AlBugdy

I'm afraid that could lead to political instability. Maybe not, but I imagine if 59% of people vote "X" but 60% were needed, people could revolt or at least drastic and unpredictable changes in voting in the next elections could happen - "how can this political regime ignore the voice of the majority?!".

You'd need most of the people to understand why 60 or 66.(6)% of people are needed to decide something and really believe in this threshold. And Y% of the populace is different psychologically than Y% of elected officials (in cases where a supermajority of officials are needed to pass Z in a forum like parliament/house/senate).

I think direct democracy is bad for a couple of reasons (some are probably rephrased versions of another reason):

* not everyone can be an expert on everything;

* people can't know what they're not sufficiently knowledgeable about;

* people would like to vote (if it was quick and easy) for anything they have even the slightest opinion on;

* people could be manipulated much easier than an expert or than an educated representative influenced by experts would;

* people value their voice and opinion and themselves too much;

* only a minority of people would vote on lots of things, skewing the results; a majority would vote on just a few issues;

* education fucking sucks everywhere - people don't have enough information about different topics, they don't know how to get said info, how to analyze it or how to filter trash or spam;

* people passionate enough about something will vote on it much more than people not passionate enough about it - with the caveat that someone can be passionate "for X" but not that passionate "against X" - which can lead to the phrasing of the question deciding who will vote;

* it would be easier to bribe someone to vote on something they don't care about (or don't realize they care about) - you wouldn't vote for a new supreme leader but might vote for a specific change in laws about metallurgical unions (gave it as an example as I know nothing about the topic so I "don't care" about it).

If people were educated, had critical thinking, knew how to spot manipulation, weren't greedy and were able to think about abstract things, direct democracy might work. But people aren't, don't, don't, aren't and aren't.

Might be unrelated to the specific GUI discussion but I absolutely hate how there is no threaded discussion on Bluesky or Mastodon (or Twitter which they desperately try to mimic for some reason). You have to use "@username" which does nothing useful when clicked.

You can barely select text on a post. If you click on it, you lost your place and go inside the post?

Why aren't comment GUIs like those of HN, lobsters or the old reddit-style not more popular?

I think I understand why YouTube, Facebook and Twitter intentionally cripple usability by only allowing 1 level of replies and (ab)using the @username way to discuss things - to cater to stupider people with less attention span, to keep discussions lighter and broader and to show more of the top level comments. But all of these would've been accomplished if there were more "show more" buttons, like new reddit does it. It's still dumb as hell but at least it keeps the discussion threaded/nested.

Off topic, but I just realized when I collapse something on HN, it sends a request to HN telling it it's collapsed. Useful for when reloading a page, but I would love a setting that makes the collapse client-only with no requests (and maybe no persistence on reloading).

Anyway, I never used any social media, including Twitter, save for the occasional link I found that I use Nitter or XCancel for. I was really hoping to finally participate in the new fediverse but when I saw the UI decisions, I don't see a point. Twitter clones and alternatives can still be Twitter-like without the dumbing down of the threading/nesting of the comment sections.

Edit: Forgot to mention both Bluesky and Mastodon load much slower than HN or Lobsters or reddit with or without Tor.

> My nutritionist tells me that recovering this quickly would have probably been just about impossible for a vegetarian or vegan, without having an iron infusion done.

"probably been just about impossible" doesn't mean "impossible", it more likely means changing your eating habits to a point where you'd have to be really conscious and careful of what you eat iron-wise unlike someone without Celiacs (vegan or not) or someone who likes and can afford beef and can eat as much of it as they want.

There are lentils, beans, tofu, dark leafy greens and other sources of iron. There are iron-fortified foods. IIRC there are other considerations that might prevent careless or food-addicted people from getting enough iron like vitamin C to help with the iron absorption or not eating foods that decrease it.

There are plenty of vegans with Celiacs who manage their iron adequately. But even if you're one of those cases where iron needs to be supplemented, even IV - why not? If you disregard all the arguments against beef or animal products in general it's easy to make the argument that beef would be the best solution.

This reads like appeal to authority (the nutritionist) but a lot of nutritionists take the easy road ("just eat beef") or aren't good at all (haven't kept up with research). That's true of the majority of doctors and the majority of programmers (something people here will be able to relate to in case they haven't realized how useless most doctors are). I've been in and out of hospitals for several relatives for years and have heard doctors tell me outright falsehoods that show they have a only basic understanding of something. That makes sense since those doctors must know about so much more than the patient (thousands of diseases, lots of scientific knowledge about biology) but with a depth-first search into a topic you can spot how most of them have either stopped reading new studies or have lost their motivation to explore all option or have just stopped caring for providing the best kind of care. I hope people here don't have to go through what I have. That was a bit of a tangent, but I already wrote it so I'll keep it as a mini-rant.

