Hindsight as they say is 2020 and in early 2020 I bought Nvidia shares as I figured a lot people wouldn't have much to do except play games, sold them in 2022 as I thought there won't be many people upgrading their rigs as things got back to normal and there won't be much demand for graphics cards, made money, could have made more, oh well!
Could/should not every incident after the discovery of the first incident be considered criminal negligence?
What happens when an agent eventually causes material damage to another company, government systems, banking, critical infrastructure etc, surely the source company is guilty of something and if not disclosed or a coverup is attempted is that not conspiracy. From the victims perspective they don't care if the source is OpenAI or Russian hackers.
I wanted to take a look at Boomi.com but couldn't sign up with gmail, turned on email forwarding for a parked domain to get past it. Stupid behaviour if you are trying to sell a product.
As long as there have been forums there have been guys and gals making extremely deep and long deep posts and threads about their projects. Video and YT just make it 100x more accessible.
> Historical texts and recent research suggest an alternative view: that sleep can be naturally segmented into two periods across the 24h cycle – a pattern known as biphasic sleep
There is a lack of historical writings clearly describing segmented sleep as a normal practice over monophasic sleep. If it had been the standard sleep pattern, one would expect abundant evidence for it.
Roger Ekirch’s theory, meanwhile, is based on what one could call a biased interpretation of a hand-picked selection of ambiguous sources.
I wonder how much time zones and seasons impact things. For example, in my city in the winter, it is often dark for 14 straight hours. No average, healthy individual would sleep for that long on a nightly basis. So, even if one slept for 7 hours at sunset, then there would still be 7 hours of darkness remaining upon awakening.
Point being, if one slept for 4-5 hours, wake up for a similar chunk, and slept the same amount again, then that'd be a great way to pass the time one could likely not use to do outdoor labor.
I asked if there's abundant evidence for monophasic sleep in historical writings. Or do we just assume it was monophasic, because there's not much written about sleep either way?
You were asking for historical backing. Sleep is definitely abundantly mentioned in historical writing, while segmented sleep is not. I take the absence of the latter as historical backing.
This is tantamount to saying that the Egyptians from the 18th Dynasty onwards did have horses but no black or white ones because while the historical records concerning warfare did mention horses a lot, nowhere is there a mention of black or white horses. I conclude the ancient Egyptians only had brown horses q.e.d.
I would posit that the null hypothesis should be that uncoerced human sleep patterns and historical sleep patterns are similar to A: modern human sleep patterns, and B: the sleep patterns of a majority of diurnal mammals and especially those primates most closely related to us: namely "one big stretch of sleep while it is dark a majority of the time when not disturbed by external stimuli or illness".
If historical evidence does not do much to disambiguate this from the alternative hypothesis, then the null hypothesis would be the default presumption.
We have evidence that during the medieval period people did take two-sleeps. Whether this is the more "natural" organization is debatable. But it made sense for that time.
But the article discussed here also points in that direction when it mentions the importance of people on the lookout at night. The article also mentions primitive tribes partying all night, so that is yet another direction.
My boy when very young (just months) went thru a phase where in the middle of the night he would suddenly sit bolt upright, swivel his head to scan the room, and then conk out again. This was not caused by noises.
I found this reassuring and slightly amazing, that he is wired to do his part as a nighttime lookout.
Assuming you are not jesting, I am not certain I would qualify that behavior as any indication of being wired for some sort of nighttime patrol duty based on those details alone.
Fascinating. Also, not that you implied this by any means, but I was not trying to say "you are wrong, I'm right." Rather, who knows? Do all behaviors happen for a reason? Idk.
I would also imagine a single block of sleep is relatively new due a host of various factors. Especially when considering untreatable medical conditions, chronic pain, parasites (bed bugs, lice, etc.), lack of comfortable bedding, cohabitation with others, and plenty of other factors all had major impacts.
I'm curious why you think China will decline or be eliminated, I always thought that China was a reliable as a production/trading partner and that they planned for decades ahead with programs like Belt and Road Initiative unlike western politics that only looks as far as the next election. Very open to correction on this though, thinking about it not sure what formed my opinion on this.
China is not a good trading partner at all. They put up barriers for companies entering their market, mandatory China employee in your company, IP theft, they subsidize and flood the market killing competition, most everything they make is lowest quality possible, lots of fraud even within China.
This just reads as sour grapes when countries don't want to deal with bad trades from Western corporations that mostly focus on extracting local populaces while inflicting as much damage to possible toward local labor groups.
