rockercoaster

> When openAI made its Nov 2022 chatGPT announcement, why did they try so hard to hype it in anthropomorphic terms?

Same reason they hyped up how worried they were about "safety" of the "we have to make sure these things are 'aligned' or they'll become Skynet!" variety: Altman was bullshitting to hype up the company. Even the "safety" stuff was just hype. "It's so capable it's literally scary, or soon will be... better invest in / use our product! Imagine how bad it'll be for you if you don't!"

I was on the fence about how serious they were until I finally got around to skimming the "Attention Is All You Need" paper. LOL. LMFAO. No.

> Willing to work for less than an American, but somehow doesn’t drive wages down for Americans.

Yeah, they obviously do. That's plain bullshit.

.... ooooon the other hand, we've never tried having an economy without them. We didn't meaningfully limit migration from elsewhere in the Americas until like the '50s, and at the time beginning such enforcement was controversial because we already used them for a ton of cheap farm labor and farmers' interest groups thought it'd ruin them if we significantly limited such migration. The reason their fears didn't manifest as reality is that we simply, and at least in part on purpose, never bothered to enforce those new laws as completely as we technically could, especially for farm labor.

So like they do lower wages (again: obviously) but also they always have, so removing them is a big change from the status quo of practically the entire history of the country's economy. I dunno, worth looking at I guess, but I personally would want to ease into it in case it turns out to be a bad idea.

> Lives in American housing yet somehow doesn’t drive up the cost of housing.

I think the cheap-labor effect on construction probably outweighs this by a good margin. But maybe not.

> Creates ethnic enclaves which mostly speak their own languages yet somehow assimilate into American culture.

Eh. That complaint has been leveled against every prior migrant group, and hasn't held up over the long haul. Even prior waves of hispanic immigrants. I'd need a reason to think it's different this time to give this any credence whatsoever.

Option+shift+dash, on a default English Mac keyboard. Easy to remember—"modify [option] the dash [dash] to make the biggest common form of it [shift]", or else you can think of it as modifying the underscore (shift + dash) to sit higher on the line (with option).

Yep, this is all (MAGA's rapid judo-flip and complete capture of the entire Republican apparatus, that right-wing authoritarian nationalism is popular at all, the legal and bureaucratic machinery being in place to enable authoritarianism) built on stuff that's been going on since the '70s. That's when the wave of neutering antitrust and deregulating media started, and that's what got us most of four decades of persistent unchallenged lies, dehumanization campaigns, and racism blasted at the public. Nixon's roughly the start of the current movement as far as direct action (the think tanks driving it precede him by a decade or two, but hadn't had much effect before him), with the cynical "war on drugs" aimed at enflaming racial animosity and providing tools to attack political opponents, and of course his downfall and pardon were what lit a flame under a lot of right-wingers' asses to re-make reality such that their crimes wouldn't have consequences again (Reagan and some Nixon alums would soon make early use of this, and test the "if we all just keep telling obvious lies and don't break ranks... can we maybe just get away with whatever we want?" strategy, which turned out to work wonderfully)

All of what we're seeing is built on an electorate that was primed to elect Trump. The Republicans had been using them as a captured base to enable their neoliberal and imperialist policies, but they'd conditioned these folks to want Trumpism, not what they were actually delivering. The shit Trump says is largely the same shit you'd hear from Republican voters since at least the '90s, and what he does is largely shit they want done. They've been asking for e.g. authoritarian federal government crack-downs on cities since then, asking for reductions in law enforcement accountability, asking for no-due-process mass deportations, asking for pulling back from NATO, asking for a wall at the border and/or a militarized border, et c. Their media's been telling them all democratic organizations and the party itself are to-the-core rotten criminal enterprises and they believe that. They will cheer when ICE starts arresting members of congress and major democratic donors on dubious charges.

I fully expect to see them take on more and more roles that e.g. the FBI traditionally performed. The strategy appears to be to expand, empower, and control them as the "MAGA law enforcement agency" and bypass all the rest, either seconding them to ICE or diminishing them to a tiny role.

