ordinaryradical

29 gün öncediscuss

Seconding this comment. I would love to read a write-up about your experience and how you’ve been trying to work on solutions for yourself. Stories like these are valuable to the field and inspiring to other folks dealing with a tough diagnosis.

ordinaryradical

29 gün öncediscuss

CRISPR is an extremely overhyped approach which found a marketing engine via popular science. There is 1 FDA approved CRISPR therapy as compared to 7 for AAV and 7 for Lentivirus.

Counting all viral vector therapies that have been approved, we’re sitting at 19 approved therapies versus 1 for CRISPR.

I think CRISPR ideas in a lab are just an easy way into the mainstream press, but viral vector delivery is the real future. It just didn’t get the same news cycle, for whatever reason.

ordinaryradical

30 gün öncediscuss

> Placing a landmine anywhere is essentially the same as firing a bullet blindly through time.

Beautifully said and truly clarifies how evil of a weapon they are.

With that said, are these drones paradoxically more ethical because their loiter time is dramatically shorter and therefore won’t harm civilians after the conflict is over?

But I think there is an extreme ethical boundary we are traversing by putting targeting and trigger-pulling in the hands of a robot. The ways this will later be abused by authoritarian regimes is just staggering. We are reducing the necessary footprint of a loyal junta and automating dictatorships with this technology. It’s very disturbing.

ordinaryradical

geçen aydiscuss

Describing the pope’s proposals as progressive and anti-money laundering laws as the antichrist… this is like a parody of the most blinders-on kind of libertarianism.

For those of you playing at home, you can definitely have multi-lateral agreements without creating a one world government. We’ve had a chemical weapons ban for decades over which many of the multi-lateral parties were in hot and cold wars with each other. The nations are not going to magically combine over the presence of a treaty. Not how power works.

ordinaryradical

2 ay öncediscuss

I think they will literally do anything to prevent the embarrassment / incarceration of the wealthy.

ordinaryradical

3 ay öncediscuss

It feels like the market is full Wiley Coyote on frontier model makers, and I like Anthropic's B2B business model.

But all progress points to a commodification of foundation models--Google first named it as "we have no moat, neither does anyone else." So there must be some secondary play driving this, right? Hardware sales? Hedging for search ad revenue?

Still feels mispriced. I think asset inflation leaves too much money desperate for the Next Big Thing.

ordinaryradical

3 ay öncediscuss

You're saying it was a turning point for you to get more embedded with them? Way to be killer robot positive, I guess...

ordinaryradical

3 ay öncediscuss

Christian orthodoxy begins with the assertion you cannot ever work hard enough to be made right with God but that your value is imputed by Christ’s death and never once earned.

See also: the imago dei.

What you’re describing is not “Christian values” but the famed “Protestant work ethic,” a product of puritan immigrants fleeing European discrimination. That ethic is Christian in source but when divorced from the knowledge that God makes you worthy—not your productivity— you begin the long slide into hustle culture, greed, and other current miseries.

ordinaryradical

4 ay öncediscuss

> Robin Hanson, the economist who’s commonly known as the godfather of modern prediction markets, thinks that using inside information to place bets like this is actually necessary for these markets to work—making “insider trading” a feature, not a bug.

> “The point of these markets is to get information, so the only reason you should ever be trading on them is if you think you have some information,” said Hanson, a professor of economics at George Mason University whose academic work inspired the founders of prediction markets Polymarket and Kalshi. “People with more information should trade more and get more money because that's how they get paid for the information they contribute.”

https://www.forbes.com/sites/aliciapark/2026/01/09/why-predi...

Seems like you should read more about these markets.

ordinaryradical

4 ay öncediscuss

This comment may or may not be wrong but it is quintessentially low effort.

The point of HN is to discuss, not to tweet about your political enemies.

ordinaryradical

4 ay öncediscuss

This is going to be remembered as a comical fumble, in my view.

I was fully locked-in to the ecosystem, the phone, the services, the TV, and I am looking for the exits.

I’m starting to parallelize to software which will play well on Linux, and when I’m feeling ready (or miserable enough) I will not be looking back.

The macOS exodus will be like Hemingway’s line about bankruptcy: very slowly and then all at once.

ordinaryradical

6 ay öncediscuss

The problem with prediction markets is not purely insiders but that they interface with the real world, so they encourage bettors not just to predict an outcome but to bring it into being.

You are a poorly paid Russian commander. You open an account on polymarket or Kalshi and place a bet about specific Russian troop movements, perhaps ones that would be disastrous to your war effort even, to up the leverage. When you’ve accumulated a sufficient position, you order the troops to be moved, perhaps even out of accord with orders from above. Your front collapses, your soldiers are routed, and you get rich.

These markets are dangerous. We will learn this lesson eventually.

ordinaryradical

7 ay öncediscuss

An all-powerful uniparty can do things like this:

    - deport or jail you without due process
    - ignore the law in service of its own ends
    - punish its enemies, pardon its allies
    - ignore the constitution
    - install loyalists in centers of power, oust dissenters
    - suppress media which challenges its hold on power
    - commit crimes
    - enrich its friends
    - declare its "plenary authority" to do the above

Brother, you are looking for the deep state under every rock and it is out in the sunshine, smiling at you.

ordinaryradical

7 ay öncediscuss

Corruption is not merely something someone in power enacts in their choices; it is a rot that eats out the society from the inside.

As individuals realize that nakedly appeasing the autocrat wins favor, they voluntarily corrupt themselves and others in hopes of advantage.

More and more of the society enters the grip of this force and weakens until the truly valuable things—its resources, minds, institutions—are annihilated, stolen, and displaced by a hierarchy of criminals or warlords. This is how nations sink. It’s the story of many in Africa, South America, Russia—and now it is our own.

ordinaryradical

7 ay öncediscuss

Agree.

If you find yourself sympathetic to Flock, you should ask yourself: do we have a right to any kind of privacy in a public space or is public space by definition a denial of any sort of privacy? This is the inherent premise in this technology that's problematic.

In Japan, for instance, there are very strict laws about broadcasting people's faces in public because there is a cultural assumption that one deserves anonymity as a form of privacy, regardless of the public visibility of their person.

I think I'd prefer to live in a place where I have some sort of recourse over when and how I'm recorded. Something more than "avoid that public intersection if you don't like it."

ordinaryradical

7 ay öncediscuss

Of course it is in their interest. The problem is that Russia only knows how to bully, oppress, or violently interfere with their neighbors.

You cannot get along with a tiger who only regards you as a meal.

ordinaryradical

7 ay öncediscuss

This comment is clever but adds literally nothing to the discussion. It had no spirit of curiosity, just contempt.

ordinaryradical

7 ay öncediscuss

I think this has somewhat strawmanned “servant leadership,” which is more about humility in posture than purely intercepting annoyances and blockers, but nevertheless the conclusions are solid.

ordinaryradical

8 ay öncediscuss

Where can I read about this?

ordinaryradical

10 ay öncediscuss

AGI is the new Marxism—a utopian dream unmoored from reality, which does not account for the nature of people, economics, states, or even nature itself. A fantasy society that will never come to pass but, if attempted by fanatics, will probably do great damage.

comments