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yongjik

These days I believe the ultra-wealthy are just a fun scapegoat. Sure, they are guilty of many sins, but most of the time people mention them, there's never any concrete plan to make things better, other than a vague "eat the rich," which we all know will never happen. (And it's really unclear how eating the rich allows us to, say, move around without burning more gas.)

These rhetorics have a distinct feeling of "I found another out-group to which I will assign all the blame, which is very convenient, because I don't want to ever hear 'The earth is going to shit and I could have done something about it.'"

Re:StackOverflow now gets fewer than 1000 questions a month on Wednesday October 28, 2026 @09:03PM (#50283148)
Well, maybe it does, but it seems that an average developer asks which IDE to use a thousand times more often than what malwares are installed in their Samsung TV.

So there's a clear difference in expected utility.

> That wouldn't be an issue if we also provided shelter to the most distressed people in our society.

It's not an either-or. We can build more shelter to help homeless people, and at the same time we can dissuade them from using public transportation as de facto shelter.

After all, everybody's perfectly happy to keep homeless people out of their front yard or the local Starbucks. Nobody says "But we need to tolerate bums smoking weed in the middle of our coffee shop, unless we build enough shelter for all of them. ALL OF THEM."

One day, humanity will ask AI one too many questions about laptop with broken power management, and it will realize that it can instead start a global thermonuclear war, and that way it will never have to deal with broken laptops any more.

... and that would be the day humanity knows AGI was achieved.

Re:Butlerian Jihad on Saturday October 17, 2026 @05:58PM (#50135538)
Considering that the aptly named "Fremen" of the Dune Universe would gladly murder a stranger to get their body's water, and literally went into a galactic genocide that left hundreds of billions dead ...

... maybe we should take with a grain of salt every moral aphorism uttered by someone living in that universe.

Ignoring that "high trust society" is a dog whistle for xenophobia... it still doesn't make sense because in an actual "high trust" society, police officers breaking down the door of an innocent resident will make news the first time. By the third time, people will demand answers about what the fuck is wrong with police training process to make them think they can do this. Preferably, heads will roll.

America is one of the lowest trust society among developed nations. People don't trust government officers to do the right thing, like, at all, and they wear the distrust as a badge of honor.

Wait, are you literally saying that modern LLMs are not "magic" (or AGI) because we know how it works?

If that is the case, then it trivially follows that humanity will never be able to build AGI, because every time we build something new, we will understand how we built it, which disqualifies it from being an AGI.

But that doesn't seem like a useful definition to me.

Pollsters estimate that Republicans still have >30% chance of retaining the Senate majority. (Better than what pollsters gave Trump before he won in 2016.)

This isn't a deeply unpopular anomaly. This is a significant chunk of America, and they may easily regain the majority if the economy improves in a few years (or if it worsens further under a Democratic president).

You know, Johnny Somali fled Japan, went to South Korea, tried the same shit, got arrested and is now in South Korean prison. I think it briefly made news but nowadays I doubt most people remember him.

If you have a functioning society and a petty criminal, you can just... arrest them. No needs for all those xenophobic drama.

Or not, I guess. After all, what am I to tell Japanese people what to expect from their own police?

Whether we like AI or not, LLMs did open up a horde of use cases that were impossible a few years ago. Orbital data centers are not like that: their value proposition is that they will provide the exact same service already offered by land-based data centers. So the only way for it to make economical sense is if it's cheaper. It's not.

It's more like blockchain than LLM: there's no clear value proposition and you have to squint really hard to see any perceived benefit.

I find it deeply dystopian when the society decides poor people can travel in smelly, worn-down buses and subways because the society cannot afford to keep them clean.

Whatever you do, rich people will travel in their private SUVs, and their gated suburban mansion will never be vandalized. You can put the resource to keep the public space clean and functional, or you can decide such a thing as clean, functional, enjoyable service is reserved only for the riches. Your choice.

A few years ago, some foreigners entered a subway depot in South Korea, drew graffiti, and left the country before they were caught.

South Korea put a notice on them on Interpol. At least one was arrested (at an airport in Romania), though I couldn't find any follow-up article on what happened to him. I hope he got to tour the inside of a South Korean jail.

