There was this project idea that some researchers at Langley developed in the mid-2010s called HAVOC (High Altitude Venus Operational Concept) [0] for a 5-stage mission to send humans to Venus's habitable-ish cloud layers. It never really got anywhere, but there was apparently some media attention around it for some time.
Because the nitrox atmosphere we're used to is a lifting gas in the Venusian atmosphere, you could theoretically just fill a big balloon with our atmosphere and live inside it, with lots of Teflon on the outside and suits made of Teflon to work outside the habitat. I also (kind of?) remember reading about using metal nets to capture and condense H2SO4 from the clouds and process it into water, oxygen, and hydrolox rocket fuel.
Just a guess, but maybe it's reporting bias? Negative or evil actions might have more impetus to be understood by others than positive actions. I'd rather try and figure out why my friend suddenly started murdering the neighbours than why he's been getting his work done on time.
The same social deduction genre, but the possible game states and the permutations of possible interactions are so massive that it stays interesting even when playing with the same group for years. It rewards both good calculation and good social reading skills, along with good bluffing of course.
Interesting. Could you give some examples as to how? I want to see how well this could work out in my friend circle, who seem to be getting bored after years of mafia-ing.
Out of curiosity, has anyone noticed a non-negligible presence of bots in threads on HN? I haven't, but I'm not sure if that's because I'm bad at spotting them or because HN is good at getting rid of them or because HN is a niche platform.
Yes, they’re very identifiable. New or resurrected account makes multi-paragraph comments on random topics with “insights” that read like AI, even if they don’t have em-dashes or “it’s not X it’s Y” (and sometimes they do).
Fortunately and in fairness to this site, they’ve become rarer, and most seem to be flagged within hours. Usually I look at the comments to confirm, and most are already dead.
I made a post here a bit ago where one of the few replies I got was one of these conversational ad-bots, albeit on the more obvious side. It was getting flagged which gives me hope that HN is good at filtering it, but I also mildly worry I'm (or we're) just missing it when it's subtle. I do suspect it's a huge volume in terms of comment count either way though.
I have suspicions but there's fewer signals on HN available to the general public so it's harder to tell.
Well... to be more precise... I'm abundantly positive there are bots and shills here in a general sense. But when it comes to identifying specific accounts as bots or shills, it gets difficult. Yeah, a lot of us have gotten pretty good at identifying the "default LLM voice", but it is trivial to kick it out of that.
I have done some formal writing with AI, and I always feed it a sample of my own writing to emulate. It doesn't do it perfectly. For instance, I'm a semi-colon kind of guy and it still em-dashes without more explicitly instructions to avoid them. But what comes out the other end would definitely pass most people's "default LLM voice" sniff test; it eliminates most of the tells [1] people look for. (I just checked. The resulting output may actually be "better" at avoiding the tells than my own actual text...)
The upshot of all of that is that we are approaching a point with the current AIs that with just a bit of clever prompting it may take many, many kilobytes of text for someone to form a justified (!) opinion that some set of posts is actually AI.
That feels more like a reflection of how terrible most GM cars are than about the inflated valuation of Cursor, which is what I infer you were trying to imply.
I was in Lesotho, a small country completely surrounded by South Africa (when the White farmers were expanding and taking all the Africans' farmland, they left Lesotho because it was all mountains, but with no minerals).
I don't think that's representative of most non-CS professionals. Most people in the fields I know (mostly professors, medical doctors, and businesspeople) can use google chrome, word, powerpoint, and a little of excel decently. There are the occasional few who confuse spreadsheets and databases, but no one who thinks shutting down computers or closing windows is hard. Heck, my ageing dad managed to troubleshoot his printer without any help, and he has no formal computer experience whatsoever.
HN has a long history of patronising the "average user" in the guise of paternal figures who don't realise that what they are doing is belittling the vast majority of tech users. I'm guilty of it myself. But they're capable of a lot more than we think they are.
Ultimately, it comes down to the willingness people have to learn new things. If they're curious enough to think about how things work, they'll be fine.
I'm not doing this to be patronising, more like telling people or myself that assumptions i make, are just not necessarily true for everyone.
And weirdly enough, a Task like sorting a file with data in it, if you are not a professional, windows offers very if not non single way of doing this. You would need to understand file types, understand that csv can be imported for excel, you need excel, than you need to understand excel how to sort stuff in it.
The ffirst thing I do in Excel is select the pseudo table and click on table -> insert to make it a sortable / real table. I showed this to every one in my Team full of studied CS people because non of them knew this.
Well, I didn't mean for this to be patronizing, but rather as a warning that not everybody is at the same level and the spread is huge. I see it often enough.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_super-rotation
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