HankStallone

I've noticed the same thing with Grok. One time it predicted a X% chance that something would happen by July 31. On August 1, it was still predicting the thing would happen by July 31, just with lower (but non-zero) odds. Their grasp on time is tenuous at best.

Some people, yes. Go on a dating subreddit and ask where to meet people, and a lot of them will say "on the apps," and that they don't want to be bothered on the occasions when they go out in public.

That's the always-online contingent, though. In real life, a lot of people still go out and would be glad to be chatted up in person. By someone they find attractive, of course, but that's always been the case. If you do it today, one advantage is that you stand out, since so many are afraid to do it.

If that's the case, then he is attractive to women. He's just not what we're told is attractive to women.

Right, nothing's stopped offshoring for a few decades, especially since the Internet became global. That's why I say what can be offshored pretty much has been. I even know some companies who did it years ago and reversed the policy after it didn't work out as well as they expected.

So higher costs on importing workers might prompt a bit more offshoring, but not much, because if those companies thought those jobs could be done offshore, they'd already be there.

There's a good video series called "Programming Paradigms" by Jerry Cain, taken from his class at Stanford. I'm not sure how long ago it was, but it was before whiteboards, when they were still using chalk. He just started including Python that year when it was the up-and-coming thing, as an example of a higher-level language that does a lot of stuff for you. It probably seemed like a breeze for the students after the previous weeks spent on C, assembly, and Lisp, but at least they got some of the fundamentals of how things worked first.

It'd be a good zinger, except isn't it commonly known that Rand had an affair with her lead follower, and basically announced to her husband and her lover's wife that they were in open marriages from then on? It seems like fornicating was one thing she did know about.

Governments are always looking for better ways to track (and control) their subjects. The idea of a national ID[1] has been floated by various US politicians since before it would have been digital. Many Americans oppose it because they fear a government using it to round up dissenting citizens, and others oppose it because they fear it would be used to more effectively identify illegals (some oppose it on both grounds), so between them it's never gotten started.

The UK government does seem especially keen on the idea of a digital/video dystopia, though. Weird, like they're trying to prove Orwell right.

[1] Social Security numbers aren't unique and you aren't required to carry your SS card, so it doesn't work for that purpose.

It doesn't surprise me either, because I'd never be able to use a phrase like "the principles and know-how of the EU" with a straight face. (To be fair, you could replace "the EU" with almost any large bureaucracy.)

Some do, and those who are able to make the move to patronage or subscriber monetization seem much happier for it. But that's most viable for creators who have already built up a viable customer base, which usually started on YouTube. It's much harder if you start out somewhere else.

It was. At the time, they felt like they were doing the right thing -- the heroic thing, even -- in keeping dangerous disinformation away from the public view. They weren't shy about their position that censorship in that case was good and necessary. Not the ones who said it on TV, and not the ones who said it to me across the dinner table.

For Google now to pretend Biden twisted their arm is pretty rich. They'd better have a verifiable paper trail to prove that, if they expect anyone with a memory five years long to believe it.

True, only the first part is odd.

But is anyone going to believe the Biden administration had to strong-arm them into censoring dissenting opinions about Covid? They did it because they were goodthinkers, and all goodthinkers at the time agreed that those opinions were dangerous and should be blocked from the public ear. No one had to make them do it.

I get the feeling a lot of people/companies are going to use Biden as a scapegoat for things they all agreed needed doing.

Odd that they're admitting this now, and pretending that they weren't happy to do it at the time.

Yeah, offshoring has been going on for three decades. What could be profitably offshored has been, and then some, because some executives just like the idea a lot. There are reasons that companies have been abusing guest worker visas and clamoring for more, instead of offshoring those jobs. This may cause a bit more offshoring at the margins, but not a massive change. The fear-mongering is propaganda.

Last year, YouTube removed a video I posted in 2017, supposedly for "medical misinformation." When I watched my copy to see what the heck they were talking about, I had to laugh, because I wasn't sharing a medical opinion at all. I was pointing to vaccines as an example of an issue on which Google might someday censor one side if things continued as they were going.

Nice of them to prove my point, I guess.

I'd imagine all the borders are fuzzy, but maybe that's the only spot where a broad enough area was that way to note it.

I live pretty much on the border between two regions on the map, and you can definitely see a difference just driving one county north or south. But of course you also see exceptions on both sides, in both individual homes or small towns that seem more suited for the other side of the border.

