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Reddit is awful. I used to absolutely love reddit in 2010, 2011. Back then, reddit was at a stage where it was just starting to be mainstream. Most of the people who had found reddit on their own or by word of mouth, and who had liked it, were cool and smart, so to speak. At the same time, reddit was becoming very popular and being seen more and more as a meme-ey social movement. As the importance of reddit became more apparent, it galvanized all those cool, smart people to work very hard to create excellent content and generally nurture the community. That was the key to the goodness of early reddit: a very high caliber subset of the user-base being driven to put tons of effort into content creation and community management — driven by the intoxicating idea that reddit was the next big thing more or less. I remember visiting a friend at UCSB in 2011, and everybody talking about reddit. One of his female roommates asked if I browsed reddit. It was just a very exciting thing back then. But now look at it.

So we are supposed to dismiss dysons conclusions because he’s a genius? That is the most astounding contortion of logic I have ever seen. If you disagree with him, then go find out the logic he uses to justify his conclusions and discuss that.

So according to your logic, AI should be heavily controlled and regulated, and possibly banned? The effect of AI on society is much less predictable than GW and has much higher ceiling for how bad the outcome may be.

Edit: my mistake. Human or near human AI. But there are strong arguments for lower forms of AI.

Freeman dyson, who is one of the smartest human beings ever to live, questions evolution and climate change. On climate change, I don’t think he opposes being proactive — he just disagrees about the completeness of the evidence. He also has an unconventional opinion about nuclear war: that it’s not a very big deal.

Why not? First of all, you are kind of forcing people to do one kind of thing in order to survive. Yes, it’s true that lots of people are not capable of advancing art or physics. But what is also true, and more important, is that most people dont want to do that stuff. Forcing everyone to be an “intellectual” for their survival would be downright dystopian. Second, it wouldn’t produce good results anyway. There would be a flood of bad and incorrect intellectual works. We would see problems arise similar to the ones we see now like the reproducibility crisis and the social justice double-think on campuses. When college becomes a right instead of an exclusive privilege for the intellectually gifted, it no longer serves the purpose of intellectual advancement.

Distilling the water won’t remove the chemical.

Reading too much into it: public figures have rationalization for what they wear, and a lot more insignificant things. But yes, I’m not saying this guy in particular. I’m not reading into him. It’s about the wide-spread trend. He’s just following the trend.

He’s just being comfortable: a $4000 bespoke silk suit is a lot more comfortable. And trust me this guy probably owns a few garments in that category.

What should he wear: I’m not saying this guy is horrible for choosing to wear this exact garment. He’s following a negative trend, and my comment is about the trend. “God do I hate the fashion of SV,” please read stuff before replying.

Who cares? Does this have something to do with my comment?

Files in the Linux ecosystem are a mess. Files scattered everywhere and each instance of Linux uses some different arbitrary directory scheme. We really need a reboot. New micro kernel based OS with clear directory logic and dedicated directories for applications to keep stuff.

Vice is completely biased and it makes me happy to imagine snarky vice people being laid off. I hope that these layoffs are a sign that the clickbait model of journalism is failing. I would gladly pay for my news if it werent biased. But I haven’t found a news firm that is free of bias, not even the economist is.

What is the correct terminology for the binary blob that is a result of training? Is that resultant blob called “the algorithm?” I see people use the word algorithm to describe the training and the actual result of the training. I think the most appropriate term for the resultant blob is “agent” or something like that.

this website is supposed to benefit American military academics and by extension the interests of the United States. But posting these lessons and insights publicly advances all nations equally, including our enemies. Wouldn’t it make more sense to keep all this stuff within the US military?

The answer is really simple. It’s because most people who use the internet are not fun and weird. Trying to blame it on anything else is wrong.

He actually did appologize

Give me micro LED or give me death

Wow, you’ve totally changed my mind. Thank you for taking the time to explain this to me. Someone really should make a new mailing list community.

I don’t understand your point. Your account is less than a year old. But anyway I jump from account to account mainly because of the abuse of flagging by politically oriented users. If you must know, I first got here in 2012.

I would rather be able to visit some central resource rather than mix email and discussion forums. Mixing those things together just feels wrong. Mailing lists tend to be extremely visually jarring. But there’s no difference between a mailing list and any other form of community. The packaging doesn’t matter. So I’m confused why you seem to think the packaging will help in some way. What matters is the moderation, the incentive scheme for users and other stuff like that. Also, traditional mailing lists lack a mechanism for maintaining solvency. The ultimate failure of all that has come before is the fact that it completely depends on altruism. Forums Create amazing value in the lives of people who use them and they will be good when they begin to sustain themselves based on that value.