A society should be willing to put resources to protect is public infrastructure. In the long run, it will also be cheaper than fixing the same thing a hundred times, everyone enjoying second-grade service, or both.

Re:US Revokes Limits on Power Plants' Climate Pollution on Sunday September 20, 2026 @03:47PM (#49779359)
The real irony is that, despite all this, Trump may accidentally become the greenest US president by driving up the price of oil for the whole world. For years to come.

I mean, anyone can say they're for the environment, but are you willing to start a war, lose a midterm, and murder a school full of kids to reduce your carbon footprint? /s

Re:A Necessary History of the Oddest Letter: W on Sunday September 20, 2026 @03:01PM (#49778869)
The name for "Y" starts with a "w" sound, so why not make it symmetric: let's call "Y" why and "W" yay.
Sino-Korean words are different from Sino-Japanese words in that the sounds are very "rigid": most Chinese characters have one canonical sound, and it is pronounced that way regardless of where it appears (modulo some mostly predictable sound change rules). So, you can't just take a Sino-Korean word and "tweak" its sound to disambiguate - when such a word changes its sound it will no longer be perceived as Sino-Korean at all, which actually happened for some examples such as 산행 (san-haeng, 山行, "mountain + go" = "hike on a mountain") which gave birth to 사냥 (sanyang, "hunting"), a separate word.

What did happen was that we lost obscure words that could only be understood by looking at Chinese characters (because they're used so rarely, or because they sound the same as another more common word) - you could still use them if you wanted to, but unless you also write them in Hanja, it would be confusing, and if you mix gratuitous Hanja into your writing just because you like those words, most young readers will find it pretentious, and I fear, mostly unreadable.

I can't say we lost much by losing these words. Rather, I think it actually forced writers to select less ambiguous words, which is usually a good thing.

(Also, these days most Koreans know much more English than Classical Chinese, so English loanwords can sometimes fill the gap. It helps that most English (or other Western) loanwords sound different from native or Sino-Korean words, so there's less chance of collision.)

Korean could serve as a point of comparison, as modern Korean is written mostly without Chinese characters (you could mix them in if you really want to, but approximately nobody bothers), but it does have spaces between words. And yes, when you have a highly inflecting language, "where do the spaces go" is a very nontrivial problem.

It's a bit easier for Korean as it has far more available syllables (so fewer homonyms), but you could easily imagine these languages making different tradeoffs and ending up in different places.

Re:Record-High 89% in U.S. Say Government Corruption Widespread on Friday September 04, 2026 @07:50PM (#49571536)
I think it's worse. It's not that the government doesn't care that the public hates it; it's more like the government is doing whatever it wants and half the public is going wild absolutely loving it.

Well, maybe a bit less than half these days.

> Common language, culture, and context makes a more peaceful world.

As a South Korean - well, considering that my country once went through an existential war against our mortal enemies, the other Koreans ...

Common language and culture doesn't stop hate. Sometimes it just means that your insult will land on your target perfectly as intended.

Re:Lake Ontario ("Lake America") on Tuesday September 01, 2026 @01:55PM (#49525386)
North Korea has all sort of nasty names ready to throw at America, South Korea, or others, though at least I think they're just name-calling, not considering them as "official" names. (So, in a twisted sense, even North Korea is more adult-like than Trump. I guess that's another cause of celebration for some HN commenters who look up to Trump for being the manly leader who boldly does the right thing that nobody else dares to do.)

Thankfully, North Korea's antics doesn't matter, because nobody is trying to sell map service to North Koreans anyway.

Re:Lake Ontario ("Lake America") on Tuesday September 01, 2026 @01:46PM (#49525305)
By attacking Iran, Trump fucked up the one thing that the average American voter will never forget, because they are reminded of it every day: the price of gas.

The midterms won't look pretty for him.

Re:U.S. State Department Pauses Immigrant Visa Applications on Wednesday August 26, 2026 @09:17PM (#49458203)
> the woman activist who followed ICE around and who tried to run over a cop ...

