absurdo

Semi-rant:

I’m very disappointed to see such wide adoption of pets, especially dogs, as “replacements” of children in adult lives. I do not think it’s healthy for adults to do this because it infantilizes the adult. It is actually very sad, almost pitiful to see it happen. I think pets are wonderful for children because it helps them to develop a connection with living beings that aren’t humans, to see emotions are a universal trait.

More frequently I see now grown people wheeling their dogs in baby carriages. If this is some cosmic-scale humor by nature because we have overpopulated the planet and it’s intentionally sabotaging the environment, then I’m afraid the joke is on us.

Poor HN.

Is there a glimpse of the next hype train we can prepare to board once AI gets dulled down? This has basically made the site unusable.

Yup. This is what we’ve had to endure on HN for the last decade. It’s been an incredibly frustrating site to comment on and frankly I want dang and tomhow to just prohibit political and quasi political articles. Other sites can be used for mindless shit-flinging.

> That's what we all thought about Walmart too and I think most people would agree that the west could have handled the transition to mass imports and overseas manufacturing without destroying local businesses overnight in a better way.

“Handled better”? this sounds like apologizing for corruption and nepotism that ruined the west and handed Chinese a massive advantage in just about every imaginable way. And we can say well yes and the Chinese are also corrupt, and they are, but at least their corruption is making them wealthy. Our corruption has made everyone poorer. The greed blinded the greedy.

Not quite. Look at how some countries value/treasure things like soft hands and paler skin tones, and how it relates to social status. It’s not that simple.

> This is literally the path that led the USSR to ruin.

Or China to current-day prosperity. It’s hard to admit but it’s a double edged sword and there are winners and losers.

Choose your poison wisely.

Unfortunately a lot of this kind of writing teeter-totters between being a massive coping strategy or a circlejerk. Using the lives of exceptional people as a blueprint for the everyday person is ridiculous. I’m reminded of people following professional bodybuilding schedules and meal plans to lose a bit of weight, getting caught up in nonsense like “cheat meals” and “cheat days.” Likewise, if you don’t have any exceptional abilities such that your creativity will advance a field forward, you may want to be reasonable with your expectations and outcomes of what you actually can apply your time and energy to.

At least read Gatto’s work in education because he knows what he’s talking about as an actual teacher who has put more students through schooling than anyone writing these articles. His work contradicts some of this because he studied very non-exceptional childhoods of exceptional people. He has a better answer to how to think for oneself as well.

To actually get to the bottom of things: I think most normal folks are concerned more about getting by and making decent money in “the age of AI” than they are about being brilliant whizkid prodigies coming up with original ideas. A lot of those end up being poor anyway. But the desire to live a quality life is a more universal thing. No amount of “mind training” will help here. Just steer clear of paths that AI can dominate (they’re expanding), and failing that, use it to your advantage as best as you can.

Right now working with one’s hands seems to be in vogue because it’s one of those things that people are unaware of is actually dominated by robotics in the industrial/manufacturing sectors, so the ignorance there can probably get people through some hard times. But eventually even that will be shown for what it is and we’ll have to find better ways to spend our time.

I’m disappointed and confused as to why countries would impose things like 100% tariffs on vehicles, especially Chinese ones. Their labor force is massive and they can iterate and build much better machines than anyone else, so rather than a tariff helping the local economy, it’s going to cripple it in a relatively short amount of time due to lateral advancements in technology that facilitate every-day cars being built. Smaller countries don’t have the manpower to keep up. So what’s the point of this?

Not talking about US in this case.

I’ve trained our support staff on basic markdown syntax and while we do use it predominantly for spitting out documentation and guides and whatnot, its usefulness far exceeds the original intent. And that’s okay.

The broader issue here seems to be that C.Y. isn’t a random online person venting, in that allegedly the VP endorses his stances [citation needed]. If he was a random kook with a blog nobody knew, we would pay no attention to it.

But actively suppressing dissident speech is indeed the slippery slope, and he may get more endorsements as a result. Plus, it just looks bad to silence opposition because it makes the anti-fascists look like fascists. This has been addressed in one of the other comments.

Therefore the way you handle these types of situations may count for a lot. Or it may count for nothing and the response is overblown. Seemingly, it’s worth something given the amount of attention he is getting. Choose wisely.

Edit: I should point out that the same dismissal and suppression has led to 2 terms of Trump. So maybe there is a lesson to be learned rather than closing eyes and putting hands on ears like what this thread has exhibited.

As satisfying as it may be to pile on Reddit for this, I’ll wait for an IP lawyer’s take. I’d like to know if Reddit actually has solid ground or if it’s just puffery and Google et al have already done this via crawling/indexing algorithms.

I read the original article. I feel like the author of this retort got nerd sniped. “Cracks knuckles”? I can find better things to grind an axe about.

The original article is an opinionated rant. It’s not a scientific or a philosophical treatise, so bringing up things like how diabetes is being cured is far, far outside of the subject matter. So for me this retort is invalid from the get go.

The crux of the original article can be summed up as: “I don’t want to be lorded over by morons who pay their way to live to 200 years.” Hard to argue with that.

In particular I’m amused by this line from the original article:

> I am not looking forward to living in such a world, and indeed I think that such a world might constitute an immense disaster for humankind.

I’d argue the world/humankind is already an immense disaster and things can’t get much worse in any real way. It’s run by sadists and we don’t even know why we are here.

I don’t expect life and death to care about the philosophy a human ascribes and it’s not a treatment to anything. It’s beyond human beings.