I so rarely come across a commenter who shares this opinion that I feel like I want to hug you. Hacker news has declined in quality. The most precipitous drop in my opinion was right after all the buzz about Facebook becoming less popular, musk joining mastodon and everyone in the comments brainstorming about alternative social media schemes. After that things really took a dive.

I think it has to do with the influx of new programmers and the growth of programming as an industry. Programming is becoming easier and more mainstream so the natural result is the ratio of excellent people to disappointing people changing for the worse. computer forums no longer intrisincly filter out stupid people.

Googling “reddit alternative,” HN is on of the first results.

I find lobste.rs to still be good. It probably has to do with the fact that you need an invite to post there.

I’m really scared and disappointed by HNs decline. HN is the only good intellectual watering hole on the internet as far as I know, and I have looked. If HN were to continue getting worse or if it shut down, it would be a huge loss for me.

I’ve considered starting a new website, filling it with a hand-curated pool of users gathered from around the internet, and then launching an invite system. Lobsters isn’t good enough because it focuses too narrowly on web development and also people are really afraid to comment there because they might mar their image or get their invite revoked, I think. I believe there is a very large amount of arbitrage when it comes to online communities.

There is so much arbitrage! A new Wikipedia that’s actually good at teaching rather than just being a reference book for experts. Social sites that differentiate between curation, storing and fluid, in-flux communication and exchange. And most of all, using new techniques for raising the quality of content and comments. The space of incentive schemes is virtually boundless and there are def some veins of gold out there.

My comment is about ai. It is about how people perceive ai, and sci-fi is a very good demonstration of how incorrect human intuition can be when it comes to ai. This incorrectness is present not only in stories about ai, but policy and opinions regarding the very real and dangerous developments that are taking place. Developments such as the one that this thread regards.

It is therefore only through deep, contemplative and unintuitive ruminations that one can come to understand that AI is going to end human society as we know it, and that the result will be very unpleasant. This is not a guess, it is the truth. People have a huge amount of difficulty seeing this. I thought the example of halo and Cortana would make it easier for people to understand. I could have written it better but why bother? Nobody ever seems to get it.

My comment is about ai. The thread is for an ai post.

Everyone likes sci-fi. Star Wars, halo, Star Trek, etc. all these franchises have something in common: they depict AIs working alongside humans. I think that it’s an important demonstration of cognitive dissonance about AI. Fans of these franchises aren’t bothered by the glaring contradictions that some fictional elements create. For example, Star Trek features transporters that teleport people across space and in reality the existence of such a machine would change the economics of many different things very drastically. Life would look a lot different if teleportation were allowed to effect the economics of human life. Another example is communication technology. Star Trek had what we now call smart phones. But they still lived their lives the way people did in the 80s. We now know that when smart phones are present, people stare at them all the time, don’t go out much, are never in trouble because they can’t communicate (car broken down) and etc. it’s not the best example but it’s the only one that actually played out irl. My point here is that people in general do not seem to appreciate the change in economics that are prompted by new things — people are only able to imagine some new technology being used in some niche case. It doesn’t bother anyone, or break their suspension of disbelief, when some groundbreaking new technology completely fails to alter the world and society in a realistic way in a fictional setting. But any other breach of “realism” is somehow very offending.

In halo, you have an AI that lives in your power armor and her name is Cortana. Cortana can sense what you see, hear, etc. Cortana is seen to be super smart on multiple occasions and it is clear to the player. This doesn’t bother anyone. It bothers me now, though. If all of this is true, the following would happen.

Cortana senses the presence of enemies faster than you. she hears them and is able to identify how many based on their foot steps. She becomes annoyed with how sloppy you are, how many enemies you didn’t even notice and how slow you are to respond to them. She suggests that she take over your power suit. You find yourself in a situation you can’t handle and are forced to give her the reigns. She jumps into action dispatching enemies with speed and accuracy that you’ve never seen before. She shoots enemies as they step out from cover. Your movements are so fast that you vomit. She wipes out army after army as you passively watch, bewildered.

