zug_zug

Literally just watched it today and it's definitely in my 10 least favorite movies I've ever watched. Wish I had seen your comment.

Well for all the whinging about how biased-to-the-left universities are, it sure seems ironic that the only colleges that explicitly banning attendance over different opinions are colleges on the right.

If somebody complains persistently about all the times the "woke" is unfair but conveniently forgets to mention a single time conservatives are unfair then I can only presume either they are not very educated about the facts of our world, or intentionally misrepresenting the facts of our world.

I've been doing it for ~20 years off-and-on. Initially I thought I'd find an audience/community that resonated, but never did. So no.

My experience has been that I have to post to HN about 6 times to have a shot at making front-page, and even when I do I feel like from the comments that I didn't succeed at communicating what I was trying to.

I also don't get any organic interaction. (https://think-twice.me/)

There's stuff all the time:

https://eji.org/news/alabama-attorney-general-releases-white...

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

Or here's a case where 6 officers collude to torture 2 black people to death (https://apnews.com/article/mississippi-deputies-guilty-pleas...). Surely they'll get a real sentence now that it's news, but it makes you wonder how many cases never get identified as racially-based when the investigators are the perpetrators.

And boy it sure does seem odd that further south you go the more of a problem it is... I wonder what could explain that phenomenon....

shrug Well I've been on HN for about 20 years, and I'm not anti-pg (he's about 50/50 by my accounting). I'm also anti-censorship, anti-authoritarian, anti-mob.

But he missed the mark here. It feels like he published a first-draft without getting any dissenting takes on one of the biggest hot-button topics on the web. I (or a million other people) would have been happy to read a draft of this and explain that he'd create offense and confusion with his... attempt to explain the history of priggishness around social justice based on his lived experience... if that's really what this is supposed to be.

I don't think you're discussing in good faith.

I doubt you're truly unaware that everybody saying woke in 2025 unironically is angry and making an insult.

I also don't believe you could read this comment section and think PG didn't get everybody emotional (and mostly confused about his point too), or that he tried very hard not to.

I think it's okay to refer to the word "woke", but if you use it more than 3 times in your writing, then it's hard to take you seriously.

Why?

Because it's a word that gets people emotional. Getting people emotional is the opposite of what you want to do when you're trying to intellectually dissect something. But it's exactly what you want to do when you're grinding a gear.

It's just like if somebody wrote a piece about trump, but mentioned he was a felon 4+ times, you'd know they weren't writing an unemotional thinkpiece.

Yeah, that's where he lost me too. I get the impression that in his head the firing of a college president is a bigger problem than racism.... like bro 24% of the world lives in a caste system. I don't know if human kind will ever be capable of treating people without preference across beauty, age, race, etc.

I'd be curious how he "sizes" the import of these problems (priggishness, prejudice) and whether it's just drawn directly from personal frustrations of a wealthy white billionaire in the most progressive state in the world.

Spending too much time in the richest, most tolerant counties in the country can make you forget that we still have colleges that won't admit gay students, or that many people still don't believe in interracial marriage.

Yes it's a teeny tiny little bit of a shame that a college president had to step down for raising a fair academic question. It is not half as important as when a cop shoots a black person dead for dating with a white girl.

I don't usually love this type of post, but this one is the exception - very valuable.

Just the section on how to rewrite alone communicates something incredibly valuable that grumpy-engineers like myself have great trouble getting others to understand.

I don't have my mind made-up on XP, I've never worked at a place that actually supported collaboration (often workers spoke different first languages, vastly different experience levels, had minimal social graces, were uncomfortable asking questions), but I think it could exist with great effort and would have a lot of upsides.

I'm not sure why this isn't considered anti-competitive behavior. Once a communication company has 1-billion users perhaps we need to classify them as a more of a utility and hold them to stricter standards of openness.

I'm not asking for a philosophical proof of which terms are or aren't bad. I am proposing that rather than taking every single complaint seriously that we try to set some basic structure or benchmark.

I perceive that the current state of language-policing is anarchy: anybody can all anything bad/harmful/problematic/ism etc. Often a small group suddenly decides that their personal judgments on language should be followed by all, and it makes the remaining majority bristle, particularly if they try to enforce it without bothering to make a compelling case and win popular support.

I perceived this blog-post to be one piece of noise in this free-for-all.

Perhaps it's time for a better system than anarchy -- such as setting a standard (majority vote of the affected group?).

Well I think you addressed the simplest case, which wasn't really the situation here (nor in the meme).

I think if somebody directly offends you by calling you something you don't like, then from first-principles, it does seem like you're always okay letting them know that and seeing if they mind stopping. And most kind people would.

But in the meme-case it wasn't the lady in the meme asking people to stop, it was just some random girl on reddit. Same with the cargo-culting, I don't think the cargo-cults themselves are objecting, rather it is somebody objecting on behalf of another group.

Or the case of how we name our git-branches is even more indirect (since nobody is calling anybody anything, except a git-branch).

