2,906 karma · joined March 17, 2015
You clearly don't have any idea what you're talking about.
The UK's two aircraft carriers were commissioned in 2017 and 2019 and carry 60 and 48 aircraft respectively.
Only historically. The calculus is rapidly changing. If the US can't even respect sovereign territory of friendly countries, it doesn't inspire trust that they would repay debt.
This has been repeated elsewhere in this story. What's your thinking here? I assume you mean the non-US members of NATO, but you seem to have forgotten two G7 members if you're equating NATO - US with the EU.
The remaining members include two nuclear-armed states, five or so aircraft carriers, submarines, several large air forces, navies, etc. What would make them unable to project force into the Pacific?
But what about the other side of the coin - that exports will now become more difficult, because of retaliatory tariffs? How does that help your domestic economy?
Trumps solution seems to be to try to bully other countries into accepting tariffs and not imposing tariffs on American goods. But how is this supposed to work? Quite apart from the appalling moral and fairness aspects of this strategy, trashing the economies of other countries is a bad idea, because you want other countries to be wealthy so they can buy stuff from you.
Free trade has built the modern Western world, and has already made the US the world's leading economic superpower. I can't even see what Trump is trying to achieve.
Examples include clubs for walking / running / cycling / scuba clubs etc. It doesn't have to be physical activity, but since you need exercise anyway, then you might as well get those endorphins whilst socialising.
Hardly relevant. If you control guns better, you get fewer illegal weapons as well. Most of the murders in Europe are committed by illegal weapons as well.
> Banning legal weapons wouldn't reduce crime
Of course it would - see the reduction in gun violence in countries where this has been implemented.
> Besides, USA is not a good example. According to Wikipedia [1], high murder rate statistics in the USA are skewed due to the overrepresentation of one specific part of the population
Oh. You're one of those.
It's a peculiarly American thing to try first to look to race to try to understand something, when there are more salient correlations.
Presumably since Black Americans are overrepresented as victims of gun violence, you'd like to see a significantly higher proportion carrying guns?
I've viewed and read an interminable number of interviews with Cummings.
He decided that a) Brexit was a good idea (we can see how that turned out), b) he decided to help get a Johnson government elected, and c) joined his administration as de facto chief of staff and chief advisor. If that's not a tacit approval of Johnson and his government, then what is? Of course, he backtracked later when it was a disaster.
He changed his mind on Johnson, but he seems to be of the view that nothing works and that there is nothing for it but to burn everything down and start again according to the Dominic Cummings vision.
Notably, stories on HN about the very severe repression on civil liberties in the US (get shot in the face for protesting about ICE...) get flagged for closure, but putting the boot into the UK for much more wishy-washy issues like this seem to be fair game.
I'm not saying there aren't genuine issues with civil liberties (for example, things like the Online Safety Act are ridiculous) but they are magnified out of all proportion by the US media / social media disinformation megaphone.
This particular article is an opinion piece from last April by "the world's oldest surviving anarchist publication" (apparently). I'm not sure why it deserves front page HN status. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_(British_newspaper)
I think a better assessment of how well you've evolved as a programmer is how simple you can make the code. It takes real intelligence and flair to simplify the problem as much as possible, and then write the code to be boringly simple and easy to follow by a junior developer or AI agent.
If you're wielding increasingly clever programming techniques, then you're evolving in the wrong direction.
Volunteer admins with nothing better to do get their dopamine by closing questions for StackOverflow points, regardless of whether the supposedly duped question from 8 years ago is actually still the best answer and covers the nuances of the question now being asked.
There probably is still a space for a SO-style site to exist, but they'd need a drastic change of approach. LLMs (+ Reddit I suppose?) have taken over most the engineer support role.
Emacs has its own tutorial (Help -> tutorial from the menus), which is a pretty good introduction. Learning to get help from Emacs itself is a bit of a learning curve, but really beneficial.
Learning to the use the help tools properly was something I didn't get around to for years, but I wish I had sooner.
Humans sometimes make mistakes in reasoning, too; sometimes they come up with conclusions that leave me completely bewildered (like somehow reasoning that the Earth is flat).
I think we can all agree that humans are significantly better and more consistently good at reasoning than even the best LLM models, but the argument that LLMs cannot reliably reason doesn't seem to match the evidence.
Our lives in the developed world tend to be limited by biology; an average of about 80 years in many countries. Pigs get slaughtered at about 6 months, well before the lifespan they could potentially live to.
> miserable
If you're feeling constantly miserable, then please get some mental health treatment.
> and pointless
Possibly, but we are free to try to find some meaning for ourselves in our lives. Farm animals merely exist to grow as fast as possible and be slaughtered for food. The only point to their existence is to be food.
Comparing farmed animals to wild animals is not really the point. A better comparison is a farmed animal compared to that animal not existing at all. We make the choice to bring them into existence.
Are farmed animals better off existing than not? I think in general the great majority of the 100 billion or so animals we slaughter per year are probably better off not existing. Their lives tend to be short, miserable and pointless.
If you insist on comparing farmed animals to wild animals, though, I don't think it's clear cut. They do live "safer" lives (at least until we kill them, as young as it is economical to do so), but they get to experience severe boredom, curtailment of their natural instincts, and distressing experiences such as separation from their offspring and overcrowding.
Here's a commentary from someone who does know what he's talking about. https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/acetaminophen-and-...
