skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> lockdowns had to happen because authorities (Trump, not CDC) pissed away a month of exponential growth

This does not match my recollection. Not to get all political, but I was headed to a conference in Belgium just weeks prior to the lockdowns starting wearing a full-face respirator and got made fun of by the TSA agents in the Atlanta airport because the CDC was telling people that masks were unnecessary/didn't work. I was wearing said respirator, because I had been deeply attuned to the news of what was going on around the world well ahead of any real concern or alarm bells in the US. I remember very clearly that the first major action to be taken by the US government was a travel restriction/travel ban on flights entering the US from China, and this was done via an executive order by Trump which was lambasted broadly in the news media and by politicians across the aisle as being racist and bigoted. I remember just months later that those same talking heads were happy to say that not enough had been done soon enough and that we should have instituted a similar travel ban earlier and more broadly.

Trump's administration definitely screwed up the pandemic response, not the least of which by basically throwing out the playbook on exactly how to respond to a pandemic that had been built painstakingly after the previous challenges we had with SARS, MERS, and H1N1. I am in no way defending Trump here, but I think making this political and trying point fingers isn't an accurate recollection. The entire US government failed to appropriately respond, this includes elected officials from both political parties, as well as the appointees and bureaucrats. Yes, this /very much/ includes the CDC that bald-faced lied about the effective usage of masks for months in the beginning of the pandemic. Luckily many people, like myself, are capable of understanding the basic physics of air movement and understand that masks can very much be effective if worn properly and so we went out and did just that. I managed to avoid being infected until early 2022 (Omicron) despite being required to travel multiple times, including internationally, because I effectively used PPE.

The most infuriating thing about all of this, as the OP of this thread points out, is that very likely the entire pandemic was caused by a lab leak after the virus was created during gain of function research, and yet, we will never actually know. The evidence of what occurred has been destroyed or muddled for political reasons by everyone involved, including both parties in the US, not just the Chinese. It's a huge mess, and a huge failure of governments around the world, and everyone involved is hoping that normal folks will forget about it and move on with their lives like nothing happened, or better yet, argue about it politically for the dumbest reasons. Your comment equates to "Trump bad, CDC good", but actually the truth is "Trump bad, CDC bad, everyone involved pretty much bad".
Of course it's not an actual fractal, because you know, infinity...

But take the Romanesco Broccoli, it really looks like a fractal. It can't be just random. There definitely is some kind of mechanism that's fractal-ish somewhere.
>It was necessary to give Stalin something to think about.

I really wish this meme would die. There's no evidence the US dropped the atomic bombs on Japan as a show of force to Stalin, yet people constantly state it as if it were proven fact. All of the existing documentary evidence from the time points to the purpose of the atomic bombs being to force a surrender from Japan and avoid the cost of an invasion of the main islands.

People need to accept that sometimes the straightforward explanation is actually correct. It isn't always a smokescreen of propaganda hiding a nefarious motive or conspiracy. Yes, the US was concerned about dealing with Russia after the war. No, not to the degree that they were willing to nuke two Japanese cities just to spook him.
That's always a great option, but weather and seasonal differences can keep large portions of the world from achieving healthy levels of Vitamin D.
I'm 42 and so much better than I was at 22, but nowhere near where I was as an individual at 33. I blame the latter on having three small children. It has taken me a long time to deal with being only above average instead of someone people viewed as a genius.

Not sure if I agree with the intellect loss - I've not lost anything, I'm just much better at juggling multiple things and less good at the math-heavy detail work. However I'm still able pick up new skills as fast as ever.

A friend of mine is in his mid-50s and has kept working on those things, he's as sharp as ever.
> various things point to ZFS being de facto deprecated

I'm not sure that's the case? Your link points to the ZFS on root install being deprecated on the desktop. I'm not sure what inference you/we can draw from that considering ZFS is a major component to LXD, and Ubuntu and Linux's sweet spot is as a server OS.

> Ubuntu were shipping binary ZFS modules at one point, but they have walked back from that.

Not to be persnickety, but this was your claim, and Ubuntu is still shipping ZFS binary modules on all it's current releases.
I think they viewed the transcription itself as a form of meditative/devotional practice and didn't prioritize efficiency as much. The illumination on some of these manuscripts can get pretty elaborate and, sometimes, kind of whimsical. So they were clearly doing some creative expression while doing it.
New Bing give you sources you can check and Google has extracted relevant facts for something like a decade at this point.
Many other comments have touched upon other unusual aspects of the Javascript ecosystem, but there's another major aspect in the ecosystem at quite a precarious position, yet of which, I see very little discussion on, namely, the debugger.

