soganess

I agree poking fun at someone's appearance is low (and this is particularly savage), but it is hard to have sympathy for Andreessen, and I'm not going to strain myself trying.

Rookie mistake by your AI; otherwise it did a flawless job, and the glaze it's been giving you is 100% accurate. You are the bestest.

If one more AI calls me "insightful" or says that my question "really cuts through the noise" or "gets to the heart of the matter"...

Brin is not a sympathetic marginal case. He is the standard: founder equity, $1 salary, unrealized appreciation, deferral, and access to liquidity without needing wage income.

It is a little strange to look at a very large tax bill landing at his feet and decide that is where the scandal starts. Is the number supposed to make the idea disqualifying because it is drastically more than most people make in many lifetimes?

Said another way, the revealing part is not that someone on the internet multiplied wrong. The revealing part is how quickly the error resolves into a fairness argument on behalf of Sergey Brin, a man whose fortune is almost a laboratory specimen of the thing the regular income tax keeps failing, decade after decade, to reach.

Pretending the rules of a private domicile apply to a jurisdiction by analogy is a sleight of hand. It operates like arguing that because memory safety is a strict requirement in system architecture, we must ensure human memories remain uncorrupted. The domains function under entirely different mechanics. A non-citizen in a public space is constrained by statutory law (and our statutory law is based on our understanding of inherent freedoms), not the etiquette of a houseguest.

This is embarrassing to admit, but I miss the halcyon days when folks were still nominally pretending to be free speech warriors.

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Court_of_Appeals...

It seems less likely to (randomly) have the same panel on two higher profile cases so close to each other:

> https://courthousenews.com/ninth-circuit-keeps-block-on-dhs-...

So I'm wondering if it is some procedural thing I am not privy to?

In the back on my head this all seemed astronomically far-fetched, but 5.5 million to get 8 GPUs in space... wild. That isn't even a single TB of VRAM.

Are you maybe factoring in the cost to powering them in space in that 5 million?

2. It's often better for the environment to keep old hardware running (manufacturing emissions usually dwarf operational ones for consumer devices).

And a more personal corollary to #2: I love old hardware and don't want to see it die (and I'm not talking about vintage tech). A 16+ core Haswell Xeon (that riiiing) and Polaris RX 480 (HWS, why yes) remain perfectly useful in the modern world. I like knowing both are out there, somewhere, just chugging away long after they were retired from some server or mining operation.

This seems to suffer from a finite-size effect. Wolfram's machines have a tiny state space (s ≤ 4, k ≤ 3). For some class of NP problems, this will be insufficient to encode complex algorithms and is low dimensional enough that it is unlikely to be able to encode hard instances ("worst case") of the problem class. The solution space simply cannot support them.

In this regime, hard problem classes only have easy solutions, think random k-SAT below the satisfiability threshold, where algorithms like FIX (Coja-Oghlan) approximate the decision problem in polynomial time. In random k-SAT, the "hardness" cannot emerge away from the phase transition and by analogy (watch my hand wave in the wind so free) I can imagine that they would not exist at small scales. Almost like the opposite of the overlap gap property.

Wolfram's implicit counter-claim seems to be that the density of irreducibility among small machines approximates the density in the infinite limit (...or something? Via his "Principle of Computational Equivalence"), but I'm not following that argument. I am sure someone has brought this up to him! I just don't understand his response. Is there some way of characterizing / capturing the complexity floor of a given problem (For an NP-hard Problem P the reduced space needs to be at least as big as S to, WHP, describe a few hard instances)?

I literally do not care what the policy says. Must I say it that way? The policy

  (1) is logically incoherent

  (2) is not policed in an equitable way

  (3) is used to launder a worldview to young tech workers just coming to hn

  (4) ... do I need to keep going? because I can keep saying stuff

  (5) is just random bits on a server

I don't even know where that is posted, I just see folks quote it all the time. I obviously don't abide, those were written at a different time on a different internet with a different HN.

NOTE: I slightly restructured this without noticing the reply. The poster below is not misquoting me in anyway.

I am sure he and I disagree on most things, but I don't fault the primary moderator. In general, dang seems pretty laissez-faire. I am venting at the flag brigade: what news gets flagged, and more importantly what doesn't.

