I suppose you're comfortable with it though. Many people aren't comfortable with even the basic step of starting a random conversation or asking strangers questions/for help.
You don't need to do it, but everyone should probably be at least comfortable/confident striking up conversations with people they don't know.
Did people only talk about themselves? It is probably a rare trait when someone legitimately cares about other peoples inane daily lives.
It would be interesting to actually talk to hundreds of people a week for years, you would probably get really good at categorizing people and predicting where they are in life and what their current concerns are.
> Did people only talk about themselves? It is probably a rare trait when someone legitimately cares about other peoples inane daily lives.
I love this honestly. I talked to people that insurance that talks about their customer, retired prostitute that have reached financial freedom, NEETs, right wingers, and many other curious people. The reality is that most people are sane, and with a little bit of compassion and empathy, it is possible to "see how they get there".
I suppose these extremes are only available online because people won't open these up in physical meetings.
This question comes up every year (I've seen it for the nearly 2 decades of HN), and the answers are never satisfying.
Other industries just don't have an HN equivalent, either for lack of trying or because hackers are good making and using things like HN when others aren't.
That's precisely why we had forums back in the '00s. there were forums for basically everything under the sun - unfortunately they mostly died nowadays. HN is basically just a forum with a single board that got enough recognition - your average forum had more boards than users and was so fragmented it mostly ended up in instadeath after a few months,maybe years
You could build a HN clone for them for that purpose, but I tell you the problem would be onboarding users.
I built a HN clone for someone who wanted it focused on just E-Commerce discussions, but it failed to take off. Also didn't help that the person wanted to monetize it using a pay-to-use model. It never took off.
Of course: for psychology, various other medical fields, and plenty of creative fields a HN-equivalent would be gold.
But it's impossible without their equivalent of @dang managing their equivalent of a forum of smart people who have a deep allergy to being marketed to/advertised at/BS'd or enshitified at. They need a HN-like immune system, often grossly overzealous and way too self-serious, that actively polices things like this.
This is the sort of a smug self-satisfied hot take that makes many non-SWEs recoil from this community.
Outside of tech, there are plenty of thoughtful communities of practice, tended by community leaders no less wise and dedicated than dang.
What HN has is YC. Its the financial estuary -- you come here to make contacts, not friends, and you come here to rub shoulders with people doing the work. And maybe, just maybe, have your own work recognized.
You can get those for much cheaper in e.g. a field like medicine, because promotion tends to happen on the basis of long-term deliverables delivered, rather than vibes about potential hyper scale returns a few years down the road. Simply, professionals are constructed as less desperate/opportunistic in other disciplines.
Other fields, like for example those that abut the artworld, are massively and aerobically served by a wide range of venues. Opportunity and curiosity are evenly distributed among them.
But that's not how our game works. Reputational opportunity is the gravity here, and we are all to some degree opportunists here, of varying degrees of success.
It's centralization. Our secret sauce is centralization.
You’d think so, but then what’s the HN for those various fields?
Their communities of practice tend to enshitify after just a handful of years, turn into professional flame wars on the same old topics, or otherwise ossify into something that just repeats the talking points of the day.
I've been in a number of these communities: you leave for 5 years and come back and it's the same discussions repeated forever, or news posted that's weeks or months out of date. They don't generate, they regurgitate, and slowly.
Another aspect of a WW3 is that people- pretty much ALL people everywhere- who have nothing to do with the war will find their lives threatened or completely changed by it.
I'm less concerned about nuclear escalation than about biological escalation.
It's quite hard to destroy the human world with nukes: you can only blow up big chunks of it, maybe take out enough power plants and supply chains to drop us into a multi-decade or multi-century dark age, or maybe cause a nuclear winter, although the actual risk of that is unclear.
Whereas a year into a major war a kid in his/her basement can release something that is functionally the end of the human species.
We currently have no real safeguards against this. If we ever have descendants, they'll think we were insane during this time period and they'll be right.
