skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As a liberal/left/progressive person who agrees with many of the ideas "woke" people are pushing, I find "wokeism" extremely problematic.

We need to put to bed the notion that criticizing some aspect of a social phenomenon somehow means someone is wholly endorsing the worst elements of the opposition.

Personally, I believe "wokeism" (I hesitate to even use this word because it's poorly defined) is actually one of the largest impediments to moving society towards the ideas generally associated with the word. It's a tactics issue.

The difference between "We want the world to look more like X" and "Let's do these specific things to make the world look more like X" is critical. How you go about the latter can have a huge impact on the former.
'against the storm' is an interesting twist on the genre, if you haven't checked that one out yet
> saying "colored people" gets you fired
@malcomgreaves I'm not sure you caught the intended target of @cle's comment. I believe he was talking about your comment being the thing he thought may be intentionally ironic, not PG's essay.

One of the main points in the essay: "The problem with political correctness was not that it focused on marginalized groups, but the shallow, aggressive way in which it did so"

And your comment is a classic example of that behavior.
That's a good reason to write an essay. I think the present case illustrates that it's not a sufficient reason to publish it.
Sure, for some meaning of "work" we've been there already for decades. I don't think anyone is doubting that AI can increase productivity (and in this sense, displace midlevel engineers) but I don't see any reason to suspect that AI can replace a given engineer.
Pretty sure the c64 did the same thing...
This comment is historically and intellectually uninformed, i.e., devoid of understanding about the antecedents and relationships between what is driving todays rise of the right, which is a populist counterrevolution to the 60s and beyond’s postmodernism-fueled culture wars, which elevated the marginalized and women, and served as a strategic distraction while the elite locked in wealth extract ion from below and minority rule by manufacturing a pervasive epistemic crisis.
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That we agree with. There is a huge difference between “we need to allocate funds for mental health and other societal ills that cause people to be incarcerated and we need to have more accountable for police misconduct” and “defund the police”.
they’re not negroes, they’re colored

they’re not colored, they’re African-American

they’re not African-American, they’re black

they’re not black, they’re Black

they’re not Black, they’re People of Color

they’re not People of Color, they’re BIPOC

I wonder what the next twist of the pretzel will look like
I’ve definitely seen a pattern in business where some guy effectively wins the lottery, and the business world puts him on a throne, gives him endless capital, and listens breathlessly to his musings about how to successfully win the lottery.
Trump is the "solution" to the problem of militant radical Neo-Marxism or whatever you want to call it. He exist in a world where the Overton window sits comfortably over the destruction of the entire western world by the hand of communists bent on burning down the world to rule over the ashes. When everything is bent into identity politics, for good or ill those that can manage their image will thrive. And Trump is very good at managing the Trump brand.
In every American community there are varying shades of political opinion. One of the shadiest of these is the liberals. An outspoken group on many subjects, ten degrees to the left of center in good times, ten degrees to the right of center if it affects them personally. Here, then, is a lesson in safe logic.

Phil Ochs
Can you prove it? Do you have any proof that Twitter promotes right leaning views more than left leaning ones?

"When You’re Accustomed to Privilege, Equality Feels Like Oppression"

Twitter was discriminating against right leaning views. Extreme far left views (like communism) were absolutely OK and widespread on Twitter. If one had as extreme right leaning views, he would be shadowbanned, reprioritised etc.

What is Twitter now is a fair game. Every voice is heard the same. What Twitter is doing now should have been the norm the whole time.

And the same is true for all major social networks, search engines, public funded media, universities and other organizations. When only leftists get their voice heard, they got used to it. Loosing this privilege looks like discrimination, doesn't it?
The existance of cargo cults is a fact, I never denied that. The point is that there seems to be no credible evidence for the specific example that Feynman gives. Or should I just take his word?
> the fact he spends this much time thinking about wokeness

This is the first and only article I recall from PG about wokeness, is it part of some anthology that I've missed or where are you getting the "this much time" part from?
I say this half-jokingly, but only half: Zuck's on TRT now and thinking much more clearly.
> Caffeine and theobromine

We still don't fully understand how they work. Of course, we didn't make them, nature did.

> amphetamines

Those break more than enhance.

> LLMs already do that

As I said, disqualified for being a cauldron of souls.

> How is this supposed to be different from what LLMs already do?

My requirements enforce a no human content during training. It's exactly that requirement that makes the test easy. If you allow human content to be part of it, then tests become ellusive.

> What did you actually mean? Be specific, be testable.

I'm saying that LLMs are the spiritual successor to the mechanical turk. The entire concept falls apart if you take the human part of it out.

There are living humans that had their works put inside and are publicly saying "I don't want to be inside this machine". What more do you want?