Look to see them expand to general "counter-terrorism" enforcement in the near future, with only the barest veneer (if that) of its having anything to do with immigration enforcement. After all, if you can stop practically anyone on baseless suspicion of being in the country illegally (see: recent precedent that apparently "they looked foreign" is enough) then charge them with whatever after-the-fact even if they turned out to be legal residents or citizens, that sure looks like a neat little work-around for due process. Or you can just "accidentally" disappear them to El Salvador....

I think about the minor plot point of the President having dissolved the FBI, in the film Civil War, a lot more this year than I ever thought I would when I watched that movie the first time.

I don't entirely know what to make of a very-small number of companies' valuations going sky-high that fast (and a few completely without any apparent connection to the fundamentals or even the best-plausible-case mid-term future of those fundamentals, like Tesla) but I can't help but think it means something is extremely broken in the economy, and it's not going to end well.

Maybe we all should have been a little more pro-actively freaked out when dividends went from standard to all-but extinct, and nobody in the investor class seemed to mind... like, it seems that the balance between "owning things that directly make money through productive activity" and "owning things that I expect to go up in value" has gotten completely out-of-wack in favor of the latter.

The book Impro treats extensively of what it calls "status games", in the context of building believable, natural scenes of dialog for the stage (or other dramatic purposes) and as a framework for making improvisation interesting.

The author muses that the situation of feeling safe playing status games with another person—that is, treating them only as games, not as serious and with real status in play—is perhaps the definition of what friendship is.

This could include trading barbs, taking turns playing the bully and the victim, trading playing "high" and "low" roles, jokey one-upsmanship, that kind of thing. Stuff you don't do with non-friends because there's too much risk of being taken seriously, and too much risk of losing actual status or of hurting someone else's status for-real when you didn't intend to.

I Found No Peace by Webb Miller, published 1936, which is an autobiographical work by a reporter and war correspondent. I actually got the dates slightly wrong, this would have been the first decade of the 20th, not the 1890s as I thought (he wasn't old enough in that decade for the episode in question to have fallen in the 19th century, it was probably in something like 1905-1908).

Page 13 in my copy (I had trouble finding the passage in the scan I found on Internet Archive, I think it's a later printing that is somewhat abridged). He's writing of working for the state highway department, making road cuts and shoveling gravel:

> Some deliberately delayed the physical calls of nature in the morning until after they came to work. That give them the opportunity of taking ten minutes off. The nonshirkers applied blunt Anglo-Saxon terms to that particular trick.

Given his supplying the term "shirk" in that sentence and the characterization of their label for it as "Anglo-Saxon", I think what he's getting at is they called them "shit shirkers", which is pretty funny.

> I’m still of the opinion that iOS 6 was peak iPhone.

You’re not alone. The release of iOS7 basically took us from having one OS that didn’t constantly confuse the non-tech-savvy, back to having zero of those. And it’s gotten a little better in a couple releases, but overall the trend is that it’s moving even farther from that over time.

The idea of avoiding work by taking a shit, though.

Like I could entirely see Julius Caesar’s Gallic Campaign including a bit about punishing some soldier because he always managed to need to shit during the hardest parts of setting up camp, or something like that.

I wonder what the oldest reference is we can find to this practice. I bet it's very old. Oldest I know of is only the late 19th century, but I bet we could beat that by at least several hundred years. Surely it comes up at least once somewhere in Shakespeare?

> Hell, the fact that the Supreme Court is a permanent bench of justices versus a rotating set chosen by lot for each case?

I've been making noise about this option but it doesn't seem to have entered even the online-politics-discussion mainstream yet. Everyone's like "expand the court" but I think both expanding it to match the count of circuits, and forming it by lot from lower courts each session (or multiple lots for a session—it might be good to at least have one group choose the cases, and a different one hear and rule on them) is a far more elegant solution and provides longer-lasting protection against problems, while also depoliticizing the reform to a degree (it wouldn't just be whoever's in control instantly gaining several justices) which I think makes it far more likely to actually be an achievable and durable reform.

