merrywhether

Many people don’t like equating human and AI learning (see sibling), but it’s interesting to pull more on that thread.

In all three of your transformation examples, you likely would’ve paid the NYT either indirectly via ads or directly via a subscription (contentious ad-blocking aside). And Mazda, GM, and VW surely generated far more value from the car designer in revenue than the designer got in salary and knowledge. Broadly, humans pay something (tuition, apprenticeship, etc) to learn knowledge and skills. Even schools and libraries are not free, though they may feel so at time of use. _Some_ free learning is beginning to emerge on the internet, but much of it is as upsell to paid learning.

OpenAI on the other hand has been purely extractive in its learning relationships. A single human contravening normal learning costs would go unnoticed but also would not scale their own downstream impact. But an organized large group doing so would certainly run into issues (10k interlopers couldn’t just sneak into a single college course, for instance). And I think a large group of aligned/associated people is more akin to AI than a single person is, given the differences in scalability.

Maybe we should help them out and start calling them 737 MBA-8/9/10.

If you’re public enough about it, other passengers who overhear might decide to join you. If that becomes even semi-regular and trends on social, that might be the most effective change agent.

Right now regulators are increasingly broken (under-resourcing, revolving doors, political pressure, etc), so grassroots refusals are potentially the only proactive pressure we can put on airlines to demand more from their vendors. Otherwise we’ll just have to wait for reaction after there are too many incidents to ignore.

He was doing it for the money (at least at the end)! That and the psychological safety of not doing his own things.

> “There is something so vulnerable and frightening about doing your own thing, because it’s your fault if it doesn’t work. And then there’s this other kind of work, where you’re paid an extraordinary amount of money, you’re the hero before you walk in the door, you’re not even held that accountable, because you have a limited amount of time, and all you can do is make it better.”

This quote from Frank resonated with me as very similar to software dev. It’s so much psychologically easier to work a day job than even small side projects. And that’s for a variety of reasons but I normally focus more on the “mechanical” obstacles like context-switching and the difficulty of shapelessness. But with enough reputation your job can also give rise to something of a “risk-free” external-affirmation loop that your brain doubtlessly pushes you to keep spinning.

If Zelda is so great why doesn’t Nintendo make it available on more platforms? Being able to run Nintendo games is a prime feature of the Switch product, and being able to run Apple software and services is a prime feature of an iPhone product. By your definition anything useful about an item is simply a marketing tool?

It’d be a very different world if nothing was allowed to have unique access to anything. It might even be better, but it would be a long way from this current version of capitalism.

I’ve wondered about a similar thing. If there was something automatically constantly generating nudes of everyone, surely the noise would desensitize people to the signal.

Tattoo artists also make money off generating infringing content all the time. I thought the issue was not in the generation but in the subsequent usage. Outlawing generation borders on thoughtcrime.

From a climate perspective, cities should incentivize people to develop their land into dense/efficient usages because urban dwellers have the lowest per capita environmental impact. The alternative is suburban or rural dwelling which requires more resources and more duplication.

At least for the previous model, the sensor module was an all-in-one that I was able to easily replace myself with the exact part from AliExpress. It wasn’t officially replaceable but it was fewer than 10 screws and like a 2/10 difficulty. Afterwards it booted right up.

It’s like they missed bikeshedding about whitespace and whether variable names were appropriately self-documenting in PRs.

> functional programming gang

This is a bit of weird assignment, given that the Class syntactic sugar over Prototype was one of the marquee features of that release.

An interesting point about VR (and AR eventually) is that clunky UX can move from being merely annoying to literally nausea-inducing. I’m not sure that there can be VR equivalents of the low-end Android market for instance where there you can overshoot perf demands and have the UI lock up and the user just waits. Low-end VR will have to undershoot performance demands which can close doors on entire use-cases.

I’m not saying that platforms won’t figure out ways to profit off market segmentation, just pointing out the inflection point we’re crossing in the human-computer interface.

I wish the defunding movement had instead focused on moving monetary liability from the city instead to the police union. Let the officers pay higher dues to protect their problematic colleagues from million dollar judgements. I feel like that change would be much more politically viable and also have a strong ripple effect. Right now the solidarity of the thin blue line is free, and I don’t think it would stand up to internalizing that cost.

What they really need to do is layoff BrightScript. They are certainly big in the streaming device space, but not enough to justify having a proprietary language. The rest of the industry is coalescing around portable apps based on web tech while Roku is derided and only begrudgingly supported due to their current market share. But Roku’s market share has been relatively flat while FireTV has grown to equal them, and Roku should be terrified of the cliff BrightScript puts them on. Every company would love to kill their oddball BrightScript app as soon as possible and that’s a dangerous position for a company without a defensible moat. See their lost battle with YouTube to see how much clout they actually have.

