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Alwayshasbeeb

Re:William Nordhaus has died on Saturday October 31, 2026 @08:40PM (#50321687)
It doesn't. It treats the economy not as a dependency tree of goods and services but as abstract disjointed numbers that can be considered as independent variables.

So if agricultural output fell by 50% he isn't considering how this would affect the cost of living and it's impact on labor prices and supply, which would cascade towards the whole economy. He's pretending it doesn't matter because the exchange value of that output is proportionately low in GDP calculations.

Re:William Nordhaus has died on Saturday October 31, 2026 @07:33PM (#50321296)
Do the "reasonable assumptions" include stating that indoor economic activity is unaffected by climate change? Or that the US economy won't be affected because agriculture represents only 3% of GDP?

If that is the standard of argument good enough to win the economics "Nobel" prize all we can draw from this is how much of a politically motivated farce that prize is.

https://johnmjennings.com/the-nobel-prize-in-economics-isnt-...

Re:William Nordhaus has died on Saturday October 31, 2026 @05:41PM (#50320527)
For those unfamiliar with the Nordhaus approach to climate change:

>Nordhaus has opined that agriculture is “the part of the economy that is sensitive to climate change,” but because it accounts for just 3 per cent of national output, climate disruption of food production cannot produce a “very large effect on the U.S. economy.”

https://theecologist.org/2023/nov/01/when-idiot-savants-do-c...

Re:William Nordhaus has died on Saturday October 31, 2026 @05:37PM (#50320484)
This article goes over his methods and why they're ridiculous:

"The fourth fatal error Nordhaus makes is the most farcical. In a 1991 paper that became a touchstone for all his later work, he assumed that, because 87 percent of GDP occurs in what he called “carefully controlled environments” — otherwise known as “indoors” — it will not be affected by climate.

...

Ignorance of systems has its way of plowing forward, juggernaut-like. Nordhaus has opined that agriculture is “the part of the economy that is sensitive to climate change,” but because it accounts for just 3 per cent of national output, climate disruption of food production cannot produce a “very large effect on the U.S. economy.” "

https://theecologist.org/2023/nov/01/when-idiot-savants-do-c...

Re:The oldest ice disappears and the Stone Age emerges from it on Saturday October 31, 2026 @07:55AM (#50315231)
Even if they knew it, climate change on the scale we're experiencing today wouldn't be as big of an issue for them because their populations were tiny and entirely self sufficient by hunting and gathering from local sources.

Today's bloated world population, completely reliant on mass agriculture only made possible by stable climate patterns, isn't so lucky. A fact your cheeky, inch deep provocative comment entirely ignores.

Re:The oldest ice disappears and the Stone Age emerges from it on Saturday October 31, 2026 @05:57AM (#50314533)
Reading the comments on any sort of environment adjacent news on this website is like a form of self torture. You'd think having access to a large corpus of humanity's written knowledge could help, but it seems like it's making it worse.
>social media let lots of people see bad messages I don’t agree with instead of good messages I do agree with

If the provider can tamper with the algorithm to filter out information that goes against its political preferences, how is that ineffective or not targeted political manipulation? The idea of democracy presumes that the public can be well informed in order to take decisions.

Do you deny that:

A: social media is a mind control tool that can be used for targeted political manipulation, as shown by the cambridge analytica scandal and plenty of other research.

B: the US is a hostile foreign power in relation to South America, as proven by its continuous threats, embargoes, tariff wars, coups and more recently the unashamed declaration of a "Donroe doctrine"

?

Censorship is when you don't leave an information manipulation and mind control tool in the hands of a hostile foreign power. Sure.

As for the evidence, it has been well documented beyond the parent comment's silly examples and it includes shadowbanning popular profiles with certain opinions.

