News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

EGG_CREAM

It’s included in a list of things bad for “ society/health.” While overconsumption on that level would certainly be a health issue for an individual, it doesn’t even register compared to the other things he lists as a social issue, like chronic obesity and Tobacco use. It’s just weird and misleading to include it in that list, is all I was pointing out.
It’s very strange to include caffeine in that list of unhealthy things. Everything else in that list is proven to be bad for society/health, except for caffeine. Why did you choose to highlight caffeine consumption when there is not really any evidence it causes health issues?
Re:DeepSeek v4.1 Flash on Thursday September 10, 2026 @06:42AM (#49641453)
Not GP, but I appreciate the discussion.

Don’t you find it odd that the thing that consciousness emerges from just so happens to be a text prediction algorithm trained on all of human output? Which is also the thing in all the world that would be most likely to be a stochastic parrot?

As for your appeal to expertise, I don’t think it really applies when all of the experts refuse to share their data.

Re:Quality non-fiction books are the antithesis of AI slop on Thursday July 23, 2026 @09:29AM (#49021267)
If it has a subjective viewpoint, i.e. sentience. Otherwise it still doesn’t actually experience any of those things, and can’t tell actually you what it’s like to experience those things. It can give you the data readings though.
The sun would come up even earlier without dst. It’s just the earth’s tilt that’s causing the sun to come up earlier after spring, nothing we did to the clocks.
Having it, physically. It’s harder for companies to play silly games like put the media into a vault, take it off their streaming platforms for tax reasons, etc… I started collected physical blu rays when HBO randomly took a million things off its platform so that it could do accounting tricks.

I want to support artists who make content I like, but I also want control over my media library. Physical media is the best way to do this.

Agreed about the 2-3% target. Seems like a crazy low target for a country that has been, historically, a strong exporter. Or at least seems to want to be an exporter. I wonder if one of the reasons behind this low target rate is that inflation will ultimately decide how expensive government debt is, since under normal circumstances people will want their bonds to at least pay out enough to cover inflation.
Re:Tim Cook's Impeccable Timing on Tuesday April 21, 2026 @01:25PM (#47851786)
3. Is an interesting perspective, because it’s not at all how I see it. There really isn’t anything for Apple there right now except that they stumbled into making hardware that is perfect for the technology right now. They could a.) burn all their cash and go into massive debt chasing a big foggy question mark that may be entirely overvalued or b.) focus on the hardware right now, wait for the technology to mature and apply it judiciously as applications for it come to light, rather than racing to hamfist it in unnecessary, expensive, and ultimately broken ways.

Siri is useless, so is Alexa and Hey Google or whatever they are calling that. LLMs will change that but cost has to come down to make that feasible. On-device AI would be the gold standard there, I hope that’s not a pipe dream. Apple seems to be positioned niceley for that outcome, if it comes to pass.

Re:UBI as a productivity dividend on Saturday March 14, 2026 @06:04PM (#47381749)
UBI is the opposite of centralized planning. Instead of the state deciding what resources people need, and who “deserves” help, it leaves it up to individuals to decide how best to divvy up resources, and everybody gets it.

As for tools that make citizens obey, the government already has the best one: a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. Everything else is child’s play compared to that.

Re:UBI as a productivity dividend on Saturday March 14, 2026 @03:14PM (#47380092)
I kind of lost the UBI plot, to be fair. I don’t really understand what UBI actually had to do with this exercise fundamentally, the exact same thing happens with or without it, it’s just that the floor of what “affordable housing” is gets risen. Unless you think that an unfettered, UBI-less economy doesn’t produce expensive housing? Which, I think we have many real world case studies in almost every major city in rich countries to disprove that assertion.

I do see what you mean, I think, now that I’m rereading and contemplating. A monthly stipend probably does more to raise prices than anything useful, unless you also pair it with regulation to stop the wealthy and powerful from taking it all for themselves. And at that point you could have just done those regulations without UBI. Hmm.

Do you think a few lump sum payments over a citizens lifetime would have the same effect? Maybe some large sum paid when you reach age of majority and then again at retirement?

