RealityVoid

I like this observation very much. Intellectual deflationary spiral is exactly how it feels at the moment and we might end up in a worse place because of it.

Pre-existing infra, designs and know-how?

This line of thinking has baked in the assumption that if something is not brining me money, it's not worth the effort. Obviously life is more than money so I am not sure why you would frame it that way.

Current AI does not decide on its own to gobble up data. The humans creating it do. In fact, a lot of times the LLM models seem utterly un-curious and are focused on just immediate goals.

Would we not see AI civilizations then?

This ideea haunts me in my nightmares.

Maybe, I'm at the point I don't know what to think anymore. But somehow, this feels still non-human. Humans don't need millions of hours of training and millions of samples to learn how do to something. We have proof that systems can deal with low-shot training. So why can't these? My point is when we have human level learning ability, then we're moving, if we expect expansion of capabilities to come from data alone, I'm prepared for disappointment.

Yes, and they used whitelists/blacklists and it worked. But at the rate things are going I would not be surprised to see direct US assistance to Russia at some point in the future.

I'm not smug, I'm disappointed. I don't think hypocrisy is necessarily irrational but it is self-serving, morally bankrupt and, in this particular instance, self-defeating.

Not in the least, people are highly irrational, I don't know how you can say this with a straight face. Even me, here, if I were rational, I would STFU, who am I helping pointing out the hypocrisy of it all? Nonetheless, I still think it's hypocrisy. And being bothered by it does not make it not so.

And not the least, this administration did not appear out of thin air. The US population voted it. I sure view the administration as a mirror (and the responsibility) of the US population.

But I do understand your wider point, and I think you're right, this whole thing is non-prodictive.

No, I think , fundamentally, I agree with you.

The part that irks me the most is the hypocrisy I feel around these issues. Essentially, people pick points that are convenient for them and dress them in moral justifications. People take opportunities that helped them or their families, and then demand others not be given these opportunities. People take a stance only when it advantages them personally and quickly discard it when it's not advantageous anymore. Not because they realized it's wrong or they were mistaken, but because now it's not personally useful. People get up a ladder and then quickly pull it up.

I am obviously an idiot since I believe in moral consistency and I believe the the pie is not fixed and that we can increase the welfare of everybody. Such a fool I am.

The 200$ drones have a couple of kilometers range at best. You won't deliver them from 400 km away. You still need a delivery vehicle. But this discussion went off the rails, it's obvious fantasy land at this point.

It's almost amusing reading this through the lens of the visa shuttering article from yesterday (which a lot were cheering) because none of the receivers were born in the US.

A MOAB apparently has the equivalent of 11tons of TNT. A drone carrying a grenade has up to 180 grams. So you need about 61 111 drones to deliver the equivalent explosive. At that point it might be cheaper to just bring the MOAB.

As someone from outside the US, I was surprised to find out impeachment does not mean removal from office, you need a senate supermajority and (to my even greater surprise) only 33% of senate is up for re-election at each election cycle.

So knowing this, I understand he might get impeached, but unlikely to be removed so I don't see a whole lot changing after midterms, sadly.

The current crop of "cruise missiles" are cheap and low penetration. Burying things is not 100% safe, but it certainly increases the attack difficulty.

There surely is a point where it's cheaper and safer to bury them underground.

I'd invest in digging equipment for the next war.

Well, the market rejected your skills, so that's how free market capitalism works. Get good, then get employed.

But no, people only take the parts of insert preferred political flavor here that they seem beneficial to them and they discard the parts that are not.

Let these people make their choices about doing or not doing it. Don't try to defend them by taking the opportunity away.

I did this for a summer, worked my butt off, got back home, paid all my expenses with the paperwork and the plane tickets, bought a laptop and came back with about 500$. It was not much, but it was much more than I ever got the opportunity by that point to make.

The people I worked with treated me quite well. Everyone I met was welcoming and warm.

I did not manage to see a lot, but I did visit Yellowstone, had a couple of adventures, and overall was a positive experience for me.

A friend I was with did not manage too well and had a nervous breakdown at the thought of having to wash toilets.

But my point is, it can be a great experience and I don't buy for a second this feigned concern for "ooh, the poor kids are exploited". No, I think it's just job protectionism.

Return immigrants are a non-negligible plus for the countries the people returned to because they saw other ways of working and lives and approaches and they seed their original countries. I do agree brain drain can be rough, but cross-polination of skills is super useful.

This is not caring about their country, this is caring about their paycheck. They want higher salaries, damned' be what it does to competitiveness. It's nearsighted protectionism, that's what it is.

Oh, this was me 18 years ago. Worked a summer in Wyoming at a truck stop in the middle of the desert. It was kind of fun. Don't regret it a minute. My one and only trip to the US. People were warm and welcoming, if a bit wierd at times. The trip I did there with the Grayhound bus was _wild_. I think of my time there with fondness.

Who's ahead, again? Do they have a moat, or just a nice field?

Describing how it worked does not mean endorsement for it. You can say "most people were trapped into having kids" and "we should have more kids" without endorsing "more people should be trapped into having kids".

It is uncomfortable, deff more uncomfortable than saying "we're not having kids because we don't behave money" but if it's true, should we just brush it aside?

Sure, you can reframe things that way, if you want to reduce all dimensions of existence to money and want to try to simplify all life as being about money, sure, go nuts. I certainly can't stop you.

You could do the same kind of exercise with whatever other measurement of reality that you consider to be the pivot of existence like free time or amounts of sandwiches available or whatever (or is that also boiling down to money?).

But that really really hobbles your model of reality so much to the point it's not useful anymore.

And, then by your own standards, were they ever NOT expensive?

Is this expense some relative state to other people, as in if other people have more it means I have less by virtue of comparison or is it some concrete measure of need one can not afford nowadays and they could before.

Really? Why so? I think the universe is plenty big and it's an issue of engineering to use all that space and harvest all that energy.

1) Shifting cultural norms. People are now enough and they want to live their lives. Kids are annoying as hell to be honest, and until you're a parent, you don't get the appeal. But nature has a way of really playing your heart when you have a kid and the intensity of emotion is hard to describe. BUt if you were to do a pros/cons list, you probably would not want them.

2) Inflation of expectation on parenting. Parents used to be much more hands off in the previous generations, but the expectation of what you need to provide has gone thorough the roof and not all is useful, to be honest.

3) Delay in child bearing led to fertility drop when people really want to have kids.

4) This, I somewhere and will pawn it as my own, but... kids are no longer useful. Previously, kids were a working hand around the house and insurance for parental care when they got older. Both of these are not something necessarily expected of them nowadays.

5) Since women bear the brunt of the rough jobs of child rearing, even in our more egalitarian societies, their increase in options and freedom means a lot opt to just... not do it. As mentioned at pct1. it's really a tough job. Can't say I blame them.

Yes, I know what people say. And they might believe it. It doesn't make it true. Or at the very least, it's _true_ in a very roundabout way.

Nah, I don't buy for a second the reason is economic. I remember how the conditions were much worse when I was a kid and my parents raised me anyways. And I look at how countries getting richer leads to less kids.

I know that this is the rhetoric around why people are not having kids, but it's a pretext, it's not the real reason.

> Many on HN still have the opinion that you must understand every line of code in the project, and that all is lost should you merge code that wasn't reviewed.

Uhm, yes?

I've said nothing about who dictates. I have said that everything in life is a tradeoff and making a tradeoff requires talking the bad with the good. It's effectively something we can't escape. If we want to do this tradeoff with AI, I did not take a positions as well. But I posit there will be tradeoffs.