What a doomer way of thinking. Scientific advancements has positively improved the lifes of people in the past I don't see how scientific advancements accelerated by AI would be any different.
> Another approach is to follow that word, heresy. In every period of history, there seem to have been labels that got applied to statements to shoot them down before anyone had a chance to ask if they were true or not. "Blasphemy", "sacrilege", and "heresy" were such labels for a good part of western history, as in more recent times "indecent", "improper", and "unamerican" have been. By now these labels have lost their sting. They always do. By now they're mostly used ironically. But in their time, they had real force.
>
> The word "defeatist", for example, has no particular political connotations now. But in Germany in 1917 it was a weapon, used by Ludendorff in a purge of those who favored a negotiated peace. At the start of World War II it was used extensively by Churchill and his supporters to silence their opponents. In 1940, any argument against Churchill's aggressive policy was "defeatist". Was it right or wrong? Ideally, no one got far enough to ask that.
> Louis and his wife Maria Theresa of Spain had six children from the marriage contracted for them in 1660. However, only one child, the eldest, survived to adulthood
> Louis outlived most of his immediate legitimate family. His last surviving legitimate son, Louis, Dauphin of France, died in 1711 of smallpox and barely a year later, Louis, Duke of Burgundy, the eldest of the Dauphin's three sons and then heir-apparent to Louis, died of measles. Burgundy's elder son, Louis, Duke of Brittany, died of the same disease a few weeks later.
The king of France, arguably one of the richest people on the planet at the time, had 5/6 six children with his wife, the Queen of France and daughter of the Spanish King die before adulthood.
Now look at the life of an average middle-class French person (or American, or English person or any of the 6+ billion people living with electricity) today. See anyone dying in childbirth? Anyone dying of measles or smallpox before they're old enough to vote?
Technological progress, helping not just the rich get richer, but everyone get richer.
Maybe with the rise of immutable distributions like SteamOS, Bazzite, GnomeOS and KDELinux.
But the other "user-friendly" distributions are just not good enough for a non-techy.
We need better and more A/B partitioned immutable distributions and we need a new implementation of Flatpak.
I recently had to repair my parents their Linux Mint installation because it powered off during an upgrade. Apt does not handle that well, Linux Mint has no snapshotting, you cannot apt autoconfigure -a through the UI. Also the UI does not explain why the machine is getting hot while it's building dkms modules for an hour.
Just this week I saw someone with Fedora get a buggy graphics driver that made the whole system glitchy, they had to downgrade the kernel.
The week before I had to repair a manjaro installation from a friend because getting nvidia to work on ArchLinux isn't trivial even if Manjaro pretends it to be.
To be frank, desktop linux is still in a pretty bad state.
I think it's equally likely a windows update breaks a family owned computer and the solution isn't clear to them eg reinstall drivers directly from Vendor.
I'd also rgue Mint is easier to navigate than Windows with it's 3+ different context menus and baked in ads.
I had many conversations about this and it always came down to business.
GPL is indeed restrictive if your priority is the free market. Pretty much every serious BSD person I know of runs it as part of their business, so from their pov GPL is restrictive.
However in the context of the constant restrictions of general purpose computing, GPL has my back. BSD at best doesn't care about restrictive forks and at worst even welcomes them as 'good business'.
Two different approaches, they both have their place but as a user, I feel GPL was written for me. BSD (license) was written for the developer.
This is an oversimplification. I'm sure that some people think like you mention, but it is by no means all. I personally choose permissive licenses because I find the GPL to be hypocritical in the way it restricts freedom while talking about promoting freedom. If I'm giving a gift to the commons, then I want it to be a true gift, not something with strings attached. So for me, permissive licenses are the way to go. It hurts nobody if someone chooses to make a closed source fork - software is a non-rivalrous good, so whatever someone else does cannot take away the free version that I have provided. So I see no reason to deny others the freedom to use my software as they see fit, even if they use it in ways I don't personally agree with.
Thanks for sharing your POV, but that's basically how I understand it. It's the old individual freedom (BSD) vs collective freedom (GPL).
The BSD is certainly less hassle and just a simpler way to give something away.
> I find the GPL to be hypocritical in the way it restricts freedom while talking about promoting freedom. If I'm giving a gift to the commons, then I want it to be a true gift, not something with strings attached.
