what_is_orcas

I think a better way to think about this might not be that this chatbot isn't dangerous, but the fact that this was developed under capitalism, an an organization that's ultimate goal is profitability, means that the incentives of the folks who built it (hella $) are baked into the underlying model, and there's a glut of evidence that profit-aligned entities (like businesses) are not necessarily (nor, I would argue, /can they be/) human-aligned.

This is the same as the facial-recognition models that mis-identify folks of color more frequently than white folks or the prediction model that recommended longer jail/prison sentences for black folks than for white folks who committed the same crime.

It is ok for one to not be social if one doesn't want to be social.

Found this because I was curious (and this was the first non-paywall link that I knew the domain from, sorry if there are other, more reputable sources): https://abcnews.go.com/US/court-oks-barring-high-iqs-cops/st...

Looks like the reason is: we refuse all smart people equally and it's a means to reduce turnover...

What a joke.

I think about this a lot. Of course, on paper it's a terrible idea to pay off a mortgage early (assuming a reasonably low interest rate). On the other hand, my mortgage is my only really significant monthly expense and not having that monthly expense would reduce my dependence on a moderately high developer salary and I'd feel more capable of either changing careers or being self-employed.

Yes and no. They're "interesting lines of research" except when they're in your field, then they're foundations or anchor points for your work, past, present, and future.

I'm not going to disagree that a lot gets lost in translation between academic article and the lay-person who hears a story on the nightly news, but I don't think gatekeeping academic research is the answer, but rather more emphasis on critical thinking and critical reading.

bing?

Holy cow. That was awesome. Thank you for sharing.

Makes one think what the internet could be like in an alternate reality or something.

I'd like to hear more about the bizarre interview, if you're willing to elaborate.

> You can even just run multiple copies of the monolith with feature flags to enable/disable different parts of the code.

I can't tell if this is facetious. I hope it is.

This is a true loss.

Yeah, I think this speaks to a much broader problem with how we attribute value in our society.

Monetary value has no bearing on actual value. For example, a smartphone is only $1000 because some people were paid $0 to produce it. Did those people not produce value? Take a fast food hamburger, it only costs $1 because it's not real meat (mostly), and the person who heated it up is being paid a wage with which they cannot afford reasonable housing and healthy food.

> some idealistic vision of how the world ought to be

Yeah, I think it's a tragedy that we have constructed a society where everyone doesn't have basic needs met. I think it's a bigger tragedy that the alternative to the current system is considered idealistic. You don't have to agree with me, but if nobody talks about the ways that things could be, not the way that they are, then things will never change.

I'm not sure I follow your last paragraph. Are you suggesting that minimum wages are bad because it sets a minimum for employers to pay as though without a minimum wage they would pay a rate more in line with value? If folks earning a minimum wage today, in a world with a minimum wage, can't afford basic living expenses, would you expect more people to afford basic living expenses without a minimum wage? If so, can you justify that? If not, what are you optimizing for?

> A raise below inflation is a pay cut.

A couple years ago my previous company cut the standard yearly raise from 3% to 2%. When inflation went crazy during the pandemic I started casually dropping the quoted line into every conversation with coworkers I could. I even threw out some feelers around organizing but I was always laughed off by someone or other.

I'll add to that: I love redux and most of the complaints or concerns that I've heard about using redux (from a few teams) have been misunderstandings of how to integrate redux into an existing application or an application design. I think this has mostly come from junior-level folks (independent of title, there are a lot of non-junior devs who can't integrate new patterns into their "senior" level understanding of code, but I digress) and folks who don't work on the front end much (or ever). I was one of those folks until I started a side-project that used redux and I had to implement it in a greenfield project and had the liberty to refactor as I progressed and my mental-model "updated" to integrate the new framework.

Yes it is.

Why should the minimum wage not provide a sufficiently secure life for the worker?

I say this all the time: if you can't afford to pay your workers a living wage you can't afford to be in business.

I think I use it like you do. From my perspective, it's just much clearer when I haven't seen the code in a while and need to immediately understand what's going on. Also, I'd be interested in profiling the two different ways of managing state because I can't imagine that recreating a composite state object could be as fast as updating one value, but I haven't done that and I haven't really looked into how the spread operator works under the hood... maybe it's super fast.

> Did I work 20-30 minutes, or have I been working for a day or two? I would say a day or two, and the 20-30 minutes was the time needed to produce the deliverable of that work.

I would say that I do this too. There's a lot of stuff I can more or less do on autopilot and stuff that requires actual attention and finesse, for lack of a better word. I feel like management thinks that I'm good at my job for all of the autopilot stuff that I can crank out, and that makes up for the time I spend implementing one of the more interesting bits.

I think one of the ways that remote work changes this is that I can do other things while I think through a tricky problem; I can do dishes or walk my dog or something instead of trying to look busy in a room with 6-12 other people who are furiously typing because that's how the manager and project manager understand that work gets done.

> he had retired, and had nothing to do.

Or: having a public-facing job is something to do that also served as a social outlet for him (especially if it's related to his hobbies) that was free (how many social activities (the kind where you meet people, not the kind where you spend time with folks you already know) are free these days?).

