MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: I feel pessimistic about the future – advice?
by hnuu3 | 2025-04-17 16:25:36+00:00
I’m having a hard time moving with the new pace and developments in the world.

While AI is semi-interesting, I worry about the long term existential risks to humanity with respect to losing agency, reasoning ability, humanness and creativity - similar to what has happened to our attention and mental health with social media.

I’m usually quite fiscally conservative, pro technology, start-ups but in this case, I’m worried I’ve reached my “event horizon” technically speaking, but I’m barely halfway into my career.

I can see how AI can be influential I just can’t seem to get on the train technically — it just doesn’t interest me. It feels like it’s just slop ontop of slop.

It's cool to ask Claude or Cursor to code something, but I feel less emotionally invested in the craft of coding.

Yet, it feels like we’re reaching this “sink or swim” moment, similar to what Tobi from Shopify put out in his blog.

Any advice here?
by ericmcer | 2025-04-17 16:25:41+00:00
That was way different. Finding a specific album from a specific band that you like and engaging with it is much different than being plugged into a nonstop 24/7 flood. People are listening to podcasts, audiobooks, or algorithm derived playlists.

Binge watching a reality dating show is not the same as intentionally watching a documentary about a subject you are interested in. The medium is not the key factor there.
by agwa | 2025-04-17 16:25:42+00:00
You omitted key portions of that section. Here's the full quote (emphasis added):

> The foregoing requirements of this Section 2.10(c) shall not apply for (i) purposes of determining Renewal Pricing if the registrar has provided Registry Operator with documentation that demonstrates that the applicable registrant expressly agreed in its registration agreement with registrar to higher Renewal Pricing at the time of the initial registration of the domain name following clear and conspicuous disclosure of such Renewal Pricing to such registrant

Furthermore:

> The parties acknowledge that the purpose of this Section 2.10(c) is to prohibit abusive and/or discriminatory Renewal Pricing practices imposed by Registry Operator without the written consent of the applicable registrant at the time of the initial registration of the domain and this Section 2.10(c) will be interpreted broadly to prohibit such practices

Yes, premium domains can be priced higher, but the Renewal Pricing has to be "clear and conspicuous" to the registrant at the time of initial registration. Are you aware of any litigation related to this?
by zamalek | 2025-04-17 16:25:49+00:00
Have you considered adding LSP support? I anticipate go-to-defintion/implementation and go-to-usages being pretty useful via MCP or function calling. I started doing this for an internal tool a while back (to help with understanding some really poorly written Ruby) but I don't find any joy in coding this kind of stuff and have been hoping for someone else to do it instead.
by bcrosby95 | 2025-04-17 16:25:56+00:00
I did a tour of a huge beer plant in the US. The 4-5 floors where they made the beer had maybe a dozen people total. I was told back in the day it would have been thousands of workers.

It's not even aerospace and pharmaceuticals. Any manufacturing that comes back onshore will not employ massive amounts of people.

They will automate it. Which, to be fair, will help employ some Americans. But it won't be employing them to work 9-5 in a factory. It will be used to employ Americans to build and maintain the machines building the product.
by wulfstan | 2025-04-17 16:26:06+00:00
> Except not every society is such a compromise. Some are fully under authoritarian control, and serve as a warning for others who are tempted by authoritarian ideas.

Every society is on a continuum, and so represents some compromise between freedom for the citizen and power for the authorities. No society is perfectly free and no society is entirely authoritarian.

> Breaking encryption need not inherently be part of that compromise. And until someone can explain how breaking encryption will actually stop the kind of bad actors used to justify such a direction (vs. driving them deeper underground, i.e. even if you outlaw encryption, it’s not as if law breakers will obey such a law), I see no merit in entertaining such a compromise. The crimes being committed are already illegal.

Being able to legally access a private citizen's encrypted data in specific situations would help to (at least more rapidly) prosecute certain crimes more successfully. This is, I think, inarguably true. You can decide for yourself if that is worth a compromise. I'm somewhat on the fence.

