The good news is that we now have alternative UI's in web/mobile, microkernel-based systems, and unikernels in high-level languages... all in production use.
Readit Newsnickpsecurity commented on The Unix-Haters Handbook (1994) [pdf] simson.net/ref/ugh.pdf... · Posted by u/oliverkwebb
Where did it say "popularity contest" because I overlooked it.
On climate, that has always been a popularity contest or act of dominance. People with specific views and set to make piles of money on soecific solutions gave funding for research that reinforced those views. Eventually, they dominated academic groups with dissenting views not allowed. Whatever results is not a scientifuc consensus since squashing dissenting work isn't science.
Further, people with that posotion started funding mamy documentaries and Hollywood blockbusters to push it on hundreds of millions of people. Liberal media outlets added it to the list of topics they'd repeatedlt emphasize to condition viewers' minds. Schools added it to their curriculums. Eventually, all these people started reoeating it on blogs, etc.
So, instead of an open discussion with grass-roots views, climate change as Progressives see it was always forced on people by elites in academia, philanthropy, Hollywood, and media. It was always a marketing campaign to make that idea win by a popularity contest. If dissent isn't allowed or is mocked, it was never science or very democratic either.
If anything, their numbers being at 60+% with billions spent show their campaign largely worked. I still want to see rigorous, peer review of all the stuff done strictly with observational science and not funded by Progressives. Esoecially exploring all alternative views that got censored. I'm curious what that would show.
Dead Comment
nickpsecurity commented on Americans Are Ignoring Their Student Loan Bills news.bloomberglaw.com/ban... · Posted by u/paulpauper
Oh man as someone who is concerned about the censorship and in favor of religious freedom, I really wish we could have a serious discussion about this, but HN probably isn’t the place. Are the sins you’re referring to mainly centered around sexuality, e.g. homosexuality? What happened to caring about adultery, maliciousness, perjury, faithlessness, boastfulness, arrogance, slander and deceit? Those are all things Trump has done and continues to do. Trump’s “character” happens to cover a pretty big subset of the sins mentioned in Romans 1. I’m very curious why people believe Trump’s claims that he’s on the side of Christians, given how often and how severely he misrepresents the truth in order to serve his own power. It is obviously pandering, and as such is deceitful in the name of religion. Doesn’t that concern you gravely? Doesn’t his selling bibles with his name on it, and with gold and camo covers, do anything for you? To me it seems extremely crass, gross, and disrespectful to God, Christ, and the Bible.
You're talking about one person. All the politicians I've seen are wicked. I said plenty often that they should be replaced with people pf godly character. Until then, working with who is in the race (eg Harris vs Trump), have to vote for nobody by that standard. If voting for policy, we look at policies rather than the politician.
Progressives have been, at an institutional level, censoring the Gospel as hate speech or harassment, mocking God in media, promoting idolatry/universalism, pushing fornication, promoting child murder (abortion) even financially, pushing LGBT even in elementary school, and recently systematic discrimination against entire groups. They also defend Palestine over Israel when they have to pick a side. They also export sexual immorality to other countries via media and political deals which is exactly what Revelation warns about in Rev. 17:2.
The Old Testament shows these same traits... especially idolatry, child murder, and ditching Biblical marriage for perversion... being common threads for the destruction of nations. That Progressives promote these on a policy level, but mock and fight God's design and the Gospel, means we have a clear choice. One party, who is merely pandering, will at least let us share Christ, protect babies from murder, and reverse other damaging trends. Those trends are happening now but didn't under Biden/Harris or Obama.
> Publishing a crawl, or the URL's, under CC-0, CC-by, BSD, or Apache would make them usable without restrictions or any further legal analyses.
This isn't true, and I can't imagine that any lawyer would agree with this statement. CCF does not have rights ownership of any of the bytes of our crawl, so we cannot grant you any rights for the bytes in our crawl. Nothing that we could say could have any relationship to this legal issue.
It's confusing to me that you say this. Your own organization claims in the Terms of Service that it has rights over the crawls, even restricting how they are used. Now, you are telling me you believe you have none or no lawyer would consider this. If so, why is "Crawled Content" and restrictions on its use in your terms of service?
Very simply, if what you say is true, then you need to change your Terms to reflect that. You have two options:
1. Take crawled content out of the Terms of Service. Put a permissive license on the crawls.
2. Modify your Terms to say "crawled content" can be used for any purpose and distributed free with no restrictions. You currently impose extra restrictions, though.
That's contract law maybe with copyright elements in it. Yet, you also appear to believe your crawls aren't copyrightable. That's a huge unknown because collections are copyrightable when sufficient creativity is put into them:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_in_compilation
Many collections claim a copyright or have a permissive license for this reason. Again, simply saying your crawls and URL databases are permissively licensed would solve that problem. It takes just one edit on a few, web pages.
If crawls and DB's are truly without restrictions, please put a permissive license on their respective pages. Also, please change your terms to put no restrictions on Crawled Content. Instead, it should say something like it's free to use and distribute with no warranty or liability on you. The usual stuff.