Chrome DevTools is the de facto debugger of Javascript, which becomes apparent once I have to take advantage of Javascript's capability of moving beyond the browser, on alternate runtimes. To debug node.js for the server and Hermes for my apps, in both cases I need to use the Chrome DevTools debugger which uses the Chrome Debugger Protocol. In the case of Hermes, the Chrome DevTools that comes with React Native doesn't even come from your local copy of Devtools, but is dynamically loaded from https://chrome-devtools-frontend.appspot.com/.

As far as being a protocol goes, I have yet to see another viable implementation of a Javascript debugger. To profile my performance or check my memory usage, I need to use Chrome. Even worse, both node.js and Hermes have strange issues pop up with the debugger connected. In the case of Hermes, it is acknowledged that the Javascript runtime is not fully compatible with Chrome DevTools Protocol, whereas node.js occasionally exhibits segmentation faults with the debugger connected, or falls into non-terminating computation when connected to certain complicated programs (such as npm...)

It worries me greatly that to debug my code, not only must I have Chrome installed, but I must be connected to Internet and trust that some particular domain, controlled by presumably Google, maintains it. I struggle to understand why no alternative debugger for arguably the world's most popular language exists, or at least a local, independent copy of the debugger that is untethered to the whims and desires of an entity as trustworthy as Google.

I guess I'll be having to whip up at least the latter option (which seems feasible enough, if a little tedious; with ungoogled versions of Chromium available by some kind souls as a starting point) when have a bit more spare time, to keep my sanity checked.
Quoting: 'repeated infections over-sensitize the immune system, almost like an allergic reaction or something."

Try the 'R' in the (Strain-) Sequency (RRRRR) maybe it matches your thought (not an expert...) regards...
Yes, and that should be paid as well. Standard average commute times factored into pay for hourly workers.
Nooooo if Python gets faster then all the Mojo demos are going to sound so much less impressive nooo
> EU draft rules propose tougher cybersecurity rules for Amazon, Google, Microsoft

So I will get another "antivirus" on my work computer besides the 3 existing ones to be compliant with the new rules. /s
FBI takes down Russia's sophisticated 20-year-old malware network called “Snake”
The death rate per capita seems to suggest Florida probably could’ve done better. 20th highest death per capita out of the 50 states.

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/covid19_mortality_...
Not just the darkness, but the necessary UV wavelengths literally can't reach you in the middle of that day without a cloud in the sky for some parts of the year at higher latitudes.
> ...There you go. Now you've seen a little bit of Smalltalk and now you hate your Ruby development environment. Have a nice day!
As with "effective altruism", the whole thing seems like an exercise in rationalizing destructive behavior in the present. "Sure, my actions are causing harm to hundreds of people, but that's outweighed by the good that will be realized millions of years in the future."

For me the universal antidote to this kind of thinking is this Stephen Jay Gould quote:

> I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.

Thus actions that put more people into "cotton fields and sweatshops" today instead of lifting them out of poverty are detrimental to the long-term survival of our species.
That wasn't clear.

Side note: "Autosharding" is largely a myth that unproven databases are touting. Sharding is complex and requires planning and control. Databases that start shuffling data round without oversight produce nasty surprises. Trying to be too magic is normally always a mistake with databases.
Gig workers are generally "commuting" all day and are much more likely to spend far more time not getting paid but still "working".

So both cases are worth considering, but I don't think they are comparable.
Very true, I totally missed that bit of the original comment.
Leaving Brighamite Mormonism typically doesn't let you keep your dignity intact, especially with close friends and family that are adherent.

At a basic level, you have to send a notarized letter to the corporation that owns the trademark "the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints" (a virtual theocracy in Utah) demanding they remove you from their records. (cf: quitmormon.com)

At a human level, the congregations are geographically based with intense community defined within a geography and effectively-dead treatment to people outside the geography.

My parent's area has been a growth area for Utah Mormon transplants for years, so their congregation has split and moved several times. At a recent funeral for an old Boy Scout leader of mine, they remarked on how many people they hadn't seen in over a decade due to the congregation splits. I was frankly amazed -- dozens of these folks they were pointing out had been regular visitors to our home during my school years! To me it seemed strange that folks lived 10 minutes down the road, were great friends, camped together, shopped together, etc. but as soon as an imaginary line changed their friendship came to an end.

Now, when someone _willingly_ leaves Mormonism, it's often the case that their family shuns them, mistreats them, and otherwise reacts in fear and loathing, because it both signals to the intense social group that the family has failed to stay Mormon together and is a threat that makes people wonder why someone might leave. Source: personal experience, spouse experience, observed experience, reddit's mormon and exmormon subreddits.

When I left Mormonism, as a courtesy I let people know in a social media post. I received about 500 personal messages from people I knew. 90% were vilifying -- my own mother calling me "so smart it made me stupid", a uniquely East Texan insult I've come to learn -- 9% were interested, of which 8 out of 10 of those people eventually left themselves and with their families.