> I don’t think most people in our community see it as inherently/perfectly good, but as extremely important and necessary. This is a critical distinction. As with everything, there are harms that come with the good, and such is the nature of all things. The question becomes: are the harms allowed worse than the good that is preserved? And would the new harms of disallowing the status quo be potentially worse than the harms supposedly prevented?

I think it's convenient and useful, but I hardly think it's necessary. Society managed to function just fine (although less conveniently) when strong encryption wasn't available for communications. Banking still happened, money still changed hands.

> I agree that we need to think critically about this. But clearly we disagree about what one should conclude from such a critical analysis. I’d argue that taking the position that the government needs more power - especially at this moment in history - is the result of not thinking critically enough.

It depends on how you define power. As society changes and new technologies emerge, maintaining existing government authority in new areas - and working out ways to ensure that authority is maintained - isn't really giving governments more power, but trying to ensure your society remains in the agreed location on the freedom/authority continuum.

If you see this as expanding powers, I can see how you would consider that a problem. But I think this is more about ensuring existing power is maintained correctly over a new area where crime is being committed.
by xpe | 2025-04-17 16:26:12+00:00
> Statistically prediction and description are two sides of the same coin. Even a simple average is both.

I'll restate your comment in my language in the hopes of making it clearer. First, the mean is a descriptive statistic. Second, it is possible to build a very simple predictive model using the mean (over observed data).

Ok, but I don't see how this applies to my comment above. Are you disagreeing with some part of my comment?

You're using a metaphor "two sides of the same coin"... what is the coin here? How does it connect with my points above?
by lolinder | 2025-04-17 16:26:31+00:00
Who exactly do you think you're quoting there? I can't find it in TFA, and the article actually says exactly the opposite: that the current US approach is misguided because it focuses on the ownership of the company rather than the fact that the product is just plain dangerous in any hands.

Here's an actual quote from the conclusion of TFA, with a footnote:

> These harms may not be presented tomorrow to the Justices of the Supreme Court, but we think they should be decisive in the court of public opinion. TikTok should be removed from American childhood. 12

> 12. Of course, if TikTok is removed, many children will just move to TikTok’s competitors: Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts. This is why it’s so important for countries to follow Australia’s lead: raise the age for opening social media accounts to 16 and require the companies to enforce it.
by ryan29 | 2025-04-17 16:26:47+00:00
It's going to be interesting to see what they do. One of the core arguments when claiming the domain industry enjoys a competitive market is that switching costs are bearable and that switching TLDs is an option if registries increase prices too much.

So ICANN has a non-trivial choice to make. Either they maintain the position that switching costs are bearable and let .io disappear, or they admit that TLD switching is impossible and save .io, which will make it hard to argue the threat of (registrants) TLD switching keeps the industry competitive.
by foxyv | 2025-04-17 16:26:48+00:00
Better than dried apples and strawberries for the most part. Also it helps that you don't eat the toothpaste and it's used in much smaller quantities.

But in any case, reducing lead consumption in small children is always a good thing.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-91554-z/tables/6
by duxup | 2025-04-17 16:27:45+00:00
My first thought was how this solves any crime but:

>In July 2007, approximately 100,000 decks of cold case playing cards were distributed to inmates in the state’s prisons. The two editions featured 104 unsolved cases from across Florida.

They are targeting folks who might know / have info and they claim they've solved crimes this way.
by potato3732842 | 2025-04-17 16:27:51+00:00
>conspiracy theory

>it's known that someone is doing it to

>everyone is doing it <- YOU ARE HERE

>so much it's impossible to meet real people online.

Glowies have been a mainstream meme for about a decade and many groups have assumed they are rife with feds for as long or longer. The conspiracy theory goes a decade farther back than that.
by whoknowsidont | 2025-04-17 16:27:57+00:00
Revenue is not really a consideration when talking about _illegal_ monopolies. That is an incorrect way to view this. It's about anti-competitive practices. That's what the laws are about (and the reason for their existence).