> Beef is kind of an important thing in our diets, that's all. Now that I'm back to a more normal level I'll go back to eating less of it, but I am now very conscious how important red meat is in a rounded diet.

That's not really true. I'm sure you could ask vegans or vegetarians or Hindus or anyone who doesn't eat beef but has Celiacs and you'd get a whole bunch of options for managing it. Sure, you'll find ignorant people who think eating fruits all the time is enough but that's the same kind of carelessness that leads to non-vegans eating the standard Western diet all the time or doing other basic mistakes.

The same is true for almost everything. Almost nothing is "an important thing in our diets". People live without nuts or fruits or vegetables or legumes or meat or eggs or dairy (not all at once, of course, although I wouldn't be surprised if someone managed to avoid all these) and are able to manage pretty much any disease other groups of people can manage.

> calories are only part of the picture when it comes to food

True, people should care about the macros and micros. But with the internet it's trivial to do so both wrt learning what does what and how much is needed, and to track how much one eats from each.

So you put up a fight because people put something on their own land that doesn't look pretty without a HOA agreement in place? Or am I missing something?

If I were living there and wanted to do an upgrade like solar panels but then some neighbor complained that my house is an "eye sore" and was supposedly decreasing their property value, I'd be really frustrated.

We the citizens, specifically the tech-inclined people who would be able to set up wallets for the different vendors. I have bought fast food from a small non-chain store with Bitcoin once, for what it's worth.

Can anyone provide historical data for "job busts" or other types of declines in tech employment, massive layoffs or hire freezes? I seem to read about something like this every few years. Would like some data to see if this trend is stronger than the previous ones or not.

> This is a perfect illustration of what cracks me up about the hyperbolic reactions to Mythos. Yes, increased automation of cutting-edge vulnerability discovery will shake things up a bit. No, it's nowhere near the top of what should be keeping you awake at night if you're working in infosec.

Mythos will most likely not be the main thing that changes the infosec world, but AI in general will. Maybe in a few years or even decades, but I doubt it will just be another tool to have in our tool belt or another type of threat to consider.

> We've built our existing tech stacks and corporate governance structures for a different era. If you want to credit one specific development for making things dramatically worse, it's cryptocurrencies, not AI. [...]

One could argue it just accelerated everything. Without crypto it would still be possible to hack things and take the money out. It would require more manpower but it would be doable. Cash, wire transfers - nothing is perfectly secure. How are you going to prosecute someone in a foreign country like Russia or NK or even most Asian or African countries the West doesn't have strong relationships with? Even if you could, what's to stop the threat actors from bribing some poor person to take the fault if and when they're caught? If I'm a struggling farmer in Whateverstan, I'll happily take $50000 to give to my family in order to move millions to you.

And that acceleration of crime has positive aspects, too. Now a lot more people care about security. More care is given to making our infra and software in general more secure. Of course it's still insecure as shit, but I think it would be even more insecure if we didn't have cryptocurrency and the issues it brought with it.

Cryptocurrency has a few positives, too. Being able to drugs online (small, current positive) or to know that if shit hits the fan politically, we at least have the technological foundation to escape oppressive, corrupt and dysfunctional governments financially (big, potential positive), even for a while, until we get out shit together financially. It hasn't happened yet, but since even a lot of laypeople know about cryptocurrency, it's possible it could help some people somewhere in the future.

It's similar with privacy - if no one abused the data we gave them, we wouldn't have as many laws about data privacy and we wouldn't have as many people who care about their privacy. You can argue that we're at the point of no return because there are trackers and cameras everywhere, both public and private. That's similar, but a bit different since it's an already established infrastructure. It's harder to fight against something like that but if we do, we could still change it. Perhaps another acceleration in that direction is what we need - mass invasion of privacy so we can collectively wake up and dismantle the current status quo.

2/2

> You see, the art should make people stop and think. You stopped and thought about the rocks. I'd guess... I cannot know obviously, but still I'd dare to guess, that you missed the opportunity to reflect on your feelings triggered by those caged rocks? Why you was annoyed? Maybe because people spend resources inefficiently, as you say, but maybe the inefficiency is just your rationalization hiding the real cause of annoyance?

