Correct. Most recently, peace in Northern Ireland and the end of Apartheid in South Africa.
5,477 karma · joined June 27, 2015
"People on twitter will really be like "you believe in voting? that pales in effectiveness to my strategy, firebombing a Walmart" and then not firebomb a Walmart" [0]
Well, Luigi firebombed a Walmart.
Is that a valid strategy for enacting societal change? Perhaps not. But this republic accepts and engages in war. And as Clusewitz says, ""War is the continuation of policy with other means." [1]
Perhaps Luigi is also pursuing policy change through other means. I have to say that watching American politicians and law enforcement agencies treat the man who at worst committed one murder (alleged; innocent until proven guilty) with the wrath and civil rights abuses previously only reserved for terrorists associated with 9/11 makes me believe that his actions genuinely shocked the system.
I'll be shocked if he makes it to trial alive.
[0] https://x.com/LinkofSunshine/status/1720538218628558969?lang...
If you live in LA or San Diego, you can live close to the beach and go there all the time. Most people there don't, but if that's important to you, you can achieve it.
If you live in Vancouver, BC or Seattle, you can ski in the winter and hike in mountains outside of cell phone reception in the summer AFTER WORK, never mind every weekend.
I assume most american cities have gun clubs. If the attraction to shooting a gun can be satiated with target practice, that can be a decent compromise. (Of course if the attraction is feeling like a frontiersman by shooting straight off your porch, that's a different thing. I can understand it even if I don't share it)
This is not possible with every city and every hobby, but that ends up kind of becoming the point. The cities that have this overlap become even more in-demand. It's why housing is so expensive in places like YVR and SFO.
Yet I can't help but wonder if people also said the same about the telephone (which enabled socialization without colocation) and television (Which enabled entertainment as a passive indirect consumption)
I realize of course that the internet, and mobile (and eventually VR/AR) is Yet Another Step Further.
But...like every step does it not also come with benefits for some at the expense of others?
For example, I simply can't believe that true extraverts are simply going to be resigned to giving up all these physical moments - they will continue to seek out and create and participate in-person spaces.
To me, the problem is less about the way that we do or do not socialize, and rather the monumentally addictive nature of online and app spaces, and the fact that the companies in charge of them have no other motivation at his point it seems than to just push it all to the limit.
Our feeble caveman brains cannot handle the dopamine roulette that is the TikTok/Instagram/Twitter feed. We have no immunity to it, so the only solution is artificial restrictions like screentime. Then again, we've had to reckon with that with plentiful calories too as we trended towards universal obesity and have STARTED to turn it around (but not succeeded yet). And that took decades.
Every generation struggled with something. Our grandparents were choked by smog. Our parents had polluted waterways and lead in everything. We are engulfed in microplastics and addictive technology. Our children will wreckon with the effects of climate change.
Through all this, humanity continues to grow, invent new technology, and raise both the floor for existence and the ceiling for prosperity.
The worst thing we can do now is to give up on the next generation or on the future of humanity. Optimism is our obligation and responsibility.
I find the US too extreme in one direction and Europe too much in the other.
Canada has many problems (from both places) but by and large IMO strikes the balance reasonably well between dynamism and safety net.
It could be a lot better.
It could be a lot worse.
Sorry, but that's just the way it is.
I live in Vancouver and I'm apalled to hear some of the things my Chinese friends sometimes say about Sikhs in Surrey.
The thesis is this paragraph and I think it's quite striking and important
> "Always go to the funeral" means that I have to do the right thing when I really, really don't feel like it. I have to remind myself of it when I could make some small gesture, but I don't really have to and I definitely don't want to. I'm talking about those things that represent only inconvenience to me, but the world to the other guy. You know, the painfully under-attended birthday party. The hospital visit during happy hour. The Shiva call for one of my ex's uncles. In my humdrum life, the daily battle hasn't been good versus evil. It's hardly so epic. Most days, my real battle is doing good versus doing nothing.
Apple participated in an illegal anti-competitive anti-worker chilling of the market.
If they hadn't, perhaps some of the people that worked on iPhone over the next decade might have joined Palm, and improved it.
Instead, Apple retained them and artificially deflated their wages at the same time.
