didericis

I’ve seen the horror of abuse and know the wrecked people that come out of mental institutions. I know the hopelessness of those without skills surrounded by predatory people. I understand the brutality of caste systems and the superficial rejection of good people for stupid fleeting status games. I understand the history of the world and current and past slavery and all the brutality we inflict on each other. But I think we can try to do just a bit better than yesterday, and make our little part of the world better if we’re proper stewards. I’d rather die trying to do that and teach others than to roll over and allow the world to degenerate without any kind of fight, or give an opiate to a person to whom I could instead give a cure.

I think focusing on inequality is an egregious mistake, and is a consequence of a perspective where comparison to others is paramount. Worth and contentment should not be viewed as related to the circumstances of others, it should be something each of us compares to our own prior circumstances.

If we are doing better than we were yesterday, that is immensely positive. And I believe that is possible for everyone. I believe everyone can find a friend out there that enriches them, and we can get the world to think and value compassion and social bonds just a tiny bit more than the day before.

If AI can supplement people when they’re in dire straights, and it works, then sure. But it won’t ever equalize the experience of everyone, because everyone is coming from a different place, and I don’t think it will ever substitute true human connection. The goal should be enrichment, and trying to increase positivity without taking from others. Social interaction is mutually beneficial when done correctly and can accomplish that.

The key and the challenge is to pair and train people in such a way that people are incrementally uplifted and not torn down. I think if AI has a place, it is best used to figure out optimal pairings that encourage that growth.

I disagree with everything you said and find your outlook both sad and disgusting.

We can make a space in the world for everyone, however small. People can find each other.

Homeless drug addicts have friends. Lonely people can find communities. Circumstances are not static.

Yes, there are ways to try to commercialize intimacy, but they're horrible and don't actually achieve it.

> It's a noble idea, but begs the question why a community would want to have responsibility to individuals that they may not want to have in their presence in the first place.

If you help build up the people around you into better people, and get to know them, they tend to reciprocate. It can take a very long time, not everyone reciprocates equally, they may be coming from a very different place that's hard to understand, and it can be painful. But it's intrinsically rewarding to pursue the companionship of others genuinely, as hurt as you might get doing so. What you gain when you're honest makes up for it. Trying to do so in the proper manner takes constant reevaluation and work, but we're not here to just sit in front of a computer and buy stuff, we're here to interact with those around us and try to get as close as we can to fulfillment.

Both of those examples just point to the value of having true support from a larger community. If you see someone suicidal or who has never known true familial support, try to bring them in and teach them what a true and healthy family looks like. And if you ever find yourself in that position, you want try to crawl your way out and into better networks and a state of mind, as confusing and painful as that may be.

Committing suicide alone or forever living without an understanding of true compassion are not good outcomes that should just be accepted.

Think about what you're saying a bit. Why are the "others" you're describing destined to be alone? At the very least, couldn't they have each other?

It's easier and more rewarding to just be more compassionate to others, and I don't think it's impossible to design social structures that at least make some attempt to serve everyone's emotional needs. Whether they'll be successful is circumstantial, and I don't think it's possible to make everyone perfectly content and with the perfect companions all the time, but we can encourage a culture of genuine curiosity and care for others that tries to move in that direction.

Giving is only draining to those who are still in an insecure and narcissistic phase of emotional development. It's extremely rewarding to give to others and help meet their needs and encourage growth, regardless of status difference.

My original comment was advocating we not create companion AIs and try to substitute real companionship with robots, and I was in fact trying to promote the creation of real communities.

I'm not sure I'm interpreting you correctly, but if you're claiming what I'm talking about is just theoretical, real life communities have existed throughout the entirety of our species.

That doesn't mean there isn't a place for companion AIs, I just think it's horrible to consider them as anything other than a narcotic. They might work as a replacement for companionship in tragic situations where there are no other options, but there are 7 billion people on the planet. I don't see how it's impractical to encourage people to hang out with each other.

The only healthy use for AI I see is in determining likely long term compatibility and helping people find each other, but that's potentially dangerous/could backfire or lead to severe abuses of power.

