Chemistry would be a great space to explore. The last quarter of the 19th century had a ton of advancements in chemistry. It'd be interesting the see if an LLM could propose fruitful hypotheses, made predictions of the science of thermodynamics.
I’m glad it was blocked. Amazon gives law enforcement and ICE access to Ring camera footage. I have no doubt they’d eventually be letting cops spy inside our homes with these vacuum cleaners.
The emergence of a totalitarian state compared to a liberal democracy (for all it's faults and current state due to voters making bad choices) is so much worse for everyone in the world. Us included
No I was pointing out the absurdity of your comment. Cops are called to respond to violent crimes in America, Chinese people aren’t (presumably the response time would be far too long) so even if they were identical people, you’d expect a lot more police shootings than ones by Chinese citizens on the streets of America.
The Chinese government may not need its law enforcement officers to carry guns (that’s great but that ship sailed here centuries ago) but they do send vans to harvest the organs of dissidents. And Google “persecution of Uyghurs”.
They’re not a benign organization just because they shoot less, they just get shot at less.
My dude I spied on the Chinese for a decade I know more about the Chinese than you’ll ever understand
Let me be clear, the Han don’t care about anybody but the Han that’s a fact. What they do to Tibetans, Uighurs and Muslims is horrible and those repressions shouldn’t exist.
However they pale and comparison into the historical horrific conditions of nonstop genocide from 1650 more or less until present day if you include the global war on terror and the modern prisoner slave market encoded into the constitution (13th amendment)
If you wanna go all the way back to the cultural revolution then absolutely fine but my argument there is going to be that’s no different than any of the culls that the United States or any other country have done. So they don’t get a pass but they aren’t worse
Ultimately all you have to do is put up the “death toll” from state action both inside the nation and outside the nation to compare numbers. I’ll let you go ahead and do that exercise.
No that the communist party has only ruled in China for less than 100 years but the same structure in America which has been completely depraved since the founders of the country were alive and actively shaping the politics of the US is coming up on 350 years ago.
I mean for Christ sake we bought the southern United States from France in order to maintain our slave plantations as the French were getting rid of all their slave holdings worldwide. And then after the Civil War which was supposed to solve that ethical burden they completely gutted the entire process of reconstruction in order to prevent the full completion of it because the population was so racist they did not want to do it. As a black person in America I will tell you the slave population in jails is higher than it ever was anywhere else.
If that’s not a disqualification on its own of any type of ethical foundations I don’t know what is.
I love Hacker News because there are people smart enough to write passably well but insane enough to get to this sort of thing within two hops of discussing a vacuum maker going bankrupt.
I won’t engage the insanity of calling anything we’re doing genocide (I guess we’re just really bad at it because the targeted populations are growing while we do it despite all our weaponry) because what’s the point? But if you think Amazon is more evil than the CCP because police shoot more Americans than the population of China, my only hope is that you learn to use logic as coherently as the language.
It is, however, about as likely as my Roomba assassinating me because the CIA ordered it to. I say this without malice and not as an insult: therapy can help. This is likely trauma response.
Yeah HN is a weird a place I’ve been messing on a long time.
I treat these discussions like if I was taking the hardest to defend positions.
Despite whatever you might think of Louis CK he taught me the idea that you try and lose the audience early snd then win them over then you have the best joke. I think it’s the same for intellectual sparring and I love causing chaos.
It’s a good critic in my actor-critic model. Plus I have an insane amount of experience so most of my ideas are kind of nested complexities and I don’t like to translate to college level.
No county matches the depravity of the U.S justice system? Other countries (china for example) have reeducation and labor camps. The us has its problems, and we should make things better! But it's incomparable, china actively imprisons political enemies, puts Muslims in "reeducation" camps, and has an iron fist on free expression.
Hard to tell if someone is ignorant, not bright, or a CCP propaganda bot these days, but anyone who thinks the Chinese government is preferable to Amazon is one (at least) of those 3.
Maybe instead of ad-hoc fear-driven interventions in the market when Chinese companies do too well (TikTok), US should have some general data protection laws, and not allow making surveillance devices that are locked-down and serve their corporate overlords?
Amazon isn't on your side. They would have sold this access to China if they could make a buck on it.
Maybe there's a 3rd option... like encrypt the footage in a way that it can't be accessed en-masse without passwords?
Like imagine if the US government gave a warrant to apple and said "Give us all iphone pictures from this area on this date"... they'd presumably say "We won't because we designed it so that we can't."
Software has been moving in the right direction. Tons of open source projects for every application imaginable. But hardware has gotten more closed. You can't replace batteries in phones, they get pre-loaded with state level spyware, laptops today have about the same hard drive space as 10 years ago to drive cloud usage, and GPUs and now memory seem to be becoming increasingly cost prohibitive for consumers.
If you care about your data privacy don't get this bed. There's really no good reason for it to phone home and tell the CEO (YC company), when you're sleeping, if you're sleeping with someone else, and when you're sick.
An edge lord is being deliberately provocative for attention (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgelord), but Shaun Maguire instead is just expressing his actual opinion, which is worse in my opinion.
No need to be that circumspect in 2025 - no one will investigate you; just funnel the money directly to a family member via a consulting gig, buy their shitcoin, or donate to a "charitable foundation" whose mission is to funnel money upwards
No we don't even have to be that subtle any more just call it a gratuity and the supreme courts says it's AOK to give obvious bribes so long as no one provably said "I'll give you $X dollars for Y action". It's painful how blatantly the highest court in the land has been captured by the same people giving these bribes.
His mistake was giving more to the Dems, it's why he's landed a 25-year prison sentence under a Dem administration.
Remember when half this forum was convinced that both parties are equally corrupt, based on their feeling that he will certainly walk?
(That half of it is still convinced they are equally corrupt, but since their guy won and the ends justify the means, they no longer feel the need to articulate reasons for why they would feel that way.)
Whomever replaced Alex Jones will read the headline and then make up the story to sound good to the base and that’s that.
I’ve been listening to Knowledge Fight, and in the way my brain needs it which is from the beginning so I’m at about 2019 and the playbook written by Jones/Stone/et al is in full swing - it used to be fun to laugh at him, and now I can see how he really paved the way for the hell we currently exist in.
Increasing the supply of the high end market often occurs while simultaneously reducing the supply of the low end market. This happens when landlords renovate their buildings. So it's very possible that adding supply can limit price inflation on the high end, while increasing costs on the low end.
Yes that’s gentrification of a neighborhood. Neighborhoods evolve over time. Displacement is bad but measures to fight it can be even worse. If no new construction can be approved over it being a gentrification signal, rents will zoom up even more. In the most competitive metro areas there are no cheap rent areas left within an hour commute.
