lisper

This seems huge, like not quite p=np but in the same league. Am I missing something ?

The question is: do the bees see music and art in their structures. I doubt it. One of the defining characteristics of music and art is that they have no obvious direct connection to reproductive fitness.

There are such civilizations here on earth: ants. Termites. Honey bees.

I'm not saying it's not cool. Parlor tricks can be very cool, and this one is. But it's still a parlor trick because it's not good for anything other than being cool. When people think of flying cars what they generally have in mind is not a car that can do a flip, it's car that can take them somewhere without needing a road so that it doesn't get stuck in traffic. This car can't do that. All it can do is backflips in a parking lot. That's not nothing, but the novelty will wear off very quickly.

> It’s an incredible engineering accomplishment

Many of the best parlor tricks are.

> Ok, so it actually flies.

For a few seconds. It's a parlor trick. And the flying configuration will not be street-legal.

Maybe things have changed, but in my day when deploying code to an interplanetary spacecraft, code reviews (emphatically plural) were not optional, and being offended by them would have been a career-ending move.

Why would anyone care about what the Open Group has to say in this day and age? Is anyone actually still using SCO or AIX any more?

> Assuming past performance is indicative of future performance.

Yeah, well, there's yer problem right there. We will not colonize the solar system, and certainly not the galaxy, because we haven't figured out how to stabilize the situation here on earth. Yes, we colonized the planet, but for most of the history our lack of planning was compensated by technological limitations and limits imposed by the laws of physics. Those are mostly gone now, and I'll be a little surprised if civilization doesn't collapse before the end of my life (and I'm in my 60s). I would be very surprised if it lasts to the end of the century, though of course I won't be around to see that.

> Imagine someone saying, "We're doomed because people walk very slowly

I think I may not have made myself clear. The analogy here is not that "we're doomed because people walk slowly". There is nothing that happens here on earth that is even remotely analogous to the constraints that the speed of light imposes on interstellar processes. Even at a leisurely walking pace, a human can circumnavigate the planet in less time than it takes light to reach the nearest star. Human walking speed is blindingly fast (relative to the size of the planet) compared to the speed of light (relative to the distances between stars).

The reason we're doomed is not that we're not walking fast enough, it's because we won't stop walking and take time to think about where we should be going. We just go.

> More likely just not seen yet, our furthest reaching signals are maybe 50 light years away at best

This is the key. On interstellar scales, things move very, very slowly and you have to plan on time scales measured in millennia. IMHO we are doomed simply because we can barely think beyond the next election cycle. (At least that's true for Americans. The Chinese seem to think in terms of decades and, occasionally, centuries.)

> Is that actually better (in practice, not in terms of entropy) than /dev/urandom?

It offers protection in the event that your /dev/urandom is compromised. Otherwise no.

(Of course, if your /dev/urandom is compromised then whatever process you use to compute a hash of a photo is likely compromised as well.)

I don't understand how your name could not have been carried along on the cap table all these years. In my experience when I've made an investment in an early stage company and they have a liquidity event, they come looking for me.

Private pilot here. No, I'm quite sure very few of you here would have made the same mistake as evidenced by the fact that literally hundreds of thousands of aircraft land successfully every day, many of them under much more adverse conditions. This is not a oh-it-could-have-happened-to-anyone kind of screwup, this is a did-this-guy-really-go-through-basic-pilot-training kind of screwup.

You seem to be missing a basic fact about how the world works: there are two classes of people, those who make the rules, and those who are expected to follow the rules. These classes are largely disjoint.

It is at once obvious and hard for people to internalize that there will come a time in the future when our time will be as far in the past as ancient Rome is to us. We might not be interested in old magazines and artifacts from our grandparent's childhoods, but they will be (at least one hopes). There are so many ways that we ought to be more considerate of future generations, and this is one them. These museums are our Libraries of Alexandria.

No, we are talking about Page Rank, which is an algorithm on directed graphs. Web search is one application, but not the only one.

