Udo

Somehow we have this notion that we can put an idea (a song, a painting, a text, a meme, you name it) out there and by virtue of copyright people will be obliged to pay for it but will not be able to use it in any way. This is not possible, and advancements in tools such as computers and AI generators make this very obvious. You will NEVER be able to prevent people from mimicking your style, your choices, even your content - you can only prevent them from publishing identical copies and claiming them as their own for a while. I think that's all perfectly fine.

If you don't want your idea to become part of the mountain of content that our civilization is built on: don't publish it. Write it down, store it in your cellar, and have your heirs burn it after you die.

This, and I'd raise the bar even further: if we were to be attacked by any alien civilization, no matter if they have FTL or other Clarke tech or even if they have no special tech at all, we're incredibly f**ed.

It would be trivial to hurl asteroids at us until we're all dead. It would be trivial to engineer deadly pathogens, or to flood our planet with hunter-killer drones, or to roast the Earth with solar mirrors. And those are just the low tech options. We chose not to colonize the solar system, and thus we have no possible way of countering a civilization even if it was on the same developmental level as us.

Maybe we'd be able to mount a counter strike against one alien craft if they're unlucky and don't eradicate us outright. But that's a very big if.

However, I sleep well at night knowing that we have so far not seen anyone else out there, and we definitely have not seen a large space ship entering our system. Assuming they're bound to known physics, we'd definitely pick up their deceleration burn as they approach. If someone wants to eradicate us, a risk-free strategy would probably be to bombard us from outside the solar system.

I also don't necessarily have any problems with that, unless it's siphoning away funds that could have been used to build up an actual orbital infrastructure or serves to further the impression that this is the reasonable maximum the public can expect from a human presence in space.

Since the Apollo program we have a history of hinting at, but then purposefully not following through on, the idea of expanding human civilization into space.

You rightfully complained about the complexity of JavaScript or C++, but you don't have to use the majority of the features. With minimal external dependencies and no other programmers in the mix, you can choose a subset of the language and just stick with that.

It sounds like C/C++ would be a good fit if doing low level things is fun for you. Javascript/HTML/Canvas is also not a bad choice per se, you just don't need externalities such as bundlers, wasmers, deployers, dependency managers.

Whichever environment you decide to go with, start with an empty directory. NO package managers, either. If you absolutely must use an external library, copy it in deliberately and manually.

See how few things you actually need to make something fun and worthwhile!

Having implemented A*-style algorithms occasionally, I was under the impression that by "navmesh" people mean a planar vector structure that can then be navigated using, for example, A*. As opposed to a grid data structure consisting of cells that can then be navigated using a pathfinding algorithm. I always saw A* as a strategy to find a path in any graph, and I saw navmesh as an example of such a graph.

Now it seems people are defining navmeshes as both a data structure AND pathfinding strategy, and by the same token are likewise seeing A* as both. This seems really confusing to me.

Have I been using the lingo wrong all this time?

While YT staff may not actually hold these extremist views themselves, my guess would be they're nevertheless actively pushing it for commercial reasons. Just like it turned out that the supposedly liberal pre-Elon old guard of Twitter had special protections in place that made accounts such as LibsOfTikTok immune to getting banned, I am quite certain Youtube has the same protections for extremist channels that would otherwise run afoul of its T&C on the daily.

Here's my theory on why that happens: Youtube knows I'm male, kind of old, a tech nerd, and that I likely don't have any kids or a wife. That's it. It's the kind of content I'm supposed to like in my gender/age/status cohort.

I did some digging on how the Amiga actually controls the HVAC systems, because at first I assumed it was through GPIO, maybe the parallel port or a dedicated I/O expansion card. However, it seems like it's talking directly to an HVAC control box by made by Johnson Controls (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnson_Controls) which communicates over radio and that seems to be the cause of the recurring radio interference always reported in articles about this school.

It seems like a pretty good separation of concerns. The Amiga could probably be trivially replaced by a more modern computer if someone actually wanted to. Same goes for the radio box, which is probably the even more pressing concern. At the cost of running data lines to the boiler rooms or even switching to a modern digital remote control system, you could keep most of the system as is without swapping out hardware extensively.