It's even got a phase-in option that'd be immediately beneficial and also side-step any questions about whether an SC justice can be "demoted" to merely another federal judge: leave the current ones in place, start drawing the new seats by lot immediately. Existing justices' seats fall under the lot system as they come open. Done.

> Charlie Kirk.

We'll see what shakes out of the trial, but odds are leaning that way, yeah.

> The healthcare ceo.

Last I checked the guy's history read as right-leaning and it was a personal grievance that motivated it? I remember this because lots of people online were surprised/disappointed when he turned out not to have clear leftist motivations. But I admit I haven't kept up on this since the first few weeks, maybe the picture's shifted again.

> Multiple attempts on Trump’s life on the campaign trail.

One right-leaning guy motivated by notoriety-seeking more than politics, and the second one was some nut with a very weird past (lots of felony charges including related to firearms but somehow also lots of foreign travel to conflict zones?) and tough-to-bucket politics.

> People on the left think conservative political violence is worse. But conservatives don’t see it that way. Both sides of American politics think the other side has a worrying amount of political violence.

One side's leaders routinely call for violence. The other's almost never do. There's a clear difference. There's even a clear difference with Republicans pre-Trump and the modern MAGA party—their talking heads used to sometimes call for political violence, but at least their elected and appointed officials rarely did. Both do, now, and have since Trump's first campaign (remember when he suggested his followers shoot Hillary if she won? On stage, to a crowd, with cameras and everything?)

> Yea in fact the ACA law caps insurers to a maximum of 15% profit.

These are plan-by-plan, not on the company overall, and notably this doesn't apply to:

1) Self-funded plans. Name-brand insurance companies manage these, but big companies fund them and take on the risk (with re-insurance and all that good stuff in the mix, of course). A large proportion of the US population is on these kinds of plans, and that limit does not apply to them.

2) New plans in their first (IIRC) two years. I've not looked into whether insurance companies are playing games with this such that a larger set of their plans are "new" ones than would be if this rule didn't exist, but if it's at all possible for them to do that, I guarantee they are.

Besides, it also invites the immediate and rather fatal rejoinder of, "OK? So how about we... don't do that?"

Any negative response to that must suppose that everyone else would just give up on trying to advance drug R&D if the US stopped unilaterally self-sacrificing to subsidize it for the entire world... and when you lay it out like that, it seems like that must not actually be what's going on in the first place, because why the hell would we be do that, for that reason? So, very probably, we aren't, and further, if we are we should definitely stop.

Solidly in middle age, three kids, plenty of other problems.

Still way easier than high school.

If next week the world went topsy-turvy and providing for my kids now (for some reason) depended on my attending and doing tolerably well at high school for the remaining decade or so that my kids are at home, no other options, but also I'm somehow relieved from all the hard parts of taking care of them and such... frankly, I dunno if I'd make it. High school was incredibly stressful (even after I threw myself a life line and deliberately stopped giving as much of a fuck about grades) and, quite literally, depressing, as in it gave me seasonal depression that took most of my 20s to stop cycling through, and recurring nightmares that didn't end until my early 30s, and I wasn't even bullied or anything. The whole institution's a mental-health catastrophe in a way that nothing I've seen in adult life compares to (perhaps prison does, I, fortunately, am not in a position to compare them)

(Separately, yes, I'm sure—very sure, having seen it up close enough times now—that old age health problems and the process of dying are going to be extremely, perhaps incomparably, bad, but I don't think that's what people were talking about when they said schools had to be shitty in order to prepare me for even-shittier adult life, I think they meant work and paying bills and parent-teacher conferences and stuff)

> Every once in a while I remember an algorithm for doing something I can include in our app and feel like a God, lol.

I can distinctly remember the three times this happened for a team I was on, in my couple decades of doing this, because everyone involved kinda got a thrill out of the extreme novelty of doing something resembling actual math of even a lower-end-of-undergrad level. Lasted all of a few minutes to perhaps a few hours, but still.

