One of my earliest jobs in tech required driving southward into Sunnyvale for a 5AM shift. Seeing Hale-Bopp each morning for weeks on that commute was amazing. All of the images I can find fail to capture the visible confirmation that we're all on a rock floating in a vast universe with myriad amazing things nearby.
Damn. I'm visiting my sister in Birmingham next week. It's a big city with a lot of history (industrial revolution, modern geology), and a lot of pride in ordinary people doing their best. RIP Ozzy.
I clicked to the comments to see how far down this observation would appear. It was my first thought, although I can understand why the more energetic discussion is around human-centered energy collection and management.
I've been confused with the AI discourse for a few years, because it seems to make assertions with strong philosophical implications for the relatively recent (Western) philosophical conversation around personal identity and consciousness.
I no longer think that this is really about what we immediately observe as our individual intellectual existence, and I don't want to criticize whatever it is these folks are talking about.
But FWIW, and in that vein, if we're really talking about artificial intelligence, i.e. "creative" and "spontaneous" thought, that we all as introspective thinkers can immediately observe, here are references I take seriously (Bernard Williams and John Searle from the 20th century):
Intelligence and consciousness are two different things though, and some would argue they may even be almost completely orthogonal. (A great science fiction book called Blindsight by Peter Watts explores this concept in some detail BTW, it’s a great read.)
I think what some ancient philosopher said becomes less interesting when the things are working. Instead of what is thought we move onto why didn't the code ChatGPT produced compile and is Claude better.
I'm a bookseller who often uses Ingram to buy books wholesale when I'm not buying direct from publishers. I've used them for their distribution service since opening 5 years ago because they are the only folks in town who can help bootstrap a very small business with coverage of all the major publishers (in the U.S.). They're great at that, for a small cut in revenue.
Six-plus months ago they put a chatbot in the bottom right corner of their website that literally covers up buttons I use all the time for ordering, so that I have to scroll now in order to access those controls (Chrome, MacOS). After testing it with various queries it only seems to provide answers to questions in their pre-existing support documentation.
This is not about choice (see above, they are the only game in town), and it is not about entitlement (we're a tiny shop trying to serve our customers' often obscure book requests). They seemed to literally place the chatbot buttons onto their website with no polling of their users. This is an anecdotal report about Ingram specifically.
Very recently their "advanced search" page was redone with a totally different and slightly more modern styling (prior to addition of the chat expert overlaid in the corner). The rest of Ingram's ordering site is still the same as five years ago and is clearly older than that.
That's objective; subjectively, it feels like there are individuals who were given the ability to "try new stuff" and "break things" who chose to follow the hype around features that look like this. The chat button seems to me to be an exercise in following-the-herd which actually sucks for me as a user with it blocking my old buttons.
In the spirit of HN I will only point out here this fact: RFK Jr's attack book on Fauci was extremely poorly produced. Specifically, the text rolled up to the top and bottom edges of the pages as well as the sides. As a bookseller this was a big red flag for me: either the book was poorly self-published, or no-one big (and sometimes reputable) wanted to publish it, and it looked like they were trying to save paper and ink. Also, it has an inordinate amount of footnotes which makes it very difficult to imagine a person following them all. I didn't read the book. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/58063409-the-real-anthon... 4.49/5.0 on Goodreads with 8.5K reviews.
It's not meant to be read. The people who produced it don't care what's inside, only that the book exists. The book existing is enough for the target audience to accept that there are valid arguments within. The target audience does not need to read the book, they've already been told what they need to know.
The producers and the audience prefer it that way. It's less effort for everyone involved.
not just that, it provides an easy vector of corruption - random rich people or think tanks / lobby groups funded by rich people can just buy (or say they buy) pallets of said book, directly transferring cash to the "author".
1. babymetal didn't attack any person; they criticized a book's production.
2. babymetal claims to be a bookseller and, if true, they offered a specialist's insight into the quality of the information disseminated by a person being discussed at HN. (Though, their observation was off topic -- like most comments in most HN discussions.)