Re:Kimi K3.1 Pro and K3.1 Pro Highspeed on Friday October 23, 2026 @01:19PM (#50212377)
Maybe not the raw intelligence/bench frontier but probably the cost per intelligence frontier.
Re:Lobbying is corruption on Saturday October 10, 2026 @11:23AM (#50033844)
Democracy is supposed to have something to do with majority rule or at least having policies that benefit the greatest number. When corporations that answer to no one use their disproportionate financial resources to hijack the political system and push policies that hurt the common people, that is fascism, yes.
Re:Software Drives People Insane on Thursday September 10, 2026 @05:33PM (#49650456)
> I imagine a lot of people feel like an engineer asking about the actual problem feels like getting goaded into some sort of pedantic debate.

Wow, that's describing it really well. I work for a guy who basically started a company by trying to vibe code his ideas into existence (late 2023 LLMs) and realized he would need actual developers to get anywhere.

It was excruciating trying to make him answer questions to get proper domain modelling going since LLM use had made him think of software as being wished into existence in a "declarative" way.

Not to mention the heavy contrast my persistent questioning had to a background of sycophantic yes-man claudespeak.

Re:DeepSeek v4.1 Flash on Thursday September 10, 2026 @06:03AM (#49641142)
Eliezer Yudkowsky is not a scientist. He made a popular Harry Potter fanfiction series and a "rationality" blog-community that attracts "human biological diversity" enthusiasts.
Re:The revolt of the reader on Sunday September 06, 2026 @07:53AM (#49585624)
>Schwitzgebel, Strasser, and Crosby fine-tuned GPT-3 on Dennett's corpus

This sounds like a completely different scenario. How many users who post LLM written blog posts are tuning the weights of their LLMs on a large corpus of their own original writing? I wouldn't doubt that this produces far more convincing and pleasant output than the disgusting slop from out of the box Claude.

>or if this is just liberal minded "see the big companies are out to get us and this is just the current example".

Of course, as opposed to the objective minded "there is no conspiracy ever, when it is repeatedly demonstrated that corporations will poison, experiment on and destroy human lives if it favors their bottom line and they think they can get away with it, this is not to be interpreted as a pattern or structural issue, it's just coincidences and 'bad' individual actors all the way down".

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2009-07-31/pfizer-pays-us75m-ove...

https://www.iatp.org/sites/default/files/No_More_Bhopals_Env...

https://www.bmj.com/content/376/bmj.o681

Re:GPT-6 Astra on Friday September 04, 2026 @09:12AM (#49564153)
Can you? Let's say you prompt it with "this is a puzzle computer game, your objective is to progress through its levels" plus the controls from the instruction manual and tie it to a vision + KB and mouse harness.

Will it effectively create an internal model describing world objects and how they interact with each other, persist that so it doesn't get lost when it's context window gets filled up, then after it has sufficiently complete knowledge of the fundamentals after the tutorial levels successfully apply that model by making plans to solve the puzzles and execute them by clicking the right coordinates tied to the visual feedback?

I highly doubt it. To me it often just looks like people are defining narrow search spaces (e.g by having all of the task complexity pre-digested by the harness design), pointing a brute force engine at them, spending 20 thousand dollars in compute and then saying "hey look, it can do anything!".

Re:GPT-6 Astra on Friday September 04, 2026 @06:09AM (#49562605)
Could I hook up a SOTA model the 2D computer puzzle game Gruntz (1999) so that it can read it from screenshots and act on it through keyboard and mouse inputs in a way where it would learn how to play and progress through the game? I don't think so. I doubt we'd see any sign of progress in building an internal model of how the game works and the win states in its "thinking" tokens.

Anyone that can read English could do that though.

Re:Taste Is All That's Left on Friday August 07, 2026 @01:29PM (#49213667)
In my experience, using LLM's for generating code has definitely dulled my capacity to think about function hierarchies, composition and having a "picture" in my head of what will go where in the repository.

Raw "leetcode" algorithm intuition and database modelling/SQL are still largely intact for me because I never trust LLMs for those and want to actually understand what I'm building. But it's scary to think how easy it is to have your skills eroded and how quickly you become dependent on these tools.

