orthoganol

Will be buried, but fantastic "fear and loathing in WeWork" kind of article. Loved it.

WeWork basically parodies itself.

I think "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" basically applies here. Short answer is: no; it's devoid of any aura.

I read for a full 5 minutes and the author had not said anything substantive, just their own thoughts about pigeon love based on some pigeons he saw in his backyard once. Ok.

> I felt more comfortable discussing controversial ideas in Beijing

You're reading too much into Sam's quote. This is almost certainly because East Asia has zero PC culture (homogenous populations; nothing in history), so he doesn't feel those particular pressures there that he's reacting against here. That's all.

I think fact that you get fired if you bring up biology at your company's brown bag on diversity (a la Damore), means, just maybe, that you can't actually say some of those things.

You know Sam, if you stopped censoring controversial positions or posts from hacker news I might take you seriously.

Coming from someone who is now almost automatically moved to the bottom of threads or the ridiculous "See More" section you all implemented, who as a result just doesn't post much anymore.

The effects of vehicular pollution? If sitting in your garage with a running car kills you, obviously being surrounded by traffic all day in the cities we live in must be absolutely terrible for you.

How is there nothing on the front page of HN, slack being out for almost an hour now?

Given timeframe and upvotes, how is this not the top of HN?

What an absurd straw man position. I open my statement with "those who should get rich". What do you think?

You're still extremely optimistic about the 'intelligence' of state of art data driven approaches, even if they aren't general intelligence. I'm not sure where that optimism is coming from.

The chess example... "They were wrong about AI never beating grand masters, they're going to be wrong about X". Well, if you make the board bigger, there won't be an AI system that can beat a human.

Play Dota 2, but introduce a random variable that can't be known beforehand by anyone, like things in the real world, and the AI will always be beatable.

Great for specific domains, obviously, but your optimism about doing more advanced stuff, perhaps doesn't seem so grounded.

Out of curiosity, we would need ~500 of these stations in their current form to offset a typical coal power plant (7.5 thousand tons co2/ year, a claim from Climework's about video, v. 3.5 million tons co2 / year), or about 5-6 million stations to offset global co2 yearly emission (40-45 billion tons co2/ year).

What about the world of contracting? You can also be someone who has flexibility on where/ when they work and for who, and it's probably a more viable 'path' in tech than in any other industry.

Since the vast majority of founders fail, having significant financial cushions from your family or years working prior is probably the top pre-requisite if 'founder' is your path.

I'll throw a line to Zizek. In his serious works, he does set out a systematic ontology of reality. I don't fully understand it, if there is even something to fully understand, but along the way he without doubt makes you think, and gives relatively accessible interpretations of a ton of other thinkers.

He's not a major philosopher like Kant, but he is much more than a charlatan or provocateur.

To his credit, I probably wouldn't have picked up his serious work if his antics hadn't first put him on my radar many years ago.

I believe everyone should give critical theory a fair shot. But I find the majority of the thinkers to have pretty simple ideas that are heavily dressed up and typically exhausting to get through, with little personal benefit, except perhaps social cachet in certain communities. I personally think you're better off grappling with the dead philosophers who critical theory seems to be predominantly in conversation with, like Kant and Hegel. And then add in Marx and Freud.

If you believe I am off base, I welcome suggestions of thinkers who are an anti-pattern here.

I wouldn't be so sure, within the last year it's now "Hechy Hech mixed with groundwater", you may have seen the pre-emptive advertising on buses when they rolled it out. My feeling is that it is probably worse than it used to be.

The HN algorithm seemingly took it off the front page fast, so no problem by me.

Wow, The Game I had totally forgotten about. Along with the 4 Hour Work Week, those are two books that gave me totally new measuring devices for success and attractiveness when I was in my early 20s. 4HWW redefined 'elite' as young entrepreneurial globe trotters (location freedom), and was probably the main igniter of the digital nomad movement, while The Game redefined attractiveness (for men) as a predominantly behavioral thing - boldness, non neediness, confidence etc. - not a wealth, credentials, or even primarily physical attributes thing (and pretty much ruined going out to bars for half a decade). Agree or disagree, those books really, really impacted thinking for millennials.

TL;DR "No, trust me."

Prepared to take the hate too. Answers seem fake under the question about relation with parents, and your voice does not strike me as a 13 year old, in particular seeming too controlling of situation. I don't buy it. I apologize in advance if I'm somehow proven wrong in some verifiable way.

You're going to have to elaborate on complex tasks. I would argue the majority of successful, money generating software based in NLP/ NLU, i.e. the majority of the industry, is "rule based" (used in a general sense to mean non DL). Personal assistants, search, chatbots, etc.

Ok but I am talking about general human intelligence when I say AGI and 'recently emerged', not mollusks. You could easily argue we will find out how higher-order intelligence emerged one day, as some researchers already have models for that if you've read a college anthropology textbook; may not be right, but it's not out of the realm of possibility that it emerged recently due to new structure(s) ('design') coming about in a relatively short time period, so making the claim "Since we don't know how it happened, therefore it must be like X" is flawed.

You know what French Enlightenment thinkers were also against? Making headstrong claims (as an authority) without empirical evidence on your side :)

An anthropology textbook in college called "Culture as given, Culture as choice" - basically the good parts of Sapiens minus the preachy, questionable aspects.

Another college textbook, "Global Capitalism: Its Fall and Rise in the Twentieth Century", I think is the best book you can read if you want to understand our capitalistic societies today.

"Incognito" was great for exploring models from cognitive neuroscience, in same vein as Hofstadter works.

