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Now look at what has happened to demand for silver for photovoltaic cells.

That was sarcasm, right?

"But think of the children" has always been the go-to excuse for tossing freedom out the window.

While I agree with this, I also find that the "but think of the children" ironic retort also usually ignores the very real problems that technology can cause children (and society at large). In this issue in particular, if banning social media for children makes it less likely for adults to use it, I see it as pretty much a win-win.

Would you also want the government to ban junk food and recreational drugs? What about unprotected premarital sex?

I'd much rather live in a society with personal freedoms than a "healthier" one with government mandates on personal behavior.


Literally every society mandates tons of restrictions for children, because we understand that children aren't yet developed enough to be able to understand the full consequences of personal freedoms.

I agree that children need restrictions, but that's the role of their parents, not the government.

Should it also be the Role of parents to prevent their children from being kidnapped by crime syndicates? Maybe we should also abolish schools because it should be the parent's role to educate their children.

This individualistic line of thinking is downright insane. It's preposterous. We live in a fucking society, no one can do anything on their own. For God's sake parent's shouldn't be expected to fight alone against MULTI-FUCKING TRILLION CORPORATIONS.

Fat load of help all that anti-regulation talk did when the current US Gov can just get all the data it wants from those megacorps.

Yeah let's also abolish laws preventing sale of tobacco and alcohol to children. This will surely lead to a prosperous national.

No wonder the US is collapsing as we speak.


> No wonder the US is collapsing as we speak.

If you look at the longterm trend in government intrusion into our personal lives, you'll see it's largely increasing, so if anything, the cause of any "collapse" would be the opposite of what you're purporting.


Children are the survival of the species our DNA wires us to to protect them.

That's why people need to be especially careful when others try to use such effective methods of manipulation.

So in this case, do we just stop thinking about the children in totality?

In the context of government legislation on personal behavior, yes.

Parents should be the ones setting up rules for their children.


If manipulative algorithm are the problem, then perhaps we should consider regulations that would protect everyone.

Exactly. The problem is no one wants to address that maybe some of these business models just need to go extinct.

Like maybe ad supported infinite feeds can't be done in a socially responsible way and just need to be banned. If that takes down or substantially limits certain web service sizes...so be it.


James is a prolific writer of book reviews. I find his reviews interesting and valuable.

https://jamesdavisnicoll.com/


> In addition to his influence as a first reader for the Science Fiction Book Club, a book reviewer for Bookspan, Publishers Weekly and Romantic Times, and a juror for the James Tiptree, Jr. Award,[4] Nicoll often offers ideas and concepts to other writers, primarily through the medium of Usenet.

> Nicoll relates a number of life- and/or limb-threatening accidents that have happened to him, which he has told and retold on various science fiction fandom–related newsgroups. Over the years these stories have also been collected into Cally Soukup's List of Nicoll events.[23]

> Inspired by Nicoll's collection of accidents, as well as his tendency to take in any stray cat that comes knocking, fantasy author Jo Walton wrote him a poem in 2002.[24]

I don't think he is beating the allegations of a guy who just has a Wikipedia article because his friends wrote him one.


An allegation you just made up, right?

Turning and turning in the widening gyre, the falcon cannot hear the falconer.

The critique of calculus as lacking in rigor goes much further back than that. Bishop Berkeley famously argued calculus was no more dependable than theology. It was only with Cauchy and the formalization of analysis in the 19th century that this issue would be put to bed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Analyst

I wonder if the issues that this essay claims came up in Italy persisted in any way. I ask that, because there was later (1885-1935) an infamous breakdown in Italian mathematics (the "Italian School of Algebraic Geometry") due to foundational issues.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_school_of_algebraic_ge...

History doesn't repeat but it sometimes rhymes.


From a contemporary viewpoint, Berkeley seems to have been a bit of an edgelord in his defense of faith: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_the_stone#Origin

(or am I doing him an injustice and he was running with the whole Cartesian Demon thing to see just how far he could take it?)

Mumford (a grand-advisee of Castelnuovo's) on the infamous school: https://ftp.mcs.anl.gov/pub/qed/archive/209


I remember the study of people who live to very old age found that the frequency of such people is most correlated with lack of birth records.

Globally 0.29% of people suffer from schizophrenia (lifetime risk of 1%) so it shouldn't have been surprising Usenet (or, really, any forum system without moderation or some similar kind of control) would experience their presence.

Why wasn't Henry Spencer listed as a Usenet personality (the good kind)?


https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/schizophren...

Schizophrenia affects approximately 23 million people or 1 in 345 people (0.29%) worldwide.

That's a lot of people.


I don't see why it shouldn't be even more automated than that, with LLM ideas tested automatically by differential testing of components against the previous implementation.

EDIT: typo fixed, thx


Defining tests that test for the right things requires an understanding of the problem space, just as writing the code yourself in the first place does. It's a catch-22. Using LLMs in that context would be pointless (unless you're writing short-lived one-off garbage on purpose).

I.e. the parent is speaking in the context of learning, not in the context of producing something that appears to work.


I'm not sure that's true. Bombarding code with huge numbers of randomly generated tests can be highly effective, especially if the tests are curated by examining coverage (and perhaps mutation kills) in the original code.

Right, that method is pretty good at finding unintentional behavior changes in a refactor. It is not very well suited for showing that the program is correct which is probably what your parent meant.

That doesn't seem like the same problem at all. The problem here was reimplementing the program in another language, not doing that while at the same time identifying bugs in it.

Conversion of one program to another while preserving behavior is a problem much dumber programs (like compilers) solve all the time.


I'm assuming you meant to type

> I don't see why it *shouldn't be even more automated

In my particular case, I'm learning so having an LLM write the whole thing for me defeats the point. The LLM is a very patient (and sometimes unreliable) mentor.


Batteries should help a lot with this, effectively increasing the capacity of the transmission lines.

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