Re:UBI as a productivity dividend on Saturday March 14, 2026 @02:59PM (#47379926)
I am a progressive government. The free market has failed to provide a necessary service. So now I pass a law that creates a not for profit contractor that builds houses. It’s not that complicated. We do it with fire departments, police, and many other services already. Free market might have been more efficient theoretically, but when it fails in practice we find another solution.
Re:The Post-American Internet on Tuesday January 06, 2026 @10:06AM (#46513185)
That’s because our mass protests are focused on the overseas concentration camps, illegal detainment and arrests, and the other authoritarian moves our president has made. It’s true that Americans in general care little about foreign policy. It’s not an anti-Europe thing, it’s just that people care about stuff that more immediately affects them. European countries are smaller and more integrated, so foreign policy has a more immediate affect on them. Foreign policy has a dramatic affect on Americans lives, but it’s usually indirect and therefore not top of mind for the average citizen. That doesn’t mean we like our government’s foreign policy. And all that’s without mentioning that many believe the Greenland talk is not serious, and simply a distraction, and therefore mass protests would actually be playing into the admins hands.
Re:Steve wants us to make the Macintosh boot faster on Friday December 26, 2025 @12:02PM (#46393875)
Just because it goes away doesn’t mean it doesn’t matter.
Re:Super Mario Bros. and Yoshi Games (Yields) Reduced Burnout Risk on Wednesday December 24, 2025 @11:50AM (#46377125)
I don’t have any citations, but I don’t think that “work” was at all similar to what we do now. Early hominid work would have involved many different tasks throughout the day, such as tracking, hunting, cleaning, gathering, building, repairing, traveling, etc, right? Compare that to “do this one task 8-16 hours in a row,” and it does seem like a mode of work we would be particularly ill suited for. Orrrr maybe I’m wrong, I’m using general knowledge and inductive reasoning, so I would not be suprised to learn I’m off base here.
Re:Aldous Huxley Predicts Adderall on Tuesday November 18, 2025 @01:40PM (#45970217)
.
I don’t know why I keep hearing that conciousness “could be an illusion.” It’s literally the one thing that can’t be an illusion. Whatever is causing it, the fact there is something it is like to be me is, from my subjective perspective, irrefutable. Saying that it could be an illusion seems nonsensical.
Re:Upcoming Rust language features for kernel development on Thursday October 16, 2025 @10:12AM (#45605600)
It’s very intellectually lazy of you not to be curious about why the creator and decades long, knowledgeable guardian of Linux has the opposite opinion as you, all because you read the Wikipedia about logical fallacies one time.
Re:Imgur's Community Is in Full Revolt Against Its Owner on Tuesday September 02, 2025 @12:03PM (#45104892)
No. I think plenty of us recognize that the law has to have rigidly defined lines that don’t always line up neatly with morality. A great example is the “jailbait” subreddit that was talked about above. It makes sense that it’s technically legal, but I’d rather not be associated with the site that hosts it or the people who frequent it.
Re:The Dollar Is Dead on Monday August 04, 2025 @09:03AM (#44785210)
Something to point out also is that more equality is actually better even for the 1%. They are just too short-term-focused and greedy to see that. There is nothing they can get today that they wouldn’t be able to get tomorrow if we taxed them appropriately. In return, they would live in a more stable and safe society, a less brittle economy, and wouldn’t be as reviled socially. But they are just too focused on their net worth to see that.
Re:What even is 'adult' content? [NSFW] on Friday July 25, 2025 @08:34AM (#44682411)
No it’s not. It’s just a picture of a naked pregnant woman showering. She’s not in a suggestive pose, having sex, or anything else that would suggest sexual content. There’s nothing inherently sexual about nudity by itself.

If you say “everyone’s idea of what is sexual can be different,” I would agree, which I think is part of the point of posts like this: why does the most restrictive definition of sexual content always seem to be the point of view our lawmakers are protecting?

Edit: she’s not showering, I think. I went back and looked at it, when I read the post from my phone I thought she was showering.

