I agree with your take but interestingly it seems to be both an argument for, and against, calling it a spectrum. Humans are so good at adapting/conforming/masking, and we adjust ourselves toward a common accepted way of behaving, which further confounds the difficulty in understanding the problem.
I think the "spectrum" analogy has reduced stigma overall, especially toward people with poor social skills. But it isn't always helpful.
Yep it's tough to be optimistic. I like to think about a micro-meteorite falling on my head. It's possible at any moment, and yet I always ask myself why I'm not worried about it.
The best advice that anyone can give you is to stop looking at social media, or reduce it by 90+%. The kind of "depression" or "despair" you express is a symptom of doom scrolling.
My next advice is a question - If you can't enjoy today, why do you think you would enjoy tomorrow, even if everything in life were perfect? "One day at a time" is really good advice. Do something tangible to mark your successes or failures on this one single day, and then rinse and repeat tomorrow. If you are "failing" too much, then recalibrate your expectations until you can mark several points of success, no matter how small. "I read my work email" or "I did zero youtube".
My non-expert prediction is that LLMs will ruin the youth's coding skills. Anyone in a deep dev discussion will have to have instinctual knowledge that LLMs can't teach, and their value will be apparent when non-trivial tasks arise. And remember, a micro-meteorite could fall on our heads at any time!
> movement in this country that defines itself largely by opposing what its perceived enemies support
I think that some of the more devious politicians realized that a "partitioning" of beliefs creates populations of in-groups and out-groups which are then manipulated against each other. Many "basic" facts are getting challenged just to create the controversy. Controversy reinforces tribalism, which in turn makes people more controllable.
There's probably just some ~Wordpress dev who picked from a selection of B-Roll. The CEO probably marginally understands bread and isn't a raisin french toast peanut butter freak.
I've spent probably 200 hours with MoonScript, was obsessed with it for a bit, and love it 90% of the time. The problem is that MoonScript's grammar is INCREDIBLY permissive. Common typos(often involving spaces) don't break your code, whereas in Lua or Python the mistake wouldn't compile.
MoonScript is awesome but I lean on compilers pretty heavily to catch my mistakes, so I sadly and regrettably admitted that I was more productive with other toolchains.
I know a lady whose entire job was literally replaced by an Excel spreadsheet that I created in a few nights of intense VB programming. It wasn't my intention to "eliminate jobs". Anyways, I got basically nothing "extra" from the company for that extra-credit work. Moral of the story is that there are plenty of problems to be solved but our compensation is only based on what we can negotiate.
> The way they've worded this betrays the internalization of their suffering as a MS developer.
While I feel less strongly about this Xbox/printing example, I remember Bill Gates saying "I reboot my computer every day" which is a similar mindset-- this culture has been forced to adopt a certain form of "hygiene" due to that same culture NOT adopting hygiene preemptively when they built their systems.
Every attempt at escaping mutability basically kills the language in the mainstream because so much of "real" programming is just bit-twiddling that gets too verbose when immutability is involved. It's a good question whether Rust nudges the world toward functional/declarative spiritual purity by placing constraints on mutation. I'm betting that No, it doesn't.
I use "The Boring Report" for this. It helped wean me off sensational websites, including hackernews, because I was able to get my "fix" without addictive toxicity. Some of the summaries were hilarious though, like five sentences explaining that an announcement was made, but not the actual announcement.
Not that the authors were necessarily doing this, but I think that simply attempting to associate misinformation vulnerability with mental illness really misses the whole point.
Fake news rewards a belief choice that healthy people indulge in every day.
While not wanting to get too into a religious debate, I think that religion teaches us that belief does not require evidence, but reward. I saw a video of someone making an elaborate orange juice for church. Price of admission- if you want that orange juice and spend time with 100 friendly people, is that you have to assent to a belief system.
This effectively teaches individuals that, if an organization can create an "Atmosphere of Plausibility" or "Illusion of Consensus", then the individual has permission to enter the tribe by accepting a belief. From there, an "us versus the world" bond is established, and outside groups/nonbelievers who want to "destroy the bond" or "destroy the group" are considered hostile.