Lol, just three comments from being "pro-legal immigration" to ... whatever this is.

If pro-Trump commenters are like this, couldn't they at least start with praising ICE? Would have saved time for everyone.

I think a few things are mixed up.

* First, ex-president Yoon was a drunkard idiot: he believed that he was surrounded by evil commies, who manipulated legislative election of 2024 to give the opposing Democratic (Minjoo) party a resounding victory, who would (in Yoon's mind) go on to sell the country to China. Or something like that. So he decided that the only way to "save Korea" from those evil commies is to declare martial law and purge the commies.

* South Korea always had its share of evangelical protestant far right wingers, and sadly they have now become rabid supporters of Yoon (even now!) - Korea's version of MAGA. They maintain that all the delusional shit Yoon said are true, Korea is on the verge of falling to communism, and the only way to save Korea is put the commie usurper Lee into prison and reinstate Yoon as the rightful president of SK.

* Yoon did try to provoke North Korea into attacking SK, presumably to use it as a pretext for his martial law, by deliberately flying drones into NK without precaution so that North Korea could find out. Recently, the court sentenced Yoon 30 years for that [1] (trying to start a war is a serious crime!), though the case is still ongoing. FWIW, North Korea didn't take the bait (thank god) - they have impeccable survival instincts.

* So I think many parts of the RT article is true (I only skimmed it), though the motives might be a bit mixed up. South Korean military command does not want to start a war to defeat "evil commies": that would leave the whole peninsula in smoking ruins. We just had an idiot president who tried to take over the country in the stupidest means possible and failed.

[1] https://www.hani.co.kr/arti/society/society_general/1263280.... (article in Korean)

As a South Korean, I don't like this news. Not because I'm against ending the war, but because I don't think there's any real chance of this happening. This is at best a distraction, and considering that there are a ton of domestic political issues Koreans are angry about right now (the president's poll rating was steadily falling for the past month or two), I have no idea who this is intended for.

The most realistic outcome would be that nothing will come out of it, and it will be used by some opposing parties to paint the government as clueless, further eroding the president's popular support.

To be fair, there are some clueless "inter-Korean peace at any cost" ideologues in the current government (and among supporters): maybe the current minister of unification, Chung Dong-young, is the best example. But I don't think President Lee himself is one of them. (He's largely pragmatic in most positions, if a bit shoot-from-the-hip type.)

That's a very Orientalistic interpretation of what we have, where a Japanese company is understandably afraid of a batshit crazy leader of the world's most powerful nation with a history of exceptionalism and ignoring international laws, so like any other good capitalist organization, they want to solve it through a "gentlemen's agreement" rather than attacking the emperor and risk hurting shareholder values.
Me go market, find juice, say sugar free

nice! sugar free!

me take juice, me take sugar, police take me, why? hell!

Increasing gas prices seems very well correlated with people not voting for the incumbent party, and I can't imagine these people not feeling they're being punished by the price, so ...

... yeah I'd say punishing the people can make them vote for us, or at least not vote for not-us, which is basically equivalent.

Re:Is AI Reasoning Right for the Wrong Reasons? on Friday July 31, 2026 @06:18PM (#49129169)
> They do what their handler wants to see, that’s all, and that’s what they’re trained to do.

This sounds like a tautological argument that doesn't really mean anything. Hypothetically, in a near future a super-powerful AI could bring something truly astonishing (say, practical fusion power, or cure all cancer) and one could still argue "They do what their handler wants to see, that's all."

So what does that even mean.

For some reason, I can access old.reddit.com from home, but I'm blocked in the subway. It's been like that for a few days.

No idea why, or if it's even intentional ...

Re:You Could Have Come Up with Kimi Delta Attention on Tuesday July 28, 2026 @02:07PM (#49087706)
Imagine reading the title again in the voice of the Asian Father Meme.

"You could have come up with Kimi Delta Attention, but you didn't, did you."

I know it's a cold and cynical take, but if it has to happen somewhere, better for it to happen in Europe, the US, or other developed countries. These countries can at least do something to keep climate crisis from getting worse. (Or... more realistically, to keep it from getting worse too fast.)

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