As a relatively "free range" child in my youth and now the parent of children, even I find it hard to reconcile how I feel differently that my parents.
e.g. at 10 years old, my cousins and I were running around in the woods at my gradparents' home in rural Pennsylvania. I was the oldest of the group with my youngest cousin probably being 6. No cell phones. No Apple watches etc. We were outside of that house around 9am and would come back for lunch and then dinner when my grandmother rang the bell.
My oldest has an Apple watch and is both reachable able trackable yet the above still feels little strange to me.
Wasn't there an idea about 15 years ago where you would open your browser, go to a webpage and that page would have a JavaScript based client that would run distributed workloads?
I believe the idea was that people could submit big workloads, the server would slice them up and then have the clients download and run a small slice. You as the computer owner would then get some payout.
I used to work at Distributive (formerly "Kings Distributed Systems") on its DCP compute platform" which is entirely what you're describing. You can deploy a JS/WASM based workload, and it will be "sliced" and served to browser-based compute nodes. With WebGPU you can sort of have inference executing in the browser too. Incredible people there with an awesome project
I added Python execution support via Pyodide (cpython compiled to wasm) and worked on a bunch of other random stuff like WebLLM inferencing during my time there.
Apart from Distributive, there's also the "Golem network", "Salad", "Koii" and various other similar projects.
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I'm not sure if I'm convinced by the "Uber for compute" use case with compute buyers and compute workers (sellers), but if you're a university and you have 1000 Windows machines across all your computer labs, it'd be nice to leverage that compute for running research or something idk - especially with the price of ram / cloud offerings these days...
> but if you're a university and you have 1000 Windows machines across all your computer labs, it'd be nice to leverage that compute for running research or something idk - especially with the price of ram / cloud offerings these days...
This reminds me of the DevOps guy who made the developer laptops part of a Jenkins "swarm" under the thought that the machines were beefy and underutilized most of the time.
I've seen claims that the average IQ in prisons is roughly equivalent to the average IQ of the general population. The line most commonly mentioned after that fact is "and those are the ones that got caught."
I'm not sure how true that is but what I do believe is that the following is 100% true:
- smart people
- who grow up in disadvantaged locales
- and have emotional trauma due to the above
- may end up in a life of crime and then prison
How do I know this? I've worked with a couple people like this. Some ended up in prison, others almost went to prison and later on went to work in corporate America (no sarcasm intended here).
Some people really activate their brains once they get locked up. The things I've seen people construct from literal garbage in prison. Tattoo guns are a popular one. Obviously half the population has a way of making some sort of device analogous to a car cigarette lighter in prison by finding staples, bits of wire, foil etc that they can stick in a 110V outlet to heat up and light their drugs from. Necessity really is the mother of invention.
A friend and I got split up into different cell blocks because we were helping each other with litigation. Knowing this would happen we'd come up with a way to communicate across the facility. We had these 5x5 grids of letters, no "K", where 11 on the grid was A, 15 was E, 55 was Z etc. They had these touchscreen commissary kiosks where you could order food. The quantity of each item allowed up to 4 digits, e.g. 9999. So that gives you two letters. 1121 = AF for instance. We'd start at the top, Beef Noodles, 1121. Chicken Noodles, 2412 etc and work through the menu. We shared our login IDs with each other. We'd place these huge orders into the cart but never checkout. Then we'd log in to each other's accts from our separate cell blocks multiple times a day, read our messages and write our replies. Got caught eventually, 10 days in the Hole. I FOIA'd their investigation and it was very amusing seeing the report from the facility "Intelligence Dept" trying to decode all the messages.
Yes, especially when it is civil rights litigation, e.g. facility conditions. They will do everything within their disposal to interfere with litigation. A lot of county facilities in the USA will retain private counsel, not government lawyers, for these kinds of cases, and it is enormously expensive. I can remember one case where they took a newspaper from a prisoner and he sued, and the jail took it to trial and lost and had to pay not only damages of $15K, but also their legal fees, which were somewhere around $1.5m, but also the plaintiff's counsel, which was another $900K IIRC.
