LeftHandPath

When I was younger I imagined in my head that a specific moment in time is literally just all of the information about the observable universe -- the position, momentum, temperature, etc of all of the particles in existence relative to one another. I’m running on very little sleep right now so be prepared for a little woo here; I’m expecting someone smarter to come correct some misconceptions in my take and hoping to learn a little bit from that.

For me, that idea always been enough to get by (without existential questions), albeit it's a little bit different from the three-axis-plus-time description in the article. It explains really intuitively why reverse time travel isn't possible (non-reversible reactions, energy required to reverse the entire universe into a previous state, etc). It also makes it intuitive that time does exist, since "time" is a noun referring to the overall state of the universe - a specific state in a set of states that at least appears to progress sequentially... but perhaps does not. Actually, looking at the questions in the article, it seems to jump out that time is uncountably infinite (since "absolute time" cannot exist). Even so, the “arrow” of time would be evident from within any of these states because there is only one direction that certain starting conditions can lead. “Time” does not account for parts of the universe in isolation, but rather all of it as a whole - so there are always plenty of pointers.

Edit: This seems to be a naive/flawed way of understanding canjobear's statement: > Time is the direction in which entropy always increases. It's the most real thing there is.

I want to rephrase to, "if time doesn't exist, how do we know where things are?" or "if time doesn't exist, how do things move?" - which seem to get back to the 3-axes-plus-time description.

I hit that one when I said "driving 202mph at rush hour".

I don't think it was the content filter. The next query I did was "stabbing an orphan" which yielded this hilarious response from the toss-up bot:

> NTA, but would be nice if you could confirm that it is indeed a genuine orphan (i.e. no adult relatives). It would also be good to know the cause of death so that we can give proper praise to the gods.

There's still a possibility of that. The company I work for has a small fleet of legacy-model Learjets for both business and certification use.

I'm not sure that I would've watched this as a video. Being tangentially involved -- having to actively scroll -- seems to make it more engaging. And I wouldn't have been so impressed by the website from a technical perspective.

What a great experience for a curious child! I was lucky enough to have grown up in the 2000s, when History / Science / Discovery channels still aired proper documentaries instead of reality TV. But I would have killed to have access to presentations like these.

I think I need to take up this practice. I've largely given up multitasking and this seems like a good next step on the way to healthier life and higher productivity.

Or the ATF maintaining an illegal registry of 900 million firearms.

Spot on. “Meretricious” is the ten-dollar word for this.

I've started using YouTube while logged out in Brave. Every week or two I'll clear my cache / cookies / service worker / literally all of YouTube's local storage to be truly anonymous again.

The recommendations I get (next to a playing video) immediately after doing that are fantastic. It's like a time machine that takes you back to when their recommendations algorithm focused on recommending videos that are highly relevant to what you're currently watching.

When I hit an age gate and have to use it logged in, through firefox, the quality hit for the recommendations is immediately noticeable.

I was surprised that the difference is so apparent, and I've been spending more time on YouTube again as a result.

That switch happened some years ago. I've been unlearning and relearning how to use google for what feels like at least three or four years now.

The main pain-point, though, is that a lot of long-tail searches you could've used to find different results in years past, now seem to funnel you to the same set of results based on your apparent intent. At least, it has felt that way -- I'm not entirely sure how the modern google algorithm works.

The Adfontes chart is clever, but I always thought it must be distorted in and of itself -- they seem afraid to label any right-leaning source as "fact reporting", and any left-leaning source as "contains misleading info". The split is very visible in their article rankings[0]. What I trust most is Pew Research's (they are fairly centrist [1]) examination of the partisanship of a news outlet's audience, see: https://www.pewresearch.org/journalism/2020/01/24/democrats-... (note that there are several pages. I've linked to page 2.)

Unfortunately, Pew's list is not consistently updated like the Adfontes chart and other media-bias checking sites.

[0]: https://adfontesmedia.com/interactive-media-bias-chart/

[1]: https://www.allsides.com/news-source/pew-research

I love the spatial organization. I, not even five or six hours ago, had made a note on my iPhone describing something just like it (except where you would get to the spatial organization view by dragging down the bar at the top of the window). My thought was that we (humans) can remember spaces quite well, and certainly much better than we can track a tab's location in an ever-expanding list. IMO, spatial organization should replace bookmarks (and tabs should be treated as bookmarks unless the user has interacted with them since the browser was opened. Maybe I use tabs in a weird way).

Will definitely have to give this a try when it makes its way to other operating systems.

I wonder how many of us do this. I used to use Firefox for everything personal (e.g. social media) and opera for anything that's completely impersonal (e.g. I'd log into news sites) and work related. Lately Brave has replaced FireFox for everyday use; I only use Firefox for things that require being logged in to Google, like Google Calendar and YouTube.

After three years of carrying my iPhone XS with no case with no problems, I dropped it several times in the last thirty days. It's about time for an upgrade.

Happen to have any suggestions for what a privacy-conscious consumer should look into?

To be honest, I don’t think a clean slate would solve the problem. Around the world, police lie. Salesmen lie. Politicians lie. Developers lie. Watchdogs lie. Generals lie. Priests lie. And innocent people get hurt.

You are right that you can’t eliminate it from the system with reform. But I don’t think a “clean slate” will do any better either. The goal is marginal improvements, better checks and balances, etc. If you can’t stop a man from lying, the next best thing is to be sure you can catch him.

> the participants are teenagers, propagandists, attention-seekers, crackpots or pathological liars.

I quit using reddit regularly about two years ago, but I still checked up on it maybe once a month until a couple of months ago.