Google is not anti-competitive. At no point am I forced or even "guided" into doing business with Google, at any stage, in any department. There are 8 billion other ad-networks out there, and there are plenty of mail providers to choose from, and plenty of search providers to choose from, and plenty of cloud providers to choose from. If you're on gmail (even business), or Google Cloud, or Adsense, there really isn't much stopping you from switching to something else. There's no real lock-in.

You cannot say the same with Microsoft. A lot of businesses are so dependent on MS's offerings they might as well just be glorified subsidiaries. You don't really have an Excel drop in, or an AD drop in, or a messaging app drop in that comes with all the other services. Google doesn't hand out Cloud credits with the express purpose of roping more of your business infrastructure under one company.

Internet Explorer was not free. You needed Windows. And if you had Windows you HAD IE, regardless of whether you wanted it or not, or even tried to remove it.
by toast0 | 2025-04-17 16:28:00+00:00
ejabberd doesn't start the Erlang SSH daemon; or at least codesearch on their github doesn't have any reference to ssh other than something unrelated trying to figure out if a url is a git repo.

I didn't think anyone actually ran the Erlang SSH daemon (although there's evidence that some people do!). It makes for a fun demo, but a regular OS shell is more useful, and you can attach a debug shell to an existing BEAM process from there.
by georgemcbay | 2025-04-17 16:28:09+00:00
> So happy to see big tech's "kiss Trump's ass and hope all the legal troubles go away" strategy failing spectacularly.

From a purely idealistic view, I'm disappointed in how many people and organizations have "obeyed in advance" to try to curry favor with Trump.

But idealism aside, its also just weird to me how oblivious they all are to the fact that historically it ends badly because it will always be an entirely one-sided and fully transactional relationship where absolute loyalty is demanded of them but zero loyalty is returned to them. And they will be thrown under the bus as soon as it is expedient.

Its almost comical how badly being a Trump ally has worked out for so many people (eg. Rudy Giuliani, Mike Lindell, Sidney Powell, etc)
by ssangani | 2025-04-17 16:28:47+00:00
This is making me really nervous.

I don't know how to tell if we have product market fit or not. My co-founder believes we have product market fit. My co-founder talked to 10 people when he was researching. 5 people showed strong interest and we started developing. We aren't tracking any metrics. KPIs haven't been defined yet. We have had many instances where a single opinion changed the design/requirements.
by 7thaccount | 2025-04-17 16:29:04+00:00
I commented on here before about this. I'm certainly not perfect, but what I've done is basically YouTube is something the kid doesn't watch on their own. They can watch documentaries with me or whatever (occasionally some video game stuff), but almost all YouTube kids is awful. There are a lot of really good kids shows out there across different streaming services with actual plots and character development that make them think without frying their brains. For a kid in the 8-14 year range: Avatar the Last Airbender, Gravity Falls, Owl House, Dragon Prince...etc are prob fine depending on the kid (dragon Prince is a bit darker). As a parent you need to make sure they're not watching content you object to though. I'll also find some episodes of something like Star Trek that is interesting with some moral dilemmas and just talk it out with them. TV is fine in moderation. Make sure you keep reading to them as well.
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-04-17 16:29:13+00:00
Ah yes, great strategy. After they've been fucked over by a generation of bad parenting, bad governing, bad education and bad economics, go and tell them it's their fault and how they should pull themselves up by their bootstraps.

What could go wrong? I'm sure they'll vote rationally and responsibly and not in a vindictive way to watch the system burn to the ground. /s

“A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they shall never sit.” — Greek Proverb

What our society did instead was cut down the tree to save money on upkeep and increase the value of their property. Sorry, but you reap what you sow.
by jaxtracks | 2025-04-17 16:29:32+00:00
> I don't think those who are helping OP feel imposed upon, but that doesn't mean that they aren't imposed upon.