Every time I go to a nursery I think about how much fun it would be to "work" there, if I didn't have to consider the pay, because I love plants and talking about plants and making chit-chat with strangers.

Ok, I want to say "well how does sitting in a basement with 10 other people making data go from server a to database fit into that" but I feel like the common answer boils down to "ETL is just an abstraction of that work. It takes the place of finding food because [capitalism]"... so yeah, in capitalism, you're right. But capitalism is bad and is a bad excuse to do so many of the things that we do.

I'd love to hear a different argument.

That's cute, but it doesn't make sense.

Most (I avoid saying all, because I'm not that smart) animals, when not surviving (finding food, consuming food, finding sex, having sex) are super idle. It's energetically expensive to work, and, so far as I can tell, nothing has evolved to be energetically stressed.

If we're throwing around words like "evolution" we need to understand that we're talking about genetic survival (passing genes on through generations). The state of "struggling to feed ourselves" is directly antithetical to the goal of having sex. At best you could argue that the hypothesis that peacocks attract mates with their flamboyant tail feathers suggests that they've survived to maturity as intact as they are because of their good genes (survival in spite of being an easy, colorful target for predators), but that's a stretch.

That's interesting, but what does it have to do with what I commented above? That comment got a few downvotes, and I don't really understand the connection between what I said and this article, but that usually means I'm not understanding something.

If you could clarify, I'd really appreciate that.

Leftist ideas don't get very far in US politics because our "left" party is pretty centrist. Every time something "socialist" gets passed (like the ACA), it's super watered-down by folks from both parties and often stripped of key provisions (as is the case with the ACA) that made it at least somewhat workable.

If anywhere did defund the police, aside from police tactics to prevent that (see my other post in this conversation), it would only work if the social services were stepped-up to work toward crime-prevention (instead of crime-punishment, which is what police do), which isn't generally talked about in conjunction with defunding the police because "defund the police and replace it with a not-racist crime-prevention strategy involving community and social engagement and support" doesn't roll of the tongue.

James Carville said, on PBS News Hour, that defunding the police was a losing strategy, which effectively told the voters where the establishment (even the left-leaning establishment) stands.

US politics are conservative. The "left" is middling-at-best.

There's also the concern of how police react to the "defund" movement. There have been a ton of accusations that the police slow down on purpose when their budgets get threatened because an increase in visible "crime" (in quotes because I don't think homelessness should be criminalized, but seems to be the underlying factor of a lot of what gets called crime near where I live) gets all sorts of people to call for an increase in funding.

This is something I've been thinking about a lot: how to make homes less of an "investment".

When I bought my house my realtor seemed unable to accept that I don't plan on ever selling. I bought this house because I like it and I want to live here, not because I think I can sell it in a few years. I work remote and I hate moving.

I know a lot of the HN crowd hates the thought of government regulation but I do agree that the individual interests are directly at odds with community interests and I'm not sure how to correct that without regulating the individuals.

I totally missed that! You're right, I was just more focused on the logic.

This is so frustrating.

I live in a relatively low-income neighborhood in a west-coast city and I hear on social media all the time about how the local government doesn't prioritize us because of our relatively low average household income, but at the same time a lot of those folks are resistant to zoning for more apartment buildings in our neighborhood because of all the nimby classics (crime, diversity, etc.). Maybe I'm wrong (and if someone wants to enlighten me, I'm all ears, because this is definitely not my area of expertise) but it seems to me that an influx of residents into the area might give our neighborhood more pull in local elections as we'd form a voting-block with some aligned interests (services & infrastructure in our neighborhood) even if we differ in other interests.

It just seems like we're already in a losing position (w/r/t local politics), why not at least try to make ourselves more formidable.

To be honest, I think it would improve a lot of other things. In the past I've mentioned that my neighborhood acts more as a pass-through between the outlying suburbs & the metropolitan city-center, but I think more residents in the area would attract local businesses (can you believe there's not a sit-down cafe in my area other than maybe a starbucks? They're all drive-through kiosks!) because there'd be more of a local population. Once the businesses open up, fewer folks would have to commute to another neighborhood for work (we'll probably, unfortunately, never be rid of that) and we become less of a pass-through neighborhood. But, again, not my expertise. It's also a long-term plan, which seems to be off-putting in today's financial atmosphere.

> And BTW, the person making that argument before the Supreme Court yesterday was a woman, and one of the justices who is going to vote to eviscerate Roe is a woman, so this is not just the patriarchy at work.

That conclusion doesn't necessarily follow the supporting statements, though I agree with your overall sentiment.

> Give a crappy code review and spend that time taking a recruiters call.

What does this mean? Like, open a PR with bad code?

What's the correct way to pluralize Safeway?

Being a contractor for an agency is the worst of both worlds: no choice on what to work on that you'd get as a freelance contractor and no career growth wherever you're placed.

I did it for a year and it was miserable. It was great for the first few months, but then I started getting put on more and more menial tasks just to fill out my contract duration and I realized that there was no real point in understanding the systems I was working on in much depth beyond what it took to execute my task.

The other contractors who'd been at it for longer wrote some of the worst code I've seen, even though they were obviously very talented; they just didn't see the point of writing beautiful code if they're not going to be around in a few months to maintain it.