unsupp0rted

> until today I believed that his vastly superior judgement

What changed today?

Every major leader and CEO has obvious blind spots. They're geniuses at X but idiots at Y.

Look at all the great CEOs with ridiculous political views. It's fine: they do have vastly superior judgement, just not in areas where it doesn't directly affect their business.

For the NVDA CEO, it happens to be a woman. That puts him in probably the 80-90% of great leaders on whom that works.

That's not unfortunate: that's the way the system is designed to work:

* Corps maximize shareholder value

* Govs make laws/penalties to avoid too much harm/risk by corps

* Press keeps everybody accountable

It's great when everybody's doing what they're supposed to do, which obviously isn't often enough.

Unfortunate is when corps are so in bed with gov that they don't bother innovating or growing, and when press is so in bed with gov that they might as well not exist at all.

Same as always: you distinguish good from bad by trying it out for your needs.

There's always been plenty of bad software.

I heard AI lacks general utility and is a bubble

They can't even generate Will Smith eating spaghetti. Or count the r's in Strawberry.

I love my M1 16" but it's a giant heavy cinder block that I have dragged with me to more places than I can count, always grudgingly

Halo and Starcraft are both about the Terrans going to war with alien species.

Same old story, right?

But getting the balance of technologies, motivations (e.g. jihad-dynamics), and nitty-gritty details (e.g. the splinter factions) right is the trick: it's much easier to do wrong than to do right.

If normies understood that baby crying detection also requires everything-except-baby-crying detection, they would be up in arms about being spied upon... and here they are

Exactly: it would have to be like Band of Brothers, or like Space: Above and Beyond from the 90s, but with a 2027 budget and effects. Or screw the effects: just good 2027 talking-in-rooms writing is nearly enough.

The Halo universe offers a lot to mine from, just like the Star Wars Universe did for Andor. It's just waiting for the chosen one writer to be allowed to do the job. Who's the J. Michael Straczynski or Tony Gilroy for the Halo universe?

It seems that way, but it's not that easy. Starcraft competitions are still on tv in South Korea 28 years later because they got the balance just right, and all the dirty little details of that universe.

In theory you can make any sci fi show about future humans and a couple other species going to war. Should be straightforward.

But getting the balance of that universe right in terms of little details is tricky: Halo has done the heavy lifting already.

The majority of GOT isn't hot naked sexy people or swords: it's conversations in rooms. Most good shows are conversations in rooms, which is why it's so surprising we've lost the ability to produce and write them.

Babylon 5 demonstrated that you can keep absolutely everything else crappy (effects, costumes, heck acting and even cinematography), so long as you're good at conversations in rooms.

Halo could be (peak) Game of Thrones level in the right hands, which means the right execs, producers and investors just as much as it does creatives.

Unfortunately, the right hands potentially no longer exist. The current generation seems largely unable to produce good things, with few exceptions (notably Andor)

There are HN guidelines for how to interact with others on here, particularly when it comes to sensitive political topics

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

The main principle is to add value in your comments by engaging with whatever would be a strong version of what you're replying to

If America didn't practice restraint with regard to Canada, let's say cut off all diplomatic and economic ties, it would hurt for a while. Consumer prices would rise, there'd be a significant uptick to inflation, the expense of building housing would increase, the international community would be pissed off and sentiment against American would be at an all-time high, European, Asian and South American countries would form new trading blocs to leave America out, etc...

It would be pretty bad.

If Canada did that, 3 months later there would be no country left to call Canada. The EU and East Asia would be sending relief aid in the form of peace-keepers, heating fuel & emergency power generators, antibiotics and food rations in a humanitarian gesture to save what's left of what was Canada.

There's more to it: it's irrational to return a wallet to somebody you'll never meet/see/extract value from... but not doing that can injure your own self-image

Often doing "the right thing", in irrational circumstances, is nevertheless self-protective.

Otherwise you get friction in your social programming that you might never overcome.

> closed the border to American tourists or slapped on an expensive visa, and closed the airspace to American flights

None of those were ever viable options on the table. It'd immediately set off a Canadian national crisis that hurts the USA 1% and Canada 99%. Even Canada's current leadership isn't that politically suicidal.

It's like fighting off a mugger by cutting off your own arm and beating him with it, as you bleed out and weaken with every second that passes.

There's a plausible version where no matter what weird detours and dead-ends a human society takes on the tech tree, as long as there continue to be wars every few generations, the needed progress keeps getting made and the dead-ends or even just over-reaches get pruned afterward.

You can go down the wrong rabbit holes for a long while in peace-time (e.g. string theory), but war-time is a crucible for correct ideas.

I love this. My personal completely unsupported theory is we’re cognitively capable of conceiving of less than 1% of what’s true/accurate about the universe, and cognitively capable of understanding 1% of that 1%

Quick and fun read on this:

The Road not Taken by Harry Turtledove

https://pastebin.com/aJQfubrK

> the Canadians have reacted with restraint

Canadians haven't reacted with restraint to Americans in the decades I've been aware of the divide, and this time there has been no restraint at all.

Canadian politicians and media are pursuing a strategy: it's arguable whether it's clever or foolhardy, but what's not arguable is whether it's restrained.

> https://youtu.be/7ZE0TuKTpo4

There's a cultural reason why "look how ignorant and stupid Americans are" has been staple Canadian comedy since the latter half of the 20th century. And it has nothing to do with America.

One of the great things about Americans, by the way, is being able to shrug, maybe chuckle along, and let it be for going on decades. That's what comes from being a first-rate global power. Game of Thrones reminded us "the wolf does not concern himself with the opinion of sheep".

And the power dynamic here is such that the analogy is apt.

Even if an itchy bug bite is the source, treating it with acid and a flamethrower is the cause of the afflicted person's problem

> anti-Canadian sentiment whipped up by Trump might make the country inhospitable

It's not Americans who are being whipped up against Canadians, and it never has been.

Are Americans "inhospitable" to Canadians now? Or more the reverse?

Today tensions are highest, but even if Trump is the source, he's far from the cause.

It's like the Mad Men scene where the junior blows up, enumerates to Don everything wrong with him and Don blandly reacts "I don't think about you at all"

Culturally, that reply makes perfect sense.

e.g. Japanese culture in many circumstances requires a company to rush to apologize for the smallest perceived (not even actual) fault

Pick a random story from this week.

E.g. we're literally commercializing alchemy now.

Not "sort of kind of if you squint and pretend"... literally honest-to-goodness alchemy.

https://x.com/marathonfusion/status/2113001073019662481

I am living in a Sci-Fi novel from my youth

Microwave ovens were never for heating food. The warming is just a means to a dinner.

Are you kidding? I've been waiting for these times since I was a kid and read Asimov and Kurzweil.

Living through these times now is like 14-year-old me receiving a new birthday present more or less every day.

Multiple times a week I get the sense I won the "lucky to not have been born a generation earlier" lottery.

To be fair, the `content` property rarely gets used for anything more than a label or icon, or perhaps a tooltip

Either that or they intentionally wanted to create a publicly-accessible backdoor, with plausible deniability of laziness

> If you’re familiar with JavaScript, this should feel pretty familiar. We define new functions with @function and specify the returned value with result.

It used to be that HTML was for content, CSS was for layout, and JS was for "code"

Now JS is for content and layout and code, HTML is for content and layout, and CSS if for layout and code

Never attribute to malice what can be explained by ignorance?

In this case I wonder if this was an intentional wide open doorway to fraud