I love VR/think it's a much better alternative to socializing than text based async communication or video chat, but I don't think it's a good substitute for real world relationships.

I don't think companionship can be commodified, and I think any attempt to do so would be the equivalent of an opiate. While there may be specific contexts where it could have utility, I think it's far healthier to encourage those who lack the inclination or willingness to join communities to do so. That's why I mentioned leadership. I think we have a responsibility to give lots of opportunities and encouragement for those lacking the initiative or will to socialize, and should try to diminish a lot of the status barriers and animosities preventing such socialization.

We've had many decades of psychological and behavioral science now. Instead of using it to get people to click buttons for hours and talk to a screen, maybe we could figure out how to use it to encourage healthier behavior.

I know you said this, but I want to emphasize that relationship failures do not invalidate the value of that ideal. I struggle to think of anyone who wouldn't benefit from pursuing some kind of family, and I believe sacrificing that pursuit entirely is always a tragic mistake.

Forming loving families is hard. You might not find the right people immediately, and some people are incredibly destructive towards each other. Everyone is not compatible with everyone else. And it is often less painful to live alone than to live with a destructive family.

That means some families need to be dissolved and reconstituted, others need time to heal. For some people there is not enough time, understanding or strength to grow and form new bonds with others.

That does not mean people should give up and live alone. Anyone who believes they will be happier alone is deluding themselves and/or too scared of the pain of rejection and heartbreak. It's worth it.

https://youtu.be/bl5TUw7sUBs?t=60

How about we not do that and try to actually cultivate real life communities and families through more leadership, planned activities, persistent encouragement, etc.

I'm kind of tired of the commodification of anything and everything. Communities aren't just supposed to be these bureaucratically labelled abstract co-locations of people mediated by a billion different services, you're supposed to actually try to get to know your neighbors. Learning how to listen, trying to teach how to listen, and being brave enough to do both is incredibly enriching.

With the rise in remote work, that should be easier than ever. Why don't we try to sort ourselves into locations where we have optimal mixes in personalities/interests for solid communities of all ages and put in the work required to understand and relate to each other better.

Intergenerational projects are worth pursuing. Those projects require intergenerational value.

Going back to the moon, going to mars, making cities more livable, building Cathedrals, healing cultural trauma, making healthy families, creating better ways of life, enhancing health and lifespan, teaching and learning how the world works, figuring out consciousness, determining the secret to a good life, eliminating pain and creating ideal adventures… that is all possible with enough dedication on a long enough timescale and with enough forward thinking and endurance/adjustment.

I get that ending deprivation in the now is important, but I can’t help but feeling we’ve been sacrificing the future to a decades long hedonic treadmill to satisfy base and immediate needs rather than future oriented striving.

I like pithy quotes like this, but I can’t help feeling we over rely on them/take stuff like this too seriously.

There is no rule that everything has to get boring after 35. If you think like that it’s kind of a self fulfilling prophecy.

If you feel like you’re in a drought, look for a source of water.

This is mine -> https://www.monero.observer/

The closest thing to micropayments deployed at scale right now seems to be youtube superchats, which use traditional banking stuff.

I believe there are people creating micropayment superchat like systems for crypto, but its difficult when its not integrated into the browser/not integrated into content as well as it is with youtube.

Brave has a pretty cool tipping feature that I’ve used a handful of times, but it’s not integrated into the user experience in a way that people actually use/very few people seem to know about it or use it.

Lightning mitigates high transaction fees by pooling.

I agree with long term concerns as block rewards decrease, though, which is why I prefer Monero’s tail emission to Bitcoin’s model.

Part of the brilliance of block rewards is it actually does pay for itself. Miners are rewarded for their efforts, and the reward amount varies based on the needs of the network.

At least that’s been true for the past decade, prior to getting towards the supply cap. It’ll be extremely interesting to see how miners behave as the rewards decrease in reality vs in theory. My personal belief is that the lack of tail emission and resultant price increase will keep bitcoin alive indefinitely, but make it more and more static overtime, even with stuff like lightning, and turn it into a kind of reserve note. This is not a novel theory and is what many are seeing happening.

