kafkaesque

> Whatsapp has this problem before AI

Yep. So does AT&T. Real scenario that just happened to me yesterday:

Spectrum is charging me $110 a month for internet. I go to the AT&T site to check if they can provide fibre internet in my area. No matter what address I enter, it says to contact them. I tried neighbouring addresses and, at one point, I even gave AI a try to see if I could get tips. Nothing worked.

I called the number the AT&T coverage page asked me to call (apparently a customer service number). I was "first" in line, but it took them over 15 minutes to get to me. Weird but sure.

This isn't even the kafkaesque part.

I finally get on the phone with someone and he says "Hello, can I get your name?" I give him my first name. He says, "I need your full name to bring up the address." I say, "You don't have my address. I don't have an AT&T account and I'm calling to ask if you provide fibre internet in my area." He says, "I understand. But I need your full name to look up the address." I say, "I don't understand why you would need my full name." I gave him my name again.

He hangs up on me.

Not much different to a useless cycle of talking to a bot, especially when AT&T apparently encourages to move on as quickly as possible from a call if the rep knows they won't close a sale and as they try to improve their "average handle time"

I'm not saying AI wouldn't exacerbate this, and this is reason to believe that this scenario would only be worse under an AI-controlled environment. Certain parts of our society will just become even more closed off and shut people down even faster and with less human effort. Even if AT&T was able to somehow identify my real identity through some governmental totalitarian identity system, I don't think this would change

Important doesn't mean "smart." I would actually argue Wittgenstein wasn't very smart (and in my opinion, often wrong). There were just the right enough people around him that thought he was a gifted student (though he didn't always excel academically, weirdly enough). At what, that is a mystery and is contentious. During his early years when people thought that, he was already harassing and beating children (he published Tractatus in his early 30s).

1. He rejected infinite mathematical extensions, unbounded quantification, misunderstood Godel’s incompleteness theorem and quite a bit more that the math community dismissed. So he wasn't a math genius (he originally studied engineering and became interested in math through that)

2. Most people were skeptical of his picture theory, and rightfully so. It grew out of the same environment that gave rise to, at that time and in their initial form, logical positivism, empiricism, and at its most horrific, behaviourism, which led to infant pain denial. Picture theory explains something surface-level, which in itself people understood was just incomplete, and I'm sure you know, even Wittgenstein rejected his theory later

3. But the problem with his last work, Investigations, was that it was again surface-level musings, and written in a weird cryptic way sprinkled with made up words. His language-games, to me, sounds like what teens nowadays would talk about in high school with less fancy language. And it describes, to me, this kind of juvenile high school behaviour. Which, fair enough, I'm sure rings true to some people. But his philosophy is general enough to not really contribute much as a whole. It just hides behind this high-brow language. Yet he was very adamant and defensive about it

Wittgenstein had severe anger issues that people recognized but hardly anyone wanted to do much about. He had a superiority complex (lots of childhood stuff in his life probably) and he just didn't like a lot of people and thought very little of them

I guess the one good thing about him I can say is when he wanted to accomplish something he really set his mind to it. If only that same fervour was used to be not just a better person but to work well with others, he might've contributed something most experts would still rely on and be influenced by

Saul Goodman?

So, you ask an LLM "what does this code do?" and it spits back a long list of things.

Is the fear that it is (maybe wilfully) misinterpreting the code, being too general, not going into specifics or is just not smart enough to catch all the nuances, privacy issues and hidden mistakes? Is it a token issue? A combination of all this?

The difference is she was a mayor of an American city. She was an elected official in direct contact with CCP officials, and while the examples provided are more or less trivial, I would hope that she would be investigated. A US official has access to certain private information and it's not far-fetched to conceive she could be disseminating private information about, at the very least, local politics

The Orwellian nightmare is nigh

I can relate! Someone who is very dear to me suggested we go to a one-day pottery class and the idea had never entered my mind. I actually ended up loving it. We're both introverts, as well, and she enjoys doing things that don't require other people (she likes to surf, as well). There's something about doing something physical by yourself (that isn't exercising) that's creative that I really like, but before the class, I hadn't realized it.

