If you met anyone, anyone at all, who’s views on the world hadn’t changed in the last 15 years - and I don’t mean this last 15 years, I mean any 15 year period - what would you think of them?
That isn't a very interesting question. If someone thought that murdering innocents was a bad idea 15 years ago and still thinks it today, gold star. If they think murdering is OK as long as you get away with it, then the length of time they've held that view really doesn't influence how dangerous they are. The nature of the view matters, not how long it is held.
It is quite possible for someone to have thought about their views before they formed them and maintain stable opinions over 15 years because they are aligned with objective reality. That is good. Then there is the opposite where they've got ridiculous views that don't make sense and they stick with them despite all evidence out of stubbornness. That's bad. But again, the exact view and the nature of the evidence is what matters.
What would it mean for someone not to notice that the world is changing? Are we talking people who don't understand that smartphones have been invented? People who can't comprehend that the world is changing are exceptionally rare and almost by definition would need to have mental problems around their ability to form memories.
The world is about as stable as it always has been. World War II isn't even 100 years ago. If someone's view 15 years ago was 'the world is stable' then yes they are going to be facing a lot of contrary evidence. But that is because it is a wildly optimistic view with no foundation in evidence or argument.
Maybe try to approach other people's comments that you're not sure about with a bit more curiosity and less anger/condescension/whateverthisis.
I think their point was more
- attitudes to pg's posts have changed over the last 15 years
- pg's views are pretty consistent about good/bad over the last 15 years
- a lot of the public's (and hn's) attitudes to tech have changed for the worse, people trust tech less
- pg doesn't seem to have noticed/internalised these changes
Some of these things are nuanced, complicated things to think about and explain. Nobody thinks that pg doesn't know smartphones have been invented.
> Maybe try to approach other people's comments that you're not sure about with a bit more curiosity and less anger/condescension/whateverthisis.
Ironically:
1. The term you're searching for with "anger/condescension/whateverthisis" is "curiosity". Typically when I feel curious I ask write a response asking a question.
2. If you're tempted to write "Maybe try to approach other people's comments that you're not sure about with a bit more curiosity" and then "less anger/condescension/whateverthisis" you should pause and consider the utility of asking someone to clarify their intention before making assumptions. I know you don't understand, you know you don't understand. Great time for a "hey, do you mean ...?" style post. I have to admit that sentence got a smile out of me.
It may be infinity, it may be nothing, but it's fundamentally inaccessible to us. All we have is our subjective reality, so the assertion that someone has found objective reality is always false and usually used as a means to deny other people's realities.
> When Wharton died in 1937, without any children, her will bequeathed her library to the sons of two friends of hers. The first, William Royall Tyler, Jr., stored his half in a warehouse on the outskirts of London. The other half went to Colin Clark, who let the books molder for decades at his family castle in Kent until financial troubles prompted his brother to begin selling off chunks of it to various dealers in rare books. Clark’s half was painstakingly recovered and brought back to the Mount, but the other half was destroyed in 1941, during the London Blitz.
Yeah, it’s funny how IBM managed to be both absolutely undeniably corporate and somehow still incredibly beautiful. I think it’s just a testament to the visual pleasure created by knowing someone really truly cared about what they were doing.
A truck will always be a worse car than a car, the question is do you need a car or a truck? If you need a car, get a Neo, if you need a truck, get a Framework. They’re not competing past that initial question.
> Times change, and I work more in R&D space than on legacy codebases, but I still ask it to write something in Python then convert it to the actual language on occasion. I don't know if I'm tricking the context window, forcing alternate pathways, or both, but it works.
My experience with LLMs is that they perform best in one of two modes - either one carefully scoped context or translating between two different contexts without modification - so this modality lines up with that fairly nicely: think in the programming language the LLM thinks "best" in and then translate that to the one you want.
That said, there's often enough structural and conceptual differences between languages that a direct "transliteration" between, say, Python and Go is going to result in some fairly crummy Go, so I'm curious what you see in terms of the fidelity of that translation - do you mostly get "Python written in Go," or does the LLM really do a proper conversion from one language to the other?
