anyonecancode

I strongly suspect the answer is yes -- or more broadly, what makes us conscious. And yes, this implies consciousness is something all life has, to some degree.

I'm not going to pretend to have a good definition of what "consciousness" is, but directionally, I think having goals -- no, that's too weak -- having _desires_, is an important part of it. And I'm not sure it's possible to have desires if one cannot die.

Something like an LLM can't actually die. Shut down all the machines its code runs on, then turn them back on, and it's in the same state it was before. So it's not the "hardware" that an LLM lives in. Is it the code itself? Copy it to another set of machines and it's the same program. Code + data? Maybe we run into storage issues, but in theory same thing -- transfer the code and date somemplace else and its the same program. You can't actually "kill" a computer program. So there's no inherent "mortality" to it that where any kinds of "desire" would emerge from.

> The internet was born out of the need for Distributed networks during the cold war - to reduce central points of failure - a hedging mechanism if you will.

I don't think the idea was that in the event of catastrophe, up to and including nuclear attack, the system would continue working normally, but that it would keep working. And the internet -- as a system -- certainly kept working during this AWS outage. In a degraded state, yes, but it was working, and recovered.

I'm more concerned with the way the early public internet promised a different kind of decentralization -- of economics, power, and ideas -- and how _that_ has become heavily centralized. In which case, AWS, and Amazon, indeed do make a good example. The internet, as a system, is certainly working today, but arguably in a degraded state.

My current slack channel organization:

- Channels I care about: ones where real work gets done every day, eg my team channels, other people I interact with frequently and directly.

- Temporarily important: short lived channels, or project channels that aren't as frequently actionable as the first category. Eg, I am struggling with some build issue so I join the public channel for the team that owns that process until I resolve my issue.

- Channels I need to follow: I don't really care too much about this, but partners or stakeholders are in them and sometimes say things I should know about or ping me or will add me if I leave, so I need to somewhat monitor it.

- Channels not really about me: Broad-based channels about company strategy, etc. In theory I guess they impact me since its about what the org, or my part of it, is up to, but tbh it doesn't actually impact me materially.

- Channels I may leave soon. Basically recycle bin, before I leave channel entirely.

What I'm missing is what, if any, communication Ruby Central had with maintainers.

> How do you tell someone that has had commit and admin access to critical infrastructure long after that need has expired that you need to revoke that access without upsetting them?

Start by letting go of the goal of not upsetting them. Make sure you do communicate clearly. Just say what you said a paragraph earlier: open source ecosystems, including ours, are increasingly suffering supply chain attacks. To guard against this, we need to tighten access that has traditionally been fairly loose. Starting <date>, we're going to remove general access and ask that contributors sign <link to agreement> before re-enabling access.

I mean, maybe that is what happened -- as the OP says, he wasn't part of the conversations so can't say. From the earlier public posts, it doesn't _sound_ like that's what happened. But I'd say as a general rule, it's important to communicate disruptive changes ahead of time to those affected and give a clear path to how they can mitigate the disruption.

When I think of swampy areas I'm familiar with, they don't get as much sunlight as desert areas. It's possible to provide water to many areas that don't have a lot, but increasing total sunlight hours isn't possible.

My understanding is that agriculture in the desert works because of all the sunlight, so if water is provided it ends up actually being really good for growing plants.

(also, I don't think the Central Valley is actually a desert?)

Vote in 2026 to make sure we can vote for a different NTSB in 2028.

That's a bit of a catch-22 argument, isn't it? If a history of violence and conquest invalidates land claims, then the white settlers who violently settled North America have no legitimate right to this land, right? But if that history doesn't invalidate their land claims, then you can't really turn around and say that somehow Comanche land claims are illegitimate.

Or maybe you're arguing that there is no such thing as morality in land claims, and it's simply a matter of who is better able to kill and steal, and white settlers just were better at this?

Also covered in https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/07/science/archaeology-menom...

I don't think article is comparing like things. Biological _systems_ are indeed complex and reliable, but biological _processes_ are not. They fail all the time -- if they didn't there'd be no need for an immune system (and on the flip side, there'd be no genetic mutation and so no natural selection and evolution). To compare like to like, look at processes vs programs, not systems vs programs.

I think you could make similar arguments about mapping technology like Google and Apple Maps -- that using them decreases people's skills in navigating the physical world, atrophying our sense of direction and geography.

And actually, that's not wrong. People really do often struggle to navigate these days if they don't have the crutch of something like Google Maps. It really has changed our relationship to the physical world in many ways.

But also, a lot of people weren't especially good at navigation before? The overall average ability of people being able to get from Point A to Point B safely and reliably, especially in areas they are unfamiliar with, has certainly increased dramatically. And a small subset of people who are naturally skilled at geography and navigation have seen their own abilities complemented, not replaces, by things like Google Maps.

I think AI will end up being similar, on a larger scale. Yes, there are definitely some trade offs, and some skills and abilities will decrease, but also many more people will be able to do work they previously couldn't, and a small number of people will get even better at what they do.

Once upon a time, this was a thing for pretty much the entire city of New York:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moving_Day_(New_York_City)

Less "reinventing" the wheel and more "uncovering the wheel."

I go to the movies for physics-defying aesthetically overwhelming explosions. For all-too-physics bound and far scarier crashes, I drive the Garden State Parkway.

"Hell Gate" in this case meaning "Bright Gate", from the Dutch colonial period.

We have that in a forested section near me in New Jersey. I think it might be this: https://deerdeter.com/

One thing they had going for them is that the people who moved (and move) to Israel come from a number of different language backgrounds, so it wasn't the case of make everyone who speaks language A now instead speak language B (as would the the case with Gaelic in Scotland, and was with Irish in Ireland) so much as choose a language all the speakers of A, B, an C can agree to learn and use so that can all talk to each other.