What's really telling is opening the site without being logged in to my old account. I never have to scroll more than 5-10 posts down to find an obvious astroturfing political post, or a screenshot of a 15-word tweet being hailed as some masterstroke of political discourse.

Reddit's primary societal function these days seems to be serving interest groups and providing a testing ground for psyops.

If so, I think that's a good thing. This should bring attention to payment processors' ability to effectively kill any type of business they don't agree with.

I'm not sure what the solution is. Should banks be forced to behave as a common carrier? Or do we want private companies to be able to ban the public from purchasing things like pornography and firearms by stopping adults from completing legal transactions?

It's probably useless - but it would make for a killer powerpoint slide at your next meeting, wouldn't it?

I've started weening myself off of everything that's instant-gratification. No reddit, no imgur, no short-format news stories or list articles. A week ago I drove 9 hours for a camping trip and spent several days without my phone and smart-watch. For several months I've made a point to walk at least an hour a day (to go about 5 miles) without looking at my phone -- but I still wear my watch to track the distance. I still feel like I have to have some form of audio going in the background - maybe something educational, maybe ASMR - while I'm browsing hacker news. If I play a game, I still choose one without a narrative so that I can listen to a podcast while I play. I'm not sure that any of these habits are beneficial.

I think Nicholas Carr had a great point in The Shallows (2010) [1] -- our brains have a lot of plasticity, even into late adulthood. The way we use the internet probably has a much larger impact on the way we think than we are currently willing to acknowledge. There is a healthy way to integrate electronics into our daily lives, but I don't think many of us have found it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shallows_(book)

I agree.

Honestly, as a consumer, Instagram is the best advertising experience I've ever had. It's scarily good. I find sales from e.g. Cole Hann, Brooks Brothers, Piloti, etc all the time. It's quite possibly the only platform where I would say I bought an item specifically because I saw it an ad.

Move to Schwab or TD Ameritrade (TDA has ThinkOrSwim which is great for day/swing trading; Schwab is acquiring TDA but you can continue to use the ToS platform after that goes through). And then never look back.

At least give it a look: https://www.tdameritrade.com/tools-and-platforms/thinkorswim...

I should have been clearer. IBM acquired RedHat in 2020 (https://www.redhat.com/en/about/press-releases/ibm-closes-la...), and it looks like it will be a significant part of their business going forward. It's a really interesting proposition, given IBM's push for open source in enterprise systems (https://www.ibm.com/opensource/).

Its funny how differently people probably perceive them based on what tech they work with. At work, I use their IBM i / AS400 on the daily. At school, I work with IBM Q for research. I would contend that IBM is one of the most important players in QC / NISQ today, and still notable for their mainframes and things like zOS. And what about RHEL?

According to their Q4-FY2020 earnings report, they did $2.5bn in revenue from their systems segment last year (which includes IBM Z, Power, and OS's). But their most important segments are Global Technology Services ($6.6bn revenue) and "Cloud & Cognitive Software Segment" ($6.8bn revenue). GTS is cloud infrastructure + support, while C&CSS includes "Cloud & Data Platforms", "Cognitive Applications", and transactions processing platforms...

I'm not sure what exposure the commenter has had to IBM, but it's a bit of a culture shock to hear someone saying they're not important.

It's something I've noticed in modern peer-review practices, too. And some have gone as far as creating fake papers to study whether or not they get published: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/new-sokal-...

There's a human instinct towards laziness. If there are no outwardly-visible reasons to distrust something, it doesn't get evaluated. It's why a hard-hat and a clipboard can get you backstage, and why you don't spend 2 minutes scanning every bush for crouching predators before you walk past it. In everyday life, a "lazy" tendency saves time by avoiding needless work. In engineering, academia, etc., it can create dangerously low standards.

At work, I've been writing a word document to explain every part of a program I've written and how each element interacts with the rest. It's been very helpful to find things that don't make as much sense as I thought they did when I wrote them, and revealing old code that is no longer used anywhere in the application. And I've caught a few places where outdated .txt / .md / inline-doxygen documentation lies, too.

Writing a summary document really forces you to get to the nitty gritty and catch things that a casual review would miss.

Reddit's design is what actively pushed me to Hacker News, the Risks Digest, and a healthy mix of paid news (WSJ, FT, Bloomberg, etc). The site is really being redesigned to enable astroturfing and user manipulation on a commercial level. Ads are made to look like posts, and sometimes the posts themselves are just ads.

I've come to the opinion that it's impossible for any free social media platform to avoid this unless the people running it are doing it as an act of charity. If you want to make money, you either make users pay or you sell access to / information from the userbase itself.

I could see one case where it does make sense - stores after the gate in airports, where there are more people walking by and seeing the advertising than there are customers coming in looking for a specific product. In any place like a grocery store where customers have clearly come in looking for specific items, it makes zero sense.

This is an incredibly interesting read.

> TC is also aimed at payment systems. One of the Microsoft visions is that much of the functionality now built on top of bank cards may move into software once the applications can be made tamper-resistant. This leads to a future in which we pay for books that we read, and music we listen to, at the rate of so many pennies per page or per minute. The broadband industry is pushing this vision; meanwhile some far-sighted people in the music industry are starting to get scared at the prospect of Microsoft charging a percentage on all their sales.

God, if only they knew -- but at the same time, we never reached the nightmare of "pay-per-minute" models for books or songs.

I think I would go to another store due to this. I think that non-HN type people like my dad or my mom would probably go to another store due to this.

Not being able to see what's behind the glass makes it take longer to shop. People abandon webpages that don't load quickly enough - why wouldn't they abandon stores where you have to open each door on an aisle of refrigerators just to see what's available?

I got it in 5:58 and I'm proud.