Religion +
State =
Violence
Readit Newssirspacey commented on Monks Behaving Badly: Explaining Buddhist Violence in Asia direct.mit.edu/isec/artic... · Posted by u/paulpauper
> UPE varied depending on exposure to stress factors like temperature changes, injury and chemical treatments
I haven’t read the study but I studied remote sensing in undergrad and one thing we worked on was how to detect the stress of an agricultural crop from multispectral satellite data. You can quite clearly detect how plants are handling temperature, pest damage, drought conditions, largely based on their near- and middle-infrared responses. On the surface this sounds a lot like that, which I think is neat.
I would watch that YT video and share it with everyone I knew. That it cool.
I could imagine, maybe, that if tariffs were 100% here to stay, that then, after some period of pain, lasting a few years, investors would have built replacement infrastructure domestically. (The word 'maybe' is doing a lot of work here, but let's roll with it, for the sake of argument.)
But this administration is already using tariffs as a negotiating tool, a cudgel. "If country X does Y, maybe the administration will cut them a break."
That means, as an investor, there is simply no certainty that makes it safe enough to invest in domestic US infrastructure. What if I build a factory and then the tariff evaporates?
There wouldn’t be any safety for that anyway.
A tariff as a negotiating tactic wouldn’t be worth much if it was known to be temporary.
sirspacey commented on The slow collapse of critical thinking in OSINT due to AI dutchosintguy.com/post/th... · Posted by u/walterbell
> Participants weren’t lazy. They were experienced professionals.
Assuming these professionals were great critical thinkers until the AI came along and changed that is a big stretch.
In my experience, the people who outsource their thinking to LLMs are the same people who outsourced their thinking to podcasts, news articles, Reddit posts, Twitter rants, TikTok videos, and other such sources. LLMs just came along and offered them opinions on demand that they could confidently repeat.
> The scary part is that many users still believed they were thinking critically, because GenAI made them feel smart
I don’t see much difference between this and someone who devours TikTok videos on a subject until they feel like an expert. Same pattern, different sources. The people who outsource their thinking and collect opinions they want to hear just have an easier way to skip straight to the conclusions they want now.
I’ll be one to raise my hand and say this has been dramatically not the case for anyone I’ve introduced AI to or myself.
Significantly more informed and reasoned.
The obvious methodology at work here is 'fire everyone then hopefully re-hire only what is blindingly obviously needed'. There are many, many problems with this approach in a business setting but even more from a governmental setting. The first, and what should be obvious to anyone with an ounce of empathy, is that these are real people who's lives are being toyed with. It isn't like you are trying out a new business process. You are literally playing with entire lives here as if they are disposable things. This alone makes what is happening inhumane. Even if it did make things more 'efficient' I would rather a humane government than whatever efficient government they are aiming for here. The second incredibly obvious reason why this is wrong is because this isn't a business. Money isn't the point. Let me repeat this one more time. Money is not the point of a government. I can't understand any argument about government efficiency that only looks at money. It is about total benefit to society, period. If you hire someone that is 'breakeven' in what they produce vs consume from a pure production point of view you could argue that for a business they should go, but from a government point of view you have employed someone and that person is churning the rest of the economy and society has one less drain. In other words all of society is way better off with that breakeven, or even net negative, person employed in government. In other words, an efficient government actually can have what would be considered waste in a corporate world and that is not only OK, but the right answer. I know of several people that are 'employed' but net negatives and society is way better off with that arrangement than having them on the streets. Is there a place for money/efficiency discussions in government? Sure, but if it is the only thing you look at then you really need to re-think things. There are many, many other ways this is morally and economically wrong but those are my top two.
If you haven’t worked in the federal government, this is an unserious take.
Experience and context matters. Especially this one.
sirspacey commented on Startup Winter: Hacker News Lost Its Faith vincentschmalbach.com/sta... · Posted by u/vincent_s
What changed is the audience
Founders are in private group chats now
Man I miss it being real here instead of Reddit Jr
Grateful for those of you who still hang out
A couple other comments touch on the point I want to make, but I feel they don't nail it hard enough: if today you told me you had a website that was 100% technologically identical to Amazon, but you were willing to make slightly less money, you'd still have no products... as a user I'd have no reason to go there, but then without users there is no reason to sell there, so you have a circular bootstrapping issue. That is a moat.
This is very different from OpenAI: if you show me a product that works just as well as ChatGPT but costs less--or which costs the same but works a bit better--I would use it immediately. Hell: people on this website routinely talk about using multiple such services and debate which one is better for various purposes. They kind of want to try to make a moat out of their tools feature, but that is off the path of how most users use the product, and so isn't a useful defense yet.
That’s how it is today, but that was also the case at the birth of e-commerce. Amazon was a large eCom store but many others were successful and switching for price was common. Not so much anymore.
Defaults are powerful over time.
sirspacey commented on Why OpenAI's Structure Must Evolve to Advance Our Mission openai.com/index/why-our-... · Posted by u/meetpateltech
I don't understand why they are spending so much time and effort trying to put a positive spin on this whole for-profit thing. No one is buying it. We all know what's going on. Just say "we want to make lots of money" and move on with your lives.
Because that is not their motivation and no amount of spin casting changes it.
There’s a simple counter-factual for people with this level of ability:
“Making money” can be easily pursued at BlackRock or any number of PE firms.
Creating historic technology, of unknown difficulty and scale of impact, is not something pure capitalism can or is designed to deliver. What would investors or customers buy at the start of OpenAI?
While OpenAI may end up a corporation like any other, it would not have achieved what it had as one.
sirspacey commented on Boeing plea deal over fatal 737 MAX crashes rejected by judge bloomberg.com/news/articl... · Posted by u/impish9208
Here's the path:
1. Imprison executives who made the decisions that led to the result. Preferably in a way that makes them spend their fortunes on legal costs so that when they get out in 20-30 years, they're dependent on social safety nets for the rest of their natural lives. People are dead because they thought that possibility of profit was worth the risk of hundreds of deaths. That's negligent homicide.
2. There is no 2.
Then we should also jail the shareholders who profited and the activist shareholders who pushed for it
CEOs, especially of large companies, are glorified management
To be clear: they deliver the HIV TAT protein which activates latent cells to transcribe HIV (ultimately possibly producing viable HIV virions).
Activating-to-kill has been pursued with other agents, but none have proven effective at depleting the reservoir. (The latent reservoir requires HIV anti-retroviral therapy to be lifelong, making one of the top three most expensive diseases in the US).
This may be more of a proof for the method, of encapsulating a fragile mRNA in a protective lipid layer, but one which will be incorporated into cells. I'd expect it to be used outside attempts to cure HIV (having consumed some HIV funding).