> Whereas a year into a major war a kid in his/her basement can release something that is functionally the end of the human species.
Urgh. "No tests, no prototypes".
Imagine trying to write "Hello, World" but there's no programming language. The compilation cycle takes a week. And you can't actually control where the program runs. And also the storage device will be destroyed by light, air, and other programs on your computer if you don't handle it just right.
It is very very clear when people with no molecular biology experience start talking about biology, because it's clear you all have no idea what any part of the process looks like.
Even the vaunted DNA synthesis machines...only synthesize DNA. Which will be completely destroyed if you so much as breathe at it the wrong way (in fact don't breathe on it at all). And that's like step 2, because step 1 is "grow up a candidate organism in sterile conditions, isolate and characterize it".
That stupid longtermism movement is god damn obsessed with this concept, and it's stunning how clueless they are.
It is so frustrating indeed reading about these wildly exaggerated biological claims.
The whole synthesis pipeline requires so much specific equipment and knowledge that at your kid in his/her basement would actually need a whole lab. By the way, good luck purchasing any consumable on sigma from your basement without accreditation. And I hope you have deep pockets because cell medium is expensive.
"Whereas a year into a major war a kid in his/her basement can release something that is functionally the end of the human species."
How?
If a a virus is so deadly, everything it touches dies soon, it would not spread quickly but die out.
If it is very contagious .. but very, very slow incubation time, so it infects the whole world, before becoming a deadly disease ... then I would say it is far beyond the possibility of a basement workshop to remotely design anything like this. I doubt the professional state labs can create something to wipe out humanity. Dramatically disturb? For sure. Covid was not really deadly in comparison, but already problematic.
This type of research requires experimentation (mostly failures) on extremely complex real-world equipment. Same with the nuclear weapons. AI being able to magically figure it out without experimental grounding is pure and absolute fantasy, used by companies like OpenAI and Anthropic as a justification for monopolizing AI R&D. In a sense it's not surprising this idea comes from rationalism-adjacent folks, as rationalism is mostly about the idea that experimentation is irrelevant and you can infer anything using just logic alone.
> In a sense it's not surprising this idea comes from rationalism-adjacent folks, as rationalism is mostly about the idea that experimentation is irrelevant and you can infer anything using just logic alone.
Yeah IIRC Yudkowski famously said something about a super intelligence could derive the theory of gravity correctly by seeing only three frames of a video depicting an apple falling from a tree. This is the same Less Wrong nonsense, rejecting how vital and irreplaceable experimentation is.
There's an infinite number of explanations for the location of an object in three equally time-spaced instances. Not to mention limitations of the measuring equipment itself.
Okay, I’m inclined to agree there.. but I can’t find the reference now, I also read that the worry is that the complexity required is coming down fast, and while maybe it’s not going to happen in a basement , there could be a small scale lab, not subject to rigorous certifications and checks that offers crisper as a service, and ai could be used to .. just perturb a protein a little bit so it doesn’t trigger some known virus black list, and people could just be ordering things online.
>rationalism is mostly about the idea that experimentation is irrelevant and you can infer anything using just logic alone.
Thanks for putting it the way you did. I didn't knew it was meant be that way, but it sort of confirms my suspicion that people who use the term 'rational' and 'logic' loosely often to dismiss an opposing view never really seek experimental results before having a point of view.
> If a a virus is so deadly, everything it touches dies soon, it would not spread quickly but die out. If it is very contagious .. but very, very slow incubation time, so it infects the whole world, before becoming a deadly disease ..
This is a made up equilibrium that actually does not need to exist in nature.
Viruses and bacteria can in fact be both extremely, extremely contagious and extremely, extremely lethal.
> If a a virus is so deadly, everything it touches dies soon,
Trivially: you actually can have a virus that kills everything it touches not soon. Nothing in biology or chemistry or physics prevents it.