Can't really be shocked when nation states enact laws to protect industries + workers.
sour grapes, sure! Are you going to argue any of the items I've listed? "Western corporations that mostly focus on extracting local populaces while inflicting as much damage to possible toward local labor groups." Western corporations didn't inflict anything. They ask for something to be built, pay, and receive goods. Chinese companies agree on payment, hire people, do the work, and deliver. win-win. Where's the inflicting part? Oh wait, Chinese companies choose to burn coal, dump chemicals, harsh labor, etc but you blame Western corporations. So Western corporations wrote in the contract you must burn coal, you must pay works $1 per day, no bathroom breaks? In fact, I doubt Western corporations deal with local labor groups at all.
You know why China has money now? Because of Western corporations. But fine, you don't want Western corporations, kick them all out. Right now!
It’s foolish to be completely dependent on anyone else, no matter how stable the CURRENT situation is. We’ve seen this with the gulf countries and Strait of Hormuz, China with rare earth metals, Ukraine with grains, etc. Once China goes to take Taiwan all bets are off…
Your example are somewhat funny (in a not-so-funny way), the most obvious example for "foolish to be completely dependent on anyone else, no matter how stable the CURRENT situation is" is the US, from a european perspective
If US educational policy says don’t educate the people because we have H1B, then that’s a total dependence and is foolish. If instead, you welcome smart talented people from all around the world then that’s a winning strategy. It’s up to those host countries to offer more so as to avoid a brain drain.
If demographics are a problem for chipmaking in China, then it's good to compare against key chipmaking countries.
To compare, 2024 (UN) fertility rates (highest-lowest):[1]
US: 1.62
Japan: 1.23
China: 1.02
ROC: 0.86
ROK: 0.75 (where an increase to 0.8 in 2025 was cause for celebration, as is a predicted increase to 0.85 by mid 2026)[2]
Alternatively (and perhaps accounting for migration etc), UN 2024 forecasts population differences in these countries between 2024-2050 as:[3]
Chipmaking is not a high labor industry (other than during the building of plants).
China's one big advantage over other work forces is massive amounts of labor that can be directed by central planning. As their labor costs have gone up, labor intensive manufacturing has already started shifting away. When population declines cause labor costs to go even higher, they lose their advantage.
Note that the (total) fertility rate normalizes away the population age distribution, and is often misleading. It does not tell you the actual increase/decrease in population. The US age pyramid is slightly more favorable than the Chinese one, and in particular China is about to face huge societal headwinds due to a large number of old people compared to young working age people.
The Belt and Road initiative is a nice try, but it's not a roaring success. The flaws of democracies are easy to see because of the openness, and whatever goes wrong usually do so over a long time. Dictatorships go wrong in more dramatic ways.
I think it's also worth noting that China today is not China from twenty years ago. The communist party ran the country but there was some form of "internal quasi democracy" and leadership changes happened, with term limits.
This changed under Xi Jinping and no one knows what the effects will be.
China will neither decline nor be eliminated, but there will be hardships from now on and - it would be very bad to have any kind of key reliance on them.
China threatened to pull rare earths from the menu which is how they beat Trump in the trade war, among other things which were not going to be sustainable aka farm stuff.
They want to take Taiwan eventually and that will cause potential confrontation.
So the key to China is that it just can't be a lynchpin for anything.
Major trading partner - yes.
Key partner for anything - no.
The US is already a material player in Chips, outside of Trump's 'knee jerk' and reactionary instinct based on 1980's geopolitics and stupid understanding of trade (aka 'importing = getting ripped off', or 'other people doing similar things = stealing from us') ... it does make sense to have material domestic capabilities.
The only place that can be more or less trusted to not play hard shenanigans is Europe. They will do their own regulatory things, and play rough with exports, but they would not threaten something hard.
Europe has underplayed the value of ASML etc..
China has also flipped from 'Quiet and Bide Time' to the opposite, and are not a nice geoplitical actor in their direct environs like S. China sea, although are relatively 'neutral' on most other things.
Best thing is to a) have 'reliable domestic capability' b) learn to build stuff, if not labour intensive ways c) don't depend on sketchy places for key things d) moslty carrots, have a big stick when needed.
China will never 'play fair' in terms of what we would consider 'fair' - they have their own views of everything - that's fine - but it just means has to be manaaged.
Also China should not have any access to data or popular social media / entertainment etc. TikTok must be locally managed, and strong data sovereignty rules also apply.
More of a 'good fences make good neighbours' think with them.
See former Aussie PM Rudd on 'Strategic Guardrails' - he has a good understanding.
Maybe we do care about truth, freedom and privacy but the majority of rest of society will happily accept any T&Cs just to get access to whatever the next digital sliced pan is and as for truth and accountability, if they were two sides of the same coin on the ground people wouldn't bend down to pick it up as possesing it looks too much like responsibility and inconvenience.
