deanCommie

And that was always known to have been a counter-productive protest. There's nothing ironic about this. They were told. They didn't care.

It was unambiguously clear that no matter how bad you felt Obama/Biden/Harris were on Israel, Trump was/would be worse.

If every single human life is worth saving (and it is), it's indisputable that Trump is worse for Gaza than Harris would have been.

It was the ultimate Trolley Problem, and a bunch of progressives acted like pulling the switch on move the trolley is NEVER acceptable regardless of how many lives it saves...

My "older" pixel (9 XL) is also now slower as a result.

It literally takes a half a second to tap "speaker" during the dialer after the update, which it didn't before.

Disappointing.

> AWS isn't well-configured for AI workloads

What does that mean? Not enough GPUs?

You're probably going to get downvoted, but the reality is it's a valid question.

Just as apparently sulfur emissions from global shipping fleets helped offset some warming and eco-friendly fuel actually caused problems, the climate is complex, and there are definitely going to be the collision of interesting trade-offs.

Unfortunately, most likely, the answer is there won't be anything beneficial here. Remember, the key here isn't average global temperatures, but rather the temperature range. Life likes a temperate climate in a narrow range of degrees. Not just humans, but agriculture too.

If you lower the winter temperatures by 10 degrees, and raise the summer ones by 10, your crops still die either from the frost or from the fire. And humans likewise either freeze on the street or overheat in the sun.

This is the main thing climate change denialists can never seem to grasp. It's not the specific temperature numbers, it's the SPEED at which it's happening. Humans, in their current biological form, have been around for a million years, and survived much larger climate swings. But...the climate also changed slower. And they migrated. And they still almost didn't make it several times, barely surviving.

A world where hundreds of millions of people from the indian subcontinent are trying to escape murderous heat one season while tens of millions of people in Europe are freezing in the winter, and putting up walls to protect what they already have, is not one where humanity thrives.

In the long term we'll probably be fine. A few billion will die. Demographics and politics will shift. The human spirit will persevere, and we'll innovate our way through and adapt to a new world.

But it might take a century and our children and our children's children will not be better off than us.

This kind of pedantry drives me crazy.

If i leave my house unlocked and someone walks in and takes my TV, they still committed a crime!

Just because it was irresponsible of me, they still BREACHED MY PRIVACY.

The correct ethical behaviour in situations like this is to report to the site that this information is exposed, not download it and archive and repost it.

EVEN IF you believe that the app is itself unethical, you cannot tell from just the drivers licenses of the users who signed up that they have themselves done anything unethical justifying reprisal.

The president is not the state. That's been established multiple times in cases like Nixon, and unfortunately recently regressed with the Trump SCOTUS decision.

But in theory all these organizations swear an oath to the constitution, not to any branch of government, and especially not their leadership.

If any of the leadership issues illegal orders or does work to undermine the constitution or the country, according to the oath sworn by CIA agents, they should be doing everything they can to work against this leadership.

Even the military expects soldiers to reject illegal orders to commit gencode.

From Terence Tao, via mastodon [0]:

> It is tempting to view the capability of current AI technology as a singular quantity: either a given task X is within the ability of current tools, or it is not. However, there is in fact a very wide spread in capability (several orders of magnitude) depending on what resources and assistance gives the tool, and how one reports their results.

> One can illustrate this with a human metaphor. I will use the recently concluded International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO) as an example. Here, the format is that each country fields a team of six human contestants (high school students), led by a team leader (often a professional mathematician). Over the course of two days, each contestant is given four and a half hours on each day to solve three difficult mathematical problems, given only pen and paper. No communication between contestants (or with the team leader) during this period is permitted, although the contestants can ask the invigilators for clarification on the wording of the problems. The team leader advocates for the students in front of the IMO jury during the grading process, but is not involved in the IMO examination directly.

> The IMO is widely regarded as a highly selective measure of mathematical achievement for a high school student to be able to score well enough to receive a medal, particularly a gold medal or a perfect score; this year the threshold for the gold was 35/42, which corresponds to answering five of the six questions perfectly. Even answering one question perfectly merits an "honorable mention".

> But consider what happens to the difficulty level of the Olympiad if we alter the format in various ways:

* One gives the students several days to complete each question, rather than four and half hours for three questions. (To stretch the metaphor somewhat, consider a sci-fi scenario in the student is still only given four and a half hours, but the team leader places the students in some sort of expensive and energy-intensive time acceleration machine in which months or even years of time pass for the students during this period.)

