eks391

Get yourself a greyscale browser filter so photoshop isn't affected. This is the first result I got; I'm sure there are better ones

https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/grayscale-screen/mc...

Dang. I bet the morale of the peers still working there is poor.

My team got a new boss 18mo ago. He had obvious favoritism, and his favorite person happened to be the only person who wasn't a team player. He also over the course of the 18mo, figured out a way to fire every remote worker, no matter how good their past performance was (one even has won several awards above our bosses level; our boss always gives recognition only to that one toxic person). So no replacements via AI, but folks have been feeling really unvalued, much how I would expect an AI replacement to be. Everyone in my supervisor's team, including my supervisor (who is high functioning autistic, and frequently made fun of by our boss), have been applying for jobs elsewhere. I hope for their mental health that they are successful. I did bring up problems with HR a couple times, and even found in the work policies rules that were being violated by him, and that's when I've learned that, at least here, they are just words, and I needed to get out because I was painting a target on my back. Several others also raised concerns, and most of them are the same ones who have since found work elsewhere.

In other news, I've got a job lined up that I will be going to very soon, and I'm excited for that!

I personally know a lot of people (n>15) who are the CEOs of their own companies (ignoring unsuccessful ones). If I broke these into a couple groups, I mostly still see competent, hard working people:

Group 1: company stays small, like a ma & pa shop or small service, with few employees. This is a mixed bag of really hard working individuals and scumbags. The scummy ones aren't breaking any laws or doing anything nefarious, they just found a financial opportunity and shoved themselves in as a middleman and just subcontract out everything and do literally nothing except sit to the side and collect a paycheck.

Group 2: large company, making a name for themselves with hundreds of employees. I only know one guy who meets this category, and he is incredibly talented and hard working

Group 3: wildly successful, international company. Again I only know one guy, so I can't generalize, but he is super lazy. I think this is what y'all are referring to when y'all are hating on CEOs. To give him some slack, he was hard working when we met, and he actually made numerous companies, but this one exploded and now he lives in luxury. He hasn't lost his moral compass, but he doesn't really needs to work hard anymore either.

I should caveat that all of these folks who I know built their company. They weren't hired into one and fought their way to the top with politics or anything. Maybe I surround myself with ambitious people rather than politically toxic people, because otherwise I think it is odd that every single one of the many CEOs I know built their company, rather than getting the seat in a different way.

Look up email alias service or something similar, if you aren't looking to self host. I can't recommend the service I use, because I'm grandfathered in to my plan, and their current plans for new customers suck, but there's enough providers out there that you should find something competitive.

If you want to 'self host' on a provider, I thing cheap/free options are available from cloudflare, Google, and similar enterprise companies.

If you want to truly self host, I don't have experience, but this guy who does gave a great thorough answer for those who are interested: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48073510

> hatred of Microsoft interferes with people's ability to think logically

100%. I fall in the 'I hate MS (and Apple, and Google, and...)' crowd myself. I lose brain cells every time I have to use MS products, so I definitely make nonlogical statements about these companies sometimes. I admit that my biasies are strong and one can't fully trust my opinion when I talk about these companies. But I do try to lace mostly truth, even if I exaggerate.

I have almost exclusively used the downloads folder since a late teen, because I realized it was the only place where I could trust microslop to not mess with my stuff.

Now I mostly use my self hosted cloud, but I do still have all of my short term things in downloads that don't need a form of backup

> alternatives where we would identify and just generally regulate the harmful features

Good point. The age ban is based on the idea that it is worse for kids (and other exploits) when the big idea is that it is bad for everyone, just moreso for kids. Might as well protect the whole populace when one change of the app design will do that.

Is 5 million a guess or a stat? I've always wondered how "big" HN is.

People definitely have preferences of tools. For your construction analogy, I'm anti hammer. I prefer screws in almost every instance where a nail could be used, and hammers aren't the right tool for screws. Hammers suck.

Back to AI, it's a tool, and you can definitely be for or against it. Someone against AI might prefer other tools, like a canvas, camera, word doc, or visual studio (depending on the application they could be using the AI tool for)

My grandpa was upset that I never bothered to memorize trig tables. Tried to argue that I am not useful when there isn't a calculator around. I can think of several rebuttles to this, but didn't care to use any. He'd already been retired for some time so I didn't expect him to understand why even a pocket calculator is useless in modern engineering analysis, so memorizing trig was no more than a boring party trick performed by the out of touch nerd.

