hacknat

Syncing on Apple devices across the board is pretty bad. A great example is the Notes app. It took me a year to convince my wife to migrate our grocery list away from the Notes app. So many arguments about missed grocery items that never synced.

Wealth inequality is not an important thing to worry about by itself. The Gini coefficient undergoes a U-shape growth curve in economies as they move from under-developed, to developing, to developed. A better thing to worry about is wage growth and wealth growth among the bottom 50% of the population. Correlating that metric to the Gini coefficient seems like an exercise for an ideologue not a rigorous thinker.

Speaking to your point about VCs. They represent a minuscule amount of capital investment in the US economy. Of course, on this website, they predominate thought and discussion. However, the simple fact is that VC money is a rounding error in overall capital investment.

Yes.

Daniel Borkmann is at Isovalent, he is definitely co-creator of eBPF.

"nature.com" made me look because I assumed there was a paper behind this. There isn't. This is an editorial. No thanks.

Would the submitter care to put "Editorial:" as a prefix on this submission?

Germany screwed itself by ending natural gas exploration and shutting down its nuclear plants. They’re about to burn more coal and wood this year than they have in years.

Iraq made some sense if you see it as a war to make sure no major energy-capital flows went through the Euro (Iraq started selling their oil in Euros in the late 90s). The US war machine wants to go to war with everyone, from time to time American economic interests lets them.

It locks Germany into its geopolitical position.

I meant users/customers, not employees.

I'm not saying that there aren't dystopian problems in our future, but my bias is that we're actually probably not doing enough, not that we're doing too much. Measuring technology progress is actually very difficult to do, most of the actors have massive incentives to lie and exaggerate.

> a VR metaverse dominated by super sophisticated ad tech

No one is joining Meta (in fact they're losing people now), it's going to fail. Actually VR in general has been unable to gain market traction for years. More and more signs point to people exiting social media (TikTok is still a concern though).

> all controlled by super intelligent AGI

Don't believe the AI hype. We've actually made very little progress on theoretical AI, the breakthroughs have all been in engineering (mostly just adding stacks to NNs that hyperscalar cloud architectures have made easy). We don't actually know what General Intelligence is yet or how to implement it. The engineering progress is making people think there is crazy progress in AI when there isn't.

> think DALL E and where that's headed.

DALL E is just cobbling together two AI innovations, semantic association and image creation. AI has been able to "combine" two types of image styles together for a while. Now there's a semantic addon that does the heavy lifting of looking up the styles for you based on the words you said/wrote.

I get that Tolkien was a staunch Catholic, but he was also a preeminent philologist trained in a way that few people today are. He was deeply familiar with all forms of human myth. To blindly assume that all characters in LotR must have a Biblical corollary is lazy. Tom Bombadil "rapes" Goldberry (in the ancient sense of the word[1]) in The Adventures of Tom Bombadil that comports nicely with other myth cycles and not very well with the idea of the "first Man" or "Adam" (it's not even clear that Bombadil is Eru's direct creation). I think if you actually read the secondary Tolkien texts you might see it differently. They are almost all worth it.

But one day Tom, he went and caught the River-daughter,

in green gown, flowing hair, sitting in the rushes,

singing old water-songs to birds upon the bushes.

He caught her, held her fast! Water rats went scuttering

reeds hissed, herons cried, and her heart was fluttering.

Said Tom Bombadil: "Here's my pretty maiden!

You shall come home with me! The table is laden...

[1]https://www.etymonline.com/word/rape#:~:text=rape%20(v.),abd....

This has always been my understanding of Bombadil as well. The most popular/accepted view of who he is among Tolkien-dom that I've heard is that he represents the lands of the West themselves (or perhaps all of Middle-Earth?). In the Tolkien legendarium power comes from knowing the right names for things and the right words to say to them. Tom Bombadil is the most powerful being in Middle-Earth because he is so old that he knows the proper name for everything and how to address them (he chastises Old Man Willow to release the Hobbits like he is a child).

I do want to credit the author of this post with the observation that the rulers of lands in Tolkien's legendarium have influence over how those lands express themselves, but I think this letter is the answer to that. Tom is the exception; he eschews power. One of Gandalf's reasons for saying that they wouldn't want to give the ring to Tom is that he would probably lose the ring, not thinking it very important. Tom only cares of eating and drinking and making merry. In that regard he is a Dionysian figure. If you read the Adventures of Tom Bombadil (which this author surprisingly doesn't reference) he is clearly modeled on the Dionysus cycle of myths.

My favorite Chen article:

Why do Windows functions all begin with a pointless MOV EDI, EDI instruction?

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20110921-00/?p=95...