* Before the exam starts, the team leader rewrites the questions in a format that the students find easier to work with.

* The team leader gives the students unlimited access to calculators, computer algebra packages, formal proof assistants, textbooks, or the ability to search the internet.

* The team leader has the six student team work on the same problem simultaneously, communicating with each other on their partial progress and reported dead ends.

* The team leader gives the students prompts in the direction of favorable approaches, and intervenes if one of the students is spending too much time on a direction that they know to be unlikely to succeed.

* Each of the six students on the team submit solutions, but the team leader selects only the "best" solution to submit to the competition, discarding the rest.

* If none of the students on the team obtains a satisfactory solution, the team leader does not submit any solution at all, and silently withdraws from the competition without their participation ever being noted.

> In each of these formats, the submitted solutions are still technically generated by the high school contestants, rather than the team leader. However, the reported success rate of the students on the competition can be dramatically affected by such changes of format; a student or team of students who might not even reach bronze medal performance if taking the competition under standard test conditions might instead reach gold medal performance under some of the modified formats indicated above.

> So, in the absence of a controlled test methodology that was not self-selected by the competing teams, one should be wary of making apples-to-apples comparisons between the performance of various AI models on competitions such as the IMO, or between such models and the human contestants.

> Related to this, I will not be commenting on any self-reported AI competition performance results for which the methodology was not disclosed in advance of the competition. EDIT: In particular, the above comments are not specific to any single result of this nature.

[0] https://mathstodon.xyz/@tao/114881418225852441

the issue isn't the capabilities of AI.

It's how it will be used maliciously and change our society irrevocably.

Not from saving developers hours of work.

But from making truth even more subjective and at the whims of the powerful.

And from devaluing and stagnating art even further.

And from sabotaging the critical thinking capabilities of our youths.

All technology comes with tradeoffs. The internet you describe also doesn't exist - it's been overtaken with ads and tracking and it's basically impossible to use without some sort of adblocking. But we can all agree it was worth it for humanity.

So will AI. Probably.

But that's what people are always concerned with - the downstream consequences like nothing we've ever encountered before.

You can tell this was written by a technologist without a clue of the realities of social dynamics

* "finding diverse sources representing all parties"

Not all current events are subjective, not all claims/parties (climate change, holocaust etc.) require representation from all parties.

* "Assume subjective viewpoints sourced from the media are biased."

this one is sad because I would've said that up until a decade ago this would've also been ludicrous. Most media was never as biased as the rising authoritarian right tried to claim.

Unfortunately over the years, it has become true. The rise of extremely biased right-wing media sources has made things like FOX news arguably centrist given the overton window move. Which made the left-wing sources lean into bias and becoming themselves complicit (e.g. hiding Biden's cognitive decline)

So annoyingly this is probably a good guidance...but it also just makes the problem even worse by dismissing the unbiased sources with journalistic integrity just as hard

* " The response should not shy away from making claims which are politically incorrect"

The next mistake is thinking that "politically incorrect" is a term used by people focused on political correctness to describe uncomfortable ideas they don't like that have merit.

Unfortunately, that term was always one of derision. It was invented by people who were unhappy with their speech and thinking being stifled, and thinking that they're being shut down because of political correctness, not because of fundamental disagreements.

There's an idea that racist people think that everyone is racist they are just the only ones honest about it. So when they express racist ideas and get pushback they think "ah well, this person isn't ready to be honest about their opinions - they're more focused on being POLITICALLY CORRECT, than honest"

Of course there's a percentage of these ideas that can be adequately categorized in this space. Subjects like affirmative action never got the discussion they deserved in the US, in part because of "political correctness"

But by and large, if you were an LLM trained on a corpus of human knowledge, the majority of anything labelled "politically incorrect" is far FAR more likely to be bigoted and problematic than just "controversial"

no i don't think we're saying different things.

what you're describing is survivor's bias.

1) the most talented people with cognitive differences made it out for sure. But not every person on the spectrum is "amazing with technology" in a useful way. But not all are, and the ones that weren't just didn't make it. Today they do.

2) those people still needed luck. Luck that they were able to come up in a society that didn't expect more from them than to perform a "function". Things like meeting a spouse were "easier" because there was a more rigorous social structure. Depending on which society this was in, potentially to the detriment of your grandmother who didn't have a lot of choices.