> since there is no testable theory of consciousness

I can't argue with this, so I acknowledge that my interpretation is as bunk as anyone else's.

> my current assumption is that insects are not conscious

Some species act as hive-minds (like bees! How convenient for your example), so I imagine the hive as the consciousness, making each bee individually lacking conscious but collectively so. Like a single neuron is not consciousness alone, but the brain is... For some reason. Kinda like how you use different physics at different levels; Newtonian physics is always there, but negligible at quantum levels, so effectively not present at all. Even a human is a collection of minds, but only one conscious. My gut biome is independent biology and can even be removed and transplanted, but I don't believe my gut bacteria is conscious. So long as it is in me, it is nonetheless part of me, and I am one conscious. I also don't exist only at my brain, eyes, or hands (deaf/blind people have expressed to me that they feel like they are located at their hands in the way I used to think I was located behind my eyes), but as my whole body.

With this perspective, I still don't believe LLMs are conscious despite modeling thinking so well. At best, it is a highly accessible modeling software, like goat simulator but if it were so good that someone thought the goat was real. You are still steering the goat/LLM, and it doesn't exist when you aren't running it. I guess the missing piece for me is the lack of autonomy that a conscious has.

Then you can go into an argument on whether we actually have choice or it is an illusion, but that is a whole topic on its own.

The author who makes the article usually isn't the same person as the editor who makes the title. The author can be arguing what your parent said and the editor claim something else for more clicks

You had me at

> gravity is just launching countless trillions of parallel instances of the same computation, with nearly all possible initial starting conditions

Great take and conclusion, no issue with the playful language here. It makes sense that, entropy being a required output with time, and 'infinite' near isolated cases would find just about every way to create that entropy, to include the efficiency at creating it (life, as you said).

Lovely take. Earth is a supercomputer. And to play on sibling responses to your first comment, this supercomputer is solving the answer to life, the universe, and everything. The answer is entropy though, not 42

I almost agreed with your comment, but then I remembered there are countless planets with conditions unsuitable for life (as we know life). We have found a couple planets that are optimisticly closer to Earth conditions, but very few, and there is usually some characteristic that makes it a stretch still.

With that said, if Earth was compared to a super computer, the initial conditions and perturbations (weights and biases, or probabilistic inference) are very important, as most planets that are also performing ~10^38 ops/sec will never succesfully manufacture biochemistry/life.

My dad (senior) was tricked by some GTA footage because the game graphics looked realistic enough. Perhaps it was modded because it looked nicer than I remember it, but nonetheless I'm concerned for the inevitable confusion from AI, in the hopeful assumption that it isn't already affecting his judgement.

Your comment is so depressing because of how graphic it is, and what makes it so upsetting is that I can't disagree. You and I have lost faith in the world. Oh, to go back to when I was young and I thought theft and abuse were rare...

Without an account with the journal, all I could read was the abstract, but it didn't hint to me that they corrupted the FBI, whatever that means, but have a high representation within the FBI.

Someone recently told me that when he worked for the BLM, there was a lot of LDS folk, which reinforced my observation that they are overrepresented in federal jobs in general (I have no evidence for this, just several anecdotes). I assumed it is because they usually don't smoke marijuana, so they are more likely to be eligible. That abstract gave more compelling possibilities that I didn't think of, that don't seem conspiratorial, like the higher multilingual likelihood at concentrated places like BYU, making it a great spot for recruiting.

Does the article go into more detail on how they "corrupted" the FBI that is not easily explained by them simply being ideal FBI hires?

That's my thinking too. Do marketers not also have phones, or do they somehow not see how annoying promotions and spam are? There's already so much paid advertising everywhere, and the free advertising with direct notification to the target is obviously going to be abused by these exact types of people. Guardrails must be put up by the transport layer (Google, Apple) so their own image isn't lowered to the image of the abusers that are too keen on promoting their disruptions. Few people want a convenient device that makes life inconvenient[1]

[1] I know a few people whose phones constantly beep and flash numerous times a minute, and when on, the top is completely unusable because any notification dismissed is immediately replaced, obscuring those upper buttons again. I don't understand how they tolerate it.

I think he is suggesting that this article is heavily exaggerated, or possibly written more as entrainment rather than to express fact. He quotes the misuse of rule of law to prove his point.

Up to you whether you agree. There are lots of examples in American past where mob mentality weighed more than law, so that example doesn't disprove the article for me but I hope it is entertainment instead of fact.

Same, almost. When I was a student, I rented a locker near the showers so I could start my day at the school gym, shower, and go to my first class.