> Viruses and bacteria can in fact be both extremely, extremely contagious and extremely, extremely lethal.
Sure, but those two things would tend to work against it becoming a pandemic— unless it managed those two things but also kept its host healthy enough for long enough before becoming lethal to adequately spread it.
I looked into this once, it depends on how splashy the death is. A virus that made people explode instantly into a fine mist of airborne virus particles could be perfectly adequate for a pandemic (although holding off until help arrives might work even better).
I think we can safely assume that OP was picking a bit of a ridiculous hypothetical example to make a point that it’s possible for something to be deadly and transmissible, although in nature Baculovirus in Caterpillars has a similar mechanism (encourages their host to eat a lot, then climb to the top of a plant so when it turns to ooze it infects others) or cordyceps although both of these aren’t as highly transmissible as they hypothetical explode virus.
But the Black Death mixed high contagion and high mortality as an actual example that shows they aren’t mutually exclusive.
What? That's your second strawman in two comments.
Nobody said you claimed they were harmless. People are taking issue with your assertion that biological agents can be either contagious or lethal (not both), and therefore you discount its risk. This implied tradeoff between contagiousness and lethality simply is not enforced by anything in nature.
The natural emergence of a pathogen that's both highly contagious and highly lethal would be a much rarer event than the natural emergence of one that's either contagious or lethal, but we're talking about engineered pathogens. There is no reason to think that pathogens cannot be deliberately created that are both of those things.
Disagree: Most people live in areas dependent on the supply chain. And when the supply chain gets disrupted they aren't going to go peacefully. And there will be enough mobility that areas that could be self-sufficient get hordes descending on them.
Haven't read it, from what Wikipedia says it sounds quite optimistic. Maybe more realistic back when it was written. I also wonder at the President dying when Air Force One went in--there's good reason it's impossible to jump from civilian airliners, but I would be amazed if Air Force One lacked some means of emergency egress--I'm not talking ejection seats, just a door.
(I don't know too much about nuclear level situations so I can be obviously wrong perhaps but here's my take on it)
> supply chains to drop us into a multi-decade or multi-century dark age,or maybe cause a nuclear winter, although the actual risk of that is unclear.
It's defintiely gonna be a hard life if WW3 ever happens but I think with hydroponics and other advancement, a localized community can still have chances of making sense of things.
It definitely wouldn't be this life where we can eat almost anything but it won't be starvation either, hopefully.
For water, we might have to do reverse osmosis or boiling+condensing to remove radiation.
The biggest issue to me seems energy. Solar energy might be hard to get if nuclear storms are made over any region which I do think iirc can even stay till decades.
Temporarily Windmills and then primarily Hydroenergy is still possible tho but it might take some time to rebuild it if it got destroyed by Nuclear attack so energy to just produce food/water is possible but everything to me feels like it would be strictly rationed. You might have some spare energy for Radio.
I am not sure how food is gonna be distributed, perhaps a new system of work would be designed within community where community gives food and you give what the community might need to get work done.
I feel like though we are gonna slowly improve our Energy situations and as we do that, society can progress back to say a mathematician who can work on theorms which might require computers/energy and just computers in general back.
The quality of life would drop but I would consider tho that the people already in war-struck regions where they don't know if they are gonna be the next target of a messy war have their Quality of life significantly dropped as well.
Now the virus point is something that I don't exist similar to Lukan's comment tho.
Oh? A lot of the old-style genetic coders got dumped on the market cheap. The sort of stuff a microbiologist could use to synthesize smallpox. The technique has been demonstrated, although on a harmless virus. The market has shifted to outsourcing to big companies (who carefully check every order against known dangers) that have much higher capital costs but much lower per-letter costs, but that didn't invalidate the old lab bench techniques.
Covid, ahem, could have been designed in a lab to be an "ideal" bioweapon. As far as viruses go it approximated just about the best bioweapon we could have made with current technology.
