tenacious_tuna

> For Japanese casualties, the predictions were essentially limitless, since the plans included bombing every city in the invasion’s path with the tactics used on Tokyo. Viewed through this pitiless lens, Hiroshima and Nagasaki not only saved 100,000 American lives but also forced Emperor Hirohito to surrender, saving millions of Japanese lives and turning the country into a bastion of democracy and one of America’s most valued allies.

This keeps being repeated. The US's own survey corps concluded that the nuclear bombing was unnecessary for ensuring a Japanese surrender, and in all likelihood was instead to ensure Japan surrendered to the US and not to Russia.

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

> The primary purpose of field programming is manufacturing logistics

Or if I lose my car key

> I think it'd be amazing if I had the energy to make up improv bedtime stories every night [...] (Lately, it's "Hey Google, tell a story" if mommy is too busy to read)

This feels like the crux of my issues with AI. We're passing the human side of life to machines to do for us; music, art, storytelling with our kids. So often I hear that these are the things that people want to spend their time on, but AI has come to "free" us from "not having energy" to do those things, so we can instead continue to spend our energy toiling away, safe in the knowledge that our children will still get a bedtime story (albeit from a machine and not from a loving parent).

I get it, I know parents have no energy on top of everything else they're doing, this just feels so much like when I walk into a restaurant to a family with their kids, but the kids are all on tablets with headphones.

Oh, I see, almost rubber-ducking the semantic meaning of the term. That makes more sense to me. Apologies for my knee-jerk LLM skepticism.

I enjoy this idea, but it's undercut somewhat by the author asking ChatGPT to define the term they're writing a post about define.

I'm not sure what the anecdote is meant to add, either. ChatGPT and other hosted LLMs seem to be the antithesis of "freehold software."

Am I missing something?

I don't think we (Americans) have a solid understanding of political cause and effect. You see this in low turnout for local/state elections (vs federal), and just a lack of understanding of how the various political mechanics work.

My mother is an elementary school teacher in a conservative Michigan town. She generally doesn't talk politics at work, but a coworker mentioned that the school's "no questions asked" free breakfast and lunch policy was ending next year due to federal education cuts. My mom's co-teacher, who voted for Trump, expressed surprise, saying she didn't realize that was something likely to be cut, or that the states would make up the shortfall.

Anyone remotely following US politics wouldn't be surprised, and would know that most states are fairly strapped for cash. (Whether that's societally optimal is besides the point.) This is a pattern I see over and over again, on both sides of the line: you see Trump voters surprised that cuts to the FDA result in higher food recalls, and you see Democratic voters saying that nothing got done over the last four years.

It baffles me. I have more awareness of the local politics in our small Canadian town than I did when I lived in Chicago, and it all just comes from listening to my friends talk about current events. It's a wild feeling.

I'm also between GenZ and Millennial. I don't have many (any?) GenZ friends, but I feel like I say "no" to social events the most out of my peers (and have for a while). I frankly don't know how to juggle it all: between maintaining important relationships (two partners, calling family regularly, keeping up with close friends), household stuff (cooking, cleaning, laundry, administrative overhead), exercise/my own hobbies (going to the gym once a week), I feel like I barely have time to do... Anything, let alone have downtime to myself.

I have (single) peers and friends who maintain wall-to-wall social calendars, so I've assumed for a while that the difference is just the amount of engagement multiple romantic entanglements takes, but maybe I'm missing something.

I'd love to "do nothing" much more than I can (read a book, work on a project, tidy my basement, learn a new skill...)

> safe in the knowledge that I am not inadvertently communicating with a minor.

Why is that so bad? As a kid I really appreciated participating in mixed-age discussions on many topics. I view that as part of what it means to grow into a "young adult."

Too often I think we (North American society) assume that school, with all it's rigorous age separation, gives kids the space and instruction they need to do well in the world but inevitably we get 18 year olds with no awareness of how the world functions beyond themselves... because they've only ever dealt with people of the same age.

The world is a diverse place; ideologically, racially, and in age. We, adults, need to be comfortable communicating with both children and legal minors because they'll be future citizens of the world [added in edit:] and they need to learn those skills too.

