egg1

A not-insignificant portion of HN has full blown AI psychosis. These are the devs churning out Windows 11 and all of the inexplicably broken functionality that has started plaguing software we used to consider reliable in the past year.

And when your users complain because you've left yourself with a pile of broken, unmaintainable slop?

Except that doesn't make sense if you can't articulate what the problem space is. We know arithmetic inside and out, and we've understood how to make mechanical calculators centuries before the dawn of electronics. "Intelligence" on the other hand is a nebulously defined philosophical concept.

What I see with these attempts at AGI is VC-funded circuses throwing shit at the wall, hardly checking to see if it sticks, and then heaping more on top. Nobody can explain how exactly transformer models are the building blocks of intelligence or how building on top of it will lead to real intelligence.

Whew, for a second there I thought I missed some big announcement from Proxmox proclaiming that they would follow the path of Silicon Valley enshittification.

At its core, arithmetic is a deterministic set of rules that can be implemented with logic gates. Computing is just taking that and scaling it up a billion times. What is intelligence? How do you implement intelligence if nobody can provide a consistent, clear definition of what it is?

Adobe can say whatever they want in their EULA; whether it's legally enforceable in court is another matter.

Imagine how these you-own-a-license-not-the-thing-itself shenanigans would play out for any other product we purchase. "No, you didn't buy that $40k car in cash upfront! You only bought Toyota's permission to operate the car, and we reserve the right to repossess it at any time."

I fear what a lot of what outspoken "progressive" types (and yes, before anyone asks, also the MAGA crowd) want is a CCP-style political system as long as they're the ones in control. Concepts like separation of powers and rule of law are merely obstacles to smash through on their road to utopia.

Seriously, if just a fraction of "intellectuals" in other fields took some time to read the past 50-odd years worth of Supreme Court rulings, there wouldn't be all this pointless bickering over basic facts. If anything, the Warren/Burger courts were egregious in making up constitutional rights out of thin air based on their moral beliefs, and not the letter of the law. It's a shame that it takes a far-right Supreme Court for people to finally understand that it's Congress's job to pass new laws, not the judiciary branch.

It became against common sense when Omicron became a thing, and if you understand what the average Chinese person has to go through now to visit relatives in a neighboring city, shop for groceries, or really just to go anywhere... I hope you get the idea. It relies on totalitarian levels of AI + big data surveillance, internal passports, lockdown measures, and completely untenable long term.

If I wasn't being clear, there are 2 major reasons why China refuses to open up: ineffective domestic vaccines and few hospital beds per capita. The CCP fears a total healthcare system collapse and subsequent discontent from its citizens.

Please tell me you did not just travel to a tier-1 city like Beijing or Shanghai, and extrapolated what you saw in the CBD to all of China. There is a reason that they're still desperately clinging to zero-COVID policies when the rest of the world has moved on, against seemingly all common sense.

Have you considered it's because you've grown up in a middle class suburb, isolated from all the depravity and violence that goes on in these inner city neighborhoods, that you can afford to daydream about "power structures" and dismiss these losses as mere property damage? Do you know how many of these businesses are owned by poor minority and/or immigrant families, who have taken out loans and spent every last penny they had to open up shop?

The enshrinement and protection of private property rights is one of the core principles that separate developed nations from third-world banana republics. If property is worth that little to you, perhaps you should start by offering up your own, and move to one of these places.

The more I read about VSCode and Electron apps in general, the more I'm convinced that all this effort is akin to putting lipstick on a pig. Modern CPU designs have all converged on multi-core as the solution to increasing performance, and yet on the software side of things... we've turned all of our desktop applications into Chrome instances running single-threaded event loops. That these extensions are even more poorly optimized is more icing on the cake.

I'm not saying the vaccines are worthless, I'm saying there is a trend of public figures gaslighting and making excuses for their ineffectiveness against Omicron, by redefining commonly accepted notions of what a vaccine is intended to do and pretending our goal all along was to merely prevent severe disease. The goal, as we've seen with past mass vaccination campaigns that worked, should be to stop the spread. Period. We need new vaccines, not fourth or fifth shots of the same thing.

Even if the polio vaccine isn't fully sterilizing, would you put our current COVID vaccines in the same league? Imagine we're living in the 60s right now, and we have a polio or smallpox vaccine with 70%+ uptake in the adult population, but the infection rate remains virtually unchanged. Would you consider this good enough?

I mean, take this quote from Dr. Fauci himself:

> As a physician and as a scientist and a public-health person, I think it is not entirely correct to make this very strong dichotomy between waning protection against hospitalization and death and waning immunity against infection and mild-to-moderate disease. It is an assumption that it’s okay to get infected and to get mild-to-moderate disease as long as you don’t wind up in the hospital and die. And I have to be open and honest: I reject that. I think we should be preventing people from getting sick from COVID even if they don’t wind up in the hospital.

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2021/09/fauci-boo...

How exactly do you think we eradicated smallpox and polio?

No, the data from the first clinical trials for the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines showed 95% efficacy against symptomatic infection. You had Fauci, Birx and countless other talking heads in the media implying or stating outright that the vaccines conferred sterilizing immunity.

Of course, we know now that the variants have evolved some degree of immune escape, that the vaccines no longer prevent infection while still being effective against severe disease, but that's not what the "experts" originally claimed. It's disappointing to see the Hacker News crowd buying into the gaslighting that vaccines are only ever meant to prevent hospitalization. That was not the scientific consensus 2 years ago, and still isn't.

Sorry, but if Singapore and Japan are your ideas of what liberal reform looks like, I've got a bridge to sell you. The kind of lawlessness you see in American and European cities is shocking to anyone coming from these places.

Both countries are paternalistic, statist societies controlled by right-wing governments since WW2. Singapore's safety comes from harsh punishment for antisocial behaviors, from caning for vandalism all the way to execution for drug trafficking. Japan is a bit softer on this front but strict cultural norms are enforced by society as a whole. They have freedom of speech but start rioting the way BLM did in 2020 and you can expect the government to use a few "emergency powers" with overwhelming support from the public.

Yes, they've implemented a few social safety nets here and there that resemble the welfare system in Western Europe, but they also don't hesitate to use the full power of the state (and public shaming) to crack down on deviant behavior.