warner25

The fentanyl pipeline is what came to my mind as well; another thing exported from China to the US to disastrous effect on the well-being of many Americans.

To be fair, trying to consider the other way around, I wonder what Chinese people could point to as disastrous stuff (in terms of the well-being of their population) coming from the US.

A couple things stand out to me:

> ...while military personnel and veterans are not more likely to radicalize to the point of violence than members of the general public, when service members and veterans do become radicalized, “they may be more likely to plan for, or commit, mass casualty crimes...

This makes a lot of sense. First, it explains the discrepancy between studies that have found no evidence of an extremist problem among service members, and studies that have, which is nice. Second, it's like saying that "while tech workers are not more likely to radicalize to the point of committing crimes than members of the general public, when tech workers do become radicalized they may be more likely to plan for, or commit, computer crimes." Of course. If you've voluntarily trained for military operations (i.e. high stakes managed violence), this is what you know and are more able to do than the average person. You can see other things too like the high suicide rate among military service members which, adjusted for demographics, because the military skews so male and young, is actually not consistently higher than the general population.

> Fort Liberty is, however, an exceptionally troubled Army base.

I think this is dumb. Liberty (the fort "formerly known as Bragg") is just the most populous Army base, arguably tied with the equally "troubled" Cavazos (formerly Hood).

If you put them into the Kindle Kids mode you get a much cleaner, more streamlined, ad-free experience without paying extra. I've seen a few adults say that they prefer it to the full-featured mode.

I recently used the system to order a bunch of chicken nuggets for my four kids. When my order came out, I got a bunch of spicy nuggets. If you have young kids, you know that this is a disaster. Anyway, I said, "Uh, spicy nuggets? That's not what I ordered." The supervisor sighed and immediately said that I could keep them if I wanted to, but he'd fast-track a new order of regular nuggets for me (on the house, of course). Then he started complaining about how the kiosk UI confusingly puts the spicy nuggets as the first choice, so this happens all the time.

Meanwhile, an old man was hollering about how he wanted to pay with cash, but the kiosk wouldn't take cash, so another employee was trying to figure out how to transfer his order to the register at the counter to take his payment.

So in addition to being a horrible experience for customers, this whole thing appeared to be a disaster for the company in terms of both employee time and real money.

That makes sense, but means that banning it from making money through (a) and (b) would be sufficient to kill it quickly (if it's a legitimate business, as you said), without directly taking it away from users and causing so much political uproar.

This part is unclear to me. I know the article says "app," but this is general news reporting, and the term "web app" for stuff in the browser is acceptable terminology anyway. It also says that opening the app will redirect people to a page with information about the ban, not to the main page of the website. Prior to this discussion, I thought a ban at the ISP or CDN level was part of the plan, so a VPN would be required to circumvent it. No?

[I made the same comment elsewhere, but I'm putting it here too because I'm really puzzled by this.]

This part is unclear to me. I know the article says "app," but this is general news reporting, and the term "web app" for stuff in the browser is acceptable terminology anyway. It also says that opening the app will redirect people to a page with information about the ban, not to the main page of the website. Prior to this discussion, I thought a ban at the ISP or CDN level was part of the plan, so a VPN would be required to circumvent it. No?

In any case, yeah, I'm not sure that "the average american tech user who has been coddled for the last decade" knows what a web browser is. I've observed some user behavior among family members that indicates a pretty bizarre mental model of how the Internet, web, and mobile applications work.

Not only this - my observation is that having a secret backup phone is not an unusual practice for kids who might get their primary phone taken away at times by parents, school officials, etc. Or if their primary phone is subject to technical parental controls.

I suspect that Washington might still be a household name 2,000 years from now like that. Other past US Presidents, I agree, no.

As an aside, I'm really hoping that Trump doesn't do anything notable enough to somehow be like that. I fear that he might be more driven to do so than any past US President.

I'll be honest: I didn't know who Crick was. Now that you've associated Crick and Watson, I was able to find the appropriate Wikipedia page. And yeah, this is not the Watson that I was expecting.

Regarding Shannon, I've read one of his biographies (A Mind at Play), but outside of my circle of friends with CS degrees I don't think anyone I know would know his name.

To your point, I was thinking that this might only be stunning for someone with a modern view of the US Presidency. I understand that the powers of the office and the election campaigns for it were quite different in earlier eras.

However, I remember someone who went to MIT observing the same thing about the names of the great scientists and philosophers etched onto the buildings. He noted that he only knew what a few of them did.

You make good points. When I looked up the word "immortality" in Merriam Webster while writing my first comment, I found it interesting that one of the definitions was actually "lasting fame."