I have strict context in place on what I expect from the final language (C# or C++) and I'm frequently left with my jaw open. Used my preferred json library on C++, used LINQ appropriately in C#. Mapped AWS libraries appropriately and used existing credential stores. Certainly better than what I got when I asked for the native version first, which is why I do the hurdle. It feels hacky but it works. In a year it probably won't be necessary.
Haven't dug in on the technicals, but this is coming out of CERN, it looks like - and in that light, the links to "We're hiring" on that page almost feel like a flex...
I'm highly agreeable, and I've had to learn not to be. Knowing when to challenge people - "strategic non-agreeableness" - is extremely valuable. I've also made most of my career off being somewhat neurotic - I've described the core of my job as "finding things to panic about before they happen" (I went on Prozac a while back and caused an incident in the first couple weeks during uptake because my anxiety didn't trigger about something during a deploy). As far as extroversion - friends of mine who are genuine extroverts about went crazy during the pandemic, while I and a few other introvert friends got some of our best work ever done during that period. There's a spectrum - you can't be a misanthrope, but being able to take (and stand) quiet time to focus on a problem is absolutely an asset. With regards to conscientiousness, this often manifests in the workplace as an unwillingness to deviate from the plan when circumstances demand it and a preference for adding process as a kind of panacea for any kind of failure or delay, and at risk of offending the more conscientious among us, I have not found that a recipe for success.
It's really more of just polite suggestion these days, sadly. Except any time they vote against legalized abortion or minority issues. Then the rulings are rigidly enforced.
Legalized abortion needs to be a law, like the democrats promised for decades but never delivered. When the court invents rights then the court can just revoke it. Can't if it's a law.
This is not true. Many laws banning abortion remained on the books, and the current dystopian bounty hunting system that Texas has was designed to evade Roe v Wade.
This is because Roe decided that a woman has a constitutional right to privacy from her state government while she is pregnant, and that the state's natural interest in the pregnancy only allows them to ban abortion in the third trimester.
Casey was not as unanimous of a ruling, but the assenting opinions made it clearer that a woman's right to an abortion before the point of fetal viability was an extension of her own absolute right to her body.
I firmly believe that the right to an abortion is and has always been granted by the wording of the Constitution, but I also think that the issue is too important for Congress to leave it to jokers like Thomas and Alito.
Courts absolutely can nullify laws. That's one of the major purposes of the SCOTUS. And you think this SCOTUS would hesitate to just declare such a law unconstitutional?
Of course the courts can but in practice never do. The 2A community has been dealing with the courts reticence to deal with patently unconstitutional laws for the last 100 years.
SCOTUS literally just de-fanged the Voting Rights Act, specifically the part protecting minority representative districts.
That's why we recently saw every red state pass new congressional district maps which split up minority representative districts and combine the pieces with deep red rural districts.
We will see how that plays out. In this year's elections, Trump is going to be so unpopular that unless he sends goon squads to the polls, the gerrymander might collapse.
In the future, I would certainly like to see a move to smaller, less-stable districts to discourage this behavior.
Indeed; the whole appeal of a gerrymander is essentially to trade depth for breadth in your votes, and if the vote swings just a tiny bit too far the other way, it makes your district count incredibly brittle.
As for the future: yes, absolutely. Uncap the House; let's have districts with 50k-100k people, tops.
Yes and your suggestion otherwise betrays your ill informed idea of how this current court has ruled.
They were practically hand picked to oppose the case law of the two pro-abortion decisions. Their other opinions are broadly _judicially_ conservative which means exactly what you're asking, a hesitancy to nullify laws.
Their opposition to the abortion rulings is largely formed out of a hesitancy to act as pseudo-legilatures. They would not overturn a law that was passed by the government unless it was blatantly unconditional.
Whenever an issue is settled they can't use it to ask for donations. As long as the problem lasts forever they can make money from it. The goal of an organization is that which brings in the money.
Abortion has been a hot-button issue for half a century. It's not that easy to find issues which inspire so much slobbering from the conservative base - because this one is at the intersection of women's rights, babies, and overbearing government responses, conservatives lose their minds over it. It's also a doomed cause - the recent SC mifiprestone case cited that the number of abortions happening in southern states is now greater than it was before the ban.
They're not abandoning this issue, no matter how many GOP leaders force their mistresses into abortions. It's just too good at mobilizing the base.
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