661 karma · joined November 16, 2023
That said, these practices do matter in other settings shared with strangers, so reflexive habits are worth having for that reason alone.
BASIC on ZX Spectrum was meant for learning, but no serious software of the era relied on it for anything that needed to run fast.
I suspect this code could be 10x faster if written in assembly or a compiled language (a handful existed for the platform).
The government obtained a warrant to seize the business and, as a part of that, to do a routine inventory of what's inside the boxes. After securing the warrant, the FBI said "sike, we're gonna rifle through customers' stuff to see if we can uncover new crimes... and we're gonna keep the contents via civil forfeiture too."
Several folks sued, and then the government dragged their feet for a while, but eventually said "ok, we'll return your stuff, you have no legal standing anymore." The courts agreed.
The only outstanding issue was whether the government should be ordered to destroy any records / copies of what they found in the deposit boxes they were not supposed to investigate in the first place. That's where the courts differed. The appeals court decision is a pretty scathing criticism of the whole fiasco, but strictly speaking, it only delivers a verdict on that last question (yes, the government has to destroy it).
To be fair, workplace safety has improved quite a bit - some of it thanks to regulation, some due to economic shifts (less mining, more office work). This improved the life expectancy of lower-class men.
But that aside, a lot of the gains in life expectancy have to do with very basic things - like flush toilets, along with generally improved standards of living.
Social media is "adversarial" in the sense that yeah, most platforms want to maximize engagement, and maximized engagement might not be best for you. But that's also the relationship you have with companies selling you sugary food or expensive shoes. They're not your friends and they want you to spend money in ways that might not benefit you. We manage.
Ultimately, you have agency to shape your experience. You're not "addicted" to it any more than one gets "addicted" to chocolate or Louis Vuitton. Social media ended up replacing social life for many teens, and it's probably useful to ask why - this isn't Mark Zuckerberg's design.
At some point, adults in the developed world decided at some point that it's not OK for children to play unsupervised outdoors, walk to school on their own, and so on. It's probably a function of increasing standard of living and plummeting birth rates. Just 50-100 years ago, you had multiple children with the expectation that not all of them will make it to adulthood. Nowadays, most families will have one kid - their single most important "investment" - and they have the means to tightly monitor and control their physical environment. The internet is sort of the only place where you can meet with friends and have fun unsupervised. It's an escape hatch.
I don't see how banning or regulating TikTok or Facebook really solves this.
A lot of "index fund" folks criticize shorting and other "gambling" tactics, but it's probably worth noting that the argument for the soundness of index funds hinges on there being a class of traders who identify bad businesses and try to drive their price down. Otherwise, you're just pumping money into a snapshot of the market with no regard for the health of the constituent businesses, and it eventually ends in tears.
Do you really need an oven? Most techies don't cook all that often, and it can be cheaper to order take out. More efficient due to the economies of scale, too! Do you really need a smart phone? Do you really need a gaming PC? There's always some other, more barebones way of achieving the same result.
We tend to have a lot of tolerance for what we think enriches or streamlines our lives, but little patience for the same in others. It's also true for politics, where we're always eager to regulate other professions or lifestyles, but not our own.
Do online communities need to be great by some HN metric in order to be deemed worthy of survival?
Some knitters had fun sharing their work online. Now that's ruined by ML. If it was ruined by cryptocurrency mining instead, would we be posting similar "they had it coming" defenses of this destruction? There is a heavy bias on HN toward excusing the externalities of generative AI.
Instead, we came up with a system where you can actually derive fairly steady revenue by creating new works and sharing them with the world. And critically, I think you misinterpret it as calling dibs on shared culture or on stories. Copyright is usually interpreted fairly narrowly, and doesn't prevent you from creating inspired works, or retelling the same story in your own words.
Generative AI is a problem largely because it destroys these revenue streams for millions of people. Yeah, it will be litigated by wealthy corporations with top-notch lawyers, for self-interested reasons. But if we end up with a framework that maintains financial incentives to artistic expression, it's probably a good thing.
A lot of his videos should be prefaced by "it's interesting, but you don't need to worry about it unless you're working on the types of projects I'm paid to work on." Without this disclaimer, PCB design becomes less accessible. It's akin to teaching basic chemistry by starting with quantum foundations and insisting that everything must be derived from that.
I'm not sure the regulation here is great. As with Rx-only contraception, these regulations force patients to spend money and discuss their intimate life with a doctor for no real reason, which many people find difficult. And it's not like you undergo thorough screening to get Viagra anyway. A doctor is not gonna say "no".