Social media isn’t always about consuming content. It’s also about getting jolts of momentary joy and reward. You get those in two ways: seeing cool things, and participating in cool things. Especially cool things before they go viral. Clicking like on a post that isn’t viral yet, and gambling to yourself whether it will go viral, has the same dopamine flux when it pays off as winning at the slots. Even my reward-defective brain manages to eke out a moment of reward from that. So if you simply remove the content, what’s left is the gambling market. Gambling on something you upvote going viral isn’t about how much content there is in what you placed your bets on, it’s about being able to have that special knowing look when someone tells you about it because you’ve just won the socio-memetic lottery. And AI isn’t doing anything whatsoever to stop that reward loop.
I proposed once a while back that we should have the HN admins strip all integer counts for a week server-side, to see if the site quality improved or worsened during that time. The mods suggested I ask HN, so I did. HN loathed the idea of it, for every possible reason except this one: removing all those integers would be like quitting gambling cold turkey after years of pulling the vote lever every day. I’m not much less vulnerable to this than everyone else, but I still want to see it happen someday. I remain reasonably confident that our social media site’s quality would skyrocket after a couple days of our posts and comments being disinfected of make-integer-go-up jackpots.
I find this idea of getting in early interesting, because it is completely novel to me. Is it common for people to derive so much pleasure from voting for something before it gathers momentum? You really lean into this idea, likening it to winning a jackpot, so I assume it is at least somewhat widespread.
By stopping integer counts do you mean not collecting upvotes and downvotes at all or just not displaying them?
If it is the later, I think it can be an interesting experiment, although I doubt it matters that much because you can still gauge the "engagement" based on how your posts rank. But there is absolutely no way HN could work if posts and submissions stop being sorted based on their votes. Community moderation via voting is what allows HN to remain functional despite having only two moderators. If votes stopped mattering for a week then HN will likely be flooded with spam by day two and the experiment will be halted by day three.
Just not transmitting the numbers to clients. I’m aware that a dedicated actor could try to infer their effects through study, code, etc., but I’m interested in the effect on the majority of people rather than those adamantly intent on counting their numbers.
Voting combined with voting on the votes/voters worked quite well in the olde days of yore when Slashdot used such a system. You did not 'vote up' or 'vote down', instead you voted things like 'insightful' or 'overrated'. Some of those categories caused the vote count to go up, others caused it to go down. Users decided for themselves whether they wanted to see all posts or only those above a given threshold. Then there was the meta-moderation system wher a rotating cadre of users could flag abusive votes. If a user got too many sch flags he lost his voting rights. This latter system would be good to have here as well given that I've seen a lot of abuse of the down-vote button where all recent posts for a user who has voiced an opinion outside of some desired narrative get voted down no matter their subject. Such abuse would be caught if there were a meta-moderation system in place. It would help reduce the group-think which is seen on sites like HN and Reddit.
A similar voting system is - or was - in place on lobste.rs where a reason for voting down needs to be given. It does - or did - not have meta-moderation though which takes away the possibility to get rid of vote-abusers.
Is moderation truly accomplished via votes, though, as opposed to flagging?
You say "spam", but unpopular comments are rarely promotional. They lack any one unifying quality. They might be naive, and/or they might be difficult.
Flagging doesn’t report any numbers to clients, so any potential changes to it are out of scope re: my client-accessible integers concerns. There was a big thread about the flagging system in the AI rule-change post a few weeks ago that may be of more interest to you along those lines, though!
There's the classic "I wish facebook had a dislike button" or the equivalent for twitter.
But in the thread-based forum context, removing the downvote has interesting effects. For one, it stops people who down-vote-brigade to lower visibility. It also stops the "I don't like that guy" engagement and works on a more positive "I appreciated this comment" mode.
It's not one-size fits all but I've seen positive effects on more marginalized forums.
The content being untrustworthy doesn't matter when it comes to social media, as most of what is enticing about social media nowadays isn't the content of the content. It's the fact that there is a never-ending stream of content specifically catered to maximize your dopamine to keep you scrolling.
So much of social media nowadays is just low quality clips of TV shows/movies with an AI-generated song over them. Or the same Minecraft parkour map as an AI voice recites an r/AmITheAsshole post. Or AI-generated funny videos. The quality of the content doesn't matter at all.
Anyone I've talked to about how it was all just AI just responds with something akin to "I don't care if it's AI, it's funny! Let people enjoy things!"
That creates a market for lemons. This is not a good thing. People who create good, valuable things cannot distinguish themselves in such a market, so they exit it. The good creators hurt the most.
Like it or not, there is a lot of value in public discourse, and we lose all that value if we drown it in noise.
I used to work for a large financial services company who bought 4 storey office block and fitted it out with very small but with own door individual offices that had internet and a connected desk phone so that companies could rent them and say they had more than a box office address in that European capital, I never found out what the rent was.
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