs are an existential threat to search, but I'm not so sure. I did a quick search (didn't verify in any way if this is a feasible number) to find that Google on average makes about 30 cents in revenue per query. They make a good profit on that because processing the query costs them almost nothing.

But if processing a query takes multiple seconds on a high-end GPU, is that still a profitable model? How can they increase revenue per query? A subscription model can do that, but I'd argue that a paywalled service immediately means they're not a threat to traditional ad-supported search engines.

> von Neumann's fear was that nuclear war was inevitable

Ethics is messy, but in this case he made an actual, verifiable prediction: that the USSR would use their nuclear arsenal and unleash nuclear war. He said "With the Russians it is not a question of whether but of when." Not that we would come close to nuclear war, or that it would have a high probability that it would happen. He stated that it definitely would happen. And he stated this very confidently.

This prediction turned out to be false: the USSR collapsed before it used its nuclear arsenal aggressively, and modern Russia still has not used its nuclear arsenal in any other capacity than as a vague threat.

We can state unequivocally that he was wrong about this. Reality disproved his game-theoretic argument.

> Sorry for those 1% of you out there who are actually useful and efficient leaders/managers; you know who you are

100% of managers nodding as they read this

Come on, let's not be reductive. We didn't just eat them, we also ground them up to make paint!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mummy_brown

This may actually be relevant if OP has to take remote exams with mandatory invasive proctoring software :/ Although I'm not sure if these attempt to detect VMs.

That seems depressingly solipsistic. I think part of the appeal of art is that it's other humans trying to communicate with you, that you feel the personality of the creators shining through.

Also I've never interacted with any piece of art or entertainment and thought to myself "this is neat and all, but it would be much improved if this were entirely about me, with me as the protagonist." One watches Breaking Bad because Walter White is an interesting character; he's a man who falls into a life of crime initially for understandable reasons, but as the series goes on it becomes increasingly clear that he is lying to himself about his motivations and that his primary motivation for his escalating criminal life is his deep-seated frustration at the mediocrity of his life. More than anything else, he craves being important. The unraveling of his motivations and where they come from is the story, and that's something you can't really do when you're literally watching yourself shoehorned into a fictional setting.

You seem to regard it as self-evident that art or entertainment would be improved if (1) it's all about you personally and (2) involvement of other real humans is reduced to zero, but I cannot fathom why you would think that (with the exception of the porn example).

> Romanticism of 19th century can be thought of as rationality winning over less rational religion.

Quite the opposite: Romanticism was a reaction to (and rejection of) the rationality of the Enlightenment. Romanticism celebrated strong, overwhelming emotions, such as nationalistic zeal.

I haven't done any serious lisping outside of tutorials and books, but I warmly recommend the wizard book of myth and legend, SICP (https://mitp-content-server.mit.edu/books/content/sectbyfn/b...). I had a lot of fun working through it.

I'm not arguing against economic freedom, I'm arguing against your argument in favor of economic freedom. And I'm arguing against you ranking it higher than, say, freedom of speech.

Your entire argument is nonsensical, but this part:

> With enough money you can buy all the others

is particularly easily falsifiable. A billionaire in China does not have freedom of speech and cannot buy it.

It's clearly allowed, but I think the reaction here is negative because, unlike for example Python, this isn't someone making their own language from scratch which is then organically adopted. Instead, it's essentially someone looking at an established language and community, and saying "you'd all be better off if I was running the show here." And the person making that claim does not have the track record to make that claim believable. I don't think it's strange that people are reacting with some reservations here.

Of course it's not a hostile takeover, he'll try to build something that convinces people that he's on the right track, and I wish him the best of luck with that. There's a small chance that the project succeeds and essentially becomes the successor language to Haskell, and there's a large chance that the project fizzles out, and both of those outcomes are fine. The worst possible outcome is that it succeeds well enough to fragment the ecosystem, but not enough to really take over.

> People with IQs below 91 walk among us.

I feel like you're misrepresenting what the article is about. I'm pretty sure it's not the people whose IQ is a bit below 91 we're really talking about here. As the article states (emphasis mine):

> These men all had IQs below 91, and nearly half had IQs below 71.