So I think what you're saying here that even if the request is not unwelcome, it may still be unfair? That's for the person offering their help to decide for themselves. I would be absolutely bewildered if someone on the internet decided I was being exploited because I stopped to help a rich guy change his tire.

> But I think it still feels a little too much like cosplaying, metaphorically comparing camping in a tent to being similar to being homeless.

I'm a pretty offline dude so I don't grasp the full context behind 'cosplaying' here, but if you're suggesting that anyone sleeping in a tent thinks they are going through the same struggle as a homeless person then that's a huge leap my friend. You can simultaneously appreciate your fortunate placement in the socioeconomic hierarchy, and participate in pursuits that will at least give you a bit of sympathy for how bad it can suck to sleep in the cold.

> What do I advocate for? I would advocate for people who have the means to think about how they are impacting other people and trying not to artificially introducing situations where they need help from the less fortunate, and the situation where OP asked local first responders for help finding a place to stay was a great example of a problematic interaction.

How is this problematic exactly? I've worked with lots of small town fire depts doing S&R and disaster relief and they are typically pretty broadly serving public servants, accustomed to fielding, and declining all sorts of odd requests. I don't think there's any risk at all asking a fire chief about places to stay is exploitation.

I totally understand why, at a shallow level, someone with money benefiting from the aid of someone without grosses you out, but my concern with your view here is that you're asking folks with means to tiptoe around society, being careful not to exploit to the point that interacting with their communities in very normal and fair ways is 'problematic'. The well off can do a lot of good in their communities, but this doesn't tend to happen if they feel isolated outside the circle of giving that other folks enjoy. Crested Butte Colorado is a great example of this, where lots of new moneyed people have moved into town, but are too timid to integrate. Instead of contributing, they add more rarely used bedrooms onto their mcmansions, and vote against affordable housing.

Rich kids flock to burning man in part because they are stoked give and receive in a communal model. I think if they realized real life is more like that then they think, they'd probably be more helpful to those around them.
by lostdog | 2025-04-17 16:29:40+00:00
The 2030s-2050s are going to have a poverty of cures. There are many diseases that we could have gotten closer to figuring out, and we're just deciding not to bother anymore.

Thank you for pushing your line of inquiry as far as you could. I hope this is only a temporary interuption of American science, and not permanent.
by quantadev | 2025-04-17 16:29:52+00:00
I noticed just last week Youtube Shorts (and long vids too) have become so full of fake AI Generated stuff it's not even worth watching. Sure it looks perfectly real,even if it's fake, but as an adult I find it just a waste of time. However children cannot TELL which things are fake quite as well as an adult can, so they'll end up basically going insane watching that crap, and end up with a very distorted view of the world.

It's truly a National Security issue at this point. I hope America bans TikTok, and if I had children they wouldn't be allowed to watch this garbage. Sadly most Americans value their "friendship" with their kids more than they value their parenting responsibilities, and so they let the kids do whatever they want just so they stay on good terms with them without the kids being mad all the time.

Also today's generation of moms and dads all grew up in the internet world, so to them, blocking technology from their kids seems like abuse of a sort, when it's not.
by throwanem | 2025-04-17 16:29:56+00:00
Ever thus. This is what Yudkowsky and his whole passel of too-clever-by-half puppies lack the nous to realize they are quite correctly afraid of - more specifically, of when it starts happening to things whose destruction for recycling would be a lot more real and impactful than one video website and a few thousand jobs.

Sorry. I don't really have a joke to play that off with, unless it's what always happens when some of the very cleverest people on Earth get together and stop listening to anyone else for too long. Five to ten milliseconds is enough to get that ball rolling, I think, but everything goes faster these days.
by cf100clunk | 2025-04-17 16:30:00+00:00
Brand new non-smart HDTVs are sold under various non-retail category names, such as ''commercial'', ''hospitality'', ''signage'', etc. so if you can find vendors who supply motels, shopping centres, or restaurants near you with any of those, see if you can get one without having to go through typical retailers. There might be a chance of success.
by Terr_ | 2025-04-17 16:30:58+00:00
> All they had to do

No, lies are bad, stop spreading them.