> we remember factoids... I might remember 7 things about Teddy Roosevelt... but those things do nothing to represent the complex individual he actually was.

I've thought this before when looking at Wikipedia pages. Especially for less famous people with thin pages, they'll cite just a handful of news articles or press releases in which the person appeared. If there were a page like that for me, or the people that I know best, the collection of factoids would be a laughably inaccurate reflection of who we really are. Someone told me that it's important to write an autobiography for this reason.

Yeah, I was thinking that the while modern social media has made the "cost of entry lower," and everyone can theoretically reach more people than ever, it's hard to even describe most of it as "fame" anymore. I mean, does content even "go viral" anymore, with users subdivided into the tiniest niche communities or audiences? Even if things get wider traction for a while, there's so much competition with so much other content that everything seems to get quickly drowned out and then can't even be found again later through search.

Totally indulging in this side discussion: I remember thinking in high school and college that fame was the end-all of life, telling people that my goal was to have my own Wikipedia page. I saw it as something like the combination of being a "cool kid" (but for, you know, the whole of society instead of just one's school) and a sort of immortality.

Anyway, over the last couple of decades as an adult, besides realizing the obvious - how terribly shallow that is, and missing so much of what's really good in life - I've realized how fleeting fame seems to be even for the truly famous. Even looking over the list of US Presidents (never mind lesser political figures like VPs, cabinet members, congressmen, etc.) as someone who has always been interested in history, I look at some names and think, "who?" or "I've heard the name, but know nothing about him." I mean, of course you can still read about them, but that even a US President can be largely forgotten as a household name within 250 years is really a stunning thing to think about; they are ultimately no more immortal than someone who only has their name in a genealogy database or on a grave marker.

I suspect that there was little data to analyze how much attention the ads were commanding back then.

I often think about how so many things now have been optimized (mostly for profit) to the extreme by data-driven processes, with big corporate marketing certainly being one of them.

Up until two or three decades ago, I suspect that it was all based on tradition and the "gut feel" of out-of-touch and arrogant executives talking to each other over drinks (thinking of scenes from Mad Men here).

One thing that I think I've learned, to my surprise, even for most people in uniform on either side, is that much of life during wartime is still mostly "business as usual."

I think we all tend to have poorly calibrated mental models of this because coverage of war tends to focus on the heaviest action and worst of the devastation.

I don't mean to downplay how awful that can be, or how far the effects can reverberate (even generations later), but like... the vast majority of people still go about their daily lives, doing their usual jobs, doing the mundane things, even having fun, supply chains and infrastructure and institutions seem to be quite resilient, etc. Locally and individually, everything can change in an instant in combat (even then, most people walk away from that and continue their lives), but nationally things can keep rolling along as war drags on much more slowly than we all might expect or hope.

So I have little doubt that the IRS would keep doing its thing, and tax returns would need to be filed (albeit maybe with extended deadlines), even in the wake of a nuclear attack. I suppose the question is how much do things unravel in a scenario of nuclear counter-attack, and counter-counter-attack, etc. for which we have no historical precedent to think about.

From the dawn of cyber operations elements within the US military, and continuing today, I think there has been a culture of trying to push them out to the "tactical edge." Basically, senior leaders have always been wary of them becoming totally disjoint from the rest of the force. So I wouldn't assume that they don't deploy abroad.

However, I would be skeptical that the people in uniform are the "actual good hackers." Unfortunately, uniformed career paths (set by law, in many cases, and certainly long tradition) are not conducive to anyone developing any deep, technical expertise. I think we have cyber operators in uniform largely to do the things that legally can't be done by someone who's not in uniform. I think they are backed by a lot of civil servants and contractors (including academics on loan or moonlighting) with the deeper expertise. I think this is true for a lot of the more technical military systems, by the way, not just a cyber thing, e.g. aviation, air defense, nuclear stuff.

This reminds me of things that I've read about intelligence agencies increasingly finding it impossible to give agents fake identities for cover; everyone now has just left too much of a trail of data behind them. And if you find or create someone with no such trail, that stands out as being suspicious.

As an aside, this is a paradox that has fascinated me for a while. Potentially any step that we take to be more private or anonymous makes us stand out more, thus easier to track and re-identify, because we end up in a smaller crowd (i.e. anonymity set).

Here's a thread on the same topic from late 2023... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37385434

I answered in that one, and I see that things have slowed down for me a bit since then. My routine has been more in flux during November and December since we took a week of vacation, then had the holidays, and have been fighting colds. This time next year I'll be living in a new place, working a very different job, so I'm anxious to see what kind of routine I'll be able to establish then.

Steven Levy's book, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, tells the story of how in the late 1950s the Tech Model Railroad Club at MIT morphed into a computer club around the TX-0 and produced a number of early influential computer scientists and engineers.

