jknoepfler

I've been using the term meatspace since at least the 90s, and would be semi-shocked if it didn't exist in either 80s sci-fi or posthumanist manifestos or whatever in some form or another.

Here are some concrete examples courtesy of an etymology site: https://wordspy.com/words/meatspace/

The use of "meat" to characterize the physical, analog, arbitrary, biological (as opposed to the logical, digital, formal) pre-dates the 80s/90s deliberate apposition with "cyberspace" afaik, but I don't have time to fish up concrete examples from my library atm.

I am henceforth going to refer to toxic technobabble projects (e.g. "AI-all-the-things") as "Peter Projects."

It does help me understand why we've seen a wave of slimy shills rise up from the corporate detritus to lead impossible/meaningless projects that their co-workers despise.

Why would Tesla pivoting seem strange? They've lost the global EV race, they've sabotaged their American market and they haven't done anything but weak publicity stunts in years. Their profits are tanking, their brand is toxic and their prospects are dim. That doesn't scream 'bright future' to me.

Fwiw, the first thread I recall was a speculative blog post about commissary freezers for the US military: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49508506

Excellent holiday cooking inspiration.

Personally I live in the Midwest. I make fairly frequent drives of around 200 miles to visit friends and family. I drive a pluggable hybrid. EV charging stations exist at both destinations, but are very spotty in between.

During the winter, range plummets. That 200 isn't getting me all the way from A to B. Having a hybrid fueling option is just much more practical for me.

I'm not saying I couldn't get it done, I could, but sitting for hours waiting for some slow-ass EV charging station in the middle of winter is not bullshit I'm signing up for.

It's complete bologna. Basic GAAP accounting eliminates intra-company service consumption/sales. Looking at cloud compute, say, Amazon "bills" departments for AWS cloud compute consumption, but reporting internal cloud compute consumption as a thing they were doing assuming the rates charged to their least efficient customer would be beyond meaningless.

The irony being that the pieces of Western culture one might reasonable feel smug about (government of checks and balances, democracy, high standard of care for the worst off, careful jurisprudence with presumption of innocence, scientific freedom and literacy, free public education, etc.) are precisely the foundations that MAGA and their ilk despise and work so hard to undermine.

Like if you're going to get patriotic about post-enlightenment values and institutions, that's one thing... if you're going to just act like a bigoted, might-makes-right, my-country-right-or-wrong, personality-worshiping, science-denying, uneducated xenophobic dipshit, then you don't have much to be proud of.

Why would that matter? The drug company will price their product to maximize profit in whatever regulatory regime they're selling in. (I have no idea).

note that this would be extremely bad for the poorer country that is currently able to purchase medicine, and would probably results in net worse health outcomes globally.

the free market is just not the correct way to set drug prices, and never has been.

See! Consumer safe. (/s)

I don't think it's rational to believe that big pharma is giving charity to Mexico. It's $100 a vial in Mexico because that's the optimal price to sell it in Mexico to maximize profit, not because it's subsidized by unregulated price-gouging in the United States.

Tom Cruise famously does his own stunts, one of which involved driving a motorcycle off a cliff. That does not mean it is advisable or repeatable to drive your motorcycle off a cliff.

You committed your own fallacy of applying a sloppy heuristic to understanding the person you were responding to without bothering to check if it applies. Spectacular. The comical levels of arrogance that infect over-hyped tech marketing boondoggles (one area among many in which GenAI is clearly similar to self-driving cars) is one of the reasons nobody trusts the hype anymore.

The breathless astroturf articles, the brain-dead talking head conversations, the endless flood of obvious misinformation about industry uptake, the nauseating LinkedIn puff-pieces about PREPARING YOUR ENTERPRISE OR ELSE... it's a hostile information economy at best, and its being driven by the same people who brought you bullshit like self-driving, crypto and the Metaverse... for the exact same reasons (to get rich).