I’m most bullish on Monero long term/think it’s extremely under-appreciated as a viable means for the mind of decentralized uncensorable micro-transactions people in the space all fantasize about.

These kinds of comments block me from doing a physics dive; I don’t know where to start/am worried about starting from a bad point. I don’t know whether to follow some of the trails the linked author has laid out if I want to learn more, whether you’re nitpicking, or whether you’re advocating for a much better approach that starts with the details you say this obfuscates. When I was younger and had more time I’d be willing to eat the inefficiency, and the bigger reason for not doing a deep dive is the difficulty, my own laziness, and lack of practical need, so take what I’m saying with a grain of salt, but the time needed to parse criticism like this to see whats legitimate and whats not drives me a bit nuts.

I’ve done enough self learning to know that there is no perfect starting point/backtracking is inevitable, but something about the modern intellectual landscape feels very noisy/jargony and particularly prone to inefficient learning.

When you say “there is translation invariance that using the Noether's theorem implies the conservation of momentum”, I have no idea what that means. It sounds like a description of a turbo encabulator. I’m sure its not, and that your description is much more efficient than spelling it out from the ground level, but it annoys me how difficult it is to distinguish between a legitimate domain expert jargon meant to condense complexity and unnecessarily obfuscatory jargon that works more like a status/club membership symbol.

Maybe its always been like this somewhat and that problem is inevitable, idk.

If all of your data is in yjs, then you can use syncedstore to efficiently send updates between clients and y-IndexedDB to store the data when the app is off. Its not exactly what was asked for, no, but depending on the application that setup can be substituted for a central database.

> a CouchDB like DB with native support for a CRDT toolkit such as Yjs or Automerge would be awesome, when syncing mirrors you would be able to just exchange the document state vectors - the changes to it - rather than the whole document

syncedstore -> https://syncedstore.org/docs/sync-providers#y-indexeddb-for-...

You're playing a very dangerous game, even if wartime changes the calculus. Though what you're saying about judgement is true, all of the worst cases of authoritarian repression were similarly justified. "We can't allow capitalist propaganda, we're facing an existential threat/they'll sabotage us", "we can't allow jewish propaganda, we're facing an existential threat/they'll destroy the race", "we can't allow communist propaganda, we're facing an existential threat/they'll destroy our freedom", etc. Viewing information as munition rather than a raw resource meant to be democratically parsed is something all repressive systems share in common.

What distinguishes our society is our ability to self correct and our decentralized method of truth discovery. That can and does get used against us, as will our hypocrisy if we alter our approach. The solution to abuse of that decentralization is not to bureaucratize truth and create a mechanism for centralized information control, however well intended or carefully crafted to attempt balance. The system level solution is to make sure that those speaking the truth within our systems are protected and discovered. The societal level solution is to make sure that those people have enough credibility and leadership capital to be listened to and take that responsibility seriously.

Our major news organizations have been burning their credibility and leadership capital for at least a decade. The willingness of people to defer to random online youtube personalities over more established sources is a failure of those established sources. That loss of credibility cannot be solved by blocking worse sources. Those more established sources need to be more honest, engage in more long form discussion and less narrative crafting, and most importantly, speak with more humility and without patronizing the masses that are falling for the propaganda. If the only people genuinely acknowledging certain grievances and speaking to an audience like equals are bad actors or influenced by bad actors, those falling for propaganda have no reason to switch sources.

That's not to say there aren't other more immediately actionable solutions to online chaos and disinformation. From the technical side, there should be less algorithmic emotional hijacking/feed manipulation. If this industry hadn't pursued click maximization so aggressively and took viewpoint diversity more seriously as an essential design goal these platforms would be much more difficult to take advantage of by propagandists. I understand why things evolved as they did and understand a lot of people have been and are trying very hard to promote societal health, but there's a certain culture of arrogance and desire to tweak human behavior that's won out over a culture of viewpoint diversity that I think would have much more effectively inoculated people against the kind of destructive propaganda state actors we're seeing now.