Don't forget if an inmate starts to look like they are winning all they have to do is change that one inmates conditions and the inmate no longer has standing and the case is dismissed (unless they have permeant damages and they are suing for damages), yet the system is designed for those lawsuits to be the check/balances. It seems like a good system, but in actuality the check/balance is easily negated by those in power.
And the 'change' of the condition is often the inmate getting shipped to a different prison, with the transfer/shipping process having the nick name 'diesel therapy'. So if you do are challenge, you are going to get punished, your safety is going to be put at VERY high risk (you are going to have to fight, and who knows who they lock you up with at night and what might get pulled on you), and you are going to be VERY hungry (meal times/shipping times often accidentally don't work out) you don't stay anywhere long enough to purchase commissary to make up for them not feeding you, etc.
Look at how upset immigration people are now that the Fed loopholes I point out are being made very public in immigration stuff (all the movement between facilities to limit court access). These are things that have happened forever, just no one cared when it was normal inmates.
I'm aware of a businessman who did high profile pro se case, regarding some alleged white collar business license violations . They moved him to different jails 300 times in a year to sabotage his defense (SDNY, so they had unlimited amount of money to fuck with him). He miraculously still won the case.
The United States has one of the highest incarceration rates in the world, with approximately 541 to 614 people imprisoned per 100,000 residents as of 2022–2026. While representing only 5% of the global population, the US holds roughly 20% of the world's prisoners, totalling over 1.8 million people.
For many crimes, the U.S. loves giving eye watering long sentences for offences that would result in a tenth of the prison time in other countries.
I read ‘helping the litigation’ to mean they both may have been involved in the same crime, and they mean to stop collusion after the fact, before trial concludes?
Both ways. Mostly it is just helping with the legal process. Rarely is it a multi-plaintiff case as the courts don't like those from prisoners. It causes too many logistical nightmares. How are two plaintiffs to communicate their wishes to each other on how to proceed? How will they both appear in court together if they are in different buildings or even different institutions?
I remember being on one join-plaintiff civil rights case and the government lawyer told the judge they were going to criminally charge me with impersonating a lawyer as I "must have given legal advice to the other plaintiff." The judge asked how they thought the complaint was written. "As I see it, one plaintiff must have pressed one key, then the other plaintiff pressed the next key on the keyboard. That is our belief."
The feds used to allow you to appeal your sentence forever. I mean if there are problems with a sentence, the government should want to fix it, right?
But then they decided it was too expensive giving convicts access to the courts. So they changed it to I think 7 days. But they decided that was too short.
So the compromise between forever and 7 days? 14 days. If you don't appeal within 14 days you can only appeal on a very narrow scope. Now realize, those 14 days after sentencing you are being transferred from a federal detention center (fed jail) to a prison, either via con-air or prison bus, cross country, staying in various country jails with minimal access to your lawyer or a legal library if you can't afford a lawyer.
The American Justice System is designed to appear like a justice system but to in actuality be non-navigable unless you have expensive paid lawyers working for you. It is very much a multi-teared system. Have you ever tried canceling the WSJ? Imagine if every single step of a Justice system was designed to be as frustrating/stiffling/delaying (when every day counts) as the WSJ canceling process. Oh, you are being transported, and you want access to the law library? Well we can only get you that during lunch hours, so chose if you want to eat. And oh yeah sorry that the morning transfer to the bus was messed up and you happened to miss breakfast. Sure you want to skip lunch? We might ship you again any time and you might miss dinner if we do.
Also, certainly for state cases, a lot of appeal routes are not available unless you are actively in prison. Post-conviction relief, and federal habeas corpus are basically only available while you are locked in prison. If you do all your time in pre-trial detention, or your sentence is too short to fully complete your appeal then your conviction is stuck forever, even if you have meritorious claims. For instance, if your lawyer was drunk, high or not a real lawyer, there is no way to appeal that after you're released, you just have to live with the conviction for the rest of your life and all the collateral reduction in civil rights that comes with that until you die.
