(I imagine you agree, so this is just to expand) a secondary, insidious issue is that administrators diffuse their rules through the bureaucracy. In the case of CS, you start seeing references to csrankings in recommendation letters for grad applications, faculty applications, or even tenure letters. At that point, it can be hard to fight against it.
It doesn't mention soil pH at all. AI didn't mention anything about sending off samples to a soil lab for testing, just "dump good sounding stuff on your soil, that'll make everything better!" It didn't even mention grabbing a recent soil survey to get a rough idea of what soil you are dealing with. It is garbage advice which will lead you to waste money and likely make your soil worse instead of better.
(Context: I’m an IC and told my
Manager multiple times that I’d quit if they ever make me a manager)
If you truly believe that, please do yourself a favor and read “The tyranny of structurelessness” to understand what a managerless place becomes. everyone and no one becomes a manager, and there’s no explicit avenue of recourse. There’s a good reason management arises. We can discuss good management vs bad management, but pretty fundamentally there’s no such thing as “no management”.
I don't think OP was necessarily trying to imply "there should be no managers", but simply "I don't want to become a manager" - which is perfectly valid.
Look, you have me for the rest of your post, but let's not imagine that the kind of management we see in an orthodox corporation in the year 2025 is some kind of emergent grassroots property.
It's a tool created by owners to exercise control over the people whose labour they own.
From what I’ve seen flatter (not flat) company structures have less politics and a healthier culture. When you get into the 7, 8, 9 layer manager hierarchy at a software company is when things have really gone to shit
My understanding is that "weird" unicode code points become https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punycode. I used the 󠅘󠅕󠅜󠅜󠅟 (copy-pasted from the post, presumably with the payload in it) to type a fake domain into Chrome, and the Punycode I got appeared to not have any of the encoding bits.
However, I then pasted the emoji into the _query_ part of a URL. I pointed it to my own website, and sure enough, I can definitely see the payload in the nginx logs. Yikes.
Edit: I pasted the very same Emoji that 'paulgb used in their post before the parenthetical in the first paragraph, but it seems HN scrubs those from comments.
domains get "punycode" encoded, urls get "url encoded"[1], which should make unicode characters stand out. That being said, browsers do accept some non-ascii characters in urls and convert them automatially, so theoretically you could put "invalid" characters into a link and have the browser convert it only after clicking. That might be a viable strategy.
(I worked tangentially on software for analyzing data that will come from the Vera Rubin telescope, and) yeah, while it was designed for spotting weird supernovae and such, the first half of its operation is expected to be dominated by the discovery of near earth objects.
A Dark Room (https://adarkroom.doublespeakgames.com/) is fantastic as well. It's not only a clicker/idle game, but it incorporates the mechanics in an interesting way.
On the whole, I've had to adopt a policy of not even touching clicker games. I find them incredibly addictive, and most of the time I'm not even enjoying the experience or getting anything out of it, I just feel hooked. I'd say Universal Paperclips and A Dark Room were exceptions to that, in that they actually had some depth, strategy, discovery, or story. But even those two I've had to stop myself from replaycing.
I'll play Universal Paperclips once a year or so when I remember it exists and have nothing I need to do for the next 3-6 hours. So I'd add that as a warning to anyone who wants to check it out: make sure your next 6 hours are ok to spend on it, in case you get sucked in.
(Late reply, but) I got to play this over the weekend together with some other suggestions in this thread, and Dark Room was actually pretty good! Thanks for the recommendation.
There's a whole combat and map system that's hidden away initially. A lot of the progression really wants you to do that but it's hidden away at first so it's not obvious.
In that it distills the game mechanic of “make number go up” into a simplistic form. It just lakes the clicking.
PS, whenever I relapse and play too much World of Warcraft, I play some Cookie Clicker as a cleanse to remind myself of the fundamental pointlessness of the whole endeavor. Great game.
I think it is one of the few games that "changed my life" in the sense that by getting addicted to it for a few days, it made me see Cookie Clicker in every platform that tries to waste my time.
I remember when I first heard about it and I naively thought that such a simple game was silly and in now way could not be addictive, but I let myself play it for a while and it really changed the way I see games.
This is a great insight, you see it in a lot of mobile games and "live services" / MMOs especially, a big focus on "numbers go up" with relatively minimal effort or skill involved (or only the perception thereof).
In a similar vein, "stamina" in mobile games that limit how much you can do, which on the one side makes the game not "feel" like it takes much time, but which on the other encourages you to open it up a few times a day, and / or buy the "restore stamina" purchase.
"Dailies" / "weeklies", things you should do every day / week to stay up to date.
"time limited events", miss it and you'll never get the chance again.
Same to no cheating - Only been playing a couple of years, lots of background.
All-Time Stats
Total Kittens 84.84K
Kittens Dead 5710
Total Years Played 18.33M
Run Number 98
Total Paragon 90.36K
Rare Events Observed 22.31M
Unicorns Sacrificed 4.20P
Buildings Constructed 553.38K
Total Clicks 712.37K
Trades Completed 2.32G
Crafting Times 501.64M
Avg. Kittens Born (Per Century) 0.46
Transcendence Tier 27
Challenges Completed 8
I'm sadly into the incremental game genre. Universal Paperclips is still my favourite, and I replay it often. A Dark Room is another really good one with some storytelling and an ending, which is not all that common in incremental games.