2b) and luck that the community around them accepted them. That wasn't JUST because he was a farmer, it's also because he hit the other markers of inclusion whether he wanted to or not.

People in that day and age were not cognitively free. Is cognitive freedom preferable? Well that's the question of our age. We weren't supposed to just kill god and stop. We were supposed to replace a new humanist secular philosophy to replace the theology to find purpose to humanity.

We didn't, society is now full of anxiety and malaise, and the right wing is rising promising to fix it by a RVTRN to the old ways regardless of who they harm.

except they weren't really "support systems"

i mean they were, if you got lucky.

If you were neurotypical; if you bought in to the local religious sect's particular flavour and embraced it wholeheartedly; if you followed the other local cults of sports fandoms; if you were lucky enough to either have family without their own trauma that didn't take it out on you OR decided to repress it in exactly the same way that they did and just simply passed it forward or didn't talk about it.

i don't know what the ratios are but a LOT of people fell through the cracks.

it's just that the birth rate was high enough to continue the population growth, and there were socially acceptable ways to ignore the inconvenient problems (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosemary_Kennedy)

it's why there's now suddenly an influx of ADHD and Autism diagnosis - because in the past anyone outside of the norm who wasn't lucky to do one of the things above was simply ignored, beaten, or died.

now the stigma is gone and we're finding EXPLICIT paths to treatment, tolerance, and embracement of mental health, neuroatypical brains, spectrums, etc. Is there overpathologizing? Maybe? Hard to know! The stigmas still aren't gone. Go read the comments on any video providing tips on how to parent children on the spectrum and see neurotypicals freaking out about how soft the current generation is.

the western world seems to have peaked in tolerance in the 2010s, and is now backsliding into authoritarianism and fascism. that's trying to recreate a lot of those original support systems (by destroying the new ones). It's a bold plan, let's see how it happens.

It was crazy to visit Oslo or Amsterdam in the mid-2010s and notice just what a high % of vehicles were Tesla Model S's.

Car ownership is expensive and unnecessary so people with wealth bought the environmentally positive status symbols. There was simply no equivalent.

I wonder what will replace it.

> That only made the world better, and we got soo many more good photographers. Same with YouTube & creativity.

I think you really missed the point of what these technologies and innovations actually did for society and how it applies to today, underneath the snark.

In the 1970's, if you got gifted a camera, and were willing to put in the work to figure out how to use it, you learned a skill that immediately put you in rare company.

With enough practice of that skill you could be a professional photographer, which would be a good , reliable, well paid job. Now, the barrier of entry is nothing, so it's extremely competitive to be a professional photographer, and even the ones that succeed just scrape by. And you have to stand out on other things than the technical ability to operate a camera.

That's...what's about to happen (if it hasn't already) with software developers.

> Promoters now can admit those tools were in fact pretty bad

Relative to what came after, which noone could predict would be guaranteed?

The Model T was in fact pretty bad relative to what came after...

> because they now have something else to promote

something else which is better?

i don't understand the inherent cynicism here.

I'm sure salt miners needed to make peace with their toil and also focused on tools and techniques to be more productive; how to remove the salt most elegantly in nice clean blocks, minimize waste, reduce burden on their physical bodies.

But to their bosses their output was salt.

I'm sorry but unless you're working in open source for the pure love of the tech/craft, the output of software engineering is PROBLEM SOLVING.

That's why "build vs. buy" exists - sometimes it's better to buy a solution than buy one. That's why a valid solution to a problem sometimes is to convince a customer that their ask is wrong or unreasonable, and something simpler or easier would get them 99% of what they need with 1% of the effort.

That's our job.

Yup. It's funny how this stuff evolves.

You used to see "surcharge for visa" but visa made that illegal.

So now you see "discount for cash/debit", and everyone is happy!

You will never convince Europeans of this. They simply seem to be unable to grasp that (1) cultural norms about introversion/extroversion and friendliness are not universal, and so the default baseline IS more outgoing, social, friendly, and extraverted in North America, and (2) because of the other differences in service industry culture [not necessarily themselves all positives but nevertheless relevant], the service industry in America optimizes for extraverted and friendly people.

So yeah, when the super friendly waitress comes over and asks the table "how is your day going", they're not forcing a smile for a tip. It helps, but they're most likely naturally outgoing and friendly and genuinely curious.

When you grow up with this environment, moving to Europe is adaptable (have done so), but whenever you go back home it is a breath of fresh air.