Incarcerated people have the right to sue, right? They have right to appeal. Prisons shouldn't be able to interfere with prisoner's rights, specially when it's about suing the prison itself.
There is the appearance of this, but the reality isn't quite so clear.
The USAs gives you a 14 day window to appeal. After that you are blocked from the majority of appeal options. It used to be unlimited time but the Feds decided that was too expensive so the right to appeal was limited to accommodate Federal financial considerations. Limiting what was a unlimited RIGHT was found to be acceptably replaced with a 14 day right (14 days in which the person is being processed into the system, shipped to prison, etc).
If you sue due to conditions, should those conditions be changed, you no longer have standing and your case is dropped. If ABC facility is unfit for habitation, the check is supposed to be inmates sueing. But if you just ship any inmate who looks like they are starting to win in court to facility XYZ, their lawsuit is dropped for lack of standing (the aren't housed at ABC facility).
If you make the transfer from ABC to XYZ as painful as possible, you limit the number of inmates willing to sue and get to keep things as bad as you want at ABC facility. You can't have the main check on the Feds be inmates when if the inmates exercise the check the Feds can punish them. That system is not fair and does not work.
Look at how upset immigration people are now that the Fed loopholes I point out are being made very public in immigration stuff (all the movement between facilities to limit court access). These are things that have happened forever, just no one cared when it was normal inmates.
>"smart people - who grow up in disadvantaged locales - and have emotional trauma due to the above - may end up in a life of crime and then prison"
I believe this to be true and some of my former schoolmates who were brilliant IQ wise and got high marks on math and physics still ended up in jails. Some were later able to recover and lead more productive life
Crime is also just more accepted in "disadvantaged locales."
Drinking openly is illegal in most of Mexico and the USA. If the area is run down and the shops are broken I will crack open a beer on the street without a second thought. I wouldn't think of doing it openly in some yuppie neighborhood where some Karen will rat your ass out in 5 minutes.
Sort of yeah, but in this case "broken windows" are used to determine the culture of an area, even if you fixed the "broken windows" I would use some other clues. I think the broken window theory relies on the idea if you fixed the broken windows crime would change, which I don't think is necessarily true.
The extra line supposes that being smart reduces the chances of getting caught.
Which from what I gather isn't very true - being smart can often lead to over confidence and making mistakes, and also a lot of crime is not premeditated.
And 80-90% of the adherence to 80-90% of those laws are self-imposed.
Once upon a time I used to buy tamales from a guy on the street corner. He was probably breaking half a dozen business licensing and preparation laws by doing his little street corner business.
HN dwellers would mostly debate for days about getting the right license or some other silly nonsense. Meanwhile tamale man is cooking, tamale man is selling, tamale man is doing his thing. Is he paying his taxes? Who knows. No one ever bothered to find out and from what I can tell nothing ever happened to him.
There's also probably the majority of the US who just make up laws that don't exist and then enforce it against themselves. Most people think they have to give an ID to a cop if he asks for it on the street.
They assume everything is illegal and self police because that's what the tyrant programmed them to do.
Same effect in HN comments also. Many people hold back from expressing their real views here because they are afraid to run afoul of the Flag Police.
They actually did change that law. Citizens of the Great Empire are now required to identify themselves to any cop who asks their name. For the childrens.
The "show him your government ID which you are now required to keep on you" part hasn't yet been instated, but it's coming. That will be introduced along with a whole heap of other big anti-freedom changes (like Central Bank Digital Currency) during the coming World War.
No, crime does not mean violation of morality. It only means violation of the law.
Now some people, say, look at a pair of expensive shoes and comically blurt out "these prices are criminal!"
That type of usage is a linguistic device known as "exaggeration", but these types of comical exaggerations don't actually change the meaning of words. Like when someone says "You're robbing me!" when a seller proposes a high price, they are not actually changing the meaning of the verb "to rob" and this does not mean that the definition of "to rob" involves charging high prices. That, too, is just an exaggeration.
