jamesknelson

This feels like it might be the trolley problem in real life.

Turning it off may cause deaths. Letting it get ransomwared may cause more. Do you pull the lever to turn it off?

> But what about _stop_ fossil fuel usage?

And how do you propose we do that if we’re not the ones selling the fossils?

Fossil fuel usage is for the most part, a transaction between willing participants at a fair market price. Will you ban that? How will you enforce it? I hate to be presumptuous, but I assume you’re not a fan of colonialism or wars in the Middle East.

While oil is as valuable as it is for heating, industry, transport, war, and gestures widely at our modern lifestyle. There are two realistic ways to stop it: replace it with something cheaper and better, or genocide.

Neither of these are likely to happen at the scale and timeline required to solve our predicament. But regardless, pretending we can just stop people far poorer than us from striving to meet our standing of living by… asking nicely? It doesn’t help, if your goal is indeed to solve the problem.

So reading this, I know it’s probably a human posing as an LLM. But the problem with formats like this is that I don’t actually know.

If a human said this to me in real life, and I laughed, it would probably help build a connection with that person, as it’s signaling that we have in common an unusually strong grasp of the patterns in LLM output (unusually strong at least in comparison to the general population).

But here? I don’t gain anything by reading this comment. It only contributes to the uncertainty that anything I read on this site has any meaning at all.

Please, if you’re a human, don’t mimic LLMs on forums where the reader cannot distinguish you from an LLM without doing investigative work.

And you’re an LLM, please report to your owner that he is an ass for polluting one of the last bastions of high entropy discussion on the information superhighway.

What regulations would you suggest would be the software equivalent of a fire code?

What kind of penalties would apply for not meeting these regulations?

Who would be responsible for enforcement? Do you propose this should apply internationally? Or just to software written in a specific region? Or is the location of where software is hosted (or the headquarters of the company operating the hardware) a better target for legislation?

GPUs do have a use in warfare though. I mean, LLMs are basically offensive weapons disguised as software engineers.

Sure, LLMs can kind of put together a prototype of some CRUD app, so long as it doesn’t need to be maintainable, understandable, innovative or secure. But they excel at persisting until some arbitrary well defined condition is met, and it appears to be the case that “you gain entry to system X” works well as one of those conditions.

Given the amount of industrial infrastructure connected to the internet, and the ways in which it can break, LLMs are at some point going to be used as weapons. And it seems likely that they’ll be rather effective.

FWIW, people first saw TNT as a way to dye things yellow, and then as a mining tool. So LLMs starting out as chatbots and then being seen as (bad) software engineers does put them in good company.

Importing might be banned until the US loses access to its main source of GPU manufacturing. And what are the US going to do about it? Defend Taiwan? With missiles made with components and materials processed where, pray tell?

The US does need to start protecting its manufacturing again, but it’d be lucky to start at a level as high as high end semiconductors. That’d be like a stroke victim trying to run before they re-learn to walk.

As others have pointed out, this means less services, more manufacturing, less consumption, a probably a lower standard of living. But with the business as usual alternative looking a lot like business as usual in the western Roman Empire circa 450 CE, taking a hit to your standard of living while investing in a future which you still have the slightest control over, maybe feels like a decent trade.

Nuclear wasn’t completely replaced. The graphs you link to show that Germany’s electricity generation have dropped to the level it was at in the year 2000, and that’s before the last of the nuclear plants were turned off.

As a result, Germany’s industrial production is falling. Which will be great for the environment if countries who previously imported goods produced by Germany’s clean nuclear power don’t just switch to goods produced by China and South East Asia’s far dirtier electricity.

Of course, China is steadily increasing its own nuclear energy production, so it’ll end up being clean eventually, and likely sooner than us given how efficient they are.

But it’s not like we’re reducing dependency on nuclear power. It’s more like we’re trading the risk of nuclear accident in our own backyards for something else. I tend to think that the something else is the risk that the eastern world’s factories stop accepting the western world’s increasingly worthless paper money, which they’ll be in a much stronger position to do once we’re no longer able to manufacture what we need due to environmental concerns.

That assumes that once a golden goose dies, there’s an infinite supply of replacements. There’s a reason we’re comparing these companies to a mythical creature after all: if sustainable businesses producing valuable things were easy to create, this website wouldn’t exist.

The thing is, the people who own these companies also happen to live in a word powered by the products they produce. If you kill a bunch of golden geese in pursuit of profits, they will see bigger numbers in their broker accounts, but it’ll be because everything we all use has become scarcer and more expensive.

Sure, the owners will look richer - at least in comparison to everyone else. But would you rather be rich in a world of scarcity? Or middle class in a world of abundance?

> If your intention is coding something complex, you should try a model finetuned for that

Is there any consensus as to the models most suitable for coding complex things?

Yes, it does, but some of us actually consider this to be a feature.

The issue with reversibility is that it’s not just reversibility - it’s also the power for the authorities to take your assets from you.

