I don’t really know what you’re talking about or how it’s relevant (I know you’re referring to an incident that happened outside of HN).
The guidelines clearly ask us to “be kind” and to not “fulminate”. Your comment was flagged by several community members so there’s a pretty strong consensus that it’s not what we want on HN.
That's...wow. What an absolutely disappointing reply.
If "be kind" is an actual value of HN I have yet to see it in almost 15 years of being active on this forum. This community is generally speaking not kind and fulminating is de rigeur as far as I've been able to surmise.
But whatever. I won't bother you or anyone else on here anymore. Good riddance.
You’re disappointed to discover after 15 years that we expect people to try to be kind and to avoid fulmination? I’m not sure what kind of forum you want this to be, but the guidelines have been pretty consistent about those things for much or all of that time, as has the approach to moderation. Yes people breach the guidelines all the time. That doesn’t stop us reminding people of them and continuing to aim for better. You’re always welcome here if you respect the community and want to make the effort to respect the guidelines.
(So far as I can tell I have never said the words "die slow" in my life. I think you have me confused with someone else; my hip hop conversance begins and ends with Tribe and De La Soul. It's "Thomas", by the way.)
I'm not advocating in doing it for the exposure as a primary reason. And absolutely not to be paid in exposure. 100% agree with the comic there.
I should not have used that word. It is clearly charged with negativity.
Of course I wish everyone would be compensated for their work. I feel that for some types of project, publishing as open source is a great way for people to find and use it. This can give new opportunities.
Exactly which kind of project and under which conditions is up to debate.
I have worked on a few projects that I regret not being able to open source. Mainly not my choice, stakeholders wanted traditional go to market strategies and failed/ran out of money trying to make sales. I can't help but thinking what other opportunities could have arisen have we chose another strategy.
I worked with a guy once whose previous employer, a startup, had been bought by a large well-known entertainment company (famous for running an amusement park or two in Southern California). He told me that when they had the company party, the three founders all got up on stage to thank the employees for their hard work, sacrifice, etc. The first two founders were humble, gracious, struck the right note.
However, alcohol was flowing and when the third founder took the mic he started with: "I just wanna thank everyone here...for making me FUCKIN' RIIIIICH." Didn't raise the mood exactly.
That was Silicon Valley then and it's Silicon Valley today. Folks are just saying the quiet parts louder and louder now.
musk is unstable. and so are the products he has under him. these are not good things to rely on. i got off twitter and now the site's drama doesn't affect me. at the same time, i miss the great content from threads. :(
Uh... maybe because he doesn't want to use technology that gives power to someone like Elon Musk, who is well known for propagating right-wing propaganda.
> At its heart, education is a project of guiding learners to exercise their own agency in the world. Through education, learners should be empowered to participate meaningfully in society, industry, and the planet.
I agree but I have never seen an education system that had this as a goal. It's also not what society or employers actually want. What is desired are drones / automatons that take orders and never push back. Teaching people about agency is the opposite of that.
We are so stuck in a 19th century factory mindset everywhere, GenAI is just making it even more obvious.
Employers want a high-agency leadership class and drones for the individual contributors.
There are systems that nurture agency and leadership. They are the private schools and the Ivy League universities. And many great companies.
Most people don't want to be leaders and be judged based on impact. They want to be judged based on effort. They followed all the rules when writing their essay and should get an A+ even though their essay is unconvincing. If they get a bad mark, their response is to create a petition instead of fixing the problems.
Maybe we should attack our culture of busywork and stop blaming educators for failing to nurture agency.
the education i received in germany did have this goal. the teachers had this goal, and i have the impression that the teachers and schools my kids go to have this goal as well. i can't say how universal that is, but it the opposite is not universal either.
the problem is that the goals are not effectively implemented. maybe it's more a dream than a goal, because the teachers and schools don't know how to actually reach that goal.
meaningful participation in society is often reduced to the ability to get a job by those outside of school, so you are right about employers. at least the large ones. unfortunately that works against them, because the current generation of juniors doesn't even want to learn anything. they are drones that just want to get paid, but are not motivated to learn what they need to do their job better.
Just yesterday, I talked to a neighbor who has two kids attending a local school in Mitte. He told me that the children are constantly indoctrinated into group conformity, obedience to authority, and fear of "wrong-think," with a good splash of wokie-talkie on top of it. To me, that sounds like a complete erasure of agency. Schools must provide knowledge, not override the nurture given by parents.