Don't get me wrong, Palm is still more to blame. But...there's a reason Jobs perpetuated this policy. He knew the value one or two key people can make in changing the entire history of product and technology.
This to me feels like a very dystopian way to have a relationship with it's government, and is a uniquely american perspective amongst the developed world.
The government is a proxy for society leadership. I expect human society to protect it's humans, and most of the world with functioning government does too.
The biggest threat to Canadian prosperity today is these american ideas percolating above the border and infecting the mind of Canadians who previously believed and trusted their government and no longer does.
Keep mind: I'm not asking "Do those cases ever happen"? Of course they do. There's already been stories. The question is what are the statistics. Every policy, every procedure, every decision can have mistakes and negative outcomes. Some homeless and disabled people have been offered euthanasia. Those cases should be investigated and the policies should be updated. But nothing will be perfect.
You can say "if you can't have a perfect system then you shouldn't have it at all." and while that may be philosophically justifiable in the same way that "I'd rather let 10,000 guilty people go free than convict 1 innocent person" is, but it's important to remember that despite that we still convict innocent people.
Some trans people regret their transition. They're a tiny minority. Some people abuse welfare. They're a tiny minority. Some people are pushed towards euthanasia when they shouldn't be. They're a tiny minority.
* Being over 25
* Having a college degree.
The people who worry about marriage because of these stats are typically in this category. I bet just by accounting for these 2 points, the numbers would plummet to the 20s if not teens.
I picked my words very carefully and I would appreciate if you responded to what I said, not what you think I implied.
I specifically called out - I'm having feelings of bias. That in a field full of quack science and overpromises and underdelivery, I am extraordinarily suspicious of anyone who I feel might be associated with a shall we say "less than rigorous relationship with scientific accuracy". This person's aesthetic reminds me of this.
> The fact is that "Burners" are everywhere, nothing about Burning Man means someone is automatically a quack. Your distrust seems misplaced and colored by your own personal biases. The list of prominent people in tech that are also "burners" would likely shock you. I doubt you've ever been to Burning Man, but you're going to judge people who have? Maybe you're just feeling a little bit too "square" and are threatened by people who live differently than you do.
You couldn't be more wrong. I'm a repeat Burner throughout the 2000's (though it's been a decade), and I've been to a dozen regional Burner events. I know many Burners both in the tech industry and outside of it.
So I actually speak with some experience. I know wonderful people who are purely artists and are not scientifically/technologically inclined - and they're great. I also know deep technologists for whom Burning man is purely an aesthetic preference - a costume not an outfit. Something to pretend to be for a little while but that otherwise has no bearing on their outside life.
And I unfortunately know those whose brainrot ends up intertwining. Crypto evangelists who find healing crystals just as groundbreaking as the blockchain. It's this latter category that I am the most suspicious of, and what I worry when I see a person presented as an authoritative leader in the Quantum Computing domain demonstrate in their external presentation.
I led with an acknowledgement that I am judging a book by it's cover, which one ought to never do. But I think it is worth pointing out because respectability in a cutting edge field is important, lest you end up achieving technological breakthroughs that don't actually change society at all (as already happened with Google Glass).
> You don't have to believe me, and I don't expect that you will,
Why would you expect that I wouldn't?
> but I've talked at length with him about his work, and about a great many other topics, and he is not as you think he is.
That's fantastic to hear! You have direct evidence contradicting the assumptions generated by my first impression. This is all that matters, and all you had to say.
What if it's already happening to our universe? And that is what black holes are? Or other cosmology concepts we don't understand?
Maybe a great filter is your inability to protect your universe from quantum technology from elsewhere in the multiverse ripping yours up?
Maybe the future of sentience isn't fighting for resources on a finite planet, or consuming the energy of stars, but fighting against other multiverses.
Maybe The Dark Forest Defence is a decision to isolate your universe from the multiverse - destroying it's ability to participate in quantum computation, but also extending it's lifespan.