I'll emphasize again that a permissively-licensed list of all URL's you've crawled is one of the most valuable changes you could make.
nickpsecurity commented on Americans Are Ignoring Their Student Loan Bills news.bloomberglaw.com/ban... · Posted by u/paulpauper
Trump's character is not what a person following Christ should be. Just his remark that "they let you do anything" to women when you're rich and famous should be evidence of that, let alone the personality cult around him that he built, and the hundreds or thousands of things he's said since 2016.
I agree on character. His policies lined up more with what we needed, though. While, the Democrats actively censor Christ, the Bible, and people sharing the Gospel ("hate speech" or "harassment") while promoting sins in Romans 1 as public policy and in education. The sins they promote are the same ones that keep showing up in the Old Testament before God destroys that nation.
We wanted God, ability to share Christ, the Word, and less sins that get nations destroyed. We got that. We saw both politicians and people on the news praise Jesus for the first time in a long tine. We also saw companies, like Meta, reversing censorship policies they used against Christians and conservarives. That affects me since I lost accounts in big communities just for mentioning Jesus or God's Word.
nickpsecurity commented on Derivatives, Gradients, Jacobians and Hessians blog.demofox.org/2025/08/... · Posted by u/ibobev
"What I just described is an iterative optimization method that is similar to gradient descent. Gradient descent simulates a ball rolling down hill to find the lowest point that we can, adjusting step size, and even adding momentum to try and not get stuck in places that are not the true minimum."
That is so much easier to understand than most descriptions. The whole opening was.
nickpsecurity commented on Americans Are Ignoring Their Student Loan Bills news.bloomberglaw.com/ban... · Posted by u/paulpauper
Voters have basically no power, and very little incentive to even bother voting wisely. There is abundant evidence that your vote does not matter, and to pretend otherwise is fantasy.
Those of us who voted for the current President have seen him do so much of what he told us he would with so much progress. Even his opponents claim he's done dozens to fifty things in office that they wish didn't happen. Even they agree he's getting a lot done. So, he's proof that our vote counted.
I'd rather have a person following Christ with godly character. That plus not taking a bribe and having skill at leading are the Bible's standard for picking rulers. Americans filter them for these rich, elitist egomaniacs. Then, we have to pick the lesser evil on policy grounds until that stops. God works even through the wicked to bless us in some ways, though. That's the bright side.
nickpsecurity commented on Americans Are Ignoring Their Student Loan Bills news.bloomberglaw.com/ban... · Posted by u/paulpauper
Of course they're not paying their student debt. When the federal government of the moment is using student loan forgiveness to try bribe reelection votes, it sends a pretty strong signal that this shit is frivolous.
As a taxpayer who has never taken on loans of any kind, I find this all quite irritating. You take on debt, you pay the debt, don't turn my tax dollars into your negligence subsidy.
We were forced to go to school under penalty of law. We were told our whole time that you have to go to college to get a good job. Employers often demanded Bachelor's degrees to get hired at all. If not, "you'll be flipping burgers" was a common warning.
The people requiring us to go to college usually wouodn't pay for it. The colleges got more expensive. So, if it's required or really helps, it was rational to take on college loans to get a Bachelor's in good specializations. Many of us did IT or Business. (I did both.)
Once out of college, people looking for jobs found that most companies woukdnt hire them for lack of experience. If they did, they would pay them a little above minimum wage. That would either not cover the bills or barely cover them. The minimums on the loans were high, too.
At this point, people with Business degrees are working in grocery stores making nothing but loaded with debt. They realize they were screwed by the whole system in what amounted to a long-term con about the ROI of a college degree. They feel that, if they got nothing for it, they shouldn't have to repay it at all or at least get a break on payments. They're paying less on the debts to experience some of the quality of life they were promised if they spent 4 years on a degree.
That's what happened to a large number of hard-working people whose expensive degrees got them nothing but poverty and debt. They're barely scraping by now. They wish they ignored all the advice in school and never got one. Or maybe got the cheapest one they could find instead of really investing into a worthless asset.
And the best part is we all get to read descriptions of us online that we were just irresponsible, lazy idiots. No mention of years of being forced by schools and businesses to get this debt to have a decent job. No mention that they often don't pay people with degrees anything. Something seems wrong about that.
nickpsecurity commented on Dispelling misconceptions about RLHF aerial-toothpaste-34a.not... · Posted by u/fpgaminer
>The feedback loop needs to produce useful results. And Genie 3 can still hallucinate or produce implausible responses
The solution to this is giving the model a physical body and actually letting it interact with the real world and learn from it. But no lab dares to try this because allowing a model to learn from experience would mean allowing it to potentially change its views/alignment.
Labs have been doing that since Brooks' Subsumption Architecture decades ago. The problem with AI now is that the architectural design, unlike the brain, doesn't have grounded memory and hallucination mitigation. Letting those architectures walk around in the real world would show similar flaws.
Multiple teams already baked memory into designs, some like typical ML and some biologically inspired. Hallucination mitigation needs a ton more research. My proposal was studying the part of the brain that causes hallucinations when damaged in case it's designed to mitigate them. Then, imitate it until we have something better.