skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Who are you writing for?

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> Language models are capable of producing and digesting substantial volumes of text. More text than any single person should ever be expected to handle in the course of a lifetime. Compared to the speed at which a human can read and write, these models are the linguistic equivalent of a chainsaw. It’s much the same with computer vision, and generative algorithms producing videos and images of events that never occurred and things that don’t exist.

It’s my belief that, in our current artificial intelligence boom’s haste to grab as much business as possible, we are essentially handing out chainsaws to unqualified and inexperienced people who don’t appreciate the responsibility entrusted to them, and who probably don’t require such power in the first place. And that is not the consumers’ fault—this is all on the companies that are pushing it into their laps.

> Some would say that, compared to the tangible hazards of losing a bodily extremity or dropping a pine trunk through the bedroom ceiling, misuse of AI by irresponsible or malicious actors sounds downright genteel. But think about how quickly memes and misinformation flow through social media and the larger internet. Whoever first used the word “viral” to describe such spread, they hit that nail right on the head.Social media craves that stuff, and AI provides the almost effortless ability to produce unlimited quantities of exactly what it desires. And the reward for the creator, as much as the users of an AI product can be called the “creator” of that content, is a shower of likes, reposts, updoots, badges, and the tiny dribble of dopamine brought by those things. Thus the system perpetuates itself.

> Unlike the venerable chainsaw, AI doesn’t give any indication that it is being misused. It doesn’t growl, shake, kick, or protest. It doesn’t even give a useful indication that “hey this result might be completely useless hogwash, I dunno.” The user doesn’t get to see what happens inside, or know precisely where the information originally came from, or evaluate how the model may have compromised reality to produce an output that looked plausibly like something a human would accept. It just hums along quietly, churning out line after line of approximately whatever it believed was asked of it.
I take offense to the idea that you wouldn't trust anyone who said they were motivated by "the betterment of the average person." (Not really take offense, more like armchair take offense, but you know what I mean.)

My free time is dedicated to projects that I believe have the potential to improve the world for the greatest number of people. I wrote a few books motivated by this, and then when I became a software engineer I build a few projects motivated by the same.

Examples include messaiah.ai, consciousness.social, multizoa.com, and dex.thesacred.xyz (though that one may not be functional anymore)

Not saying that they did the job - but that won't stop me from trying. Why I do it is a whole other discussion, but if I'm motivated by this, then there must be others, since I can't be THAT unique.

One of the reasons why I became a software engineer was to be able to bring to life projects that I believe have the potential to lead to "betterment for the average person," so...joke's on you :p
> There was a time being smart was considered good and to be admired. Now, stupid people and bullies are society "heros".

Is this true today? It's repeated pretty often, but I have my doubts. It almost seems like it's one of those things that gets repeated through the years ("back in the day, it was cool to be smart, but now we have Idiocracy IRL") over and over.

I might be wrong, but I'm guessing I'm on the younger side here (given your reference to the 70s), having graduated college a few years ago. From looking at my generation and interacting with our successors I get the impression that culture has (for a long time now) kinda shifted towards it being fine and good (if not cool per se) to be smart / a nerd / whatever. If anything it seems like, IDK, 70s and 80s? pop culture had the whole "the jocks vs. the nerds" thing, there were stereotypes of smart people having no friends, it was a social death sentence to have a geeky hobby, etc. That doesn't seem like it's the case anymore. Part of this is probably down to schools not really having centralized, stereotypical "popular kids" anymore, but if I had to pick out popular people from my high school, they were plenty smart. And it was never seen as uncool or weird (outside of jokes) to play video games, play DnD, do theater or robotics, or whatever.

The way people talk about this stuff you'd think the whole 80s movie stereotype of "he's reading a book, what a nerd!" and giving someone a swirly still exists in real life. I don't think I ever saw anything close to that, nor do I ever get that impression from people younger than me. Obviously, this is all super regional and dependent on socioeconomic groups and all that stuff, but I'm just sharing my perspective.

There is, of course, a distinction between being smart/nerdy/geeky/whatever and having crappy social skills. They overlap, obviously (and probably correlate), but they are distinct. The latter was never cool or admirable, and I wonder if people miss that and conflate the two.
I mean, when there's enough financial incentive, all the gatekeeping in the world won't stop the wave of people hoping to get rich. They'll pay off many of the nerds who were thought to be resistant to such means.
I appreciate this survey for how thought-provoking it is. Ironically, I'd say that the survey is itself art. And not a piece of art that AI in it's current state could ever pull off. Maybe that's when the AI art turing test will truly be passed, when AI is capable of curating such a survey.

For me what really distinguished the more obvious human art is that it had a story. It was saying something more than the image itself. This is why Meeting at Krizky stands out as obviously human, and so is The Wounding of Christ whereas muscular man is not.