It may be time for a change. It's probably a programmer's version of a midlife crisis. You notice that your remaining (productive) time is limited and running out quickly. While porting code from one language to another can be fun, I doubt this fun extends to mindlessly porting APIs. Your brain may just be rebelling.

German here, it's not fast for the Autobahn, per se. The issue is though talking about the speed on its own is nearly meaningless, the most important factor becomes the road and what speed it is designed for. There are plenty of stretches on the Autobahn where there is no speed limit AND you can "safely" go 250+kph. Although I personally get uneasy at speeds beyond that because it starts to feel like you're entering an event horizon where unforeseen things on the road ahead are now beyond your ability to meaningfully react to them.

That being said, there are lots of stretches on the Autobahn where the speed limit is 80-100kph, often with good reason.

In this specific case, hydrogen atoms are fused together, which is a reaction that releases energy because the resulting combined atomic nucleus is at a lower energy state than the atoms that went in. This technically holds true for fusion up until you get iron nuclei, with heavier atoms than iron requiring energy to be put into the reaction when fusing. This is the other side of the equation, which we are already using for nuclear fission plants.

Bashing nuclei together hard enough to overcome their innate repulsion is where most of the input energy is going in fusion reactors. It is comparable to the concept of activation energy in chemical reactions.

Keep in mind that this announcement does not cover the total energy cost of running the reactor, "only" the theoretical amount of energy released into the chamber by the ignition laser. So we're a long, long way off from achieving what they call "unity" (an input/output ratio of 1:1) in practical terms. In theory, fusion reactions achieving practical unity can be self-sustaining. Although this specific way of triggering a fusion reaction is not continuous, it could theoretically be re-worked into a permanently running reactor that is pulse-driven in the same way an internal combustion engine is.

Requiring a comment is probably a bit much, but I do think two separate downvote buttons would be helpful to the commenter, even if only they could see this feedback. Maybe one link labeled with "disagree" and one with "low quality" or something. UI-wise this would have the added benefit of letting new users know that HN officially expects them to consider both options.

Of course, an intermediate horror scenario will then come true if the IP-holding ghoulish husk of Elsevier is snapped up by an IP troll. However, that could finally push us over the edge to rethink intellectual property timeframes.

By the way, this is a limitation of the paid plan:

> Sorry, you can only save 30 songs.

Edit: after trying this out for a bit, it seems like all the music is just a roughly randomized mix of the exact same loops and themes. Is anyone working on a Midjourney or Stable Diffusion for music?

When most people start programming: most people discover what they're passionate about early in life. That of course gives them a huge bonus, because they usually can spend a lot more free time and are nimble learners at that age. However, learning a skill early can also have draw backs, such as being set in your ways because you were in a "know it all" phase at the time, or learning to do things based on instinct rather than reflection.

How long they stay productive: that probably varies a lot, but I don't think I was as productive in my twenties as I'm now in my fourties. I suspect that people who drop out of programming lose passion for it or discover more important things, rather than lose the knack for it.

Whether it's possible to pick it up later in life: there is such a thing as innate suitability. If you're having a hard time, that could be a factor. Or maybe something just hasn't clicked yet. More likely, it's just not for you. All of these considerations don't matter if you're doing it just for fun, mind you. That being said, unless you really forgot how to learn new stuff, it's totally possible and pick up skills later in life and then excel at them (bodily restrictions may apply).

I would say programming as a skill is mostly driven by a constant dissatisfaction and need for improvement, not necessarily by the age of the programmer.