E.g. I have ls set up aliased to eza as part of my custom set of configuration scripts. eza pretty much works as ls in most scenarios.
If I'm in an environment which I control and is all configured as I like it, then I get a shinier ls with some nice defaults.
If I'm in another environment then ls still works without any extra thought, and the muscle memory is the same, and I haven't lost anything.
If there's a tool which works very differently to the standard suite, then it really has to be pulling its weight before I consider using it.
Biden had different pressures. E.g. I suspect that he judged that the knife-edge election he was facing didn't allow him enough leeway to put more pressure on Israel.
In addition Netanyahu made it easier to force through a settlement given he'd manage to alienate practically everyone, including uniting the Arab world after that unbelievable strike on Doha.
If you were a cynical person you could also ask whether this settlement owes anything to Trump's personal narcissist saviour complex or need to distract from domestic issues such as the Epstein files...
Still, even despite some significant scepticism about Trump's motives, I think there is a reasonable case to be made for awarding him the prize. It was still a significant (maybe even brave) jump to break with American political orthodoxy to put this kind of pressure on Israel, and the practical result of this could be very significant in terms of saving lives and potentially long-term peace in the region. We also need to encourage these kind of acts, even (or especially) amongst unlikely peacemakers like Trump.
Let's see what it looks like next year, though. Middle East peace deals don't have a great history of holding together.
Hah, fair enough. Thanks for getting the Culture back on the front page of HN :)
> I don't remember the details of Excession very well as I didn't actually like it
If you were actually referring to the Sleeper Service - I think you still remembered something like the opposite idea of what happened in the story. The twist was - (Spoiler!) - the Sleeper Service was actually not Eccentric at all, and had not built up a small army as a Mind that had gone rogue, but had actually done this as a planned failsafe in conjunction with a number of other Minds. Hence the multi-level pun of its name.
> I don't remember that at all, perhaps you could tell me which book to look at.
I'm afraid I can't remember exactly which books this was explored in, though Inversions, State of the Art and Player of Games are books where the Culture is explicitly compared to other civilisations and so more likely to have mentioned it.
Also Banks' essay /A Few Notes on the Culture/ covers it quite well if you haven't come across that yet. Very short but I think very readable and interesting.
You can of course interpret the novels however you like, but that absolutely wasn't Banks' intention when he wrote the series. See the quotes from other comments.
> In one tale, the entire crew of a spaceship deliberately infect themselves with the common cold just to feel something.
Or they just do it because why not? If you'd never been ill, you'd probably be curious as to what it felt like.
> In another story, people turn off their safeguards and go rafting on a lava stream, causing themselves intense pain and even dying, only so they can finally experience some real excitement.
I think in the story the lava-rafters were having a great time, and they were fairly unusual... and people in our culture risk pain and death doing sport just to feel excitement. In the Culture they just have additional options, such as rafting on lava.
Most of the Culture citizens were happy enough with their exploration, art, travel, genetically-enhanced sex, implanted drug glands, games, sports, and so they never got around to lava rafting.
Many of the points seem to be hallucinated. Either the author has a poor memory and an active imagination or there has been some poor-quality LLM input.
Examples
> There are apparently no sociopaths – Culture has to recruit an outsider when they need one
Banks describes several ways how such individuals are managed - such as offering full immersion level VR to satisfy extreme megalomania.
> We also see that there are a number of Eccentrics, Minds that don’t fully share the values of Culture. They’re not that rare, about 1% of the population.
I don't believe that 1% figure is mentioned anywhere. I'd be surprised if it was. Eccentrics seem to be much rarer than that.
> We even see GSV Absconding with Style stockpile resources without general knowledge of the other Minds.
This name is made up, and not by Banks. A Google search for "absconding with style" has only a few hits - mainly this article.
I could go on...
The idea that vaccines didn't reduce severe illness is laughable. Multiple robust tudies across many nations and institutions have been carried out, showing that several different vaccines were highly effective.
Of course the main benefit of the vaccines was a dramatic reduction in severe disease, hospital admissions and deaths.
It depends how you look at it. Omicron had a lower CFR, but higher transmissibility, so arguably worse.
There is no inherent selection pressure on viruses to mutate towards being less aggressive. Omicron had a transmission advantage that coincided with being a bit less lethal, but often being more transmissible correlates with being more lethal (e.g. delta variant).
We could have easily had a more lethal omicron variant emerge if it wasn't for vaccination effectively halting the pandemic.
Far more people were saved by vaccination than any luck on random mutation in the virus.
> With time, treatments improved
They did. Like the use of dextramethasone. Still a small improvement compared to the dramatic success of the vaccines.
> and so did the outcomes, regardless of vaccination status.
No. Vaccinated individuals were better off in pretty much every measurable statistic. By any reasonable measurement vaccination saved millions of lives.
This didn't happen. There was no selection pressure on the virus to mutate to a "less aggressive" form. To think there was is to fundamentally misunderstand the science here.
The incubation period was plenty long enough for the virus to spread before incapacitating the host. All the selection pressure was for the virus to become more virulent - and that is precisely what happened. We saw multiple strains appear which were harder to deal with.
> Reducing counter-productive treatments (like ventilators) helped greatly too.
This had a negligible impact. Patients were only put on ventilation when they were already very sick and at a high chance of death. Worldwide only a tiny proportion of deaths came about in this way. Even rich countries only had ventilators in the tens of thousands. Compare that to the billions who received vaccinations.