(I don't believe ANY of this, but I'm just noting the fascinating science fiction storylines available)
In this day and age, I feel an immediate sense of distrust to any technologist with the "Burning Man" aesthetic for lack of a better word. (which you can see in the author's wikipedia profile from an adjacent festival -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hartmut_Neven, as well as in this blog itself with his wristbands and sunglasses -> https://youtu.be/l_KrC1mzd0g?si=HQdB3NSsLBPTSv-B&t=39)
In the 2000's, any embracement of alternative culture was a breath of fresh air for technologists - it showed they cared about the human element of society as much as the mathematics.
But nowadays, especially in a post-truthiness, post-COVID world, it comes off in a different way to me. Our world is now filled with quasi-scientific cults. From flat earthers to anti-vaxxers, to people focused on "healing crystals", to the resurgence of astrology.
I wouldn't be saying this about anyone in a more shall we say "classical" domain. As a technologist, your claims are pretty easily verifiable and testable, even on fuzzy areas like large language models.
But in the Quantum world? I immediately start to approach the author of this with distrust:
* He's writing about multiverses
* He's claiming a quantum performance for something that would take a classical computer septillions of years.
I'm a layman in this domain. If these were true, should they be front page news on CNN and the BBC? Or is this just how technology breakthroughs start (after all the Transformer paper wasn't)
But no matter what I just can't help but feel like the author's choices harm the credibility of the work. Before you downvote me, consider replying instead. I'm not defending feeling this way. I'm just explaining what I feel and why.
* Divorced parents aren't representative experiences for most parents. (The oft-used statistics that >50% of marriages end in divorce miss that those with one divorce often end up with N divorces. Aka most PEOPLE, and most COUPLES, do NOT end up divorced)
* The job of a parent is to raise an adult. There are certainly those that become enamored with the idea of parenting a baby/toddler/child and are unprepared for the complicated job ahead. But there are also those that seem to think their job ends as soon as the child is legally an adult. Or those that are all too happy to throw away their decade plus of investment because their teenager going through absolutely normal hormonal chaos are suddenly disrespectful to them.
* In essence, I'm trying to say that divorce parents of older children are just as much full of shit as the new parents in terms of giving someone advice.
This is the first release of something new and groundbreaking.
Depending on how you measure you could claim Facebook is 1st if you grade them on a different scale for being the most "open-source". But quality wise, they're pretty much in the "everyone else category.
Anthropic is new to a definitive 2nd position, and it remains to be seen if it's durable (probably not).
But regardless of how you measure, Google/Gemini is squarely in the "everyone else" bucket.
When they should have been the definitive first - leading the entire industry with every launch, the way OpenAI is.
The difference to me between whether a company is able to do something amazing vs. a person working at that company does, is whether they're able to productize it/do something with it or not.
Google is famous for hiring the smartest people in the world, and has been for 20 years. That's good. It hires those people and gives them permission to do whatever they want. That's good too! (maybe not for the sharesholders, as we come to see, but for the world of technology and for humanity)
But if all of the authors of the Transformer paper end up having to leave Google and each start competing startups, that shows that the only impressive thing Google has done is managed to hire those people to do the research. That's it.
They had a goldmine and they wasted it.
Whenever a new incumbent gets on the scene offering the same thing as some entrenched leader only better, faster, and cheaper, the standard response is "Yeah but it's less reliable. This may be fine for startups but if you're <enterprise|government|military|medical|etc>, you gotta stick with the tried tested and true <leader>"
You see this in almost every discussion of Cloudflare, which seems to be rapidly rebuilding a full cloud, in direct competition with AWS specifically. (I guess it wants to be evaluated as a fellow leader, not an also-ran like GCP/Azure fighting for 2nd place)
The thing is, all the points are right. Cloudflare IS different - by using exclusively edge networks and tying everything to CDNs, it's both a strength and a weakness. There's dozens of reasons to be critical of them and dozens more to explain why you'd trust AWS more.
But I can't help but wonder that surely the same happened (i wasn't on here, or really tech-aware enough) when S3 and EC2 came on the scene. I'm sure everyone said it was unreliable, uncertain, and had dozens of reasons why people should stick with (I can only presume - VMWare, IBM, Oracle, etc?)
This is all a shallow observation though.
