ud_0

That being said, it would just be a gesture. These women are not free to travel, or make any kind of life choices freely. And even if they were, social pressures are almost insurmountable.

Digital privacy is demonstrably being eroded on many fronts, all over the world. The EU currently has tenuous protections that are in danger of being superceded by concerns that are perceived as higher precedence. The article does seem to be doing a reasonable job of highlighting one such process and sets it in context with the bigger issue.

> The pirate party is desperate for attention among EU electors, it only has a total of 4 members [...]

Just because a political opinion has almost no supporters doesn't mean it's wrong. Historically, privacy alarmists got it right more often than not. None of the scenarios outlined in the article seem particularly over the top to me.

> Moreover: data retention is Breyer's pet peeve, he built a career around it so he obviously talk constantly about it.

I don't know this person, if you say they're untrustworthy I'll take your word for it. But being against data retention seems a reasonably stance in my opinion.

> If some of you here ever spent time in the environment of the EU elected representatives, you'd know how much each of them the lobby for their agenda, all the time, non-stop.

I'm not sure what to make of this sentence. I have no doubt that EU officials are lobbying for their agendas. But the debacle behind the upload filter / copyright directives has shown to me that those agendas either don't include digital rights (in which case they apparently default to deferring to industry lobbyists) or their agendas are not particularly well aligned with citizens' interests.

There is no need to debunk every claim. I could say "the rods are held in an unstable way" and "your mind makes your body do things without you noticing" but that's just a guess at what happened. I wasn't there, and it's not necessary. Claims can be made vastly quicker than debunkings can.

It's the other way around: people who claim they can do water sensing should submit to controlled experiments. After that, we'd know what their performance was given the experimental circumstandes.

I'm sure most people would be against presenting dousing as a legitimate belief, but it's all on a sliding scale. How many people would balk at authoritatively declaring astrology nonsense? And soon you're on the mainstream religions, where the vast majority see nothing objectionable in making provably nonsensical claims about the nature of reality.

Fact checking works as long as there is no widespread societal investment in the outcome, would be my cynical take. I don't see a workable alternative to letting everyone spread whatever they like and rely on a resilient immune response in the form of education and critical thinking.

Being able to observe your own past is a given after FTL travel, and the most important thing: it's a given that relies on almost no assumptions about the deeper mechanics of the universe. If you instantly teleport to Alpha Centauri, you will be able to see your old Earth photons for years.

> Instead, your past self could observe your future self.

Now that statement (like the Tachyonic antitelephone) relies on some assumptions that we can't test yet. My hunch would be that either an as-of-yet unknown non-local temporal dimension (or synchronization mechanism) exists at the foundations of the universe, or that FTL travel is indeed impossible. One excludes the other would be my intuition.

> In the real world it means treating a study on 31 American undergrads as scripture

My opinion is that scripture shouldn't be treated as scripture to begin with.

> This policy by science simply doesn't seem very effective.

As a tool for making policy decisions, science gives you access to solutions that might work based on the evidence. Now, that evidence may be completely bogus, so there is no getting around the need for evaluation. But saying that data is a bad basis for goal-oriented action planning is a self-defeating position.

Policy by science is not a meaningful concept on its own, policy action requires a component we haven't talked about yet: a value system. Science can give you the data, but your goals determine what actions should follow. You're certainly correct when you say that politicians are getting some cover from improper data, but overall I find they seldomly hide their motivations.

Same here :D

I really like the idea, but I see problems. I'm still watching the video, so maybe they'll be addressed.

Repetition: repetition in text can get quite jarring if the text is written like a novel, as opposed to the classic RPG way of displaying it as a text log. It's not unsolvable, but it certainly is difficult. Not only does avoiding repetition require knowledge of previously generated text, I think it also requires adjustments to the game world itself. It can't be Skyrim in that regard, it needs to generate unique and meaningful situations.

Effort of parsing: it takes the user a lot more effort to parse free-flowing text, as opposed to graphical shorthand representations or even photorealistic scenes. We like to spend that effort when we read stories because we get something in return. I'm less convinced that a completely automated but open world can offer the same appeal. It doesn't seem impossible, but it's certainly quite hard.

Of course the other alternative to generating meaning as a reward for the brain's effort to parse the text is to just generate the text with predictable patterns. In that case though, we are exactly back at the point where MUDs left off. Not that this is a bad thing, necessarily.

Admittedly, I'm probably just jaded and very dubious about well-produced videos making a lot of grandiose promises when it comes to games. I would certainly buy this game and give it a try.

I don't mean to sound condescending, but if science as a concept 'says' anything, it is exactly that truth must be verifiable.

There absolutely are problems with how study results are weighted. Starting from the way the press reports on findings, up to and including the uncritical acceptance of questionable material by many members of the scientific community.