Not exactly the same, but reminds me of the saccharin rat studies. Massive dosing (the human equivalent of ~800 diet sodas per day!) plus a physiology that highly concentrates urine led to bladder cancer in rats. Turned out to be completely irrelevant to humans (and now ironically saccharin may be somewhat cancer fighting?).

For expedience many of these studies are done at the Maximum Tolerated Dose, which is the amount that does not otherwise outright kill the subjects. It’s understandable that this is useful for magnifying sensitivity but it also leaves them with a tinge of doubt. That compounds with the career benefit for publishing sensational results to generate some bad science (especially frustrating when there are tinfoilers looking to distrust science as it is).

> Forget about new products, forget about improvements to existing products, forget infrastructure work/cost optimization, forget not having major data breaches regularly, forget mitigating large-scale security vulnerabilities(i.e. log4j), forget being able to capitalize on market trends on a useful timescale, and forget about the ability to deal with situations that require more engineering capacity that your company uses on an average day.

And say hello to being increasingly surrounded by Chesterton's fences[0] at every turn.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chesterton's_fence

The irony here is that you could easily fire 80% of the C-suite and VPs and a company should survive for some time. This is kind of a tautology because leadership at bigger companies should be mostly operating at the months-to-years timeframe, so it should take a long time (or a unique emergency) for their absence to be felt. We could run both experiments (firing engineers vs firing execs) against each other across a sample of companies and I know which I'd bet on to still be mostly functional 3-4 weeks later.

FWIW a personal “fork” is being made for you, the tooling just makes it invisible.

What tipped you over the edge to jump back into the job market? I certainly empathize with prep bringing a significant increase to the threshold energy.

These claims have been coming under scrutiny: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32724569

> most teams beyond grade school have tryouts...

Apologies if my 0-minute edit was too slow (I always find minor issues in my comments after submission; the HN comment box is not optimized for readability), but I immediately added "or as judged by others via fair tryouts". But even without the tryouts qualifier, I feel that was _heavily implied_ by my emphasis on skill-level/competitiveness over all else. Tryouts very frequently are open to anyone who shows up, and many house/intramural programs don't have tryouts at all and are just lottery-assigned.

> Most parents know it's pointless to enroll your kid in a sport that he lacks the ability to be competitive in

By volume, house and intramural teams (when they exist) necessarily make up the bulk of teams at each of their respective levels: a college may have 2 varsity soccer teams but 40 intramural teams. Are you discounting the value of sports for non-elite players? Should their parents have told them to give it up long ago because they weren't going to the show? Statistically 0% of people play pro sports, so it really doesn't seem like they are the ones we should be worrying about when it comes to these discussions. People talk about the value of sports for building work ethic, team skills, etc, and that is by far the major reason people care about youth sports policies in general. And truly 0% of women play in top leagues like the NFL or NBA already, so your concern of "deny[ing] a lot of women the opportunity to participate at all" at that level is already reality; how could any different system possibly be worse for them?

> So college football for example will be open to anyone interested?

College/pro football is full of stories of famous walk-ons who showed up unannounced and proved they were good enough. I suppose they should've known better as well, for not fitting into the "obvious, logical and natural" progression of having been a recruited Texas high school star since on average they weren't going to be good enough. Similar are the basketball players who transition to tight end and star despite _having never played football before_. Skill/competitiveness is the only thing that matters in the end.

> How about someone who is paraplegic? Can he make the team too?

Can he pass the tryout? Would you have told Shaquem Griffin that you're cutting him because on paper a linebacker missing a hand couldn't possibly be good enough? Jason Pierre-Paul didn't seem to have a problem finding a spot for his Super Bowl ring despite his missing fingers. Again, skill/competitiveness is the only thing that matters.

> Who pays for the expense of all this dead weight on the teams?

When I said as many teams as necessary, I was trying to point out that if you went from 2 sex-divided varsity teams to one combined varsity team there would definitely be less opportunity for everyone because there would be fewer inter-mural teams overall. But just like English pro soccer can have EPL, EFL, etc, colleges could figure out a similar multi-tiered system (some teams/sports already have "second teams", JV in high school, A/B/C travel leagues, and similar). Same number of teams should cost the same, no? And outside of the varsity college sports (which are hugely distorted financially for lots of reasons), players are the ones paying anyway.

> Implementing "sport for all" will most likely result in "sport for none".