Overall, we keep trying to model a world that filters it's own interactions towards children, which is flawed to begin with, but at some point people stop being children, and where does that leave them w.r.t. their expectations of others? If you've never had to consider that an adult might act in bad faith because your world has been so sanitized, are you prepared for a world with bad actors in it?

I would rather we have a system that is too generous and gets taken advantage of than one that is too parsimonious where people die for want of food and shelter that we could provide for them.

We exist in a world where people can be unable to work or even advocate for themselves through no fault of their own. As we raise the bar for how people have to prove that they "need" help, there will be people who die because they don't have the capacity to prove that. In theory we have social workers (as a societal role) but in reality they're underfunded/don't have capacity for the same reasons.

This feels like the same moral argument behind the presumption of innocence in the American legal system: far better to let criminals walk free than to falsely imprison an innocent person. Why do we not apply the same logic to welfare?

I mean, I know why: we're worried the system would get taken advantage of and not serve the people it's "meant" to help.... but then, who does it help? How much effort is it worth making people spend to prove they need help when that effort comes with a blood cost?

I agree with GP that welfare systems make for better societies--see also, public healthcare. I have several friends who are alive because of welfare systems. I grew up with people whose family squandered the welfare they got, but I don't view that as sufficient reason to withhold welfare from anyone else; I just accept that's the cost of a system that helps people.

...or by sports.

My HS spent millions on a completely new athletics complex. our math and reading scores were in the dirt, classrooms had 70s era carpet growing crap I don't want think about, the band had 30 year old uniforms...but we had a gorgeous basketball complex.

I've run into some performance issues routing everything over a local wireguard link. I have a 10gig connection between my desktop and my NAS, though I only get ~1.1gbps over the wireguard link to the NAS. Without wireguard I can saturate the link.

I could probably tweak it, but I haven't had the bandwidth (ha) to troubleshoot it.

In the case of unhelpful human support, I can leverage my experience in communicating with another human to tell if I'm being understood or not. An LLM is much more trial-and-error: I can't model the theory-of-mind behind it's answers to tell if I'm just communicating poorly or whatever else may be being lost in translation, there is no mind at play.

People with ADHD don't experience the task-completion-reward-loop like others; i.e., it's vastly diminished. This makes building habits more difficult because it looks more like a task that takes energy rather than continuing an establishes behavior.

> When you leave a building, do you exit through the door or the window? I assume the door.

This is a poor example; I think discussing workouts suffices. If a workout is mentally engaging (bouldering, arial silks, an active team sport) it's easier to engage in than a simple, unengaging, repeated task (weight lifting, running, cycling). Why? Because the mentally engaging exercise is appealing because it absorbs attention, which can help overcome the diminished reinforcement cycle.

If you don't already have a workout habit, framed to an ADHD person, it's a crap value proposition: spend time and energy to do something boring and you should feel better, but historically the things people say will make you feel better never have that effect, and you only ever end up with less time and energy to do the things you actually want to do.

In my personal experience, I loathe going to the gym on my own because it's boring and takes time and energy that I would rather spend interacting with friends or playing games: it's a "task" that I "should" do, but it never feels rewarding when I do it. However, if I go bouldering, I'm not bored because my brain focuses on the "problem" of positioning and coordination and I feel like I"m having fun because of the problem I can satisfy my brain with, which distracts me from the energy expenditure both in the logistics (going to gym, changing, showering, etc) and from the actual work my body is doing.

> Neurodivergence is an internet-nurtured buzzword

No, it's a well-defined term from an expert in the space and a member of the community [1], coined to describe an underserved group of people who didn't have existing terminology to describe themselves [2]. Reducing it to a "buzzword" to describe people who have "mental disorders" or "conditions" is a gross misunderstanding of both the term, the people it describes, and the space.

[1]: https://neuroqueer.com/neurodiversity-terms-and-definitions/

[2]: https://neuroqueer.com/throw-away-the-masters-tools/

re: 2, the issue is that e.g. airport gates are a(n artificially) limited resource that require airlines to perform behaviors that don't benefit customers and have externalized costs (e.g., wasting fuel) in order to maintain access to those resources.

A bus only needs to have something like four people aboard to make it more efficient than equivalent cars by most measures (road space required, fuel, etc); so it's not a 1to1 comparison to other transit rates.

