fatbird
fatbird on Hacker News
I think you're missing a subtlety of the situation. You're right that gothic cathedrals were enormous undertakings, and that the enormity was itself a worshipful and meditative act that drew in the entire community, current and future.
Even with the CNC machines, this is still a multi-decade endeavor that will span generations because the number of monks (and outside support) is small and not getting larger. They've scaled down the work required to match their capabilities, and still creating something that will last centuries. Relative to their community, it's still a cathedral effort.
This seems truer every day
Being a billionaire must be insane. You can buy new teeth, new skin. All your chairs cost 20,000 dollars and weigh 2,000 pounds. Your life is just a series of your own preferences. In terms of cognitive impairment it's probably like being kicked in the head by a horse every day [0]
[0] https://x.com/LouLakeyDraws/status/1488076999105323011
I call this "the capitalism fallacy": it doesn't exist in the (my) market, therefore it's not possible.
The fallacy is that there are infinite market opportunities but a finite supply of entrepeneurs/business/money to exploit them. Therefore, there are an infinite number of market opportunities that will get passed up for one reason or another.
His statement is all generalities. "Decisions are made by POTUS". Not "This decision was made by POTUS"--that part you're supposed to infer from the previous. He's being quite careful not to address this instance.
The Bene Gesserit and the Spacing Guild were also a result of the Butlerian Jihad. All three started as schools of human development in the absence of powerful technology.
Also, Herbert's point about dependence on machines creating machine-dependent humans, trapped in a deterministic arc of evolution, feeds into his larger themes about open-ended evolution and its arms-race. It's not just a throwaway backstory.
I don't think it's that obvious because another thing that's obvious is how much Trump wants to be Putin. He looks at dictators and admires them, envies them, identifies with them. They're the only people he respects, hence his willingess to humble himself and the US to gain Putin's approval. And before that, it was Kim John Un.
I still don't understand how Prigozhin felt safe after surrendering, so much that he flew his jet near Moscow.
No neighbouring country would want to add a population centre with a million Russians to its polity because then you'd have a million Russians agitating for closer ties to Russia, if not actively facilitating or planning a coup.
Lithuania, to the north, has a population of just under 3,000,000, of whom Russians are 5%. Take Kaliningrad and suddenly they would be 30% Russian.
Poland is 37,000,000, so Russians would only be around 3%, but that's enough to cause a lot of trouble, and they gain nothing they don't already have besides a ready-made fifth column.
Kaliningrad is entirely ethnically Russian. Every other group has been forced out. No one wants Kaliningrad for that reason.
Ukraine still has deep pools of manpower to tap--they still don't conscript anyone under the age of 27. Running out of soldiers isn't their problem, especially since they very conspicuously switched to a defensive strategy to preserve lives and use drones as a first wave attacker instead of infantry.
Time favours Ukraine. Absent a really shocking reversal in all western aid, they're surviving and advancing. Russia, meanwhile, is incurring deep structural damage to its economy that shows up already as huge labour shortages, high inflation, and high interest rates, along with war-driven destruction of infrastructure. It's steadily marching to a point where economic collapse, internal unrest, or both, demand that Russia withdraw from Ukraine.
Putin either doesn't know or doesn't care that they're not winning, and any replacement for Putin will be Putin*2, so it'll take something societally catastrophic to force the issue, which becomes more likely every day. As long as Ukraine just hangs on, they win by not losing.
Supporting another's right to something doesn't entail helping them exercise that right, and not facilitating their exercise doesn't call into question your support for the right itself.
They're not talking about inspecting or controlling speech on the network, they're talking about speech outside their network and how it relates to them and their relationship with Mullvad.
There are different grounds for being granted a green card. One of those is that your employer wants to hire you permanently, and can't find an American to take the job. Getting a green card doesn't require an employer's sponsorship, that's just the most common application for green cards.
This is how pets are euthanized, usually, and it's about as humane as it gets. That said, you'd never sell this because the portion of the population who want the death penalty either want it to be inhumane, or would balk at the possibility of making the condemned euphoric before death.
So having AI in the US requires us all, collectively, taking that 1% chance of the end of humanity? It would be too expensive to properly sandbox the models, we'll just externalize that risk of
the end of humanity?
Truly psychopathic.
Unsaid in the blog post is that disabling persistant undo is one of the most common config changes for vim users who bother to set things up the way they like. Persistent undo is what causes your filesystem to be littered with tilde files, which have the same name but prefixed with a tilde. Every file you touch with vim gets a tilde version. Your ls output becomes polluted with noise.
I think it's rare for people behaving badly to be fully aware that they're behaving badly, and proceeding anyways. Humans are constant rationalizers, and where sexual consent is the issue, there's a lot of ways for people to tell themselves it's okay. I've heard men say horrifying things in all seriousness. "You need to be a little forceful so she can say 'no' and then give in." "I kept going and she stopped saying no." "Women have rape fantasies, so they actually want it to happen"
I'm taking a regional conflict where the total manpower of both sides outnumbers all the rest of the armies of NATO without the US. Where one side, Ukraine, sends OPFORs to NATO exercises and wins handily with drones because NATO doesn't know how to fight drones, or how to operate in a front line that's 20km deep and the enemy knows everything going in it and it's impossible to mass forces because tube artillery is still cheap.
And yes, this is what warfare is now. When Russia invaded in 2022, it was using its new armored battalion tactical groups, and they failed to reach Kyiv at all, or to conquer Kharkiv or Sumy--they just surrounded them and stretched out along the highways, where infantry teams with Javelins destroyed them in detail.