For the young players: this is what hacker in “Hacker News” stands for. This is 101 and it’s very simply explained which makes it a great step by step example of a typical journey. Hack-a-day is full of these if you want more.

The author is clearly curious and leads in knowing a lot to begin with.

The work-behind-the-work is looking up data sheets for the chips involved, desoldering them without damaging them, in the case of memory resoldering with hookup wire and hopefully its access is slow enough that it can work fine over the length of the wire, following hunches, trying things, and knowing (for next time) the possibility of using a pinhole camera or something of the sort when drilling shallow holes and looking through for tamper traces to avoid in further drills, if so desired be.

As others have mentioned, it would be interesting if the author stuck in and got past the tamper checks to see if it would work as normal. Oh well!

People have been blowhards for as long as there have been people. Live and let live.

HN does the same. We don’t really have a platform on the internet for good discussions so we mostly get regurgitated talking points and a lot of flags/downvotes if it’s deemed a serious enough issue (f.e. pandemic) that taking a contrary stance is strictly forbidden.

Basically if anyone has an iota of sensibility you should have never taken sama, Zuckerberg, Gates, or anyone else of that sort at face value. When they tell you they’re doing things for the good of humanity, look at what the other hand is up to.

Basically yeah. You live in a world of layered servitude and, short of a financial windfall that hoists you up for some time, you’re basically guaranteed to work your entire life, and grow old, frail and poor. This isn’t a joke, it’s reality for many people that’s hidden from us to keep us deluded. Similar to my other mini-rant, I don’t have any valid answers to the problem at hand. Just acknowledging how fucked things are for humanity.

IMHO actual worry has to be tempered by action. Blog posting is a short term relief from the pent up emotions. There are doomers that doompost and doomscroll, and doomers that prep and give themselves a buffer. The world’s wealthiest people build bunkers and buy real estate and agriculturally healthy land across the globe because they’re doomers at heart and can’t shake the feeling of needing to prep for any disaster at any moment. So it’s not just the tinfoilers that have this mentality.

Unfortunately HN predominantly caters to the doomposters and doomscrollers, and then somewhere the shitposters that thrive on performative acting of outrage, fright, drama, and so on to perpetuate the cycle and milk it to its full extent.

I’m not saying go out get some 25-year shelf life MREs and move to a very LCOL area and start growing vegetables in case you need to get through a particularly peckish winter, but humanity as a whole has lived through worse situations and no idea is off the table if its time has come.

I imagine a lot of people are very averse to losing what they have, being set back in their life in some way and seeing others unfairly benefit and perhaps unfairly benefit from their hard work. I don’t have an answer for this that actually solves the issue at heart. We won’t be holding hands and singing Kumbaya any time soon and weather events certainly don’t mind razing entire states. Starting resistance movements and communities is great but hard, unrewarding work with no guarantee of success.

> Anchor Electronics in Santa Clara

Looks about right! I thought Sayal was scattered across US so my bad :l

A big box product store opening that sells plug and play stuff is to me, personally, not worthy of bearing the title Electronics. It’s not news worthy for hackers. I could say that out of smugness but very often I’m confronted with sales staff that don’t know much about what they’re selling, and I end up (playfully?) educating them about the products, so I suspect this would be much the same.

The “Maker” space as it’s called today is amazing but I guess done to death so nobody talks about it?

There are of course no real contenders today that warrant bringing up Radio Shack in any way (but people still do as if it’s relevant). RS put a gorilla’s weight behind teaching people how to fish that when they left, they left a massive cultural void that nobody has since filled and is unlikely to fill. The world has moved on.

I wouldn’t go that far but I do like the analogy. I just think if someone is this hung up on a tool or technology or a process taking over their job, or the jobs of the world, probably doom-ranting through a blog is a short term relief to the anxiety or denial or grief, but ideally I’d say they should see a psychiatrist so we don’t have to all collectively suffer the enmemefication.

I am afraid of asking but what does Sayal classify as? I figured it would take negative time for someone to post Radio Shack in commentary because it’s basically a knee jerk reaction, but I do appreciate a store like Sayal although they’re proper electronics parts seller. These stores are more like finished product distributors. Maybe I’m too picky.

See flight sim book counterpart called “Flights of Fantasy”.

I miss this late 80s early 90s jazz fusion.

On the flip side, I cherish my torn and beaten up copy of The New Masters of Flash. RIP Macromedia.

Like other posters I feel this change is way behind the curve, but not because others did it already and long ago; rather, because as a dyed in the wool Win32 API/Petzold Acolyte, the age of desktop apps ended at least a decade ago in my mind. The rare app here or there that people have installed is eclipsed by phone apps and the browser. In my case I tend to by far have utilities installed moreso than any other kind of program, but that’s not a valid business case for MSFT. So who is their target audience?

> Edit: Alright, as I get further into the article I see more and more what you're mentioning...

I was waiting for this edit but didn’t want to be mean about it :-)

I am going to nitpick this but I’ve come to expect this kind of posting style from medium, substack and others.

It has no coherent thesis, it throws way too many links, it uses meta titles that reference memes. The SNR is incredibly low for what should be a technical synopsis because the words get in the way of information.

What I want to see: I don’t care what you call it, “blowtorch” is meaningless. Tell me concretely what is it, what does it address, and how does the current widely accepted theory fail to account for certain things. I don’t need detours into minutae so the author can have their r/iamverysmart moment. I want to see the list of experiments with data points that validate hunches and disprove others. We can reduce it down to simpler terms for laymen if we start with good information. As it stands, it’s noise.

Of course, Chromehounds! The one and only prequel to Chromelords.

This is more or less what SimCity tried to teach us all along, wasn’t it?