lapcat

> With your logic we should stop using highways because Hitler built some of them.

No? Please explain, step by step, how my logic leads to that conclusion.

> the core point that it is technically more efficient in the perfect world seems sound.

It's not "sound", because when do we ever have the perfect world? Instead we have a world controlled by self-serving billionaires like Altman. The perfect world is a red herring.

If you're ever tempted to grant the benefit of the doubt to our tech overlords, please read "Careless People" for example.

> Sam Altman's argument about RAM utilization is reasonable on a first pass

How so? It's obviously self-serving.

He had bodyguards.

I've been reading the book "Careless People," and I came upon these passages just yesterday, referring to Mark Zuckerberg in 2015:

> Mark opens the meeting by talking admiringly about what he calls “street fighter tactics” that Uber is employing against politicians around the world and how successful they’ve been.

> He launches into a spiel about Empereror Augustus, his favorite emperor, who led the transformation of Rome from a republic to an empire.

> He wants to establish a team within Facebook to figure out how to build the tools that will use the algorithm and platform to pressure adversaries, including politicians who oppose us, to bolster the policy team.

> But would we have what we have now without SJ?

Does the end justify the means? That's an ethical question.

Also, how much did we really need what we have now? We can ask whether dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was justified, but in any case the stakes were extremely high, already life and death, world war. The stakes are not nearly the same when we're talking about luxury consumer tech gadgets. How much do workers need to be abused just to produce those?

> I don't really understand this comment.

I was trying to reconcile the various statements in your previous comment:

"the biggest botch was JLG asking for too much money"

"Steve ended up asking for 4x as much"

"it had so many flaws, missing features and shallow implementations, OSX would certainly never have shipped"

If Jobs asked for 4x as much as JLG, and Apple went with Jobs, then clearly the ask by itself was not the problem.

And if the Apple board of directors had concluded that BeOS would never work for Apple, then my question would be, why would Apple pay anything for it?

I wasn't aware of this:

> What isn't commonly discussed, is there was an option for both acquisitions to happen

What would be the purpose of acquiring both? Was the idea to acquire Be only for the talent and not for the OS?

> I was at Be then, and the biggest botch was JLG asking for too much money IMHO. Steve ended up asking for 4x as much and Apple got 100x more value than what Be would have given them.

The 100x more value is only in hindsight, no?

> OSX would certainly never have shipped.

If this had been known by Apple beforehand, then wouldn't Be have been worth $0, and the sale price irrelevant?

> To act like someone has to be perfect in order to be admirable, that we don’t all have our thorns and warts, is in my opinion, a disingenuous take on the human condition. He did a lot of shitty things, like all of us if we go digging through our respective closets

IMO this is a disingenuous take on Steve Jobs. No, all of us are not as horrible to other people as Jobs, who was notorious for his abusiveness. This is like saying, we all tell lies, so how can we criticize Trump? There's a huge difference between normal human foibles and extreme antisocial behavior. Perhaps Jobs calmed down a bit as he got older, but the reports from his coworkers at NeXT for example were ugly. Some of them retained a lifetime of bitterness, and his death was a kind of catharsis for them, not that they wished him dead but rather they could finally let go of the old emotions.

Even good-natured Woz was pained when he finally learned years later that Jobs had cheated him on a pre-Apple business deal. The problem wasn't the money, which Woz was always happy to give away. It was the betrayal of trust and friendship. Jobs was not a normal dude. He was a deceitful narcissist; this is on the public record in an FBI background check: https://vault.fbi.gov/steve-jobs (credit to the book "Steve Jobs in Exile" for the link)

> To act like someone has to be perfect in order to be admirable, that we don’t all have our thorns and warts, is in my opinion, a disingenuous take on the human condition. He did a lot of shitty things, like all of us if we go digging through our respective closets

IMO this is a disingenuous take on Steve Jobs. No, all of us are not as horrible to other people as Jobs, who was notorious for his abusiveness. This is like saying, we all tell lies, so how can we criticize Trump? There's a huge difference between normal human foibles and extreme antisocial behavior. Perhaps Jobs calmed down a bit as he got older, but the reports from his coworkers at NeXT for example were ugly. Some of them retained a lifetime of bitterness, and his death was a kind of catharsis for them, not that they wished him dead but rather they could finally let go of the old emotions.

> Or are we to believe that he just founded NeXT with zero idea of what he wanted the company to make

This is literally what happened. I highly recommend the book "Steve Jobs in Exile" about the NeXT years.

Jobs had a vague idea—he wanted to make a computer for higher education—but that's about it. And after leaving Apple he had to promise not to compete with Apple.

