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Fortunately I store all my knowledge offline in my brain

Unfortunately its capacity is not very big


My processing power is also weak :(


My processing power was weak before LLM era, now it is extra weak.


In China, I would see kids who must have been 7 years old running around the streets or on public transit without adult supervision.

It seems like a much healthier way to live than in constant fear.


depends. my kids school in china didn't allow me to let my kids bike to school without supervision. (well, actually, they couldn't stop me from sending them to school alone, but they would not let them out unless i was there to pick them up. (there was only one crossing on the route, and that was close to the school and didn't have a lot of traffic)

in germany on the other hand, there was a case where parents demanded a school bus for a 7yr old, but the court said the kids could take the public train to school on their own.


In the US, if you are in a residential neighborhood with a lot of kids, its also fairly typical for them to be out finding their playmates.

I would say if you're in a neighborhood where there's just like 1-2 kids, it may not be that typical. The kids parents might do more scheduled playdates.

Unfortunately in the US there are people that get annoyed about kids playing. And they are also the same kind of person that escalates things to the authorities / complains a lot about trivial things.

There's a Netflix documentary about one such sad case https://www.netflix.com/title/82018736


This. Those of my friends with kids moved to neighborhoods and suburbs where other households of a similar age existed.

You see this in SF, with singles primarily living in the Marina, Russian Hill, or Rincon Hill and then upgrading to Mission Bay once they have kids.


I agree. I "revived" the comment by clicking on the timestamp ("33 minutes ago") and then clicking "vouch". I believe only users with a score of 200+ (points? karma?) can do so.


Been here 8 years, always wondered how comments died. I assumed it was algorithmic. TIL


“[dead]” usually means algorithmic (could be as simple as an account registered via Tor that hasn’t been vouched for enough times). “[flagged][dead]” usually means it was flag-killed by users, except I’ve been noticing some AI written comments that are flagged instead of just dead, but they’re minutes old so unlikely to be user flagged.


There's been an "AI comment detect" algo trialed and running for a month or so now.

If you see any probably human comments tagged as Mr Roboto either vouch (weak indication, needs a few others to boost) or email hn@<this site> for dang / tom to cast a meat based eyeball over it.


Does the account registration date also matter? I have 2110 points and I dont think I have the vouch button


you have to go into the actual [dead] comment itself (eg, click on the datestamp) for the vouch button to appear on that post, just like flagging comments several layers deep


Many countries have far better service without tipping, China and Japan come to mind.


Japan is amazing in some places, that you can order with a tablet apps then you pick up your food yourself when it arrived. Very minimum interaction and employees needed.


If I go to a restaurant and it’s all handled through a tablet I leave. I can get that treatment at the airport.


It's good for some neurodivergent people.

Overly-solicitous hospitality staff can make me tense.

At the far end of the scale are bathroom attendants who want to help me wash/dry/moisture my hands after using the facilities.


Or the sales staff in the fancier retail stores that after I tell them I'm just looking around, will proceed to stand behind me and stare at me.

Maybe they judge me too poor for their products and it's an attempt to get me to leave...

>At the far end of the scale are bathroom attendants who want to help me wash/dry/moisture my hands after using the facilities.

I've never ran into these and I hope I never will.


You can order drinks at a bar and on an airplane, what's your point? Do you go out to eat specifically to talk to cashiers? If i want fine dining, being served is part of the experience. But if I want a good bowl of ramen, I can't see how using a tablet is some sort of deal breaking issue. What vital experience do you get giving a regular food order to a cashier?


The market works better in China: Competition is fierce and nowadays with online reviews most restaurants are so scared of a bad review that they go the extra mile and staff go all out as soon as you raise a slight concern.


Yes, and South Korea too.

Efficient service, good food, good prices (for a foreigner), no tipping expected or even possible.


"There’s nothing magic about the $40 trillion number, and we can grow our way out of that" - Bessent

He also claims the number is temporary because of tariff refunds, and that they will reduce the debt with more tariffs.


He's right, the number is temporary because of tariff refunds: as the refunds are issued, it will grow.


We'll grow our way out whenever the mythical trickle down works


Grow our way out of that means hitting the $50 trillion number.


"I'm not bald, there's nothing special about 300 hairs, which I currently have, compared to 300,000, which I used to have making me suddenly bald"

Just because there's no magical boundary number doesn't mean a metric can't become increasingly more shitty, and suddenly turn into a bad outcome. Not every response is linear.


The best lies contain truth in them. Yes, there's nothing magical about $40 trillion. It's true, nominally. But if the conveniently-round number, in dollars (an arbitrary unit) and base-10 (an arbitrary base) prompts some people to poke their heads up and start asking questions, that's a good thing. Mind you $10 trillion might have been a better time, but, $40 trillion is a better time than $100 trillion.


Maybe there is no magic about the absolute number. How about magic of the debt servicing costs that are paid by Joes and Janes


We will grow to $50T before you know it, and this headline will look silly.


"grow" == "inflate"


You ask "Why destroy physical books?"

I ask "Why save physical books?"

If they are truly rare, then they are likely not valuable, otherwise there would be more copies or their contents could be found elsewhere.

Owning and storing physical books is not free, there is a real cost. Even owning and storing the scans is not free, especially when IP rights and challenges get involved, since a scanned book with no distribution is worthless.