Re:The Gargantuan Lie That Is Collapsing the Climate on Friday August 07, 2026 @12:51PM (#49213192)
I wish the soy one were hidden on a corner on my local supermarket. There isn't even one anymore in my country, and that's the biggest soybean producer in the world.

Other plant milks are 3x the price of the cow one because of economies of scale and subsidies. It's all a big joke.

Re:The Gargantuan Lie That Is Collapsing the Climate on Friday August 07, 2026 @08:37AM (#49209480)
While it's great that green energy is now economically feasible, the idea that there will quickly (say, in the next 50 years) be a "green transition" that eliminates the usage of carbon fuels is still highly dubious.

What we've seen is new renewable capacity carving out a tiny sliver in the energy mix, sometimes even being able to meet all new demand in the installation period, but we still have all the existing demand running on the old stack.

https://ourworldindata.org/energy-mix

This book talks about this: https://www.amazon.com/More-All-Consuming-History-Energy/dp/...

There's also the fact that global society is not a real time strategy game being managed by a well intentioned min-maxing actor driving compounding efficiency gains in resource usage. It's a free for all where everyone is paranoid that they'll be destroyed if they don't use every dirty trick they can (on a global geopolitical level), entrenched oligarchies permanently lobbying for their inefficient, destructive structures to continue (on a domestic economy level) and so on.

It's not looking good overall.

Re:2x, not 10x: coding with LLMs in 2026 on Thursday July 30, 2026 @06:22PM (#49116633)
Sometimes small tools are all you need, even if they're slop.

About a month ago I pirated an Argentinian movie and the only subtitles available in my language were out of sync and at a different speed/framerate so adjusting for delays wasn't enough. I was unsuccessful at fixing it with VLC and every other "online tool" I could find.

Knowing a srt file is just text with timestamps I vibe coded a python script to take in sample times throughout the movies so it could recalculate the rate and shifts and replace them in the file. It worked on the first try using only the deepseek web chat interface and my terminal.

Without AI I theoretically could have sat down with a pen and paper to figure out the math adjustment, then looked up python input handling syntax which I already forgot, typed something out and then hammered it into shape through trial and error over a few hours. But the friction and time investment of doing that would have been so great I would have just given up on watching the movie instead.

Re:Our position on open-weights models on Tuesday July 28, 2026 @07:34AM (#49082321)
Not really. It's probably just international users not tolerating american exceptionalist hubris when they see it, especially now that the pretending is done.

Plus, what a shocker it is that a "hacker news" website would have many people with an affinity towards open source technology they can fiddle with and have autonomy over, and a distaste for tech monopolies trying to control and limit access to these tools.

Re:Our position on open-weights models on Monday July 27, 2026 @08:00PM (#49077376)
Oh no! The evil CCP is a huge threat to world peace and goodness! Give all your money and input token data to Palantir to support a rules based world order where the good guys thrive and cleanse the earth from crooked turtle biologists.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jun/20/mona-khalil-tu...

A "US for-profit publicly traded company" is what brought us the Cambridge analytica scandal. I'd rather not trust them with the next wave of consciousness and opinion shaping technology.

Also, oligopolies aren't famous for being strongly bound by market forces, especially when their decision makers are non ironically being treated as if they were heads of state.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/17/world/europe/g7-summit-ai...

Re:Claude Opus 5 on Saturday July 25, 2026 @02:34PM (#49050282)
Nothing today indicates that they will be living in a renewable energy utopia. Solar panels and batteries getting cheaper is just not enough.
Re:Claude Opus 5 on Saturday July 25, 2026 @02:31PM (#49050259)
That's quite easy.

Fracking

Social media infinite scrolling and targeted ads

Short form videos (tik tok, YouTube shorts, instagram reels)

Coming soon: Deep sea mining

Some of these are not great technologies, you might say. Well if they're impactful enough to turn everyone I love into a phone zombie and make the political landscape violent and insane then that's enough.