I own a modal logic textbook used by a course in a philosophy department, and on any given page it looks an awful lot like a math textbook except that the presentation is far friendlier and the explanations are better than are in 99% of math books.

It contains lots and lots of exercises.

OK, but I've never been anything but complete shit at proofs, and I'm really good at debugging. They don't feel like the same activity to me at all.

This "well actually you're doing math!" stuff feels like some kind of rhetorical trick, when the "math" I'm doing doesn't seem strongly related to or to require being any good at the math-thing it supposedly is. It's not quite the same thing nor quite so far off the mark, but it seems at least in the same ballpark (ha, ha) as claiming that professional sports players use lots and lots of complicated trigonometry. Sort-of yes, going by something like unfair riddle-logic, I guess? But in reality, no, of course they don't.

I don't see any daylight between this claim and, "diagnosing a funny noise in an engine is math," and if that's true then I think we're heading into territory where we've rendered the term "math" so broad that it's no longer useful.

There's perhaps more pressure in a way because you're now responsible for fixing any problems, but kids are exposed to the exact same risks of adult life and employment via their parents, plus some extra ones that adults aren't subject to (parents can be abusive, for one thing—adults can abuse other adults in their household, but getting out is a lot easier for an adult than a kid, especially young kids).

That's one factor that's lower-pressure (sort-of... plenty of kids end up working to help support the household, in addition to school) but still offering up similar risk & worries, on one side, and then all the bad stuff of high school and of not yet having the freedom of an adult on the other side, increasing pressure. I still think in the typical case, being a high schooler's a ton worse.

Add to this that the pressure on you in high school is in part to perform well so you don't fail at adult life. That adult life pressure, and the concerns about e.g. lack of employability or homelessness, are is already present in high school. The harm is in the future, but the pressure is already there.

Though, yes, one absolutely can "fail" badly at adult life. I don't mean to suggest it's entirely easy street. It's just a whole lot less unpleasant or difficult on average than high school.

I mean, truly, if adult life were anywhere near as harsh as high school, assuming I hadn't offed myself, I'd definitely have "failed" by now and be living on the street or something. Expectations are just... comically low, most of the time, not much-higher as so many suggested when I was in school, so it's pretty easy to do alright provided you don't get hit by bad luck (which exact same bad luck potential, again, high schoolers are exposed to via their parents anyway).

Seconding all this.

I'm worry that somewhere out there there are kids hearing adults go "high school has to do [shitty thing] to get you ready for the 'real world', which is even harder!" (LOL no it fucking isn't) or "enjoy it, these are the best days of your life, adult life is so much harder" (what the actual shit are they smoking? Harder stuff than weed, for sure)

I had a relatively good high school experience, and even so, if people saying that stuff had been correct I'd have surely killed myself by now, probably before age 30. There is no possible way I could have tolerated decades more of life as unpleasant as high school, let alone worse. Harsh and short deadlines, general inflexibility of expectations, begging to be allowed to take a piss, the equivalent of multiple hour-long presentation meetings every single day, very-early starts, lots of rooms with shitty lighting and no windows, terrible seating that you're in all day long, complete assholes common and you're just stuck with them, they're not gonna get kicked out (this goes for teachers and students alike), and no realistic ability to leave and find something better.

Luckily, I had a part-time tech job in high school (I did later work a couple very-low-paid non-tech jobs for a while, so I'm not writing this "no really high school is far worse than adult life" perspective from an entirely privileged perspective) and could see that something was wonky about what these people were saying. Then I go to college and it's like a goddamn vacation. On to the "real world" and there are hard times but it's nothing like the 4-year marathon rigid-schedule grind of high school. Those tend to be more like, oh this week is rough, or this month, or perhaps this quarter. And I have so very much more freedom of action to fix things that aren't going well.

Adult life is far easier than high school. High school is insane. Like it's an actually-crazy thing to subject kids to.

I want to disagree with 2, but OTOH it's also so easy to do that I've just accidentally done it my whole life.

