- > the real "value" being delivered by the commercial software providers is often the setup, support, and hand-holding provided to customers who pay the crazy amounts
That is also possible and even usual with open source. The difference is you can choose the provider for each of those things, they can be different, you are not locked in.
- > It feels like we have sometimes accreted an amalgam of these pithy takes based on very small, one off, studies (never replicated) that let us comfortably assemble an affirmation of our broader takes.
The patterns are there and are hard to deny. The reasoning and explanations of these types of books? Don't take them for granted, do your own research if anything is of particular interest, think for yourself, etc. The books can be of value without being 100% correct.
- > “It seems that perfection is attained not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing more to remove.”
If we go by the above then Sagrada Familia is far from perfect. I guess it depends on taste but I found it extremely kitschy. The lighted signs inside make me think more of a bar than a church. And I found the actual Barcelona Cathedral beautiful. There's also a pretty heavy discussion if the present thing is what Gaudi intended.
- > Failure to prove dolus special
This one is sufficient for me. And I think classifying it as genocide is a big mistake if your goal is protecting the civilians in Gaza. An easily proven wrong accusation overshadows the fact Israel could have taken things more slowly an carefully. Which I think (with little experience or knowledge) they could since the power difference is huge between the sides.
- I was hoping for a review from a server perspective. That's where Debian shines in my opinion. I feel like the desktop part is a secondary priority for them. That's not a criticism, there's no other distribution I would use in production if it where my choice. On the desktop though they are a bit too stable. Even if one uses testing or unstable the focus on long term versions is still there.
- I define AGI as the only real AI that can exist. Anything less is just mimicry. To give a stupid/simplified example: a truck driving specialized "AI" would not be able to decide when to stop or not when somebody steps in front of it, making it trivial to rob "AI" driven trucks. To decide it needs to understand the kinds of people that exist, their motivations, the laws, etc. So it needs to be an AGI. Otherwise it will make horrible mistakes we don't even think are possible, or are so uncommon that when they happen to a human they make the news.
- > I don’t think there is a single key to intelligence but rather that, unfortunately for both the philosophers and dreamers, intelligence is a vast, complex collection of simpler processes.
I don't think intelligence can be separated from the physical body, world and the interactions between them. A human brain grown in a jar would not be intelligent. Even if you could somehow communicate with it. Human abstractions that stray too far from empirical experience are nothing but hallucinations.
Nor can intelligence be separated from general intelligence. A domain specific "AI" will always have unacceptable shortcommings. For example a programming "AI" not being able to deal with the X Y problem.
TLDR: I am betting on AI being at least a century away. And not being a sure thing even in a millennium.
- Might not be worth much but I just want to thank you for being willing to put in the work to make such discussions possible even though clearly (wink) the vast majority of comments don't want to have a discussion. I would have shut it down writing it off as too much work for almost no result.
I don't even want to comment on-topic because I already know nobody will seriously consider my point of view, but just downvote and attack me.
- If you watch TheQuantifiedScientist you must have found out by now that optical sensors on the wrist have no chance of ever being accurate enough for health and fitness tracking. No matter how much they massage their algorithms they simply don't have the right sensors at the right positions on the body.
At the same time the fitness features add cost, bulk, the uncomfortable sensor bump and cost battery life. The original Pebble didn't have any of that and in my opinion was better for it. I also see little point in competing with the already existing numerous options for fitness tracking, even if you only look at the ones without a subscription.
- I personally hope they stay well away from fitness stuff. I think all those big companies having a go at it for years has sufficiently proved that a wrist device can not be accurate enough at tracking steps, sleep or even heart rate. While GPS is better served by a phone which has a more accurate chip and also the battery to sustain it.
And orienting towards fitness means compromises for size, weight, comfort and battery life. The original Pebble was slim, light, didn't have a sensor bump, wrapped nicely around the wrist.
- The reason they don't is they have a narrative they want to push. The entire thing is deeply flawed, from sitting vs standing when in fact it's white vs blue collar. There's plenty of sitting blue collar jobs that are brutal. Then not differentiating qualified vs unqualified blue collar work. These days qualified blue collar has similar pay to white collar and arguably more job security. But in the end there's no point digging to deep, it's just another race bait.
- This comment has me puzzled for so many reasons. Which candidate or party wanted Romania to get into a war with Russia? I don't think this issue was mentioned at all during the entire campaign because nobody is even thinking about that possibility. And what do you mean Ukraine "got into a war"? They where attacked.
- A bit of context: the presidential candidate in question was predicted below 1% on all polls days before the election. He declared a campaign budget of absolute zero. He had no posters, no tents, no apparitions on TV, absolutely nothing. After a massive presence on TikTok in the last couple of weeks he won 23% of the votes, placing him first and wining a spot in the final elections where just the first two placed candidates run.
Currently the elections in Romania are in an total chaos. The Romanian Constitutional Court ordered an unprecedented recount of the votes, even though the count was sanctioned by all the parties through their observers. Also the country's Defense Council declared they have proof of cybernetic attacks which influenced the elections.
- I personally tried a lot of dev fonts several times over the years but keep coming back to dejavu sans mono, which is always missing for some reason from showcases like this. I find all the others to be imbalanced. Too wide, to skinny, too short, etc.
- "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
I am sure there are plenty of people who misunderstand or misinterpret statistics. But in my experience these are mostly consumers. The people who produce "science" know damn well what they are doing.
This is not a scientific problem. This is a people problem.
- Psychology is IMO in the state alchemy was before chemistry. And there's no guarantee it will evolve beyond that. Not unless we can fully simulate the mind.
- I myself was wrongly banned more than once by automated systems. Google even identified gmail pulling email over pop3 from another gmail account as an attack! Hilariously bad.
But think about it from the other perspective. Can they involve a human in every ban? Can they offer human support for appeals? You have nefarious actors with automated systems submitting malware and then automated appeals. How would Google or any other company cope with providing human support in every case?
- A long time ago I operated an email blacklist. Since then I don't just trust by default when people shout "they banned me for absolutely no reason, I swear!".
I am not saying anything about this case, I just notice people on HN always take these post as 100 percent true. When money is involved, people get caught and their revenue affected they are capable of spinning the wildest tales.
- A bit off-topic but the number of IT workers still using small 1080p monitors in 2024 is absolutely shocking to me.
If you are one of the "I don't want a monitor that is too big" people: a larger (30+ inch diagonal) monitor allows you to place it further from your eyes which is the number one eye health and comfort factor. So the relative size of the display does not change, you won't have to move your head to see all of it. And you can scale up your display to >1 factor so the text won't be small either for hidpi displays. There's absolutely no downside to having a large diagonal large dpi display, aside from needing a wider desk if you have a very narrow one now.
Anybody who tells you they can predict the future is shoveling shit in his mouth then smiling brown teeth at the audience. 10 years from now there's a real possibility of "AI" being remembered as that "stuff that almost got to a single 9 reliability but stopped there".