That is not the only thing that has backed the value of money in the history of humanity. It (violence) is arguably the most inferior social mechanism for enforcing value that has been tried.

So gold’s day in the sun from the 15th century to the 1970s was what?

You've just described money. Is BTC good at being money? No. But your argument isn't the reason.

This was pretty much settled long ago according to pot sherd, architectural, and textual analysis. DNA is just the final nail in the coffin.

Not if you're able to influence the market in a meaningful way from your Twitter handle. How is anyone underestimating Twitter's power at this point?

I believe AGI is possible, but the more I study ML the more convinced I am that we don’t know what it (AGI) is. I also, don’t know if I agree that humans have GI (humanity as a whole does). I think we’re actually copycats more than anything else. Neural nets are the atoms of GI, but it’s not clear what the superstructure of GI is. We all assume that we understand what general intelligence is, but I don’t think we actually have the goods yet. We understand optimization, but we don’t understand the thing that chooses what to optimize. There is some notion of “values” in order for intelligence to be legible, and we don’t know what that is either.

Are you reading the deeper lesson though? The individual examples aren't meant to be authoritative. He was trying to illustrate the very thing you are bringing up. Namely that lazy heuristics create information cascades. The information cascades can have positive effects, as you point out, but they can have profoundly negative consequences, which is the point of the whole article.

We shouldn't use or intellectually tolerate lazy heuristics because they can create immense amounts of counter-productive sense-making, and consequent negative social outcomes (a poorly managed pandemic, for example). The reason this article is hitting a nerve is because he is basically describing the current state of sense-making in the US (and maybe even the West more broadly?), which is quite poor — worse in some areas than others, but still quite degraded all around.

On your doctor take, you do know that the other author of this post is a licensed and practicing Physician, right?

Ditto. I'm a heavy(ish) user and I've never tested positive, despite being exposed more than once. Though admittedly I'm very cautious (always wear an N95, et al) and vaccinated.

It sounds like it was motivated by laziness.

In your world Einstein doesn't exist.

I don't know. Ostensibly it looks like pathos is easy right now. Politics seems super intense right now, but it also seems super fake. Mostly I think shows of pathos are fake right now. Getting people to actually do things and act seems like the hardest thing right now. Posting on social media doesn't count.

Ethos is very hard, but pathos is harder, especially in secular society.

Let me be clear, I think arguments about ethos generate the most argumentation and heat right now, but the silent killer is really pathos. People feel comfortable arguing ethos. Most people will not argue pathos openly though.

We have a crisis of pathos in our culture. How do you claim that something is important without an appeal to authority? You can't. We live in a culture that is fragmenting its sources of authority; different groups of people have different sources of authority.

Here's a good example. The external dialogue that a lot of conservatives give on climate change is that scientists can't be trusted. The internal dialogue that a lot of them (though not all) engage in goes something like, "The earth doesn't matter. God is going to come back and set things right. So we don't need to worry about it anyway."

Devil's advocate, is democracy in America working anymore?

You need to read Girard more closely (I recommend reading Things Hidden...)

Girard does not embrace a Hobbesian view of the world, he is trying to explain the origin of human cooperation and society. The scapegoat narrative is not a nihilistic war of all-against-all it is a narrative of all-against-one to create order. Human cooperation can exist when violence is pared-down to one person (the scapegoat).

Where Girard admits that nihilism can come into play is when the scapegoat narrative becomes openly acknowledged. Which is what he argues Christianity effectively did (opened up the scapegoat mechanism for all to see, thus rendering it ineffective). Girard predicts that our lack of a scapegoat mechanism will likely lead to apocalyptic violence.

Frankly, I think the leftist view that humans can cooperate out-of-the-head-of-Zeus is naive and needs no account, because it has never happened.

If true that distinguishes him from nobody, including people without power. However, a serious investigation of Thiel's work dismisses any serious accusation of "Intellectualism" it is well thought out and philosophically rigorous.

Is he completely correct? Probably not. But then, who is?

If one person is an existential threat to humanity (which is what I assume you mean) then, frankly, we probably "deserve" it (in the evolutionary sense). Thiel is useful here to countermand this point. One of his most useful ideas is that the so called "powerful" and "elite" have much less power than we think they do and can can be easily circumvented if ignored (of course there are marginal cases).

I don't disagree, but I think there is a lot of nuance to it. Thiel is an ardent disciple of Rene Girard. If people want insight into how Thiel sees the world, I would strongly recommend reading The Straussian Moment. There is a Peter Robinson interview about the essay that can serve as a good primer[1].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRleB034EC8

Great example of an article which, I hope, invokes the Gell-Mann amnesia effect for most of its tech-educated readers. Its fascinating to read such articles being written with so little irony.

Journalism really is dead now.