There's no epistemic credibility left in the tech industry in general. Maybe the Dario's or whoevers of the world believed what they were talking about at one point, but I don't believe a single word I read from Anthropic or OpenAI for the same reason I don't believe anything I read from Russian state media. I know it's being produced for reasons that have nothing to do with the truth.

As someone who interacts with the technology on a daily basis at a non-trivial level... I'm not seeing anything that would cure my skepticism about GenAI. The information economy surrounding it is broken. The fundamentals don't line up. The hype about "nearby capabilities" is identical to the hype of generations after generations of hype in the AI space (dating at least back to Turing). It smells like a bad bet.

A healthy measure of my personal skepticism comes from the fact that GenAI represents the convergence of so many historically negative (and frankly idiotic) influences.

- AI hype-mongers. We've dealt with these for decades in academia and industry, through countless boom/bust cycles. Yes, there's progress, but reality is boring and selective.

- Tech Bros. NFTs? The MeTaVeRsE? The CEOs of OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, and SpaceX have proven repeatedly to be dishonest grifters chasing all and only money. They're like the tobacco industry of laughably dishonest at this point (and consistently wrong).

- Singularity grifters. The Kurzweil cultists flooding the ranks of lesswrong feel suddenly emboldened. They've been issuing batshit proclamations and navel gazing about AI alignment to anyone who will pay attention to them (and write them a check) for decades. It's no more connected to reality now than it was then.

- The LinkedIn hivemind. If you aren't transforming your organization to meet the new GenAI future, your company is BEHIND and you are FAILING AS A LEADER. Be the one firing white collar workers, not the one being fired. Make sure you look good on paper with bullshit performative AI initiatives or your ass is dust. Oh, no ROI? No problem. Read my book on NAVIGATING THE ENTERPRISE AI TRANSFORMATION. It's skin-deep and filled with empty platitudes and clip art, but it will make you look like a big brave tech leader, just like Steve Jobs or Dario.

- Investors. Yes, we're in a bubble. Yes, we've been in a bubble before. Yes, it's going to pop. Yes, that's going to be bad. Really bad, probably. Remember the financial crisis? Investors don't. And this time, there won't be a deep-pocketed government to bail anyone out, because debt is already sky-high and we're still recovering from COVID.

So while I get there's something there, and I'm keeping abreast of it and extracting the best and leaving the worst, it is an exhaustingly negative experience. My guard is up and I have absolutely run out of patience for bullshit. It's not funny or smart or interesting. It's not even fun to complain about. The forces in the mix are awful and I don't want anything to do with them.

If a craftsman injures themselves or a co-worker with a faulty tool, the tool manufacturer is very often liable for damages. I struggle to see GenAI any differently.

Please take 5 seconds to fact check yourself with a very quick query against your information source of choice.

Over ~95 degrees, a fan blowing on a human acts as a convection oven, increasing body temperature while dehydrating the body.

This is greatly exacerbated in extreme heat.

CDC guidance is to avoid using a fan in extreme heat conditions unless it is combined with a cooling source and careful hydration. Once again, not exactly an option in a Texas prison.

Fans have no cooling effect once the ambient temperature exceeds human body temperature, so "making do with fans" is literally making do with nothing.

Those citizens "making do" generally have freedom of movement, free access to cool water, air-conditioned businesses or vehicles, and are not locked down in a concrete facility.

There is a absolutely no nuance to this.

That's a very dodgy etymology. The use of "slop" to refer to trashy content dates back to the late 19th/early 20th century, long before the advent of the internet.

I think our tendency to attribute "novel" word usage to 4chan might reflect more on us than on our language.

I'm a little short on primary reference material, but here's an example from 1917: https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/22692/pg22692-images.ht.... Conversation on language log has at least two others from 1897 and 1920 respectively.

72% of job postings on company career sites are closed within 90 days. Pretty sweet.