I don't understand why you're arguing with everyone in the comments. The premise was that enthusiasts drove public opinion. I was one of those enthusiasts. I got everyone I know to switch to Chrome. Why?

1. It opened instantly. The others hung.

2. People can't conceive of this now but in that era if a rogue website started going crazy with Javascript it would CRASH THE ENTIRE BROWSER. In chrome it only killed the one tab. That sandboxing was game-changing for the state of the internet back then.

3. It could handle an obscene amount of tabs. The others couldn't.

4. 3 enabled a new mode that essentially didn't exist before - "reopen tabs". Tabbed browsing existed in Firefox but each tab was still so heavy to reopen that essentially nobody would expect to reopen their last tabs. With chrome the default was to reopen where you stopped.

5. Its built-in popup blocker actually worked. Yes, pop-up blockers existed before. And yet websites still found a way to work around it. Chrome's just worked. I don't know why they could do it but others couldn't, but at worst it would pop up a new tab next to your existing one. For others internet browsing was still an experience that ended closing a browser window with "oh shit there's been a porn popup window in the background this entire time". Not so with Chrome.

NONE of this came from marketing. ALL of this became apparent within seconds-to-minutes of using it. I only had to lead my friends and family to it, once they started using it they never ent back.

Good points, but the other part of this is that back in "our time" (we may not be the same age - I was in University 1999-2005, but regardless) there was...basically no other choice.

If you wanted to work in CS, you had to get a degree. Then you'd get a shitty entry level job. Then eventually after a couple of years you'd be an "intermediate" engineer, have a good enough salary to live on your own (that's right - up until this point, you probably still needed to have roommates, if you are in a major city), take vacations, start putting in for retirement, etc.

Maybe if you were in Silicon Valley and already saw the dot com boom you saw another path. But most of the world didn't think like that.

Over the last several years you instead saw people go into CS thinking their first job will be 150k/year from a big tech, they'll be a senior within 3 years, and start working on their FIRE plan. And meanwhile they're surrounded by friends and peers who are either influencers, content creators, or have startup exit stories from the ZIRP era.

You and I remember endless work and drudgery. Those in our shoes today instead feel constant anxiety like they're already behind, they're not good enough, like maybe they missed their chance in the gold rush, and the only solution is to hurry up and dig faster.

I feel like that's another reason for the increasing # of shortcuts people are taking with their education.

I think to most (90+%?) software developers out their in the world, Assembler might as well be hieroglyphics. They/we can guess at the concepts involved of course, but actually being able to read the code end to end, and have a mental model of what is happening is not really going to happen. Not without some sort of Rosetta Stone. (Comments :) )

I think 2075 developers will feel the same way about modern Java, C#, TypeScript, etc.

They will think of themselves as software developers but they won't be writing code the same way, they'll be giving guided instructions to much higher level tools (perhaps AIs that themselves have a provenance back to modern LLMs)

Just as today there will still be those that need to write low level critical code. There are still lots of people today that have to write Assembler, though end up expressing it via C or Rust. And there will be people still working on AI technology. But even those will be built off other AI's.

SQS went into beta first, S3 went "GA" first.

AWS typically considers the "GA" milestone as the "public launch" date, which is silly because the criteria for what is good enough for GA has changed over the years.

Why were you offended by AWS?

To MAGA, he spoke louder, and with more confidence, therefore he won.

Unfortunately this will not shake support of him in his base.

They're not mutually exclusive because they're a triangle.

Cost, Convenience, Quality: Pick 2

This isn't that deep either - convenience and quality are 2 things that cost the restaurant money (either via higher rent, or more expensive ingredients).

You can't do all 3 because you'll never make a profit.

You can't do only 1 or you'll never get any customers.

Two is just right for both buyer and seller.

Technically nothing what you said disputes the claim.

You're jumping to the assumption that surely YouTube's costs have to be lower than $36B, and that is not at all assured. They handle an absolutely gargantuan amount of network data transfer, not to mention processing compute. I'm ignoring the storage but even that at their scale is probably at least 1B.

The Witness isn't revolutionary, but it is crafted with the care of someone who cares about the small details of 3D worlds. Besides being easily one of the deepest/broadest puzzle games of the decade, it is GORGEOUS, and filled to the brim with visual scenes that take your breath away.

To me it's something more akin to the iPod. "No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame." was absolutely a correct way to dismiss it as nothing revolutionary. And yet it's perfect well-rounded craftsmanship WAS revolutionary.