This is part of the Canadian border control in my experience; i.e.

- Arrive in Pearson

- go to passport control, scan passport at kiosk, kiosk spits out receipt

- you flash receipt to a border officer at the stairs out of passport control

- go to baggage claim

- get bags

- go to customs

- hand passport with receipt to officer at customs

- welcome to Canada

I haven't had that experience when leaving other countries bound for the US; like GP said, I've had to show my passport to the airline to board, but I believe that's to fulfill the requirement that they made good-faith effort to ensure I'm capable of entering the US.

I used to live in downtown Chicago, where the worst violators where high end sports cars, though we did get the occasional quartet of motorcycles ripping down the roat at 3am.

Illinois doesn't require vehicle inspections, so there's no opportunity for exhaust modifications to be discovered.

Also, doesn't that break the network if the pihole is offline? Before I'd just override DNS on my workstation, but that iptables config would block any "unsanctioned" DNS traffic

> Working and educating yourself is decent and dignified, no?

I think that depends radically on the nature of the work. I hold a BS in Computer Science but am at an organization that requires me to use LLMs as part of my performance evaluation; I could protest, but it puts my immigration status at risk (my employer has sponsored me into my current country). I view the things asked of me (using LLMs) as degrading, but I'm unable to effectively protest that despite being well-regarded as an engineer (by peers and past employers) and credentialed (BS in CS).

Put differently, most people do A Job because they need to put food on the table. One of my partners used to work in the veterinary field, which took an immense physical toll on them. They're much happier being (f)unemployed currently, being able to work in the garden and make good food and produce art, but our finances are suffering for it; they're hunting for jobs, but most of the current openings are pretty bad in terms of work/life balance and future opportunity.

Working is not inherently necessary; in our current economic system it's exploitatively-required in order to live any sort of decent and dignified life, and there's loads of stories about people who work but aren't treated with dignity (thru healthcare or housing or food strife).

I think it's more than incompetence or accountability sinks; The DMV (and similar offices; Service {Canada, Ontario}, etc) are also the points at which the bureaucratic system of government interfaces with actual people as well. Boundary-layer components in any system are complicated because they have to distill complex input into abstractions understood by the system.

I recently emigrated to Canada from the States and exchanged my US state driver's license for one in my now-home province, but there were a ton of hoops to jump through to add my US driving history to my provincial record. The process seemed to be somewhat exceptional as the supervisor for the DMV-equivalent had to guide the reps I spoke to on how to append the multiple-states-of-history that I had to offer.

That's just a microcosm of what it wakes to distill the complexity of a person's life into pieces of verified information that a government can ingest. That's a lossy, complicated process that relies on both the 'customer' and the agent having a matching mutual understanding of what points of information can be agreed upon or, indeed, offered.

In some cases it's not clear, either; my wife was told initially that she would have to hand over her license from two states ago to update her history, because the province's documentation showed it was still active (despite the fact that our immediately-previous state merrily punched a big VOID hole in it, and that it was expired), but when she returned after digging up her voided license they said they didn't even need to see it. That last bit was possibly 'incompetence'; possibly on the part of the Canadian agency, for not being consistent on if they needed to see the license or not, or the US states, for not being up to date on their record keeping, but again: these are complex systems tryng to maintain consistency. It's reasonable to expect noise.

> firebombing and vandalizing teslas that have nothing at all to do with elon

Can you elaborate on this? AFAIK it's entirely to do with Elon & his politics.

> This seems to pretty much ignore AI and robots which will be able to do all/most of the work way before 2060

Just like self-driving has revolutionized trucking, even before 2020!

/s

I hadn't thought of sheet music in this context before; that's a helpful counter-example, thanks.

Broadly I agree; the semantic density of domain-specific language is often required to operate well in that domain. I disagree some with the "Math doesn't start on hard mode," but I think that's just bikeshedding at some level.

The endemic "I just don't understand math" that my (American) peers have espoused, to me, points to a failure in our (American, public school) instruction practices around it.

> why pretend that such a low bar could prevent anyone from understanding?

I don't know why this is a startling take. If you encode your ideas in an unfamilar symbology, of course that's going to make it more difficult for someone who isn't familiar with the space.