Here's my real question, though. How does one go deeper and evaluate what is real disruption and what is fluff. Does Cloudflare have something that's unique and different that demonstrates a new world for cloud services I can't even imagine right now, as AWS did before it. Or does AWS have a durable advantage and benefits that will allow it to keep being #1 indefinitely? (GCP and Azure, as I see it, are trying to compete on specific slices of merit. GCP is all-in on 'portability', that's why they came up with Kubernetes to devalue the idea of any one public cloud, and make workloads cross-platform across all clouds and on-prem. Azure seems to be competitive because of Microsoft's otherwise vertical integration with business/windows/office, and now AI services).
Cloudflare is the only one that seems to show up over and over again and say "hey you know that thing that you think is the best cloud service? We made it cheaper, faster, and with nicer developer experience." That feels really hard to ignore. But also seems really easy to market only-semi-honestly by hand-waving past the hard stuff at scale.
At the time I was happy. It was the first time I was surrounded by peers as smart or smarter than me. First time I wasn't bored in school.
It absolutely destroyed my social abilities and I spent the next 5 years miserable and depressed. I barely graduated and took another few years before I felt like I had caught up enough on everything I missed out on and I was able to start a career in my mid-20's at a comparable time to everyone else.
I'm no longer "exceptional" relative to my age peers, and Im just fine with that.
I have a son now and I genuinely don't know what I would do if he has the same challenges and opportunities as me.
On the one hand I would never wish what I went through on anyone. On the other, noone forced me to go. I wanted to.
Folks are always surprised to see just how fast Java is able to perform on benchmarks - it has a reputation as such a slow language then how come it's able to execute almost as fast as C++?
But Java's problem isn't execution performance. It's:
* Startup performance. It takes time to instantiate the JVM. That matters for some, not for others.
* Consistent performance. This is the nature of Garbage Collection. It can surprise you when it executes you and drop a performance blip when you least expect it.
Most developers who think they need the fastest performance actually need CONSISTENT performance more than the fastest.
pisses me off.
physical media for the win, tho.
You can certainly go "Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos" during domestic discussions of displeasure of the ruling party. But, in international affairs, we are accountable for our government's foreign policies.
I'm Canadian. "We" are in a proxy war with Russia. "We" need to win lest Putin thinks he can just take sovereign nations like Ukraine without the rest of the world stopping him.
Appeasing dictators is a losing policy. "We" need to do everything possible by having Europe fund Ukraine, and now while "We" have Biden agreeing to do so, until Trump takes over and "we" have infighting between NATO nations about what to do about Ukraine.
Pedantically, their resources were never combined. They independently tried to compete, and they independently failed.
For what it's worth though, Amazon seems to be doing tidy business with entrypoint tablets and FireOS, which is a fork of Android, but still one they own.
Microsoft's exit of mobile was a short-sighted decision IMO. They have the entire office suite. They have windows and Windows has essentially become an app store model too.
I can easily imagine a future where Microsoft leaned in hard on Microsoft Mobile-exclusives for Word/Outlook/Excel/Teams/etc., bundled it with the rest of Office/Windows subscriptions, and had every office worker in the world carrying a windows phone for their work device.
I know, I know - everyone wanted only an iPhone. But it feels to me like Microsoft didn't try very hard.
Academia the calling is the pursuit of knowledge, truth, the advancement of humankind. It sometimes needs flexibility, other times rigor. Sometimes a full team of aligned individuals. Sometimes the singular concentration of one person over a long period of time. Results are not guaranteed, and even when they happen they may be revolutionary, or they may be a tiny stepping stone that only reveals it's greater purpose literally CENTURIES later. (Joseph Fourier died in 1830, never realizing that 2 centuries from his all modern life would not be possible without mathematical concepts named after him)
All of this is great, but...how does one survive to be able to do this? Historically, virtually every famous scientist you can think of was a noble. They had family money, servants. They didn't have to think about rent or laundry or cooking or parenting.
If instead we want to be able to guide humans with the ABILITY to do great things towards such pursuits, how do we compensate them? How do we track progress, and create reward structures to incentivize both achievement and progress?
Therein lies academia the profession. I am not in it, nor have I ever been it. I have nothing to gain from defending it. Every ex-academic in industry I come across is so relieved to be out of it.
But that is so sad and disappointing to me, and it pains me how often it's trashed on hackernews...
Just because they weren't "defending a NATO member" doesn't mean that the operation was "offensive".