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> It's controversial because of how he makes fun about the people using and promoting other languages, like Rust. I thought it was hilarious.

But doesn't that completely ruin the point of the post? I agree with you that something feeling 'fun' is more personal, and that the criteria of what constitutes fun are up to the user. The author doesn't agree with that - you can either adopt the former point or promote the Right Way of having fun. Those snarky remarks made me put this blog into the second category. When you're so invested in your argument, even a fundamentally harmless post about having fun will get that language wars hit piece subtext.

If anything, they seem more like desperate cheap shots than arguments. Other people, the NSA etc dislike unsafe-by-default code? Well, they're just authoritarian anti-fun ideologues! Rust users bring up some of the same criticisms I recall in the last paragraph? Well.. uh... that borrow checker, am I right?


I think he was just making fun of people who inflate the importance of their language and their way too much and it should be taken in that spirit. There are good reasons why all these new languages like Rust and Zig popped up in the last 10 years or so and started getting traction. Obviously a lot of people were unhappy having C/C++ as their only choice for performance focused or system level programming. At least in the games business it still seems to be doing well.

But to get back to the point of the article, for fun solo projects, when the 'mood for coding' comes over, I may be biased, but I think C++ is still the best. It's like when building a prototype. You just want to test your idea and see how it looks and play with it and just worry about bugs and program correctness later. While coding it in Rust you'd have to spend extra time determining the correct memory ownership relations and that can break the flow.

After programming for 20 years, it doesn't come nearly as often as it used to, but I still get that feeling from time to time.


The reason why this is a difficult problem is that physically emulating the flicker requires emulating the beam and phosphor decay, which necessitates a far higher refresh rate than just the input refresh rate. You'd need cutting-edge extremely high refresh rate monitors. The best monitor I found runs at 500hz, but pushing the limits like that usually means concessions in other departments. Maybe you could do it with that one.

If Recall is all that needs to be fixed, it can just be disabled pretty easily from systems that have it (I presume that most don't, and it doesn't even exist on my current Windows PC).

LTSB/LTSC is very much viable for businesses that can obtain it legit through bulk licensing as a build of Windows Enterprise. The complicated process above is intended for individuals, who can't get buy it directly. Even then, it's more oriented towards HN users and such, not the average person.


Looking at all the articles about this issue, this seems to be more about a bug in the Windows cleanup tool that lets the user delete old update files. Maybe the tool isn't working properly, or it's flagging update files as deletable and they're not supposed to be. Admin users can still delete whatever they want manually, unless the system or something else is currently accessing the file. The OS sometimes protects its system files by having them be owned by the SYSTEM user, but the admin can take ownership of them to delete them. This hasn't changed and I can't see it changing.


I don't think it's that bad, the duration is certainly not enumerated in hours, at least on Windows. It depends on how high a standard you have, but since other people were long aware of the issue, third-party scripts and software to automate a lot of the tedium exist and work pretty well, anything else can be smoothed out by hand.


Freeing up the disk space in a VM is definitely an hours long struggle the first time, must count research time into it as well. I did it last year. Don’t forget the privacy tweaks and research. Sure you could script most of it, like anywhere.


so you don't trust ms but you trust a script from some guy in his mom's basement in Russia?


Any such tools that are worth their salt have their code posted publicly, you can check it yourself. Most of it isn't some groundbreaking stuff, a lot can be stripped out by just changing registry values and other deeply-ingrained settings that would take a long time to find and edit by hand. I also don't see how "trust into Microsoft" factors in here - it's not about trust, we know there's telemetry that can't be disabled through standard settings, and I know there are features I'd like to uproot entirely (like deep OneDrive integration).


Yeah I can't deal with rug pulls every version. I use xmonad on linux, with no rug for anybody to pull on me.


> Don't expect people to profoundly connect to music that is nothing more than a collection of regurgitated ideas.

Music is one of the worse examples to pick for claiming that people don't regurgitate in art. Everything in music builds off one another, and a lot of music (especially music that's seen as lower quality) is described as being just collections of cliches. The reason why "sad music" sounds sad isn't because there's something about instrument choices, key, chords, melody, tempo etc that is measurably intrinsically "sad" - it's because these are stereotypes that the creator has combined together to invoke a certain association in the listeners. If you were extra cynical, you could describe the entire musical field as people largely conditioning themselves over generations to like certain qualities of sound and hate others.

And that applies to almost all art. Basically everything people make is based on stuff that came before that - and it's frustrating to encounter hubris that assumes there's some magical creative process going on inside human brains that will never ever be even approximated by any other means.


> it's frustrating to encounter hubris that assumes there's some magical creative process going on inside human brains that will never ever be even approximated by any other means

Maybe we will, maybe we won't. In the same way maybe we will be able to create life artificially, maybe not. The AI I am critiquing today is what Tamagotchi is to human life. Sure, you can get attached to it and think it's expressing real emotions and wonder why other people are being "hubris" by not realizing how wonderful it is.


