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Mar 31

Remember when Google and Facebook were the good guys?

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Comment · 7 days ago

It was Carlyle who, in his seminal Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question, argued that slavery is a fundamental human relationship, and as such you can't ban slavery, but can only ban the word.

Comment · 7 days ago

You're right, a genuine activist used by the state for cynical motives is called a Useful Idiot. Ironically, this turn of phrase was traditionally said to be coined by Lenin, although modern scholarship no longer espouses this view.

Comment · 17 days ago

It's a picture that's been painted in a different scifi novel,

     Hug me till you drug me, honey;
     Kiss me till I'm in a coma;
     Hug me, honey, snuggly bunny,
     Love's as good as soma."

Still, I'm optimistic. With obesity, who cares about the underlying cause if you can easily cure the symptoms?

Comment · 22 days ago

I saw it used five years ago on a LessWrong post: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Y6TtPfcKiHjK9Bmoa/sleeping-j...

That's the only time I've ever even heard it mentioned outside HN. I felt a lot of excitement for Julia's automatic differentiation during the ML era, because you had programmers with weak math backgrounds suddenly needing to do basic calculus (any dev from that era has the chain rule burnt into their brain).

Then the ML community settled on Python as their language, and if performance was an issue you wrote a library in C++, and obviously that was all sucked into the event horizon of LLMs so people "code" in whatever language the LLMs had the best training data for.

Comment · 22 days ago

Wouldn't this make credit riskier for lenders, reducing access to credit in general and thus making housing less accessible especially to working people?

Not asking polemically, I just have never studied economics and wonder if my intuition here is flawed

Comment · 26 days ago

>do we want to win talent war or not?

Talent war against whom? It's not like the best and brightest are lining up to defect to China.

Comment · 1 month ago

The word genocide is currently undergoing semantic bleaching (https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/very-actually-and-ot...). It's too powerful a word for propagandists/activists to resist beating it into oblivion in the service of their causes.

Comment · 2 months ago

Oooh good idea. Yes that should be quite easy to hack together. Tbh that's easy enough that Codex could oneshot it for you, but either of us should make it and release so you can sort jobs by not-being-posted-for-years-at-a-time-ness