I disagree with putting books on a pedestal and saying they must be protected. If they were any good, they would stand on their own, but if we have to run a moral crusade to save them, perhaps we are all better off if they're destroyed.


>If they are truly rare, then they are likely not valuable,

Sometimes I don't even know how to respond to comments here. I don't want to be rude, but you just have to give this a moment of thought. Is all the media that you find valuable common? I know that's not the case for me based on my own experience.


So these books are not worth anything because they have so few copies but they are still worth including in only their models? Seems a bit contradictory


Not really. A trivial example: smut novels. I'm sure AI companies want them for training so their models work better as AI girlfriends/boyfriends, but I doubt much would be lost if the bottom 50% (by readership) of such books went into a woodchipper.


You're confusing the worth of the book and its content. A book can be valuable (ie a rare bible print), whereas its content is not (we have all the bible variants copied).


Good point, why waste time deciphering old badly burnt scrolls when anything worthwhile should have been preserved.


If the Romans had the printing press we'd have a lot more of those scrolls.


That's what state libraries are for, although I understand that sometimes is hard to wrap around the concept of using public money for something different than producing money.


Libraries tend to regularly destroy books as well. And they aren't scanning them first either.

Doesn't that make them even worse?


"State libraries" such as the Library of Congress. (Which is not regularly destroying books, AFAIK.)


What you personally find important is not what everyone else finds important or inspiring. Destroying something takes it away from every single future human being.


> If they are truly rare, then they are likely not valuable

"likely" being the keyword here, what about heavily censored books?


> If they are truly rare, then they are likely not valuable, otherwise there would be more copies or their contents could be found elsewhere.

The Gutenberg bible is rare, its content is not rare, and some would argue that the content itself is not valuable, and yet the Gutenberg bible is valuable.

Same can be said about many books.


Right but is an AI company going to destroy a Gutenberg bible? No, as you said the content is not rare, and that's what they want.


So old books are valuable because old paper is valuable? I understand why the Gutenberg bible might be valuable but do we really need thousands of mass paperback novels?


Ask: valuable to whom and why?

- Reader: narrative

- Collector: scarcity of the physical artifact

- AI Company: language samples (quantity, variety), facts


They may have been made scarce by many methods, perhaps a low print run; court rulings; burning in a revolution to suppress dissenting views; scanning to avoid competitors to get the content and prevent other LLMs to reference, search, or train on it. Perhaps it's a particular edition that is rare (e.g., the first edition had a different description and was thoroughly changed in the second edition of the book, which may be important to have all the facts from someone's biography).


> If they are truly rare, then they are likely not valuable, otherwise there would be more copies or their contents could be found elsewhere.

That is literally the opposite of how it works.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scarcity


Nobody's said it in this thread so I'll drop it here where you ask "Why save physical books?"—

The problem isn't with morals or copyright. What we're up in arms about is case law. Past rulings have implied that destruction of books significantly contributes to the process being "transformative". This encourages companies to destroy the books. I think this is really dumb.

Why save physical books? It's because the reason to destroy them isn't good. If you think there's too many bad books out there, that's a different argument. Maybe your fight is against consumerism, I don't know.


I agree with you for the same reason I think McDonald's is the best restaurant in the world!


Massively missing the point. Having paper books isn't the point. Preserving copies of books is the point, so history isn't lost. Often those books only exist as paper copies due to their age. I don't really care what happens to the paper copies, only that their content is preserved in a way that is accessible. Anthropic's private servers aren't it.


> If they are truly rare, then they are likely not valuable, otherwise there would be more copies or their contents could be found elsewhere.

That's what I keep saying about the van Goghs I burn to heat my home but everyone is still mad at me!


Hope this helps:

https://archive.ph/SQQ97


Sorry, what was the problem we were originally trying to solve again?


“Guys, guys, guys, can we take a step back here? What problem are we really trying to solve?”

https://medium.com/conquering-corporate-america/10-tricks-to...


Oh my god. That was not satire?


Living a meaningful life. My yak has too much hair though.


Isn't that directionally what OpenAI's core message was for a while?

A large amount of people building their own customized apps for themselves.

Similarily, everyone becoming their own accountant / lawyer / other professional services.


> Similarily, everyone becoming their own accountant / lawyer / other professional services.

These professional services will defend themselves with gatekeeping. Suddenly it doesn't depend anymore on the quality of your legal advice, but whether it has been stamped by a qualified Lawyer. It doesn't matter that your taxes are correct, but whether they are submitted by an approved accountant. Etc.


It's not just gatekeeping though. The reason you get a qualified, credentialed structural engineer to sign off on your house instead of just YOLOing the build is so that you (and your insurance company) can sue their pants off if it collapses.


If a future version of Claude ever gets less error prone than a human, I might prefer the smaller chance of a building collapse from Claude than the larger but insured chance from a human engineer.


That future version of Claude will still be mediated by an error prone human who in this case would be a non-engineer. So even if Claude is not error prone, it could be giving correct answers to the wrong questions and correct designs for the wrong constraints because the human getting Claude to do things doesn't know any better.


Except in extreme cases of fraud or negligence, you won't win a suit against your accountant or lawyer.


They already do protect themselves. It’s what licensure is for in large part. I’m not saying licensure doesn’t have other benefits, many are plainly obvious. But licensure is also used as plain old gatekeepong.


Probably true, but the rubber-stamp process will be a race to the bottom.


I have found Chinese quality control to be quite good in my daily life here.

Or was that your point?


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