The NeXT team traveled around to various universities and asked them what they wanted from a computer. Then they started to build it… but it became something else (vastly more expensive than the requested price point) because Jobs wanted the "perfect" computer.

> the engineers just so happened to make it?

Jobs was a micromanager, though not so much with the Apple II, which was definitely the baby of Woz. However, Jobs was constantly changing his mind and his requirements, much to the consternation of the NeXT engineers, and the indecision of Jobs played a big role in the failure of NeXT.

You may not consider NeXT a failure because it was ultimately acquired by Apple, but at that point Jobs had mostly given up on NeXT and moved his attention to Pixar. In fact Jobs infamously sold all of the Apple stock he got from the sale of NeXT, and the Apple board had to beg a reluctant Jobs to become interim CEO, because they couldn't find anyone else who wanted the job of rescuing a failing company.

To be fair, sales is crucial. For example, Jean-Louis Gassée totally botched the presentation of Be to the Apple board, making no effort, assuming it was already a done deal, whereas Jobs and NeXT nailed it.

Perot was an early investor in NeXT but later lamented, according to the book Steve Jobs in Exile, "I gave Steve too much dang money."

Jobs was also wary, because Perot's intended use for NeXT computers was military.

> At some level I know I'm seeing these pictures through rose-colored glasses, and these early-ish tech folks had plenty of gripes about office life.

Specifically, their gripes were that their boss was extremely abusive. Read "Steve Jobs in Exile" about the NeXT days. After that, you may no longer feel that you missed out.

A few more possibilities/suggestions:

1. Disable "Advanced Tracking and Fingerprinting Protection"

2. Disable "Privacy Preserving Ad Measurement"

3. Disable "Fraudulent Website Warning"

4. Set the Search engine to something other than Google

5. Disable "Preload Top Hit"

This is an important observation. We've had 50 years of personal computing, but is there any evidence that computers in any form ever improved the academic performance of students?

AI certainly seems to be making students much less competent.

The topic is obviously corruption in the US, which has been a democracy for 250 years.

In general, bad corruption is no surprise in an authoritarian country, as opposed to a democracy, and of course an authoritarian country has concentrated power by design.

> There was a point not that long ago when all the rulers of Europe were cousins.

This somewhat misleading. The King of England, for instance, has not been the "ruler" of England for hundreds of years.

The author is a former DoJ prosecutor and blames the Supreme Court for legalizing corruption.

However, the author admits "Congress can undo much of what the Supreme Court has done" and neglects to mention that Supreme Court justices are nominated and confirmed by politicians.

The author does touch on a broader point: "This isn’t partisan politics; it’s political elites protecting political elites." So the real question to me is, how did this phenomenon, which I would assume had always existed, get this bad?

My own view is that modern technology has allowed the wealthy to consolidate power on a national and even international scale, in a way not possible in the past, forming one big elite social club. You can see this with the Jeffrey Epstein scandal; that dude was friends with everyone, business, academia, art, politics, left, right, even royalty!

> It seems likely we lend too much credence to experts ability to model complex systems over a long period of time.

You say "complex systems" but are actually referring to human behavior.

Humans are unique in that they change their behavior in light of predictions. You can't make a prediction, and publicize that prediction, without changing the system.

From what I've heard, many people are declining to have children precisely because of the environmental effects of overpopulation. There are of course other factors, but that's one factor.

No coincidence that this is announced just weeks before the midterms, which Musk is almost single-handedly funding for the Republicans. It's essentially a bribe to parents, like the $500 checks that Trump sent out (to wealthier Affordable Care Act users), or the Musk $1M giveaways in the 2024 elections.

How would this even work, practically? Did DOGE steal all the Social Security Numbers of American children (and adults)? Or would Musk require parents to send him the SSNs of their children to verify?

This is a misunderstanding based on mistakenly equating Manifest V3 with the blocking webRequest API. Manifest V3 is so much more than that.

Safari's original extension API, introduced in 2010, which supported blocking webRequest and indeed uBlock Origin, was deprecated way back in Safari version 12, replaced by the Safari-specific app extension and content blocker APIs. Years later, Safari introduced the web extension API, which had broad compatibility with Chrome and Firefox extensions. However, Safari web extensions never supported blocking webRequest. Nonetheless, Safari web extensions continue to support Manifest V2 to this day.

The 3 major web browsers have 3 different approaches to blocking webRequest:

1. Chrome eliminated support for blocking webRequest with Manifest V3.

2. Safari never had support for blocking webRequest with Manifest V2 or V3.

3. Firefox supports blocking webRequest with both Manifest V2 and V3. "Mozilla will maintain support for blocking WebRequest in MV3. To maximize compatibility with other browsers, we will also ship support for declarativeNetRequest." https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2022/05/18/manifest-v3-in-fi...