I come here to stick my thumb in the wind and see what the prevailing tech view is. As for the tech itself, I am more "if I learn something cool along the way, neat," so I guess I am here for the vibe as well. I just wish folks were more honest about what HN is (like you are being here). Things change; it's okay for them to change.

  > “so desperate to contend”

The tech talk here is embarrassingly shallow. Depth is now the rare exception. If I want deep dives, I’ll go see about some crabs. This place now exists to launder the tech worldview, and that’s an inherently political act. Pretending it isn’t doing that is political too.

Like most folks here nowadays, I primarily come for the politics. The difference is I’m not lying to myself about my posture.

Sounds like a real monster... wait... nvm.

In all seriousness, I don't know a ton about her, but, if her Wikipedia is to be believed, the only thing she is guilty of is being a little "Leave Brittney Alone" extra while living through a genocide:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nuTV6hrjQW8

But maybe there is another side to her posting that isn't available from a terse search?

Great idea! Le's pathalogize another thing! I love quickly othering whole concepts and putting them in my brain's "bad" box so I can feel superior.

  - full uBlock support

  - the ability to still be themed

  - first-party isolation

The common wisdom is that overall Firefox can feel bottlenecked at render and draw times (“less snappy”). That could be a result of a slower JavaScript engine (takes longer to get to drawing), or a result of poorer hardware acceleration (slower drawing), or a less optimized multiprocessing/multithreading model (more resource contention when drawing).

I honestly can't see it in the real world, but synthetic benchmark are pretty clear on that front.

It's funny because the person who wrote that article clearly loves computers (and has loved them for a long time)! I guess we are all a bunch of contradictions zipped up in a meat sack.

  "I usually don't comment on stories like this..."

  "women needs to get a grip... men who are 40 or 50 years older"

Wild idea: every adult should be able to date every other adult without having to do rape calculus.

Do you really think there is only the same sliver of daylight between KH and DT as there was between Bush and Clinton? Look around and answer this for yourself. Do you think that?

Then ask yourself one more question: who benefits from you still thinking that? And finally one more: how do they benefit?

At the same performance/quality tier, Macs can at times/trims be cheaper. Plus, buying an old M2 MacBook Air as Apple refurbished (new battery) is $800, and third-party can be sub-$600. With M1s cheaper still.

Sure, they aren't new, but an Apple refurb is generally better quality than a bargain-bin (not to be confused with something nicer in the Acer lineup like the Swift X) Acer. Plus, the Minis are just great desktops.

Again, these are not for me, but price? Unless you are ultra price conscious (sub 300), nawh brah.

I do think that's a good question to ponder and one I hope I'm thoughtful enough to consider in my future relationships. If it were my idea I would keep growing it into something, but that's just me.

It's a velocity + availability "no Tom Brokaw" argument as applied to relationships. Like the question it's poking at "if an ecosystem can radicalize a person, what are its effects on a relationship?" is at least interesting to consider.

I'm not convinced that the existence of a low-probability event justifies normalizing the regular occurrence of a much more likely (and negative) event, like a belligerent engineer throwing a fit in a design meeting. I'd go as far as to say I'm open to more people-pleasers in engineering.

Also, fwiw, if you want to know why someone changed their mind, you can just ask them and see how you feel about the answer. If someone changes their mind at the drop of a hat, my guess is that their original position was not a strongly held one.

Do the physical quanta we call electrons experience the phenomenon we poorly define but generally call consciousness?

If you believe consciousness is a result of material processes: Is the thermodynamic behavior of an electron, as a process, sufficient to bestow consciousness in part or in whole?

If you believe it is immaterial: What is the minimum “thing” that consciousness binds to, and is that threshold above or below the electron? This admittedly asks for some account of the “above/below” ordering, but assume the person answering is responsible for providing that explanation.

Heck, you still are; "Read other people's experiences and feel your own body." That is a mode of interacting with the external world and processing knowledge. You didn't even suggest I do it; your sentence was a directive. Furthermore, it was packaged in that cool detached "above it all" way that humans sometimes use to convince others.

It's good/okay/whatever to try and sell people on your worldview. I was engaged and conversing that is the social cue to do so. The fact that you didn't convince me is whatever on the internet. But playing it off like you weren't doing that... why?

I'm pretty sure the number of times someone has been convinced on the internet wouldn't even correctly round in IEEE double-precision floating point.