However, there is no workable alternative to the process of science, because defaulting to whatever people personally like and discarding any inpportune data is certainly not how we move forward as a civilization if we have any ambition to continue our ascent (and we might in fact not have that ambition, but I do like to pretend that we do).

Studies and data in general must be weighted. Sometimes the proper weight is zero. I see little other options but to continue stumbling towards improvement and knowledge. Acting on data will always be an imperfect process on a sliding scale, very few people would disagree with that.

Edit: I would also say that there is a distinction between the opinion that we're generally moving too fast and the opinion that we have severe deficits in how we weigh incoming data. Both of these can be addressed, although the solutions appear to be way easier in the former case. We need to be honest about which camp we're in though.

> For instance, the Theory of Gravity. I know people who take it to be a law, even though science itself hasn't moved it into that category. If you dare to suggest that there might be some as-yet-undiscovered mechanism for gravity

There is no scientific consensus on the mechanism that is causing gravity, at least not on the level you suggest. There is consensus on how gravity behaves, in regimes we can currently observe.

The problem with suggesting "some as-yet-undiscovered mechanism" is that you can generate arbitrary many such mechanisms, because there aren't good options yet for experimental corroboration. We all have favorite ideas for how gravity might work behind the scenes, and it absolutely is fun to speculate. But if your goal is to actually make a contribution, your need to come up with an idea that can be falsified.

In my opinion you are completely within your rights to make claims that contradict empirical findings or theoretical frameworks. There often are holes in our knowledge, and continuously re-examining established science is absolutely part of the process. Of course, the burden of proof is on you in that case. But science is absolutely meant to be a living process.

I was unfamiliar with that term and googled it: it's described as "excessive belief in the power of scientific knowledge and techniques". I'm struggling a bit to understand how a belief in the importance of scientific knowledge and techniques equates to a religious mindset.

In an ideal world, I would absolutely prefer my government to make decisions based on facts and methods of finding out more facts. Currently, that's only one small part of our governmental decision making process, with the other notable parts being powerful special interests and public opinion.

Could you elaborate a bit on what exactly you meant by this?

"The question now is whether governments can put the genie back in the bottle through concerted, co-ordinated action. Many politicians say the power to tinker with biology is too dangerous to have in the hands even just of doctors and must be regulated."

Similar arguments are being made regarding the public's access to general-purpose computing, 3D fabrication equipment, AI agents, and indeed: drugs (both psychoactive and medical). Putting this increasing number of "genies back in the bottle" is infeasible and I would argue harmful. We'll be putting an ever-growing amount of our civilization's resources into controlling technologies and behavior just so we can act as if it's still 1975, while unaccountable mega corporations reap all the benefits of modern technology.

I am utterly unconcerned by what people choose to do to their own bodies and minds. What does keep me up is the potential harm to bystanders, both in premeditated acts of terrorism as well as uncontained accidents. I really don't have an answer to this, but I do know that iron-fisted government control of citizen technology is not going to prevent these horror scenarios.

Don't do that! The algorithm counts that as an engagement action.

What you need to do is click on the three dots symbol next to the video title and select "don't recommend this channel". This absolutely fixes it. You may have to do this a lot. There is also a general "don't recommend this" option that, anecdotally, doesn't work as well.

Also, disable autoplay. It doesn't seem like YT can distinguish between clicking on a video and it just playing on autoqueue.

The YT algorithm is not fundamentally different from the other social media algorithms out there: it tries to serve you up with controversial content that "engages" you. You are most likely to be "engaged" by content you either directly disagree with, or by second-source channels that report on content you disagree with. As a fallback, the algorithm will also try to serve you content based on your cohorts, which can in of itself be pretty radical and disagreeable.

Get a YT Premium account if you can, sending a very small message that you vote against ads and all the algorithmic baggage that comes with them.

That's not to say formal methods are bad per se, there is just a lot of reason to doubt motives and outcomes behind concerted overarching initiatives.

The notion that software engineering should be grouped under civil engineering is misguided. Part of the reason why we're looking to other fields is to profit from their experience (which is good) but part of it is also because we're desiring a kind of legitimacy we feel is absent. It's a reasonable impulse to a degree, for smart people dedicating their productive years to a discipline. We want to do a good job.

The problem is that we have more in common with architects than we do with civil engineers. There are some goals that can be measured with a boolean outcome: does the code compile, is a certain algorithm provably correct given certain conditions, can a building be built. But it gets murky very very quickly: how well does a thing we create serve its purpose? Does it use resources efficiently? How long will a structure last? What kind of adverse conditions will bring it down? Does the thing make people's lives better and if so by what measure? These are a small hint at the questions where formal methods tend to fall down or even work against us.

