unification_fan
unification_fan on Hacker News
Whether they are gullible, corrupt, or simply pieces of shit and sociopaths... Why are they allowed to keep their job? And how can we fix democracy to make sure that they are held accountable?
Let's be clear about one thing: Hanlon's razor is bullshit. Globally, only about ~30% of humans think that "people are generally trustworthy". Even fewer think that "strangers can be trusted". So it fucking IS malice, and people are not trusting because they know that it is malice. In fairness you can look at nord-european countries for some counter-examples, but 30% is a good approximation.
I don't even care if politicians are stupid or malicious. They're probably both anyway because they're human. But what I care about is that they don't fuck with my hard earned civil liberties. So much blood was shed to get where we are... have we learned nothing at all?
Daily reminder that traditional AI expert systems from the 60s have 0 problems with hallucinations by virtue of their own architecture
Why we aren't building LLMs on top of ProbLog is a complete mystery to me (jk; it's because 90% of the people who work in AI right now have never heard of it; because they got into the field through statistics instead of logic, and all they know is how to mash matrices together).
Clearly language by itself doesn't cut it, you need some way to enforce logical rigor and capabilities such as backtracking if you care about getting an explainable answer out of the black box. Like we were doing 60 years ago before we suddenly forgot in favor of throwing teraflops at matrices.
If Prolog is Qt or, hell, even ncurses; then LLMs are basically Electron. They get the job done, but they're horribly inefficient and they're clearly not the best tool for the task. But inexperienced developers think that LLMs are this amazing oracle that solves every problem in the world, and so they throw LLMs at anything that vaguely looks like a problem.
Hey it's not like I feel superior or smug about it. I'm affected too, in my own country. The world is slowly but surely giving away all of its democratic rights. One by one...
But the problem is that all the uneducated, easily manipulated dumbfucks are letting "them" do it. As if they actually understood what they voted for. As if their opinion actually mattered. They're just pawns and nothing more. Sigh. Let me out already I don't deserve this.
I'd better start carrying fish nets with me. If this is how it's going to be then I'd rather go down trying.
In other news, MANHAAAAAAACKS
I'm usually not a bigot but that one is dumb
But Nintendo will never take down anything that is related to Showdown because it would highlight their massive hypocrisy!
It would set a precedent. People would go: "wait, but why did they never take down Showdown itself? Could it be that it's because they actually benefit from its existence? Then why did they take down X/Y/Z? Oh! It's because copyright law only applies when you want it to! It's all arbitrary and made up! You just need to be friends with the right people in the VGC!"
Or something. We should just start hosting Nintendo stuff en-masse. They can't sue everyone. Capitalist scum
Good luck
Regardless it's creepy. Use DDG, a VPN, and never persist history if you're looking for shit like this on the web.
The people you can trust the least are not hackers or foreign agents (who don't really care about you) but your own government.
Much like you have to cope with hash or GUID collisions... that is, you don't, because it statistically never happens. Unless you're speedrunning super mario or something.
Besides if you have a program that's formally verified, you just need to do what NASA did for its Apollo missions and make all the logic redundant and gate it behind a consensus algorithm.
You can argue that all 4 computers might get hit by a cosmic ray in just the right place and at just the right time... But it will never ever happen in the history of ever.
So my point is that the real world is messy. But the systems we design as engineers are not necessarily as messy. And the interface between the real world and our systems can be managed, and the proof of it is that we wouldn't be chatting across an entire ocean by modulating light itself if that weren't the case.
Verification is useful when you're dealing with low level or very declarative stuff. You don't really have to "verify" a CRUD repository implementation for a random SPA. But the primitives it relies on, it would be good if those were verified.
The point being that all the code on the stack is not necessarily yours
The experienced ones can
I don't, building websites is the equivalent of being a factory worker. You're gluing together code written by other people and your own insight is worth very little since everything has been done and standardized already. In fact I really don't understand why we're still busy building websites instead of automating that shit and focusing on stuff that really matters. Especially now that 90% of websites are just a bootstrap landing page for a random company that no one cares about. They all look the same, they all do the same things.
I mean, yeah, you can 3d print your own useless piece of shit and claim it didn't come out of a factory. That it's made in your own country even. But it's still a hunk of plastic that serves no actual purpose to society as a whole and actively damages the planet, if only by a little. And, let's be real, it's also janky as fuck because the printer has terrible tolerances. Maybe you should've just bought that shit on Aliexpress and save yourself the trouble...
The only joy I have left in this profession is coding stuff for myself and my close friends. Everyone else can bug right off. Even Open Source is no longer what it once was, it's just a way to give free labor to megacorps now. Why even bother? Why even take pride in it? That culture was co-opted by people who don't understand it or share its values. They use your labor to build walled gardens and you don't even get royalties.
No what I meant is that animals use body language, smells and all kinds of non-auditory cues in order to communicate. And they rely a lot on behavioral reinforcement in order to communicate efficiently with us.
They don't really use verbal language like we do and therefore they also lack the tools that are required for abstract conversation.
They don't talk about complex topics like astrophysics. They usually just talk about their immediate needs but they can also convey more complex emotions like trust and guilt -- displaying a rudimentary theory of mind.
Regardless, there are many interactions you can have with your pets that entail a string of questions and answers.
Example:
1. My cat comes up to me and sits there staring. She means: "I need something of you, but I can wait"
1a. If I don't get up in a while, she will come closer and bump my leg. She means: "come on, please"
2. I ask her what's up and get up from my chair to signal that I am ready
3. She recognizes this signal, having seen it many times before, and heads for the bowl/the door/the balcony/the cat tree depending on what she needs
4. I understand her need and give her what she wants
5. She trills or purrs to tell me that I'm on the right track/my assessment is correct/to thank me
That is clearly a conversation, albeit a simple one.
Lately she's become addicted to bird and mice videos on Youtube so she comes up to me and stares intently at my laptop and/or desktop until I put those on for her.
Nah most of it is nurture. Raise a human in the wild and he'll be more in tune with nature. We have become alienated from the environment we evolved in and that's why you feel like a "naked office worker" on your own planet despite being the result of billions of years of adaptation.
Most humans simply ignore animals when they communicate. Both because they're ignorant and because they won't bother to listen. You can't expect an animal to talk with human words, but they talk all the time. Pets actively have conversations with us.
Plus there's this hardwired notion in our culture that humans are inherently superior to all animals but that's a very self-centered and short-sighted understanding of the world. We are more intelligent, yeah, but that's about it.
Some people became software developers because they wanted to make easy money back when the industry was still advertising bootcamps (in order to drive down the cost of developers).
Some people simply drifted into this profession by inertia.
And everything in-between.
From my experience there are a lot of developers who don't take pride in their work, and just do it because it pays the bills. I wouldn't want to be them but I get it. The thing is that by delegating all their knowledge to the tools they use, they are making themselves easy to replace, when the time comes. And if they have to fix something on their own, they can't. Because they don't understand why and how it works, and how and why it became what it is instead of something else.
So they call me and ask me how that thing works...