digging

My point was that drawing arbitrary lines for what's legal isn't the new invention you acted like it was.

This most recent comment has shifted the topic entirely, and I'm not going to address it because it's obviously either written in bad faith or just painfully unthoughtful.

Sure, but I think that falls a bit short of what's really at play here. Advertising anything which tugs at our animal weaknesses is unreasonably manipulative. Images of food (especially marketing images, which are photos of inedible objects masquerading as food), ads for sex, drugs, gambling - these are vices for a reason. Humans, generally, are weak to these things. Adults shouldn't really be exposed to these advertisements either.

You know that laws already exist right?

Well banning it would also remove the marketing. Just because some illegal gambling will still happen doesn't mean banning it wouldn't help a lot of people.

> Now, if you could switch it around so that I write the code, and the AI reviews it, that would be something.

I'm sort of doing that. I'm working on a personal project in a new language and asking Claude for help debugging and refactoring. Also, when I don't know how to create a feature, I might ask it to do so for me, but I might instead ask it for hints and an overview so I can enjoy working out the code myself.

That argument holds no water because the grifters aren't the source of this idea. I literally don't believe Altman at all; his public words don't inspire me to agree or disagree with them - just ignore them. But I also hold the view that transformative AI could be very close. Because that's what many AI experts are also talking about from a variety of angles.

Additionally, when you're talking with certainty about whether transformative AI is a few years away or not, that's the only way to be wrong. Nobody is or can be certain, we can only have estimations of various confidence levels. So when you say "Seems unreasonable", that's being unreasonable.

> They should pay up and submit to extortion and the whims of one guy

Not necessarily, just saying that "extract only, never give back" has some inherent risk as a strategy. It could piss people off or it could dry up the well.

> What's the economic incentive for WP Engine to give back? They have a moral duty, sure, but as a business where is the profit?

Avoiding this exact situation which kills their business

If the streaming platforms cared strongly about this problem they could have addressed it already, so I'm not confident they'll use LLMs effectively to do it without making the problem (or at least edge cases) even worse somehow. I think it would take a different business goal driving their algorithms to, for example, stop playing MF DOOM for 8 songs in a row under different aliases.

Ok but if you're getting into tree-of-many-fruits and art-plant territory, it's no longer accessible to non-experts.

I don't see anything describing why someone would choose this over other options... Is it just, "This is the one made for Vue"?

Very good article. Can anyone more familiar with quantum physics confirm if the analogies and descriptions are mathematically sound? I didn't get the vibe that the author was uncareful.

I know there are many reasons to be cautious, but this discovery has me really excited for the potential to witness incredible new leaps in science.

Yes, but also, we don't know where complex life began on earth. It probably wasn't in extreme cold, but who knows. Certain extreme environments may be more amenable to adaptation than to abiogenesis. There are still just many many unknowns, which is why we need more missions like this!

> I’m not a space probe engineer but I sometimes wonder if we go overboard on specialized compute hardware. I kinda wonder if that made more sense “back in the day”

...Probably not.

> The people that lose ...

are also everyone who makes (literally) any effort in the direction of digital privacy, whose internet experience is degraded and frustrating due to increasingly bad captchas or just outright refusal of service.

Have you tried a "coffee nap"? I find that if I just drink caffeine to counteract building tiredness, it's not going to help. Like sponging up water from a broken faucet. But if I lay down and rest (this doesn't have to include sleep, I set an alarm and let my body do what it needs, but the primary factor is giving your brain the peace it needs to process and flush stress accumulated through the day, in pseudoscientific terms), and then drink coffee, I'm reset and it can take effect.

The "Coffee Nap" is where your drink a cup of coffee (quickly, I guess), then lay down for 10-20 minutes to rest, and by the time you get up the caffeine will begin to kick in. I find that process to be a bit more stress-inducing.

There are probably mistakes an amateur cannot make because they can't penetrate the problems where the mistakes would be made.

I'm sure it was marked up still, but the best and last pillow I've ever bought is buckwheat hulls. Basically a fancy sack of grain, but I'd guess procurement was more costly than filler plastic fabrics/foams. It was an immediate cure for neck pain from side sleeping and it's quite cool, too. For me, anything stuffed with fabric is going to be a waste of money anymore.

But do you think they're taking a measured inventory of the possible consequences, both personal and societal, and saying, "No, I don't value that" ?

Extremely few decisions that people make are deeply calculated with cold logic. Most decisions are primarily unconscious, automatic, and emotional.

