15,554 karma · joined February 24, 2016
About: www.nikolanovak.com
(sometimes I try to type on work-mandated iPhone; apologies for occccasional aWfu l typoes:)
I'm neurodivergent, and on various nerdom bell curve tails, including know more than averga bear about technology societal implications and misuses, but I still wouldn't use that term; here in particular, it seems a strong pejorative for anybody who disagrees with your world view :-/
Apparently it unnerves people. My wife coaches me to give occasional Yes,Go On, or UhHuh. But it's a conscious, learned, active mechanism for me. Intuitively, I'll tell you if we've weered off my desired conversation path and I'd ask the same courtesy. I've learned very late in life it's apparently an autism thing. Either way, I don't seek mmms and umms in real live people and I especially don't need fake ones in a machine :)
Whether that's due to my slight autism or massive nerdery, I don't want more realistic voice. I already switched to non-advanced voice in gpt, and I cannot imagine wanting the mmmhms, the yesses, the laughs, in my ai interaction. I want to ask a structured question and get a structured meaningful response. Informative and structured are really the KPIs. The umms and ahms of existing gpt advanced voice are annoying enough, the recent increased usage of first person almost a deal breaker (when asking for bike technique on lose surfaces yesterday, it literally gave me "back when I was learning bikes riding" story - eww).
Fascinating to see the architectural advances though, even when they deliver something I personally don't need :)
To be explicit about each other's assumptions, I think Race (however ill-defined or specific construct as it may or may not be), is not the same thing as Country, Political System, Culture, Religion, etc.
Understanding racists these days mostly use euphemisms and codewords, and it's a devil's work sometimes to figure it out, in the "Principle of Charity" sense, I read that post as being a critique of China's political and cultural systems in general, and their sport-league / development in particular, leading to specific societal outcomes. I could be extremely naive though but I'm willing to learn if you may provide more backing/thought for that?
And it works both ways - people are allowed to care about something, express that, and others are allowed to not care about it, and express that :)
(in this case, as I mentioned in sibling comment, I care about the same cause as well:).
This is why I love Hacker News; I feel you genuinely believe this - that designing and enforcing the law around digital property rights is the easy, straightforward, and the priority/important law :).
(I don't disagree! I'm a computer geek too, this stuff is important and visible to me as well. But let's have awareness of a) the actual complications around crafting and implementing laws around something so massively complex and constantly changing, and b) where the actual priorities for vast majority of people in the world may be:)
At its best, a government law/regulation/policy is people saying "Ouch, that hurt, let's not do THAT again!", or "Oooh, I like this, this is good for us, let's do more of THAT please!".
At its worst, its self-preserving bureaucracy run rampant.
Any oversimplifying platitude like "I'm against big government!" or "I'm against government regulation!" so tremendously lacks specifics as to be worse than worthless.
And this is an extremely complicated issue which a tiny minority of people care about that'd be ridiculously over-complicated to implement with huge difficulty in tracking and enforcing! But because where we are, it resonates with us, and we on Hacker News feel it's an obvious and easy policy to apply :). You know, unlike the minor issues of war and peace and hunger and poverty and economics and minority rights et cetera :)
100 internet points and tip of a hat to you sir :)
So how come today, even people who do content for a living, not necessarily programmers but writers and "influences", just generate default LLM-style content? I see exactly what triggers you in the github writing linked, and it feels so easy to fix even using AI itself.
It's at the point where I'm like "if you can't even bother to rewrite or mask or ask LLM to give it some personality, why are you asking me to bother reading it" :-/
But still, I have a soft spot for the Golden ages of engineering well before my time - like many, I'm an apollo program geek. No matter how many documentaries I watch, books I read, websites I peruse, schematics I try to figure out, it is still beyond astonishing to me that we flew to the moon with 60s technology. I'll continue reading about it for rest of my life and be incorrectly melancholic about the simpler days of engineering :).
While the 747 isn't my kink, it'd adjexent enough thay I think I can understand it - I imagine it's similarly fascinating to think of massive intercontinental airplane designed by slide rule , then flown across Atlantic without computers or gps or ils or any other amenities.
More expensive and breakable and inefficient and polluting and just insane as it also may have been :)
I'm specifically wondering about the X4, which is the size of a phone, meant to be attached to the phone, but it's not a phone and crucially no backlight. Does it specifically fill a situation for people who don't want to carry a phone but will carry this? Or, for people who might carry x4 and a smart phone, why read on the x4?
Thx!
I have a kindle for beach and travel as a good compromise size; I use my 10" tablet when I really settle in for reading, or when I read technical books with graphs or books with photographs etc. For my adhoc reader I use kindle app on my phone. What is the unique selling point of something like X4? I notice it attaches to the phone which seems bizarre, phone feels like a functional superset, so I must be missing something - is it battery life or less distractions or something else?
Thx! :)
First, to your point, I'm Not a googler or ex googler.