This relates to fake news because we are trained that a belief requires minimal evidence as long as the social opportunities it affords are substantial. In fact, the greater the leap of defiance against evidence, demonization of "experts", etc, the more that a tribal bond is reinforced.
Since I've already crossed a line by discussing religion, I'll refrain from addressing politics aside from saying that this theory of "Belief Bonding" seems to fit with some paradoxes in American Politics quite well.
This reminds me of discussions about superfluous information in human language sentences. Consider the phrase "that man is bad" versus "that man bad". Somewhat crappy example, but basically yes, an idea can be conveyed in a more efficient representation, but what is lost through compaction is redundancy in a noisy environment.
If all you're doing is parsing "Alexa" out of the air... you're going to have a bad time because realistically, there is a contextual requirement. In AI applications, a proof-of-concept is great, but 99.9% accuracy is basically useless. Think if computer RAM is accurate 99.9% of the time... that's a broken tool.
If it takes 2 seconds to say "Alexa", that's 43,200 2-second chunks in a day, but if the listener is using a sliding window at 60hz, that's 5.2 million opportunities to screw up each day. 99.9% success of parsing a 2-second slice of audio is insufficient.
At some point, no matter how much training you do for ONLY the word "Alexa", you're going to start getting diminishing returns, in which the model to reach desired accuracy will start getting bigger and bigger for less and less improvement. Logical context analysis can easily bridge the gap for much larger gains.
Honestly this whole thread is very pedantic. Popularity doesn't define a feature, and the writer probably just plucked the word "feature" from a few not-great options.
Either way, general grumpiness about Rust being used to write an OS may be a reaction to the hype, but plenty of people have expressed interest in an OS written in Rust, if not for any other purpose than to challenge Rust's basic claims.
In flight school lore, during a training exercise, a plane righted itself from "uncontrollable flat spin" after ejection. Basically, pilot input can fight against the natural stability of the plane's design.
Also:
> During a training mission from Malmstrom Air Force Base, on Feb. 2, 1970, his F-106 entered an uncontrollable flat spin forcing him to eject. Unexpectedly, the aircraft recovered on its own and made a gentle belly landing and skidding for a few hundred yards on a field near Big Sandy, Montana, covered by some inches of snow.
I got sucked into a clickbait recipe video for "2 ingredient cake". The video was just over 10 minutes long, which I think puts it in a different monetization category on youtube. I spent wayyy too much time out of my life trying to find out what 2 ingredients are in the cake.
I feel like every comment on HN of mine now lately is just defending ChatGPT, but I don't think that's a reason to self-censor my comments... yet.
I was watching a car chase on youtube yesterday and used an LLM to tell me the city location based on a description of the news station logo. So that was a "niche" I guess. I also got it to teach me how to use the https://gene.iobio.io/ software as I was using it, and I'm pretty good at it now! I asked it to help me to understand the connotations of several similar sentences in another spoken language I'm learning. It's helped me with understanding property tax appraisal records. We use it at work daily to analyze code, it shortens research by 30% or so. Calling it "niche" is 100% correct: yes it's very good at its "niches" which happen to be... almost everything except math? Have it craft a choose-your-own-adventure detective story and get back to me, because that niche is surprisingly fun.
If you can predict the implications of this technology or make an insightful assessment beyond "we don't have flying cars yet" ... let me know.
There are plenty of situations where averaging two safe-but-opposite inputs would cause a crash. For instance, if you're holding hands/handcuffed with someone and walking toward a pole, you must both either go left, or both go right. This is a very common scenario in life and we have many solutions for the problem.
In the Air France situation, there's no way for the plane to "know" which pilot's input is correct, so I don't have a good answer, but "just average two drastically different inputs" seems crazy.
I see a lot of Navy pilots say "fingers and toes" to ground themselves, prevent white-knuckling, and as a "reality check". I started doing it in moments in life where I recognize that I am getting intense or lost in the moment. I've even used the phrase to calm other people down.
I think the "spectrum" analogy has reduced stigma overall, especially toward people with poor social skills. But it isn't always helpful.