n4ture

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43704319

Hi @dang,

Sorry to hijack this thread with a completely off-topic issue, but I have no idea where else to reach about this. I did a submission yesterday showcasing the work of some of my colleagues at UofT, it's satire but it is backed by serious academical work. I was very sad to see it quickly got flagged and removed from the front page when it started to generate discussion. I just wanted to ask you to unflag it or provide an exlaination as to why it should remain flagged and is breaking the guidelines, as I believe censoring/muting academics on important topics such as AI in the current political climate is yet another dangerous step towards fascism.

The submission in question:

Thanks for listening to my plea, and again apologies for being so off-topic!

Best,

Edit: formating/typo for clarity

Agreed, but I think some people on HN might actually feel threatned by such awareness. I wish there could've been a more constructive discussion around resource consumption rather than a war on "green propaganda".

Yeah wonder why that is... There is a serious group of University of Toronto researchers behind this project. I thought it was pretty cool!

Edit: Genuinely wondering why, I thought it was a good opportunity to talk about some of the less advertised sides of AI.

AI Is Facing a Crisis savethe.ai

53 n4ture 1 year ago 58 comments

Yeah was going to change that part too for something like "Writing code like this is verbose and spans too many lines", but then I just thought it'd be better if it sounded more like the parent comment.

And I understand it doesn't resonate with most, I just wanted to highlight how the initial parent comment was very subjective and not very substantive, some people didn't take the joke so well, I guess it could've sounded a bit passive aggressive. I personally enjoy both C-like and Lisp-like syntaxes and languages, I do have a sweet spot for Forth tho.

But back on topic, Fennel is a great language, working with Love and Fennel is really nice. And if the parentheses can seem off-putting for some, I'd highly encourage to give it a shot as you can quickly get past it and see how comfy it feels to have your statements properly demarkated.

S-expr shine the most when working with XML-like structure. Spinneret[1] was the most fun I ever had working with HTML, every other templating engine feels subpar now that I have tasted that sweet nectar..

[1] https://github.com/ruricolist/spinneret

I do not understand the appeal of non-LISPy languages. I get that most people are used to reading it and that they are efficent, but I believe the developer (of the compiler in this case) should serve the convenience of the user, not the other way around.

Writing code like this is combersome and unnecessarily symbol heavy, and reading it isn't really nice as well.

I'd rather have the language add those extra parens into the parser than have me stare down these endless semi-colon, linebreaks or indentation. Parsing something Lisp-like is not that, hard, trust me, I've done it.

You need to educate yourself some more my friend. You could start with the latest IPCC report's summary. Green cover won't tell you much about loss of insects, marine wildlife, microorganism in the soil, etc... Also I'd be interested in which specific metric you speak about when talking about humans being better off and which studies you are refering too. You'll reckon that if you don't even trust a widespread scientific consesus, I'll have a hard time trusting a random person on the interwebs.

Ok, then we don't have the same definition of de-growth. China is very much growth oriented, although in a different way than the collective West. 2. I think that has more to do with eugenics than degrowth, degrowth is asking how many children is desirable, if you want 10 children, first you need to think about women and how desirable it is for them to be pregnant for 7-8 years of their lives, going through labor 10 times etc... Especially if 9 of those 10 children will live till 70, what good are you achieving there? World domination with your genes? XD Asking people to not have kids sounds pretty undesirable and anti-democratic too, but it the desirability of it should be debated publicly for sure. Also would you have 10 kids in a world where abundance is not a given? Where it's hard to afford a nanny, or even find one, etc...

I mean it depends on your perspective. Because you could also think that preventing only one of the multiple crisis we are facing won't be enough to perceptively delay the breaking point.

Who talked about sacrifice? De-growth is not about sacrifice, it's about changing the perspective on what is considered "good" and "desirable". I don't know why people are always so scared of de-growth, what you are describing with sacrifices is about decolonialism and global equalization. Ultimately if you are against such changes, you should champion neo-colonialism and make sure to promote racism so that you don't have to sacrifice anything and continue living at the expense of the poorer parts of the world...

The "solution" you're showcasing only addresses global warming, not climate change, nor any of the other facets of the environmental crisis (e.g. biodiversity collapse, ocean acidification, soil depletion, fresh water pollution, etc...). Techno-solutionism at its finest!

Both of you basically said the same thing to me, our seeking of unbriddled progress is like a moth to a flame, we think it's our guide but it'll just burn us if we don't think properly/rationally about it. Our single most important skill as humans is our ability to adapt, hence the plasticity in our mindstate, culture, introspection etc... The Elites understand that very well and uses that to fulfill whatever sick fantasies they harbor.

qikInNdOutReply said we need a patch, you appeal to common sense, I like to speak about some kind of "transcendence". In the end, we all speak about the same thing: With this much progress, technical prowess, power etc.. comes a great deal of problem and responsibility we are unable to handle, we need to balance this with a "progress" in our mindset and culture to get some sort of control over our tools, society, destiny or whatever we deem important to continue living decently.

Wow! I have been surprised two times, once when listening to the podcast: Someone who seems to grasp some global understanding not given to most and articulate them (the central role that progress plays in our society, the progress having peaked, the need to study and understand the notion of progress) being so short-sighted and individualistic that he fails to even take into account the nature of progress itself. He wants and believes in a brighter future (I do to) but what he is advocating for leads us to catastrophy, I am all for progress, but I think we really need progress on moral standing, a progress in mindset etc... Basically a progress of ideas and spirituality, and NOT more technical/technological progress!

My second surprise was to see this heavily tech-oriented community not bite into this bait and remain very critical without falling into cynicism, this makes me hopeful that something can be done about this. A lot has been said to highlight the shortsightedness of the guest speaker's argument and even more could be said, but I want to ask something else, what are we doing about this? What can we do as techies/engineers to address this madness?

Awesome project! I've been on the lookout for such projects ever since discovering uxn, I'll definitely have a look and keep an eye on uvm.

>The creator of UXN is a friend of mine and we chat semi-regularly about our VMs.

Does the discussion happen in a public place? If yes I'd be extremely happy to join in since I also got started with making my own system around a month ago, and it feels a bit lonely going on such an endeavor at times.

It's extremely early and I haven't really shared it anywhere yet, but I feel there is already the possibilty to play around with the custom editor I made, try to make little graphical programs etc.. If you manage to build it that is (I develop mostly on OpenBSD and also try to make it build under Ubuntu with gcc sometimes).

The source is hosted here for now: https://git.blazebone.com/pochi/

The README (in the about tab) should give a rough explanation of what it is, I also have a bit of documentation already.

>Another difference is that IMO, UVM is more approachable.

Very interesting choice, I did away with such assumptions and ran the other way, my system might feel quite alien/esoteric since I went for something that draws a lot of inspiration from Chuck Moore's work with ColorForth as well as his F18 chip.