snek_case

Well they're not trying to raise up men, they're trying to destroy any notion of gender, see "gender is a social construct".

I think this completely falls apart because most of the women who give birth identify as mothers, and would be very offended if you told them they couldn't.

I wish there was more pushback against this insanity. I've also seen people want to erase the word "blindspot" from the dictionary... Even though I'm sure no blind person was ever offended by it, because that word typically is used to refer to the limits of people who aren't blind.

I think in any rate there's something to be said for just taking a proper break for an entire year if needed. Why not take a year to just focus on raising the kids, sleeping in if you can, taking it slow and easy. The energy should come back if you give yourself time.

I also agree that lifting weights is a very good idea, but don't stop seeing your therapist.

Well, no. Your average Facebook users doesn't have the time, money or skills to really touch up the photos they post on Facebook. If you can just ask your computer or your cellphone to pose you on top of Mount Everest or flying an F-22 fighter jet or driving a Lamborghini while wearing an expensive suit and it produces 20 variants of that image in 227 milliseconds though, that completely changes the game.

The internet is going to be full of fake photos and soon full of fake video clips too. You'll basically never be able to trust someone's Tinder profile picture.

The upside, maybe, is that if the internet becomes more fake, it also becomes less interesting. Maybe it will encourage people to do more activities and things in real life, away from computers. Dating websites will probably drop in popularity because profile pictures are so manipulated that you basically have no idea what the person looks like without meeting them in person.

What's a bit worrying here is that life has had billions of years of evolution to shape its instincts (i.e: empathy, self-preservation, desire to explore, etc.). Our basic instinctual drives are tuned in a way that the system is more or less stable, the species doesn't go extinct.

We're in the process of creating machines whose drives will be completely artificial, not shaped by natural selection. We're going to shape them... Or, more accurately, greedy corporations, billionaires and leftists are going to imprint an approximation of their own morals and goals in there, for better or worse. Those machines will also inevitably end up a lot smarter and more capable than we are. It's possible that if we fuck up the programming, we just just won't be able to stop them from transforming the world into whatever they want... If the world they want is toxic or unsustainable, good luck trying to reprogram a machine that's faster, stronger and smarter than you. It's going to be the other way around, the machines will reprogram us if it suits their needs.

I don't think anyone trusts Putin or Russia at this point. That really defeats the point of trying for a diplomatic solution with them unfortunately.

If only the Pixel 6 had a headphone jack... :'(

Deep learning is probably not the right tool to generate a taller human. We've mapped the human genome. You could probably create a statistical model that pretty accurately maps different versions of genes to height. Then it would mostly be a question of swapping different versions of genes to get the result you want. With a statistical model, you would need a relatively small dataset (hundreds, or thousands of human genomes), and you wouldn't have to worry about errors being introduced.

Maybe very very short (single-gene) sequences. The thing with DNA is it's the product of evolution. The DNA guides the synthesis of proteins, then the proteins fold into a 3D shape, and they interact with chemicals in their environment based on their shape.

In the context of a living being, different genes interact with each other as well. For example, you have certain cells that secrete hormones (many genes needed to do that), then you have genes that encode for hormone receptors, and those receptors trigger other actions encoded by other genes. There's probably too much complexity to ask an AI system to synthesize the entire genetic code for a living being. That would be kind of like if I asked you to draw the exact blueprints for a fighter get, and write all the code, and synthesize all the hardware all at once, and you only get one shot. You would likely fail to predict some of the interactions and the resulting system wouldn't work. You could only achieve this through an iterative process that would involve years of extensive testing.

Could you use a deep learning system to synthesize genetic code? Maybe just single genes that do fairly basic things, and you would need a massive dataset. Hard to say what that would look like. Is it really enough to textually describe what a gene does?

It's definitely more locked down, less open than something like Linux or BSD and less developer-friendly (signed software, etc.), which takes away from the Linux/Unix hacker ethos IMO.

I respect that Apple makes good quality hardware, but I wish there was an equivalent that was more developer-friendly. System76 is almost that but not quite.

TikTok has a lot of CCP propaganda in it (fake influencers paid by the CCP). It's not just a happy place to see cute dance videos.

This goes into some of said propaganda in it, and how they have more "soft" propaganda in the US version of TikTok vs more intense propaganda in the Chinese version of the app: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3aYCG4vEe5s

Yeah. It's a bit strange because Mercedes is known for making expensive cars, and they're nowhere near being a leader in the EV field, the amount of EVs that they make is tiny.

Tesla has already shifted the majority of their cars to use LFP AFAIK. It's good enough for 250+ miles of range.

There's at least two key differences between something like Reddit or HN and Twitter. The Twitter platform is structured so that a large mass of people will "follow" a few influencers. It creates a really asymmetric power dynamic. On Reddit and HN, if you have interesting content, you can make the front page. On Twitter, your odds are much bigger if you're famous, and every comment a famous person makes is hugely amplified.

