SZJX

It's funny that I was just having this discussion with somebody yesterday. I guess it's always a question of degree. An airplane engineer may still not need to know every bit of detail regarding how all of their tools are produced before they can make use of the tools to build an airplane. But I agree that you raised a valid point in that at least they know how the components of an airplane itself fit together. Maybe it would be similar to how software engineers don't necessarily need to know all the details about how a computer is built (even though in some cases this would be beneficial), but if they don't even have the understanding of the actual _software_, building which is literally their job, it might be going too far. Similarly, a car driver doesn't necessarily need to know all the mechanics about a car, but is a software engineer more like a car driver or a car builder? Or indeed, is what we're currently doing with agents akin to wielding tools to build a system, which we still understand on a high level, or driving a black box? There is a balance there which people are still figuring out as everything is still rapidly in flux.

Isn't that a concern peopld would have about all software? Not sure if there's something particular to a rewrite about this necessarily.

There's a Chinese saying from more than 2000 years ago: When one steals a weapon, they are executed; when one steals a country, they become a king.

How the world has always worked, sadly, ha.

> They did 100,000,000 forced abortions, killed tens of thousands of their own people and covered it up.

lmao have you realized how absurd such numbers are (even though I'd assume the 100,000,000 can only be a hyperbole, or are you actually serious with it? Having a single child policy for a long while is not the same as "forced abortion" if that's what you're referring to. The thing called "contraceptives" exists) if you use your common sense for just a second?

Seems that it's you who got fed a lot of propaganda unfortunately.

And yes there have been a lot of disasters throughout the history, even not so long ago (e.g. Great Leap Forward, Cultural Revolution etc.), but if you're suggesting that's what the current regime is doing in 2026, you have no clue.

Exactly. The strong Western societal taboo and moral panic on this topic have led to a frenzied crusade that easily bypasses reason (e.g. Chat Control), unfortunately. This is just one of the tragic consequences.

The crusade and strong Western societal taboo/moral panic on this topic clearly massively cloud people’s judgments (e.g. Chat Control in the EU), unfortunately.

No matter your perception of PRC, I don't see how competition around open-weight models has much to do with a "global police state".

Curious, what’s exactly not true about these? The Nordic (and Central European) countries are surely not friendly to people accumulating wealth, and it’s a widely known fact that monetary supply got out of control especially since Covid. Data about it are all available in public.

I looked through some related recent discussions, interestingly somebody[1] pointed out that this has long been the case in some countries where the military service is mandatory, such as Switzerland (even though the threshold of continuous absence for applying for such a "military vacation" is longer, 1 year in the Swiss case): https://www.armee.ch/de/militaerdienst-urlaub

[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/luftablassen/comments/1s33z9v/wtf_g...

Yeah, by such definitions any country is justified to wage a war and always find a way to claim it’s for self-defense (which is indeed how most causus belli have worked throughout the history – they always claim to have the moral high ground when launching the war). This is also how essentially in every country it’s called the Department of Defense (unless you’re Trump) but that means nothing as they start wars all the same. Not a trace of any rules, accountability or restraints still remains under such a framing.

Sounds like a weird incentivization for sure. Why not base the pension on the average over all the years worked as in many other countries? When you offer such incentives, people will naturally work in such a way.

> It demands people ask: Do you prefer Hong Kong's past? Or its future?

Such a formulation is either sheer ignorance or worse, full-on deliberate cynicism.

Hong Kong's "past" was a typical colony where the governor was appointed by the British government with no local input whatsoever, and where any assembly of more than 6 people was deemed illegal and brutally suppressed. The type of thing that people like Gandhi (who are apparently heroes in contemporary narratives) fought against throughout their lives.

The British government only started changing the laws and handing locals more political freedom and freedom of speech once they knew that Hong Kong was returning to China no matter what (surprise, surprise).

In all such propaganda you see now, they try to construct a "past" that never existed, and apparently a lot of the young generation who never experienced the old days fell for it. But the older generation would tell them outright that "Hong Kong's past" is far less rosy than what's made out to be.

It's just astonishing when you see the amount of people waving British and American flags on the streets during the protests. What kind of "fight for freedom and independence" is that? Just imagine the reaction to protesters in a US territory or a European region (Catalonia etc.) waving Russian or Chinese flags.

Not sure it’s a “long-running Internet movement”. You make it sound like one of those loony anti-science conspiracist agendas. There have been a lot of serious articles written about it. I don’t think it’s hard to believe that a lot of scientists and institutions have the incentive to try to keep a whole system of focusing on removing beta-amyloid going as a self-fulfilling cycle. Getting funding and publication citations snd promotions etc. could always be the fundamental incentive out there.

Change Your Diet, Change Your Mind is another book on these topics which is rather comprehensive and compelling.

Good that I saw this post on its last day of opening. Gonna pay a visit today. Typography is fascinating. Thanks for sharing.

It's mindblowing how the majority of the comments here seem to be rather cynical and distrustful. I'd be really discouraged if I were the author. I (as an engineer) found the article rather well-written and convincing! Well, at least it did get 100+ upvotes.

That's the whole point of the article: It's not about "decoration", but about making the underlying UX flow make coherent sense.

That's a similar thing to clothing though. You may argue how it can be manipulated all you want, but people do think in this way and it's a socially agreed upon contract to show you care enough about the occasion and have enough respect for the other people present. No head of state shows up to a meeting in shorts and slippers for a reason.

That doesn't seem to be talking about exactly the same point as the article is focusing on though.

I was wondering about grammar checking tools in the era of LLMs, especially for grammar checks beyond English, and Sapling https://sapling.ai seemed decent. Nobody seems to have mentioned it here?

You can always come up with criticism for anything. Do they deliver some interesting ideas (while understandably they might oversimplify some other aspects) and are not complete frauds? If so there is some value in them.

They’ll be fine and will survive regardless, but their current astronomical valuations probably won’t be.

Weird that it shows that to me at first as well, but now when I opened the article again, the video seems to be available? Not sure if it was restored just now.

From the D/M/Y date format at the end of the article, they may not be native English speakers (at least they aren’t American).

If it’s true, one idea to explain it might be oversensitivity to input (which maybe sometimes leads to withdrawal or avoidance to social situations which could be too stimulating and stressful?), which given the connection between autism and ADHD which has become discovered more and more by research in recent years doesn’t sound entirely unreasonable to me. Then again I have no expertise in this field whatsoever so can only conjecture.

lol that’s such wishful thinking and seeing those congressmen in a way too competent light. If they had any hard evidence they’d have published it. It isn’t hard to understand is it.

This is precisely how English is the lingua franca of developers around the world, and a lot of (not all, of course) companies in e.g. Germany or Japan hire English-speaking programmers.

Funny how when I read Brave New World it greatly got on my nerves, mainly due to how it's supposed to be a "dystopian" novel. To me it indeed depicted a dream world in so many ways.

Interesting perspective, and it's hard to disagree with the idea that there are people who are more outliers than some others on either end, which is just a natural result of any distribution, though I think another angle to this topic is how "good" and "bad" are always relative. Throughout human history, somebody who is regarded as a visionary, saint and savior by their own in-group might well be regarded as the biggest evil by another group of humans. Some simple examples would be somebody like Columbus or Genghis Khan. Those are extreme cases of course, but the same applies on various scales.

Of course. That doesn't mean they are not familiar with the local traditional system though. They just can use both, as in many other countries such as Japan and China and in the Middle East for example.