As you go through the game, you are on a mission to unravel the mysteries of halo and find a way to survive. Cortana assesses the battle space and concludes that you need to travel east. She notices several patterns of ancient runes and directs you to investigate a hidden passage. Her assessments seem incredible and bizarre but they consistently prove to be correct and eventually she ends up making every decision.

At the end of the day, if Halo were real then it would be a story about a man who passively sat inside a suit and watched an ai save the world. He probably would die in the suit at some point due to experiencing high g forces during some adventurous fight or maneuver and it would be a story about an ai who saved the world with a dead guy in the suit. It doesn’t make you feel warm and fuzzy like halo is supposed to, does it?

People seem to assume that once they get a computer science degree, and when they become good programmers, they will automatically be wise in all domains of life. The cockiness and gigantic egos of programmers is very clear evidence of this. Some of the weakest people I encounter, in terms of the thoroughness and completeness of their existential philosophy, are programmers. Having a feeling of content or completeness when you identify as a “programmer” is a trap that only the weak-minded seem to fall into. Just look around the peninsula now.

Go to the library and read their math books. I don’t know why the internet is filled with these questions that are always “how do I start doing x?” Just f* do it dude. Nobody is going to be able to or bother to answer anyway. The answers wouldn’t make deep sense to you because they rely on having done it before. Once you’ve started and you’re really stuck and everything you read doesn’t seem to illuminate it, post a question. People will notice you’ve put some work and time in and will be eager to help you.

Intellectual Darwinism.

The fact that people actually went back is amazing to me. To make that journey you stood a very good chance of dying if I’m not mistaken. Plus it must have been super unpleasant even if you survived.

I thought this would be about the psychology of “getting inside” someone’s head. I think it’s a very interesting phenomenon when someone says something to you and you can’t seem to shake it, and it bothers you for days or weeks. I’m very sensitive to it. I believe it’s a very important window into how the mind works. That’s one reason why it’s interesting. The other is that understanding this phenomenon would be very powerful — to never allow anyone to “get under your skin” would make you a much more powerful and productive person.

I have read that the unibomber, before he started bombing, was subjected to an experiment under the mk-ultra program. The experiment was psycological cross-examination. Ted was taken into a room and asked about certain things, things that were probably very important to him — fundamental beliefs that perhaps he didn’t even realize were fundamental to his psychology. Then, with all of that established, he was cross-examined and inconsistencies in those beliefs were brought to his attention or in some way de-stabilized. It was after this that his descent into insanity began which ultimately resulted in the bombings. This concept of “getting inside your head” is much more important than it is given credit for — completely untapped and unexplored as far as I can tell. I really wish I could understand it. But I can’t really find much when I google around for it. Nobody seems to talk or think about this online. Not in the way I do which is viewing it as an exploit in the human mind.

Yeah. I still massively prefer carrying my own space with me if possible. But actually I think hotels could be an option even for people like me. If rooms were properly constructed then they wouldn’t be able to harbor any parasites at all and it would be possible to clean them thouroughly and properly between guests. If I were to start a hotel, I would make public the methods of cleaning and then offer some kind of verification for each guest. Like the receipt checklist you get on a ups, your room would come with some kind of receipt of cleaning. Mattresses would be sealed in plastic. All cloth goods like sheets and curtains would be autoclaved and come with proof of having been so. I honestly think hotels focus way too much on making rooms look homey and warm. Give me a small barren room that’s 100 percent guaranteed to be clean.

There was a video I watched years ago about a specialist who studies the flow of pedestrians and redesigns walkways to improve flow of pedestrians. I remember she was working on an airport and there were two hallways joined at a 45 degree angle with a minor outcropping of walkway right at the joint. A lot of people seemed to float around in the outcropping like turbulence, greatly bottlenecking the flow of people. She installed a clever partition to smooth the transition from one hall to the next and the bottle neck was resolved. Still can’t find that video. I always found it interesting.

Any implementation of sharing living quarters with other people has too many problems. People nowadays don’t understand what it means to be clean. Back wen cleanliness was up to you and of great practical importance, people were aware of beg bugs, Scabies, fleas, dust mites and the such like. Bed bugs are disgusting and when you stay in a hotel of any kind you risk picking them up. Their eggs stick to you, your luggage, everything and you trail them everywhere you go, including your own house. I just don’t understand why people want to sleep in bug infested cum stained shit hole shared rooms. I sleep in my car instead and while it’s not as nice as a room, it’s a lot better than sharing.