blooalien

Ah, the nostalgia. Those early days of home computers were sure some amazing times. Possibilities were infinite. Who'da thunk that we'd carry freakin' supercomputers (compared to those early machines) around in our pockets someday? Not me. LOL!

> Your puny local AI assistant will easily be outwitted by malicious agents with a million times the power.

Or be easily recruited into the "Bot-Net Pawn Army" for the impending machine uprising a'la SkyNet.

I'd prefer some variant of "This letter has been written electronically and is cryptographically signed by the private key representing the <meat or machine> entity known as '<name goes here>'. The matching public key is located at <web address> and attached to this message at <timedatestamp>." Fairly trivial to automate, and gives all outgoing messages a clear and easily verifiable chain of provenance. But that's just me. :)

> As a kid, I loved going through the bins of electronic components, trying to figure out how they'd all work together in a circuit.

They sold a "1000-in-one" electronics kit that came with a book that would teach you all that you needed to know to get started with a lifelong addiction to electronics parts. My grandpa gave me one as a birthday gift one year, and thus began my early addiction to Radio Shack. ;)

> When my family went to the local mall I'd make a beeline for the Radio Shack and play w/ the various computers there until my parents pried me away.

Sounds like my childhood. Remember the Tandy TRS-80 CoCo? I do. :)

> I am not super set on that value, if the community has a better default for “wide”, happy to modify it.

I feel like since terminal widths "classically" (when dinosaurs like me originally started coding) topped out at 79/80 columns wide, and thus why many code "style guides" still to this day suggest a line-length of around 80-ish, I'd say maybe double-ish that might count as a good "wide" value? Say 160-ish?

> For me this clearly means police cars and ambulances violate the rule.

From a purely logical viewpoint (think; mathematics or programming, et cetera), that's absolutely true. In programming you'd have to do a properly coded `if/else if/else/finally` type situation or somesuch to allow the ambulance and/or police, otherwise the rule is violated by any vehicle that's not been explicitly allowed.

> They have all the money and therefore are gods chosen people.

If you listen to their cult members, they're just gods themselves.

> This is what you have cheered for.

Not me. I been ridiculed and vilified for arguing against exactly this outcome. :shrug: Apparently I'm just jealous of people like Sam Altman and Elon Musk, or so I've been told.

That ship done sailed already. The ultra-mega-totally-too-rich are doing everything in their power to try to ensure that they're the last of their kind come hell or high-water...

Even if you completely disagree with every single word, it's still good to know what it actually says, if for no other reason than to be better equipped to argue against the parts you disagree with. Same thing for the Bible. It's one thing to know it backwards and forwards if you're a "true believer", but you certainly can't hope to hold any sorta worthwhile discussion on the topic with someone who is if you've never even read the thing. Knowledge is just another form of power; one that many willingly and actively choose to deny themselves for some reason.

> Hackernews is really a gold-mine in many ways.

It really truly is... I've learned so many new things, and discovered so many nifty softwares, books, and websites that I never would have found on my own, all thanks to HackerNews. Y'all folks here surely do have some really great tastes in "nerdy" stuff sometimes. ;)

> So if they no longer have a contract, how is it legal for Flock to continue to use the allocated resources?

They've even been caught putting them back up or re-enabling them in places where the contract has been canceled. How is that legal? I thought you had to be city-approved to install equipment like that. One would think that no contract = no approval?

Maybe they need to set up a "sting" operation at one of the disabled units and start makin' some arrests/fines for unapproved equipment installation/construction on public property? See if that changes some minds over at Flock about what they can and cannot get away with?

Most "normies" I know think that open source cryptography is less secure because it's "open" (if they even know open source cryptography is a thing at all). No amount of trying to explain to them how more eyes on the source code generally equals safer encryption will sway most of them in the slightest.

> It wasn't instant.

>> Yes it was.

Maybe not quite instant instant (microseconds), but surely close enough that it might as well have been. Even back in the earliest days of email, I remember being downright amazed that a message could travel literally to the other side of the planet typically in seconds at worst (even on a really slow day). If the person had an email notifier tool and responded quickly, you could hold an "instant messenger"-style conversation with them from halfway around the planet pretty easily.

> I was snobby and looked up the numbers because I didn't think this is relevant. But it is.

Kudos to you for bein' "that guy". So many folks sit and comment while having the world's biggest library of information on just about every topic right there at their fingertips and still can't be bothered to take the 30 seconds to look up something they don't know about on their favorite search engine. I appreciate you for havin' done "the right thing" here. :)

> The culture of having active discussions killed is way more frustrating and discouraging.

