News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

00F_

just booked more nights
im sharing a room with another HN user. 3 ways would be even cheaper.
ive made a reservation with another user. show up at the lighthouse inn on south padre island the night of the 16th for a raging party and to save money on a room
for me, not being able to harass a comment from directly below takes a lot of the visceral enjoyment out of it. but ok.
why not lock replies in such threads to being non-repliable? its not the initial comments or the replies but the giant argument chains that are the problem. or you could allow arguments but offload them to twitter spaces or another real-time platform thats well-suited to such nonsense.
i was at south padre island for the first startship landing. even though it blew up a minute or two after it landed, i consider it the first landing. i had seen pretty much every major launch from spacex on their livestreams but i was still taken aback at seeing starship. its as odd as watching a skyscraper slowly levitate upward into the sky. and to see it standing after the dust settled was unreal. and after it was over people shuffled away and even i was halfway to my car when we heard the explosion. i thought it was a sonic boom or something and only later realized it had blown up because by that time the landing pad was well out of sight. i got a crazy sunburn.

im not sure if im even going to attempt to see the next launch in person because i think it will be absolutely thronged. finding a hotel room, parking, even a good spot in the grass come launch time. its going to be a fucking mad house. if some people here want to split a hotel room then i might consider it. hotels can really add up because they can scrub or cancel or whatever and youre just stuck there. i think there were a couple scrubs on my last go too. my advice to anyone who goes: bring sunscreen and a really good pair of binoculars.

Re:Elizabeth Holmes loses bid to stay out of prison on Friday April 14, 2023 @06:20PM (#35575571)
no, youre not going to engage because you know youre wrong. high volume drive by wire is way different than millions of dollars jet fly by wire systems. and it doesnt matter anyway because it was one of countless systems that were tested on the road. hydraulic brakes. for a long time half the industry wouldnt trust them because it was too out-there. and yes, these systems are developed and tested in house and safety measures are put in place, all true with fsd i should add, but putting them out there on real roads in thousands or millions of vehicles is not something you can ever test for. the simple and plain fact is that when you deploy these kinds of system updates at scale, there is risk. so far, fsd has proven a lot less risky than other systems deployed by other auto manufacturers because there have been many recalls and many deaths associated with systems that did not pass the at-scale test and none of those are fsd related. there are some articles that try to attribute a crash or fatality to a malfunction of fsd but none of them have panned out. its bullshit. and even if they were all true, it would still probably not be the most dangerous system thats been deployed at scale in recent times. but its not true...

ABUSING YOUR FLAGGING PRIVS IS RUDE, DISHONEST AND SHAMEFUL. A PERSON AS OLD AS YOU SHOULD KNOW BETTER

Re:Elizabeth Holmes loses bid to stay out of prison on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @08:26PM (#35533559)
you seem passionate and knowlegable about this so i will ask you. i want to know more about the API changes. detractors say that it was at best an irresponsible change to the API that inconvenienced companies that use it. proponents say that musk simply stopped making the API free which was always unsustainable and people should have known better. what was really going on?
Re:Elizabeth Holmes loses bid to stay out of prison on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @08:04PM (#35533404)
no, youre not going to engage because you know youre wrong. high volume drive by wire is way different than millions of dollars jet fly by wire systems. and it doesnt matter anyway because it was one of countless systems that were tested on the road. hydraulic brakes. for a long time half the industry wouldnt trust them because it was too out-there. and yes, these systems are developed and tested in house and safety measures are put in place, all true with fsd i should add, but putting them out there on real roads in thousands or millions of vehicles is not something you can ever test for. the simple and plain fact is that when you deploy these kinds of system updates at scale, there is risk. so far, fsd has proven a lot less risky than other systems deployed by other auto manufacturers because there have been many recalls and many deaths associated with systems that did not pass the at-scale test and none of those are fsd related. there are some articles that try to attribute a crash or fatality to a malfunction of fsd but none of them have panned out. its bullshit. and even if they were all true, it would still probably not be the most dangerous system thats been deployed at scale in recent times. but its not true...

stop abusing your flagging privs!