As with other commenters, I'm surprised the author liked the big gate so much. To me it was one of the easier AI pieces just by virtue of it's composition. It's a big gate. With no clear reason for being there, there are no characters that the gate means something to. It's just a big gate. Obvious slop. Paris scene on the other hand, did convince me. It does a pretty good job of capturing a mood, it sort of feels a bit Lowry but more french impressionist.

I think this has similar parallels to good character writing. A few words of dialogue of action can reveal complex inner beliefs and goals. The absence of those can feel hollow. It's why "have the lambs stopped screaming?" is more compelling than "somehow, palpatine returned".

To some extent, we already have had this competition between human made high art and human made generic slop for hundreds of years. The slop has always been more popular to the chagrin of those that consider high art to be superior. I don't blame anyone for consuming slop. I do. It's fun.

This is a bit of a ramble but I honestly appreciate that this survey genuinely adds another perspective to the question of what art is. Sorry if that sounds extremely pretentious. But then again, I like slop.
The name is familiar, I learned a couple of things from Solène in the Qubes OS forums. Many thanks in case you see this.

I think OpenBSD has a big advantage (to me at least) that it’s the OS I really want to use, but I could never find a place for it for the reasons described. It just doesn’t fit my use cases except on the philosophy department!

In fact I had to leave Qubes OS for different reasons: strange behavior with USB devices, perceptible latency, would not sleep properly when running on battery, Windows VM would freeze on wake up from sleep. Small things but very annoying.

Maybe I just got bad luck with hardware (Thinkpad X260), or I just don’t have the time to troubleshoot it anymore.

Anyway, I’m having a great honeymoon period with OpenSuse now. I’ve chosen it mainly for great filesystem snapshot support. It seems this time everything missing on the repositories are covered on flatpak, and things that usually give me trouble (for example IME support) simply worked. I loved the Xfce theme. I’ll probably be staying for a while.
When choosing my degree back in the mid-1990s, I chose a BEng in Software Engineering, and not a BSc in Computer Science because I wanted to enter a career writing software, not a deep study of the theory of a branch of applied mathematics.

I was fortunate enough to have figured this out for myself, and whenever I met a CS grad in my early career it was obvious that the production of actual software terrified them.

Meanwhile I'd learned how to build (and how not to build), working programs in C including a simple OS on an M68k chip on a VME bus. I struggled with my final year project because it became too theoretical and CS-ish (trying to write a Prolog to SQL interpreter), so my grade took a hit, but I am really glad I entered industry with useful, practical skills that employers valued.

There's always going to be a place for pure CS, I'm glad it exists as a discipline, but more kids should understand the difference, and more colleges should be offering degrees that teach people how to software is built (and how to build software yourself), not just write papers.
Yes; let’s do what the companies and billionaires want in solidarity with our blue collar worker peers. Let’s not stick together and work for the benefit of everyone. We should be demanding better conditions for everybody.
Tech in US created a narrow elite of billionaires. India's story is different
What is this supposed to be telling me? This also looks like it was multiple files concatenated together because there are multiple different header guards throughout the file.
Yea. The world is full of people who have spare money and bedrooms and won’t use it to help others. Those are the bad people.
From a pure numbers perspective, if you work 40 hours/week and commute 3.5 unpaid hours/day, then dropping the commute and taking a 50% pay cut results in only a 28% hourly pay cut and an extra 17.5 hours in your week.

And let’s not forget the gas and car maintenance savings. I reduced my annual driving by about 4,000 miles. My car will also not have to be replaced as soon. I’m also eating cheaper because I’m more likely to make my own lunch rather than eating out. I’m sure there are more expenses like this that add up.

If I could make the finances work, I think I’d take that deal. (I’d be unlikely to sign up for that commute in the first place.)
Another department store squatter here along with my brother. It was crazy to think this is how we learned to program, but it made sense at the time. We went for the ZX Spectrum and eventually wrote our first commercial game for it [1] with the rubber keyboard, it never bothered me.

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bgi6gndpTTs
> But they will not burn foreign reserves to zero

No, of course not. But it's clear they've burned through enough that they've given up trying to prop up the Ruble, as they did in 2022.
You're not getting it.

You ask A "Why did you choose that?" > He answers "I like the color blue"

This makes sense. This is what everyone thinks and believes is the actual sequence of such events.

But often, this is the actual sequence
"Let's go with this" > "Now i like the color blue"

'A' didn't lie to you or try to trick you. He didn't consciously rationalize liking blue after the fact. He's not stupid or "prone to bad thinking". Altering your perceptions of events without your conscious awareness is just simply something that your brain does fairly regularly.

Make no mistake. A genuinely likes blue now - the only difference is that he genuinely believes he made the choice because he liked blue instead of the brain having the tendency to make you favor your choices and giving him the like of blue so it sits better.

