Ycombinator does have a podcast.
184 karma · joined May 20, 2017
I strongly suspect the moral accounting does not favour your position in the long term, the same argument is expressed here but in the abstract since this is of course an emotive subject.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/kn/torture_vs_dust_specks/
It moves!
Examples:
1. Ban on Televsion News during the weekend. 2. High taxes on mass produced media for general audiences. 3. Internet time limit restrictions for social media.
I'm sure I'm not the first to suspect talking all the time to everybody is unhealthy. It sounds like the inverse of autism. I believe surveys show the hyper-social media users are often mentally unstable.
It's not what they say, it's what they leave out. Those soothing dulcet tones are half way to hypnosis.
I give you little credit for recognize Fox News propaganda because it's entry level manipulation. Most people who visit Huffpo know what it is. Organizations like the New York Times, NPR, The Economist and National Review have refined it to an art form.
I take the latter group more seriously because large numbers of people buy into their lines but Fox and Huffpo are what WWF is to armed conflict.
The New York Times is a Communist organization. That is not hyperbole, it is the truth. It's not well hidden if you go and look. They have always supported Communism. Likewise The Economist has always supported Fascist and other authoritarian dictatorships. Inside every friendly, well mannered, articulate moderate is an extremist trying to claw out.
Us Westerners support all manner of extraordinary adventures because for ourselves at the center of world power this is a game that doesn't involve high stakes. The voters are complicit of course, we have prospered greatly over the centuries and like our comfortable lives that don't involve thorny questions.
I don't feel bad about this, it's the same as every other civilization in history. Perhaps we ought to restrain ourselves more from saving the world if only to halt our plumbing the depths of grandiose neurosis. I think I've offended everybody now so I'll shut up.
I wonder if that is partly information asymmetry. A person who buys a passivhaus knows what they're getting. But normal people pour their finance into granite countertops, inferior construction materials/labour and exhibit poor taste in a way that makes them ultimately poorer.
Think of the number of times your computer has crashed, had memory wiped, new OS installs, been stolen, replaced. Did your bookmarks from 15 years ago survive?
With mobile phones identity works a little better and likely because of SIM cards.
It is intriguing (I think) we know AGI is possible, I think we get there by emulations/ems if in no other way. Civilizations might rise and fall before it becomes feasible.
I expect consciousness to be a lower level product, the development of language, reasoning, arithmetic, those are high level products. What's odd about our efforts in computer science is that we are plausibly going to be able to replace the higher functions without the lower ones such as mobility, consciousness. Moravec's Paradox is a kind of deep truth, perhaps more than we presently understand.
The other inkling is that there is something Lovecraftian about the brain or intelligence in general. Consider how upsetting the atomic weapons were in the 20th, evolution theory in the 19th. I think it likely that venturing into the interior will reveal a truth mankind shall feel is at least as horrifying, probably more than giant bombs or genetic ancestry because it would register as being inescapable.
It's not like that. I don't want to trivialize the death of the girl in Charlotte either, it's a domestic terror incident.
There's a constant background hum of political violent extremism throughout Europe and America. The key indicator for which species is ascendant is whether the popular media narrative is leaning one way or the other. The validation of these group's concerns seem to give them the entitlement they need to turn rhetoric into activity.
There's already been an attempt on one Congressman's life so imagine what will happen if something similar succeeds.
> I know where this is going. I say "Oh, but communists aren't as bad as Nazis, that would never happen" and you bring up that wikipedia page showing that more people died under communism than nazism and we all mark you down as a "whataboutism" sympathiser and the world is a little bit shittier.
I see you've been here before. We can always hold a truce and declare both groups unworthy.
>> Have you any idea how many protests feature the flag with the hammer & sickle?
> Oh, there's the whataboutism.
It does bug me. One gets consternation. The other "meh".
If you're looking for people talking shit about their ideological rivals on the Internet you're going to find it. We can find examples of nazis or tankies threatening people any day of the week. They're nearly always posturing. What's different about "Punch a Nazi" is that it's a widespread meme across Twitter, Facebook and Reddit.
Imagine the reverse for a second. A meme called "Cut a Commie" receiving widespread acceptance from large groups of people across social media, including authority figures and celebrity endorsement.
> This article has a photo with two different guys holding two different flags - that makes at least 3.
Barely getting to plural!
It's the same as with that NPI conference in which 3-5 people raised their arms in a Nazi salute. The rise of the 4th Reich this is not. It's possible even those people are doing it 'for a laugh'. They're edgelords.
Have you any idea how many protests feature the flag with the hammer & sickle? Quite a lot more. I am not worried about Communist infiltrators interfering with my bodily fluids. They're nearly all edgelords, not Bolshevism 2.0
This is a moral panic, we have the media fanning the flames.
I strongly suspect if a lot of people on this forum simply turned off their television or newsfeed they'd be in a healthier place.
I also think for gigantic disruption in business or the military AGI is not required - the right species of narrow AI coupled with human intervention could be very effective.
Organizing a military invasion is one of the most difficult examples of complex coordination. The USA already has used similar systems for the first Iraq war. I suspect any nation that developed strategic agent systems to augment human generals would have an advantage comparable to going from infantry to motorized vehicles.