At the funeral I mentioned earlier, I was effectively a persona non grata. That's okay. I wasn't there for me. I was there to remember and honor a sweet man, one of the few who reached out then and later with compassion and tolerance despite not agreeing with my choice.

I believe there are a few other high-demand religions with similar institutional failings preventing freedom of thought and association, but I'll not call those out here, simply note that this isn't a unique phenomenon to Mormonism nor is it ubiquitous to religion generally.
It isn't about learning prompt engineering ... but rather expanding your horizons and what applications are currently feasible with existing tools.
Once fused into super-instructions/adaptive instructions, does `disas` still allow users to manipulate the bytecode as if it were not optimized?

That'd be a very nice feature and I'm not sure it exists in other languages.
People in general don't have to clock out every time they put down the pencil or stop typing.
...and how do you imagine they do that (spend their time waiting for gig work by working minimum wage)?

Work at McDonalds, and then walk out to go do an uber run?

It's often claimed that the flexibility of gig work benefits workers to 'top up' their wages...but the reality is that companies push this work, and it just ends up with workers earning less than minimum wage, because rather than companies paying you for the 'between time', you now end up earning nothing. Much like other commenters say, should you get paid for the Jira ticket, or just the coding work? Gig work suggests just the actual coding.
> Actual fern leaves and cauliflower curds have a very small number of anatomically variable and non-iterating bifurcations, which superficially look self-similar, but do not allow for scaling down of their structure as real fractals do.

Sorry, can't help it, but really? You cannot zoom into real-life fractals infinitely like in those math animations, only a few times?

What comes next? Even the coast line or mountains fractal analogies are wrong in the mathematical sense, you won't even the same shape once if you try hard??

> The above cases demonstrate a general problem of using mathematical tools to investigate or illustrate biological phenomena in an irrelevant manner.

No, I think we have a different problem here..
The open source community has been that for me. Just wish I had more time to engage in it, especially face to face.
IQ is a much better predictor, controlling for other known contributors, of success for individuals within, say, the United States, than it is for countries.

Sure, IQ “correlates strongly” with national economic success, but that’s because of other causal relationships, like that economic success predicts environmental conditions which are known contributors to IQ.

There’s no paradox here.
Automation isn't the same in each sector, but even if it was, it's unlikely to be linear going forward.

Likewise, fertility rates may be going down, but we also have people working on all kinds of things in that area, including but not limited to artificial wombs.
Good thing Plato disregarded Socrates' advice and wrote that down
It seems pretty clear that longtermism and consequentialism in conjunction have the potential to be dangerous; although I endorse both.

That said, the author of this piece seems to be a bit of a nutcase. There's a well-evidenced writeup of various dubious behaviors in this blog post:

https://markfuentes1.substack.com/i/81210415/tyler-cowen

So while some of the high level arguments in this seems plainly right, their overall strength and the integrity of the author seem pretty questionable.
Another
A dumbed down status page that intends to make fun of the fact that Github is going down almost on a daily basis.

Companion blog post: https://oschvr.com/posts/isgithublive/
Boaz Barak for example
The same gagging is happening to all the internet media companies in Brazil including Google and Meta, but we are not hearing about it because we are not allowed to hear about it except through side channels like this. Glen covered it in the later part of this episode.https://rumble.com/v2looka-system-update-79.html

New Law Sought by Brazil's Lula to Ban and Punish ‘Fake News’ And ‘Disinformation’ Threatens The Free Internet Everywhere. Many Nations seem poised to abandon the core lesson of the Enlightenment: no human institution can or should be trusted to decree Absolute Truth and punish dissent from it. (G. Greenwald. Feb. 25, 2023)
Facts about Africa's Geography never taught in schools [video]
How often do you show multiple screens open to a user at the same time? Even in desktop ERP type software you rarely ever show more than 3 to 4 screens open at a time and how often do these screens all show the EXACT SAME data fields?

How often do you show more than one screen open at a time in a mobile app?

How often would you then need to display the same data field in multiple screens?

I think the state management in mobile apps is extremely over engineered for a use case that rarely ever happens.
I think it's the social aspect that is what I am after - not so much specific tech side resources, although I always appreciate learning more.

The ability to freely discuss the pros/cons of the tech industry from a coder perspective with people that have been through a couple of industry cycles is both fun and therapeutic.
How do you build web applications?
There is a syntax error in the example shown by that article. If you must use any time to find it then you should not go with PHP.
I worked at Amazon from 2009-2016. For a while near the end I worked on brand management which was specifically trying to address the counterfeit problem. If you’ve used Amazon in the last 14 years, you’ve used software I’ve worked on. My n=1, but from an informed position.