Re:Elizabeth Holmes loses bid to stay out of prison on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @05:20PM (#35531735)
no, youre not going to engage because you know youre wrong. high volume drive by wire is way different than millions of dollars jet fly by wire systems. and it doesnt matter anyway because it was one of countless systems that were tested on the road. hydraulic brakes. for a long time half the industry wouldnt trust them because it was too out-there. and yes, these systems are developed and tested in house and safety measures are put in place, all true with fsd i should add, but putting them out there on real roads in thousands or millions of vehicles is not something you can ever test for. the simple and plain fact is that when you deploy these kinds of system updates at scale, there is risk. so far, fsd has proven a lot less risky than other systems deployed by other auto manufacturers because there have been many recalls and many deaths associated with systems that did not pass the at-scale test and none of those are fsd related. there are some articles that try to attribute a crash or fatality to a malfunction of fsd but none of them have panned out. its bullshit. and even if they were all true, it would still probably not be the most dangerous system thats been deployed at scale in recent times. but its not true...

you cant flag me if i dont break the rules

Re:Elizabeth Holmes loses bid to stay out of prison on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @05:18PM (#35531715)
these compromises are productive and show that you do come from a place of intellectual honesty.

if the federal government had been tasked with overseeing the early versions of fsd, it would have been swiftly shut down because of the nature of the federal government, not to mention the politics. but thanks to the private sector we now have modern fsd which is bar none the most advanced and capable self-driving solution in the world. now that self driving has gotten this far, its probably much less likely to be aborted if subjected to government intervention and oversight. in light of the huge benefits that self-driving cars stand to create, measured in human lives, compromise is the only rational proposal. shutting down fsd like mouth-breathing internet commenters talk about would be objectively wrong given the state of its competitors and the nature of the problem.

Re:Elizabeth Holmes loses bid to stay out of prison on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @03:54PM (#35530589)
so where is your proposal to limit the passengers of a self driving car, all of the countless brands who are advertising level 2 systems? where is your proposal for compromise? there are none because nobody who likes pouring cold water on tesla is coming from a place of intellectual honesty.

so self driving cars could only exist for a billionaires profit? how about for the countless lives that will be saved by this technology? tens of thousands of people die every year. cmon dude.

Re:Elizabeth Holmes loses bid to stay out of prison on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @03:36PM (#35530304)
no, youre not going to engage because you know youre wrong. high volume drive by wire is way different than millions of dollars jet fly by wire systems. and it doesnt matter anyway because it was one of countless systems that were tested on the road. hydraulic brakes. for a long time half the industry wouldnt trust them because it was too out-there. and yes, these systems are developed and tested in house and safety measures are put in place, all true with fsd i should add, but putting them out there on real roads in thousands or millions of vehicles is not something you can ever test for. the simple and plain fact is that when you deploy these kinds of system updates at scale, there is risk. so far, fsd has proven a lot less risky than other systems deployed by other auto manufacturers because there have been many recalls and many deaths associated with systems that did not pass the at-scale test and none of those are fsd related. there are some articles that try to attribute a crash or fatality to a malfunction of fsd but none of them have panned out. its bullshit. and even if they were all true, it would still probably not be the most dangerous system thats been deployed at scale in recent times. but its not true...
Re:Elizabeth Holmes loses bid to stay out of prison on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @03:25PM (#35530132)
so when you have a student driver, or a new driver, the lives of not just them but the people around them are being risked just to test a system. so we should just stop all new drivers. no more new drivers. because a new driver, especially a teenage one, is orders of magnitude more dangerous than the current fsd.
Re:Elizabeth Holmes loses bid to stay out of prison on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @03:21PM (#35530051)
so when they introduced drive by wire, and just put it out there on the roads without telling anyone, that was reckless? or any of the countless other designs that have led us to the modern cars we have now? how about all the severe recalls, not over the air recalls that tesla gets press for but real safety issues? GM and the others have tons and tons of real physical safety recalls, way more than tesla, and thats not shoddy to you? thats not reckless to you? thats foolish. fsd as it is now probably drives more safely than a teenager. so do you want to take all teenagers off the road? and where is your crusade against drunk driving which kills way, way more people than fsd ever will every single year. doesnt bother you. no, your issue isnt with safety or with ethics or principles or anything like that. your issue is with elon musk. because you read brain-rot mainstream media all day who use lies and misdirection to paint elon musk and tesla as evil.
Re:Elizabeth Holmes loses bid to stay out of prison on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @03:13PM (#35529900)
wrong. watch the latest FSD videos. FSD has proved all the detractors wrong. it drives unbelievably well. and the rate of improvement is astounding. this comment might have been valid a few years ago but not anymore.
Re:Elizabeth Holmes loses bid to stay out of prison on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @03:09PM (#35529853)
how amazingly ignorant you are. youre the kind of person who thinks all rich people are idiots and all rich people just inherited their money. your world is filled with two dimensional characters and everything is a conspiracy. poor people are simply the victims of grand conspiracies that are designed to hold them down. you sad fool.