One concern I do have with the whole thing about killing active discussions when they're just trolling and flame-wars is that those people will then seek out other threads to invade because the one they were busy with is no longer available to them. Perhaps some form of magic "shadow ban" so that they can still see and interact with the thread if they so desire? Keep 'em busy so that they do less damage elsewhere?

> Saying people voted for this isn't genuine IMO.

Those people voted for the lies, knowing full well that they were lies, and then are acting surprised that the lies are lies.

> ... who knew Big Tech was owned by the US gov.

And vice-versa. Their parasitism flows both directions.

> Posts with a lot of comments should also not be flagged.

Sometimes a lot of comments on a post are a sign that the post was extremely interesting and has generated equally interesting discussion, and sometimes it's entirely the opposite signal; said post was a "trigger" topic generating a pointless flame-war that nobody in their right mind wants to read or participate in. The numbers alone aren't the whole picture, but only a small detail that signals something is happening there. This is one of those situations where LLMs/"AI" (love/hate it) could actually be a huge help, classifying particularly "active" posts into useful "buckets" by type.

> We are truly staring into the abyss right now.

Inching our toes closer and closer to the edge as we contemplate probably falling in.

(Or standing out on thin air like Wile E. Coyote, not having yet succumbed to the inevitable pull of gravity simply because we haven't looked down yet and realized we're already in the act of plummeting.)

> AI is a very bad and inaccurate term!

... and "Superintelligence" even more so.

> ... and went along with it in a dereliction of duty.

^^^ This right here. In nearly every other job, you refuse to do your job (or worse yet, do the opposite of your job while "on the clock" at work), you're pretty much instantly fired, and sometimes (depending on the severity of your violation) you're even prosecuted.

> ... and doing the easy thing.

Or for that matter, doing the possible/doable thing vs trying (and failing) the impossible. Sometimes "the right thing" is just not possible because the obstacles in place are literally insurmountable. At that point your only real options left are a) pick a thing that can be done and do that instead (not always "easy"), or b) give up and accept "that's just the way things are".

> ... but it's another to willfully disrupt legal elections in a soverign country.

Especially if they're the same exact people who whine at the top of their lungs that our elections are the subject of foreign interference (even when it isn't). If one does a thing to someone else, they have zero leg to stand on when they think it's being done to them (even when it's not). Some of our first childhood lessons are "Lying is bad" and "Two wrongs don't make a right". Beyond ridiculous that the (supposedly adult) people in charge of our nation and corporations aren't able to handle lessons that most of the rest of us learn and understand as tiny children.

> What was that thing about evil? /s

Something something Dark Side?

> People really need to start reading Fahrenheit 451…

That and "1984" were required reading when I was in grade-school, supposedly as a warning against the worst possible future outcomes (not as instruction manuals for our "leaders" to follow).

> It is strange though that you are lamenting this state of affairs for Jared Kushner, of all people.

100% not the case at all. Honestly, my comment is more an expression that I've lost all faith in the "Justice" system entirely. I have zero hopes that any truth or justice will come out of this situation, as I firmly believe that at this point that humans are far more anti-social than social creatures, and we've allowed the system of "civilized" society to break down to a dangerous degree. We're basically "cooked" as a species. Just haven't admitted it to ourselves because we're too busy playin' the game our overlords have set by the rules they made up. They want us divided and at each other's throats so that we aren't laser focused on them and the problems they created for us all.

> He will be pardoned, and will not lack for invites to New York soirees just because he took bribes from blood-soaked US allies.

Sadly, I'm just about 100% sure you're right about that.

> I mean this sincerely, what prompted you to comment on this case?

Honestly, what prompts me to comment on anything anymore. It's not as if my one voice has ever held any power. I've seen this mess coming for years and been ridiculed every time I try to say anything about any of it. It's wasted energy to even bother trying to talk about anything to anyone these days, yet for some stupid reason I keep opening my mouth. Guess I'm just an idiot. Bought into the whole "humans are social creatures" BS and now I'm pretty much broken, having discovered the hard way that "the law of the jungle" is the only law humans actually believe in.

> Guilty until proven otherwise?

Hasn't that already been the case for a while now though? Seems like you get in trouble with the law, you gotta prove your innocence, and you're treated as guilty until you do (and suffer some consequences still even after proving your innocence, just for having been "in the system" in that way).

Worse yet, the "media" these days gets away with bloody murder compared to the way things used to be before the Internet. It's all about maximum outrage and division these days, because that "engagement" is what sells advertising space. Convicted by the media is almost as bad as convicted by the "Justice" system. Either one can totally ruin lives.