This is not something you "check your hypotheses" out of. And it's something every human deals with everyday, including you.
“We will frack, frack, frack and drill, baby, drill,” Trump said in Detroit on Oct. 18. “I will cut your energy prices in half within 12 months. … Cut them in half within 12 months of taking office. That’s going to bring everything down.”
CIS-10: encoding is the essence of the data+algorithms dyad

WORK-n: write an interpreter

WORK-n+1: add indirection

...
Amazon won't accept written communication
We had a bad time with Amazon yesterday, and I can't reach them to tell them about it.

Without getting into details, an Amazon delivery driver did a bad thing on our property, which we only discovered this morning when a neighbor brought it to our attention.

I attempted to write to Amazon, but apparently they no longer accept email at cs-reply@amazon.com, there is no way to post a support ticket, they no longer have chat, and they make it very, very difficult to find a customer service phone number. No, none of their automated support options applied to this particular situation.

Through Googling, I found 1-888-280-4331, the customer service number, but for obvious legal reasons I need to send them a written account of what happened, so I have a record that they were notified.

Short of filing a lawsuit and serving them with a complaint, how do I reach these people?

And more generally, when a large FAANG company makes it nearly impossible to communicate with them, is this not evidence of bad-faith dealing, and should consumer protection agencies come down hard on them?
Has no one here read Harari's s latest book, Nexus?
Our final CS course, Operating Systems, was in C, after all the previous courses were in Pascal. Luckily, I had already gotten access to various Unix systems and had taught myself C (thanks, K&R !!). And I say luckily because it was expecially lucky for my SWE group members who would otherwise have not graduated. I was already 10x at that point because of early access and passion for the craft. Most if not all of them had already decided that programming was not their career path, so it was in everyone's benefit and happiness.

Funny enough, there was no version control at our uni (a pretty good one, but not primarily technical), and that OS we tweaked for the course was the current version of Tanenbaum's Minix that Linus transformed into Linux. 20 minutes for a recompile and test loop to fix that stupid mistake in the semaphore logic was painful, but that's life on a 286.

It took real passion to want to bang through that learning curve. It really weeded out the folks who were just looking for an engineering job, at least for the handful (4) of people I knew in the program.
I do not think that porn and flash games were the reason the internet became trendy and stupid. I blame social media, like tuenti, facebook, fotolog, hi5, even myspace.

The thing with stupid people overcoming the internet was not corporations investing on publicity nor searching engines selling the rankibgs of searching results. What made stupidity feel safe on internet and become trending, were the spaces that allowed those people to gather, to be in "the same place" with no one there to judge, correct them and laugh at them for being ignorants. This gave them the wrong idea that they were relevant in a sense were despite knowing nothing about anything, their opinion was valid and deserved respect, as much as the opinions from experts.
Weird, i totally cannot relate. I don't see decay around me. The decay is mostly the geopolitical situation in several places in the world, together with climate change. If it were not in the news, i wouldn't even know.
By that definition, communist are also fascist?
Bullies with social skills are much worse than those without.
Tardigrades were placed in the "extremophile" class with good reason. If anything could survive a truly catastrophic impact event, I'd say the smart money goes on the lowly "water bear" to win. :)
Look I would love for that to be true, but that’s not how it works. The “natural state” of social media would be that observed without any interference, but things on social media get attention because they get recommended by algorithms. This constitutes interference in that “natural evolution,” interference which selects the thing being optimized for by the process of evolution. It’s not just attention grabbing, it’s attention holding, engagement maximizing, etc. That’s why tiktok slop is both highly stimulating and not highly stimulating enough to drive users off the platform. It has evolved to maximize what the company wants. There’s nothing natural about this process.
Firing Federal workers so that ultra-rich people can do whatever they want without any oversight, while at the same time undermining the rule of law, and creating a scapegoat ("illegal immigrants") at the same time - that's literally fascism.
"In retrospect it was extremely arrogant of us 90's nerds to think that the bullies and autocrats and sleazebags of the world were too stupid to figure out how to use the Internet to their own ends"

Or that nerds are not immune to become "bullies and autocrats and sleazebags" themself. I mean, why should love for technology, translate into consistent love for people?

Because so many nerds were treated badly and should know better, how to behave, once in power?

Sadly it is quite known, that people who suffered are likely to cause suffering as well, unless they really processed it all.

So it is a good thing, that therapy looses its stigma. Because people can change as well.
Both in and out of education, "it's" always means "it is" or "it has".
My catchphrase for a while has been "business ruins everything it touches." And before someone swoops in to try and convince me otherwise, save your breath. I'm not interested in hearing the positives of business, I will ignore outright anything pointing to "you wouldn't have THIS without business!"-type replies, and I don't want to reduce this thought further.