So do we need overarching formal methods or do we need to be more scientific about specific objectives and measurement of outcomes that are important to us subjectively?

It's kind of obnoxious to even admit this, but I always assumed I'd be a successful person at some point down the line. This was of course utterly ridiculous and led to some really bad decisions. It was exploitable by other people, too. My work made a few people rich, and while I was always compensated for my time, I never got a proportional cut from the outcomes. But it wasn't a bad life, and there is still some fuel in the tank :)

In practice, the money has never materialized because our sector took a big hit and much of that promise was tied to incentives based on the company's success. I can't really blame anyone for this, but that's strike one as far as job satisfaction goes.

Second strike, I love writing code, and I don't get to do that a lot anymore. I'm listing these "pre-existing conditions" because I believe it's common for us quitters to have other areas of dissatisfaction that hadn't been enough to drive us over the edge by themselves.

Third strike, while my company does not support WFH after Covid, I did get to experience at least a partial WFH program, and it was absolutely wonderful. There's a problem though: I would absolutely like to continue working from home, but I also want to work on my own projects, on my own terms, on my own schedule. A traditional full time job is not compatible with that.

So I put in my notice for the end of this year, to allow current company projects to come to a conclusion and/or hand them off. I want to stress that for a man in my age group, with no significant savings or other safety net, this is extremely scary. It's just that this Angst is outweighed by the thought of staying on the treadmill hoping for an eventual reward that may never come and seeing the little time I have left drain away.

That doesn't mean they're not working on an actual game (or games), but it follows that almost all the effort goes into the in-game asset sales funnel. Creation of new assets and selling them.

What you and I would likely consider core parts of game development, namely focusing on technology and gameplay, has never been a priority except in short bursts. But even during those short burst of priorization, development seems to have been hampered by duplication of effort, incompetent programming, and absent project management. Judging by what's being accomplished, the often-repeated reasoning of "it's just very complex and ambitious" is not enough of an explanation. On top of this, I believe there is actually a disincentive of making gameplay progress too quickly, because much like many SV startups there is probably more value in keeping the unicorn phase going.

That being said, I don't think SC is a scam. It's just a victim of its overall design in some respects, while continuing to be very successful financially.

To get a sense of how condescending that comes across, imagine if I turned that around by saying: "Religious people have more atheistic tendencies than they're aware of. By understanding atheism and/or science, these tendencies can be recognized."

A huge number of HNers would immediately see all the things that are wrong with this sentence: it generalized a diverse group, it alleges their world view is invalid and incomplete, and it's an obvious attempt of the speaker to redefine other people's convictions in terms that are easier to attack.

The label "not religious" doesn't mean anything. People use it to refer to atheists, in which case you are alleging that atheists by definition don't have the tools to understand their own position - which is absurd. Others use the term to refer to minimally-practicing members of a faith who basically only show up to places of worship when there is an official event, in which case you argue that these people don't understand the reasons why they avoid their own religion until they become active practitioners.

> The secular world would benefit from adopting more formal definitions of their belief system.

First of all, a secular world doesn't preclude the population from being religious. Having a secular world that is explicitly separate from religion only means that society itself is not regulated by religion.

If by secular world you mean the percentage of the population who is atheist or agnostic, then you're not talking about a specific belief system. You're talking about a diverse group who have chosen to not believe in deities, and that often extends to not believing in the supernatural altogether. The allegation that this absence of belief happens without reflection is simply untrue. On the contrary, being an atheist is still a thorny path to take, even today. It doesn't happen passively.

> In the secular world these aspects exist but they are implicit, making them difficult to debate and attack.

When you say that these aspects are well codified in religion, what you really mean is that specific religions have behavioral codices that members must adhere to. The consequences of non-adherence depend on the religion and the society. But when you look at different religions, these codices are all quite different.

As soon as a population contains more than one religion, what you are touting as a benefit quickly becomes just as impossible as if you were dealing with an atheistic society.

What you find difficult to debate and attack is non-uniformity in general. I consider that a plus.

You are of course completely correct that a diverse society can appear more nebulous, and in some ways individuals can have a much harder time finding a path in life if they, well, have to actually go and find a path. This is a consequence of the freedom to choose. Systems that don't give you those freedoms are assigning a path to you from on high, or at least they heavily constrain your choices. No doubt some people would prefer that.

But the benefit of living in an open society is that you have the option of choosing to be religious, and you are free to choose any religion and any flavor. A secular society doesn't take that away in any form, it just means that your religion doesn't get to make the rules for people living outside of it.

The meandering argument, as far as I can tell, boils down to: it's going to be cramped and dangerous, and if you're looking for a way to escape Earth, you're not going to find a more comfortable existence out there. These are all obvious, by the way, and should be understood by anyone who is willing to risk their lives for a shot of establishing a permanent human outpost on another planet.