I have personally observed how locals are bullied by overseas guests and choose a delusional escape into virtue signaling rather than defending themselves. I consider German upbringing to be that of a defeated people.
I consider German upbringing to be that of a defeated people
i don't know what you are trying to imply here. how should the feeling of defeat affect the upbringing? (i mean,i am sure there would be an effect, but how would that look like?)
what i can tell you is that the sentiment i experienced was not defeat. after all this is neither our, nor our parents, (and for the current generation also not their grandparents) experience. the feeling we were taught was that of embarrassment, of how could we let that happen and consequently the need to understand how we can avoid that from ever happening again. except for a minority or right wing sympathizers that we keep a close eye on.
I think that the Allied victors laid the foundation of the current German education system on initial denazification and subsequent extreme pacification, to such a degree of impotence that people refuse to defend themselves even when they are fully capable of neutralizing a criminal, preferring to become victims rather than use force.
I’ve seen multiple instances of robberies where the attacker was a head shorter and could have been easily stunned, or worse, with a single hit, yet people gave away their valuables because even the thought of using violence is taboo. Of course, the police always say, “Just file a complaint,” which never results in anything. It’s not a joke: even if violence is used purely to stop a criminal, the police will prosecute you, lol. I’m not American, but I like the idea that one could defend themselves and their property using all means necessary.
While you are likely correct about systems, I have known quite a few individual educators who have the goal of helping their fellow humans learn about their agency in the world.
I attended a public school system which, while at times did falter in various ways, did a fairly good job meeting its stated mission that was more or less exactly that.
I witnessed far more personal political pressure and cajoling than corporate/future employer. Where I went to school the pressure on schools was usually from parents, students, and local groups concerned with civil matters. I had (until recently) indirect (and sometimes direct) exposure to this because one of parents was an educator and a senior member of their department in an adjoining district to the one I attended.
Where I went to college, it was always very clear to me what was shaped by industry vs. research and academia. I went to a research university for an uncommon hard-science degree and so there was a lot of employer interest, but the university cleverly drew a paywall around that and businesses had to pay the university to conduct research (or agree to profit sharing, patent licensing, etc). There was a clear, bright line separating corporate/employer interest from the classroom.
> For anyone interested in Canadian history, always check-out the French version of a wikipedia page
In reading about Canadian history this entire comment strikes me as very "East" biased? (Because I'm reading a strong implication that the French are the true holders of the history and the English just showed up later. Which may very well be true)
> I'm reading a strong implication that the French are the true holders of the history
I interpreted this more as "don't forget to check out the French-language Wikipedia articles too, since they might have contents that are absent from the English-language Wikipedia articles." This would likely be the case for anything concerning Québécois or Acadien culture, or the early settlements by the French; but not likely for most things west of Ottawa (aside from some pockets like Grande Prairie, Alberta or Saint Boniface, Manitoba).
It seems everyone outside of Ontario feels some kind of alienation or other. The west, as you mentioned, but also the maritimes, and especially the Québécois.
Historically speaking, it is the case for Manitoba. Manitoba was founded by French speakers and Winnipeg should be a majority Metis city today. The reason it isn't is because of repression from Ottawa and anglophones. See the Manitoba Schools question and the history of Louis Riel and the Metis treaties.
> It seems everyone outside of Ontario feels some kind of alienation or other. The west, as you mentioned, but also the maritimes, and especially the Québécois.
Yep, and then there's Newfoundland, which isn't even part of the maritimes. (No worries though, they're used to being excluded)
It is true from the Quebec to Manitoba (about the French), but not west of that. The East Coast provinces are more complicated with their own histories.
Funny this article is trending today because I had a similar thought over the weekend - if I'm in Ruby and the LLM hallucinates a tool call...why not metaprogram it on the fly and then invoke it?
If that's too scary, the failed tool call could trigger another AI to go draft up a PR with that proposed tool, since hey, it's cheap and might be useful.
We've done varying forms of this to differing degrees of success at work.
Dynamic, on-the-fly generation & execution is definitely fascinating to watch in a sandbox, but is far to scary (from a compliance/security/sanity perspective) without spending a lot more time on guardrails.