The battlefield transparency that drones bring is a sea change in warfare, and a big part of that change that Ukrainians and Russians have learned is total force dispersion. You can't assemble an armored fist because it's bombed to oblivion before it ever sees the enemy, or encounters an artillery deployed minefield that didn't exist the night before.
NATO will take years to ingest the obvious lessons from Ukraine and adjust its doctrine to handle them. Until that time, they face an adversary who knows them in its bones.
> A million casualties and three-year stalemate in Ukraine is "worked out"? Good for them.
Could NATO take a million+ casualties and still be fighting with another million in uniform and the nation not yet undergoing general mobilization?
> This is the Russian drone infantry currently occupying Kyiv?
If that Russian drone infantry suddenly showed up on Estonia's borders, what chance would you give the Estonians?
>> the US just disbanded its drone warfare division because drones aren't manly enough for Hegseth
> Please explain what you think this means.
It means the most expedient way for the US to learn to apply the lessons of the war in Ukraine was just discontinued. The Pentagon does not see drone warfare as a top priority.
NATO has virtually no experience in modern warfare, which is substantially different than how they're organized now. NATO is well equipped for an armor-centric battle of maneuver, but Ukraine showed that's not at all how it has to be fought.
Russia wouldn't use armor or logistics to take over the Baltics. They've already got their human waves and infantry infiltration tactics worked out, under a cloud of drones and cruise missiles that NATO has no counter for (and the US just disbanded its drone warfare division because drones aren't manly enough for Hegseth).
Russia has a million man standing army that's now thoroughly blooded and well versed in modern warfare, and an industrial base that's retooled to supply such an army (i.e., drones and missiles). The only problem for them is that they're facing the only other large, experienced army in the world.
Imagine if tomorrow, Russia went on the defensive and froze its lines in Ukraine, setting up Surovikin lines everywhere, then withdrew half the forces it has currently committed. Now imagine that a half million Russian soldiers show up on the border of Estonia, Finland, Kazhakstan, or Georgia.
Yes, Russia is exhausted and doing deep structural damage to its economy. It still has one of the best land forces in the world at the moment. The way Ukraine always smokes NATO forces in exercises is a strong indicator of what would happen if Russia decided to "liberate" the Baltics.
I had a client call me up and complain about my reduce code because it was hard to read and he couldn't tell what was going on. I broke through to him when I added comments to it that showed a particular data structure going in, and what was coming out. Once the transformation was clear, the apparent complexity was no longer a problem, leaving me to believe that the problem with reduce is almost entirely about legibility.
Give me a dictionary, a computer, and infinite time, and I'll generate all possible English texts: Shakespeare, works regarded as surpassing Shakespeare, new holy books, math proofs never even imagined... none of which is either "creative" or "solving" anything. If I optimize my generation algorithm so that I'm not slavishly trying all possible combinations of words, it doesn't move me any closer to being creative, or solving anything.
The real casualty here may be our belief that humans are doing something more than some super-optimized version of what LLMs are doing. That doesn't elevate LLMs, it just makes us much less special.
I think you're leaving out a key aspect of the problem: not one of those people had the scope of responsibilities to really fix the issue. There was the website, windows update, and OS team, all being fed by a variety of product teams with marketing and delivery concerns. At root, Bill's problems were a coordination issue spanning half the organization. If you were on that email chain, you wouldn't want ownership either because that herding the rest of the cats towards a comprehensive fix that would probably restructure the whole company.
One thing that the earlier documentary on Theranos, The Inventor, made obvious is that Holmes is pretty charismatic at a personal level. At one point, Gibney is trying to interview her, but the camera he’s setting up isn’t working for some reason, and he’s apologizing. She says “it’s alright” and then leans in and says “we’re going to get through this” and smiles. It’s very warm. It was easier to see how people bought into her and her vision after that.
An unarmed woman climbing through a smashed window with a capital police officer on the other side, sidearm drawn, warning her not to advance, in the middle of a crowd storming the capitol building while a gallows stood outside,
waiting for the crowd to bring out a member of congress or the Vice President.
> * U.S. representative Markwayne Mullin [currently head of DHS], a witness to Babbitt's attempted breach, said that Byrd "didn't have a choice" but to shoot, and that his action "saved people's lives".* [0]
The shooting was deemed “lawful and within department policy”.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Ashli_Babbitt
I've yet to see anyone address the more immediate problem for (humaniform) robotics, which is that it runs counter to the economic benefits of specialization at industrial scales.
A robotic warehouse that's just like a human warehouse but with robots walking the aisles will always be more expensive (and likely far less efficient) than a warehouse purpose built for automated picking using standard containers and graspers, conveyer belts or path constrained wheeled platforms--something I've seen in operation 20 years ago.
A factory of general purpose robots sewing t-shirts will always be more expensive than a factory a low wage humans sitting there doing the same.
The Fourdrinier process for making flat-sheet goods (i.e., paper, thin plastic, in massive rolls) is more than two centuries old. The idea that robots, returning to dipping a mould into the furnish to create individual sheets, could even come close to the economics of modern papermaking is insane.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paper_machine
I've been referring to it as the "United States of Lower Canada" (USLC) since, and calling my American family members "Lower Canadians". They giggle in a kind of resigned way.
As you seem to know, the prion example was to highlight how industrial scale operations create industrial scale problems, namely the bone-and-meal feed that was throwing all the cow brains into a common pool from which all were feeding. I understand that sanitary practices don't affect this.
> It’s not dirty or unsanitary by any means
I didn't say this and I don't know where you got it from.