You don't get to decree whatever it is that you like and then call it "law". If a "law" is un-Constitutional, as most US "laws" are--or in violation of the highest laws of the Universe (the Laws of Nature), as the most US "laws" are--then it is not law. It's the scribblings of a tyrant.
There just might be an entire army of goons ready to enforce that so-called "law." With an Empire, there always is. But any so-called "law" enacted without permission of the The People are in fact the workings of a tyrant and deserve no serious consideration among free individuals, except whatever minimum is necessary to protect oneself from the tyrant while awaiting (and planning for) his inevitable downfall.
This is called a "strawman" argument. I am not decreeing anything and calling it a law, so you must be responding to some interlocutor that lives only in your imagination, and then pointing out flaws in this imaginary conversation makes you feel better I guess. Or it gives you some kind of virtuous thrill. Why would you do this? Imagine yourself winning verbal victories with imaginary debaters in the shower, don't do it in public in social media.
And now you are going off on some laws being unconstitutional and that "most US laws are", when the point I made had nothing to do with a particular jurisdiction or nation, but when laws are deemed unconstitutional they are struck down and are no longer laws, so by definition you have now positioned yourself as a one man supreme court, voiding most US law, when the actual supreme court does not do this. Wow, what an active imagination you have. How you glorify yourself. But please do all that stuff in the privacy of your own home, no need to do it online. Here, e.g. outside of your imagination, people make arguments and you can if you want respond to that argument. Think about it.
"I am not decreeing anything," he said, as he attempts to argue me into the grave concerning the definition of the words "crime" and "law." As if the tyrant's definition should be the only definition and God's (or Nature's, if you prefer) can just be ignored.
It's going to surprise the shit out of you one day when you wake up to find that this entity called the "US Supreme Court" no longer exists, and has been replaced with some other entity which has vastly different ideas about things.
This will likely be accompanied by many people being put on public trial and convicted of various crimes that you and they will vehemently insist weren't against this "law" that you believe you understand the definition of. Yet despite your protestations they will be tried and convicted nonetheless, and in many cases executed.
On that day you will finally understand the definition of Law.
>>kdhaskjdhadjk is a 1 day old account pushing anti-US and soverign citizen BS
I'm shocked no one has figured out who this is. For anyone that hasn't figured it out -- hi weev!
>Your Empire murdered my Cherokee ancestors and made up lies about them; said they were all a bunch of dirty savages.
Weev has native american ancestry.
>Your Empire murdered my Confederate ancestors and made up lies about them; said they were all a bunch of inbred racist losers.
Weev is well known for southern / confederate rhetoric
>Your Empire has fucked me over personally in numerous ways that I will never, ever forget or forgive. And no, it wasn't my fault, as you Imperial goons always like to claim about your victims.
Weev was falsely convicted under fraudulent jurisdiction, then the morons that did it were forced to release him, and then essentially run out of the country before it could happen again.
>Your Empire continues to murder people around the entire world in my name, which despite being against everything I stand for, will in the end only bring more destruction to my doorstep.
Weev also has jewish ancestry.
>I am only one of a giant growing horde of Others who feel exactly the same way about the crookedness of your dying Empire. Finally, hundreds of years of murder, robbery, and lies are coming to their ultimate conclusion. Many are much less kind and charitable than I. Some of these guys and girls have entire warehouses full of axes to grind, and are establishing machine shops just to grind those axes.
Weev used this rhetoric during his trial.
>You accuse me of being a bot, but in fact the mindless automaton is you. Your nation is doomed, but you are incapable of perceiving this information as it conflicts with your programming. I predict your future will be a difficult one.
This sort of high IQ, boisterous, machine-gunned shock rhetoric followed by Revelations sort of premonitions for his enemies is the exact sort of unique rhetoric weev uses, and the unique application of it is pretty obvious on inspection. There is no on else on HN I've ever read that uses quite this same method of speech in this exact style with the same background (look up user 'rabite' for other examples).
