Crazy to see the Twitter behavior here of really smart, well conveyed top level comments replied to by weird propaganda pushing bottom feeders.

HN discussion quality has deteriorated dramatically, especially for anything AI related.

One of my indices of mania. You saw similar comments for crypto, blockchain, NFT, VR.

Unfortunately it's not limited to the trendy topics. For example there is a huge amount of factually wrong comments on the topic of npm vulnerabilities. I'm sure it's the same on topics I know less about.

I think there are also people who understand the technology but overestimate potential impact. I remember someone at the Apple Vision Pro announcement arguing that this would be one of Apple’s biggest products and everyone would want them for taking photos and videos of their kids birthdays and such because it would be so much more natural than pulling out a camera and they just couldn’t be talked out of it.

Sometimes a technology can be really cool and never catch on. Sometimes a technology can be really popular anbd even world changing and never make much if any money.

One of the reasons my account is so young is that I went through each of those on HN and decided fuck it and nuked my credentials so I don’t have to stare at it.

There again now.

Sadly you are absolutely correct. The quality has nosedived in the past 1-2 years. I am not sure the exact cause but one of the things I noticed is a massive uptick in users who have insane post counts with sub 1-2 year history.

Breaking the rules but it does feel very much like Facebook or Reddit where there are distinct hive minds on topics and it just becomes a pissing match between brain-dead individuals.

I suspect this is due to fatigue. I admit I often post low quality replies under AI slop posts, simply because flagging them does nothing when they are somehow upvoted above and beyond anything human made.

This fatigue also causes a lot of readers to skip the AI threads, meaning less self-moderation of the forum through voting.

No, it's bots. When it comes to AI the HN community is now the mark.

Mind that the host of this site has an interest in keeping the hype going on ...

And? Continue down your conspiracy theory please.

So what's your intelligent argument as to why SpaceX's deserves an exception? Please lay out a case that's comessurate to the gravity of such an exception

You missed the plot and are only reinforcing the point. Where in my comment was I saying SpaceX deserves an exception? I am just stating what I observe anytime Elon or one of his companies comes up, it devolves into the extremes. Sorry you fall into that trap.

It's just a coincidence that whatever Elon does impacts the life of millions of people.

>due to its Orthodox Jewish population

and its use of United States tax dollars to fund social services that make it possible to raise their broods that American citizens simply don't get.

>I shop at walmart compared to whole foods and other "better" chains for similar reasons. "great value" as walmart's motto goes, it isn't about the price, it's about the value you get for what you pay for. Spirit was the "great value" airline.

Yeah it's not a secret that you can get by in life on the cheap if you have cheap, trashy tastes.

Be kind... When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names.

name calling aside, i think you missed my argument. If you think my taste is trashy, by my argument, your taste is also trashy, you're just dumb enough to spend extra money so you feel like you're above others. That's the point of the whole "value" thing, if more money gets you more value, that's great, if not then you're saying paying more for less is less trashy? It's like a person paying for a $15 wine and a $70 wine, the quality in that range isn't all that different, you're acting like you're paying $10k to fly singapore airlines when you're just flying cramped on united just like on spirit, but you're paying more.

And you sort of made another point I had: people like you, and companies who cater to people like you come with all that haughty snobbishness that's just unpleasant and degrades the experience. Good taste has to do with appreciation of value and quality, not polishing of one's ego, or pretending you're superior to others.

Euros generally understand that taxes aren't purely for what they themselves want to be done.

>ChatGPT, prompted by an amateur, solves an Erdős problem.

There, fixed that for you.

>I am David Schneider-Joseph, an engineer formerly with SpaceX and Google, now working in AI safety. Alzheimer’s isn’t my field

If anyone wants to know who wrote the article linked before wasting time reading it, there you go.

Many in this thread, who have evidently spent very little time studying the topic, have confidently concluded the experts are wrong.

I, also a non-expert, spent six months studying what the experts are doing, concluded that they actually seem to know what they’re talking about, and shared my understanding of that with other non-experts.