3. You want HN users, who are mostly code monkeys, to criticize a proposal to address viral diseases?
babymetal states "the text rolled up to the top and bottom edges of the pages as well as the sides. As a bookseller this was a big red flag for me: either the book was poorly self-published, or no-one big (and sometimes reputable) wanted to publish it, and it looked like they were trying to save paper and ink."
Also babymetal admits he didn't read the book. How can anything he says of the book be trusted?
I read the book. Actually there are two stories in the book, the first mostly about Fauci and COVID-19 and the second about Fauci and AIDS. FWIW I'm glad RFK is in power now.
“I trust the guy who published a paper on White House letterhead with hallucinated citations in some instances, and conclusions in complete contradiction of the cited paper in other instances, and who expressed no remorse for such errors.”
It’s just so incredibly dumb to listen to recurrent (and especially unrepentant) liars. Even if you know they’re lying, your brain subjected to that will break down. Propagandists and conmen through all of history have discovered it. All you’ve gotta do is say it over and over again and hope there are people dumb enough not to stop listening the first 15 lies.
Indeed, the power of McLuhan's "We become what we behold" is not to be underestimated.
It's why Fox News works, it's why "flood the zone" is a shrewd tactic, and why "alternative facts" was Yet Another Milepost along our journey to the full-blown post-truth America of today.
"I'm glad (the guy who drove to the beach to cut of a stranded whale's head with a chainsaw) is (in charge of our health) now"
"I'm glad (the guy who dumped a dead bear cub in Central Park and threw a bicycle on top to put the blame on those pesky bikers after doing a photo-op with his hand in the dead cub's open mouth) is (responsible for medical research programs) now"
"I'm glad (someone who has been thriving financially on bogus claims to disparage vaccines) is (overseeing vaccination policies in the US) now"
"I'm glad (another incompetent creep) is (joining the gang of criminals known as The Trump Admin) now"
These comments are creating exactly the feeling that troubled me about in-person engineering meetings and I still can't quite express it. It's like we all know we don't want to discuss this topic and can't help but do so. I get the same feeling whenever I see a bot introduce itself and then someone immediately replies "read stop". It's pretty close to a mixture of regret and disappointment.
Thank you. Showing tidbits like this from HN to my kids has seemed to help guide them to be be more curious and creative in how they use the internet, instead of treating it like a magical black box.
It's been useful to me for slapping together solutions during ops emergencies. Luckily, I have usually had real programmers around to take the few bits of insight in those scripts to fix their code.
I opened a bookshop after a long run in tech to try to slow down, and one of the pleasant surprises was the joy in accepting used book donations. I re-donate most of them, but have found some wonderful bookmarks and inscriptions in many. The words matter most, of course, but the tangible evidence of people decades or centuries ago is something that speaks to me profoundly. One inscription in a tiny book of prayers mentioned a friend passing it on after it had been placed under her deceased infant sister's chin, which was both morbid and moving. Autographs of spooks like J. Edgar Hoover conjure up other feelings. One other comment: the very old books will probably be around for a few centuries more after the newer ones have turned to dust.
> One other comment: the very old books will probably be around for a few centuries more after the newer ones have turned to dust.
Future historians will curse the 19th and 20th centuries for switching to acidic paper. Thankfully more and more books are printed on acid free paper via ISO 9706.
From my experience this seems to be an American thing. I have US-printed books that I bought brand new about 15 years ago that look 100 years old today. On the other hand the Brazil- or France-printed books are still good as new. The paper color they use in Brazil is also very different (white as opposed to yellowish brown).
This isn't every US book though, seems to be mostly the fiction kind. The tech books I have are US-printed and are holding up perfectly.
But yeah the acidic paper thing is real and a big problem. The book I’m currently reading has these rust-like vertical streaks covering every single page. I don’t know how to recover or preserve them.
To preserve acidic paper books, you might have luck with archival-grade boxes made of "buffered" material. The buffer is an alkaline material that's supposed to neutralize the acid in the paper.
what are you using for ecommerce? i need feedback on my app for booksellers if you're interested in trying it out: https://www.bookhead.net/. i'm also working on a squarespace plugin to sync a store's inventory from basil onto their website.