I've thought trains are cool ever since I was a kid reading about the Silver Streak and the Orient Express, so every now and then I look into travelling by train. Unfortunately, Amtrak is like someone was tasked with making train travel as inconvenient and expensive as possible to make the idea of state-funded rail look bad. It's so bad someone wrote a book about it, called "Derailed."

I find that following a few rules helps to keep my heterodox views from hurting my karma too much.

1) Keep them to myself most of the time. Pick my spots, in other words, and don't just toss off quick replies every time I disagree (who's got that kind of time anyway).

2) Don't make a factual claim without a link to back it up, even (maybe especially) if it's something everyone knows. There seems to be enough respect for the process of researching something and backing up your claims here, that people are less likely to downvote a fact they don't like to hear if you make the effort. (This is one thing that distinguishes HN from Reddit.)

3) Make the case dryly and impersonally. People are less likely to be triggered by disagreement if they don't feel like you're laughing at them or calling them stupid.

4) Include a "to be fair" balancing point if you can do so truthfully. For instance, if you're criticizing the Democrats, point out where the Republicans are also wrong on something.

Of course, none of this would be necessary to keep my karma positive if I were left-leaning, but that's okay. Communities should be allowed to lean whichever way they want, and there's nothing wrong with dissenters having to work harder to fit in.

Good point. I was kind of itching to upgrade that box anyway, but maybe I should repaste it and make it a backup server.

I'm actually replacing the FX-8350 in my fileserver next week, because I was running ffmpeg on it and it kept crashing about a minute into the job, so I assume it was overheating either the CPU or something on the motherboard.

It's almost 10 years old, so I can't complain. And I think I got a check for $2 or something like that from the class-action suit.

Kind of like how on the Salesforce support forums, there are a lot of incorrect answers from people who don't appear to have understood the question, but they all have "Please mark my answer as helpful" at the bottom. (And this started long before AI.) If there's an incentive to "contribute," even if it's something as small as being able to put "Salesforce support volunteer" on your LinkedIn page, and it's very easy to do so, you'll get a lot of low-effort (or worse) contributions.

Heh, just yesterday I drove past some roadkill and wondered what a self-driving car would make of that. Then I started wondering how it would handle deer crossing the road 50 years ahead, or running alongside the vehicle as they sometimes do when they get spooked. Or how it would handle the way people drive down the center of gravel roads until they meet someone, and then move over.

At 56, I don't expect to see it on country roads in my lifetime, but maybe someday they'll get there.

There's also a false equivalence, because when the government is on the same team as all the big tech and media companies, it doesn't have to threaten anyone into silencing speech the team doesn't like. It just happens, and then everyone pretends it's organic.

I'd be glad to have a free speech conversation about this with anyone who actually cares about free speech, but that doesn't include anyone who spent the last decade cheering every time someone they disagreed with got his livelihood taken away. One TV network dumping one "comedian" who was well past his sell-by date is a tiny, tiny counter-trend to what's been going on for years.

It's different when they do it.

Yes, much of the anger is coming from the petard-hoisting nature of this, and people who spent 2017-2024 trying to silence (or worse) everyone who disagreed with them and cheering on governments that tried to suppress "disinformation" and other speech they didn't like, having to come up with elaborate justifications why It's Different This Time.

Yeah, I'd think if an LLM's instructions are sufficient, one would have used a written tutorial in the past and not watched a video.

Being born to a human, growing up and living as one of them, and letting himself be tortured and killed by his own creation isn't humble?

You don't have to believe it, of course, but God humbling himself is pretty much the defining aspect of Christianity.

In Illinois, how property is valued and taxed seems pretty obscure, and may involve witchcraft.

The rate on my tax bill is 6.03%. But that's on a "net taxable value" that's about 40% of what I paid for the place 15 years ago, and maybe 25% of what I could get for the place now. So the rate is effectively 2.5% of what I paid, or 1.4% of what I could get. The total tax has also gone up 26% since 2020, increasing by more each year, but I don't know whether they've raised the rate each year or the valuation.

It's probably possible to find out how it works, but there's not much point. It is what it is, so you pay it or leave. No one lives in Illinois for the tax rates.

No, because that started before 2025.

> Was the assumption that the left would own the cultural zeitgeist forever?

Yes, that was clearly the assumption. It's hard to blame them; that had been the case for 50+ years, and the early 2020s suggested that they had the system licked and would be fully in charge until their internal contradictions brought them down.

Yeah, this is the first time most people have thought about Jimmy Kimmel in years.