From what it seems, Blow is doing exactly the same thing with his next game too. And there's something admirable about that.

I say this as someone who disagrees with 80% of what he says, but VEHEMENTLY agree with the remaining 20.

The Linus response is pretty great -> https://groups.google.com/g/comp.os.minix/c/wlhw16QWltI/m/P8...

Plenty. What looks like generic dots to us laymen are actually different types of stars. With more resolution, astronomers can more accurately categorize the different stars in the galaxy. The ratios of different stars tell us things about the universe.

With better high resolution images recently we've also been able to see confirmation of Gravitational Lensing [0] which reveal superstructures in space-time that affect the images we see. (i.e. with lower resolution we might've assumed we're seeing multiple distinct stars, with better resolution we understand that it's the same)

For example, we just discovered the first "Einstein Zig Zag". [1]

Ultimately, understanding the gravitational structure of space-time is the key to understanding dark matter which is arguably the biggest mystery of the universe today (besides dark energy).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_lens

[1] https://www.space.com/first-einstein-zig-zag-jwst

> That is like saying that replacing the car emoji with a train car is changing it from a ‘car’ to a ‘car.’ A squirt gun is not at all the same thing as a pistol

In the context of human conversation via emojis (which is a very specialized subset of communication), can you give me an example of a scenario where the semantic meaning of a sentence is going to change significantly by the gun emoji being a squirt gun instead of a pistol?

I mean this in good faith, I can't think of a reasonable scenario outside of something like:

Alice: "911, what's your emergency?"

Bob: "Help, I"m being threatened"

Alice: "What are you being threatened with?"

Bob: "" (edit: I pasted https://emojipedia.org/pistol in here, but of course HN didn't render it)

> > Am I "manipulating my son's thoughts and culture" by choosing when I intentionally expose him to profanity?

> Yes, and it’s good because you are your son’s father.

If you were right, I would dispute that me being a child's father gives me exclusive rights to manipulate their thoughts and culture so it's a good thing. They are an independent human being. I could use my power and influence to enstill obedience to a cult (aka, religion), or teach them racism. It might take them decades to deprogram themselves, if they ever do so at all.

But I don't think you're right. Keeping profanity out of my son's brain until he grows out of the "repeat everything he hears especially if it gets a reaction" phase is no different than not giving him a gun before he can grow up to be a responsible gun owner.

And conversely, just because I am failing to keep profanity out of his mouth (obviously - most kids at some point figure out potty language and how fun ti is to repeat) doesn't automatically mean he's going to grow up a profane sailor.

Likewise, I don't know if my 5-year-old will grow up to be a responsible gun owner, a conscientious objector to weapons, or a mass shooter.

But I do know that his fate will not be decided by whether he sees a water pistol or a bullet pistol in the gun emoji on the internet.

> Apple is not anyone’s father, and does not have that right over its customers.

And customers aren't citizens. Apple may have a pretty large market share, but it is in no ways a monopoly. It is trivial to avoid Apple products in your life.

If the concern is that they used their power to influence the rest of the tech industry and the Unicode consortium, I mean the list of things like that is infinite. All modern web standards are shaped by tech companies, large and small. The issue isn't that someone CAN influence a consortium, the issue is that you disagree with the decision.

And I can understand if this was a threat to free expression or culture, but the list of emojis is already curated and influenced by the artists.

I'm still curious of an answer to this BTW:

> how does replacing a gun emoji with a squirt gun help make their case or in any way weaken the 2nd amendment? I don't think it says anything about not infringing on rights to a gun emoji?

> replace the gun emoji with a squirt gun

so just to be clear, and in your own words, they changed it from a "gun" to a "gun", right?

> as a way to attack second amendment rights

Apple sells to customers across the entire globe. Most of us don't have a second amendment.

Also, even if Apple was notoriously anti-second amendment and even wanted to somehow lobby the US to pass a new amendment reversing it....how does replacing a gun emoji with a squirt gun help make their case or in any way weaken the 2nd amendment?

I don't think it says anything about not infringing on rights to a gun emoji?

> and manipulate its customers’ thoughts and culture.

When I listen to music with my 5 year old, I put on the non-explicit versions of pop songs since he's kind of a parrot right now repeating things he hear. This is a version of the art for use cases like mine. Am I "manipulating my son's thoughts and culture" by choosing when I intentionally expose him to profanity?

If no, what's the difference?

If yes, why is that bad?