gurkendoktor

Humans are great at making up purpose where there is absolutely none, and indeed this is a helpful mechanism for dealing with post-scarcity.

The philosophical problem that I see with the "AI overlord age" (although not directly related to AI) is that we'll then have the technology to change the inherent human desires you speak of, and at that point growing tomatoes just seems like a very inefficient way of satisfying a reward function that we can change to something simpler.

Maybe we wouldn't do it precisely because it'd dissolve the very notion of purpose? But it does feel to me like destroying (beating?) the game we're playing when there is no other game out there.

(Anyway, this is obviously a much better problem to face than weaponized use of a superintelligence!)

Your comment summarizes what I worry might be a more widespread opinion than I expected. If you think that human extinction is a fair price to pay for creating a supercomputer, then our value systems are so incompatible that I really don't know what to say.

I guess I wouldn't have been so angry about any of this before I had children, but now I'm very much in favor of prolonged human existence.

One avenue of hope for successful AI alignment that I've read somewhere is that we don't need most laypeople to understand the risks of it going wrong, because for once the most powerful people on this planet have incentives that are aligned with ours. (Not like global warming, where you can buy your way out of the mess.)

I really hope someone with very deep pockets will find a way to steer the ship more towards AI safety. It's frustrating to see someone like Elon Musk, who was publicly worried about this very specific issue a few years ago, waste his time and money on buying Twitter.

Edit: I'm aware that there are funds available for AI alignment research, and I'm seriously thinking of switching into this field, mental health be damned. But it would help a lot more if someone could change Eric Schmidt's mind, for example.

To be fair, ants have not created humanity. I don't think it's inconceivable for a friendly AI to exist that "enjoys" protecting us in the way a friendly god might. And given that we have AI (well, language models...) that can explain jokes before we have AI that can drive cars, AI might be better at understanding our motives than the stereotypical paperclip maximizer.

However, all of this is moot if the team developing the AI does not even try to align it.

For one thing, we could try to come up with safety measures that prevent the most basic paperclip maximizer disaster from happening.

At this point I almost wish it was still the military that makes these advances in AI, not private companies. Anyone working on a military project has to have some sense that they're working on something dangerous.

Not you specifically, but I honestly don't understand how positive many in this community (or really anyone at all) can be about these news. Tim Urban's article explicitly touches on the risk of human extinction, not to mention all the smaller-scale risks from weaponized AI. Have we made any progress on preventing this? Or is HN mostly happy with deprecating humanity because our replacement has more teraflops?

Even the best-case scenario that some are describing, of uploading ourselves into some kind of post-singularity supercomputer in the hopes of being conscious there, doesn't seem very far from plain extinction.

Ooohh, I didn't know this name for it, thanks. I somehow came across it as The Sultan's Riddle on the internet:

https://explainextended.com/2016/12/31/happy-new-year-8/

I prefer this less sterile framing of it. It was the most fun that I ever had with a puzzle, so to anyone scrolling around on this page, I would recommend not jumping straight to the solution :)

Self-correcting because frustrated users will simply start their own Google? Even if that happens, their second generation of employees will start a revolt if their company doesn't follow the latest DIE best practices.

I honestly think that only the Russian/Chinese model of a nationalized IT ecosystem has a chance to resist these trends.

Here's what I would consider a boring example of such anti-vaxx heresy:

https://www.eugyppius.com/p/maximum-vaccination

According to this Guardian article, the "Center for Countering Digital Hate" (also mentioned in your article) would be happy if Substack hadn't given it the platform:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/jan/27/anti-vaxx...

The idea that Yet Another Generic NGO needs to "counter hate" because someone on the internet thinks the vaccine is not going to stop the pandemic is completely bonkers.

What I want to say is, a lot of the controversy around Substack seems to be that it is not aligned with the Right Side in the Culture War. I think they have some great writers, but they're not the next WikiLeaks or anything.

I agree about the engineering failure, but I'm not sure if mass hysteria is the right term. It was messier than that, we also saw a few leaders chilling out too much too early. My favorite: https://twitter.com/billdeblasio/status/1234648718714036229

And if anything, governments have been too relaxed about the origin of the pandemic (which has now officially killed 6 million!), while panicking about other details.

I disagree. The appeal to solidarity w.r.t. masks would never have worked because a tiny minority of scalpers can ruin it all. But the white lie didn't work either, so it seems like the worse option regardless.