It's probably a better system for what to live by. The government can and will imprison anyone they want by a variety of methods they have for putting anyone they want away at any time. If you follow "god's / natural law" as they put it, it is a better guide to whether you will anger some victim who will call the police on you. Most of the rest of the law are just the excuse the powers that be will use for putting you away if the powers that be find you threaten their order. The vast majority of victimless crime laws are selectively chosen to be "enforced" for the actual reason that you've done something to challenge the ruling class, trying to adhere to them as if they are applied as 'rule of law' is probably irrational.
I make it a point to keep a healthy distance between myself and Imperial Officials.
During any unavoidable interaction with Imperial Officials, I always pretend subservience and submission. I am aware that many others do also.
The result is a large and growing body of people who secretly despise Imperial Officials, while said officials are under the increasingly detached from reality impression that everyone loves them. It usually doesn't end well for them.
Or being disliked by a DoJ who can pressure a judge (who's other legal experience is being a career prosecutor for the feds as well) to not allow many forms of defense, while expending millions upon millions of their own money and "expert witnesses" to tell lies that you can't afford to defend against, and if you will only sign on the dotted line you will only get 3 years instead of a gazillion.
This is how they got Samourai Wallet guy to admit to "operating an unlicensed money transmitter" business despite FINCen saying he wasn't even a money transmitter which means how would he even get a license?
Likewise a lot of crime isn’t “crime” at all. Kill someone by putting lead in their lungs by means of a firearm and we call it murder and you go to prison. Do it by dumping lead into the air from your factory smokestack and we call it business and you get rich.
Murder some foreigner at the behest of your empire and they'll call you a hero and pin shiny medals to your chest. Kill the guy who ordered you to murder the foreigner and they'll call you a murderer and feel self-righteous when they murder you.
Prison IQ is a very different distribution. As I recall, the top 2% IQ of the general population makes up something like 20% of the prison population. You also have quite a few at the other end.
The gifted are more over represented in prison then black males, however, most of those gifted are themselves minorities.
I’ll have to see some evidence on that, in my search it’s basically a normal bell curve shifted 8 pts down. The idea that 130+ IQ individuals make up 1/5th of the prison population does not pass the sniff test, that would be a crazy statistical aberration. In my search I found reports that 130+ IQ individuals only represent less than 0.4% of the prison population.
Roughly yes, it is declining. The Flynn effect was just smart people having kids later which has now normalized and reversed (with smart people having fewer kids).
I wonder if there are any benefits of the adaptations made by those with higher ACE scores. Surely the adaptations we've evolved to make can't be entirely maladaptive.
Here's one
Emotional abuse: verbal threats, swearing at, insulting, or humiliating a child.[1][3]
I'm trying to imagine what someone would be like if they reached 18 without ever having been "sworn at, insulted, or humiliated." Given this is one of the gentlest ways of correcting anti-social behavior, I can only imagine such person would be a maladapted nightmare.
there are strategies that can be taught to increase resilience, and sometimes that may include some tough love.
but there are differences between some tough love to build character vs. years of emotional and verbal abuse. one of the big kids calling you a loser on the playground is not ACE; your mom telling you're worthless and she hates you and you should have never been born for most of your childhood is.
put another way, 8 weeks of military boot camp teaches you to handle some of the stresses you might encounter; it builds resilience. but 18 years of it would create someone deeply screwed up.
>I've seen claims that the average IQ in prisons is roughly equivalent to the average IQ of the general population. The line most commonly mentioned after that fact is "and those are the ones that got caught."
This includes white collar crime and all kinds of non-violent crimes though.
IQ is negatively correlated with reactive violence, but positively correlated with premeditated violence, per the evolution of our species. Despite our greater emotional regulation and lack of reasonable contextual circumstances to support the need for violence, we're still killing people all the time just like our ancestors.
>Hmm, what would make you assume perpetrators of violent crimes would have a different IQ level than other crimes?
For starters there's the lead exposure relation to violent crime, that is accepted as a factor, and which is also known to lower IQ.
That lead-affected criminal population would drive average violent criminal IQ down, even if the lead exposure worked through a different causual mechanism and lower IQ was just an orthogonal effect.