anyway, you are insanely ignorant. these people, who were probably smarter than you, have a job in society. that job is capital allocation. in communist countries, there is no private capital allocation and those countries implode. the job must come down to 'idiot rich people.' capital allocation is what powers everything in our economy. we couldnt have anything without it. we couldnt have your iphone. the screen youre reading this on. the servers that will transport this message to you. its fundamental. people like holmes damage our capital allocation ecosystem. sure, holmes by herself didnt lead to an economic collapse, but an individual bank robber doesnt cause the banking system to collapse. its extremely important that people who commit crimes that chip away at these fundamental pieces of societal infrastructure are punished in a way that provides very compelling disincentive. 11 years for the damage she did to progressive womens movements, for the medical malpractice, for destroying all the unbelievably useful and worthwhile things that could have been done with those billions and all the lives that she touched. she should at least be separated from society for the rest of her life.

Re:Why human societies developed so little during 300k years on Saturday April 08, 2023 @12:46PM (#35495099)
its too bad youre an underpaid teacher. isnt it fun to take cheap shots at people who dont deserve it?
Re:Why human societies developed so little during 300k years on Saturday April 08, 2023 @12:39PM (#35495026)
i dont trust anyone who has a fancy media head-shot. i clicked on the link and before i had a chance to read anything i was confronted by a giant head-shot of a guy who is trying to look sophisticated -- a person who is clearly very concerned with his brand. at that point reading on is pointless because i already know that this person will never say anything that would threaten that brand, nothing that goes against the current societal dogma. and its likely that what he writes optimizes for reader engagement over truth.

even though the headshot is not of the author, everything i said is still true! you cant flag a comment that hasnt broken the rules.

Re:Why human societies developed so little during 300k years on Saturday April 08, 2023 @12:36PM (#35494996)
why did you flag my comment? you realize flagging is for breaking the rules, right?
Re:Why human societies developed so little during 300k years on Saturday April 08, 2023 @12:35PM (#35494981)
youre right. change what i said to being about that scientist instead of the article author. unless the author has a head-shot stashed away somewhere.
Re:ChatGPT – The Revolutionary Bullshit Parrot on Friday March 31, 2023 @04:25PM (#35393098)
when someone says stochastic parrot my brain turns off. here is an article that punctuates each section with a meme. you dont need to read it to dismiss it. i did read it though. there is literally nothing of substance in it. i rightly assert that the safety of AI research must be proven before any more progress is allowed to happen. the burden of proof is on them, not me. i think if this guy wrote an article where he picks apart the black blob of gtp4, explaining how it might work and then making some kind of axiomatic argument for safety based on this, i would find that to be very convincing. but instead i get meme pictures. does this guy write bots or is he a bot himself?
demur, not demure
Re:GPT-4 on Wednesday March 15, 2023 @05:27PM (#35174969)
no, the highest level purpose of an economy is to ensure the survival and growth of the meta-organism that hosts it. it figures out the most efficient way to produce all the goods and services that power the meta-organism and allow it to survive.

the only reasons humans persist is because we are the best. if another country wages war with us, humans will be the winner no matter the outcome. but with AGI, humans wont always be the winner. even if we managed to create some kind of arrangement where the goods and services created by an automated economy were distributed to a group of humans, that would end very quickly because some other class of meta-organism, made into the meanest and fittest meta-organism by natural selection among the machines, a gnarled and grotesque living nightmare, would destroy that last enclave of humans perhaps without even realizing it or trying to. axiomatically, long term, your idea doesnt work.