Yes, they are impressive. I already said that. It's just not intelligence, it's an almost mythological trick we should have been more guarded against.
A corollary to this is always have a good roll-back plan. It's much nicer to be able to roll-back to a working version and then be able to debug without the crisis-level pressure.
Why exactly is that a terrible outcome? What's wrong with boring white dudes?
The reason the clothing dumps exist is greenwashing. If we weren't pretending that reusing clothing is meaningful to the environment, we'd just burn the clothing locally.
Being this judgemental is sad. But as you said it reflects on your ability to square his decisions with the situation.
>Mobile operating systems don't have good (if any) support for opening things in subprocesses with restricted permissions from the rest of the app. [...]

>And the thing is, ads are a bottomless pit of third-party JavaScript. [...]

If it's actually javascript, attempting to grab location would result in a weird location prompt[1] that shows even if you granted the app location permission. It's still conceivable for a random SDK to go rogue and exfiltrate location data, but it's unlikely that an ad in a webview would be able to.

[1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/39665367/how-to-prevent-...
https://www.reddit.com/answers
Awesome. One can never have enough Bad Apples!
STalker / fAN. I think it’s attributable to the Eminem son Stan about a stalker. Likely even predates that.
The problem with words like "woke" is that there is no agreement on what it means. One sides it means this another says it means that. I think whatever it means to you shows truly what you believe. I don't use this word because it means nothing to me and I use more specific words to better communicate.

"Cancel Culture" has agreement on what it is, but one side says only the other side does it while doing it themselves. Give me a break. I just don't care enough about this.

Feminism, Privilege, gaslighting, toxic, DEI, etc. These words are perverted to mean whatever people want it to mean these days. Sometimes there is agreement other times there are not. DEI means inclusion spaces to one and exclusion/racism/sexism/ageism to another.

To address one part of the article about moral purity, again give me a break. We all have our compasses and will typically react with disgust to those who don't follow. Some people share some vague sense of moral compasses. You see it everywhere, not just politics. The spreading of outrage via the mainstream via internet and media outlets is really what has changed.

America, in its history, has had mobs that would be "woke" in today's culture apparently. Social media mobs are nothing fundamentally different.

Also, Twitter under Elon did censor people and ban words causing them to move to Mastodon and Threads before Bluesky, so let's not whitewash the suppression of "free speech" under him by saying that all he did was give more visibility to paying members when in fact it's what they settled on.

If PG actually wants better examples of moral purity and pushback against it, he can get in touch. Some of these examples are just not it.
You must have spent a lot of time studying them to reach your conclusion.
I have had very mixed experiences when suspending a laptop using Windows, various Linux distributions, MacOS and Windows 7-11. MacOS is the most polished yet, but Linux (kernel 2.4 to 6.8) has never nailed this. Often times the kernel refuses to sleep and the laptop will hotbox in the bag until the battery runs out. The same has happened on the other OSes, but less often.

It looks like this particular FreeBSD installation (we don't know if it's out of the box or customized, and haven't seen it side by side with another hardware setup) works very well. Wonder if the results are the same if they closed the lid rather than remembering to press the button. Also, I wonder why this doesn't trigger any authentication when starting back up. Anyone could snatch that laptop and still be logged in.
> i.e. the morality of homelessness and not having a disdain for them but empathy for them instead.

> people on the American political right see it as what this website describes it as “ A self-righteously moralistic person who behaves as if superior to others.”

I think those are just two perspectives on the same situation. “wokeness” is realizing we should be treating people better and “anti-wokness” is people feeling called out by that.

People tend not to like it being pointed out that they are assholes, especially when they know it’s true. That’s pretty much the whole “anti-woke” thing in a nut.
The cargo cult metaphor has very little content: there are about two main ingredients in it, based on these features of the anecdote:

1. Foreigners visit island, riding on flying machines, bearing mysterious technology and products.

2. Foreigners disappear.

3. Locals worship foreigners as gods, develop a legend that foreigners will return, and use ad hoc hand-made objects whose shape resembles foreigners' technology to summon them, such as model airplanes made of bamboo, or pretend radios.

It might all be based on a single anecdote, and that is obvious to anyone with two brain cells. There might have been as few as one actual "cargo cult". I don't suspect anyone believes there were anywhere near half a dozen of these, let alone tens or a hundred or more.

A single anecdote is enough for a working metaphor.

The Great Hanoi Rat Massacre was one particular episode in history, in one place in the world. Yet we can bring up that name in any situation where the wrong incentives backfire.
> Since then, over the years, China got flooded with Western-style junk food, like Pepsi/Coke, KFC, McDonalds, and so on. And now, obesity is an actual thing in China

China also got rich in that time. Do we have counterfactuals with which to disentangle Western food from wealth?
It’s not an accounting/bookkeeping thing. I can’t record expenses there, generate PnL reports, etc.
This reminds me of the discussion of whether if open source AI models are open source or not, when the training data is not available to the public.
I think the big shift was in cancel culture, doxing, swatting, and all that stuff starting to rise, which is all relatively recent.