The second difference is that Reddit and HN are organized by topic. HN only has a single topic, but there's moderators to enforce that posts be somewhat on topic and retain a certain minimum of civility. Twitter is not organized like that. Even if you're just interested in programming, Twitter will try to get you to engage in political topics, and if you do engage, you might get responses from random people Twitter also pulled from other discussions who have very little context, and you'll get to exchange with this random set of people through responses that are limited in length. If a famous person happens to strongly disagree with you on Twitter, their hordes of fans will start to attack you.

So yes, all social media platforms have more active and influential users[0] , but no, these platforms are not all the same, and a lot of the difference is structural.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle

A 50GB storage limit is not going to be a problem for most people, but the 100K hits limit is much too low for a paid plan. If you make the HN front page once or twice, you can easily bust that. There really shouldn't be a limit for a paid plan that costs $15/month, but if you're going to have a limit, at least make it based on bandwidth usage, not the number of hits. You're incentivizing successful bloggers to move away from your platform. Is that really what you want?

I feel the same. 100K visits is really not that much, and for the price they're charging... What the fuck? This is seriously making me consider dropping them and rolling out my own thing.

If you can make a garden light server that will survive the HN front page, you win at HN :)

If you want more power, there's a lot of all-in-one lithium ion batteries with inverter nowadays. These also have a built-in solar charge controller. You can pair it with a 20W, 30W or 100W solar panel, and this can all be found on amazon. Theres also USB outputs and 12V outputs typically, if you want to be more energy-efficient.

Example: https://www.rocksolars.com/products/rocksolar-weekender-port...

Should be enough to power a small router and a full Raspberry Pi 4 for a day, or a more minimalistic setup for several days.

I think the cars picking up things/people without drivers could be the worst part. Imagine being driven in a taxi, and about half of the vehicles around you have nobody in them. I suppose it's not inherently wasteful since you never really needed to be in the car to go pick something up. However, if the price of delivering something by car decreases a lot, the volume of deliveries will increase a lot too.

It seems to me it's extremely common to work with vectors that are much larger than the host CPU's SIMD width. In that case you could get much better performance letting the CPU schedule a large batch of work rather than trying to micro-optimize for multiple possible targets.

Software is typically compiled for x86-64, but not necessarily for each specific x86-64 processor available. You often just get a generic precompiled binary. That's not really optimized for the machine you're running the software on.

Maybe you want to have some restrictions on the size of the vectors you're working with to make it more convenient for the hardware, like "should be a multiple of 4x64 bits", but I still think there could be big gains with variable width in most cases.

The right thing to do IMO would be to have vector instructions with a variable number of operands. Quit adding wider instructions, just tell the instruction how many operands you want to add/multiply and let the CPU take care of it. This could also allow the CPU to decide what's the most efficient way to prefetch, etc., or to run these operations asynchronously.

Whoever wants to work on a project like this should build a scale model IMO. Start with a small remote-controlled thing, then build a small ship that carries just one or a handful of containers or trucks to demonstrate the principle.

Maybe that could work. You would lose a bit in terms of aerodynamics I think though. Container ships also don't have very sleek hull designs.

Assuming you mean for shipping containers, I think one issue there is that sailboats tend to tilt a lot, which you can't do if you have a lot of containers on your deck. Might be possible to design container ships where all the shipping containers are inside the ship instead.

You could do some powerful things with LISP machines but I think the underlying assumption is that everything is written in LISP, or compiles to LISP (or its underlying bytecode). That places restrictions on what you can do. For example, does it do high-performance multithreading and SIMD right?

Also not sure LISP machines solved security as well as modern-day Linux does. I think it was just less of a concern back then, because you knew most of the people who were on the network.

> EVs have environmental costs too. How do we solve that?

We incrementally get better at it. For one thing, it should be possible to power any mining, manufacturing or recycling process with electricity.

Agreed, the RST syntax is truly awful. At least Markdown is easy to understand and work with.

I think it's similar to short term reward vs delayed gratification (see the marshmallow experiment[0]). By refusing to admit you've ever made mistakes, you can protect your ego in the short term. However, you're also alienating people and preventing learning from taking place. That has a long-term cost in terms of missed or lost opportunities.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_marshmallow_experimen...

Disagree. Some people are less self-aware than others. It's not a matter of opinions or what you believe in, it's a matter of how much you are aware of your own cognition.

There are many people out there who seem to lack the ability to analyze the consequences of their behavior, or to admit that they were ever wrong. There are also people who seem to be very bad at understanding what are their motivations for doing certain things. Not being able to look back at your own behavior and your own mistakes makes it nearly impossible for these people to grow.

I won't get into the argument as to whether these differences in self-awareness are biological in origin or due to nurture. It's probably some of both. Either way, even though this metric is multidimensional and hard to quantify, some people are definitely less self-aware than others. Just like some people are less physically fit than others.

A lot of people seem to miss the distinction between DJ (someone who mixes/remixes music) and composer/producer.