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I recently used it to watch "Revolution of our times", a documentary about the 2019 Hong Kong protests. As far as I could tell, this is the only legal way to stream the movie.

I don't understand. It's not like the far left is Volkswagen's fan club?


The television, the atom bomb, the cigarette rolling machine, and penicillin are also "just tools". They nevertheless changed our world entirely, for better or worse. If you ascribe the impact of AI to the people using AI, you will be utterly, completely bewildered by what is happening and what is going to happen.


It irritates me a bit that many comments on HN are like a Yelp review of the linked article instead of adding to the discussion of their comments. Maybe you see HN primarily as a community-curated list of links while I see it as a place of discussions?

In this thread, for example, wccrawford gave an interesting perspective on choices in life. While they used the linked article as a reference point, the contents of their comment stand entirely on their own. The information value in the linked article is not that important, the value of the discussion is much more important. To me, that is.


DFW = David Foster Wallace


But there are other platforms out there (especially for books) that people will prefer if they make it easier to find high-quality content. I’m with the poster you replied to; it would make sense for Amazon to go after these fake products.


It's a particularly bad problem for books, but it's a problem for every product category. Unless Amazon sees people abandoning them in large numbers (personally, I haven't ordered from them in years) they're not going to change.


What gives you that idea? Of course we can build enough windmills and other renewables.


Murakami wrote a non-fiction book about the Sarin attacks and the Aum cult, Underworld. I’m not sure if it’s accurate (he’s a fiction writer, afterall) but it’s very fascinating and sent many chills down my spine.


Best way to understand Aum Shinrikyo is to watch the two ungooglable documentaries about it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_(1998_Japanese_film) and A2.

No different than other cults. A bunch of once aimless people who found purpose by subsuming their existences to the will of a venerated man (who teaches yoga in his apartment.)



Something that piqued my interest in that post:

> The confusion here comes from our misunderstanding of mathematics. Much of the math that mechanical engineers use is continuous math. This is where we work over a continuous domain, like real numbers. Things like calculus, trigonometry, and differential equations are in this category. This is what most people in the US learn in high school, codifying it as what they think of as “math”.

> In software, we don’t use these things, leading to the conception that we don’t use math. But we actually use discrete math, where we deal exclusively with non-continuous numbers. This includes things like graph theory, logic, and combinatorics. You might not realize that you are using these, but you do. They’re just so internalized in software that we don’t see them as math! In fact most of computer science is viewable as a branch of mathematics. Every time you simplify a conditional or work through the performance complexity of an algorithm, you are using math. Just because there are no integrals doesn’t mean we are mathless.

I'd be interested to hear more about this. What actually defines "math" then?


I've heard computer science described as "applied mathematics". And if mathematics is a branch of philosophy, then perhaps software engineering is a distant branch (or the most cutting-edge frontier) of "applied philosophy".


Obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/435/ (Although apparently Randall forgot to include philosophy in the chart.)


Do you mean a _low_ signal-to-noise ratio?


For Google it's actually high. It seems like they still fall victim to repeating the words over and over (Method 1 for changing your desktop wallpaper: Changing your desktop wallpaper is easy using this quick method, it will quickly allow you to change your desktop wallpaper ...).


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