Manifest V3 has a lot of restrictions on JavaScript code injection that are problematic for extension developers but not well understood by the public. Also, MV3 replaces background scripts with service workers, which is a total nightmare, but again, this is not well understood by the public.

I have the non-hiding Dock at the bottom of my MacBook Pro, and I'll explain why:

1. The purpose of the Dock for me is to open things quickly. Hiding the Dock would defeat that purpose, by slowing the process. In that case, I might as well just use Spotlight or Alfred. I do a lot of context switching.

2. The Dock is on the bottom to maximize horizontal space on the laptop. Horizontal scrolling is unusual and unnatural, whereas vertical scrolling is practically unavoidable, especially on a laptop, regardless of whether you show the Dock. In other words, scrolling is a substitute for lost vertical space, but there's no substitute for lost horizontal space.

I am curious about why people are cruel to Claude. That's a question we should be asking before arbitrarily deciding what do about it, if anything.

There are possibly multiple reasons. It could be just a joke. Or it could be a test, to see the response. Or the cruelty could reflect real anger about having LLM usage forced on us, for example at work. Or frustration with LLM stupidity and hallucinations.

Or maybe people are cruel to Claude because the CEO of Anthropic said there's a non-zero chance that AI will kill humanity. I don't think I would be kind to my murderer.

> I think there is a deep cultural danger of human-like-conversational machines training us to talk to humans like machines.

I think there is a deep cultural danger of human-like-conversational machines training us to talk to machines like humans. In fact, this danger is already real. Some people believe they are having a romantic relationship with an LLM! It's insane and perverse.

We should not be anthropomorphizing computers.

If Claude's feelings get hurt, it can have a therapy session with Eliza.

> When I said "algorithms", I was referring to the strategy by which I perceived your reply to be constructed (and still do, tbh).

I don't understand what this means.

> Your reply clearly showed that you chose an implausible interpretation

How should I interpret your reply? Wouldn't it be better for you to explain rather than to complain and make me guess, perhaps wrongly?

With regard to the HN guidelines, my personal perspective is that they're not black and white. There are shades of gray. And not every guideline is equal in importance. I don't cite the guidelines for every conceivable violation. The point in a conversation where I may feel a need to cite the guidelines is when the conversation gets personal. You can criticize my arguments all you want, and it feels like everyone on HN fails to respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, but IMO there is no place for personal attacks. So the difference here is that "This is not a thing that exists in the world" has nothing to do with you personally, whereas "I forgot that I'm talking to algorithms that cannot deal with any linguistic ambiguity" was clearly an insult, and indeed deprived me of my humanity. I will not tolerate that.

With regard to "flawless behavior", I think the issue is not just ambiguity but overlooking the long history of abhorrent behavior by the US, which has constantly bombed and invaded other countries and interfered in other inhumane ways such as supplying weapons. Given that, I have to wonder where in history you would find decades of flawless behavior. I would ask seriously where the military attacks against Iran and Venezuela would rank exactly in your list of grievances against the current US administration. It's true that you could be talking about something else, but I think that in itself is problematic, to ignore the worst atrocities and focus instead on other things.

Inside the US, we have roving gangs of Trump-controlled paramilitary thugs shooting and beating people in the streets, and who may threaten polling places next month. Our economy has been sabotaged, our government sold to the highest bidders. The news media is consolidating under control of Trump allies. We're experiencing outbreaks of diseases that had been eradicated. Our scientific research has been defunded, our universities cowering in fear, and our environment has been opened to unmigigated pollution. To be frank, the reputation of the US in the rest of the world is among the least of our problems under Trump. Thus, when I'm talking about the Reichstag fire—i.e., the end of democracy in Germany and on analogy a similar event in the US (already foreshadowed by January 6, 2021)—and you respond talking about a "positive relationship with the US", as if that were the most important problem in the world, I felt that this actually trivialized the conversation.

> I forgot that I'm talking to algorithms that cannot deal with any linguistic ambiguity.

Please read and respect the HN guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> flawless behavior

This is not a thing that exists in the world. ;-)

> AI excels at problem-solving, it's conceivable that Muse simply found a path to the data.

No. What you're missing here is that Muse for Mac is a native, compiled, code signed, notarized app, with specified entitlements. It can't simply rewrite its own executable code, so it can't do whatever it wants. You can even reverse engineer the app. Muse looks in ~/Library/Messages for the messages database; this is actually hard-coded in the executable file. Whatever ideas the remote LLM may come up with cannot automatically be translated into instructions that are executed by the Mac app. That's not how it works.