We do however take note of hallucinated tool calls and have had it suggest an implementation we start with and have several such tools in production now.
It's also useful to spin up any completed agents and interrogate them about what tools they might have found useful during execution (or really any number of other post-process questionnaire you can think of).
>Dynamic, on-the-fly generation & execution is definitely fascinating to watch in a sandbox, but is far to scary (from a compliance/security/sanity perspective) without spending a lot more time on guardrails.
Would love love love to hear more on what you are doing here? This seems super fascinating (and scary). :)
Interesting article, I'll admit when I first saw the title I was thinking of a different kind of "scaling" - namely the client/server decoupling in X11.
I still think X11 forwarding over SSH is a super cool and unsung/undersung feature. I know there are plenty of good reasons we don't really "do it these days" but I have had some good experiences where running the UI of a server app locally was useful. (Okay, it was more fun than useful, but it was useful.)
"reasonably well" as in... yeah it works. But it's extremely laggy (for comparison, I know people who forwarded DirectX calls over 10Mbit ethernet and could get ~15 frames/sec playing Unreal Tournament in the early 00's), and any network blip is liable to cause a window that you can neither interact with nor forcefully close.
It felt like a prototype feature that never became production-ready for that reason alone. Then there's all the security concerns that solidify that.
But yes, it does work reasonably well, and it is actually really cool. I just wish it were... better.
It is laggy but not because of protocol limitations but due to Xlib not being able to hide the latency and we never got the proper support from toolkits to do this via XCB. Xpra or other proxys work around this, but it would be nice if toolkits supported this directly. Also reconnect or moving windows between displays would be no problem if toolkits supported this.
For applications that were written with X11 in mind it works much much better than that.
One example was the controlling a telescope.
The computers in the control room were thin clients pretty much and displayed various windows from various machines across the mountain - even across multiple different operating systems! Some machines were running Solaris and some linux.
The different machines belonged to different aspects of the telescope: some controlled the telescope itself and some machines belonged to the different scientifc instruments on the telescope.
And it all worked quite well with no real noticeable lag.
I worked on the NeWS drivers for Emacs (both "Evil Software Hoarder" Gosling UniPress Emacs 2.20 and later "Free" Gnu Emacs 18), which were extremely efficient and smoothly interactive over low baud rate modems (which we called "thin wire" as opposed to i.e. the "thick wire" coaxial 10BASE5 Ethernet of the time), because instead of using the extraordinarily inefficient, chatty, pong-pongy X-Windows protocol, Emacs could simply download PostScript code to the window server that defined a highly optimized application specific client/server protocol and intelligent front-end (now termed "AJAX"), which performed as much real time interaction in the window system as possible, without any network activity, like popping up and tracking pie menus, and providing real time feedback and autoscroll when selecting and highlighting text.
For example, both versions of Emacs would download the lengths of each line on the screen when you started a selection, so you could drag and select the text and animation the selection overlay without any network traffic at all, without sending mouse move events over the network, only sending messages when you autoscrolled or released the button.
>TNT programs perform well over low bandwidth client-server connections
such as telephone lines or overloaded networks because the OPEN LOOK
components live in the window server and interact with the user without
involving the client program at all.
>Application programmers can take advantage of the programmable server in
this way as well. For example, you can download user-interaction code that
animates some operation.
DonHopkins on Feb 12, 2021 | parent | context | favorite | on: Interview with Bill Joy (1984)
>Bill was probably referring to what RMS calls "Evil Software Hoarder Emacs" aka "UniPress Emacs", which was the commercially supported version of James Gosling's Unix Emacs (aka Gosling Emacs / Gosmacs / UniPress Emacs / Unimacs) sold by UniPress Software, and it actually cost a thousand or so for a source license (but I don't remember how much a binary license was). Sun had the source installed on their file servers while Gosling was working there, which was probably how Bill Joy had access to it, although it was likely just a free courtesy license, so Gosling didn't have to pay to license his own code back from UniPress to use at Sun.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gosling_Emacs
>I worked at UniPress on the Emacs display driver for the NeWS window system (the PostScript based window system that James Gosling also wrote), with Mike "Emacs Hacker Boss" Gallaher, who was charge of Emacs development at UniPress. One day during the 80's Mike and I were wandering around an East coast science fiction convention, and ran into RMS, who's a regular fixture at such events.