Was being a bit tongue in cheek, but yes, it depends on your definition of politeness. I’d argue that being genuinely polite, ie being genuinely respectful and considerate, involves the kind of self sacrifice you’re describing. But I also agree that when most people imagine politeness, they imagine what I’d call “superficial politeness”, not “genuine politeness”

The old fashioned term for this is “politeness”

Similar project -> https://github.com/Y2Z/monolith

(I used both and ended up favoring monolith, but can’t remember why. I think they’re pretty comparable/am grateful for both of them)

That’s fair and understandable. If you look at the safety claims of the past as equivalent to the claims of today it makes sense to be mistrustful. I think it’s fairly tragic and misguided to conclude that, though. The new plants are actually quite different (at least that’s what it appears; I’m not a nuclear engineer, so I’m trusting what seem like qualified nuclear engineers to describe the new systems).

The big difference is the need for active cooling in both Fukushima and Chernobyl. The new ones don’t need that.

I know that sounds like the same thing as “an rbmk reactor cannot explode”, but that’s very dismissive of decades of work since then by people completely unrelated to those responsible for past disasters. All major nuclear disasters or near disasters like three mile island were from old systems which used active cooling.

The energy output of nuclear is unmatched, its safer than it used to be, and I’m pretty sure most of the expense comes from red tape. I think its good to have learned some hubris from past mistakes, but abandoning that technology would be like abandoning spaceflight. The star trek motto is not “to responsibly stay where we already are.”

When it comes down to the raw physics, I don’t see how most renewables can compete. It seems like the cost effectiveness is being distorted by subsidies for renewables and red tape for nuclear. If renewables actually are cost competitive now or close too it and can legitimately be used without requiring energy rationing and causing grid problems, thats great, but I don’t really see how that’s possible.

At the end of the day I don’t really care whats generating power, I just think it’s foolish to not try to have as much as possible, and I don’t see how something as energy dense as nuclear wouldn’t be massively beneficial.

Jinx -> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30493173#30493292

Fukushima was not a case of unknown unknowns. That style of reactor requires active cooling to prevent meltdown, and the cooling failed. The consequences of the cooling system failing were known, as were the vulnerabilities of the cooling system. They just didn’t add enough safeguards/didn’t account for the backup failing. There’s an argument that you can’t add enough safeguards to account for all possible ways an active cooling system could fail, which is perfectly reasonable/a good argument. Thats’s why next gen nuclear reactor designs don’t require active cooling.

People citing Chernobyl and Fukushima strikes me as rhe equivalent to people citing the Hindenburg when talking about flying; I’m pretty sure both reactor designs could be thought of as the design equivalent to the hydrogen blimp. People’s minds are stuck on an image of a blimp on fire when thinking about flying even though modern passenger jets exist.

Vocal recognition software was good enough to pick up numbers and lightweight enough to fit on a phone of that size in 1988?

I wish a political faction came out with a uniting message about both getting money out of congress and repealing legislation/reducing bureaucracy. When it comes to cases like this, they’re the same issue. The ideological blaming and banner waving hides the common ground.

Which specific github flavored features violate the original spirit of markdown? I only use the basic syntax, but I don’t think I’ve run across a readme edit that hasn’t adhered to that original spirit.

More like terrifying.

The possibilities made available for bad actors to manipulate the masses with this technology is unprecedented and terrible.

I think there needs to be a return to a more siloed, community based, web-of-trust model of communication where there is confidence that the people being interacted with are actually human.

A persuasive, funny, distributed army of commenters that sound like real people that are given prompts by people with the resources to spin up accounts undetected (or allowed via backdoor deals) and mimic the general public is nightmare material. I think a fair bit of that kind of manipulation is already starting to ramp up.

This technology is in my opinion on the same scale of danger as nuclear weapons and needs to be treated as such. It’s insanely dangerous.

I don’t think it can be regulated out of existence, and that also risks concentrating it in the hands of bad actors. I think attempts to regulate it effectively should still be made. But I think the only practical way out of this is some kind of distributed private set of communication networks where people control their own servers, their own online identities, and only connect to people they meet in real life (and then connect to others through networks of relations). I think that’s more realistically accomplishable then it sounds and is desperately needed.