Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | lubujackson's comments login

Just read an interesting sci-fi novel grappling with this question very directly - Blindsight by Peter Watts, if anyone is interested.

The problem with sci-fi and this matter is that the author can portray anything that suits his/her ideas. Can Rorschach exist as described? Who knows.

Watts also believes in the Ganzfeld effect, as per Starfish, yeah so his beliefs in the mind should definitely be taken with a grain of salt.

What's wrong with the Ganzfeld effect? I can experience it personally even without a uniform visual field by suppressing saccades for about thirty seconds.

Or, at least, I could. It seems I lost the knack of controlling saccades. When I was younger I was able to suppress saccades and induce nystagmus-like eyeballs movement.

Ah, I still can do it after some tries. Amplitude of induced nystagmus seems to have diminished though. And it's more uncomfortable than it was.


He believes, or rather entertains, the parapsychology claims that the effect relates to ESP

https://www.rifters.com/real/STARFISH.htm#references


Juxtapose this legal process with DOGE hoovering (in more ways than one) data willy-nilly from everywhere. The dissonance between THIS uninteresting DB schema being so rigorously protected while massive amounts of sensitive data is completely misappropriated is painful.

Haven't tried Numi, but I made a calculator with variables as a side project on a whim: https://calc.li/ - it is online, but there is no backend and you can save the whole page as an offline file if you want, using localStorage for state.

Typing “2”, “+”, “3” on an iPhone in Safari gets it to display “23+”, which doesn’t appear correct to me ? Looks cute otherwise.

I feel like identifying problems is the most important skill for success. Especially with AI, (but even before that) SEs are more often "editing" rather than "writing" code, and most of your time is either fixing odd states or anticipating them.

Let's also note we are aware of the possible corridor of impact, so if you don't live near the equator in Central America or Africa the chance of hitting YOUR city is 0%. News articles conveniently leave out this detail so they can continue to spike fear and clicks with every micro-refinement.

Funny story, I'm a SWE and my wife used to work as a marketing manager. Her boss wanted her to make something similar, a heat map over a U.S. map. Except he wanted it to work in Excel. She asked me about it and I told her I could code something like that, but no way inside Excel...

Sure enough, she hacked on it for a while and was able to actually build a functioning heat map in Excel. I have no idea how it works. I've been a dev for 20+ years and that remains one of the more voodoo tech things I've seen!


In one of the most consequential hacks ever, the Chinese broke into RSA in order to then access Lockheed Martin and steal classified info.

They did it by embedding an Adobe Flash object in one cell of an Excel file, which self-executed when the Excel file was opened. Desktop Excel is insane.


Excel is not merely Turing-complete, but a step above, able to achieve dark things best left unsaid.

Set default zoom on the sheet to very small and map out states by cells - treat them like pixels.

So much yuck.


I did this back in the early/mid 1990's. I wrote a program that could convert .gif files to Excel using the cells as pixels. I converted a pic of a supermodel and sent the excel file to my buddies. They were surprised to say the least.

Excel has a store with many types of choropleth charts for free. Takes literally two minutes to make a US heatmap.

I don't think it's doomerism. I started my career during the dotcom boom. I think we are right now in a transition period that is little bit of the start of the boom (just add AI! is the new "just add Internet!") and also a bit of the scorched earth after the initial boom, when all the tourists (CS is easy money!) are rerouted to other careers if at all possible.

This also means it is a great time to start a small, profitable business because labor is undervalued.


Big tech layoffs were a global issue and U.S. tech firms hire (and fire) globally. So like it or not, U.S. economic issues have a downstream impact around the world.

Sec 175 especially hurt small to mid-size tech companies (especially fast growing ones...) which I imagine amplified the problem across the board.


Meta's rep continues to degrade - first they steal from copyright holders, but then they admit to leeching? Not even a 1:1 ratio?!

/kickban


Seriously though, where is that magnet link? That's the only question on my mind when these articles come up.

>This torrent list is the “ultimate unified list” of releases by Anna’s Archive, Library Genesis, Sci-Hub, and others. By seeding these torrents, you help preserve humanity’s knowledge and culture. These torrents represent the vast majority of human knowledge that can be mirrored in bulk.

>These torrents are not meant for downloading individual books. They are meant for long-term preservation. With these torrents you can set up a full mirror of Anna’s Archive, using our source code and metadata (which can be generated or downloaded as ElasticSearch and MariaDB databases). We also have full lists of torrents, as JSON.

https://annas-archive.org/torrents


annas archive has a whole section on torrenting

So just to be clear:

- they knew the assist was dangerously broken - while people drove around with this dangerous code running they worked on improving the code so they could say it is now "fixed" - released the update

I see how this is the most... efficient... way to handle the situation, from a monetary perspective. But this is not how I, or anyone I know, would handle life-critical code. Not to bring politics into yet another thread, but this is not a smart or human way to handle things.

First, you disable the damn road assist. It's an optional feature, FFS!


I think "power steering assist" here is another technical term that misleads people who aren't car nerds. It's not some kind of lane assist feature, it's the system that makes the steering wheel easy to turn at low speeds. Anyone who's used to driving cars built after 1950 or so would not consider it an optional feature.

Join us for AI Startup School this June 16-17 in San Francisco!

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: