- Granvelle
"I have heard that tomorrow they are to execute the two prisoners, the accomplices of him who shot me. For my part, I most willingly pardon them."
- William of Nassau
- I think it may be all summed up by Roy Amara's observation that "We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run."
- Just an innocent bystander here, so forgive me, but I think the flack you are getting is because you appear to be responding to claims that these tools will reinvent everything and introduce a new halcyon age of creation - when, at least on hacker news, and definitely in this thread, no one is really making such claims.
Put another way, and I hate to throw in the now over-used phrase, but I feel you may be responding to a strawman that doesn't much appear in the article or the discussion here: "Because these tools don't achieve a god-like level of novel perfection that no one is really promising here, I dismiss all this sorta crap."
Especially when I think you are also admitting that the technology is a fairly useful tool on its own merits - a stance which I believe represents the bulk of the feelings that supporters of the tech here on HN are describing.
I apologize if you feel I am putting unrepresentative words in your mouth, but this is the reading I am taking away from your comments.
- This is why I don't by alcohol online for delivery: the delivery person is required by their company to scan my ID. Places I order from already know enough about me - they don't also need a copy of my identification.
- They certainly have those for radars! Although the reason for using them is different.
- Well, instead of repeating myself manually, I'll paste in a comment of mine here from a past discussion on carbon capture:
It's easy to forget why there is a bit of a challenge to getting C02 out of the air: there's so little of it, comparatively.
In order, air is, broadly, made up of the following:
Nitrogen: %78.084
Oxygen: %20.946
Argon: %00.934
CO2: %00.042
The stuff is essentially beyond a rounding error - it really gives one an appreciation of the "either don't release it, or capture it at the point of release" sentiment, and for the difficulties in making carbon capture outside of these scenarios be even slightly cost-effective.
- My goodness, are you really saying, in effect, "I wish people over 50 would just hurry up and die"?!?
Good lord, expressing that kind of sentiment does not make for a useful and engaging conversation here on hacker news.
- They took early steps to do so (ads) just recently. User response was as you'd expect.
- Yes, but that is the standard methodology for startups in their boost phase. Burn vast piles of cash to acquire users, then find out at the end if a profitable business can be made of it.
- Definitely is a relatively newer innovation/reading. In the earlier days of the religion (thus Byzantine), Amphilochius of Iconium mentioned that the book of Revelation was widely held to be dubious, and Eusebius of Caesarea himself doubted its authenticity.
- I understand what you mean, but that is more of a "Hacker News user" problem than a "young guy who does drywall for a living in Lawrence, Kansas" problem.
- Adding "jk" after a casual prejudiced insult to a demographic doesn't undo the prejudiced insult.
- Prior discussions here on HN noted this writeup on how some of it works (in Russian):
- Well, not to put too fine a point on it, but it would be more correct to say that the author/artist is likely from a country that uses the Cyrillic script.
- ... due to longer processing times, which makes the title a lot more mild sounding had they included it.
- It will be interesting to see if they can answer a question better now than with the original Steam Machines ten years ago: what problem do consumers have that Steam Machines solve?
Their original answer was a resounding "nothing" - Steam Machines solved a problem for Valve (fear of an impending "Windows Store" being added by Microsoft that would steal the battlefield from Valve), but very little for the customer.
I guess that same question needs to be asked again here: are there sufficient problems that the average game-player at home has that are better answered by a Steam Machine than a Windows 11 box? Are those real problems experienced by the broader market of people, or are those just tangential issues cared about by a more vocal few?
- Keep this kind of comment on reddit, not here.
- "space is cold"
I've always enjoyed thinking about this. Temperature is a characteristic of matter. There is vanishingly little matter in space. Due to that, one could perhaps say that space, in a way of looking at it, has no temperature. This helps give some insight into what you mention of the difficulties in dealing with heat in space - radiative cooling is all you get.
I once read that, while the image we have in our mind of being ejected out of an airlock from a space station in orbit around Earth results in instant ice-cube, the reality is that, due to our distance from the sun, that situation - ignoring the lack of oxygen etc that would kill you - is such that we would in fact die from heat exhaustion: our bodies would be unable to radiate enough heat vs what we would receive from the sun.
In contrast, were one to experience the same unceremonious orbital defenestration around Mars, the distance from the sun is sufficient that we would die from hypothermia (ceteris paribus, of course).
- I believe you may be missing the sarcasm of the post you are responding to.
- Odd. I run noscript, so no javascript was running. I use ublock as well. I saw a number of photos. What's your setup?
On the other hand, the random bold lines makes it seem AI generated. Dunno.
- The technically unnecessary due to pluto.tv, twitch streams etc. if you want to relive that early 2000's period of pre-youtube Shoutcast streaming, a guy has kept a number of low-rez streams going for posterity and nostalgia - including two MST3k streams. You can control-n these right into VLC:
https://www.pracdev.org/channel99/pls_files/channel_3000.pls
https://www.pracdev.org/channel99/pls_files/channel_3000_hal...
from his site: https://www.pracdev.org/channel99/
- Oh goodness, Brood War most certainly is not the game that started e-sports, tho I of course appreciate your enthusiasm for the game.
- You first.
And no cheating by bringing antibiotics with you.
- Right.
I'm gonna stick with "What?!"
- What?!
- "A woman's work is never done."
In our agrarian past, the cultural division of labor at the time said that men worked the field, women ran the home. And that later job was brutal, never-ending, and consumed all waking hours until the day she died.
Men broke their backs in the field, women consumed their lives doing the ceaseless work that never ended, every waking moment. (And occasionally helped out in the field, too).
Running a family was a brutal two-person job -- and the kids had to dive in to help out the second they could lift something heavier than a couple pounds.
We forget so easily that for the entire history of our species - up until just recently - simply staying alive and somewhat warm and minimally fed was a hundred-hour-a-week job for mom and dad.
There are important downsides, but the Green Revolution - and dare I say it, the industrial revolution - was truly transformative for our species.
- Too true - "dentistry." Which translated into "pull the tooth out." Rough times people went through up until just a handful or two decades ago.
- An aspect of this that always strikes me is 1940's or 1950's actors. They lived through the depression, where protein was a rarer commodity. Childhood diseases that we now have forgotten. Their frames are small, but their heads are normal sized.
Then, suddenly, a decade later, the men who are actors are all strapping young guys, fit and healthy.
It reminds of me of WWII era japanese, who, a decade or three earlier, had also been protein-starved. Their height and frames reflected this.
All this to say that while we see the downsides, the green revolution also had its health upsides, I guess.
And Campbell knew a good thing when he saw it, happy to agree that Lucas' film represented a hero's journey.
This was a time when Campbell's writing was entering broad pop consciousness and his speaking engagement schedule was starting to grow: the massive popularity of Star Wars was a great ship to catch a ride on.
People wanted to see a depth in Star Wars that caught Lucas off guard (remember that he just wanted to replicate the exciting, cliff-hanger kids serials of his 1950s childhood). He decided to go with it, saying it was all part of a big plan, "I have ten movies with their stories all plotted out" etc. The reality is he cobbled things together ad-hoc and kind of quickly, with no real overarching intent - something he only decades later finally admitted.
I feel for him: in his mind, he was just a nuts-and-bolts technology guy who loved the "how would I make that?" questions and work far far more than the story he had to come up with to tell. He freely admitted he hated writing. If he had it his way, he would have merely been the head of ILM, excitedly figuring out ways to use new technology to solve film making problems, but Star Wars blew up on him, becoming an over-the-top ultra-success.
The real connection between Lucas and Campbell was nearly non-existent, but it was a useful thing for each of them to strategically latch on to as their popularity began to rapidly grow.