Recently my friend paid attention to a statue of a man near his apartment he had passed for years. The story is behind this person is worthy of a movie, he’s like a character in a Pynchon novel:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernie_Houghton

https://youtu.be/0MWnSKDsURg

> TIL that filtering is on by default on the standard resolver (9.9.9.9).

Their offering is explained in the first paragraph of the home page, in fact the h1 and page title cover it.

Why have a technician at all? And without the six warehouse workers and one technician, why do you need the robots, the robotics company, or the companies paying the robotics company for the robots?

This and Elevator of the Year on the front page, it feels like the good old days of HN! Everything about this site, starting with the domain name, is so matter of fact. It’s fantastic.

I loved Syndicate, but I never beat it. There was a mechanic I couldn’t figure out that caused my whole operation to fall apart after a certain amount of time.

Try Satellite Reign. It's also almost retro by now (2015), but it's essentially a modernized Syndicate.

There is no need to “bring back” forums, there are plenty that already exist. You just need to participate in them if that’s what you want.

With how many times I have seen the "forum" for a community be a Discord server I would say that there has been a noticable shift away from independently hosted forums. Which is what I would associate with a "proper" forum.

This, I don't really understand this "bring back" things, there are a handful of forums I am visiting almost daily. And they are probably my most visited websites alongside hackernews and a couple of others.

Such as?

https://tl.net is a great old school forum if you like RTS games

Could you list a few?

FreeBSD forums, using XenForo which doesn't seem to be open source: https://forums.freebsd.org/

Arch Linux forums, using FluxBB: https://bbs.archlinux.org/

Free Pascal forums, using Simple Machines Forum: https://forum.lazarus.freepascal.org/

Python forums, using Discourse: https://discuss.python.org/

Nim forums, using their own nimforum software written in Nim: https://forum.nim-lang.org/

LinuxForums has been going strong for decades. My account there dates to 2004.

electronic music production (hosted by elektron but discussion about other gear is accepted):

https://elektronauts.com

cycling:

https://velocipedesalon.com

https://forums.thepaceline.net

simracing:

https://simracingonline.co.uk

https://www.lfs.net/forum

https://www.overtake.gg/forums/

And a few others I visit less frequently but I won't mention because I have already leaked a lot of information :-)

I guess there are still a ton of forums that cover a wide variety of hobbies/interests.

Bogleheads forum is great: https://www.bogleheads.org/forum/index.php

There's a Spain equivalent forum also if you poke around

I still regularly visit TheGearPage forum for musicians (mostly guitarists), and it's still active.

There's also Hardforum for hardware related discussions, though I don't visit as often anymore.

Many others I used to visit are dead.

68KMLA (68K Macintosh Liberation Army): https://68kmla.org/bb/

A small but great little community: https://leviathanalpha.com/

Motorsports: forums.autosport.com is very much alive

Also f1technical.net

True, but I genuinely think we lost something over the years. This all might be a feeling that we lost what was, and that we know we can do it again, but it's impossible to replicate what we had (format and, more importantly, the users).

It might not be a platform issue, but a "corporate X decide to scrap forum Y", and it never was the same again.

I've seen this a few times, and it basically blew up incredibly tight and excellent groups.

Yeah, ideally the system used should be something distributed like NNTP or a free software forum software with an easy import/export option + frequent export snapshots anyone can download.

Then if the forum goes down for whatever reason, one or more community members can rehost it elsewhere.

Even there, though, a lot of the forums are dead or decayed or have disappeared. It's not like it was even 10 years ago.

This analogy makes absolutely no sense.

> vacuous empty comments > saying sweet nothings > empty puffery

By definition the only ad-hominem comments to be seen anywhere above.

If a hammer had a chat interface that said everything was a nail then the answer would be yes, the hammer lies to you about everything being a nail.

That wasn’t the question though? A hammer doesn’t have a chat interface, that’s the point.

Duh

If hammer companies were suddenly the most valuable international companies, and spent millions on ad campaigns and lobbying about trusting the hammer interface, then you can assume a large amount of people might trust the hammer interface

Still, it's a tool.

Even if your tool learns to talk and to make decisions, it's still a tool, not a person. You're the person and the one responsible for the decisions you make based on your tools.

Going back from the analogy, the problem is that we conflated software <engineers> with "coders". A lot of people thought their job was to create code, we gave them a tool to generate a lot of code fast, and they truly think that "more code" = "more good"

A hammer usually doesn't have the power to persuade people.

> it's still a tool, not a person.

Tell that to the CEO's who have replaced all of their yes-men with yes-chatbots.

Where are the ad campaigns telling me to trust LLMs?

I don’t use an adblocker, do read traditional dead tree newspapers and do get exposed to satellite tv channels.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone anywhere telling me how reliable LLMs are.

Pretty sure this tech sells itself to consumers, enterprise sales are what they’ve always been.

Literally saw a video ad the other day which went like "I've always been cautious using Google's AI because it sometimes gets things wrong, but this time, it got it right!"

So now you're pivoting away from the caretaker proposal? I thought it had potential but I don't know how you'd fund it.

> I thought it had potential but I don't know how you'd fund it.

The same way we fund other social services here in Europe. If an individual is incapable of caring for themselves, the state is expected to care for them.