robot_no_421

"As it master, I should be able to force my machine into giving me access of private fields."

If you're writing the code then you can do whatever you want with it. But if I'm writing the code you're using, I want the power to express "the end user cannot use this private field".

You trying to access the private fields in the library I or someone else wrote would be like trying to change a book someone wrote or a painting someone made. It's not the computer restricting you, it's the author of the code.

EDIT: This response was not my finest take.

The difference between a heap allocated string (String), a static string literal embedded in the binary (&str), and a stack allocated string ([char], but this is more common in C than Rust) is the simplest introduction to manually managed memory.

The complications have nothing to do with Rust but with how computers manage and allocate memory. You might as well also skip C, C++, Zig, and every other language which gives you fine-tuned access to the stack and heap, because you'll run into the same concept.

Not at all, that's why we have moderators. Hacker news is interesting because they stay focused on the right topics. If you let people just talk about whatever they want, you're just gonna get an inferior Reddit. Topic != "Whatever we want to talk about", the topic is very often the technical and technological aspects of a story or article. Talking about politics on HN is definitely "off topic".

Right, but you could theoretically say this about any software or technology (and this argument has very frequently in the past been used to argue against technologies like cars and airplanes). DNA sampling has "flaws" and "bugs" in it too that occasionally lead to false positives. Even police officers and lawyers falsely identify people occasionally. AI technology would just be another tool we collect evidence with for use in making inferences about the world. Imperfect technology never has been a blocker for using or improving that technology until it meets its purposes.

> "you can't think of any uses for facial recognition surveillance that pegs you at specific locations at specific times? You can't imagine a single way how to monetize that data and use it against you or other law abiding citizens?"

Having imagination has nothing to do with staying on track and sticking to the conversation topic. Nothing you said has anything to do with criminalizing law abiding citizen for just existing. Privacy rights are a related but separate topic. We could talk about that separately if you want to. But I don't see how AI knowing where we are, or how AI enabling the monetization of our data has anything to do with criminalizing anything I do on a daily basis.

“There has long been a concern [facial recognition] could invade upon people's lives through expanded surveillance and through the criminalization of just existing within the public sphere,” Mamdani said.

Except, nobody is calling the regular fare paying people criminals. Just the people who aren't paying the fare and breaking the rules.

I say that you're not thinking critically because your arguments are very weak and you don't provide any inference or evidence to support your conclusions. It's irrelevant that "you read both Chinese and English" or that you think "you've critically analyzed every idea from both sides" if you're not using any of those in your logical argument, which you're not. In fact, it's an obvious logical fallacy to use "I have read more about this than you" as evidence that you're right.

>Say what you will, but I won't be able to espouse the virtues of freedom of speech in China anymore.

The real reason you can't "espouse the virtues of freedom of speech in China" is because they will arrest you. Let's not mince words here. The Chinese government would shoot their citizens before they would let them protest or speak their mind freely.

This is a really poor argument. You are equating banning one social media app with the GFW, which is obviously a huge hyperbole which has nothing to do with reality. The Great Firewall operates by checking transmission control protocol (TCP) packets for keywords or sensitive words. That is a violation of freedom of thought at the infrastructure level. As an American, you are still free to visit Chinese hosted websites and drink whatever propaganda you want. You just can't use TikTok to find it anymore.

Plus, freedom of speech is about protecting American Citizens from being censored by American Government. Banning an ungovernable, foreign owned business does not stop you from freely expressing yourself on the internet.

Your education was not a lie, but you should still get a refund on your failed education. You clearly did not learn to think critically.

> Is it acceptable to correct the answer to the query "Eminent scientist" from 95% men, 5% woment to 50%/50% or to the current ratio of men/women in science ? Should we correct the ratio of black to white people in answering a generic question to average across the globe or US ?

I would expect AI to at least generate answers consistent with reality. If I ask for a historical figure who just happens to be white, AI needs to return a picture of that white person. Any other race is simply wrong. If I ask a question about racial based statistics which have an objective answer, AI needs to return that objective answer.

If we can't even trust AI to give us factual answers to simple objective facts, then there's definitely no reason to trust whatever AI says about complicated, subjective topics.

The longer I remain a software engineer the more I hate relying on computers. Maybe the people closest to the technology are the ones to first realize how superficial and downright damaging these innovations actually are.

> It’s a bit nonsensical to compare the number of words in English to the number of packages in PyPi, but we can agree that both English and Python are very rich languages, and no single person can reasonably understand the full scope of either language.

If I were editing this article, I would tell the author to remove the entire paragraph leading up to this snippet. Why would you insert a section that's so bs that even you immediately criticize your own point?

Truthfully, I read this article and came away with the conclusion that writing code is nothing at all like writing prose.

Yes, in the sense that if P = NP, it would conceptually be a lot easier in theory to break a lot of public key encryption, which are NP hard problems.

>Where management is helped more by having resources than it is by understanding it.

There are many examples of lottery winners, athletes, and celebrities who came across considerable resources yet still went broke because they didn't understand how to manage it or the concept of exponential growth.

A fool and his money are easily parted, as the saying goes. People who don't have financial literacy will lose their money over and over again regardless of how much you give them.