My workplaces have not had gyms, but I bought equipment for my home that maintains the streamline. I haven't been perfect at my routine because my work schedule isn't consistent which is annoying, but I do still get some exercise in at least twice per week with it. I doubt I'd be getting at least that otherwise.

I always thought it was weird that all of the equipment issued to me beyond the laptop was registered to me, such as the monitors and desk phone. Your comment enlightens me... That's wild to imagine folks just swiping things from other peoples desks. We even have storage rooms of office supplies where someone could drop off their crate of paper and binders if they had one for some reason.

Google has support?? How did you find it, and what other services besides gmail does it cover?

I envy you. Before I degoogled my life, I tried going all in to no smart phone. It didn't last very long. I still would like to get there, but considering how difficult and slow it was just to degoogle, I anticipate that it may be a long time before I can operate without a smart phone.

Not just mountain states. I lived in one of the windy US deserts, and everything outside is minimally cared about because it's getting practically sand blasted several times a year.

What I'm saying is the car doesn't have a method to track you, and if you want entertainment, you have to bring it.

If you don't want your phone to track you, just don't bring it, but most people will have their own phone on them when they travel anyway. It's unfair to blame Slate for the invasiveness of whatever phone you choose to have.

This seems to be a dual concern: do they collect driver data during vehicular usage, and/or during web browsing?

For the first, my argument is they simply cannot, even if they wanted to, in the same way I can't track my friend if I supply him with a toothpick. There simply isn't sufficient technology in a toothpick by itself for me to violate their privacy, so I would need other methods, like agreements with businesses or a backdoor to his phone.

Regarding web usage, their privacy policy says

> To contractors, service providers, and other third parties we use to support our business.

> If you do not wish to have your email address or phone number used by Slate to promote our own or third parties' products or services, you can opt out by changing your communication preferences in your Slate account.

I have read a lot of privacy policies, and this verbiage suggests that they don't sell your data (even in aggregated form), but they do sell access to a customer base. This is similar to youtubers getting sponsored - only assumptions of the customers can be made based on the youtubers content, and no YouTube telemetry itself, since that it owned and processed by YouTube, not the youtuber. Otherwise the policy would have mention of selling data. This is further confirmed by the language that you are opting out of emails to not receive third party stuff, not opting out of selling of data. Since data being sold is required to have an opt out method (in most US states), it is further safe to infer no data is sold. Just access to the reader base.

I hope this answers your questions on whether they are worthwhile to use. Personally, I think this is honorable and I'd be confident to say that these cars don't have the problem being discussed in this forum.

What you described sounds to me like slate. It doesn't have maps or a sim. It doesn't even have a digital dashboard at all[0].

I barely looked it up so I'm no expert, but that's what I'm interpreting from their site.

[0] https://www.slate.auto/en/faq

I haven't heard about slate till just now, but based on their specs, it doesn't seem like they are capable of collecting or selling data. The dashboard is your personal tablet or phone. It literally seems to just be a battery, motor, chassis, and trunk, with climate control and required safety features

I didn't think of that, but that makes complete sense, as it is https. I think my info was sold by my registrar as well because solicitors call or email me on occassion because they "accidentally came across my site" and want to provide the design/js/etc help.

You've gotten several comprehensive responses so far and I want to add a niche corner that people might assume might not have the bot problem but still does.

I run a website that hosts tools for my family: games and a TV interface for the kids, remote access to our family cloud and cameras, etc. Sensitive things require log in and have additional parameters required for access of course.

I specifically blocked bots from search engines so my site is never indexed, as I'm not selling anything nor want any attention, as well as some other public non-malicious bots in case they communicate with Google, just to be safe there, and my robots.txt doesn't allow anything.

I assume then, that the only way a bot could even find my site is to do what the indexers do: brute force try every single possible ipv4 address hoping to hear something back, as my domain should not be known (and isn't simple enough to be quickly guessed), and most traffic must be malicious, or indexing (AI overview and other scrapers won't be finding it via web search).

Since it isn't indexing, and keeping everything in simple black and white boxes, my remaining traffic is family or malicious bots, and 99.9% isn't family.

I currently have the most strict bot-blocking setup I could come up with, which nicely cut down on quite a bit of traffic, but I do still receive ~2k attempts per day, which as you can imagine, still is around 99% not traffic, as I have fewer than 20 kids, and my kids aren't using the site nonstop.

Conveniently, my setup has never accidentally blocked a family member, so I'm pleased with the setup.