What's with astonishing praise for evil just for the sake of sticking it to the status quo?
Completely orthogonal to any US allies and their action, it is absolutely disingenius to dismiss the evils of Saddam's empire: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kLUktJbp2Ug. There is a large body of work around Saddam's regime, this YT clip isn't provided as an evidence, but to show how misplaced it is to say "Saddam did nothing wrong".
I find this an ongoing problem on HN. There are 2 counter acting forces A and B. Objectively, B is evil. But, HN equates A and B on the same level and demands equal criticism of both just by the virtue of the fact that A and B are up for a discussion. I am sure there is a list of biases being violated. It's similar to the debate between flat earth deniers and believers. If we host a debate between them, there is a perceived notion that both parties are on the same footing. The truth couldn't be far from that.
Generic tangents that get us to Saddam from the OP are not at all the point of this site. Please don't. Reductio ad Saddamum may not be full Godwin but it's way over the line.
We've asked you before to stop using HN for political flamewar. It's not only not what HN is for, it destroys what it is for. If you keep doing it we're going to have to ban you. Using multiple accounts to do this kind of thing is particularly not cool.
I apologize. It is difficult to tell when to refute praise of evil (Saddam, NK) and when to avoid starting a political flamewar. I'll just disengage since it leads to unpleasant toxicity, you're right.
The point is that Saddam was a hero when he was killing Iranians, but a villain when he invaded Kuwait. Saddam didn't actually change, his usefulness to us did. And a large part of the reason he was able to rule Iraq was because he was supported by the West.
Assuming the people you're arguing with are simple-minded flat-earthers who can't think that anything against America is bad because they think America is bad and two things can't be bad because they like to argue is causing you to hear the worst possible version of people's positions.
If you re-read my statement it doesn't justify or praise Saddam. "Saddam did nothing wrong" in the eyes of the US.. like Salman did nothing wrong that is worthy of punishment in the journalist murder case, from the US point of view.
It merely states that the US will happily create, fund and tolerate monsters, but the moment their are political enemies they suddenly become devil incarnate. Happily fund and arm bin-laden, and extreme fundamental ideologies and then turn around and claim the high moral ground. Today KSA can do no wrong and Iran can do nothing right. Tomorrow if KSA switches sides, then they will suddenly become evil tyrants that have regressive views and torture their people.
It's not A vs B is a flawed comparison. It's A makes B, both are evil and roll around happily in the mud. A then claims moral superiority and is called out on it's bullshit.
Just shows how politics have divided us. No one seems to be thinking independently and that includes myself - I try but often the first reaction is otherwise.
You can despise someone deeply, but if they are citing facts, reason, logic, etc - have no association, they stand on their own. Doesn't matter who uttered it.
May be its just easier to pronounce Pfizer than BioNTech?
Not everything needs to be distilled down to nationalistic undertones.
I am getting sick of this kind of discussion permeating on HN - It is extremely juvenile and damaging to the spirit of HN. In this regard, Reddit seems to be a lot better. Go on any vaccine related thread and there is absolutely none of this. There is so much more global cooperation observed on Reddit than on HN.
This has nothing to do with nationalism. I'm not German. I don't care about whether Germany gets credit for this. I care about BioNTech getting credit.
My complaint, beyond just the media, is that large pharma, like Pfizer, being fundamentally uninnovative companies that grow by acquisition rather than invention. And about small companies being denied the potential to grow because of an oligopoly of control.
Name brand recognition drives dollars, and in biotech the ability to raise money is just as much a hurdle as the chances of your trial failing.
I see your point, and that's a valid concern. I wonder how much damage public PR does to investors - who are supposed to be highly informed and not be pursued by public hype.
I have the complete opposite view: it’s such a naive thing to say we don’t want wars - ofcourse no one wants wars. Spending on defense and being prepared isn’t going to war, it’s preventing it in the first place.
On the other side of the fence: Your own shitty framework owns your code, it locks you into this custom frankenstine thing that is a ball of mud that also smells bad. No one wants to look at it, it brings the best developers to their knees and the docs are impossible to relate to. One dude knows how it works and the tech debt is deep.
I'll take a Django project instead, thank you very much.
This is an age old discussion about appropriate abstraction.
You seem like you didn’t really read the article so whatever you say here is not quite relevant. Using a framework is not excluded and they certainly have their place, but it really does depend on the project or the organization the system is developed and run in. There are places where a web framework is entrenched at a core of a business and Im sorry to say it but this is really misguided. Just using a framework doesn’t absolve you of the responsibility of architecting and thinking a solution through.
Spaghetti with mudballs is not shy to take over code that happens tobe written in a framework, it is just a function how much care is given for a codebase. In cases where a frameworks help it does provide some structure that can be used as an organizing unit but it should not be followed dogmatically.
> This is an age old discussion about appropriate abstraction.