I actually play instruments, as well, but this feels totally different and almost stimulates a different part of my brain. I was much more relaxed doing pottery and I saw instant results that I could track whether I was doing something right or wrong (even though the "right" and "wrong" was driven by my own personal idea of them).

Do you think you'll end up sharing any of your pieces to the public?

The idiom is, "Do as I say, not as I do."

Yet here you are trying to convince folks why this doesn't lead to poor morals, low self-awareness, and a lack of trust in doctors. We are talking about a doctor, of course, not just an average nobody. And we are talking about a doctor with 6 million subscribers. His influence is wide.

Last I checked, a doctor is not the same as a politician.

I'm not sure why you are drawing a parallel to a good doctor that smokes.

I never said "Doctor Mike" is a bad doctor. I have no idea if he is a good or bad doctor.

Further, an ad hominem is when a person attacks someone's character without any base.

I wrote specifically about him not being at the forefront and questioning his values, as displayed by his actions during the pandemic. His actions were literally not in line with Covid guidelines. Those are guidelines that were formulated by hundreds (thousands?) of doctors, all of whom sought to be at the forefront of medical science during a pandemic.

As another user said, MRI scans not corresponding to brain activity is not really news, and in at least the part of the US I live in, MRI scans are not so easily recommended, especially since they're not covered by health insurance.

Dr. Amen should be called out, of course, but it doesn't mean a doctor is at the forefront for doing so.

People questioned his values and his "medical thinking" after he had a party during the pandemic without masking or distancing[1], so he is probably not exactly "at the forefront."

From a Medium article[2]:

"The issue was that he attended a party on a boat and someone took a picture of him and over a dozen other people in close proximity without masks. After getting caught, he made an apology video on his second channel, which only has 58k subscribers compared to his main channel’s 6 million. Not only was this apology riddled with flawed logic and self-justification, but now the opposition to COVID guidelines now has more ammunition."

[1] Image from November 2020: https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:1400/format:webp/0*Lr_...

[2] https://therewiredsoul.medium.com/the-real-problem-with-the-...

> physics is what you study if you couldn't do engineering

This reminded me of something from my alma mater.

At my (Canadian) university, there was a running joke that engineering was what you studied if you couldn't get into computer science. In fact, the Engineering and Computer Science faculties would semi-frequently prank each other because they were next to each other, I guess. Each faculty focuses on different things, of course, but the "running joke" was that engineering courses were just easier, not as rigorous, and therefore getting in engineering was seen as easier (and so they had more time to do such elaborate pranks).

Again, I don't think this had any truth to it, but it was just one part of a fun tradition the university had.

Also, this was a long time ago. I'm not sure what the current state of this is now or if it even still exists.

Every time I tried taking a motorbike taxi, they charged me probably three times more than a local to just travel maybe 1km, not to mention Bangkok has one of the deadliest roads in the world, if not the deadliest. I have explored pretty much all of Bangkok and I don't think the MRT and BTS are as convenient as some people make it out to be. It is built as it is in any other city where it's very concentrated around the city centre but anything right outside of that is terrible.

Also, for two weeks in December you have the Red Cross festival. I challenge you to schedule your day every single day to avoid that mass of hell if you live anywhere in a 2km radius of that. Even if you call a tuktuk or a motorbike, they will absolutely NOT come to get you if they think there's too much traffic, or worse, they will tell you to get off somewhere where it's convenient for them.

Like a lot of foreigners, you seem to have built your life avoiding many things in Bangkok, which you can do in any city, but that's not the point. You are compensating for how poorly the city is built and how poorly the city is ran. A city is not appealing if you have to self-impose so many restrictions and find so many workarounds.

"Learn how to avoid peak traffic hours." Most people living in Bangkok cannot do this. Also, a very high percent of the time, the Icon Siam area is extremely congested (even on weekends). Yes, you can avoid living in or going to that area, but there are also very few nice areas in Bangkok in general.