I think that a reasonable definition of counterculture is moving against the dominant culture, rather than just doing something uncommon. And if this is it, it absolutely can't be defined as counterculture.

Look at a country as religious as the US - even if it's seemingly getting barely less religious than before, the dominant culture is absolutely run by religion. A political candidate, let alone a presidential candidate who's openly non-religious would almost always be seen as an abhorrent non-starter. Public servants swear on Bibles and school children recite a mantra to prove their belief in a "nation under God". Basically the entire ideological landscape is run by religion, from the issues that people talk about to the stances they take on them. You don't even have to be religious to be influenced by all this. It doesn't really matter if a believer is committed enough to go to a church, all of them are contributing at least a little bit.

And then, just as my own unrelated opinion... the thing we associate with counterculture was always a radical disregard for arbitrary standards, an ability to pinpoint and reject the things in the world that are unjustly enforced by society. In that way, doing anything religious can never be counterculture - how can you envision a rebel with a capacity to question everything wholeheartedly believing a system of preconceived dogma?


In my city the mayor cuts the ribbon at a new abortion clinic, so for our community being religious is an outlier.


This misses the bigger point of my argument. The whole reason why abortion is seen as this religious issue is the system of religious thought that's ingrained in American society. It was created as a wedge issue for religious voters, and this system grew so much that nowadays it's seen as this intrinsically religion-dividing issue, as if it's just natural for it to be this way. The reason why you (and possibly the mayor) see opening a clinic as this big act of secularism is because the underlying religion is deeply integrated into their community.

And the second half of my argument still stands. Someday, religion may become a minority ideology. But it will never be a rebellious counterculture.


No the overwhelming majority of the city loves aborting children. Being pro-life is not a majority opinion whatsoever. Maybe you live in the rural south, I live in a Democrat-lead blue city.


No one is aborting "children".


> maybe drive by wire car manufacturers could start adding a "oh crap" manual handle to physically disengage power and apply some type of physical friction brake

It depends on the manufacturer, but I think this is already the case with Tesla cars? The brake specifically isn't drive-by-wire, it's an electrically assisted hydraulic brake - so even if a malicious actor could get the car to not do the assist part anymore, you can still stop by pressing the pedal hard.

I feel like bollards and other form of separating roads from pedestrians are unviable on the large scale. I hope manufacturers start focusing more on sandboxing any internet-connected parts of their software and leaving the whole car-driving part inaccessible from any of that.


But the thing is that this isn't even the first jump in terms of making photo tampering easier - this has already happened in the past. Both naturally as these processes matured, but also when manual editing has been superseded by digital editing.

The introduction of digital photo editing (and especially making it accessible to everyone) also brought the skill floor down by several orders of magnitude. To my knowledge, people back then were also saying things akin to "you can't trust anything now". Before that point, you needed skills in working with physical photographs, and had to be a visual artist to some extent. It was a pretty niche skill set. Now, any random user can fire up some software and start doing things that used to be impossible or unthinkably hard, after just some hours of training. And that was just the beginning - photo editing became easier and more accessible over the decades to come.

So why didn't this "data collapse" happen then? I'm not saying it's impossible, but people in this comment thread are acting like there's some hard barrier in technological accessibility, before which everything is good and trustworthy, and after which there's apocalyptic consequences, permanent decay of trust, erasure of history, etc. Is it a barrier or a sliding scale? What makes people so confident that it's this exact development that will finally tip the scales for good? And if this was always bound to happen with our technology evolving, should we even fight back?


> So why didn't this "data collapse" happen then? I'm not saying it's impossible, but people in this comment thread are acting like there's some hard barrier in technological accessibility, before which everything is good and trustworthy, and after which there's apocalyptic consequences, permanent decay of trust, erasure of history, etc. Is it a barrier or a sliding scale? What makes people so confident that it's this exact development that will finally tip the scales for good?

I think people tend to get too focused on one narrow thing (e.g. this technology) and loose sight of the context. Some things going on now:

1. AI fakes will take the skill floor down "several orders of magnitude" more.

2. Trust in all kinds of institutions is declining, including the government and media (precisely the ones that were relied on to debunk and discredit fakes in the past).

3. More and more people are getting their information from social media.

tl;dr: "data collapse" hasn't happened yet because, previously we had the institutional capacity to manage airbrushed fakes/photoshops/etc. As the technology gets cheaper, and the institutions get weaker, eventually they won't be able to keep up.


If we made sure Einstein's mind never lost its youthfulness, why would we need a next generation? Imagine the outcomes if any of the well-known, world-renowned geniuses got basically infinite time to pursue any projects of their choosing. To think of new ideas, build atop what they've already discovered. Hell, think of everyone else - one could study or research for decades, with professionals in their fields joining forces with anyone who studied enough to join with them. Needing a constant flow of new generations for new innovations seems like a self-imposed limitation, not an actual necessity.


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