Recent submissions

Comment · 10 days ago
Ironic, since public education is also obviously about indoctrination to accept the status quo as dictated by the state.
Comment · 10 days ago
There haven't been any good options for president in a long time. Democracy is mostly an illusion. Nearly every politician has been corrupted and co-opted by corporations, the military industrial complex, deep state, and perverse special interests. Obama was a huge disappointment, infamously bailed out Wall St and arrested zero bankers over the GFC, ACA was a massive giveaway to the private health insurance corporations, expanded mass surveillance, presided over the persecution of whistle blowers, engaged in widespread drone bombing and regime change wars in the middle east...

Biden was a senile career politician. His administration pushed for confrontation with Russia over bringing Ukraine into NATO, and did nothing about Israel's genocide in Gaza. When it became obvious Biden was effectively brain dead, much like Mitch McConnell now, the DNC appointed Kamala without a primary -- another glaring example of their subversion of touted democratic principles. She was yet another empty suit, incapable of expressing original ideas, and would have done basically the exact same things as Trump like allowing Israel to expand theirs wars of choice in the middle east.

Comment · 10 days ago
Comment · 1 month ago
Get to work.
Comment · 1 month ago
A guy who worked for the CIA and was friends with Kissinger in college. If you accept his definition uncritically, then you have some work to do.
Comment · 1 month ago
Good post. Keep fighting the good fight.
Comment · 3 months ago
I enjoyed most of my math classes like multivariate calculus and differential equations, though I pursued my BS and MS degrees in CS later in life, and was already independently wealthy so didn't need to take out student loans. I also took many of the core STEM courses first at a California community college, which were honestly quite rigorous, and not obviously lower quality education than what I got at UCSD. The idea that students must go into vast debt attending an expensive 4 year university is dubious.

It's also easy to condescend and indict the students who may not necessarily love every single class they're forced to take. They're also not going to be using most of the concepts they're required to learn. In my personal career I've worked in software engineering, computational biology, machine learning, and quantitative finance, yet I don't think I've ever had to explicitly use Stokes' theorem or Cauchy-Euler equations. There are various tools I've used which I'm sure relied on these mathematics, yet it's really only at the frontier of advanced research that people will be using anything more complex than algebra.

Comment · 3 months ago
Race is not skin color. Albino Sub-Saharans are very obviously not European.

People of course prefer others that share their language, culture, religion and politics. Race is often highly correlated to those.

To ignore the dimension of genetics is to willfully blind yourself to reality.

Comment · 3 months ago
It's human nature to be "racist" since people generally prefer to be with others similar to themselves. That can be multi-dimensional, ranging from values, cultures, tastes, but race is the most obvious and one of the major principal components of human experience.

Japan, Korea, and Taiwan are effectively ethnostates and they've not had the cultural enrichment yet that America or Europe has faced. Notably, there is rising anti-migrant extremism in the West, because the Great Replacement Theory is becoming increasingly obviously not just a theory.

Comment · 6 months ago
Yes.
Comment · 9 months ago
The US, UK, and Western powers have been waging information war for far longer than 2016. Look at Canadian PM Mark Carney's latest speech at Davos, he admits the 'Rules based international order' was a fiction, and the US has had a very long history of covert operations, 'enhanced interrogation', destabilization campaigns, funding of terrorists, propping up of dictators, bombing and invading of many countries...

To be specific consider how many lies have been told by the American mainstream media around the narratives of Iraq, Afghanistan, Israel, Syria, Libya, etc. Israel has the most surveilled and well defended border in the world, the Mossad is sophisticated enough to launch pager attacks to decapitate Hezbollah leadership, yet somehow they got caught with their pants down and Hamas combatants could raid their country for 12 hours without a response. The US also had funded Osama bin Laden in the 1980s, knew Al Qaeda was plotting another attack on the WTC, and the Neocons in the Bush administration wanted a new Pearl Harbor as outlined in the Project for a New American Century.

Russia is not uniquely or even particularly evil here, it's entirely rational for them to not want a major neighbor to join an enemy alliance. Look at how America has treated Cuba for decades. People should stop being so naive.

Comment · 10 months ago
Seems foolish to trust them. The EU is fundamentally undemocratic with the unelected Commission proposing laws and decision making hidden within councils. It has been steadily centralizing and concentrating power, creating a dense web of regulations that have been strangling member states' stagnant economies. Right to free speech is notoriously bad in Europe. The EU is trying to increase military power, and ultimately a centralized European army.
Comment · 10 months ago
You're assuming mutual exclusion. Democracy is two wolves and a sheep deciding what's for dinner.
Comment · 11 months ago
Freedom of speech is just as much about the freedom to listen. The point isn’t that an LLM has rights. The point is that people have the right to seek information. Censoring LLMs restricts what humans are permitted to learn.

Live from the official Hacker News API

A modern reader for Hacker News · SvelteKit + Skeleton