> It’s just a lot smaller geographically.

That's actually a fairly important detail. I live in the NYC metro (lived in the city itself for many years) and have visited SF several times. The "city" part of SF is just much, much smaller, and the suburban parts are much less dense.

NYC and its metro are still quite expensive and we have our own problems with NIMBYism driving housing costs up, but I'm always rather shocked at how much more expensive the SF metro is and how under-developed it is.

Not necessarily. For instance, if you take enough ibuprofen you'll suffer liver damage, but it doesn't follow that a smaller dose you'll still suffer damage.

I only really have enough general understanding of chemistry and biology to note that dosage generally is pretty important and often non-linear in its effects -- I write JavaScript, not drug formulations -- but "dosage makes the poison" has always struck me a good general purpose aphorism to keep in mind.

Isn't this talking about naturally-occurring fluoridation, not added? The concentrations they describe as having an inverse affect are far higher than what gets added to water on purpose:

What the study measured:

"For fluoride measured in water, associations remained inverse when exposed groups were restricted to less than 4 mg/L or less than 2 mg/L but not when restricted to less than 1.5 mg/L"

And what the US federal government recommends (or I guess soon, previously recommended):

"Through this final recommendation, the U.S. Public Health Service (PHS) updates and replaces its 1962 Drinking Water Standards related to community water fluoridation—the controlled addition of a fluoride compound to a community water supply to achieve a concentration optimal for dental caries prevention.1 For these community water systems that add fluoride, PHS now recommends an optimal fluoride concentration of 0.7 milligrams/liter (mg/L)" [1]

Note, too, the study's section on Study sample;

"No studies were conducted in the United States."

[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4547570/

The power of software is how it 1) moves a lot of work from the domain of the physical to the domain of the written and intellectual and 2) the way it can be replicated at scale. So it really isn't like engineering, more like writing, but industrialized. Well, at the application level at least, where a lot of software work happens. The work that actually allows written software to physically interact with the machines it runs on, that's engineering, but generally not what most "software engineers" work on.

Anyway, it's not really so surprising that there are few hard and fast and replicable rules in "software engineering" as there really aren't in, say, essay writing. There are best practices and tips and techniques that are generally more effective than others. And there _are_ actual constraints around software that don't exist around essay writing as, ultimately, software does have to translate to real physical limitations like available memory and such, but the abstraction away from those physical limits is by and large the point and purpose of software.

In that vein, you might find this article interesting:

https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/discworld-rules

It also was posted here on HN recently -- discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43299815

Does make me wonder about the 18th and early 19th C, where the written language was very polite and formal but people regularly had duels and killed each other. But perhaps spoken language at the time was far less polite? What did Hamilton and Burr shout at each other in Weehawken, I wonder.

Never have I ever woken up to find myself in Far Rockaway, Queens.

Focus on outlets that prioritize reporting. You can't find a "neutral" outlet -- all human beings have biases, and that gets magnified once we're talking about collective human endeavors such as newspapers, magazines, etc. But we can at least avoid solipsism ("the view that the self is the only reality") by grounding ourselves in outside, shared reality. That's what reporting is -- actually being at a place in real life, talking to actual people involved. Sure, the transmission of those observations will inevitably be shaped by the human reporter's own biases, but you're still getting access to shared reality. Even if the opinions aren't ones you share, you can at least see what they're based on and so have some ability to make your own evaluation on if the implicit conclusions the reporter is drawing match up with the base facts they are sharing.

Cool! Though the data must be a bit noisy as you get some oddities. For instance, if you select Astoria/Ditmars (last top, NW Queens) the Flushing/Main Street stop (last stop of purple -- go directly west on map from Astoria) is out of range. Click Flushing/Mains Street, though, and Astoria/Ditmars is in the 40 minute range.

In a similar vein, for New York City the official highway distance to the city is measured from Columbus Circle [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbus_Circle

I think there's a lot to be said for knowing your audience. I don't submit often, and most of my submissions only get a handful of points -- very rarely have I had one get onto the front page. (To be clear, I'm talking about submissions of article I found interesting, not things I've written myself, so this is a bit different than TFA's focus).

But, there was one submission I made I knew instantly would be very popular -- The elusive future of San Francisco’s fog -- 152 points, the most by far. Given that many on this forum live, work, or visit SF, and that people everywhere love to talk about the weather, and that SF's fog is an iconic aspect of SF weather, I knew there'd be interest.

(gift article link: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/19/us/malibu-home-california...)

I'm not sure about Amtrak boarding processes, but regarding Moynihan vs Penn:

- Penn Station is directly under Madison Square Garden. There used to be a large building similar in scale to Grand Central Terminal, but it was rather controversially torn down in the 60s [1], and MSG built on its site and the train station portion becoming a bunch of tunnels beneath it.

- Across the street from Penn was a big post office building, with a grand Neo-classical design. As an attempt to somewhat remedy the destruction of Penn decades earlier, NY state decided to turn that into a train hall, which opened in 2020 [2]. It's the same station stop as Penn, so you can really think of it more as just an expansion of it. Take the stairs on the western (toward the Hudson river) end of the platform and you'll emerge into a big open space with an atrium that looks like an actual train station, instead of the basement of MSG. (They've also been doing good work raising the ceiling and widening corridors in Penn, so there's more light and air, but you're still basically in the MSG basement even if it's less cramped now).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Penn_Station#Original... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moynihan_Train_Hall