throwaway72762 | 2 years ago
Culture war outlet with culture war title. Flagged.
throwaway72762's comments
throwaway72762 | 2 years ago | on: Florida ocean temps surge to 100F; mass coral bleaching event is found in reefs
Even if nuclear were built as fast as possible it can't replace fossil fuels fast enough to mitigate before major feedbacks kick in. We're left with significant decrease in energy use as the main thing that has to be done and that there's no will to do.
throwaway72762 | 2 years ago | on: Florida ocean temps surge to 100F; mass coral bleaching event is found in reefs
If you're sincerely interested the IPCC reports and their summaries describe the basic science and the projections and are surprisingly readable if you're willing to read scientific writing.
throwaway72762 | 2 years ago | on: Congress Wants Answers on UFOs: ‘The American People Deserve the Truth’
If they're going to report on this then I sure hope the media demands more than third hand personal testimony. If there's anything real here then it has to be global and we have no indication that people all over the world have seen anything similar.
throwaway72762 | 2 years ago | on: Stanford researchers find Mastodon has a child abuse material problem
Like discussed on the Engadget version of this same story earlier, this is basically like saying that because Gab runs on the Mastodon codebase that Mastodon has a fascism problem. Good server administrators already block 90% of the problem servers and quickly block the rest through user flags. The problem servers are apparently are mostly in Japan. (Sounds like Japanese authorities need to crack down better.)
throwaway72762 | 2 years ago | on: RNA editing is common in behaviorally sophisticated coleoid cephalopods (2017)
We have so much to learn from them. They diverged from us so long ago.
throwaway72762 | 2 years ago | on: Mastodon's decentralized social network has a major CSAM problem
Also the underlying report is mostly about servers in Japan where the laws are different and/or that are blocked by almost everyone else because they are toxic. As they should be, because the whole point is that servers can block badly run servers elsewhere.
throwaway72762 | 2 years ago | on: Mastodon's decentralized social network has a major CSAM problem
A misleading headline. Not too different from the last round of headlines that there are card carrying fascists in the fediverse. Both are true and they are blocked by all well run servers.
This is like the web and just like we don't say that HTTP has a X problem it doesn't make sense to say that open source software run by thousands of people across the world under different laws has any specific purpose or problem.
Improvements can be made to the software but bad admins can just rip that code out. Still I bet good instances will make changes.
throwaway72762 | 2 years ago | on: All foster kids in California can now attend any state college for free
I agree that a ban on the posts isn't the right way. I agree moderation is the right way forward but we need much more active anti flamebait and anti culture war moderation.
throwaway72762 | 2 years ago | on: All foster kids in California can now attend any state college for free
There is something wrong with it.
I think about it information theoretically. Oversimplifying, the information content of something is how unpredictable it is in a given channel. On HN, in 2023, the information content of yet another comment ranting about some given city or state or group of people is basically zero. Everyone has seen those comments a thousand times recently and it adds nothing to the discussion.
throwaway72762 | 2 years ago | on: All foster kids in California can now attend any state college for free
Perhaps we'd be better off not having any country or state or city does X type posts here unless they're about tech. (That won't solve it, though, because any mention of certain cities or states, even in a tech context, brings out the culture warriors.)
throwaway72762 | 2 years ago | on: All foster kids in California can now attend any state college for free
I agree with the guidelines, but they aren't working anymore. I can predict the tenor and content of the comments on half of the HN front page these days just from the title and domain, which means flagging isn't cutting it.
throwaway72762 | 2 years ago | on: All foster kids in California can now attend any state college for free
I completely understand that everything has a political dimension. And the broader culture war is leaving nothing untouched. But that means we have less room for a shared community even in small spaces like this.
What I lament is that the community of tech folks, embodied by sites such as HN, have splintered and moved away from their roots. I mean go watch the documentaries about the early days of the 70s and 80s and even the not so early days of the 00s: vision, tinkering, weirdness, geekery, cussedness, anti-authority, pay it forward, etc. That is what defined the scene. That's our roots and I'd like it to come through in comments here. Instead it's just culture war: us vs. them, grievances, IGMFU, and all the rest.
throwaway72762 | 2 years ago | on: All foster kids in California can now attend any state college for free
Is everything culture war all the time now on this site? Every post becomes a stupid comment section where we'd be better off getting an LLM to write the comments for us.
Here it's people trying to insert their affirmative action narratives and also rant about California a bit (in a backhanded way).
We can do better.
throwaway72762 | 2 years ago | on: In Phoenix, this is life at 113 degrees for more than 20 days
Definitely. The only place in the deserts in the US that will be an exception to this is Yuma AZ because it is close to the warm ocean waters to the south of it so it's more humid. But it doesn't have a huge population unlike Houston or Miami.
throwaway72762 | 2 years ago | on: Show HN: I made a customizable iOS browser for minimalists and myself
Adblock? I've been hoping for an iOS browser with adblock that isn't bloated.
throwaway72762 | 2 years ago | on: In Phoenix, this is life at 113 degrees for more than 20 days
Yes, this is exactly right. The wet bulb temperature in parts of Texas and Florida in the heat wave a week or two ago got close to the limit of human survivability. Five years from now Texas, Florida, the Persian Gulf, and South Asia are all going to be seeing that limit exceeded at least briefly every summer.
throwaway72762 | 2 years ago | on: Every economist on Mastodon just had their data breached by hackers at Yale
Best I can figure it, an anonymous webboard for economists used lousy identity hashing and some data scientists wrote a security analysis showing that fact. Part of it was showing that, surprise surprise, a bunch of economists at big name schools were posting a bunch of middle school taunts of women and minorities. (Not much to do with Mastodon here except just as one among many services that has IP address info of users.)
throwaway72762 | 2 years ago | on: White House Secures Commitments from Leading AI Companies to Manage AI Risks
Eh, one can dislike the longtermists and the non-longtermist plutocrats. I'd say there's good reason to dislike both, but for different reasons.
throwaway72762 | 2 years ago | on: White House Secures Commitments from Leading AI Companies to Manage AI Risks
Why should the tone have changed? The billionaires and AI godfathers talking about it now all were inspired by LW and scifi, and it's the same narrative: no need to care about people living today or real problems in the world when there's a scifi story about trillions of people in the future for whom we must sacrifice anything (except the billionaires and AI godfathers comfort, status, or money) in the present to protect.
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