Appeals to solidarity w.r.t. staying at home, wearing masks, getting vaccinated to flatten the curve all worked quite well in my bubble. Projects like Zero Covid would have required insanely high levels of compliance. If you say "anything involving solidarity with others does not work anymore", how high is your bar? What used to work but now doesn't?

(I'd guess that solidarity is lower than it used to be, but if anything I am surprised how much goodwill still exists considering growing inequality, atomization, erosion of public trust and all that.)

Agree with everything you said, but want to add one more point:

I have made my peace with all of these bureaucratic failures. Maybe a certain amount of contradiction and chaos is part of living in a democracy.

The scary part is that at the same time there has been an authoritarian push to crack down on "disinformation", you know, like the lab leak theory, or the conspiracy theory that vaccination will become mandatory. That has sent my trust from low into negative territory.

Notably, the Mac Mini does not have a stupid external power adapter, but just uses a standard cable that costs like $1. I did carry mine around for a while, and it was glorious! I'm not sure why Apple's competitors insist on including a brick that's almost as large as the PC itself.

I went from a 16" MacBook Pro with an i9 and 32 GB of RAM to the MacBook Air with 16 GB of RAM, and my build times at work were almost exactly the same. But the single-core speed makes everything _feel_ so much faster than the stupid slow i9 cores. (At less than half the price, and without a fan!)

In my opinion, the Air is the perfect addition to a heavy Linux/Windows workstation. You get the full spectrum from iOS development to gaming, albeit at the cost of having to babysit two or three operating systems. You can use the Air for meetings or conferences, because everything that's not a game has a macOS version (think Microsoft Teams etc.)

Exactly: Most studies that I've been referred to are shiny McKinsey pages that boil down to big companies having more diverse boards on average.

Besides what you said, that's not a surprising correlation because it's easy for Multinational MegaCorp Inc. to have a multi-ethnic board after a few international mergers.

And then there are very opinionated shareholders like Vanguard and BlackRock, which receive voting rights for every Euro that I save for old age, who can make this outcome a self-fulfilling prophecy by punishing companies for lack of diversity.

I don't think it's possible to control for all of this.

If you look at some PRs on elementary's GitHub, you will see that neither Cassidy James nor Danielle were cranking out mountains of code at any point in time. Both were involved in reviews and UX decisions, Cassidy seemed a bit more in charge of communications lately, but the majority of elementary OS code has come from volunteers for as long as I've followed its development.

elementary's daily/preview builds are only accessible to GitHub sponsors over a certain amount. I wonder how that worked out, because I like this pseudo-subscription model a lot better, and wish AppCenter could even figure out that I'm a supporter and redistribute some of my $$$ to apps that I often use.

> people who clearly have no idea what the actual majority of people pushing for inclusive language are typically suggesting and shy.

It does not seem to matter what any majority wants. I have never seen a request to rename something because a majority of black/trans/female/... people considered a term offensive, or the majority of staff, or - as you say - the majority of people who are pushing for inclusive language. (Who gets to define this group? Do I count if I make sure to use singular they, but don't care about master branches?)

The way it works is that a person or institution high up declares a term offensive, and then it takes only one or two people to suggest a change in a company Slack or other public space. Nobody wants to be racist/sexist, so the path of least resistance is to go along and make the change. That's why it feels like power games - if things were decided by anonymous polls instead, then I think acceptance of either outcome would be much higher.

> You have inflected nouns and adjectives -- you'd have to come up with new endings for those

Two proposals that I've seen replace all endings with either -x or -ens.

German source - https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lann_Hornscheidt#Gendertheorie...

Now one might think that these are outlandish ideas that will never fly, but...

> And teach everyone to use them.

...that's easy, because languages changes are implemented top-down. Considering how unpopular the neutral forms using : and * are in polls, it is absolutely fascinating to see them spread so quickly from academia, to tech (macOS, Spotify), to local governments, to normie coworkers. Nonbinary people wouldn't have to do the teaching themselves.

Edit:

> ...not the neuter ones in case that this were offensive in German...

My first intuition was that using the neutral gender would indeed be offensive. But children (das Kind) and girls (das Mädchen) are neutral - and it doesn't feel rude to refer to them as "it"? I think it could work.

German unfortunately has no equivalent of singular they. The concept is a non-starter because "they" and "she" are both "sie". The new PC spelling is to always write he*she or he:she instead of he/she to make room for nonbinary people, which doesn't make any sense to me. We still don't have a pronoun to refer to nonbinary people, we can only include them if we're not sure of someone's gender. Yay?