What people find inhumane about this policy isn't "the army recruited a guy with an IQ of 87 from our town", but "the army recruited a guy with an IQ of 68 who can't read or write and has never heard of Vietnam from our town".

An IQ below 71 is typically labelled as a cognitive impairment, not only now, but then as well. These are people who are often considered unable to function independently in normal civilian life. The idea that, even with modern tech, a war environment is much simpler to navigate than civilian life, seems so obviously absurd to me that I have trouble even articulating an argument against it.

> Is it more moral for the inevitable sacrifices of warfare to be solely among a society's higher IQ individuals?

I object to your use of the term "inevitable". Sacrifices are inevitable during war, but the war itself wasn't inevitable. The moral thing would have been to end the war, rather than prolong a war that leadership knew damn well they were losing at this point.

Given OP's (presumed) age, curiosity and enthusiasm, my advice to OP would be to not worry about what language you are going to specialize in at all. That can come later. In fact, do the opposite: learn every language under the sun and prioritize weird languages with unique ideas that are outside of the mainstream. Learn Rust, Haskell, Lisp (OP is already learning Racket so that's covered), Prolog, Forth, assembly, Smalltalk, ... (admittedly I haven't learned every language on this list; there are some that I wished I learned when I had more time for it).

OP is at a stage in life where fluid intelligence is still very high and crystallized intelligence is growing rapidly. This is the time in your life where you are perhaps most able to absorb new ideas and ways of thinking, before you get set in your ways and less receptive to different ways of thinking.

They did end up doing so, but they insisted on unconditional surrender regardless. Even though they knew that they would end up meeting the singular Japanese condition.

The website is called "incrementalelm.com".

It is unknown, and will forever be unknown, exactly which terms the Japanese would have agreed to in the event of an earnest attempt at a negotiated peace, because there was no earnest attempt at a negotiated peace. Truman was dead-set on achieving an unconditional surrender, mostly because of US public opinion.

But all in all, based on historical evidence and testimony, I find the case that, even without the bomb, Japan would have eventually surrendered on terms acceptable to the Allies the more convincing one.

> The use of [the atomic bombs] at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons — Fleet Admiral William D. Leahy

> The Japanese had, in fact, already sued for peace. The atomic bomb played no decisive part, from a purely military point of view, in the defeat of Japan. — Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz

> In 1945 Secretary of War Stimson, visiting my headquarters in Germany, informed me that our government was preparing to drop an atomic bomb on Japan. I was one of those who felt that there were a number of cogent reasons to question the wisdom of such an act. During his recitation of the relevant facts, I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and so I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly, because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives. - Dwight D. Eisenhower

> Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts, and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey's opinion that certainly prior to 31 December 1945, and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated. - 1946 United States Strategic Bombing Survey report

I listened to this >2h essay about the atomic bombing over a year ago. I'm writing mostly from memory, so there might be errors in my summary.

I think the argument was that the reason for the atomic bombing was not really a military necessity (fleet admirals Leahy and Nimitz at least seemed to think so). The Japanese were already signaling they were willing to surrender well before the bomb dropped -- but not yet _unconditionally_. The one condition they had was that the emperor had to stay in place and should not be punished for the war. The US could have chosen to accept this condition and end the war, but didn't for a variety of reasons (none of them military).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCRTgtpC-Go

This is true in many European countries. But for a kid from a poor family where no one has an academic background and chances of success in higher education are low, a good technical education can still provide significant upward social mobility. If you train to be a competent mechanic, welder, carpenter, mason, electrician, plumber, ... you're set up for a pretty comfortable middle class life. You can even get quite wealthy if you start a business.

I don't think it's necessarily bad that the education system tries to identify students which have low odds of making it in higher education, and offer them an alternative route that results in them having an in-demand skill and some work experience when they graduate at 18 years old.