> Because it's hard to unanimously and unequivocally identify those who are intolerant as such. Owing to the beguiling nature of language and rhetoric, the intolerant can thrive and propagate by arguing that they're not in fact intolerant, and appealing to "free speech". This seems to be the MO of this so-called "alt-right" stuff; legal or constitutional barriers are almost impossible to define or enforce.
That is creepy to me. You have the ingredients of a witch hunt.
"can't easily distinguish them" aka "anyone could be a witch", "can't use legal methods to attack or 'regulate' them" aka "something... must be done", that's what I'm reading.
There's no evidence that the altright as a group are plotting to murder other citizens. The reverse, threats to do violence to altrighters, I see that on a daily basis without looking for it online e.g. the "punch a nazi" meme. Going from that to "beat up a nazi" to injury/death is not a leap.
And who are they? It's a large collection of loosely connected right wing groups. A full list would take several A4 pages. Most of them hold beliefs little different to our grandparents or possibly great-grandparents in the case of the monarchists. Anybody to the right of the Republican party could be 'altright'. This isn't true but that seems to be how most people have built their classifier.
It's easy to prove that because if you ask (as Trump did to a reporter) people to define the group, they don't know how to do it. I think there is a definition but nobody in the media has mentioned it AFAIK, it's not something that is well understood and so "Nazis!". That nazi flag at the charlottesville rally? A singular item unless the photographers were holding out on us. There are lots of photographs and it's this one guy walking around with a nazi flag.
There seems to be a curious motte and bailey argument going on here. The altright is a relatively small set, but in the media and twitter they are either a fringe sect of right wing lunatics or they are an all pervasive threat to society. It can't be both. Not unless you have an infinitely extensible definition that you can be using for ulterior political purposes.
Also it's fast on old machines, saving you money/recycling.
Your 7 year old ought to be able to throw it across the room when they get annoying bugs :-)
Come to think of it, this should be a feature of all laptops programmers use...
> Because it's hard to unanimously and unequivocally identify those who are intolerant as such.
> This seems to be the MO of this so-called "alt-right" stuff; legal or constitutional barriers are almost impossible to define or enforce.
These are fairly creepy statements. Very difficult to apply a charitable explanation to what you're saying.
> Owing to the beguiling nature of language and rhetoric, the intolerant can thrive and propagate
Sounds familiar.
Suspect the format puts some people off, I understand it's publisher economics but having 4 volumes paired into 2 books strikes people as complicated as they try to work out how much book they're getting or not getting.
The majority of what HN is went under the name 'trade publications', these have a community surrounding them.
Fine Homebuilding and Green Building Advisor are examples for tradespeople that I frequent.
If they had a flexible forum, agolia search and native imugr it'd be a hugely improved experience.
You should have the ability to load like a whip on a typical workstation from 10-15 years ago, your audience isn't there because of the tech or JS bullcrap. That is one thing HN got 100% right.
Why?
Darwin opens up the door of Deep Time when he explained his discovery. An appreciation of the immensity of time happens to be linked to explanations of how and why things are. Wolfe also deals with Deep Time but in the context of society.
What Gene Wolfe does is he creates books where you need to read between the lines, you need to create hypotheses to understand what's going on. I won't describe it further because it may lose some of the import, it's probably the most important fiction book written in the 20th century.
What I'd like is a photograph of Peter Thiel's library, I'm fascinated by the range of ideas, the meta-ideas he explores. Maybe @sama can smuggle in a camera or we could hijack a roomba.
" Every civilization believes it is “the end of history,” the last and best political idea. In this sense, the notion of human beings as inherently selfish competitors is no more true than a medieval serf’s belief in the divine right of kings, or an 1840s American’s belief in the inherent slavishness of those he keeps as slaves. These are delusional beliefs that support a political structure — not inherent truths that demand politics be structured as they are."
A mere detail! Scott Alexander made the same point. The crux for me though is this:
You appear to think that technological progress is continuing, except that it is not. Thiel and Cowen have made the same point countless times and by now it is self evident to me. The ball as it were, is in the other court.
Eric Schmidt and Peter Diamandis's rebuttals are unconvincing. They do not appear to be grounded in the data we have available on energy prices, worker wages, commodity prices.
Without that the entire line of reasoning falls apart.
I would, in case you suspect my motivations, actually like to see Utopian visions from the Left but am unaware of anything interesting. If I am wrong, tell me. UBI can't be one, even uncle Milton supported the concept.
By somebody else;
> I would cite examples, but it would get me banned from hacker news and/or fired from my job. Ha ha.
Mostly that, and without the ha ha.
I recommend Fastmail for email. It is pretty much for the same reason that Saul Goodman asked Walter White for one dollar.
I know I mentioned using Youtube in the other thread we were talking in - but actually I don't use it conventionally, I usually use youtube-dl to download 720p copies of the videos to my hard drive, and sometimes download entire channels that way.
It's so much easier than dealing with youtube's playback issues, it's a much higher quality experience.
I suspect it will ultimately be upended through a deeper change, likely with agent based computation.
A lot of us use services like Fastmail, Protonmail for email and simply do not use Facebook. Gmail is so bad it's not even usable for me in comparison to how it was several years ago.
Changing your email account is easier than you think, especially if you already use Password Managers like most of HN will be doing. You can redirect email from Gmail to your new email address, and at your new email provider put a footer into your every sent email which states you've switched to this new email address. I advise backing up your email from Gmail using Thunderbird just in case, but personally I've never had to access the backup, it's really much easier than you imagine.