What I found interesting about this particular bot is that it wants to replace "actress" by "actor". (Yes please!! You don't know how good you have it in English, where most occupations are gender-neutral.)

In contrast, the current progressive push in German is to replace generic/masculine Schauspieler (actor) with der*die Schauspieler*in (think "actr*ess"; male, female, and everything in between, a bit like latinx). Maybe it makes sense that German has a tendency to become ever more complicated like C++, while English becomes simpler? But it shows how fad-driven this whole thing is: Either gendered nouns are good or bad, why would it depend on the language?

There is (was?) always a lot of C++ in Core Animation stacktraces, and Core Animation was really foundational to the iPhone UI.

> Things like Fitt's Law and so on. It was not just opinion.

Here's another one: "users were roughly 37% faster at finding items when visual indicators varied both in color and icon compared to text alone"

Source: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/visual-indicators-different...

The whole point of the settings app shown in the OP's screenshots is to quickly find the relevant section in the sidebar. But even before the great design madness of 2012, designers have started to remove icon colors everywhere. (Except for app icons, where Google and Apple have now removed shapes instead, sigh.)

From the sidelines, it doesn't look like the trend is reversing in GNOME land. https://twitter.com/hadessuk/status/1506316793413087241

A curious inverse of this headline from last year:

> Code in huge ransomware attack written to avoid computers that use Russian, says new report

Edit, a better reference than the NBC article: https://krebsonsecurity.com/2021/05/try-this-one-weird-trick...

I have moved from a 13" M1 Air to the 16" M1 Pro only because I wanted a bigger screen for traveling. I feel some buyer's remorse because it was more than twice as expensive, and I don't really care about the extra speed or memory (yet?). It's also really heavy, and I don't love its looks.

What I'd absolutely buy is a 16" MacBook Air, like an Apple version of the LG Gram.

Edit: For comparison, the 16" LG Gram with a discrete Nvidia GPU is exactly as light as the 13" M1 MacBook Air, and supposedly it has great battery life. And all those ports...sigh...

A neutral web browser is not one that only lets me access politically neutral websites (all five of them), but one that doesn't care what I look at.

In fact, the few times that I've used Yandex were because it is not politically neutral. I was curious whether the results for some queries look different when they're not being filtered through the lens of the American empire. That use case should make Yandex more relevant these days, not less.

(Although, to be honest, the search results were quite boring and normal.)

Regarding your last paragraph, I generally agree, but there is at least one exception: If you need lots of RAM and nothing else, then many consumer laptops won't do the job.

> history has shown that slavery is unsustainable and that humans resist and succeed against it time and time again

The problem is that technology as a force amplifier is getting better and better. At some point it gives the 1% enough power and artificial smarts to enslave the 99% indefinitely. When people in history have overthrown slavery, the masters couldn't stop all transportation in the country (minus bicycles) with the push of a button. That's where we are headed here. Same with the cash-less society and so on.

I admire your optimism, but almost every Steam Deck review complained about the UI. All the work under the hood looks really good, with Proton and pressure-vessel and so on, but they just don't seem to have the almighty yet tasteful UI dictator that a desktop distro needs. Unfortunately, that is also the part that the community cannot help with.

Still, can't wait to get mine and play around with the desktop. Ironically, I was planning to use mine for contributing to elementary, after having been locked out for a while (ARM Mac).

I think that technical hurdles absolutely matter, even more so at the current scale of elementary. And offering apps that are neither sandboxed nor auditable sounds like a PR disaster waiting to happen once someone steals Bitcoin wallets.

Thankfully, the kernel of apps that work across distributions is slowly coming together over at flathub, which is planning to add payment support: https://github.com/flathub/flathub/issues/680

Even the KDE-based Steam Deck, on the opposite end of every spectrum from elementary, embraces flatpak (and flathub).

It's exactly the piece of the puzzle that would have enabled what you suggest: write elementary-flavored apps, sell them everywhere. Given that elementary has already added the Sideload app, I'm not sure if they're as ideological about GTK FOSS purity as it sometimes seems.

I don't think that's the basic premise. elementary is not just a GTK theme, they have their own set of apps (for better or for worse) which follow their HIG, they are rewriting productivity apps to use the EDS backend throughout the system, they are trying to improve gesture support everywhere... It feels a lot like what made OS X so great about a decade ago.