I'm not arguing that we should teach real analysis this way, or any other high level math class. I'm only contesting GP's comment that there is NO value to be had in using more familiar language to explain a new concept to an unfamiliar audience.

This is the entire reasoning behind "word problems" at the elementary level; they're meant to ground the abstract modeling of a math problem (193 - 3 * 12 = ?) into something more intuitive for a child to understand (If you start with 193 eggs, and you take three dozen away to bake a cake, how many are left?)

> are you really saying that "let function(argument has type RealNumber) has type RealNumber be a function from a real number argument to a real number" is somehow superior to "let f(x) : R->R"

No, I'm saying the there's tradeoffs on either side, and our educators ought to be aware of this.

> math notation is by and for professional mathematicians.

I agree, but we teach math to plenty of people who aren't professional mathematicians. I wouldn't want to do formal abstract algebra proofs in a more verbose form, I'm perfectly happy using the domain notation, but my friends from biological sciences who have to take a calculus course now have to learn both a new symbology alongside the problem domain. I've watched enough of my (clearly intelligent) biology friends slam face first into calculus and spin out. They're not dumb, they can do circles around me when it comes to chemistry, yet they Just Can't wrap their heads around calculus-style math, which leads me to wonder what the difference is between how we teach complex chemistry vs complex math. Questioning the pedagogy is a fairly logical extension of that.

I think this is a very limited take for a hacker forum. We talk about how useful accurate names for variables are all the time, or generally how working to encode more natural/context-related semantics to code helps anyone reading it understand what the goal is better than an extremely terse symbology.

Yeah, lots of existing math texts will forever exist with greek alphabet soup, but we don't have to rely on those as our be-all-end-all teaching tools.

To operate at a high level in mathematics I would agree that having the skill of easily abstracting complex things into compact symbols is a necessary skill, just as I would agree to the same concept applied to software engineering or really any complex engineering system; by the same token, we don't have to START on hard mode with all of our students. Math is infamously difficult for some, largely (I think) because we make it unnecessarily opaque out of some misguided sense of traditionalism.

If we want to have lots of people who are good at math we should embrace whatever pedagogy is effective.

> How can you have been neutral on Trump until just now and then wrote that? This both-sides-ism looks a bit ludicrous.

Devil's advocate, I think it's easy if you don't directly feel impact from his policies. I've been losing my marbles about Trump at family dinners for a while, but for a chunk of my family he's a check against "radical" liberalism (read: gender ideology, spending money on things that don't serve everyday americans) and a path to lower tax bills.

Similarly, I think it's easy (from a conservative perspective) to dismiss all the seemingly emotional reactions to something Your Guy is saying because that's just politics; that's the expected behavior of politicians. It's not a problem if Your Guy is caught in a lie because they all do it.

I'm straw-manning a bit, but I'm just trying to sketch anecdotes of how I've seen otherwise rational, empathetic, intelligent people routinely offer (to me) unreasonably calm takes on Trump's activities and behavior.

Out of curiosity, what would your rubicon[1] be in the current circumstance? I've found it useful to draw specific internal lines instead of trying to pull apart tit-for-tat reactions between two belligerents.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0YFdwfNh5vs

> The problem of american politics, over the last decade or two, has been the complete cultural maginalisation of the right (from centres of civil power). Something had to give. The universities, the corporate culture, the internet mass media -- had all been monpolised by a "consensus moralism" which was replusive to a lot of people.

I see this offered a lot as an example of a "missing middle", that conservative ideals are systematically underrepresented in e.g. universities or popular culture, and the explanation offered by conservative thinkers is that there's some shadowy force at play.

Could it not just be that these ideals are unpopular? The classic tale of a kid going off to college and coming back with more liberal politics is offered as an example of brainwashing or "consensus moralism," but maybe it's because they were genuinely convinced to shift their worldview.

it's been a couple decades since I've read it, but I'd buy it again as an adult. Like the peer comment says, "Engineering in Plain Sight" purports to be similar and I bought my dad a copy last christmas. Planning to spend some of my professionial development stipend on a copy this year.

This reminds me aesthetically of The Way Things Work [1] which was one of my favorite books as a kid. Having a similar wordly reference as an adult has been a goal for a while.

[1] https://www.indigo.ca/en-ca/the-way-things-work-newly-revise...