HackerLangs
TopNewTrendsCommentsPastAskShowJobs

ifwinterco

1,165 karmajoined 3 वर्ष पहले

comments

ifwinterco
·11 घंटे पहले·discuss
It’s a mixed blessing because while the competition should lead to better designs it also leads to massive fragmentation in the drones used which has negative consequences for maintenance, training etc compared to the Russian approach of making huge numbers of a few proven designs
ifwinterco
·20 घंटे पहले·discuss
Yes I fear you’re right, power is addictive to most people, once they have a taste they want more.

Likewise loss of power is traumatic, picture the barely conscious 90 year old senator getting wheeled into congress to vote or something or other. Few ever give up power willingly even if they’re just a small node in a bigger system and not even really in control
ifwinterco
·22 घंटे पहले·discuss
The funny thing is it’s so transparent. Like… is that the point? They want us to know how dodgy they are, kind of as a “** you”?

Often the point of propaganda is not to convince, it’s to demoralise.

On the other hand I could also believe that they live in such a bubble they genuinely don’t understand how it comes across. Add in a non-negligible amount of neurodivergence and maybe that’s the simplest explanation
ifwinterco
·परसों·discuss
Yes in theory it should be easier to get on with people if you yourself don’t hold many strong opinions.

Unless of course you’re dealing with a zealot who gets angry if you do anything other than passionately agree with them, but there’s not much you can do in that case anyway
ifwinterco
·परसों·discuss
[dead]
ifwinterco
·3 दिन पहले·discuss
I don’t think there’s any one thing or set of things you can read that will make you informed on all topics.

Human knowledge is siloed and you need to already be well-informed to judge the quality of information (this is the cause of the dunning-Kruger effect, if you’re really bad at something you lack the tools to understand just how bad you are).

So imo you have to accept you’ll always be ignorant of most topics and get comfortable with thinking “I don’t know”.

Within your own specific areas of competence you should be able to identify independent sources of information that add value and consume those while discarding the rest.

Also when it comes to politics and international affairs: no substitute for travel. Go to lots of places with different systems, talk to people and you will learn a lot more than you will from reading the economist
ifwinterco
·3 दिन पहले·discuss
Truth is reading any of these MSM sources on either left or right is bad imo.

Before reading them you're merely uninformed, after you're misinformed which is far worse
ifwinterco
·3 दिन पहले·discuss
The backlash is baked in now I think, people hoping it will just go away are delusional.

But if European elites (including UK) are smart they should be able to avoid the worst outcomes, most people don't really want trouble.

Issue is, there's no sign of smartness so far
ifwinterco
·4 दिन पहले·discuss
Yes, this is part of why I lost interest in video games (probably mostly just getting older if I'm honest).

However at the risk of sounding basic, RDR2 (2018) and Cyberpunk (~2022, once they fixed all the bugs) are both really good single player games that are a lot more fun to play than anything from 1980.

How many more of those will we see? Not sure
ifwinterco
·5 दिन पहले·discuss
Some ticket prices are crazy, but the issue is a lot of trains are already very busy especially at the weekends, even with those prices.

If trains were made cheaper, some of them would become extremely unpleasant to use. In an ideal world, we'd have both more capacity on the busy routes and cheaper tickets, but that will need a lot more work than just nationalising the train companies.

(Or just fewer people would solve all these problems, but that doesn't look likely to happen...)
ifwinterco
·5 दिन पहले·discuss
Yes, that's a fair counterpoint. I guess my counter-counterpoint would be that LLMs actually seem to have characteristics closer to the first group than the second, in that they (currently at least) need enormous quantities of physical things and energy in order to work.

So the nuclear power problem of "it works fine and it's actually very good in a lot of ways, it's just too expensive" could be quite relevant
ifwinterco
·5 दिन पहले·discuss
I believe this in general but the issue with AI specifically is historically in every cycle we've overestimated the potential of AI in both the short and the long run - people in the 60s were genuinely quite convinced we were close to AGI for a few years, as ridiculous as that now sounds.

This is why you get "AI winters" but we've never had a "steam engine winter" or a "railway winter" or a "petrochemicals winter"
ifwinterco
·5 दिन पहले·discuss
It can't follow orders because it isn't thinking - even in a best case scenario, all you're doing with AGENTS.md is altering the probability distribution of outcomes away from things you don't want towards things you do want.

However that still means there's always some probability it will do things you told it not to, it's just reduced
ifwinterco
·6 दिन पहले·discuss
Anecdotally this isn't uncommon among heavy users, I've heard of similar things happen to a few people. You did the right thing stopping, where people really go off the deep end is when they don't listen to the warning signs and keep blazing.

I think weed should be legal and for the majority of people used in moderation it's going to be fine, but at the end of the day it's a psychoactive drug. It's probably not optimal to use it daily and in particular waking and baking every day is asking for trouble.

Also a case to be made that modern strains are worse. I fully believe that the risk of losing the plot is higher when you're smoking some lemon sherbet bubblegum flavours every day instead of old fashioned moroccan hash
ifwinterco
·6 दिन पहले·discuss
I'll be honest, both these things are true:

It works extremely well, and I don't do it as consistently as I should, precisely because it's actually kind of hard work and the reward is uncertain and delayed (though it can also be enjoyable at the time sometimes).

So I'm also in the boat where I don't get the benefits I could get, I get it. Making it a routine is legitimately hard.

I just find it hard to believe that it wouldn't be beneficial to most people if they stuck with it, because so many human problems are caused by fixating on the past and future and ignoring the present.

I can't experience what it's like to be someone else, but based on what other people say and do, most people seem to be experiencing similar problems to me in this regard.

Having said that: if you have any kind of mental health condition like depersonalisation, derealisation etc, you should consult a medical professional before starting any kind of meditation programme.

These are powerful techniques that can be dangerous if used inappropriately by the wrong person
ifwinterco
·6 दिन पहले·discuss
It being boring is part of the point - normally your brain is constantly stimulated so it does indeed feel strange and uncomfortable when that stimulus is taken away.

Pushing through that is what leads to progress.

Meditation is like physical exercise, it's not exactly "fun" at the time, you sort of have to learn to enjoy it, but it's never easy. Like exercise the real reward is backloaded
ifwinterco
·6 दिन पहले·discuss
It’s not just you this is also my opinion, 5.3-codex was a fantastic model in terms of balancing output quality and cost.

Cheap and efficient enough I could afford to use it on basically everything unlike 5.5 or Opus, but still pretty good, I preferred it to sonnet
ifwinterco
·7 दिन पहले·discuss
It's peak HN meme material because 1) it (allegedly) affects your intelligence which everyone here values highly 2) you can measure it, it's a number 3) requires tech to measure it

So perfect for HN, you can obsess over numbers and tech and how to measure it endlessly and overhype the significance to trick yourself into thinking you're doing something useful.

You get to have your cake and eat it, no wonder everyone loves this topic.

(Also if you're a doomer type you can link this in with rising atmospheric co2 levels for extra points)
ifwinterco
·8 दिन पहले·discuss
And Israel is attacking various countries - okay not in quite in Europe, but pretty close to the southeastern EU member states.

So you have one country which is in a very loose alliance with a country that's attacking a country around the periphery of the EU, and another country that's joined at the hip with a country that's attacking another country around the periphery of the EU, just slightly further away.

It's not exactly a ringing endorsement of the US
ifwinterco
·8 दिन पहले·discuss
It’s not spite it’s just logical - US/Israel are a known bad actor.

China is also probably bad, but currently there’s no evidence they’re as bad as US/Israel