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"Don't struggle only within the ground rules that the people you're struggling against have laid down." -- Malcolm X

"If you're unhappy with your job you don't strike. You just go in there every day, and do it really half-assed. That's the American way. -- Homer Simpson

"To steal from a brother or sister is evil. To not steal from the institutions that are the pillars of the Pig Empire is equally immoral." -- Abbie Hoffman

Some might consider it unethical but others might also consider it immoral to not do what you're describing.

I guess you're fortunate enough to have only worked at places where your moral framework matched up with their business practices and treatment of the staff.

That isn't the case for most people. Most people are put into situations at one time or another where the people they're working for don't value them as equals, where the people they work for casually violate reasonable laws like product safety or enivronmental standards laws and what's worse these people will suffer no consequences for doing so.

No White Knight in shining armour is going to come from the government to shut them down. No lightning from heaven will strike them down. No financial penalty to dissuade them from further defection from society and the common man in the game that is life.

So what do you do? Do you do nothing? Just put your nose to the grindstone and keep working for the man? Do you quit, only to end up penniless and jobless, with poor prospects of an alternative, and even if you found one maybe it's 'meet the new boss same as the old boss'?

Nah, you come into work every day and you subtly fuck it up. You subtly fuck it up and you take whatever value you can extract.

They'd do the same to you.

They are doing the same to you.


That's the point -- maybe the US should have bought apples instead of buying bananas.

I don't understand your point. Switchblades are (roughly) more akin to FPV (300 model) and Vampire drones (600 model) with reapect to size and payloads. Shahed style drones are roughly like like low end cruise missles. Different form factors and different capabilities. All of them are needed, but they're all very different.

Let’s compare it to Lancet then.

Lancets were miles better than Switchblades.

AFAIK Switchblades were used only in first months of the war then completely abandoned.


A cruise missile is 3,000,000$ and a shahed drone is 50,000$ so if it’s even remotely the same capability it is an immense technological improvement over an expensive and slow to manufacture cruise missile.

You need a high/low capability that mixes all levels. For example, the Ukrainians and the Russians are both manufacturing very expensove cruise missles (Neptune/Iskander) and long range attack drones (shahed/fp-2/lute/etc). At any rate the original post I was responding to was comparing Switchblades to Shaheds, which is non-sensical.

What is the use case of a dumb, slow, suicide drone for the US army?

If only they had bought banana bombs!

In your world view is it possible for empires to fall?

If so, why do you think this is not relevant to this particular empire at this particular time?


Obviously. All empires either have fallen or will fall.

That doesn't mean all extant empires are currently actively falling, and soon, will have fallen.

The US is less divided now than it was during the Civil War, which it survived. Why would it be more likely to fall now than then?


Certainly it's possible that could happen to us. If it does I fully expect to have elections throughout the process.

We have the highest concentration of weapons per capita in the world and a deeply ingrained expectation of voting. In a very dark humor sort of way it would be absolutely hilarious if someone was stupid enough to attempt to intervene in the process.

We might go down in flames but you can be absolutely certain we'll have collectively agreed to light them ourselves.


That’s not the motivation for these attacks at all. They’re waging asymmetric warfare against a much larger and more exposed opponent.

Their goal is to make it too troublesome for the US/Israel to continue attacking them, like a swarm of bees attacking a bear to keep it away from their honey.

Iran is in it to win it and the US is so very obviously not.

The question is if the pressure that Israel can put on the current administration greater than the pressure that Iran can put on America as a whole.

Time will tell.


Trump and republicans are now all-in in this war and this administration can tolerate a huge amount of chaos if it allows them to keep winning. It doesn't matter wether Israel pressures the administration or not. I'm not confident that the regime will fall but I am confident that it will be put in its place internationally even if it means closing the iranian borders from the outside indefinitely. BTW the US and Israel are not alone in this war.

Trump is never all in on anything. There's a reason that "TACO" became a meme. This administration is much more likely to lose interest and declare victory while oil facilities in the gulf states are still on fire.

> closing the iranian borders from the outside indefinitely

Are you proposing to disrupt China-Iran shipping? Intercept even Chinese-flagged oil vessels? (not that there are many, most are still under flags of convenience)

Shoot down China-Iran civilian airliners? (again)


>There's a reason that "TACO" became a meme. This administration is much more likely to lose interest and declare victory while oil facilities in the gulf states are still on fire.

Do you think Trump's going to lose interest and declare victory while bombs are still flying over Bibi's head?


https://news24online.com/world/5-times-in-13-seconds-donald-...

