One of my earliest jobs in tech required driving southward into Sunnyvale for a 5AM shift. Seeing Hale-Bopp each morning for weeks on that commute was amazing. All of the images I can find fail to capture the visible confirmation that we're all on a rock floating in a vast universe with myriad amazing things nearby.
Readit Newsbabymetal commented on A Suicide Cult's Surviving Members Still Maintain Its 90s Website (2016) vice.com/en/article/a-sui... · Posted by u/jameslk
Damn. I'm visiting my sister in Birmingham next week. It's a big city with a lot of history (industrial revolution, modern geology), and a lot of pride in ordinary people doing their best. RIP Ozzy.
babymetal commented on Solar power has begun to transform the world’s energy system newyorker.com/news/annals... · Posted by u/dmazin
> Solar power is now growing faster than any power source in history, and it is closely followed by wind power—which is really another form of energy from the sun, since it is differential heating of the earth that produces the wind that turns the turbines.
It's interesting to realize that the vast majority of the energy used by humans comes from the sun (with the exception of nuclear and geothermal energy). Even hydro power comes from the sun, because the sun evaporates the water which then becomes part of rivers or other water reservoirs that power hydroelectric generators.
I clicked to the comments to see how far down this observation would appear. It was my first thought, although I can understand why the more energetic discussion is around human-centered energy collection and management.
babymetal commented on I don't think AGI is right around the corner dwarkesh.com/p/timelines-... · Posted by u/mooreds
I've been confused with the AI discourse for a few years, because it seems to make assertions with strong philosophical implications for the relatively recent (Western) philosophical conversation around personal identity and consciousness.
I no longer think that this is really about what we immediately observe as our individual intellectual existence, and I don't want to criticize whatever it is these folks are talking about.
But FWIW, and in that vein, if we're really talking about artificial intelligence, i.e. "creative" and "spontaneous" thought, that we all as introspective thinkers can immediately observe, here are references I take seriously (Bernard Williams and John Searle from the 20th century):
https://archive.org/details/problemsofselfph0000will/page/n7...
https://archive.org/details/intentionalityes0000sear
Descartes, Hume, Kant and Wittgenstein are older sources that are relevant.
[edit] Clarified that Williams and Searle are 20th century.
babymetal commented on The force-feeding of AI features on an unwilling public honest-broker.com/p/the-f... · Posted by u/imartin2k
Is it specific to AI or have they made other bad UI choices over the years?
Very recently their "advanced search" page was redone with a totally different and slightly more modern styling (prior to addition of the chat expert overlaid in the corner). The rest of Ingram's ordering site is still the same as five years ago and is clearly older than that.
That's objective; subjectively, it feels like there are individuals who were given the ability to "try new stuff" and "break things" who chose to follow the hype around features that look like this. The chat button seems to me to be an exercise in following-the-herd which actually sucks for me as a user with it blocking my old buttons.
babymetal commented on The force-feeding of AI features on an unwilling public honest-broker.com/p/the-f... · Posted by u/imartin2k
It’s not spot on. Buying and using all of these products is a choice.
The last is especially egregious. I don’t want poorly-written (by my standards) books cluttering up bookstores, but all my life I’ve walked into bookstores and found my favorite genres have lots of books I’m not interested in. Do I have some kind of right to have stores only stock products that I want?
The whole thing is just so damn entitled. If you don’t like something, don’t buy it. If you find the presence of some products offensive in a marketplace, don’t shop there. Spotify is not a human right.
I'm a bookseller who often uses Ingram to buy books wholesale when I'm not buying direct from publishers. I've used them for their distribution service since opening 5 years ago because they are the only folks in town who can help bootstrap a very small business with coverage of all the major publishers (in the U.S.). They're great at that, for a small cut in revenue.
Six-plus months ago they put a chatbot in the bottom right corner of their website that literally covers up buttons I use all the time for ordering, so that I have to scroll now in order to access those controls (Chrome, MacOS). After testing it with various queries it only seems to provide answers to questions in their pre-existing support documentation.
This is not about choice (see above, they are the only game in town), and it is not about entitlement (we're a tiny shop trying to serve our customers' often obscure book requests). They seemed to literally place the chatbot buttons onto their website with no polling of their users. This is an anecdotal report about Ingram specifically.
babymetal commented on RFK's proposal to let bird flu spread through poultry livescience.com/health/fl... · Posted by u/anjel
In the spirit of HN I will only point out here this fact: RFK Jr's attack book on Fauci was extremely poorly produced. Specifically, the text rolled up to the top and bottom edges of the pages as well as the sides. As a bookseller this was a big red flag for me: either the book was poorly self-published, or no-one big (and sometimes reputable) wanted to publish it, and it looked like they were trying to save paper and ink. Also, it has an inordinate amount of footnotes which makes it very difficult to imagine a person following them all. I didn't read the book. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/58063409-the-real-anthon... 4.49/5.0 on Goodreads with 8.5K reviews.
[edit]: misspelled "imagine"
These comments are creating exactly the feeling that troubled me about in-person engineering meetings and I still can't quite express it. It's like we all know we don't want to discuss this topic and can't help but do so. I get the same feeling whenever I see a bot introduce itself and then someone immediately replies "read stop". It's pretty close to a mixture of regret and disappointment.
babymetal commented on Add "fucking" to your Google searches to neutralize AI summaries gizmodo.com/add-fcking-to... · Posted by u/jsheard
You can also append `&udm=14` to the end of your search url and the AI summary will go away.
If someone hasn't already made a userscript to do this automatically, someone should, it would be very easy.
Thank you. Showing tidbits like this from HN to my kids has seemed to help guide them to be be more curious and creative in how they use the internet, instead of treating it like a magical black box.
babymetal commented on A Second Search for Bash Scripting Alternatives monzool.net/blog/2024/07/... · Posted by u/thunderbong