- very deadly
- asymptomatic spreading for a couple days
- spreads easy
- no tests/vaccine (early on)
It did kill a lot of people, that's for sure, and caused a huge disruption. But was far less disruptive, imo, than e.g. a nuke in multiple big cities would have been, even if the death toll was similar.
Without a vaccination, it killed 12.9% of people who were infected, killing mostly older people and people who had multiple pathologies (eg. hypertension).
That’s 12.9% of hospital inpatients. All estimates I’ve seen for infection fatality rate — that is, mortality rate among all those infected — place it around 1–2%
It doesn’t kill 13% of people infected, only about 1%. Just look at the number of cases reported compared to the number of deaths. That paper was reporting 13% mortality rate among those admitted to the hospital, not among all those infected.
Smallpox, which the only remaining samples exists in a couple of secure facilities controled by superpowers for use making vaccinations in case they are wrong about their only being a few samples controled by superpowers. Everyone with an ounce of sense knows bioweapons infect both sides and nuetral parties who are no longer neutral once you infect them. It like mustard gas but worse no one other than suicidal terror groups want them and they dont have the facilities equipment samples or knowhow.
>Smallpox, which the only remaining samples exists in a couple of secure facilities controled by superpowers...
I used to believe that, too, until the Russians found a few vials in a random storage cabinet. The fact is we have no idea how many samples exist and where they all are.
Fortunately, we already know how to make a smallpox vaccine.
Not only that, but we have currently functioning distribution networks for pox vaccines. AIUI, the MPox vaccine is just a smallpox vaccine that happens to also work for MPox.
Yep! I count sects of Christianity among those groups and you're right that there are many more just waiting for the right situation and leader to really push them into full blown eschatology.
You mean the same smallpox that ran rampant in a world without vaccines and failed to destroy the world, and was still present while a humans fought a bunch of conventional wars?
> As if some people are born as cost centers, like it’s the genetic programming for pupillary distance.
I literally said the opposite of it. The classification is descriptive, and frequently reevaluated. It'd not a property of a person, but a function of where they currently are in the org chart.
> If you want to be a profit center, be one.
Sure.
> When the body is in danger of dying should it stop healing the fingernails or the brain?
Nothing is dying, though. The body that is the org needs both kinds of centers to function. Like any other system that resists entropy, it has parts that are sacrificed so other parts are preserved.
The brain is the most obvious cost center, consuming nutrients without doing anything to directly provide them. Legs move us towards food, but also away from it, so they're a wash. Eyes and ears are redundant with nose, in these lean times. Hands are essential to pick up food that's in a container we can't fit our face in. Mouth too. Digestive tract, on the other hand, is always complaining for more food and never generating any itself, so it has to go.
Once we've fired everyone but the C-suite, marketing, and accounts receivable, we'll have the most efficient, profit-center only company in existence!
Ah, so this is why many companies end up full of sociopaths who contribute nothing to the actual revenue of the company: they all managed to weasel themselves into the “profit centers” while the chumps doing actual work that keeps the lights on remain in the “cost centers”.
As it is when I go to some fast food places they greet you in one voice (possibly a central ordering system) and you get a second voice that interrupts (local people I suspect) and takes over. It's weird.
This is a better idea. Put the headset on a delay so AI can inject the requisite politeness. Construction workers don’t have to turn screws by hand so why shouldn’t service workers have a tool that helps them give great customer service?
Those pre-ordering recordings asking if I'm using an app are already horrible enough as it is. Offloading basic human politeness to machines would be even worse.
If someone is being forced by an AI to be polite to you, is it really still basic human politeness? Or is it some weird, different, corporate-hellscape-mediated thing
Less offensive than a completely meaningless forced "please" and "thank you" coming from an employee who only does it because if they don't they are punished.
The thing is the asians are dressed / made up in a confusing way. Koreans don't on the street don't typically look like that, whereas say a Japanese person might.
It would be a better test if it were from the collarbone-up, no clothes or makeup.
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