It’s 2023 and I still get counterfeits.
Very interesting. What do you think of metrics like valuation or # of employees?
Yes this sounds great but the issue is about how longtermists revel in the opportunity to sacrifice near term goals for long term ones, in an almost pathological way. I still don't understand why there should be any conflict between aggressive environmentalism and longtermism, but it keeps coming up over and over again. All I can think of is that longtermists want to demonstrate how truly long-term they are and therefore act like one of the most pressing current issues is secondary to a bunch of other stuff. In general and in the absence of more info I think it's safe to go for the proximal goal of stabilizing the world's ecosystems, even though it _could_ in theory be a non-existential risk. All of that said, the conflict between longtermism and environmentalism might mostly be manufactured by the critics of longtermism, like the author of this article.
These waters are incredibly muddy.

- the virus could have been 100% natural, in containment at a lab that was accidentally mishandled and then exposed to a huge population center. This would be a man-made disaster

- the virus could have been man-altered, as in naturally evolved via man-directed evolution and the escape could have happened.

- the virus could have been edited, “artificial” in this sense, then escaped

- the virus could have been edited and intentionally released

- the virus could have been natural and intentionally released

- the actor is not monolithic, a rogue employee could have maliciously acted to expose people while the broader entity covered it up to save face

There are a lot of variables here, but all we know for sure is that the Chinese government has worked hard to conceal the truth and that ground zero is suspiciously close to a research lab studying these specific virus types. We also know that, unlike most other pandemics at this point, no preexisting natural reservoir of CV19 has been found. Make of that what you will.
I am curious too, how could they contact someone who has basically bought a domain to do absolutely nothing with it.

Also, I'd hate to pay a broker $100 just to be told that they can't do anything.

Now commission based I could see myself doing that.

Then again I am not willing to go 5 figures for a vanity domain - more like mid 4 figures just like the guys in the article.
I'm sorry but your job as a homeschooler is to teach your sons to write. That's not a skill you can enter adulthood without, and expect to achieve success. Liking it, not liking it... none of that matters when you're asked to document a process or argue in favor of an idea.

Imagine the value a professional teacher would have provided for them...
Do you really need to store the hashes?

I imagine in an application like this there would be a "settled" set for which all agents agree, and a "pending" set which is agreed by some but not all agents. The hash could be used solely for the pending set to get agreement on order of operations, but after that it could simply be dropped altogether. The sequence number could even be generated on the receiving agent's side.

Also, even for the "pending" set you wouldn't even need to store the hash in your primary data structure. You could simply add a dictionary from (agent id, seq) to hash, right?

The second issue seems reasonable easy to solve with this: include a salt in the hash. You're only storing the "head" hash of the "settled" set, so when the salts aren't stored there is no way to reconstruct this hash from the settled set itself.
> if we don’t realign our incentives away from maximizing short term profits we may be destroying our future.

What does that look like, in practice?

It seems to me the magic of Longtermism is that when time horizons can be arbitrarily set, anything that one dislikes or doesn't care about can be dismissed as "short term."
Many Countries which did little had better results. Arguable that all efforts outside protecting nursing homes were futile or harmful.
Wild. This was only a weak criticism and still made longtermism look embarrassingly bad.

Why do longtermists put any faith in their ability to discern the current state of the world, to discern the consequences of current events, of their own actions, of reactions to their reactions, etc? Tremendous measurement and prediction error in all these even if you give it a couple coats of "rational" paint so you feel smart when you talk about it.

Any reasonable course of action under so much uncertainty would not try to wiggle the entire future, but to accomplish some smaller part of "the work" now, taking responsibility for something you can actually understand (not just delude yourself into imagining you understand). Go work on some constituent component of spaceflight, maybe, at best. AI X-risk is still OK but only to the extent your work accomplishes anything (thus far—zilch, all wasted.) But absolutely anything else done in service of the "species" is the grandiose delusion of children, and can be used to justify anything. If the species will survive anyway, then you're just comparing infinities—so some other criteria is needed. Better pick a good one and now you still have to decide what Good is. The "longtermist" imagines themself above all finite concerns. The only work good enough for their ego is lecturing others about the vastest things possible.

Early 20thc eugenics committed a fallacy constantly that comes up here too. You learn about evolution, you learn that the ultimate "goal" of evolution is to survive and thrive and outcompete, and then you falsely conclude that therefore you should make that your goal. Not so. It does not follow. You just found some reason to justify your desire to glorify yourself.

Same for long-termism. The species ought to survive, but when you make that your personal objective, you reject all the other emotions that have evolved to ensure survival and have done so so far, in particular, caring for the wellbeing of people around you, and the capacity to solve actual problems, at a scope where you can understand the consequences of your actions.
I don't think Bard has an API available - so it can't be fairly tested.