If you’re going to dismiss me for saying the experts are right, since I’m not an expert, then shouldn’t you dismiss those who spent far less time than I to learn about the subject, who are saying the experts are wrong?

DSJ! I remember you from about 2001, when you had made the chatbot VIAL. I can vouch for you being a smartypants 25 years ago, don't know about now.

For you, simply listing the author of the post is enough to discard it. Not everyone is that well informed, so it would be helpful for you to add another sentence explaining why this author has no credibility with you.

By this logic, we wouldn't have some of the breakthroughs made throughout history. Outsiders have made some pretty interesting leaps (later honed by experts). Expertise is great, but it can exist outside of formal education, and it isn't the only metric.

Might this be a doctor vs. physician assistant situation?

The people who know the most are probably busy and (not to be rude) are not necessarily the strongest educators.

Maybe my standard is too low here or I have a different need than you, would make a different accuracy-accessibility tradeoff…

there is even easier way to estimate the chances of time wasting - it is a "rationalist" website, an "effective altruism"-like version of rationality.

wrt. original post - quickly googled, and that for example https://www.news-medical.net/health/What-are-Amyloid-Plaques... - pretty short and seems to be clear that amyloids do have some correlation while may or may be not the cause.

"Amyloid plaques form one of the two defining features of Alzheimer’s disease, the other being neurofibrillary tangles"

Interesting that the latter is inside the neurons while the former is outside - speaking of complexity. The article also describes that activating microglia back helps with amyloid plaques while this

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33010092/#:~:text=The%20stud...

"The neurofibrillary tangles (NFT) and amyloid-ß plaques (AP) that comprise Alzheimer's disease (AD) neuropathology are associated with neurodegeneration and microglial activation. "

Human body reminds a large monolith codebase - fixing one thing breaks some other :). Claude Code, Human Body CRISPR edition, can't come soon enough...

>there is even easier way to estimate the chances of time wasting - it is a "rationalist" website, an "effective altruism"-like version of rationality.

Is that supposed to be an endorsement or a dismissal? The ostensible goals of "rationality" seem like good things, so it sounds like an endorsement, but in the wake of the FTX/SBF fallout they got a bad rap.

there is a big difference between a theory/idea and espousing the theory/idea as an ideology.

Huge codebase with years of fixes, features and hacks added on top and nothing ever refactored.

It’s a miracle it works at all

It is worse. The code changes are mostly random, only surviving the tests of fitness nature is applying (on various levels though; immediately catastrophic changes on level of cell biology are sorted out). And at least the high-level tests are also random and unreliable.

So basically it's a codebase mostly composed of bugs, and the features mysteriously work because they're based on bugs that happen to be mitigated by other bugs. :)

A billion years of kludges.

People greatly overestimate the number of Vietnam vets who were drafted.

For others' sake, I double-checked: 2.59 million served, of which 648,500 were draftees. Right at 25%

Is there a study of soldiers who enlisted but only because their draft number was low? There were substantial benefits to enlisting, because you could choose your branch of service.

Should break that down by people who had enlisted before hostilities began. Material difference enlisting during peace time vs when there is an active theater of war.

It would be more interesting to see those numbers broken down by frontline service. What percentage of the guys actually dying in the jungle were drafted?

17,725 draftees died, just over 30% of all American combat deaths in the war

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

It isn't the number that were drafted that matters. It is the number who were enrolled who might have been drafted that matters.

A relative of mine who was of draft age during the Vietnam war, deliberately enlisted in the US army because he thought that this would reduce his chances of being sent to fight in Vietnam And it worked, he spent his time overseas in the military in Japan in a non-combat role. I'm sure many males of draft age made similar choices.

For maybe people, even one would be too many.

HN guidelines say "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity" is on-topic for HN

Go to a juggling club and you'll find that a Venn diagram of juggler, nerd & technology has a lot of overlap.

For real? I am a juggling nerd, but didn't know that was a thing. I gotta go find my people now.

Why autism?

lol. Thank you for the laugh.

I’m there will you. I always laugh about how autism and SSRIs are not for discussion here. It’s too on the nose.