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> no X. no Y. just Z

i am so sick of AI slop writing..


I agree. Why should I read such a long article that a human didn't put any effort into?

>Built with love and ~25 000 tokens. Conceived and directed by a human. Written by AI.

I appreciate the transparency, although it is at the bottom.


i wouldn't have such an issue with it if didn't completely homogenize every text it spits out. i want to read something that at least resembles the words in the author's mind, not the output of an instruction to describe something.

i should take a break from the internet, the past couple of weeks feel like being stuck in an asylum where everything is written by the same one author, using the same words, same tropes, same idioms. i'm slowly going insane.


I feel much better since I have closed of my social media accounts and concentrated my reading on newspapers I know to be written by humans.

I'm pretty sure AI generated submissions go against the guidelines on this site.

i use an extension called OhMyECH to show whether a website used ECH, and it is currently very rare that i encounter one that does.

at least none of the major websites on the internet do.


adding, one can test it here [1] though I think it also depends on the client using DoH [2] For people already using Cloudflare or Google DoH DNS it should just work.

To get ECH to work for me I had to enable DoH in my local Unbound DNS daemon and point Firefox to it rather than using unencrypted DNS on my LAN. I had to force a refresh (shift-F5 on tls-ech.dev). I only use my own recursive DNS so I get query logs and can block some ad/malware sites.

[1] - https://crypto.cloudflare.com/cdn-cgi/trace

[2] - https://tls-ech.dev/


i couldn't finish "Don't Look Up", it felt like sitting through a political lecture. all i wanted from a comedy was some laughs.

Fair criticism. It was very lecturing. Beyond that, it was also quite funny, but really, there was nothing funny about the end. I don't think it was meant as a comedy.

Same here. There was something feeling so obviously off with Don't Look Up.. for me at least. Idiocracy did not suffer from this.. but Mike Judge is somewhat of an acquired taste I guess.

I never saw it but Scott Alexander's review made it sound like the writers of Don't Look Up were themselves idiots, who wanted to send a political message but couldn't figure out how to do it properly.

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/movie-review-dont-look-up


To be honest, I think it's about whether someone feels like they are making fun or being made fun of.

Thereby proving the point of the film.

Don't look!


I'm in the same category. The film is so awfully written and acted it isn't something that can be watched.

Then you need to watch comedies made decades ago.

How about the British "Till Death Do Us Part" from the 1960s/70s?

That had a similar irony in that people complained about the racist character of Alf Garnett, but the series very much used his bigotism/racism as the butt of the jokes.


> Then you need to watch comedies made decades ago.

Yes. It was nice when corporate taxes were high, xenophobia was seen as something bad, and movies could focus on smaller problems satire.

I hope that we go back to the socialist era of the USA with unionization, safety nets and welfare for the working class instead of for billionaires. Movies could just be silly again.


Was that supposed to trigger me? Not from there, but I'm in favor of "unionization, safety nets and welfare for the working class instead of for billionaires" and higher corporate taxes!

But also I don't think movies aren't silly because they deal with all the "big problems". After all they didn't have a problem making silly movies in eras with far worse problems, social and economic. And they could make hella fun movies on heavy topics just fine (Blazing Saddles and racism for example, or MASH and the Vietnam war - even if nominally about Korea).

Modern comedies aren't silly or fun, not because times are troubled, but because they're written as shallow moralizing lectures. Any "caring" is performative. They're also walking on eggshells, and are too polite to have any edge. And then there's the derivative reboots and remakes, which many of them are.


I couldn't finish "Idiocracy" because the underlying eugenics nonsense made me angry enough not to enjoy the comedy anymore.

It made me angry because makes the point that natural selection has become ineffective on humans and thus intelligence declines unironically. There is no joke in that - all jokes build upon the assumption of this being true.

If it were true, then decline wouldn't have begun in the 19th or 20th century but around the time that property and currencies emerged.

But there is no need to disproof this because there is no evidence that it has any truth to it.


That's like being angry at Star wars because the very first title text says "long time ago", and we know humans didn't go into space long time ago duh.

> If it were true, then decline wouldn't have begun in the 19th or 20th century but around the time that property and currencies emerged.

Why? Can you elaborate on that? Did the emergence of property and currency cause a negative correlation between intelligence and number of offspring?