It's not finished. I think the last change was that you don't need to worry anymore that something awful might be hiding under the hood. Sitting there, waiting to take your project where no man wants to go.
I wonder if the person you're replying to is correct in but in a different way.
Since text files and excel sheets are "outdated", we don't stack them up against bloated webapp that Asana is.
What if, really, excel sheet can just work? Its like we get so wound up in existing status-quo, we get narrow vision and forget the larger domain space for solving problems.
It's like the guy that ran a bunch of ETL jobs on a Macbook Air faster than a Hadoop cluster. KISS is beautiful sometimes and eye-opening. When someone brings up a ridiculous "outdated" idea, I try to keep an open mind. May be... just maybe we're wrong about all this?
I don't see it as "outdated", but mostly as avoiding unnecessary overkill. But then again, my to-do lists rarely have more than 5 or 6 items, and I don't manage other people, so I'm certainly not the public for such apps. For my use case, text files are perfectly appropriate and I would feel ridiculous using anything else. Like using a tractor to work on my tiny lawn.
I think it just takes a really powerful single AGI that can convince other humans, impersonate them, do things that is super-human level and we can't even conceive it or imagine it (think how far a chimp is from AWS load balancer documentation), think 10,000,000 times smarter than any tactic or possibility we can currently imagine and then we're in for a ride.
It is actually quite terrifying to imagine yourself as sub-human. Equally, it is terrifying to think about super-human capabilities.
First, I like to think intelligence as the problem space an agent is able to solve. given that this kind of space has approximately infinite dimensions, by any meaningful measure [1] we already have people that are indefinitely more intelligent than an average person, and they seem to not have been turned to paperclip maximizers.
Now, of course, there are different kind of infinities. And yes, there may be an entity coming whose intelligence to humans is like intelligence of humans to ants. And only reason humans destroy ants is because in some rare cases ants happen to annoy humans. And whatever goals this kind of superintelligence may have, it is only out of really bad luck humans may annoy or be of use to such an superintelligence. In the end, maximizing paperclips is really f&cking stupid, so it is quite unlikely such superintelligence would want to maximize paperclips.
[1] I mean meaningful in the sense that you actually can make statements that agent a is N times more intelligent than agent B. Obviously _IQ is not meaningful in this sense, someone with IQ of 120 is not 20% more intelligent than one with IQ 100 in any meaningful sense. It would still in practice take infinite time for infinite amount of average people to finish Project Mannhattan - thus Oppenheimer was infinitely more intelligent than average person.
I agree that there exists a possibility that superintelligence might want to maximize paperclips or mine bitcoins. I just think it is very unlikely, and that there exists a positive correlation between intelligence of the entity and intelligence of its goals.
Further, why should I think that given all possible goals a superintelligence might have, goals that happen to somehow cause destruction of humanity represent something else than infinitesimal share? Earth is not a significant source of mass/energy even in our solar system, and already humans are intelligent enough to escape earth.
Note that I am talking about superintelligence in the sense humans are superintelligent to ants. Not pseudosuperintelligence developed by humans having human specified goals.
> I agree that there exists a possibility that superintelligence might want to maximize paperclips or mine bitcoins. I just think it is very unlikely, and that there exists a positive correlation between intelligence of the entity and intelligence of its goals.
Lots of humans have pretty despicable goals, including some very intelligent ones.
I think the positive correlation is mostly because intelligent humans have value to other humans, and so they can cash out their intelligence in rewards of their choosing. The outliers have values that can only be satisfied by actively hurting other humans, for a variety of reasons.
Value-alignment in AI is roughly the problem of finding suitable rewards for AI that can't go off the rails the way some humans do.
Yep, I have an emotional attachment to this thing. Such a magnificent piece of software. Everytime I need to edit something, it's right there for me. Launches instantly, can handle a kitchen sink thrown at it and regexes like there is no one's business. Multiple cursors is something that even god doesn't have. Not to mention, it is absolutely blazing fast. It doesn't betray me and stab me in the back with Micro$oft telemetry.
Sublime Text is like a finely crafted precision tool in the shop. Sure, it doesn't have all the bells and whistles, but it is undeniably a reliable tool and does what it is supposed to do well as you said.
Completely orthogonal to any US allies and their action, it is absolutely disingenius to dismiss the evils of Saddam's empire: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kLUktJbp2Ug. There is a large body of work around Saddam's regime, this YT clip isn't provided as an evidence, but to show how misplaced it is to say "Saddam did nothing wrong".
I find this an ongoing problem on HN. There are 2 counter acting forces A and B. Objectively, B is evil. But, HN equates A and B on the same level and demands equal criticism of both just by the virtue of the fact that A and B are up for a discussion. I am sure there is a list of biases being violated. It's similar to the debate between flat earth deniers and believers. If we host a debate between them, there is a perceived notion that both parties are on the same footing. The truth couldn't be far from that.