Hard disagree about "more intelligent". They are playing a financial game using a combination of leverage and reptilian ruthlessness to EBITDA hack.

They buy one (or more) companies, often with only the slimmest understanding of what those companies do, slash opex by gutting the company with layoffs (yay EBITDA), maybe staple a few such companies together with leveraged buy-outs, then resell the whole bundle for more than they paid.

From experience, they don't give a single crap whether the resulting mess still functions. They care about selling the company for more than they bought it for. That prospect is only tenuously and at best accidentally related to whether the company still functions.

The private equity companies I've had to deal with were full of braindead MBA spreadsheet monkeys and used car salesmen. Their chief differentiator was that they worked 80 hours a week and were enthusiastic about laying people off without much deliberation.

Thinking private equity is "more intelligent" than business owners is like thinking house flippers are "more intelligent" than home owners. No. They know how to rip out carpet and replace it with laminate on the cheap. They know how to cut corners and hide it. They know buyers will over value a fresh veneer of paint. They don't give a shit about the long-term health or value of the house. They are not better stewards of houses. They specialize in short-term profit maximization and that is literally it.

They have suffered from abuse because of unregulated police. They have not suffered because of police simpliciter.

Police perform an important function. Unregulated, unchecked, untrained, militarized police taught that they are immune from prosecution for crimes against citizens do not.

Drawing an equivalence between these two muddies the waters in an extremely unhelpful way.

A well-regulated police force drawn from the population it is sworn to protect is a good thing. It's a hard, important job.

And yes, it's obvious Flock was going to be abused and no I don't think a well-regulated police force should have access to pervasive surveillance. But that doesn't mean I want to do away with police in general.

The whole ACAB narrative is one of the most deeply unpopular views of the American left, polling at something like 80% disapproval. I guess ACAB people think my friend who went to the police to report sexual abuse by her step father (leading to his arrest and incarceration) should have hired a... community councilor? A mercenary? Gotten out the community pitchforks? Because that ends well as a mechanism for justice? I genuinely don't know, but I think people who want less policing (as opposed to accountability, transparency, and demilitarization) aren't thinking very clearly.

Why would it require explanation? It was stupid beyond belief to begin with. It would be like rescinding a policy profiling soldiers using phrenology or waving some scientology wand over them or something.

The fact that people think there's anything even worthy of discussion on this is alarming to me.

Or maybe people like to stare at the clouds while herding sheep. This is just bro-science half-baked evolutionary psychology bullshit.

Personally I enjoy listening to the birds with a book in my hands.

The solution is very clearly neither deregulation nor defunding regulatory agencies.

I sign in to video calls using my browser every day. Saying video/audio requires an app beggars belief.

Privacy is the opposite of what you get with an app. Privacy? Really?

Local storage is available to browsers. Office 365 literally functions in a browser with full access to local storage.

Anything processor intensive can be compiled to WASM. This isn't 2005 anymore.

So... widgets?

I can see an argument for games, where you want to pre-install a large amount of resources, and maybe have a better i/o story. Even that is a function of convenience over necessity.

Did domain names stop functioning all of the sudden? Going to somedipshitsbar.com/menu is about as complicated as entering a wifi password at a coffee shop.

I guess this will be a good test of the open source model DuckDB has opted into.

As I understand it, DuckDB is MIT-licensed and governance is provided by a separate, non-profit DuckDB foundation. This was done explicitly to prevent BSL-ification.

I'm very curious to see whether that approach holds the line. I wouldn't bet on it, but one can hope?

Nothing has made me want a downvote option for HN posts more than the endless AI advertisement slop that has flooded the site.

It's a familiar story. If you copy/paste Wikipedia and turn it in, you learn nothing. If you skim Wikipedia, hit up the references, the consult other sources, then synthesize your own thought, you probably get farther faster than you would without it.

We could probably cook up thousands of examples of the same problem (YouTube DIY tutorials, GPS navigation, etc.)