A moralistic ideology acting holier than thou is nothing new. In the 80s (and for sure time after) evangelicals had their "Moral Majority."

But nobody really cares until an ideology starts regularly driving harmful actions, at which point there starts to be a lot more push back.
> The problem is that you are creating an echo chamber.

How's that? Bluesky, say, has a fair bit of diverse opinion. It's low on the far-right (though there are certainly some; I subscribe to a few blocklists to filter their nonsense out), which has a bit of a personal affinity for Musk, but to an extent, y'know, who needs 'em? Like, it is not the case that there exist two opinions, far-right lunacy and everything else; the non-far-right segment contains multitudes.
Most of them have just been handing Trump one million bucks of protection money. There is really no need to go above and beyond and post an article like this, Trump isn't even going to read it.
Then explicitly say "PG should stick to topics in his domain", don't use a generic term that indicates low IQ...
Wil Wheaton explains why we should separate art from artists (2024)
I was hoping to introduce my old “donging through the millennia” thesis work and ride that hobby horse around the room a little :(
Thank you, this is what I've been trying to say for awhile now.

It feels like people are assuming that there's only so much work that can actually be done, and I don't think that's what happens in practice; instead we figure out how to exploit the resources more instead of doing "the same with less".

Basically I feel most people are not thinking in terms of Gustafson's Law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustafson%27s_law
The point of an engineer isn't just "to write code." You pay engineers to understand the systems they work with. Code is incidental.
AI will never replace bridge salesmen.
>Free and open-source software (FOSS) or free/libre and open-source software (FLOSS) is openly shared source code that is licensed without any restrictions on usage, modification, or distribution. Confusion persists about this definition because the "free", also known as "libre", refers to the freedom of the product, not the price, expense, cost, or charge. For example, "being free to speak" is not the same as "free beer".

I generally think of open source as where I can see the code and freely modify it, not necessarily freely commercialize it on my own.
It just amazing to see how the new Trump administration prepares to take over, all the Tech Bros suddenly are coming out of their shell.

Musk on DEI. Zuckerberg just got back to his Misogynistic persona of the first days of Facebook. Peter Thiel published an editorial in the FT last week talking about conspiracy theories on JFK, and now...The attack on Wokeness... Cherry-picking historical examples, misrepresenting real power dynamics, and dismissing genuine social concerns as mere “performative” gestures. All while coming from a privileged VC perspective that notoriously funnels opportunities to the same elite circles...
What nonsense is this? The St. Louis Federal Reserve documented most inflation was due to profit seeking (gouging), not QE—that’s right wing libertarian drivel.
I've gradually moved over to Mastodon for most of my posting. The pocket of Fedi I reside within (queer fedi) is quite nice.

Last year, I seriously started using Bluesky. It's okay, but a little too much like "old Twitter" for my tastes. I still use it, but my most interesting posts go on Fedi.

This is all to say, Bluesky has replaced Twitter for me, but I was already phasing it out.
> The people on the left, while far from perfect, are generally morally superior to those on the right.

Do you have evidence of this claim? If not, your stance is factually incorrect. I have evidence of the opposite [1].

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34429211/
Maybe, maybe not: there is not a lot of protein in rice, and it might be that whatever process is used to extract the protein from the rice also extracts most of the arsenic and that the process of making white rice (again, the kind most Americans eat) gets rid of most of the arsenic, making rice-protein powder much higher in arsenic than the same amount of calories of white rice.
I flipped the Bozo Bit on Paul Graham a long time ago. But if I hadn't then, I would now. I simply do not care to know what yet another tech industry financier thinks about "wokeness". Or, indeed, whatever anyone involved with startup culture thinks they know about history, culture, or philosophy of any sort - it's always just a distillation of their class interest dressed up to look profound to people who tried hard to avoid classes in the arts and sciences.
>Whatever else you think of him, he's an incredibly concise and persuasive writer.

This is not a concise essay.
what's an example here of unfair cancellation that you are thinking about? I feel that most of those who have been "cancelled" have been so because of fairly egregious stuff like sexual assault, clearly racist speech, etc.
Hhahaha! Thought the same! We'll see if AI fits into this some day!
Weren't a number of the accounts that Elon reinstated just overt white supremacists? Like, yes, by "not censoring" white supremacy, there are some causally correlated effects for what the far right considers "wokeness" on that platform.
Sorry, can you back this up with some data and specificity?

I understand that you feel Musk is aligned with the far right; my question is what exactly is Musk doing with twitter, and (other than when people take the piss against him personally) how is he removing free speech that is not "far right"?