You clearly don't understand how Page Rank works. It is not just a matter of counting the incoming links.

Um, no? It works in non-adversarial environments. Such environments are rare in today's world but they still exist, mainly where there isn't a profit motive. Believe it or not, there are still some people in the world who believe that there is more to life than money.

Thanks. I don't have time to watch the video, but the article still leaves me skeptical. Matching myths to past events seems to me fraught with all the same potential pitfalls as matching them to future events and thence labeling them as prophecies, especially when the event in question is as common as a volcano erupting. But I will admit it's not entirely implausible either.

> Importantly, PageRank doesn't work today

It works as well as it ever did, i.e. in non-adversarial situations. It's not designed to be secure so it fails when people try to game it. Designing something like Page Rank that works in an adversarial environment is still an open problem.

> The original caretakers of the Australian continent have been telling the same stories orally for 40,000 years.

I know that this is commonly believed, but how could you possibly know?

The Supreme Court has a long history of ignoring both the letter and the spirit of the law for the sake of politics and practical expediency. I can legally buy an AK-47 but not a Patriot missile despite the fact that the second amendment makes no distinction between different kinds of armaments. Allowing Patriots to be banned but not AK-47s is a distinction that the Court invented out of whole cloth. Likewise the weakening of the fourth amendment at the border is an exception that the Court invented out of whole cloth. Both of these exceptions were invented for defensible reasons. I don't want people to be able to buy Patriot missiles or nuclear bombs (or AK-47s). But that doesn't change the fact that there is a line that was invented by the Court out of whole cloth.

The problem is that the Constitution is broken, and has been since it was drafted. The right to bear arms probably should be conditioned on something more clear than the necessity of a well regulated militia (whatever the hell that means) to the security of a free state. The requirements for warrants probably ought to be weakened somewhat at border crossings. But the plain text of the Constitution does not allow this. The plain text contains no exceptions, and does not empower Congress to make exceptions. But changing the Constitution is hard, so rather than go through this slow, arduous process, everyone just punts the problem to the Court and says, "You deal with it." And so they do. The Court just does end-runs around the Constitution for defensible and practical reasons. But this doesn't change the fact that it is doing end-runs around the Constitution.

Not sure what you mean by "in this case." I'm pretty sure that the founders intended the Bill of Rights to apply everywhere including the border.

> The law is not “hackable.”

It absolutely is. The rich and powerful do it all the time.

And so, as I predicted, we come full-circle back to the no-true-scotsman fallacy.

> Hayek

Oh, the irony. If you look at the rest of the comments in this thread you will find people insisting that the Austrian School is economics, not philosophy.

And this is exactly the problem. Philosophy is whatever other self-styled philosophers say it is, and that authority ultimately can be traced back to the people writing the checks. Yarvin is able to do what he does in no small measure because he has (or at least had) Peter Thiel as a patron. In 50-100 years, if the Republicans win the next election, Yarvin will be taught alongside Trump and Vance as being among the brilliant thinkers who threw off the yoke of woke and ushered in the new era of enlightenment.

It's ultimately all about money and power, not truth.

Air conditioning!

In the context of a discussion of the kinds of philosophy that silicon valley tech bros misread, what would cross your mind?

> you didn't qualify "a lot"

Why do you think I needed to? The phrase "a lot" has an established meaning in the English language.

> or mention which topics in philosophy you think are legitimate

That's true. I was writing an HN comment, not a review paper for submission to a peer-review journal. But it doesn't take a lot of imagination to notice that my comment was made in the context of a discussion of an article entitled "Silicon Valley misreads science fiction and undermines democracy" and to infer from that I was referring to philosophical topics popular among silicon valley tech bros. The specific topics I had in mind are mainly political and economic theories, which not everyone considers philosophy. But I'll point as an undeniable example the work of Curtis Yarvin a.k.a. Mencius Moldbug who, rather incredibly, attracts a huge audience by advocating for the divine right of kings, among other absurdities.