I think there's so much ill-founded assumptions in eugenics BS that it's hard to know where to start, but as a genealogist, I can personally verify that upper or middle class, wealthier people, presumably the sort eugenicists identify with, clearly had at least a 2-3 generations head start on the demographic transition where I come from.

There are other trends, there's always some groups of people who started having fewer kids earlier or later for reasons not obviously related to class - but class is the big one.


> It made me angry because makes the point that natural selection has become ineffective on humans and thus intelligence declines unironically. There is no joke in that - all jokes build upon the assumption of this being true.

you seem pretty convinced that intelligence plays an important role in natural selection. I'd argue that decisiveness, confidence, looks, social skills all play a more important role. (I'm not saying that's a good thing)

I'm interested in understanding your point of view, can you elaborate on what you mean by "There is no joke in that"?


Can't remember in details that part of the film. Was it explicitly eugenics? Otherwise it could be seen as not getting the same education, depending on parental situation.

It's in the opening scene, where poor, "low IQ" couple complains about getting another child again by accident while a suburban "high IQ" couple was hesitant to start making children until it was too late (the husband dies). "Low IQ" couple's son grows up into a stupid, sexy jock and it goes on from there for generations.

So yes, eugenics was pretty much an integral part of the premise. IQ bubbles even pop up on the screen during those scenes, just to remove any shadow of a doubt.


> So yes, eugenics was pretty much an integral part of the premise. IQ bubbles even pop up on the screen during those scenes, just to remove any shadow of a doubt.

Is that really how we use the word "eugenics", though? That scene you refer to explicitly explained that Natural Selection does not necessarily select for intelligence.

So while some people are calling it "Eugenics", it's what we more typically call Natural Selection, Evolutionary Pressure, etc.

Eugenics implies that the selection criteria was not natural. The scene you mention makes it clear that, in-universe anyway, the selection criteria was entirely natural and not a pressure imposed by humans.


I agree that it doesn't explicitly show someone tilting the scales, but that doesn't mean that eugenics are not an integral part of the premise in a "if we don't do something about this, this is what the world will look like" kind of way.

I still like the movie, but like with any 20+ years old comedies, I can recognise issues with its premise which would be more-or-less unacceptable today. In 2006... not as much. The future is now, old man!


> Come on, use your brain a little:

Classy

> does that scene imply that we should do something to tilt the scales in the opposite direction?

No, it did not.

> I agree that it doesn't explicitly show someone tilting the scales, but that doesn't mean that eugenics are not an integral part of the premise in a "if we don't do something about this, this is what the world will look like" kind of way.

And, to you, "Do something about this" means only one thing - forcefully stopping classes of people from reproducing?


>It made me angry because makes the point that natural selection has become ineffective on humans

So it's a documentary?

Even the basic reproductive instinct has become "ineffective on humans".

>There is no joke in that - all jokes build upon the assumption of this being true

No, there are countless jokes in the movie that don't depend about how the world became stupid (be it cultural or genetics or combination) at all. Literally all of them are like that.

>If it were true, then decline wouldn't have begun in the 19th or 20th century but around the time that property and currencies emerged.

Why, did the movie say it's the result of "property and currencies"? And even if somebody said so, who said it's just about "property and currencies" merely being a thing that starts this decline, and not surpassing some level of development of property and currencies (e.g. late capitalism), which prevents mitigating factors from working?


nowhere near comparable experience if you want to seamlessly use your YT account across a TV + phone + computer

i'd rather pay the $10 than pay with my time by being an ad-block whack-a-mole diagnostician


I use skipvids.com across phone and computer and xbox. I'm too cheap to pay $15.99 per month

For those of us who are too cheap to pay the subscription:

On my iPhone I almost never see YTube ads. I don’t use the YTube app and instead I install Chrome and watch YT that way. I lose notifications—which is perfect for me, since I don’t want many notifications on my phone anyway.

This might also work in Safari but I haven’t tested it.


On Android, Firefox with sponsorblock. I do pay for Premium though. In since YouTube Red.