>Mike said: "Hello, Richard. I heard a rumor that your house burned down. That's terrible! Is it true?"
>RMS replied right back: "Yes, it did. But where you work, you probably heard about it in advance."
>Everybody laughed. It was a joke! Nobody's feelings were hurt. He's a funny guy, quick on his feet!
In the late 80's, if you had a fast LAN and not a lot of memory and disk (like a 4 meg "dickless" Sun 3/50), it actually was more efficient to run X11 Emacs and even the X11 window manager itself over the LAN on another workstation than on your own, because then you didn't suffer from frequent context switches and paging every keystroke and mouse movement and click.
The X11 server and Emacs and WM didn't need to context switch to simply send messages over the network and paint the screen if you ran emacs and the WM remotely, so Emacs and the WM weren't constantly fighting with the X11 server for memory and CPU. Context switches were really expensive on a 68k workstation, and the way X11 is designed, especially with its outboard window manager, context switching from ping-ponging messages back and forth and back and forth and back and forth and back and forth between X11 and the WM and X11 and Emacs every keystroke or mouse movement or click or window event KILLED performance and caused huge amounts of virtual memory thrashing and costly context switching.
Of course NeWS eliminated all that nonsense gatling gun network ping-ponging and context switching, which was the whole point of its design.
That's the same reason using client-side Google Maps via AJAX of 20 years ago was so much better than the server-side Xerox PARC Map Viewer via http of 32 years ago.
Outboard X11 ICCCM window managers are the worst possible most inefficient way you could ever possibly design a window manager, and that's not even touching on their extreme complexity and interoperability problems. It's the one program you NEED to be running in the same context as the window system to synchronously and seamlessly handle events without dropping them on the floor and deadlocking (google "X11 server grab" if you don't get what this means), but instead X11 brutally slices the server and window manager apart like King Solomon following through with his child-sharing strategy.
While NeWS not only runs the window manager efficiently in the server without any context switching or network overhead, but it also lets you easily plug in your own customized window frames (with tabs and pie menus), implement fancy features like rooms and virtual scrolling desktops, and all kinds of cool stuff! At Sun were even managing X11 windows with a NeWS ICCCM window manager written in PostScript, wrapping tabbed windows with pie menus around your X-Windows!
I’m a 90s kid so there’s something poetic about Zuck choosing Oakley for this, feels on-brand for him.
In my mind it was inevitable that we would reach this point. The novel Snow Crash predicted this exact phenomenon (along with the Metaverse, of course, which is where they are trying to drive this). It’s the same with companies issuing cryptocurrencies and the like.
We aren’t totally locked in to the techno-feudal state just yet, but we’re getting there. Pretty fascinating how foreseeable these last many years and decades have been.
> Pretty fascinating how foreseeable these last many years and decades have been.
It's a twisted kind of foresight, a lot like prophesies in ancient stories, that both predict the future and steer their subjects toward it. Neal Stephenson wrote books that appealed to (many, but not only) nerdy boys during their formative years. Lo and behold, 30 years later some of those boys have achieved wealth and power, and are trying to make random aspects of those books real.
I get the sentiment, but I really enjoyed the Oakley Flak series, the fit was superb. BUT, I hated the feeling that it was perceived as a statement rather than utility. I bought them originally for high field of vision and blocking glare when riding bikes.
I lost a couple pairs and one got scratched really bad - and I don’t have a nice alternative in mind that fits a reasonable budget. *Am open to suggestions, I need ONE nice pair of polarized sunglasses that’l last.
> I really enjoyed the Oakley Flak series, the fit was superb.
Oh for sure, they were quite good, there was a real reason they became popular. But like you said, it got to be annoying that wearing Oakleys was a statement. (Plus, at least where I lived, they were part of the "douche uniform.")
In terms of recommendations, I'm still getting lots of mileage out of my Ray-Ban Wayfarers, and they're polarized.
Reading this article I couldn’t help but remember the Key & Peele skit about joke theft - “high on potenuse.” All this AI training feels similar to me on some level. Yeah, it’s “just making a copy” on the other hand the person who originated the idea doesn’t get to participate in the success.
Life is hard, but at least on the other hand, it’s also unfair.
https://theoatmeal.com/comics/exposure
In other words, please STFU with this sentiment.