Example: A persons hears it's good to have a webcam cover, so they get one. Nobody mentions doing it for their phone, so they never even think about it. Then someday a friend does mention it, but that would be an inconvenient change, so the person's gut puts up resistance against considering it too strongly. They give in to their emotional response, instead of doing the hard work of changing their emotions based on the knowledge they have.

At no point in the above scenario would the person state "I don't think mass surveillance is a bad thing." For me, that's why I mean when I say people "aren't ok with it."

If one's definition of people being "ok with mass surveillance" just means they tolerate it, that they don't sufficiently resist it (and what level of resistance is sufficient? For a person with a webcam cover but no phone cam cover? Does adding a phone cam cover mean they've declared their opposition to mass surveillance?), then how can you say people aren't okay with literally everything evil or wrong? Most people just won't summon enough activation energy to fight any given injustice around them, no matter how egregious it is. That's not a reflection of their morals and values, it's a reflection of how fucking tired we all are.

I would challenge you to offer up in detail how strongly you have worked to resist mass surveillance in your life. You're logged in and posting on HN, so my guess is, you haven't worked hard enough at it according to someone's metric. Do you have a cover on your phone camera? Just the front one or both? Do you have a cover on the microphones? Do you let others add your number in their contacts or do you refuse to ever give out your real phone number?

> I think people don't really understand what an enormous sleeping dragon the entire thing is.

Isn't that what I said? Mostly we're debating semantics. My deeper point is that it's counterproductive and borderline misanthropic to argue "People just don't care about evil being done!" whereas the argument that "People seriously have no idea yet what they're 'agreeing' to" opens the door to actual solutions, for one inclined to work on them.

> Though I’d say it is more an indictment of the game than the players.

But these are specific people working extremely hard and spending extremely large amounts of money to make the game less and less "fair".

> and people are ok with that

I've seen no evidence of this. People mostly either don't understand it for feel powerless against it.

I'd agree, but also note that plenty of remote jobs were and still are ad hoc. The difference is adults have more agency to improve their own situation even if their work doesn't make any concessions to the nature of fully remote work; children have very little agency over their schooling.

Knowing the difference between bacteria being living organisms and viruses being not-quite-alive does not qualify as a "deep understanding" though.

Further, the presence of people misunderstanding something that most of the population knows pretty well in no way makes teaching that subject to the population bad. Your assertion would require that believing demons cause sickness actually has benefits we've lost.

> this feeds garbage to their backend

How is a timestamped chain of communication between persons interested in a particular topic "garbage"?

> But if all we're talking about is "mining" websites like HN for topics and then creating original content that covers those topics in a different format for a different audience... where's the issue?

Plagiarism, generally. I really enjoyed the semi-recent hbomberguy video on why it matters, and a later response (from another channel) on "The Somerset Scale of Plagiarism" for a more rigorous explanation of what the different kinds of "content reuse" can be. Those are generally where my current model of plagiarism comes from.

A specific concern would be the inaccurate telling of information that isn't understood. A video saying, "Here I will summarize this HN thread," is perfectly ok, and a good thing. A video saying, "Here I will tell you how $thing works," should be well researched and cited. Doesn't matter if the content's entirely from an HN thread for from 40 different SEO farms, it's low-quality content and it's wasting everyone's time at best, and probably actively misinforming people. (Because how true and complete is information gleaned from HN comments anyway?)

There's almost no way to make really good decisions with crypto anyway. The people who held on to early gains often think themselves geniuses but they were acting entirely on unfounded faith, like everyone else.

> I'm also tempted to copycat some of those YouTube microbiologists who collect water samples from random places and throw them under a microscope to look at diatoms, among other things. I could possibly convince my retired pathologist mom to gift me her microscope and repurpose it for exploring the microcosmos :)

I'm a fan of them and have tried my hand at this a few times with a microscope I eagerly bought. I'll just say, it's harder than it looks. Not simply the observation, but the collection and preparation of specimens - it was pretty rare for me to find something more interesting than fast little living bubbles. But I did see one copepod with a bright red eye, and several very cool varieties of rotifers, and some fascinating nematodes. If you're more dedicated than I am, you could have a really good time finding and filming them.

Appreciate the measured input. Those are both pretty important points and I don't dispute it's a very different situation from the war with Hamas.

Sorry, I meant that I don't believe they are, but I believe they would if it became opportune. And I'm not aware of any indication otherwise; it can be assumed they would choose against it, but I don't make that assumption.