20 year programming career and I've never engaged with math beyond approximately Algebra II, in the real world. Hell, I go years at a time not needing anything trickier than Algebra I.

Nearly all of the math I actually use I learned in the 6th grade or earlier, overwhelmingly elementary school arithmetic—mostly the "bad" kind I got from memorization-based practice that mathematicians seem to hate even though it's a contender for the best bang-for-buck of almost my entire educational career, plus a lot of fractions-related stuff (so, so very many people are terrible at this, can't even do basic things, IME it's where an awful lot of people permanently fall off the math-train, way back in like 3rd grade), basic arithmetic, and pre-algebra-tier simple variable substitution.

Every now and then I get a bug up my ass to try to expand my math abilities, but 1) I'm so goddamn rusty at this point because I never use any of it that I have to start back at brushing up on high school stuff, which is discouraging, and 2) I'm not even really sure what I'm going to do with it (long experience suggests: nothing) so the motivation fades fast.

I hated how much 7 bloated the base installation size (10x or more) versus late versions of XP, but otherwise, yeah, it's by far the best desktop OS they've made.

(EDIT: Actually maybe it was Vista that introduced the inexplicable massive installation size bloat? My memory is fuzzy there)

Would a very-small number of people leaving affect a well-distributed and population-wide metric like IQ in a measurable way at all? I'd expect not.

What are you trying to get at? Could you be more direct? I'm having trouble making sense of this post.

I distinctly remember the main effect being that everything suddenly looked way, way more "3D".

It actually briefly made me worse at batting, in baseball. Took some getting used to.

I think it could be pretty damn immediate. What's missing are unions and pensions for long-term job stability, tolerability, security, and clear career progression. What's missing are wages that kept up with the inflation rates of housing and healthcare, not the price of wheat or flatscreen TVs. What's missing is C-suite norms that favor retaining workers through the usual economic-cycle downturns, rather than swiftly choosing to enact mass firings any time the CEO has a little indigestion (the science is extremely mixed on this anyway, there's not even a good reason to believe the latter approach is better for the company in general, and the C-suite zeitgeist used to favor avoiding mass firings unless absolutely necessary)

I don't think there'd be any waiting for worker "culture" to catch up to fill roles with comp packages and working conditions that addressed those core issues.

> modern culture of company hopping is contributing to this

Zero people are doing this for the fun of it. This is entirely driven by incentives, not "culture".

Or, rather, not by "culture" of the people doing the hopping—C-suite and MBA culture, yes, very much so, this is one of many bad outcomes from having companies run entirely by "professional managers" and finance dudes rather than people who were, at the start of their career, close to the actual productive work of the company, with the latter scenario once being far more common than it is now.

> So maybe a case of HN comments being "more on point than the article", but primarily in the way that it directly illustrates what the author is saying: engineers routinely bail out of the politics, to their own detriment.

IDK about everyone else, but I pretty routinely bail out of the politics of decisions when it's mostly to the company's detriment. Starts to look like an uphill battle against people above me on the food chain? Sure man, go ahead, not my money you're wasting. The only politicking worth doing in those cases is making sure I'm outside the blast radius if it's something so bad it's gonna eventually blow up. Luckily big businesses move so slowly that this rarely takes less than a year, and often quite a bit more.

Notably, this administration illegally fired (ignored a notice-to-congress period, and IIRC also didn't state a cause, both of which are required by the law) all the Inspectors General as one of their first acts.

These were positions set up after the Watergate scandal to make it harder for the executive to engage in blatant criminality for long periods without anyone noticing. One ought to read that as a statement of intent to commit lots of obvious crimes.

There was clear, genuine shock even on the right over that event. It lasted a few months, at most, until their talking heads managed to "catapult the propaganda" sufficiently, and various conspiracy theories were seeded, fertilized, watered, and took root to give people something to believe other than their own eyes and ears.

That brief span of perhaps a few months was probably the last window of time we had to save the US—maybe, still would have been a long shot. But nothing was even attempted.