> ad-block whack-a-mole diagnostician that is being done as open source community efforts now: NewPipe for mobile, SmartTube for smart TVs etc. All you have to do is update them once in a while


It's not comparable, it's superior! The youtube app stinks! And I don't care about "seamlessly" using it across my devices.


i don't care if someone has bad grammar, i want to hear their thoughts as they came up with them, we're all intelligent beings and can parse the meaning behind what you write.

i type my comments without capitalization like i'm typing into some terminal because i'm lazy and people might hate it but i'm sure they prefer this to if i asked an LLM to rewrite what i type

your writing style is your personality, don't let a robot take it away from you


I, on the other hand, find incorrect grammar mildly annoying, especially when it's due to laziness. It distracts from the thoughts being conveyed. I appreciate when people take the time to format comments as correctly as they're able.

In fact, I'd argue that lazy commenting is the real problem, which has now been supercharged by LLMs.


i'm kinda jaded because it seems the type of people that get into politics do it to gain money and power.. so voting always feels like picking the lesser of two evils


I think idealists often get into politics as well, but they're not cold, calculating and power hungry enough to get into the important positions.


Start by just attending a some meetings of your local school board, city council, etc. Sit, watch, and maybe take notes. Compare the reality with local press coverage (if any) of it. Try analyzing the social dynamics. Talk to other ordinary citizens about it.

If the only people paying real attention to gov't leaders are the greedy and power-hungry, then few decent people will run for office. And very few of those win.


Not only that, but one rotten apple can kill decades of work (see Trump, Putin).


overblown? billions of users use consumer tier hardware just fine. i have servers at home with years of uptime without any ECC memory


But how much bit rot? You’ll never know.


If I don't know about it, then how does it affect me / why should I care? My home server does what it is supposed to do and has done so for a decade. If bit rot /bit flips in memory does not affect my day-to-day life I much prefer cheaper hardware.

I do hope the nuclear powerplant next door uses more fault tolerant hardware, though.


Eventually you might notice the pictures or other documents you were saving on your home server have artifacts, or no longer open. This is undesireable for most people using computer storage.

> I much prefer cheaper hardware.

The cost savings are modest; order of magnitude 12% for the DIMMs, and less elsewhere. Computers are already extremely cheap commodities.


12% for the DIMMs only, but with Intel you need Xeon and its accompanying motherboard for it. Someone said AMD "kinda" lets you do ECC on consumer hardware, not sure what the caveats are besides just being unbuffered.

Assuming that's more due to intentional market segmentation than actual cost, yeah I would pay 12% more for ECC. But I'm with the other guy on not valuing it a ton. I have backups which are needed regardless of bitrot, and even if those don't help, losing a photo isn't a huge deal for me.


> Someone said AMD "kinda" lets you do ECC on consumer hardware, not sure what the caveats are besides just being unbuffered.

That was me. It isn't "officially" supported by AMD, but it should work. You can enable EDAC monitoring in Linux and observe detected correction events happening.

> Assuming that's more due to intentional market segmentation than actual cost

That's the argument, yeah.


I'm more concerned how the Mac filesystems don't have payload checksums.


the whole concept of a "clean room" implementation sounds completely absurd.

a bunch of people get together, rewrite something while making a pinky promise not to look at the original source code

guaranteeing the premise is basically impossible, it sounds like some legal jester dance done to entertain the already absurd existing copyright laws


> it sounds like some legal jester dance done to entertain [...] copyright laws

Clean room implementations are a jester dance around the judiciary. The whole point is to avoid legal ambiguity.

You are not required to do this by law, you are doing this voluntarily to make potential legal arguments easier.

The alternative is going over the whole codebase in question and arguing basically line by line whether things are derivative or not in front of a judge (which is a lot of work for everyone involved, subjective, and uncertain!).


In the archetypal example IBM (or whoever it was) had to make sure the two engineering teams were never in the cafeteria together at the same time


It usually refers to situations without access to the source code.

I've always taken "clean room" to be the kind of manufacturing clean room (sealed/etc). You're given a device and told "make our version". You're allowed to look, poke, etc but you don't get the detailed plans/schematics/etc.

In software, you get the app or API and you can choose how to re-implement.

In open source, yes, it seems like a silly thing and hard to prove.


Halt and Catch Fire did a pretty funny rendition of this song and dance


naming something tech related without referencing crabs or lobsters challenge [impossible difficulty]


the plurality of this website are californians so this whole discourse is about as predictable as can be


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