The right to free speech is a freedom too, yet it has strings attached. Namely it's no longer a freedom the moment it crosses a certain line into endangering someone else and their freedoms. That's sort of the view the GPL takes, but it gets into how different political philosophies view the concept of freedom. Is it freedom to pay whatever the free market (in practice monopolies) demand for commodities critical to survival (BSD view of freedom) or is it freedom not to have to worry about not being able to afford commodities critical to survival (GPL view of freedom).
I do agree the BSD freedoms is simpler to grasp.
> It hurts nobody if someone chooses to make a closed source fork - software is a non-rivalrous good, so whatever someone else does cannot take away the free version that I have provided
True in theory, trickier in practice. 'It hurts nobody' only goes so far because if a closed source fork starts collecting telemetry then it actively hurts its users, unless very much opt in. Now how many average computer users are going to know that there's an open version that doesn't do that? A small number. Trickier still, because the fork is closed, it's likely going to be quite hard to replace it or block the telemetry, at least without loosing some features. So again, the difference is in what is viewed as the commons. BSD views the commons as everyone, including capital interests best in a position to take that the software and twist it into a tool in the ongoing war on general purpose computing, ability to repair etc.
GPL views the commons as the users, so it aims to grants freedoms to them, even at the cost of restricting the freedom of capital in the process.
In short, I do understand and even appreciate the BSD concept of freedom and its simplicity, yet I find it insufficient to protect my freedom in a system full of monopoly power, corruption and exploitation.
In an ideal world where the behaviour the GPL aims to protect doesn't exist, I'd agree the BSD is more free. In the current world, I'd argue that BSD gives freedom to exploit computer users to those with the means to do so.
ISP operations/back-end systems perspective, there's indeed tons of RRA files out there still getting charts drawn based off them with rrdtool, but increasingly everyone is trying to store metrics in things like influxdb and draw them using grafana. Or similar. Even Cacti, a truly old and crufty thing that's been around for a long time has migrated to drawing charts as SVGs.
> even though 2,977 people died while 42,116 died from car accidents that same year
I have trouble understanding your logic. A lot of trouble is made to prevent car accidents. We require driving licenses, we develop whole categories of law and do plenty of research to make driving safer.
We’re certainly not trying 15x harder to prevent car accidents as done to prevent another 9/11.
Prior we had metal detectors for people and hand luggage x-ray. Now we have x-ray backscatter for people, ID and facial photography, and a whole lot of other nonsense. Liquids banned, visitors at the gate not permitted, and the list goes on…
I don’t entirely agree with the actual measures taken purportedly to prevent a recurrence, but it’s hard to argue anything other than significant steps were taken.
Roughly a million people have died in car accidents since. Was there really nothing possible to prevent a fraction of them?
Where’s the new government organization? What new laws have been passed to prevent? What safety features are now required to mitigate such?
Ok, we have backup cameras and the funny headlights that turn off when the turn signal is on. Mission Accomplished?
This is America. We see constant mass murder of random citizens, often children, via mass shootings. So maybe the question is, why was 9/11 special among murder?
Because it was a terrorist group killing people to make a point, not somebody who has lost their sanity and, failing to have any other outlets, takes it out on the weak.
Do you seriously believe that among the thousands of mass shootings to have taken place in America since 9/11, none were the work of sane people trying to make a statement? The shooting death toll of people trying to make a statement since 9/11, exceeds the death toll of 9/11.
Maybe you missed that since it's diluted by all the other shooting death of children and random citizens.
Though it would be unkind to accuse you of being that dense.
The observation you replied to is that 9/11 is not so different from the mass shootings as you erroneously thought was obvious. You've now been educated to understand differently. I never faulted you for your ignorance.
Yes, I know. 99.9% of those shootings are kids who have zero emotional self-control, zero outlets, zero friends, and access to a gun. It's not a terrorist. There is a dictionary definition of a terrorist. I don't know how much more literal I need to get in order for you to understand you've got zero education to pass on here.
Exactly, that incorrect statistic about the percentage of who perpetrates the shootings is among the things forming the foundation of your argument.
Getting more literal with madeup numbers you imagined that present interpretations incompatible with reality doesn't convince anyone else of your view, though I'm sure you find it effective in showing others that, as you said, any education they have to pass on will be reduced to zero when encountering you.
Pretending to be too stupid to understand my point isn't helping you as much as you think it is. Rewording my jokes also isn't helping you like you think it is.