  What I can do for you:

  - Godot game engine projects
  - MVPs, game development, scientific applications
  - working in custom codebases
  - performance optimization of existing code
  - rapid prototyping, proofs of concept
  - scientific applications and simulations

  Technologies

  - C, C++, PHP, Javascript, C# 
  - Websocket brokers, server-side rendering, 
    vanilla JavaScript web apps, Three.js, Pixi.js
  - OpenGL/WebGL/HLSL, Cuda, SIMD, MySQL, Arduino/MCUs

You could just let the discourse end there - it's a strongly held belief and that's the end of the discussion. What confuses me, and maybe you can clear this up in a reply, that you still want to have a discussion about facts and reasoning. For that to happen, you would need to show that "nature" does indeed have the privileged and unreplicable position you assert it does. Just using the term "nature" is rhetorically evocative but not rationally meaningful in this context. To start with, you'd also have to definitionally delineate nature from artifice, because we humans have really been blurring those lines for a long time now and no cosmic force has stopped us yet.

Your implication that "natural" processes can never be functionally replicated or continued upon by volitional development is not supported by evidence. There is, however, a lot of evidence for the other side of this debate. We are heavily altering "nature" to suit us, and wherever we looked so far we find machinery that can be rationally understood, manipulated, replicated, remixed, and used whole or in part in our own designs. If there is a supernatural component that somehow privileges "natural" life, we have not found it yet.

Those are my thoughts as well: for the purpose of the Fermi Paradox, it doesn't really matter whether it's machines or not - it doesn't even matter if they're "conscious", they could be the equivalent of bacteria colonizing everything.

I think you nailed it on the head when you said their drift rate largely determines their future. I consider beings with (for lack of a better term) high general intelligence to be innately high drift organisms, whether their actual replication processes are locked down or not. The drift they experience will be guided by volition.

Whereas machine bacteria (which we are) would be subject to traditional evolutionary processes. I'm really uncertain about the prospects of locking down the latter with high error correction, because it takes only one such bacterium with a random mutation to escape the error correction mechanism and voilá we're off to the races.

It's worth noting that organisms on Earth have a high variability when it comes to their mutation rate, which suggests the mutation rate itself is a parameter guided by a fitness function rather than an inherent byproduct of our specific biological substrate. Of course I agree with your intuition that much higher error correction rates can probably be achieved in architectures other than DNA/RNA.

In the end this is mostly a meditation on how static life in the universe will end up being. Not just regarding the time frames but also the depth of change. On balance, I suspect we'll end up with a highly variable ecosystem just by virtue of more pathways leading to that future.

Among other things, yes. There are enormous amounts of biochemical machinery we are still running today originating from the dawn of life. Although I believe intentionally designed augmentations would be (and in a way: already are) a complete game changer, in at least as much as the advent of higher reasoning and shared culture was the game changer that gave birth to us. So there may well be an insurmountable wall of separation between us and our successors.

From my admittedly biased perspective I think the most important aspects worth porting over to a new species are not even necessarily biological, but cultural and emotional. I personally think there is a potential for experiential richness that I would love to see explored in a human-like but highly advanced lifeform. To be clear, I wouldn't object to personally being that lifeform, either, but alas I was born too early.

Absolutely, I think we agree on that. It's fun to think about whether machines with some intentionally elevated drift rate may occasionally outperform locked-down ones, but I doubt it would be worth it since I don't see a random walk algorithm like evolution beating intentional design strategies implemented by extreme intellects. (Especially since they'd be able to simulate designs beforehand and could easily consider vast numbers of variations in advance...)

Our own brains are an excellent proof of concept that machines can be made to think. We're all machines in a way, after all - unless you believe there is a special supernatural exception for human minds.

Humans are already a hybrid organism that works to ensure survival not only of genes but of culture and knowledge. It's not difficult to imagine a machine civilization would do the same: not only preserve their construction patterns but also their intellectual achievements.

However, none of that is strictly necessary - because evolutionary pressure still applies to machine species in the same way as it applies to us. Machines that stay at home and don't propagate, well, won't propagate. Eventually someone comes along who does propagate and the stagnant species will fade away. There isn't really any difference in mechanism between what we consider biological lifeforms compared to machine ones.

Edit @jimmytucson: HN doesn't let me respond directly, so I'm clarifying my answer here:

> And I can’t see any reason why it would, tbh

It doesn't technically need a reason. The fact that those machines who do replicate eventually dominate the landscape is enough, on its own. If 100 billion machine civilizations choose not to procreate but one does - that's the one that eventually seeds the ecosystem.