throwaway72762

Culture war outlet with culture war title. Flagged.

Even if nuclear were built as fast as possible it can't replace fossil fuels fast enough to mitigate before major feedbacks kick in. We're left with significant decrease in energy use as the main thing that has to be done and that there's no will to do.

If you're sincerely interested the IPCC reports and their summaries describe the basic science and the projections and are surprisingly readable if you're willing to read scientific writing.

If they're going to report on this then I sure hope the media demands more than third hand personal testimony. If there's anything real here then it has to be global and we have no indication that people all over the world have seen anything similar.

Like discussed on the Engadget version of this same story earlier, this is basically like saying that because Gab runs on the Mastodon codebase that Mastodon has a fascism problem. Good server administrators already block 90% of the problem servers and quickly block the rest through user flags. The problem servers are apparently are mostly in Japan. (Sounds like Japanese authorities need to crack down better.)

We have so much to learn from them. They diverged from us so long ago.

Also the underlying report is mostly about servers in Japan where the laws are different and/or that are blocked by almost everyone else because they are toxic. As they should be, because the whole point is that servers can block badly run servers elsewhere.

A misleading headline. Not too different from the last round of headlines that there are card carrying fascists in the fediverse. Both are true and they are blocked by all well run servers.

This is like the web and just like we don't say that HTTP has a X problem it doesn't make sense to say that open source software run by thousands of people across the world under different laws has any specific purpose or problem.

Improvements can be made to the software but bad admins can just rip that code out. Still I bet good instances will make changes.

I agree that a ban on the posts isn't the right way. I agree moderation is the right way forward but we need much more active anti flamebait and anti culture war moderation.

There is something wrong with it.

I think about it information theoretically. Oversimplifying, the information content of something is how unpredictable it is in a given channel. On HN, in 2023, the information content of yet another comment ranting about some given city or state or group of people is basically zero. Everyone has seen those comments a thousand times recently and it adds nothing to the discussion.

Perhaps we'd be better off not having any country or state or city does X type posts here unless they're about tech. (That won't solve it, though, because any mention of certain cities or states, even in a tech context, brings out the culture warriors.)

I agree with the guidelines, but they aren't working anymore. I can predict the tenor and content of the comments on half of the HN front page these days just from the title and domain, which means flagging isn't cutting it.

I completely understand that everything has a political dimension. And the broader culture war is leaving nothing untouched. But that means we have less room for a shared community even in small spaces like this.

What I lament is that the community of tech folks, embodied by sites such as HN, have splintered and moved away from their roots. I mean go watch the documentaries about the early days of the 70s and 80s and even the not so early days of the 00s: vision, tinkering, weirdness, geekery, cussedness, anti-authority, pay it forward, etc. That is what defined the scene. That's our roots and I'd like it to come through in comments here. Instead it's just culture war: us vs. them, grievances, IGMFU, and all the rest.

Is everything culture war all the time now on this site? Every post becomes a stupid comment section where we'd be better off getting an LLM to write the comments for us.

Here it's people trying to insert their affirmative action narratives and also rant about California a bit (in a backhanded way).

We can do better.

Definitely. The only place in the deserts in the US that will be an exception to this is Yuma AZ because it is close to the warm ocean waters to the south of it so it's more humid. But it doesn't have a huge population unlike Houston or Miami.

Adblock? I've been hoping for an iOS browser with adblock that isn't bloated.

Yes, this is exactly right. The wet bulb temperature in parts of Texas and Florida in the heat wave a week or two ago got close to the limit of human survivability. Five years from now Texas, Florida, the Persian Gulf, and South Asia are all going to be seeing that limit exceeded at least briefly every summer.

Best I can figure it, an anonymous webboard for economists used lousy identity hashing and some data scientists wrote a security analysis showing that fact. Part of it was showing that, surprise surprise, a bunch of economists at big name schools were posting a bunch of middle school taunts of women and minorities. (Not much to do with Mastodon here except just as one among many services that has IP address info of users.)

Eh, one can dislike the longtermists and the non-longtermist plutocrats. I'd say there's good reason to dislike both, but for different reasons.

Why should the tone have changed? The billionaires and AI godfathers talking about it now all were inspired by LW and scifi, and it's the same narrative: no need to care about people living today or real problems in the world when there's a scifi story about trillions of people in the future for whom we must sacrifice anything (except the billionaires and AI godfathers comfort, status, or money) in the present to protect.

Sam Altman's doomstead is in Big Sur. Same idea, different Sam. EA for me not thee: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/10/sam-altmans-ma...

Anil Dash is right, billionaires are high on their own supply: https://www.anildash.com/2023/02/27/tycoon-martyrdom-charade...

This strikes me as the best outcome as long as it stops here. This lets the White House move on from the nonsense AI x-risk discussion without being attacked for not doing anything about it, and also doesn't let the companies use fake x-risk to kill off open source models.

Please stop posting culture war garbage here.

Exactly re China: my point is people should stop describing the US response as lockdowns because they literally never happened.

Re reinfection, good luck with that. Every time you catch covid you have a one in ten chance of long covid, and that's the current conservative estimate in meta analyses.

China did actual lockdowns. The US? Not so much.

Herd immunity? Never happened because infection isn't preventing reinfection with a different strain.

If there had been actual, effective lockdowns early enough they might have worked but by March 2020 the cat was out of the bag. Japan's model of universal masking, testing, and outdoor interaction without lockdowns is the best model for the future.

Yes, this. The UK has been subsidized for several decades by the dominance of the US and as a result English. Just as Canada and others in the Anglosphere.

GDP per capita is a poor measure. I have seen things this year that I would never have thought I'd see outside of wartime. Ambulances never showing up or taking half a day if they do. Rationing of basic vegetables at the store. The return of diseases of vitamin deficiency.

I dunno, sounds like your beef is with the folks who buy the same truck as you for no reason other than the look, not the folks who are seeing and mocking that trend.

The article doesn't contest that view but instead considers how germs are an orthogonal dimension and that we are starting to understand better that the host and all of its cells, not just some ill defined subset called immune cells, are responsible for host health and that when functioning properly can coexist with germs without letting them cause disease.

I wonder whether this perspective aligns well with research into bat viral reservoirs as they exemplify this model.

This is excellent but also galaxy brain level. Not something that's ready for popular digestion, given the levels of basic science denial that have popped up post COVID, even among supposedly empirical communities like tech.

Eventually if this gains more predictive power then it can be merged with germ theory and explained better to the public.