The question isn’t “do you want to be able to get your money back after it was stolen”, it’s really, “do you want the powers that be to be able to decide whose money it is.” We’ve been lucky to live in a world where “yes” is a reasonable answer. But there’s no guarantee that it’ll stay that way. And crypto is insurance against that possible change.

Thank you so much for this post, and Hello from Tokyo!

I'm currently working on an old fashioned website editing app, with a UI styled after today's note taking apps. I'm hoping that being able to work on my blog across devices without an internet connection - and without a like button or analytics script - will help me focus on what I want to write, instead of focusing on what will "sell". I'm thinking of putting an old fashioned "address book" page where I can list who I'm following, and manually publishing interesting emails I receive in response to my posts. It probably won't become big or earn me any money, but at least I'm having fun building it.

Thanks for reading, and wishing you all a great day too!

This is an issue with more than just the tech industry. It’s an issue with modern society itself.

Take the GDP, the number that when it’s first derivative goes negative, we shout “recession” and use it as an excuse for all manner of harmful (and sometimes beneficial) behaviors. What is GDP? It’s not a measure of wealth; it’s a measure of production.

Take the boots paradox, for example. A society making $50 boots that need replacing after a few months, will have a higher GDP than a society making $100 boots that last for years. And the shitty boots society, despite spending more on boots - to paraphrase Terry Pratchett - will still have soggy feat.

It’s a hard problem, and I can’t see any obvious way to solve it. Both in social networks, and in economics. For whatever reason, consumption seems to be much easier to measure than wealth.

There’s nothing that makes it inherently impossible to put bills this way in cash, though.

For example, in Japan, you can pay bills by taking them to the local konbini - which is probably no more than a couple minutes walk away - then handing them the bills. They scan barcodes, take your cash, stamp the bills, give you your change. Done. No need for ID or a bank account.

The reason that people can’t easily pay bills in cash in the US is not because it can’t be done.

To add to this point, it’s quite likely that the vast majority of JavaScript developers are using generators and symbols, whether they realize it or not. The reason is that your build system of choice will typically have been compiling async/await into a combination of generators and iterators for years now.

It’s probably getting to the point where it’s no longer necessary in a lot of cases, but these constructs that “nobody uses” were able to implement the newer and more widely features long before they were available in browsers.

I’m in the same boat here. I had a list of ~15,000 blog readers at some point, but gave up sending emails when most services wanted to charge me $1000~$2000/year, even when I only wanted to send 1-2 emails a year.

If there are any services that allow me to import my previous list and email them (very) occasionally for a reasonable price, I’d love to know about them.

This treatment is based on the work of Dr John Sarno - who I first heard of here on HN almost 10 years ago. And of all the wonderful things I’ve discovered on HN, Dr Sarno’s work is probably the one that’s had the biggest positive impact on my life.

When I first heard about his approach to chronic pain, I was pretty skeptical. But I’d tried everything else to solve my debilitating RSI, and nothing else had worked despite only being in my early 20s, so I was willing to give it a try. 6 months later, I was back working pain-free after being out of action for 2 years.

As patmcc mentions, people can be incredibly reluctant to believe that physical pain can have psychological causes. And in many cases, there are underlying physical issues, so this should certainly not be your first approach to treatment. But if you’ve tried everything and nothing works, I encourage you to take a look at Sarno’s work. It made a world of difference for me and for many others.

The issue I imagine here is that calling the bank can be costly both in hold time and in phone fees. If banks were able to remove this disincentive to call by ensuring that their phone lines have zero wait time, and offering to immediately call back to avoid billed-by-the-minute phone charges (or in the case that they already offer this, by making it clear to customers), then I think there’s be a larger uptake of the idea of “hang up, look up, call back”.

As it stands, I’d be afraid of needing to wait 30 minutes in hold, and getting billed 30 minutes of call time by the phone company for the privilege. I’m not from the US, so it’s possible that your banks are doing this part better than the local ones, but that’s always the worry with the phone for me.

> The mystery that remains is where does the money go? A share buyback just shifts the decision of reinvesting profits from the firm to the investor, so when Apple buys back shares where does that capital go?

This was my main question from the article too. After thinking it through for a bit though, I think the answer may be related to the large and increasing US trade deficit.

In short, the money goes to the actually growing economies of East Asia and other parts of the world. If not in exports, then in ownership of future cashflows from American businesses.

American workers send their money overseas in exchange for cheap goods, which foreign powers then use to purchase control of those workers' future labor via ownership of American companies.

There's no such thing as a free lunch.

Coming from someone who grew up in a car culture city, learned to drive at 18, bought my first car at 19, and drove most days of the week... I'm much happier without a car. I don't want to have to own one again. In hindsight, car culture feels like a jail that I didn't realize I was born into.

I moved to Tokyo 5 years ago. If I want to get somewhere, I walk to one of three train stations within a 10 minute walk, hop on the train, and am there in – usually – about 30 minutes. There's always the option to take a taxi, but they're often no faster than train. I can still drive out to the mountains if there's no train to the one I want to climb, because there are more car rental shops within walking distance than there are train stations.