French Enlightenment thinkers - esp. Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau, who are not only awesome but in my opinion articulate the core of what's actually worth defending in Western civilization, not to mention are formative of actually good political views.

German idealism, really starting with Kant to lay groundwork, and working up through Hegel, has hands down been the most wild and impactful philosophical journey I've taken. I don't recommend it unless you have some formal background or unusually strong appetite for philosophical reasoning, or (not including Kant) you'll probably just dismiss it or simply not be able to meet the exorbitant time demands required to reach a satisfying level of understanding.

Writers like Borges, Calvino, theater of the absurd - just plain, intellectually stimulating fun.

Disclaimer, I like contemporary 'critical theory' tinkers too, because they make you think outside the box.

It's interesting how people come out of the woodwork with their personal theories on AGI. Do you/ we even really know how general intelligence works, or even how it emerged i.e. incrementally, or in a dramatic mutation more recently? Last I checked there wasn't a scientific consensus on either topic. To then come out headstrong and say "AGI will be like X" always makes these AGI conversations a tad farcical.

That tier distinction is way too fluid in my experience to claim it as a real thing; a large (not small) number of people I know who've worked at or work at Google easily belong in the 'minor leagues', but it's just an over the top confidence even arrogance, often combined with a lot of years of sticking with tech, that got them their job. Seriously, a lot of mediocre developers if you add a bunch of years (or a post grad degree), maybe a month of leetcode if they haven't already, and double their ego can a get a job there. (New hires get assigned to the uncompetitive, boring projects at Google, so there's that negative compensation too).

Btw talking about total comp and not base salary is highly misleading. Yeah sure, by that standard with recent valuations I'm making >250k at a post Series A startup.

Fair, I guess I meant comparatively to alternate cheap living destinations of digital nomads.

Well for one, they are now letting you stay for 4 years without needing an actual job at a Thai based company :)

I think it's just more exotic. Chile, Colombia, Argentina, Peru, they are pretty US-like in their own ways.

Do you really expect an uncomplicated answer given the range of people we're talking about?

I mean of course there's a subset of heterosexual young men who weigh women high in their travel decisions, and that's across every ethnicity for almost every region of the world, not just SE Asia. Pick a country. There will be a reputation there, of one or a few ethnicities or nationalities having privileged status in the dating pool. North American gringos -> South America; French guys -> American girls; White guys -> Japanese girls; Argentinians, British guys, etc., etc.

Of course girls is a factor for some. And then of course it's hardly a factor at all for many others who, SEA in particular, want cheap living, beautiful nature, safety, super polite and humble population, and escape from Western first world social practices, people, egos, politics they don't like.

If you're trying to chalk everything up to a single thing, you're showing a limited mind.

Edit - hijacking my own comment, after insulting religious institutions on the Muzzmatch thread, I appear to now be defaulted to the bottom of comment threads, despite upvotes. That's happened to all my comments since then, when they used to be defaulted at top and usually hung around there. Hopefully it's temporary... ? Am I going to need a new account/ VPN ?

Edit2 - yep, blocked from posting ('too much posting', well over an hour after last post). Farewell HN. Orthogonal out.

Prerequisites for 'the zone' (why not call it flow? isn't it the same thing?):

a) You have to be interested and eager to get started. If you're not happy with the project, if anything else going on in your life is taking your attention, you will not experience it.

b) When you experience it, you feel like you're a 'real' engineer, like that is your true identity now, your imposter syndrome disappears. So ultimately, if you don't identify as a programmer, as opposed to identifying as someone who programs because it pays well or view it as just a temporary phase of your career until you do management or become a startup CEO or something, you may never experience it.

c) After you experience it, your brain goes "whoaaa" and needs to recover. You won't be able to experience it for at least another 2-3 days, in my experience.

I had non melting ice cream in Shanghai, at a relatively overpriced/ touristy, outdoor seating restaurant. It felt like I was eating some weird synthesized product from a lab. It didn't taste very good either. There is no reason for us to go in this direction.

Edit - whelp, after insulting religious institutions on the Muzzmatch thread, I have been defaulted to the bottom of comment threads, despite upvotes. That's happened to all my comments since then, when they used to be defaulted at top and usually hung around there. Hopefully it's temporary? May be in for a karma winter.

How? It's not randos, it's your actual connections. It's engineered and marketed as a replacement for FB, as the way to stay connected and engaged with your personal network, that erases what gets people depressed about with FB, that is not premised on FB's or Instagram's or whatever's modes of attention seeking.

We need to build the "social network for people who are intelligent, non attention seeking, and want to discuss, socialize, and organize things".

a) no profile picture albums; no one gets to evaluate you based on what you choose to show off about your lifestyle, friends, the stuff you own, the fun you have, the trips you take, the people you date, whatever; those pictures may be interesting but it really is irrelevant to this network while being primarily attention-seeking, and is also the main source of anxiety and depression (especially for young people) related to using FB today. Obviously pictures of you or others pertinent to a discussion are fine, as is having a profile picture, just no concept of photo albums for the profile or otherwise.

b) there would have to be UI and features for organizing the entire network around discussions, wrt what's on your feed, what posts look like, how you interact with others, how you launch or join discussions, etc.

c) again, it's more than a HN with your real identity, it's still a social network, you still organize events, you still check in about things going on with each other, but "launch discussion" or "join discussion" are the primary features, not a generic "share", "update status", "like", "tag", "browse album" etc. Overall it's oriented around insights and mind more than stuff, lifestyle, and impulse thinking.

Towards a better humanity.