thomassmith65

I'll disregard that advice unless he runs for political office, and then only if the incumbent is noticeably smarter.

"Benjamin, I want to say one word to you. Just one word... agents."

The film's issues wouldn't speak to today's young Americans, many of whose parents are (outwardly) too individualistic even for a mid-1960s beatnik.

If someone made an updated version of The Graduate, it would have to pick on a different version of conformity - maybe on "I'm different just like everyone else".

An opportune time for a remake would be the 2010s when working at FANG had a similar cachet to working in "plastics"

When someone posts "why was this flagged" or "why did this disappear so quickly from the front page" it makes me think of De Niro driving alone in the final scene of Taxi Driver.

Not to pick on this post in particular. The gold medal for such comments was a John Gruber blogpost accusing HN of blackballing him. As a runner up, there are the requisite accusatory comments on every flagged Israel post.

People too young to remember the 1990's might not know that Patrick Stewart's Picard was a sex symbol.

I was surprised by how many of my friends considered the character 'hot'; on paper, one would expect young people to write him off as a balding goody-two-shoes.

To have a character whose main traits included compassion and reason was a good influence on my generation of men.

In normal circumstances, one cannot return a phone with a broken screen; it's generally accidental damage rather than the design being unfit for purpose.

In this case, it's obviously a manufacturing or design flaw, but were I in these customers' shoes, I would be a little nervous on my way back to the AppleStore, too.

Is that a misguided dig at Apple? I can still run plenty of my old Mac apps, some of them from as far back as 2025 or 2026 /s

It does not matter how they give Alzheimer's to a lab mouse providing they give Alzheimer's to a lab mouse – not a different disorder that happens to have the symptoms of Alzheimer's.

Probably, but the questions I was thinking of are whether it's the design or the substrate that we consider significant.

The question comes up a lot here when there are posts about whether to consider LLMs conscious.

"We're going to condemn conscious entities to slavery"

vs

"They'll always just be machines and it's dehumanizing to consider them anything else"

If a device made of human brain cells were designed to function like a traditional, deterministic CPU, that would raise similar questions as LLMs raise today.

"Just like the majority" is exaggeration, but my comment locked before I could think better and delete it.

It's primarily about social media, just like the majority of the idiotic protests and riots since Occupy Wall Street.

The incumbent is always a villain, every policy failure is an evil plot, the system is irreparably corrupt, no commonly accepted knowledge is trustworthy, etc.

And we are here as on a darkling plain, swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, where ignorant redditors clash by night.

Both "Gen Z and their…" and "Gen Z and its…" are fine. I personally prefer to treat a group as a plural.

"The class tossed their graduation caps in the air" strikes me as less clumsy than its alternatives.

Vehicular traffic was, for the most part, equine until the 20th Century. That doesn't negate your argument; it's just interesting to reflect upon.

https://youtu.be/NLxRoDuwaeY London traffic circa 1900

It isn't clear if the accusation is that I knowingly am telling lies, or that I am gullible and repeating lies. Either way, we could go back and forth all weekend and probably still not agree on much. Cheers.

In case my point was unclear: Discover-Tech served ads to many clients. As far as I could tell, it's the paper's authors who singled the ICC and UN out.

That might be why the authors, in that disclaimer:

• used "in and of itself" without a footnote

• downplayed "confirm targeting" by sticking "or infection with spyware" into the same sentence.

I wasn't making an argument for or against the legitimacy of Israel; I was arguing that self defense explains Israel's immigration laws better than a sense of racial superiority.

It's one thing to accuse Israelis of paranoia, hypocrisy, or even genocide, and it's another to deny that the primary motivation to have Israel be a jewish ethno-state was to have a refuge from persecution.

That makes the policy sound gratuitous.

  The reasoning behind the 1970 amendment is usually traced to the Nuremberg Laws. Nazi Germany defined a Jew for the purposes of persecution as anyone with a Jewish grandparent. The amendment drew Israel’s circle of protection at the same radius: if having one Jewish grandparent was enough to be persecuted, it should be enough to be given refuge.

From https://masaisrael.org/law-of-return-israel

That would be the most likely explanation if we knew the ICC and UN were targets, which we do not:

  A Discover-Tech ad impression does not in and of itself confirm targeting or infection with spyware.

That's from the study itself: https://citizenlab.ca/research/how-discover-tech-turned-targ...

That conflates the state with a business headquartered in it. It begs the question of what the sanctions would be for: is the argument that this firm is an arm of Israel, that Israel turns a blind eye to abusive businesses, or something else?

  Exporting the Islamic Revolution of Iran is a strategy in Iran's foreign policy that believes in exporting the teachings of the Iranian Revolution of 1979 to achieve similar results in Islamic and even non-Islamic countries.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exporting_the_Islamic_Revoluti...

Incidentally, Israel's relationship with Iran was surprisingly good before the Revolution.

This comment is an excellent of scarcity mentality* (I can't decide if that's an insult; if it is, I apologize).

It's in America's best interest as a nation to have as large a pool of smart students to choose from as possible. The loser nations are the ones whose brightest minds leave (aka: "brain drain")

If the people of a nation capable of attracting foreign students are resentful about it, the real problem probably lies elsewhere (eg: inequality, economic depression, or broken media environment)

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scarcity_(social_psychology)

A quick web search¹ shows these as the only other nations that still hold public executions: Iran, Saudi Arabia, North Korea, Somalia.

Those aren't places whose approach to justice the US should emulate. Civilized governments did away with public execution a century ago²

In fact, one argument I recently have used in support of the war with Iran is that the Islamic Republic still holds public executions.

¹ https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/countries-where-public-e...

² https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_execution

A Vectrex wasn't prohibitively expensive, but, even for its time, vector graphics seemed a bit primitive*.

1980s TV gaming consoles may not have had high resolution, but they were less visually monotonous than glowing lines on black.

* Consider that Asteroids is the only vector-based game listed here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1982_in_video_games

** https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroids_(video_game) was already three years old by the time Vectrex hit the market

I don't want a Vectrex, but I do want a vector CRT display and driver I can use with a modern computer. They don't make them anymore; not even for oscilloscopes.

To be zen about one's privacy is easier for some people than others.

There are situations in many a person's life that if revealed to the public would have life-altering consequences.

Rather than the world give up, we should have better tools and laws to flood the internet with spurious personal data.

There isn't necessarily a conflict between wanting to behave according to an arbitrary set of ethics, and being rational.

The ethics don't need to make sense universally any more than a particular variety of cheesecake needs to have universal appeal.

As an aside, the issue reminds me of Douglas Adams' cow who wants to be eaten: https://nhseb.org/case-library/the-cow-at-the-end-of-the-uni...

That would be interesting, but probably require exposition of the perception within China of China's history.

If I see a person with a generic arm tattoo, hoodie with skateboard logo, and sweat pants, it express the same amount of uniformity as a person in a bad off-the-rack suit with a boring tie.