I'm not at all convinced that an approach where students of all levels are kept in the same classroom is better for the weakest students. I imagine the experience of struggling (and often failing) to keep up every day must be exhausting and demotivating (and perhaps even humiliating). I also have never seem any evidence that such an arrangement is better for weak students in any metric (but I'm happy to change my mind of this if such evidence is provided).

It's just not the case that the arithmetical algorithms implemented in circuitry have "nothing to do" with pen and paper algorithms. The core ideas of the algorithms we teach kids to add, subtract, multiply, and divide carry over to different bases. The biggest difference between the algorithms implemented in circuitry and those we execute with pen and paper isn't the base, it's the fact that logical gates can be placed in parallel so there's some additional trickery in exploiting that maximally. But understanding the pen and paper algorithms, in whatever base, is still a good starting point for understanding how computers do arithmetic.

SF might be the a progressive city for US standards but there are many cities in the rest of the western world with social democrat governments, sometimes even under social democrat national governments, which have much lower crime rates. If you're going to blame progressive politics in general, you need an explanation for that fact.

It seems to me that rising crime in the western world is a general pattern. The biggest port city in my (European) country (still pretty small compared to big US cities, granted) switched to a right-wing nationalist government about a decade ago, after literal decades of unbroken social democrat rule. And gang violence has only gone up since then.

I'm not blaming the current mayor for that, because other nearby cities are suffering from the same problem, including those run by social democrats. But the policies that the right wing have been shouting would definitely work to keep crime down haven't been working here, demonstrably.

> adults in same bathrooms with opposite gender children

Gender-neutral bathrooms aren't some theoretical possibility where we have no idea what would happen if we introduce them. They're already a thing in many places, at this point probably for long enough and in sufficient numbers that we can collect actual data on whether this conservative moral panic is justified. So far, I've seen zero hard evidence that this leads to an increase in sexual harassment or assault.

And I want to emphasize the term "conservative moral panic": this really is just current year's iteration of the conservative moral panic over social progress. Moral panics are the standard reaction of conservatives to social change, and their favorite moral panics are those related to children. They pulled the exact same shit against gay people. First they suppressed them on religious grounds. When that stopped working they conjured a moral panic by constructing an unfounded association between homosexuality and pedophilia. When they lost that fight they had to begrudgingly tolerate gay people existing, but then the fight for gay marriage began. First they tried suppressing it on religious grounds again, which once more didn't work out. Their next move was, no points for guessing: constructing a moral panic about gay parenthood. If kids see two men kissing, they might catch the gay themselves! Etc etc.

The strategy against trans people is startlingly similar. They've lost some ground already in that they have to begrudgingly tolerate trans people existing, so now they're in the "will someone think of the children" moral panic phase over how the trans people will trans your kids, or how drag queens are going to groom them, or whatever. All without any evidence to back it up.

And also similarly to how they treated gay people, conservative pundits openly use language laden with disgust and open contempt. It's not just "a trans woman" sexually assaulting your kids, it's a balding sweaty overweight man in a dress and makeup sexually assaulting your kids.

The fact that you agree with the police brutality example directly contradicts your first post, which stated

> Calling people fighting for REAL issues "woke" is incorrect.

So you state that there are at least two axes -- severity of the problem and how widespread the problem is -- that influence whether a problem is worth addressing (or whether it is a "real" problem, as you put it). I agree so far.

For instance, we can probably agree that slavery was an issue that, in the US, affected a small minority of the population, but that was extremely severe so worth addressing and a "real" problem.

In the same vein, I would state that police brutality towards black people (typically categorized as a "woke" topic) in the US is a problem that affects a minority but that is very severe. Not as severe as slavery, but severe enough to be a "real" problem worth addressing.

Not using preferred pronouns is perhaps another rung down on the severity ladder compared to police brutality, and affects fewer people. But I think it's still a topic worth talking about because it scores very highly on a third axis we've omitted so far: how easy it is to address the problem. Not using preferred pronouns is done exclusively out of callousness. It is similar to other forms of bullying: it only affects a fairly small subset of people and the damage is "only" psychological, but the solution is: just don't bully/misgender people.

Are you implying that issues that don't affect the majority of the population aren't real issues?