That being said, for what little may be worth, No company I worked for would be ok for me releasing unauthorized code to official public report with official logo and company name without some approval / discussion / disclosure, at whatever appropriate level that may be m. I'm curious, On your previous team, did your manager know and approve of open source publications? Team mates? Did they have names like "Google Hangouts X" and accompanying logos etc?
I guess what strikes me negatively and mutes my empathy is the "zero lessons learned" part of the tweet:
>>"I think the cause was that Workspace and certain leaders (and projects) were afraid of being disrupted"
I'm not quite silicon valley enough to use the word disrupted unironically, and certainly not self-unaware enough to proclaim that as the one and only reason for my misfortunes. I hope they and any family they have are ok. I feel if they had actual grievance with the firing, they should've gone through appropriate legal remedy. Twitter drama is just a zero-win game to me :-/
More to the point, anything I'd want to plug in to a gaming machine, is usb a.
In magic the gathering I had dozens of decks trying different things. He had a single deck that he kept tweaking to within the millimetre of perfection.
In overwatch, I would play different characters to experience different parts of the game and try different strategies. He played single character for years, with 10 times the hours in that char than I had in all of them combined.
Heck even in real life, he was a Java developer for decades whereas I was a type of fleeting sysadmin specifically so I could play with different toys in the stack :).
Now, this is a bit side Venn diagram, he'd never be rude on an online game (he does have offline opinions on the meta :). But it let me understand people who have fun in a very different way than I do :). He doesn't see boredom in playing same way over and over (and over and over), I think he sees it as professional athlete being focused and honing their specific craft.
I actually think "not impaired by superstitious beliefs" is somewhere between "less than 1%" and "zero", myself sadly included. For "severely" we have to set up some definitions and thresholds.
Outside of the "so mainstream and prevalent we don't even consider it" superstitions (which, remember, were all the historical ones we may dismiss now, thousand years later), we have horoscope and astrology, psychics, and people who think wearing same socks will help them on a winning streak, and everybody hesitant to talk about good or bad outcomes less they "jinx it". Maybe you're from Germany or Scandinavia and your daily experience is different?
But again, the thread started about biological differences and I will agree that there are little to none between ancient Egyptians and modern humans.
In terms of cultural values, sanctity of life, freedoms and poverty and lifestyle, I do think some things have improved. We can debate numbers as to how much.
Understand that as a Canadian, and not knowing where you're from, you unfortunately find me at a cynical time as we watch our southern neighbour work so very very hard to dismantle much of the progress we are discussing here very every effectively, so it's just difficult to put one's mind in historically optimistic mindset :-/
Romans had educated intellectuals who had some progressive and scientific ideas, and the less educated masses who had less progressive and educated ideas. This seems to describe today's world well. And we still LOVE to attack the "intellectual elite" for having progressive, scientific ideas.
Again, welcome to reality, meet some racists. They make the majority of population :O
More seriously and in the spirit of HN: Because a lot of people, per the original post, assume ancient people were fundamentally, biologically, less intelligent. Couple of reasons:
1. We teach people about evolution and Neanderthals etc, but it's hard for most of us to grasp the time scales. People conflate "Egyptians 5 thousand years ago" and "australopithecus 5 million years ago".
2. As many many people do today, we also conflate circumstances with inherent - like we've seen several times in this very thread, because people 5k years ago they didn't have technology or knowledge of today, there's subconscious assumption they weren't fundamentally as intelligent as capable.
Original post had a simple and specific claim: Egyptians 5k years ago were biologically equivalent to humans today and their intelligence was just as high. Raise them in modern society and you'd get the same bell curve.
That claim alone is mind blowing to many.
Basically I think we have to pick a lane on whether we are talking biology, vs culture, vs knowledge and accumulated data.
If genuine, I'm puzzled. In the current world we have a tremendous amount of people who hold various superstitious beliefs as well as spend tremendous amount of time on their genealogy. And nepotism never went away. I agree those are "bad ideas", but don't see how they differentiate us from people 5k years ago?
Oh let me tell you the fun of spelling that one over the phone. He's also not the most patient man in the world either :-)
But I love the chatgpt voice interface e.g. on a long drive when I can use it to learn about random stuff (btw, turn advanced voice off for such usage).
Other part though is, hacker news vs regular population, majority of which would much much rather talk and listen than type and read.
That's the Crux of the conversation here, with two differing perspectives. I'm not assuming it, I'm putting my perspective forward. and asking either clear disproof or acknowledgement of two perspectives.
My perspective to be clear :
If I buy a thing for $2, somebody offers me $1,300 for it, and it is not worth $1,300 to me, I will likely sell it; or I will acknowledge that it's clearly worth 1,300 to me and not call others who buy it for 1,300 insane :).
(This is the opposite of claiming there is no sentimental value. This is acknowledging that somethings absolutely have sentimental value to me and others are more utility based).
Yes dealing with friends is nicer than strangers - but also when you're selling stuff, sometimes it's better to do strangers. Expectations of long term service and support are clearer and have more defined boundaries.