sph

Price of human intelligence is going up actually, because there's ever-decreasing amount of it, and we've invented a cheap substitute that makes people even stupider.

The question: “what is your purpose?”

Valid answer, I guess, though some might wish for a deeper connection to life than a mechanical, subservient existence.

I did, I mostly agree. They certainly don’t paint nicotine as the loathsome, terrifying substance everyone believes it to be. It’s a mildly addictive stimulant just a bit more toxic than caffeine.

I deleted my comment talking about it because it usually goes badly with the HN audience and their preconceived notions.

But I have had the hypothesis (as a layman) that growing around smokers affects the brain of a child, they self-medicate with tobacco, and the cycle continues, and it has for many generations until today when smoking is frowned upon and self-medication is no longer readily available. I don’t think smoking is the cause of all of ADHD, but we’ll eventually learn that dopamine dysfunction has a lot of different causes.

No evidence that nicotine is a stimulant? What?

> Personally reviewing code or trying to ensure code quality has become a kind of leisure activity

Jesus Christ. And you still call yourselves engineers? It was a joke already when people valued care and effort in one’s own software.

It's two very touchy subjects: nicotine and ADHD. I'm not fond to talk about it because misinformation and ignorance is just rampant. Nicotine has indeed been turned into the boogeyman.

Anyway, I told my psych about my plan, and he agreed there is research indicating nicotine works as a third-line stimulant medication for ADHD. In many modern, Western countries adult ADHD is not even recognized, let alone medicated, so one has to make do with what's available.

In my experience it is almost as effective as amphetamines, with fewer side effects, much longer lasting (a patch lasts 16+ hours), and very cheap - if you get them on ebay from China. Addiction potential is null: addiction is a function of how quickly the effect peaks, and it takes 3 hours. Not even lisdexamfetamine can compare with how unaddictive patches are.

That said, if I had access to prescription amphetamines, I'd go back to them, but I sure don't miss the days all it did was making me incredibly horny and focused scrolling social media all day long. It was a little too effective at keeping me engaged for my own good, so using a subpar medication means learning to live with ADHD, adjusting your life around your own quirk, rather than only relying on the medication to fix everything for you.

I've been a heavy cigarette smoker for 12 years (pack a day min.). When I switched to vaping, I vaped continuously the entire day.

There is no human on earth that can smoke continuously the entire day for very long. A pack a day smoker means smoking one every ~30 minutes circa.

Are we reading the same site? Are you saying HN is not pro-AI enough for your tastes? Jesus.

What is?

For the past 3 years I have replaced my ADHD stimulant medication with nicotine patches and they’ve been great, cheap, and legal in the country I live in now.

Recently I got the urge to try vaping again, bought all the paraphernalia and started vaping like a chimney 24/7. Got light nicotine poisoning as well. After two days, I caught myself compulsively reaching for the vape.

So I threw everything away and I’m back to patches. Took me a week to forget the compulsive hand-to-mouth urge. I now believe intradermal nicotine is the superior method of administration. At least with cigarettes the smoke is such an intense irritant you self-regulate pretty quickly compared to a cupcake flavoured vape you can just suck on all day long.

The option doesn’t exist simply because the sitting president is a complete lunatic.

Yes, to set timers. But as the English language is dumb, it’s always a lot of fun having it distinguish between 13/30, 14/40, etc.

I don’t have any other use case.

Yeah

Unless the President decides to eat some humble pie and basically surrender, this one is end up much worse than Vietnam, and the ramifications global.

What worries me the most is that I can’t imagine students and citizens going to protest en masse on the streets against the war. They’re too busy to complain on X and Tiktok to do anything about it.

Much appreciated

Yeah, if you’re a complete sociopath.

What in the AI slop is this website? Looks like it's trying to get me to download malware.

I’m not against, I’m just saying one can find answers to the deep questions of life without having to buy into religion wholesale. No one ever told me this was even an option, especially due to the toxic discourse around atheism and Christianity by Americans that have poisoned the conversation for everybody else (quelle surprise…)

Can we stop conflating AI hype and boosterism (i.e. LLMs are great and can only get better) with AI doomerism (i.e. AI research is gonna end up killing us all)?

They are two very different camps that because of ignorance or malice (Altman and Amodei trying to hype up their product) are lately being seen as one and the same, annihilating the body of philosophical research into long-term prospects for this technology and how best to contain it.

What is moral? It is not a law of the universe. It is a subjective and culture-defined human construct. It is very ineffective to try and understand metaphysics through the ever-shifting lens of morality.

I love both of these, and I wonder why would I need mainstream religion when stories like these are deep enough to provide answers, hope and meaning for those who seek it. If the message resonates with you, why not adopt it? Nobody could ever prove they’re just fantasy.

Sorry for the digression, I’m just an atheist with a love for philosophy and spirituality.

> Tech has always been breaking social contracts

The unnecessary hyperbole ruins your argument. Not all of tech is about breaking social contracts. Whose livelihood is destroying the engineer that design better protein folding software? Linus made the world better and richer for everyone. Even the humble startup shipping yet another calendar tool isn’t harming anyone or being the direct cause of layoffs of other workers.

Not everybody works for Uber.

Nowhere is safe, is it? All that is holy is profaned.

Another pro-AI psyop to show that AI generated content is perfectly fine, created by cunning machines and spread through mindless meat proxies glad to do their bidding.

/s but also not really.

timecube.com is lost, zombo.com has been redesigned. If this is not proof of a dead internet, I don’t know what is.

Another one: encode instructions on how to draw the glyph into the text itself. The string becomes both the text and the font. Why not make it turing complete and as powerful/complex as TTF.

Given the HN-worthy differences posted by others, here’s another example of why it’s not a good idea to delegate your thinking to LLMs.

True, but not all non-UTF8 bytestrings contain 0xFF bytes, so it’s not very useful in practice.

> UTF-8000 is in no way endorsed by or representative of the Unicode Consortium.

Not until they decide to expand the emoji range, allocate space for all past and future fictional languages, as well as birdsong and dog barks.

Someone at the consortium is rubbing their hands with glee with all the newfound space.

But honestly, cool hack! If you invent a method to encode large numbers into bytes, why limit yourself to 24-bit numbers?