Most don't have the luxury of the flexibility to avoid certain areas and/or certain peak travel times (which in BKK are many throughout the day)

Am I the only one who sees "content boxes"/divs with content displayed in different widths as poor design? At least in the example given, I would think you would want the image and its associated content box to be the same size for all four and not have its content vary in width based on how much content it has.

But in terms of functionality, I'm sure there are plenty applications for this!

Is it possible to label/tag these submissions as containing content that is AI-generated? I think the HN community would appreciate that

This is a great point. When I was studying philosophy in university, an extremely common roadblock to moving the discussion forward was that people (professor and students) were philosophizing about specialized topics that they themselves were not well informed on or held no expertise in. I think this is the problem with philosophy adding practical value to people's lives in general. We seek answers to questions that require specialized knowledge in areas in which we don't have sufficient knowledge in.

The discussions that were more fruitful were the ones where the professor asked if there was someone who majored in that specific subject in the class, and that person would be used as an expert to speak to whatever thing we were questioning, and since it was philosophy, we would question everything.

I tried living off my music for 10 years when I was young. I was on the verge of homelessness at the end. The existential dread was good for my art, but not my mental health. I was very creative, but also on the verge of not wanting to exist. After that, I sold all my gear and focused on a career in software development. I live a comfortable life now and slowly building back up my home studio and making music again. It doesn't feel the same and I have to really think about how to be creative, whereas before it was more intuitive. It's a trade-off. It feels different.

For context, you can refer to section 2.1 here:

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/protagoras/#AllThinMeasMa...

Sure, it doesn't take long to explain the gist of Protagoras' Truth, because it is fairly bare bones. I'm not sure what the intent was to post this specific University of Reading link.

It's the kind of thing that is taught for a few minutes at the start of an intro course.

> Stop trying to make social networks succeed, stop dreaming of a universal network. Instead, invest in your own communities. Help them make long-term, custom and sustainable solutions. Try to achieve small and local successes instead of pursuing an imaginary universal one. It will make you happier.

This resonates with me. The beauty of the Web was to allow you to find your niche anywhere in the world from your own place of living. But that concept has been contaminated and taken over by your typical big corporation. It is now diluted by hostile ads, psychological warfare, and manipulation, all while, on the surface, pitching you the idea that you can "cater" your experience to whatever you like.

The Web, or any community that is online or offline, should incite togetherness through a common good, whether it's artistic in nature or for the betterment of a community. Before the Web or BBS, this was done in forms of artist communities and forums in person. Seeking to return to this format, but with the aide of the Web is probably something I would prefer, but highly unlikely because younger generations seem to only live in their phones and in a Web reality.

I'm interested to know what city is at the other end of the spectrum.

From my own travels, one city I would submit as a candidate would be Bangkok. In fact, I control-F'd Bangkok and no one has mentioned it yet.

As soon as you leave Savarnabhumi Airport, you are bombarded with maybe 15 to 20 billboards within just a few metres from each other, back to back. It was truly a wild thing to experience at first. All the billboards had the same ad, too.

Truly a thing to behold.

Social media needs to be destroyed, not enhanced, empowered or encouraged. Don't give Meta PMs ideas.

Ceci est un post de protestation.

I'm Canadian and every single Canadian with a computer science degree I know either has moved to the US or is actively trying to. We are essentially trading in highly skilled developers with low skilled ones, with some exceptions, of course

Canada is doing this wrong. What will happen in practice is someone who lives in the US with an H-1B will move to Canada to get that "easy" job, all the while applying for jobs in the US. As soon as they find one in the US, they will leave again. This solution is a band-aid and Canada will be used as a doormat, as it often is.

Here is an idea: forums are easy to build. What if people got back into them and just hosted them on their domain and then there was a webring attached to all forums like sites were back in the 90s, except there would now be a main site that would serve as a directory of forums divided by interest. so everything would be owned separately: the directory and each forum, but all connected through a webring like it was before. It would "decentralize" the Web in some ways (except for there being a directory).