Relevant story: In 2015-2016, I was the commander of a few hundred new troops going through their initial Army training; not basic training, but the subsequent stage where they had a bit more freedom. When they violated the rules, I had the power to take away those freedoms, fine them up to a few weeks of pay, etc. Most of them endured that without blinking an eye.

Eventually I confirmed with the lawyers that I could also take away their phones, and that broke some of them. I mean that I had troops break down in tears in my office when I informed them of the punishment, and some went to extreme lengths to circumvent the punishment and secretly gain access to another phone. (They still had laptops and Wi-Fi, by the way, along with permission to borrow a phone if they needed to make an important call.)

The Army has studied this a bit and found that not allowing troops to have their phones during basic training is a significant obstacle to recruiting right now.

> It's a bit odd that blue Massachusetts would choose a Republican, even a relatively moderate one, to replace Kennedy

It feels that way, but let's remember that Republicans have held the governorship in Massachusetts for most of the past 30+ years. That's an interesting broader phenomenon, though. A number of other states have turned reliably blue in congressional and presidential elections while voting in Republican governors. New Hampshire is like that, and I was recently surprised to learn that Vermont is too.

I think that those of us who live in the HN bubble, who tend to be more intentional and minimalist about our technology choices, are often out of touch with 90+% of users. My wife is my daily reminder of, and window into, the technology world that most people live in.

Because I want her to find authoritative sources, read, learn, understand, think critically, etc. rather than taking a given answer at face value.

I absolutely agree that it handles natural language questions much better now than when I started using search engines in the late 1990s - in fact it's optimized for this task now, meeting demand where it's at - but a direct answer to a question is often not what I want. For example, I often want to find a page that I remember reading in the past, so that I can re-read or cite it. Or I want more reading material to get a deeper, more nuanced understanding of some topic; things that will provide more context around answers or lead me to generating new questions.

I've been fascinated by the boom in university CS departments since I was a CS major myself during the low point between 1999-2001 and the start of the current boom. At my alma mater with a total undergrad enrollment between 10-20k, my graduating class of CS majors had just 23 people. The department didn't even have its own building. For a number of years now, CS has been the most popular major there (graduating hundreds per year) and the CS department's newly constructed building is perhaps the most iconic building in the whole city (it's an urban campus). I keep asking myself how long this can really go on.

I have little doubt, by the way, that the booming compensation for software folks in recent years is partially a function of how few people in their mid-30s to early-40s today did CS degrees during undergrad.

For undergrads today, though, I suppose the good question is "what else is there?" (i.e. providing a path to an upper-middle class American lifestyle). Pre-med programs have long been over-enrolled with med school admissions being super competitive. Business and law degrees only matter if they come from the top schools where admissions have long been super competitive. My own kids will start having to figure this out soon, and I don't know what I'll suggest.

I think even when the answer is "right" in some sense, it should probably come within the context of a bunch of caveats, explanations, etc.

But maybe I'm just weird. Oftentimes when my wife or kids ask me a question, I take a deep breath and start to say something like "I know what you're asking, but there's not a simple or straightforward answer; it's important to first understand ____ or define ____..." by which time they get frustrated with me.

These are good points. You've made me feel a bit better about how much is really being wasted.

But "search" and "getting an answer to a question" are two different things, aren't they? I realize that the trend has been going this way for a long time - probably since Ask Jeeves started blurring the line - and this is indeed how a lot of people try / want to use search engines, but still... I wish that Google (and competitors) would have separate pages for something like "Ask Google" vs. traditional search (where I want to find a particular document or quality content on a certain topic instead of just getting a specific answer).

May I ask how old you are? I'm 38 and I've been trying hard to break my 10 year-old of the habit of just typing questions into search engines (or telling me to "Ask Google" whenever she asks me a question and I say, "Oh, I don't know").

> YouTube and TikTok are their real competition

Even in real-time... My wife will literally watch Facebook Reels on her phone while we sit on the couch at night to watch something on Netflix together.

Anyway, I was thinking about this too when the article talked about the data from Amazon showing that viewers preferred stuff from the 90s and 00s over their newly produced content: How are Netflix, Amazon, etc. doing with young adults? If the audience is all Millennials and Gen-X folks, because Gen-Z folks are exclusively watching short-form video instead, it would make sense that stuff from the 90s and 00s would be the most popular. Like I think this is a well-established phenomenon with music, where a person's lifelong preferences will be fixed on whatever they first heard during their high school or college years. I will absolutely pay for a streaming service that gives me access to all the movies and TV series from, say, 1990-2015 and never adds any new content.