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Red_Comet_88 commented on Roald Dahl on the death of his daughter (2015)   telegraph.co.uk/books/aut... · Posted by u/areoform
Red_Comet_88 · 6 months ago
I am thankful that there are some challenges that providence has deemed fit to deny me.
Red_Comet_88 commented on Age and cognitive skills: Use it or lose it   science.org/doi/full/10.1... · Posted by u/nabla9
bluGill · 6 months ago
Only if you get a rest of your life. While most do I've known more that one person who didn't make it to 40. Worse those that do all srart reporting their body is starting to fail. If you have not done some things by 40 it may be too late to ever do them.
Red_Comet_88 · 6 months ago
Won't expound on my life story, but this is massively overlooked. You can't just prioritize money without taking into account the massive sacrifices it will require in your life. I spent a long, long time becoming successful in careers that I hated, only to burn out and do the career I knew I wanted to do since I was old enough to think and remember. Except now I have wasted decades of my life that I will never get back.

The majority of your life is spent working so you absolutely MUST find it fulfilling or you will burn out (at best) or destroy your body and mind as a sacrifice to the insatiable Mammon.

Red_Comet_88 commented on Lobsters blocking UK users because of the Online Safety Act   lobste.rs/s/ukosa1/uk_use... · Posted by u/ColinWright
Red_Comet_88 · 6 months ago
They also block Brave browsers entirely. I tried reading into it, but it appears to be one of those "programmer personality quirks". The fellow that runs the site appears to think Brave is a scam of some sort, and just decided to block the entire browser.

Oh well, I'll stick to HN.

Red_Comet_88 commented on The Generative AI Con   wheresyoured.at/longcon/... · Posted by u/nimbleplum40
mitthrowaway2 · 6 months ago
LLMs are pretty good at the aspects of coding that I consider to be "the fun part". Using them has made me more productive, but also made my job less fun, because I can't justify spending time using my own brain to do "the fun part" on my employer's dime. And that was something I was particularly good at, which is why I was able to be paid well to do it.

So now my company makes more money, and the work gets done faster, but I can't say I feel appreciative. I'm sure it's great for founders though, for whom doing the work is merely an obstacle to having the finished product. For me, the work is the end goal, because I'm not hired to own the result.

Red_Comet_88 · 6 months ago
Bit of a boomer statement here but maybe this will encourage devs such as yourself to contribute more to open source passion projects that will help dethrone the monopolies. Looking at Valve's investment into Linux via Proton as a great example.

It would be so nice to have a productivity Linux OS that just works on all my devices without tinkering. I want to stop supporting the closed source monopolies, but the alternatives aren't up to par yet. I am extremely hopeful that they will be once mega corps inevitably decay and people tire of the boom-bust cycle.

As technologists, we all want beautifully designed tools, and I'm increasingly seeing that these are only created by passionate and talented people who truly care about tech, unlike megacorps that only care about enriching their board and elite shareholders.

Red_Comet_88 commented on The Generative AI Con   wheresyoured.at/longcon/... · Posted by u/nimbleplum40
Red_Comet_88 · 6 months ago
"We are in the midst of a group delusion — a consequence of an economy ruled by people that do not participate in labor of any kind outside of sending and receiving emails and going to lunches that last several hours — where the people with the money do not understand or care about human beings."

Regardless of the hostile tone of the article, this stuck out to me as an incredibly poignant description of the current tech/finance elites' mindset.

As most of us who have tried LLMs can attest, they are indeed stochastic parrots with no capacity for knowledge or understanding. This is best exemplified by their non-deterministic outputs, wherein they give different answers to the same question if asked enough times. This is not how a human brain works. Perhaps it is a small building block, but the systemic architecture required to reach brain level is currently not in sight based on what I'm seeing.

Red_Comet_88 commented on Increasing rat numbers in cities are linked to climate warming, urbanization   science.org/doi/10.1126/s... · Posted by u/rntn
jongjong · 6 months ago
Of course the increase in rat numbers in cities is caused by climate change. As the ice melts due to the seething heat caused by global warming, the melted ice-water from the arctic chills the air throughout the entire planet and so the rats get cold and they have to move closer to the cities to warm up on the hot bitumen. Also, they have to huddle up together to stay warm and thus they breed more.

The heat causes cooling which creates a feedback cycle thus releasing more heat which melts everything which causes yet more cooling. This makes sense. The science is settled. Trust the science.

Red_Comet_88 · 6 months ago
You forgot to add that the majority of climate scientists agree on climate change.

This is important because science, like America, is a democracy. And we know democracy is the best thing ever. Period. Therefore, when groups of people agree on something (DEMOCRACY!!), it becomes an inviolable law of the universe. It wasn't until America became the world's greatest nation (thanks to democracy) that we discovered this natural phenomenon, however.

Red_Comet_88 commented on TSMC 2nm Process Disclosure – How Does It Measure Up?   semiwiki.com/semiconducto... · Posted by u/sroussey
Red_Comet_88 · 7 months ago
Does anyone know why Nvidia chose to re-use the 4N process for their Blackwell series? From everything I've read, 3N is mature and is already in full production, yet Nvidia chose to just reuse 4N. It seems very much unlike Nvidia to leave performance on the table.
Red_Comet_88 commented on Phyllis Fong, who was investigating Neuralink, "forcefully removed "   timesofindia.indiatimes.c... · Posted by u/iancmceachern
roenxi · 7 months ago
It rings a bit hollow when the single most popular president in recent history was Obama. If the US can cope with him what is the problem with women supposed to be? Harris was an unusually weak candidate; the primary system is supposed to shake people like that out and the Democrats were left in a disadvantageous place after bypassing it.

One of the reasons Trump is getting all these historic wins is because the US Democrats refuse point blank to do some introspection and ask if their policy positions are effective. Name-calling and shaming tactics turned out to not be good enough to stop Trump, so there is an interesting question of who they could stop and under what circumstances they could be politically successful.

Red_Comet_88 · 7 months ago
Indeed. If the DNC had allowed Bernie Sanders to run against Trump, Sanders would very likely have beaten him and Trump would have remained a reality TV star. Instead, they pushed Clinton on Democrats just like they pushed Harris this cycle. The corruption within the DNC is very much to blame for Trump.

I refuse to accept the childish assertion that the majority of American voters are card carrying members of a radical political system that was defeated last century. This is just an emotional response to a reality that one does not want to accept.

Red_Comet_88 commented on Phyllis Fong, who was investigating Neuralink, "forcefully removed "   timesofindia.indiatimes.c... · Posted by u/iancmceachern
khazhoux · 7 months ago
The people spoke very clearly in November: they wanted this.
Red_Comet_88 · 7 months ago
Americans are desperate. May not be felt among the HN crowd, but standards of living in the US have been declining consistently for a long time [1]. Remember that Trump was not re-elected to a second term initially specifically because he failed to deliver on his promise of "MAGA". He instead did a Jeb Bush presidency, complete with Wall Street (Mnuchin) and the CIA (Pompeo) running the country exactly as would have occurred had Bush won. So Americans tried Biden, in the hopes of a return to Obama era America. This obviously didn't happen, as standard of living continued to decline. So they tried Trump again, in sheer desperation.

I don't see a positive future for the US, as it is so clearly a declining empire, exhibiting every textbook symptom. The startup/tech crowd loves talking about cheap phones and "services", but the reality is bleak outside of this narrow tech bubble.

1. https://www.oftwominds.com/blogjun24/negativity6-24.html

u/Red_Comet_88

KarmaCake day95January 18, 2025View Original