You made an insane statement that only a complete fuckin moron could support, then acted high and mighty when you are the one with the onus of evidence while pretending you aren't. But hey, at least you're clever enough to pretend that I'm goofy because I don't think children are terrorists. Maybe it wasn't an act. Maybe you just are that stupid.
Nobody thinks children are terrorists. If you want to make the claim that they are, prove it. Otherwise, I'm just going to keep calling you a dipshit, dipshit.
I'm neither stupid nor pretending to be. Rather, this is HN. The guidelines state I should try to take the best interpretation of your comment.
So, I've been twisting myself in knots trying to find interpretations of your comment that don't make you look like an unintelligent, bigoted asshole who loves to tell others they're wrong regardless of reality.
Since it's clear from your last comment that any alternate interpretation wouldn't be accurate, that's the end of my replies to you. If you're interested in why you're wrong, feel free to read back on how I talked about mass shootings, which you decided meant a subset of school shootings. Dipshit.
hn comment threads on most articles have rapidly taken on the character of Reddit threads ca. 2009. This argument in particular was a classic back then.
I’ve started downvoting inanity and flagging one-liner, content-less snark, but unless the mods get serious on stuff that hits the front page, I don’t see that trajectory changing.
To be fair, even before LLMs could spot my bugs in an instant I really only regularly used debuggers in C because it can't display arbitrary types in debug print statements.
Debuggers still have their place in algorithm heavy work, or to pull apart heap dumps to try and figure out obscure bugs.
Even LLMs use debuggers. I asked Claude to reverse engineer a closed source binary the other day. It used gdb to trace its behaviour. Didn’t even use ghidra.
> even before LLMs could spot my bugs in an instant
I guess it depends on the bugs.
LLMs even INSIDE the (VS) debugger couldn't work out some of the more recent bugs I have been looking at. Never mind by statically looking at the code base.
Scraping would be costly in this world: scrapers would have to spend tokens in order to get the webpage.
But, in this world, the website owner would receive tokens that they can then use to do whatever they want, including paying for servers and bandwidth. This is the sense in which the cycles aren’t wasted: the website owner now has cash to spend.
Effectively, both scrapers and ordinary users would be paying for the privilege of getting website bytes.
This also solves the problem of having to wait for your phone to solve the challenge while you’re browsing: you can buy or mine some tokens ahead of time and pay them as soon as challenged. So can the scrapers, but because they’re accessing enormous numbers of pages it’s hopefully prohibitively expensive for them.
Yup was thinking the same: make honest people pay $0.00001 when they visit the site (in electricity/compute), have the challenge made so that only the website wins a tiny something. Bleed the bots dry.
> This makes Anubis challenges use a memory-hard proof of work function (argon2id) instead of just a CPU hard one. It also means that the "hey Claude vibeslop me a CUDA Anubis solver" route is on its way to being fundamentally dead.
I want to do this eventually, but it's hard to split things into the micro-tasks that would be required to make this work on Anubis. One of the ideas I'm throwing around is a world where Anubis helps fuzz old games to find timesaves in tool-assisted speedruns. It's harder than you think.
The tools that exist for fuzzing speedruns (TASers call it "botting") are fairly primitive, excluding a few game-specific ones. Because of that, there really aren't that many TASes where a distributed randomised search could make improvements which don't get immediately overshadowed within a day of human attention. Improving botting tools and increasing their adoption would be more effective IMO. (Incidentally, TASVideos.org recently banned one of the people pioneering bot development.)
Meanwhile BOINC is well-established as the platform for distributed computation. If you can figure out how to squeeze its work units into Wasm challenges, I'm sure a lot of researchers would thank you.
BOINC isn't really built for "small tasks", afaik. Once you get small enough, the work the server is doing to manage the tasks gets to be around the same cost as the server just doing the tasks itself.
Yeah, I'm using PoW-based "DDOS defense mechanism" for a current project and had this thought too. I briefly looked into what it would take to exploit PoW to do something economically valuable like folding@home, and it looked a bit tricky. At first glance, these sort of projects seem a bit unsuitable for real-time PoW because they were designed to be run on desktops and so tend to do things in large batches. There probably are other use-cases that could be more suitable though.
Might be worth chucking that thought into Astra, especially if someone springs the $$$ money for it?
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