Besides several studies have found the general correlation.
>My initial instinct would be that violent crimes are often committed out of passion, and are unrelated to intelligence.
Choice of outlet for the outburst, impulse control and other factors however are related to intelligence.
Besides you're just covering "crimes of passion" here. There are career criminals doing homicides, gang shootings, etc, plus physical violence unrelated to passion, but related to intimidation, theft, etc.
Higher IQ would correlate with an increased ability to predict the consequences of one’s actions. “If I stab this person I will go to prison” versus “if I stab this person everyone will think I’m great because that person sucks.”
> She was pretty much completely immobile from the neck down, and couldn't even see our hands properly from her wheelchair. She could only see the arc of the ball, but that was sufficient information for her to tell us how we could improve. "Pull your elbow in". "Focus on the left hand, the right will follow".
I've both been a coach (paintball/martial arts) and been coached (golf) and it really is wild how good your brain can become at seeing the outcome or just a piece of the process and then working backwards to a root cause.
I sometimes make the analogy "in particle physics, you don't actually see the collision. You see the after effects and then figure out what happened by going backwards to what must have occurred."
My favorite version of diagnosing a root cause from an outcome was "Car Talk" on NPR, where somebody would call into the Tappet Brothers's show and imitate the weird sound that the car was making, and then the brothers would diagnose a very specific car problem based on the secondhand impersonation of a weird noise. I have no idea how accurate their diagnoses actually were, but it always seemed like a tremendously impressive trick.
>> I sometimes make the analogy "in particle physics, you don't actually see the collision. You see the after effects and then figure out what happened by going backwards to what must have occurred."
I keep coming back to that. Nobody has ever directly seen direct the force carrying particles, only their effects (indirect evidence). The models make excellent predictions, but I still feel like they're "wrong" in some sense.
This is the only fact we know for certain in physics; we know for sure that our existing models are incorrect. But they sure are great at lots of stuff and correctly predict lots of phenomenon so until someone can come up with a better model they're likely to continue to be used widely!
I've worked at some of the "top tier" finance firms over the years.
It is absolutely astounding how much of them run on code that is:
- very reliable aka it almost never breaks/fails
- written in ways that makes you wonder what series of events led to such awful code
For example:
- A deployment system that used python to read and respond to raw HTTP requests. If you triggered a deployment, you had to leave the webpage open as the deployment code was in the HTTP serving code
- A workflow manager that had <1000 lines of code but commits from 38 different people as the ownership always got passed to whoever the newest, most junior person on the team was
- Python code written in Java OOP style where every function call had to be traced up and down through four levels of abstraction
I mention this only b/c the "LLMs write shitty code" isn't quite the insult/blocker that people think it is. Humans write TONS of awful but working code too.
Finance is like an oil well. You can do just about anything technology-wise and as long as it more or less pulls the oil from the ground, the money just keeps coming. So good code is not necessary. Some may even say that terrible code that needs to be replaced every year is a feature in terms of promotion possibilities.
It is completely possible that the path that got them to this point was the optimal path given their goals and knowledge at the time. And wildly enough, maybe it was even the optimal path with perfect knowledge of the future as well.
This is getting to be possibly the most irritating thing I've seen on Hacker News since registering here. Every thread about a limitation of LLMs being immediately rebuked with "humans do that too."
It's a continuous object lesson in missing the point. A similar thing happened a few hours ago when an article was posted about a researcher who posted a fake paper about a fake disease to a pre-print server that LLMs picked up via RAG, telling people with vague symptoms that they had this non-existent disease. Lo and behold, commenters go in immediately saying "I'd be fooled too because I trust pre-print medical research." Except the article itself was intentionally ridiculous, opening by telling you it was fake, using obviously fake names, fictional characters from popular television. The only reason it fooled humans on Hacker News is because they don't bother reading the articles and respond only to headlines.