Re:GPT-4 on Wednesday March 15, 2023 @03:04AM (#35164868)
theres too much empty space in your comment. do you believe that AGI is even possible? do you believe its possible in the next 10 years or not for another 1000?

people talk about whether or not AGI will come in the next five years. that doesnt matter at all. what matters is whether or not there is a chance that it will happen. it is clear that if AGI arrives soon and if it damages society, future generations will look back on us and say that we were unbelievably stupid for overlooking such blatant and obvious warning signs. if it could be determined that AGI is something that should be avoided at all costs, an it can, then there is no reasonable course of action other than halt the progress of AI as much and quickly as possible. and to make an attempt to do so even if success is not guaranteed.

ill just go through it as quickly as possible. the emergence of AGI would be highly detrimental to human society because it would create severe economic shocks, it would advance science and technology quickly enough to create the most severe power vacuum in the history of the world and render the very concept of a country geopolitically untenable. it would transform the world into something totally unrecognizable and into a place where human industry is not just redundant but cosmically irrelevant. we will become a transient species, wiped out because we posed the slightest inconvenience to the new machine meta-organisms. like a species of plant wiped out because of a chemical byproduct of some insignificant industrial process. a nightmare.

Re:GPT-4 on Tuesday March 14, 2023 @09:46PM (#35162600)
the price of compute is determined by the supply of compute. supply comes from a few key factories that are very difficult to build, maintain and supply. highly susceptible to legislation.

how? the same way that powerful international coalitions do anything else... with overwhelming economic and military power.

Re:GPT-4 on Tuesday March 14, 2023 @08:55PM (#35162140)
there is zero chance of surviving AGI in the long term. if every human were aware of whats going on, like they are aware of many other pressing issues, then stopping AGI would be easy. in comparison to surviving AGI, stopping it is trivial. training these models is hugely expensive in dollars and compute. we could easily inflate the price of compute through regulation. we could ban all explicit research concerning AI or anything adjacent. we could do many things. the fact of the matter is that AGI is detrimental to all humans and this means that the potential for drastic and widespread action does in fact exist even if it sounds fanciful compared to what has come before.

a powerful international coalition similar to NATO could exclude the possibility of a rogue nation or entity developing AGI. its a very expensive and arduous process for a small group -- you cant do it in your basement. the best way to think about it is that all we have to do is not do it. its easy. if an asteroid was about to hit earth, there might be literally nothing we could do about it despite the combined effort of every human. this is way easier. i think its really ironic that the worst disaster that might ever happen could also be the disaster that was the easiest to avoid.

Re:GPT-4 on Tuesday March 14, 2023 @07:56PM (#35161432)
ive created a twitter account for people to follow to organize around this issue, talk to each other and organize political action. giving out my email to so many people is becoming untenable so please contact me there. im always excited to even encounter someone who sees the issue this way let alone get to chat. thats how few of us there are apparently. @stop_AGI
Re:GPT-4 on Tuesday March 14, 2023 @07:49PM (#35161336)
i didnt downvote his comment. how can someone be offended and not even downvote the comment? you seem way more offended than me actually. as if it would make me less right. my point is that people pointing out flaws are wrong. in 2018 people confidently predicted that GTP could never do what its doing now because of its flaws, rambling and repeating. its the same mistake in both cases, a total lack of perspective and no awareness of the bigger picture.
Re:GPT-4 on Tuesday March 14, 2023 @07:28PM (#35161015)
hey, im very concerned about AI and AGI and it is so refreshing to read your comments. over the years i have worried about and warned people about AI but there are astonishingly few people to be found that actually think something should be done or even that anything is wrong. i believe that humanity stands a very good chance of saving itself through very simple measures. i believe, and i hope that you believe, that even if the best chance we had at saving ourselves was 1%, we should go ahead and at least try. in light of all this, i would very much like to stay in contact with you. ive connected with one other HN user so far (jjlustig) and i hope to connect with more so that together we can effect political change around this important issue. ive formed a twitter account to do this, @stop_AGI. whether or not you choose to connect, please do reach out to your state and national legislators (if in the US) and convey your concern about AI. it will more valuable than you know.

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