I didn't even stop as there was nothing to look at. If I stopped, it was to see if there was something I've missed, but there wasn't - poorly made metal cage with random stones inside. But apart from being annoyed at how public resources are spent, I got annoyed at other things, too:

* at the priorities people have in general, how they're seemingly blissfully unaware of anything that's not in their field of vision,

* at the fact that some pretentious fuck graduated with this as one of their biggest achievements (compared to people who actually try to advance science (hard or soft) or math or try to become better teachers or movie directors or nurses,

* at how some other pretentious fuck is going to pretend they admire this,

* at all the obvious things missing in the park or around it (yes, the "public resources" annoyance, but more concrete) - the poor state of the sidewalks, the lack of public toilets (or the state the existing ones are in), how poorly parking is handled, how no one helps the homeless people or animals and so on. Even if you live in the best city in the world, I bet there are similar things you get annoyed at. My city is far from the best one.

And so on, and so on. But I get annoyed at these things whenever I see someone sick or poor on the street, whenever I see some idiot that parks their car and takes up the whole sidewalk, whenever I can't even safely walk on the sidewalk even if there are no cars because it's so uneven and hasn't been maintained for decades (imagine an old person or someone with a disibility or someone with a stroller trying to walk there) and because the municipality decides "we'll have a themed fest/gathering/show" that costs a few thousand $currency just to set up the lighting. So the stones in a cage weren't that special in that regard. Maybe I get annoyed too much, but I think most people get annoyed too little. They shrug off most things and sheepishly say "well, things are shitty, but whatchagonnado?". And they vote for the same people who did nothing during their previous term.

> I dug into similar annoyance in myself, and I've found that I was annoyed because people do not share my understanding of art. I had some theories that people are mistaken because they do not try to think what is art and what is just plain crap, they just follow fashion. And for some reason it annoyed me a lot. What is this reason, I'm not sure, I think it has something to do with a social status or something like. Like, society I belong to ignores my opinion and goes into a direction I do not approve. It kinda make me a less important member of the society? I can't explain it clearly, because I do not understand it myself. But it is a very interesting observation, and I guess those rocks might become your opportunity to make this observation or maybe some to learn something else about yourself. Though I may be gravely mistaken of course. I can't just look into your head and explore your feelings and their causes, these things can be done only by you.

I thought a few minutes about whether that could be it for me, but I doubt it. I don't mind people listening to generic radio top 20 pop music. I just feel a bit sorry for them as they've never really explored other genres, but I don't mind their tastes. I don't mind people reading or watching cheesy romantic stuff even though it's the farthest from what I like. I may get annoyed at someone intensely staring at a black square in a gallery but not because they genuinely like it - it's because they got the scarf and the glass of wine and they're trying to pretend to like it. I love it when someone goes to something I don't care about, like a toaster exhibit or a museum of 19th century bottle caps or something. Or if they genuinely like art I don't care for. I have a friend who could talk to you for hours about random painters from the past. Is he pretentious? Maybe a bit. But mostly he likes the styles, he likes reading about them, about the history of that art. I get that, I like it and respect it even though I couldn't care less about Monet or Manet or whatever myself.

> > You have Michelangelo's David where you can admire the Michelangelo's skills, the time and care he took to sculpt it...

> Well... With Michelangelo I'm an example of what you said about the subjectivity of art. I don't see the point of drawing things on a canvas or shape rocks into a form of a muscular guy. I kinda can see the appeal of paintings before the photography was invented, but now they are useless.

Definitely, realism is boring to me, too. I meant to compare the skill, the attention to detail and the time spent making David, not whether we can make better 3D models than David in seconds in whatever software. And even if the stones in a cage were to compare to David wrt skill and time spent, it would still be worse than dealing with infrastructure or poverty or animals or whatever. The counterargument is "we'll never fully deal with these" which is a valid one (it's been used against lots of things I support, such as space exploration or animal welfare) - we can't spend all our time on a few issues and neglect everything else. But art with public money on public property is a giant "FUCK YOU" when we haven't dealt with these things even in the slightest.

But maybe the stones in a cage and the train sonification sparked up this conversation and that's enough; they did what they were supposed to do. Probably not, but who knows.

Edit: That art is forced down on us like poetry and prose was in school. I always thought we could grasp the social issues better by just talking about them or seeing pictures of bad things instead of reading fiction or poetry. Maybe that's part of my dislike towards art I'm forced to interact with? I think Frank from Raymond (I watched it a loong time ago) said something like "Poetry? Get to the point!" which resonated with me.

I got a "That comment was too long" for the first time so I'll split it in 2.

1/2

First I'd like to say I enjoy communicating with you even if it seems like I'd disagreeing or being obtuse or combative. It's much easier to write about what I disagree with than what I agree with, besides "I agree" or "I get it" so the disagreeing portion is naturally longer.

> What it means, that things become very complex to the point when sciences still can't take over the discourse and philosophy needs to fill the gap.

> ...