The problem with bodies such as the FDA is that once they address grave risks, they seldom reach this point of "OK, we fixed the problem of arsenic in patent medicine, so let's scale back for now." Instead, the bureaucracies only grow. Today, far too many drugs are Rx-only and stay this way for too long. The need for prescriptions for equipment such as eyeglasses or contact lenses is hard to justify too.
I think there are two realistic paths for the company. One is to make the browser amazing and edgy in ways that Google and Microsoft can't match (out of the fear of cannibalizing revenue or running into regulatory trouble). Mozilla has a shot at it, but it's unlikely to happen if they have a defeatist attitude about it internally, and are focusing on non-browser pivots.
The other path is to basically turn into some completely different company, throwing money at unrelated pursuits such as AI and hoping that you get lucky. But what gives Mozilla any edge with that?
> To explain how an AI-generated story written by an AI-generated person was published despite this policy, B&H says it was part of a “test” to identify and protect against such content.
> “Our editors wrote a test article in mid-November as part of their efforts to identify and protect against AI-generated content. They overlooked adding disclosure to the article indicating that it was AI-generated, which was a mistake, and did not delete the article after the test.”
This sounds... rather unconvincing.
I'm surprised by the "more spacious" comment, however. In the same size class, EVs tend to be more cramped because of how much space is needed for batteries. Even for large cars, like the Cybertruck, the trade-offs are fairly evident. No spare tire, for example.
IIRC, VW had code to detect emissions testing and reduce performance at that time. What did Cummins do?
The problem artists have with LLMs is not that they routinely output copyrighted works (it can happen, but isn't common), but that they copy human-expressed knowledge and art styles on an industrial scale, thus destroying revenue streams that supported or encouraged creative expression in the past. I doubt this is going to be solved via existing copyright laws. I suspect that the need for disclosure of copyright on the source material is to build a case for more novel legal protections for artists down the line.
At first, you have an influx of excited members, so it feels like you have a shot at it - but within a couple of years, most of them drop out. They either get discouraged, or they find their groove and really want the convenience and flexibility of working on their own schedule with their own tools that aren't abused by strangers.
If you want to run a Makerspace in Portland, Seattle, or in the SF Bay Area, you better have an endowment from a wealthy donor, a long-term government grant, or something of that sort.
Another bias might be in product line-ups. Pickup trucks are often used in construction, hauling, snow plowing, and so on. All of these activities are accident-prone. So why is Ram #1 and Ford is way down the list? Probably because Ram only makes trucks, while Ford sells a lot of smaller vehicles too.
Separately from this, there's some science to suggest that PFAS are harmful to humans, but at doses very much higher than experienced by the general population. Many of the headlines about PFAS being detected in weird places involve parts per trillion, and at that level, no health impacts have been demonstrated. Even for lead and ethylmercury in water, the norms are in parts per billion.
Then, there's a cottage industry of anti-progress doomsayers who want to equate it to a handful of big environmental missteps of the past, so the lines get blurred. Same as with microplastics, where you're bombarded with headlines about them being found in random places and being vaguely bad for you.
My DSL provider received hundreds of millions in government subsidies and did nothing to improve the service in the region, and brazenly lied about it to the FCC. I know that it's fashionable to criticize Elon Musk, and it's often justified, but Starlink is far more deserving of government funds than most of the grifter ISPs who actually get the subsidies.
It's surprising that we have such cavalier attitudes when it comes to our own field, but so much fear and magical thinking about the power of government oversight when it comes to everything else...
I'm not taking the position that the negative impacts of our civilization should be ignored, or that biodiversity shouldn't be preserved. But I really struggle to understand going from "we should be better stewards of the environment for our own benefit" to "it would be better if we never succeeded in the first place." Maybe that isn't your point?
Even the differences in height are often overplayed by making bad-faith comparisons: https://i0.wp.com/www.curbsideclassic.com/wp-content/uploads...
The main difference is that nowadays, there are more factory and aftermarket configuration options available, and people have more money, so you see more people driving heavy-duty trucks with 35,000 lbs towing capacity, which have big engines and thus are rather beefy. But conversely, you also see more people buying small trucks with "stub-length" (4-5 ft) beds.
It's interesting that you don't really have a market of mini-pickups that are seen in Japan, but that's probably partly a matter of weird fuel efficiency regulations, of import restrictions, and cultural factors (few people in the US want to be seen riding anything golf-cart-sized, and it's not exactly a guy-only thing.)
I wouldn't feel any more comfortable getting diagnosed by an open-source LLM than I would be by a proprietary one made by OpenAI.
You can't use this to prove that the model will always behave correctly (or desirably). At best, you can build test-suites to empirically check that it kinda-sorta appears to be doing the right thing most of the time. Which you can just as easily do with a black-box model.
It's not that I'm against openness. I just don't see how you can posit that it gets us close enough to safety.