Charitably this is defeatist, but uncharitably it feels like blowing everything up is better than diversity. Some men would definitely not make a team they previously would've as they get displaced by more skilled/competitive women, especially in early teen years when girls get taller and stronger sooner than most boys. I'd happily wager that such mixed competition would result in the development of even more equal competition because playing at higher levels is the best way to improve yourself (like when a kid gets to play up an age-level and skyrockets ahead of their age-group peers). I fail to see how this could be bad in any way: it will continue to elevate elite athletes through the ranks while also providing the same opportunity for the non-elites to play their apparently-unfulfilling games, just with slightly different team make-ups. But with the major improvement that we wouldn't be signaling to half of the population that they are de-facto second-class athletes.

Most sports are not as “brainless” as running, and by that I mean so thoroughly dominated by solely physical traits. It’s simplistic and patriarchal to reduce the logic to “because men are ~10% faster than women (or stronger or whatever), they are superior in all aspects of sport”. You can partly judge this by the efficacy of steroids or other enhancers for a given sport/position: juice up all you want but it won’t make you a competitive 3-point shooter.

Tom Brady is the ultimate example of being thoroughly unexceptional physically yet transcending his sport via mental acumen. But even for normal players it’s possible to have a wide range of roles and body types working together: hockey can have small guys and big guys play together and somehow they each contribute in their own way.

You mention the idea of “most obvious, logical and natural peers”, but from a first principles perspective that would immediately lead one to find peers who produce similar outputs during play regardless of inputs. Or should we make basketball teams solely of the tallest kids in a school regardless of their level of athleticism because that seems more logical?

Ultimately it seems like there’s a lot of confirmation bias going on that propagates the status quo and discards consistent counterexamples as black swans. I can easily imagine a different world where people can compete at the level they feel is the right intensity/skill/etc for themselves (or as judged by others via fair tryouts). Boys already do this with house/travel or intramural/club/varsity and no one worries that the ones who aren’t genetic lottery winners are going to get pummeled or embarrassed or whatever. You would just need to field as many teams as there as interested players, regardless of sex, and you’d have the same level of opportunity for everyone.

I think another obligation of a society that truly wants to tackle this is to help provide a life that is “better” than addiction, so to speak. Addictive drug use is frequently a symptom of a deeper root issue (long-term pain, physical abuse, homelessness, etc) and functions as a means of escape, so the solution is often much more holistic than just getting someone off drugs.

Isn’t there tension between what I’m assuming is land-value tax to push developers to create more housing and keeping people in the home they’ve lived in for 20 years? That home has probably become inefficient from a public value standpoint and would better contribute if it was a multi-unit dwelling. I’m with you that people should be able to continue to afford to live in the same neighborhood even (with a shift in the type of building most likely), but attempting to protect their exact house just creates the equivalent of a public subsidy to exempt them from keeping pace with local land efficiency demands.

Safari only zooms if your input text is too small (less than 16px). The answer to defeating autozoom is to not make inputs that many people would need to zoom manually.

Holy smokes. It sounds like you weren’t given the option, but did you prefer that to the risks of GA?

(Honest question, no agenda. That sounds like something that would make me never go back to the dentist, but maybe that’s just me projecting popular dentist horror.)

The easiest argument against current property taxes is that they have completely failed to prevent the current situation. They do not properly incentive the efficient use of land, so mini-kings get to sit in their mini-castles and argue against densification while looking down on the new-comer peasants.

And the current situation is already “destroying” peoples lives as their courses into “normal” adulthood are interrupted and delayed, so it’s somewhat a question of who feels the effects. The difference with devaluing homes is that people may lose some wealth, but they still have a home! Investments are supposed to risky, that’s why you make money off of them sometimes; so let’s make it that way for houses.

If only the younger generations had more political power, there’d be no government intervention in the event of a crash. The older generations that bought houses and then pulled ladders up in order to politically engineer constant wealth growth should be left to deal with it on their own for once. The house of cards is going to completely collapse eventually, so the sooner the better.

High mortgage rates mean that is only more expensive for “poor” people, while the wealthy will continue on their merry way. The US desperately needs a land-value tax as a step towards making home ownership costly and depreciating, removing the home-as-investment angle. Who wants a nest egg that means giving up your dwelling in the case of actually needing to liquidate it anyway? (Oops, got expensive medical bills? Now you’re sick _and_ homeless!)

Actions like this will unfortunately destroy a lot of older middle-class wealth in the short-term, but longer term it would hurt the upper-classes the most (and even short-term it’s not like the upper classes haven’t been winning every transaction anyway). And the longer we let this problem fester, the more lives we disrupt of the younger generations who have seen countless ladders pulled up in front of them.