I'd love to hear some from-first-principles, emotionless arguments with clear proposals (e.g. If x% of people think term Y offends group Z, at what threshhold do we care? And does only group Z get to vote?).

I know that this strictly isn't "freedom of speech" because these are comments on an internal website, but it really does seem problematic.

In a remote-first environment, where there is no longer any means of communication that isn't through some other corporation's equipment, we are seeing levels of suppressing dissent that were never technologically possible before.

I don't know if there's a technical solution, legal solution, or no solution. But it sure seems like the ability to collectively organize has been hampered. Complaining about RTO may not be the most evocative example, but certainly the future will hold more significant ones.

This blog piece perfectly encapsulates an interesting discussion we are having as a society - "Do we need to care if a word has a hurtful etymology (if nobody using it nowadays knows that history)?"

Taking it out of the superheated culture-war lens, let's examine a more chill example: There's a popular meme with a girl crying and pointing and a cat sitting at a table. After some number of years somebody online pointed out that the panel on the left is some reality-tv personality going through a genuinely terrible life experience. They were sort of implying that everybody on the internet should stop using the meme for this reason.

Most of the arguments in either direction have thus-far been name-calling (due to culture-war nature). I'd be curious to see a well-reasoned from-first-principles argument in either direction, though curiously never have.

Looks to be 100% about aging, but I don't see anything specific to programming

Yeah that's a problem -- Here's my law for honest leveling - If somebody of a given level is incapable of doing something of the level below them, then your leveling system is broken (and they should be in a separate track).

Basically if your leveling system says "A company of all Staff+ would write no code and go out of business" then your leveling system is bs.

So what if your dad died last month, and the DM decides it'll be a cool twist for his BBEG to abduct your character's dad gouge his eyes out and try to kill him?

It's good to be able to explain these things, and IMO a lot of D&D players aren't comfortable being the first one to say that stuff without an "HR" exercise to give them permission.

Presumably you've had different experiences, but from my personal D&D experience I've had zero people who abused the "distress signaling" and seen multiple cases where people were a bit uncomfortable and didn't really say anything other than snarky jokes (e.g. a player's backstory culminates in them graphically torturing an NPC to death while everybody else at the table is weirded out).

"Don't play with them" strikes me as impractical advice compared to communicating. If you're 6 months into a campaign as opposed to establishing a protocol to be able to say "hey this is kinda much for me, could we take the gruesome details of this offline?"

Communicating a tone for the setting early would have also helped.

Yeah I agree. To me the "If you know you know" mentality is a negative signal about something, suggesting that something is possibly seen as cool/trendy (which is a negative signal against being the most practical/utilitarian/unsexy solution).

I love css. My hot take is cascading rule sheets should be used for much more configuration; hits a sweet spot in between repetitive text and overpowered code-config

Unclear doesn't mean safe, it just means hard to quantify. Your child could be in a car accident and their survival odds could be unclear, scientifically speaking. Doesn't mean "totally safe."

This is a lot of noise around what's clearly not even an order of magnitude to the way to AGI.

Here's my AGI test - Can the model make a theory of AGI validation that no human has suggested before, test itself to see if it qualifies, iterate, read all the literature, and suggest modifications to its own network to improve its performance?

That's what a human-level performer would do.

I think they could be called a scam. Having flame retardent in our bedding by law, all so smokers could smoke in bed safely, feels like some sort of regulatory capture to me.

They should make flame-retardent bedware and non-flame-retwrdent bedware, and should be legally obligated to disclose every flame-retarded chemical and daily expected daily exposure levels on the tags and box.

EPA safe guidelines are changed all the time often by much more than 1 order of magnitude. E.G. lead has gone from .5ppm being safe (1995) to 20 ppb (2023).

If you adopted a life strategy of "only avoid things after scientists have conclusive evidence it's dangerous for you" then you'd have unnecessarily ingested hundreds of various poisons over the last 100 years.

I hear a lot of people speculate this, but frankly we don't need a million people repeating this theory. We need a few scientists looking into it, and the rest repeating whatever the scientists conclude.

So you're saying the US outpaced areas that didn't have vaccine and didn't even take social distancing seriously?

Are we controlling for age and health of the population then?

Here's on litmus test -- if it wouldn't be criminal/negligence for one kid to say this to another kid, should it be criminal/negligence for a chatbot to say it?

Like on the one hand, I obviously think that if this is a frequent behavior on commonly used chatbots, yes that's a problem. But if you have tens of millions of people talking to chatbots, I think it's almost inevitable that somebody is going to take something the bot says as a justification to do something wrong/illegal (in the same way that some crazy person is going to say a celebrity is in love with them, or that some crazy person will use a kitchen knife as a murder implement).

For now I think the world is a much better place with more competition in the AI market rather than fear of a lawsuit stifling smaller players.

I don't think you understand. USA had exponentially higher reported deaths because we tested probably 10 to 100x as much as your average country.

Probably only because we reported it better.