> But in any case, what I'm trying to say, sciences try to answer the question "what is art", it just happens that people are not content with the existing answers, and different scientific approaches to the question do not add up into a theory of art.

I understand now, thanks. Although it appears we're much, much closer to solving this than ethics (especially meta-ethics), metaphysics and the hard problem of consciousness. It's solvable even if it's not solved. Are the other 3 examples even solvable? Who knows. We may never get a scientific answer for meta-ethics. Even if we "solve" physics, the underlying questions like "but why are these equations the way they are" or "is there anything besides our universe" or "are we in a simulation" may never have a satisfying answer from science. Even if we map the brain and understand it like we understand a Hello World! program, we may never have a satisfactory answer to what qualia are. There are many other examples of topics likely-unsolvable by science that are studied by philosophers. OTOH, there are many things that will likely take decades with or without AI until they get solved - lots of questions in biology (incl. neuroscience and psychology), in physics and in math. But we don't say "philosophy of $unanswered_problem" for many such problems that are almost surely going to be solved this century. Anyway, that was a question I turned into a small rant as I often see "philosophy of $relatively_easy_problem", not just "art" and get very confused about why it's still in the philosophical realm.

> I like the idea that art is based on the contradiction between form and content (and a kind of a cognitive dissonance triggered by it

Maybe "art" isn't 1 thing but many things. Take music as it's one type of "art" I consume the most. Maybe some of it is "entertainment" or "a way to focus", not "art". But I feel very different things when listening to soft rock or trance or glitchy electronic music ("IDM" which a lot of people dislike as a term) or rap or techno or metal or whatever. I imagine most people who listen to different genres do so for different reasons. They do so when they're in a different mood or when they want to get into a different mood. Some tracks I can listen carefully to 100s of times. Others I play as background noise and rarely focus on them. A lot of them can serve both purposes. Yada yada, you hopefully get the point I'm trying to make.

> The sculpture touched you, it triggered your emotions and thoughts. This is the goal of a modern artist. Their goal not to annoy, but to trigger emotions. I laugh at such things, you become angry, we are both influenced by art.

I get that, too. But a lot people might elicit laughter or anger from us that we'd have a hard time categorizing as art. Maybe someone broke a bench. A case of simple vandalism? You may laugh at the person who felt it necessary to destroy property, I might get angry about it. 30 Wordpress addons bought and turned into malware? Same reaction (although I laugh about this, too). We might witness someone kill someone else over a few bucks. Those were most likely not intended as art. So are they art if you laugh but I get annoyed?

The philosophers might argue further. I say it doesn't matter - "art" is ill-defined to begin with and we could never hope to say whether something is art definitively. Even a chair is not well-defined as I could sit on a rock and call it a chair, you may disagree. Yet we don't have "philosophy of chairs". We discuss the broad idea if what kind of definitions we can have and what properties they have in metaphysics and in other fields related to semantics. I haven't read much about this as it's obvious that there's no universal or definitive "chair" we can agree on. But I at least understand such broad fields, such as those that deal with what a definition is, what properties does it have an so on. But no with specific ones like "art" or "chair".

> You remember the caged rocks, so they are not like the others, the artist succeeded.

I literally saw them 2 days ago. There were other BS "art" installations/sculptures but the dumbest one IMHO were the rocks. I guess if someone had deliberately lumped several hundred people's shit in the middle of the park, I would remember that more. Future artists - people don't put a pile of shit in the middle of the park. A note with "imagine a ton of shit here" would be funnier.

> The sculpture touched you, it triggered your emotions and thoughts. This is the goal of a modern artist. Their goal not to annoy, but to trigger emotions. I laugh at such things, you become angry, we are both influenced by art.

If that's the goal, then it's relatively easy to achieve it, isn't it? What wouldn't trigger emotions if it was big enough? If I saw (rolls a mental dice) a blue Santa with GPUs for ears, wearing Geordi's VISOR sitting in a bathtub made of scrap electronics, I'd get annoyed. You might smirk like "wtf...?!" and so on.

Sure, if the chili peppers or the beans are not packaged, you could buy as little as you want. Sometimes you might get funny looks, sometimes they'll give you the bean for free as it's not worth the hassle to sell an individual bean.

But what about prepackaged beans, like 500 gram pack? You can't open the package and expect to pay for part of it. Sometimes the beans are packaged by the grocery store with their branding. That's the same as not letting you buy an individual bean.

I remember a story about someone my parents told me. They really liked a certain musician (forgot which one, I was told the story like 30 years ago), then my parents mentioned that the musician was gay and then the friend stopped listening to him for some homophobic reason.

Tangential, but the nicotine is not as bad as people think.