But if anyone wants to get deep into it, Dodecadragons is probably the best implementation of the incremental mechanics, but it's extremely addictive, so be careful with it.
let me save everyone's time of writing each recommendation individually - by linking https://www.incrementaldb.com/ where all the games are listed together
(Disclosure: I’m a former academic with more than a handful of papers to my name)
The parent comment is harshly criticizing (fairly, in my view) a paper, and not the authors. Smart people can write foolish things (ask me how I know). It’s good, actually, to call out foolishness, especially in a concrete way as the parent comment does. We do ourselves no favors by being unkind to each other. But we also do ourselves no favors by being unnecessarily kind to bad work. It’s important to keep perspective.
I realized that I do have institutional access and so I was able to read the paper, and I stand by my initial criticism of the above comment.
"It seems to me all this paper does is define tasks in a highly abstract way that imposes a uniform cost to process '1 bit of task information'."
The paper uses this number and acknowledges that it is not the only possible measure, and explains why they use this number and how it was derived. It is just the start of the paper, not "all this paper does." The paper primarily focuses on counterarguments to this number to then address the primary question of the relationship between the inner and outer brain.
A few questions it poses: does the superior colliculus contribute to a bottom-up "saliency map" to ultimately direct the attentional bottleneck in cognition? Why does the brain use the same neural circuitry for both rapid/parallel sensory processing and slow/serial cognition? This is not even how other parts of the body work (e.g., type I and II muscle fibers). Perhaps the associated routing machinery between input and output accounts for the billions of neurons? Maybe, like the visual cortex, the prefrontal cortex has a fine-grained organization of thousands of small modules each dedicated to a specific microtask?
We do ourselves the most favors by reading research with some skepticism, and asking questions. We do ourselves no favors by writing comments after only reading an abstract (please, tell me if I'm wrong). I only point out that discounting research so blithely does nothing for improving research. This was a perspective paper - an author asking questions to better understand a possible issue and guide research. And maybe the commenter is right, maybe this is the wrong focus, but I do not believe it was truly considered.
The question reduces to "how does the intrinsic capacities of intelligence, had by humans, give rise to the capacity to answer complex questions?" -- I see nothing which the framing in informational terms adds.
It's nothing more than saying: we know that wires have electrons, and are made of metal, and can support a transfer rate of 1Gbp/s -- and we know that an LLM takes 1 min to answer "Yes" to a postgraduate physics question -- so how/why does the current in the wire at 10^9 bit/s second, support this 1bit/min mechanism?
It's extremely wrong-headed. So much so the paper even makes the absurd claim that Musk's neurallink need not have any high bandwith capabilities because a "telephone" (to quote) would be sufficient.
This is like saying an internet-connected server, hosting an LLM, need not have a high bandwidth RAM, because it only needs to transmit 1bit/s to answer the "yes" question.
In my view there isn't much worthwhile to say under this framing of the problem -- it's a pseudoscientific framing --- as is quite a lot of 'research' that employs 'information' in this way, a red flag for the production of pseudoscience by computer scientists.
Their implied premise is: "computer science is the be-all and end-all of analysis, and of what one needs to know, and so reality must be as we conceive it". Thus they employ an abuse of abstraction to "prove" this fact: reduce everything down to its most abstract level, so that one speaks in "bits" and then equivocate in semantically-weighty ways between these "bits", and pretend not to be doing so. This ends with pythagorean levels of mysticism.
I appreciate that you are elaborating further on your issues with the paper. I, again, am not choosing to defend the paper itself, rather the reason for science - asking questions and finding answers, even ones that may not be "worthwhile." Because we do not always know what is worthwhile and often we ignore some important facts when we think, intuitively, something makes sense and there is no reason to study it.
But, I will counter your comparison regarding LLMs and the transfer rate of wires. We, humans, have wired up the LLM ourselves. Evolution wired our body/brain and we do not know all of the filters and connections that exist in the transfer and processing of data. There is so much about the body we do not know. With LLMs, we've created every part so it doesn't really compare.
And to say that fields of science should not consider the knowledge gleaned from other fields is preposterous. I read about a new discovery in Math almost every few months in which a person from a different field brought in different techniques and looked at a problem from a new angle. Maybe this framing of the problem is silly in the end, or maybe it is just what someone needs to read somewhere to spark an idea. It doesn't hurt to think about it.
> if you think of all people as people, even Republicans
The OP didn't accuse Republicans of being non-people. They specifically made a -- true, incidentally -- factual claim:
> > That's why they spread lies about refugees and other legal immigrants, right
It is notable, though, that it is the Republican candidate that has very directly been using dehumanizing language. And you are here asking people to get into a both-sides argument. The situation isn't symmetric: the arguments shouldn't have to be.
> I understand you might not able to think in these terms when it comes to the hated enemy
Also notable it is that one specific candidate is using the term "enemy within" to describe US residents. It's not the Democrat.
> Or even that they don't hate illegal immigrants, but think that laws are a good idea and criminals should be punished, not rewarded.
Again, your statement has nothing to do with what you're responding to.
> Also notable it is that one specific candidate is using the term "enemy within" to describe US residents. It's not the Democrat.
It's also notable that one whole media and political morass has been calling a candidate "literally Hitler" and he's been shot by a would-be assassin. Almost... more notable.
> Again, your statement has nothing to do with what you're responding to.
What do you mean? If someone says the OP's friends and relatives hate a group of people, it's worth mentioning that they may not hate them at all.
(To reproduce exactly the scenario being discussed, you fit a constant-only model to the data using least squares: that gives the average as the best fit. Then, you measure the leverage of each point of interest.)
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