I would choose to be a colonist in a heartbeat, if the opportunity ever arises. I know full well I'll probably die there or even on the way. Life there is going to be hard work, and the environment will frankly never be as pretty as Earth. I would go fully knowing that I can deal with both isolation and cooperation in groups. That I can deal with sparse resources and the need to improvise daily.

> "This is the paradox of spacefaring: It’s a lose-lose proposition."

The assumption behind this article is that people considering doing this don't know any better, that they are somehow deluded about how arduous and bleak it will be. The conclusion that space colonization would be a lose-lose proposition is especially infuriating. For the same reason that humans live in more than one city here on Earth, we should go out there. Not to escape Earth, but to develop further.

I wish this had caught on. CTRL-X/C/V is okay-ish until you get to different platforms and/or need to use the terminal.

I also wish we'd have stuck to a clearer separation of which modifier keys apply to the OS/desktop level, which ones are app level, and which ones are text/input level.

Specifically the rate of star formation has always been dubious, because there is such an enormous lag between star formation and the emergence of intelligent life (even if we turn out to be an extremely slow outlier), making it unsuitable for estimating the amount of civilizations active at a specific point in time.

My personal drake equation would include only factors that are based on the current state of the galaxy. But that's the Drake equation doing its job: making people think about cosmic odds. It doesn't need an update, because I argue it shouldn't be taken literally in the first place.

A few times a year, authors put out "new" estimations of the number of galactic civilizations, and to do that there is really not much alternative to chaining together these kinds of probabilities. While they sometimes may or more often may not use the actual Drake equation to do it, its value lies in the basic structure, not in its specific implementation.

In particular it's the casual anthropocentrism that doesn't sit right with me, but it's so much more. You're mostly concerned with human perception and philosophical aspects that have roots in human feelings. If your main objection to the existence of time is that it doesn't fit in with your definition of consciousness, that means we're not even remotely talking about the same thing. We might use overlapping words, but that's it.

Consciousness is not a scientific concept.

Penrose did a lot of damage trying to legitimize it with his quantum woo, but it's fundamentally incompatible with scientific considerations outside of psychology.

The problem is even worse, because without some time-like process, that geometry can't even be observed. The problem here isn't mathematics, it's the practical aspects of the universe.

> timeless universe within which I sit with the illusion of time

I'm not sure what the definition of illusion is here, but the universe does have an evolving state and that's not an illusion according to any meaning of the word I can think of. Time as a general measure of the speed of this evolution is not a human concept either, there is no difference in the way living matter is subjected to time vs how "dead" matter is.

Where there's room for interpretation in my opinion is whether time is a real dimension, or if it's just a dimension-like phenomenon. It may in the end well boil down to something like "time is just the local tick rate of matter", which is a position that may only be provable if we could somehow discern whether the past actually exists physically (as opposed to being destroyed as the universe's state evolves like an array of cellular automata would).

> And it’s a grave disrespect against them to say that nobody actually cares about anything.

I think you might have completely misread my intent. For starters, if you're a HMH watcher, I invite you to tell Casey how much society cares about software quality, you're probably going to trigger a well-deserved rant.

When I say as a society we now have less low-level tools developers per capita, that's not supposed to be an insult to you personally, nor is it necessarily a lamentation on the state of affairs.

> If you really are worried about this, don’t just complain and cry about it, be the change you want to see in the world.

I have no idea where this criticism connects with what I wrote or meant. I did not mean to "complain and cry". My GP post was set against the backdrop of the article, and my disagreement was specifically with the article.

The age of making tools and coming up with workarounds in the face of limitations has come to an end as a mainstream computing activity. A person using a computer in the 90s had to know a lot of technical details and was far more likely to need this knowledge in order to accomplish something. A person growing up today does not, in general, have this need: they can go their whole lives without ever needing to know anything "technical" by virtue of never brushing up against serious limitations that seem surmountable with personal expertise.

Before judging what's good and bad about this, other people have rightfully pointed out the exact same shift in other technology/tools sectors, such as the car industry. The most positive way I can frame this shift in respect to computing is:

In the beginning, the tool itself mattered the most. Its composition, its setup, its ever-evolving but inspectable properties. For many, the tool itself was the purpose. Overcoming its limitations and improving it was the purpose.

By now, the tool itself is no longer relevant. It only matters what you can do with it. The works made with the tool are center stage. Whatever limitations the tool still has are accepted as unchangeable and/or not worth contemplating. Spending time on the tool itself is considered, at best, a weird hobby.

I'm frankly amazed that the mitigations so far have not already been disastrous to performance. Either we accept drastically less performance from now until basically forever, or we adopt a more fine-grained security model.