From my perspective, business ruins everything it touches, whether right away or slowly over time through enshittification.
Tunable ultrasound propagation in microscale metamaterials
The point is distinguish the baby from the dirt water. Bit tech is the dirt water, IT is the baby. The fact that most developments these days and since some decades is purely commercial by giants does not means IT is distopic.

The fact giants push modern and worse mainframes (the cloud/mainframe + mobile/dumb terminal) to retain control, "you'll own nothing", and to sell fast-tech crap instead of long lasting, partially upgradable desktops, does not meas that's the tech, it's just a commercial choice.

The main issue is not even technical but political: on one side giants needs slaves to prosper, so people who depend on them, who own nothing, who consume the 100% of what they earn in services and so on, while nature and the civil society needs Distributism. From the '900s -ism we have dropped most of such "giant-centric" way of thinking, it's about time do drop a bit more.
I wonder if NASA will still existing in 2028.
Give them the time and budget to build it like a bridge then. Oh wait, your competitors beat you to market by several years.

Making people work 24/7 is not conducive to good anything, thus on call is a terrible way to do things.
On a spectrum he is definitely in that direction. There are many examples but a few:

a) Publicly shamed a civil servant with full knowledge it would drive the violent elements of his supporters to attack her. I've never seen this before in US politics where an innocent party was targeted this way and clearly it was done to drive fear within the government.

b) Has constantly promoted false stories about immigrants, black people, trans people, women etc. The narrative being that the US is a zero sum game where in order for non-white males to succeed white-males must lose.

c) I run Twitter business accounts which are post-only and every single one shifted hard towards showing ultra-right wing political content in the For You feed. There is no doubt that the platform was used as a propaganda tool during the last election.
Computer Science is to Software Engineering as Physics is to Civil Engineering.

Software Engineering is to programming as Civil Engineering is to construction.
That's because the big energy sources are in northwest China, and the big loads are in southeast China near the coast.

The US should have similar lines running east and west from the wind belt, which runs roughly from the Texas panhandle to the Canadian border. There's not enough transmission capacity out of that region. Some of this is due to opposition from the oil industry.
I think the word for what is about to happen is not yet invented. It will be something else, something with dire consequences but of a different kind. Something that leaves everyone but a thin elite completely behind. Some may say it has been like this a long time, but I think it will evolve/level up to something we have never seen before.

Some call what they fear to come is fascism, but I think it will be inaccurate. Oligarchism maybe. Or something new.
What the Mesopotamians Had for Dinner
sure but they're both cool bugs so they belong together imo
The interior of my 3d printed parts has that exact gyroid pattern by the way. They put that in SuperSlicer, and presumably in PrusaSlicer, because it is really easy to print by running wiggly lines along x and y direction. Works great.
What they mean is they use GPS to get their current coordinates, and then superimpose that on old maps. Because without GPS, how does the Allmaps Here app get your coordinates in order to plot it on old maps?
Ah, so "polling" means "their attitude towards a political candidate who voices a wide range of policy positions, which it may not be reasonable to assume uniform agreement with" ?

This approach to "polling" also appears to ignore the fact that statistically speaking, almost half "the population" made the opposite choice. This makes sweeping statements about "what people want" based on this sort of thing pretty suspect.

Of course, the claim could be true, nevertheless. This sort of "evidence" isn't really very salient, however.
XFS on longhorn is double trouble for me. And mostly what made me realize XFS is trash.

I use longhorn on ext4 and never have issues at all
If it's sensational enough and you have evidence, you might write to your local news station. PR issues tend to get swift attention.
Musk doesn't need to do the heavy lifting himself.

He can just direct his supporters to violently attack opposition:

https://www.theverge.com/2024/11/22/24303594/elon-musk-haras...
> I feel like you aren't reading this in context?

That's a strange interpretation of a citation of the last footnote, as if I hadn't read the entire article.

> those efforts are not enough

But I'm stating that those so-called "efforts" are mostly just propaganda to whitewash the vast amount of bad done by the perpetrators and can only naively be interpeted as using "their money for good".
Car manufacturers barely make money on the smaller high volume cars - eg. Mercedes only makes real profit starting with the E-class and up.
A lot of the people I recall interacting with on Usenet in the mid 1990s were very much grown up, graduated, far away from “mom”, and employed as developers or uni staff somewhere. However, they still enjoyed hacking, either out of pure fun or FOSS idealism, and without monetary reward very much in mind. I think that the OP is on to something when he says that the economic environment changed, and this led to nerd things being seen through a much more mercenary lens.

Even the major “news for nerds” site in the early years of the new millennium, Slashdot, where there was awareness that FOSS was now fueling major economic growth, did not yet have the same overwhelming culture of startups, venture capital, megacorps, and hustling as the venue we’re conversing on now.