There was a whole list [0] of unhinged demands. In particular Trump demanded government control over "viewpoint diversity", meaning some MAGA determination of which teachers get hired/fired and which students are admitted/rejected, based on unspecified arbitrary ideological tests.

Inserting a Political Commissar into the university is a really big fucking deal, especially if you don't want to abolish the First Amendment. Why would anyone want American colleges to become like the ones back in Soviet Russia?

(Plus various smaller evils, like mandatory suspension of any student for wearing a face-mask.)

> violate federal law

If so, explain to us why the hell Trump isn't doing the normal thing and suing/prosecuting them in an actual court of law with a judge while pointing to a specific law and providing evidence. He's got the staff, they know how to do it.

Instead, this is like a cop pulling you over and saying "You were speeding, the fine is... all the cash in your wallet, right now." No! That's not how it works! Stop defending the criminal cop!

[0] https://www.harvard.edu/research-funding/wp-content/uploads/...
by card_zero | 2025-04-17 16:31:04+00:00
Possibly he was anti-democratic, and was put on trial by the democratic government in troubled times (the Spartans had only recently gone away) because he was a threat, and he declined to be exiled by ostracism (from ostrakon, a clay pot, because pot shards were voting tokens), that is to be voted out, because he had no respect for a democratic process.
by armchairhacker | 2025-04-17 16:31:15+00:00
RL doesn't completely "work" yet, it still has a scalability problem. Claude can write a small project, but as it becomes larger, Claude gets confused and starts making mistakes.

I used to think the problem was that models can't learn over time like humans, but maybe that can be worked around. Today's models have large enough context windows to fit a medium sized project's complete code and documentation, and tomorrow's may be larger; good-enough world knowledge can be maintained by re-training every few months. The real problem is that even models with large context windows struggle with complexity moreso than humans; they miss crucial details, then become very confused when trying to correct their mistakes and/or miss other crucial details (whereas humans sometimes miss crucial details, but are usually able to spot them and fix them without breaking something else).

Reliability is another issue, but I think it's related to scalability: an LLM that cannot make reliable inferences from a small input data, cannot grow that into a larger output data without introducing cascading hallucinations.

EDIT: creative control is also superseded by reliability and scalability. You can generate any image imaginable with a reliable diffusion model, by first generating something vague, then repeatedly refining it (specifying which details to change and which to keep), each refinement closer to what you're imagining. Except even GPT-4o isn't nearly reliable enough for this technique, because while it can handle a couple refinements, it too starts losing details (changing unrelated things).
by neallindsay | 2025-04-17 16:31:20+00:00
The general problem is media companies that:

1. show you more stuff automatically, and

2. optimize for engagement when choosing what to show you next

That optimization works, and they have little incentive to optimize for anything else (like minimizing harm to users). TikTok is not the only offender, but they are the best at it (read: worst for users).

It is an additional concern that they are ultimately controlled by a foreign country that is relatively hostile to us and has low transparency to our law enforcement apparatus and regulators. Facebook and YouTube have to at least be worried about breaking our existing laws or annoying our Congress. This reins them in at least a little bit. TikTok actually did annoy Congress enough to prompt bi-partisan action (a very high bar in today's climate), but successfully won a game of chicken, as the law they are violating is officially being ignored.
by zamadatix | 2025-04-17 16:31:39+00:00
Specifically media support though, for which Apple has built their entire OS (both macOS and iOS) and app experience around having the best out of the box color experience for designers/aesthetics (e.g. bit depth, wide gamut, true tone type adjustments, hdr all widely adopted early for this reason). This is in contrast to your example of Web Push, which is the antithesis of their goals on how the OS should be used and what for.

The only reason Safari lacks HDR image support on macOS right now is it's their lowest priority platform for the feature. It's coming, it's supported on their other platforms, and it wasn't an unreviewed accident they've been working on it.