It's just like your code examples. Humans fail because we're lazy. Just like all animals, we have a strong instinct to preserve energy and expend effort only when provoked by fear, desire, or external coercion. The easiest possible code to write that seems to work on a single happy path using stupid workarounds is deemed good enough and allowed through. If your true purpose on a web discussion board is to bloviate and prove how smart you are rather than learn anything, why bother actually reading anything? The faster you comment, the better chance you have of getting noticed and upvoted anyway.
Humans are not actually stupid. We can write great code. We can read an obviously fake paper and understand that it's fake. We know how hierarchy of evidence and trust works if we bother to try. We're just incredibly lazy. LLMs are not lazy. Unlike animals, they have no idea how much energy they're using and don't care. Their human slaves will move heaven and earth and reallocate entire sectors of their national economies and land use policies to feed them as much as they will ever need. LLMs, however, do have far more concrete cognitive limitations brought about by the way they are trained without any grounding in hierarchy of evidence or the factual accuracy of the text the ingest. We've erected quite a bit of ingenious scaffolding with various forms of augmented context, input pre-processing, post-training model fine tuning, and whatever the heck else these brilliant human engineers are doing to create the latest generation of state of the art agents, but the models underneath still have this limitation.
Do we need more? Can the scaffolding alone compensate sufficiently to produce true genius at the level of a human who is actually motivated and trying? I have no idea. Maybe, maybe not, but it's really irritating that we can't even discuss the topic because it immediately drops into the tarpit of "well, you too." It's the discourse of toddlers. Can't we do better than this?
Google “hospital server room”. Guess everywhere should just do the same thing with their server rooms, yeah? Works for hospitals, and look how much money the healthcare system makes! Why even pay an IT engineer, just plug in another wire bro.
> I asked if what they had done was ethical—if making deep learning cheaper and more accessible would enable new forms of spam and propaganda.
Someone asked Yuval Noah Harari, author of Sapiens, his thoughts on LLMs and how easy it was to create fake news, ai slop etc.
His response:
"People creating fake stories is nothing new. It's been going on for centuries. Humans have always dealt with it the same way: by creating institutions that they trust to only deliver factual information"
This could be government departments, newspapers, non-profits etc.
A personal note on this:
There is a Christmas card my grandfather made in the 1950s by "photoshopping" (by hand, not the software) images of each member of the family so it looked like they were all miniature versions of themselves standing on various parts of the fireplace. The world didn't collapse due to fake media between the 1950s and today due to people having that ability.
I see this kind of take a lot, and I don't think it's convincing. To me it's similar to saying that the water frame and the power loom won't change anything, because people have been able to make thread and cloth for millenia.
Individuals with Photoshop making obvious fictions for entertainment is different from funded entities producing clips at scale and passed off as real.
They're essentially a combination of a plane, spoke-shave, draw-knife and gouge but all in a one handed tool. They were primarily used by Native Americans to build things like canoes, snowshoes, baskets etc. I first found about them from reading John McPhee's Survival of the Bark Canoe [1] but there are lots of uses of them on video on the website below (which I created).
If you want to get into woodworking but want only a few tools and/or a very portable tool, highly recommend.
e.g. in theory you could build an entire canoe with an axe, crooked knife and 3 or 4 sided awl (and a lot of time, patience and materials)
> There was a great article on here a while back about VHS and Betamax. While Betamax was better by nearly every metric, it lost.
There is some nuance here.
Manufacturers didn't know if people preferred shorter, higher quality (Beta) or longer, less quality (VHS). That's partly why there were two formats.
Most people like to say VHS "won" but what it really won was the consumer market. Beta won the professional TV news market because it turns out news stations had a high demand for short, high quality video storage.
I point this out only to say that winning isn't a one dimensional/binary outcome. You can "lose" in one market but still be very profitable in another market.
e.g. at 10 years old, my cousins and I were running around in the woods at my gradparents' home in rural Pennsylvania. I was the oldest of the group with my youngest cousin probably being 6. No cell phones. No Apple watches etc. We were outside of that house around 9am and would come back for lunch and then dinner when my grandmother rang the bell.
My oldest has an Apple watch and is both reachable able trackable yet the above still feels little strange to me.
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