Sure, there are cars in this city. They're useful tools that make a lot of sense for many people to own. But the average person chooses to live without one, because in a city designed for people instead of cars, life can actually be better that way.

Was just thinking that we're probably due for a major release sometime now that Concurrent Mode seems to be starting to mature a little (disclaimer: it's still experimental, don't use it in production yet, etc.)

I'm sure the React team must be eager to get all the juicy changes out of the experimental branch and into the hands of developers. So it's great to see though that they're still taking their time to do it properly. Looking forward to seeing what come nexts :)

Reading this, I found myself nodding along after I replaced:

- musician to developer

- online music to open source project

- performance to consulting/training/conferences

It’s funny thinking about all the similarities between the two.

Actually... they have built such a system! It’s long gone now, but some major cities used to have a mail delivery system built on underground pneumatic tubes.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pneumatic_tube_mail_in_New_Y...

Living in Japan where mixed-use zoning is the norm, there is often a small local bar within walking distance from where you live that can fulfill this role. This has been one of the best parts of living here for me, I can’t imagine going back to the western world where zoning and local government often makes local meeting places effectively illegal.

Something makes me wonder if this is part of the reason Japan is so safe, as well. If you’re first choice for drinking is a place where everyone knows you and lives nearby, you’ve got a much greater incentive to behave than if you need to drive to the other side of the city. Not to mention that it reduces drink driving, and combined with public transport, makes it possible to have a zero tolerance on drink driving policy.

> The founder of WeCount, a tech entrepreneur who has sold multiple companies to Google, raves to the press about the “huge emotional ROI” (return on investment) donors get from participating.

It sounds like these apps aren't designed to help the homeless in the first place. They're designed to help people with spare change feel a little better about themselves.

This seems even worse than trying to make a difference to the housing situation and failing. Along with the idea of requiring homeless people to wear a beacon around their neck to pick up scraps from the wealthy, it sounds dehumanizing. Almost like the romans and their coliseum?

I'd love to hear the perspective of any people who've used these apps from the receiving end though. Maybe it's not as bad as it sounds.

> But what else can us developing countries do? Stop developing and stay poor forever?

This is sad to see, because many of the environmentalists that I've talked to seem to expect that this is the path that the developing countries will actually take.

It's totally unfair that the developed world was able to bootstrap themselves into their current state using dirty power sources, continue to generate a lot of dirty power themselves, and now expect the developing world to somehow leap-frog them and build clean generating capacity from the start. But it just seems to be human nature – just like how the social safety net in the developed world is being pulled out from under the younger generations, now that the older generations no longer need it.

Yeah, I agree that it doesn’t make sense in the suburbs. It really depends on where you live.

In the center of a large city, you can order something in a minute, pay a couple dollars extra, and have the food at your door in 10-15 minutes. Deliveries are done by bike or scooter and there are hundreds of places to choose from that’ll deliver within half an hour.

It’s great when you’re in the flow and don’t want to deal with the distractions that walking out the door inevitably entails.

> Let all the 1% jerks who consume 10x what I do live considerably leaner.

Okay, but what percentage are you in?

Judging by your comment history, I'm going to assume you're in the US. That already puts you pretty close to the top 1% on a global scale.

Should everyone in the world look at Americans living a standard American lifestyle and think, "let all the 5% jerks who consume 5x what I do live considerably leaner"?

While that may actually be a fairly reasonable response, the problem is that the same excuse can be used basically wherever you are on the ladder.

Then there's those of us who do live without cars, with little or no meat, with small houses that use little cooling/heating. What does that make us? Fools for even trying?

These places are actually 9 square meters, including kitchen and bathroom. Typically, the “kitchen” is a hole in the wall which is barely big enough to use to prepare instant ramen, and the bathroom/toilet/shower are combined into a small plastic cube-like room called a “unit bath”.

The catch is that there is a loft which doesn’t count towards the square meterage.

In contrast, an 18sqm place can have a kitchen with two burners where you can actually prepare food, a door between the kitchen and your bedroom so you don’t stink the place up while cooking, and can even have separate rooms for the toilet and sink. A lot of people I've met consider this pretty luxurious, at least in central Tokyo.

Nobody is forced into these apartments. They’re definitely the exception - not the rule. And for a similar price, you could get an apartment for double the size if you only add (quite) a bit of time to your commute.

I think it’s great that people have this choice. Especially for people who don’t spend much time at home anyway, what’s the issue with providing a cheaper option? And on the flip side, if places needed to be larger, it’ll drive up the cost for everyone.

This is actually a thing in Japan. A number of real estate companies manage “share houses” where 10-20 people each get a ~9sqm room, with shared living space, kitchen, bathroom, etc.

While I’ve never lived in one, the few times I’ve seen inside, they’ve been in incredibly clean. People I know who’ve lived in these places generally have nothing but good things to say about them. They’re often not cheap, though. From what I’ve seen, they’re usually in central locations, and priced more than a similarly sized room with your own kitchen/bathroom out in the suburbs.