I think so, because the users seem to like having different options. For commercial software, it makes sense to count how many devices use a particular distribution as the measure of “success”, but for projects like most Linux distributions , I don’t know that number of users makes sense. Why should we care how many users a particular distribution has, when almost all of them aren’t paying or contributing? Having more users doesn’t make the software any better inherently, and nobody is making money from those users. Instead, I would argue that user enthusiasm and dev interest are better measures of success for open source projects like this, and arch, Debian, Linux mint, etc are all doing fine in those regards.
Where is “racist” even factoring into it? I see this argument all the time, mostly about North Korea or china. There is nothing racist about suspecting someone from a specific country because you don’t trust that country’s government. That is not racist and what’s more I think you know that. It think these arguments are extremely bad faith. Here’s the test: is it about race? If not, then it’s not racist. For example, if I don’t trust Chinese nationals to work at my company because I think they will steal secrets, but I absolutely don’t have that same fear about people who are ethnically Chinese but born in my country, that’s not racist. If you want to call it xenophobic, sure, I’ll buy that. But racist? You are conflating nation and race on purpose.
Re:Briar: Peer to Peer Encrypted Messaging on Saturday March 15, 2025 @06:19AM (#43371478)
Heard from where? How would they do that? Tutanota doesn’t have the key, the end user does. I keep hearing weird things about Turanota that sound like the types of rumors intelligences agencies who really don’t want people to use the service would start.
In their defense, using Athena again here would have definitely sounded strange and not natural. But, they could have used the word “it” without introducing ambiguity, which they do 2 times already.
Re:DOGE will use AI to assess the responses of federal workers on Tuesday February 25, 2025 @08:39AM (#43171688)
The point is to make working for the federal government a traumatic experience.

https://www.govexec.com/management/2024/10/inside-key-maga-l...

Stop it with the false equivalency. China’s government is not Chinese people. You can’t be racist against a government.
Forgive me if I’m misunderstanding, but it sounds like you feel there should be some higher, ideal-based reason for the ban. But this is happening in the anarchic environment of international relations. The USA’s goal is to reduce the potential for its citizens to be engaged by enemy propaganda. Yes, they are more worried about the influence of Chinese propaganda than domestic propaganda, why shouldn’t they be? This isn’t about ideals, it’s about power. And probably also lots of lobbying from X and Meta.
After your very last sentence, I’m not even sure what your point is here. You just listed a bunch of reasons you don’t think mail in ballots are safe, and then ended with saying the alternative also isn’t safe from vote buying.

Vote buying also does not appear to be a problem in the US electoral system, as another commented pointed out: in order to make a difference in the election, you’d have to buy enough votes that someone would be bound to tell on you.

Re:Inside a Ferroelectric RAM Chip on Tuesday September 24, 2024 @09:19AM (#41636163)
I did notice from the article that reading is destructive, so every time you read (or at least every time you read a 0), you have to re-write it out. I wonder how much that affects the practical durability.
You are making so, so many assumptions, many of them false. For instance, there is all likelihood the OP doesn’t mind meritocratic systems, and just thinks ours aren’t nearly meritocratic enough. That’s what that “too much” could also mean.

For instance, Elon Musk is one of the richest people in the world. He inherited a ton of wealth, made some good decisions, and made a ton of bad decisions. In your version of the world, because he is the richest person in the world, he is also the most “competent” person in the world.

You’re completely ignoring the possibility that the poster is lamenting that there isn’t enough meritocracy, not that there’s too much of it, because you are for some reason assuming we all live in a 100% meritocratic world, or at least that’s the impression you give in this post.

Why do you assume that? It’s for a very similar reason that you attribute others not being able to accept the unfairness of meritocracy. You are presumably relatively successful, or think you will be, and don’t want to live in a world where that’s not 100% because you are more competent than others. You don’t want luck to have played a role.

It may be frustrating to hear someone who doesn’t know you make a ton of possibly false assumptions about you, your circumstances, and your motivations, but I’d say you invited that on yourself when you did the same.

Older »