I'm genuinely interested in the details -- and they are hard to come by.
The Elgin marbles are named for the Scottish noble who purloined them. It as much a British thing as it is an English one.
Does social search just filter by Reddit and LinkedIn? It doesn't do anything fancier than that? It also doesn't search HN or X?
Are there viable alternatives to HN? I'm pretty sick of PG and Altman's influence.

They aren't good people.
This is one the reasons I love FreeBSD. You boot up a fresh install of FreeBSD and there are only a couple processes running and I know what each of them does / why they are there.
This has arguably been happening with all fields since the beginning of time.

Mere literacy used to qualify you for a management role. I am not sure you could get a job of any kind without being able to read and write now. It gets replaced with more time spent in specialized education.
What I find funny is that PG thinks he is a thinker who breaks the rules. No PG, you and your friends write the rules. Wokeness is about acknowledging the game is rigged against black people and others. But go ahead PG, redefine it as political correctness, then write an essay about how the current system is actually good.

The reason wokeness scares the elite like PG is because it targets the system they themselves helped create.
But not arrested.

Freedom of association is a thing.
The defining work on this subject is “Industrial Society and its Future” by Ted Kaczynski. Where he says “leftism” say “woke” and you have it.

This always needs to be followed by a condemnation of his violent methods, but that has been used as a way to avoid dealing with his horribly on point diagnosis of the problem.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Society_and_Its_F...
There’s so much mumbo jumbo on that platform that it might as well be the case?

Would be great to know what’s the day of a mid-level engineer at meta like.
Does this mean it has already replaced their bottom level engineers?
> but for some reason decided not to make integer types available to programmers.

Can you expand upon this? All of the research I've done suggest that, not only was it was possible to use integer math in Basic for the Apple II, there are versions of BASIC that only support integers.
Nobody wants your shitty AI implementation. But we did finally get more ram so that’s a win
Liberal =/= leftist
Having been on linux laptops for ~20 years, I've found this to be really h/w dependent.

I've mostly run thinkpads, and they've mostly worked. My current T16 not only suspendds/resumes well, I also successfully use full disk encryption recovery on boot from hibernate.
This is great and the spiciest take buried within what you mention is the following (Christian) POV:

People inherently need meaning to function and if a postmodern society insists that there is none, life is a tabula rasa, and religion is basically the projection of the mind, then people will begin building new religions and even “a-religious” religions to substitute for this lack.

Personally, I disagree with the overall tack that leftism is always and inherently religious but the elements which are come from exactly the void you’ve described, just blown up to the level of society.

Business leaders would be wise to set a vision for their companies that creates meaning and even, yes, acknowledges the transcendent in how they do that. People seem wired to want this and pretending we are all too reasonable to need meaning isn’t getting us anywhere.
have you actually read the twitter files? doubt that you did and also wrote this comment. you can also just read the above-the-fold part of the link you provided ... :)
You're clearly passionate about social justice. But pretending it's just 'being nice' and everyone who disagrees is evil? That's exactly the kind of oversimplified thinking that stops real progress and actually causes evil.

Movements for social change are messy. They involve hard trade-offs, heated debates about methods, and yeah, sometimes people on 'your side' screw up or take things too far. Pretending otherwise doesn't help anyone.

And the history is just wrong - 'stay woke' wasn't forced on anyone. People chose it proudly before it became contentious. You're rewriting history to avoid engaging with actual criticism.

You can fight for what you believe in without pretending you're in a morality play where the good guys are pure and the bad guys twirl their mustaches. Real life is more complicated than that.
How is this anything other than self-flattery? It's also a huge moral hazard. Once one defines themselves as "morally superior" to a group of people it becomes easy to justify truly immoral behavior against them.
There is no world where people imitate a southern accent as a form of “flattery” any more than when a White person immitates how they perceive Black people talking or how imitating Indian accents use to be the norm.

Of course the exception I can think of for imitating southern accents would be acting
Yeah, I agree. Not to mention TPUs and ASICS for AI.
Again, it goes beyond that. Respecting a person and demanding people adopt certain beliefs[1] are two separate things.

And yes, these people exist and should obviously be treated with respect as people. that doesn't necessitate an alignment in beliefs, however.

1. Eg. what is a man/woman?
I don’t disagree on that point; that's what "openly" means.
>> frees up resources for the remaining engineers to work on something more interesting.

Or forces them to waste all their time babysitting the "AI" workers that can't do basic tasks.
This whole "AI replacing engineers" statement would bear a lot more weight if it came from a company that doesn't have in-house model development teams like Shopify and Meta.
If I could answer that question to everyone's satisfaction, I'm not some rando on the internet.

But the justification for a lot of the incentives we give capital is "they shoulder all of the risk", and when your risk is walking away with a severance package that is often many multiples of the median lifetime earnings of the American male, you aren't really dealing with any real risk.
RE Zuckerberg - How about AI to replace his own role?
Building multiagent systems for intelligent test automation
Britain deploys quantum clocks for military systems