I suppose that just claiming victory doesn't mean the US stops fighting


Did you read the article? They said explicitly that is why they did it.

I've thought about fine-tuning a model on the corpus of your HN posts and then offering a service that would allow the user to paste their message into a text box and the Dangified version of their comment would pop out in another box next to it.

I was thinking of calling this service "Dang It."

You say you want hear posts in other people's voices but I'm pretty sure that if I did this that the people who used it would find greater acceptance of their comments than if they just posted them as they originally wrote them.


I very much hope that's not true, and my guess (or desperate wish?) is that the community would pattern-match to it after a while.

One dynamic I don't think has yet been given its due: while AI is training on us, we're also all getting trained on it—that is, the hivemind's pattern-matching ability is also growing. We're heading up the escalation ladder in a paattern-matching race.

But that name is hilarious!


> Here's what I think. If you have a public blog, it's fair game at an interview. If you write mostly about data science stuff but you apply for a software engineering job, you ought to be prepared to explain the contrast. Understand that, for most top firms, hiring good people and getting them to stick is hard. Most employers will want some assurance that you are serious about the position you're applying for. If you send signals that you might want some other position, be prepared to get asked about those signals.

This is kind of absurd. Could you imagine a registered nurse being asked to expain why they have a blog about astronomy and not nursing?

"What do you mean you don't write about dressing wounds in your spare time? How much could you really know about it then?"

"Managing Type 2 Diabetes isn't interesting enough for you to blog about? I'll have you know most of the patients htat you would be dealing with at this long term care facility have T2D. I'm skeptical that you'd be able to care for them."

Why do we allow this kind of BS in the tech industry? Whens the last time a nurse did a whiteboard interview?


> Could you imagine a registered nurse being asked to expain why they have a blog about astronomy and not nursing?

That hits pretty close to home... I'm a doctor who has a small blog about the implementation details of the lisp I made.

> Managing Type 2 Diabetes isn't interesting enough for you to blog about?

If someone asked me this point blank I think I'd laugh out loud. It's interesting enough for me to keep up with the latest evidence, thanks.

> Whens the last time a nurse did a whiteboard interview?

To be fair, healthcare professionals have some pretty gruelling training and difficult licensing examinations. Some amount of preselection is taking place. Nobody needs a license to write software.


Maybe you have it backwards?

Why do you need to communicate in English with us native English speakers? Why don't we need to learn your language to communicate with you?

The way I'm looking at it is that you're putting all this effort towards learning how to communicate with people who would never without an outside pressure do the same for you.

If language learning is intrinsically a positive thing what can we do to encourage it in native speakers of English, specifically Americans who are monolingual (as they dominate this website)?

Imagine a scenario where Dang announced that we're only allowed to post in English one day week -- every day is dedicated to another language, like Spanish, Russian, Mandarin and the system auto deleted posts that weren't in those languages. Would that be a good thing? Would we see American users start to learn Spanish to post on HN on Tuesdays?


Honestly, having a common language that offers access to most knowledge and people in the western world at once is already amazing. If it happens to be the native language of most Americans, all the better for them.

A century ago it was French or Latin, and a century from now it might be Mandarin or something else. The existence of a standard is what matters.

The only complain I have about Americans and language is that most tech companies fail spectacularly at supporting multilingualism, from keyboards struggling with completion to youtube and reddit forcing translations on users.


But the problem is that people with poor written language / english skills are 'competing' with people who have superb skills in this domain.

There are people here who sit at a desk all day banging out multipage emails for work who decide to write posts of a similar linguistic calibre for funsies.

Meanwhile you have someone in a developing country who just got off a brutal twelve hour shift doing manual labour in the sun who wants to participate in the conversation with an insightful message that they bang-out on a shitty little cellphone onscreen keyboard while riding on bumpy public transit.

You could have a great idea and express it poorly and be penalized for doing so here while someone could have a blah idea expressed excellently and it's showered in replies despite being in some metrics (the ones I think are most important) worse than the other post.

What's the solution for that?


> What's the solution for that?

Remember that you're on a message board and you're not actually 'competing' for anything?


This is a perfect example of what I'm talking about.

I knew someone was going to comment on my use of the word there despite me putting it in quotes which was intended to let the reader know that I meant that word as an approximation of what I was meaning.

When I say competing I mean competing in the space of ideas here. There is a ranking system here that raises or lowers the visibility and prominance of your comments and it's based on upvotes by other uses. For better or worse people penalize comments with grammatical errors over ones that don't and that affects how much exposure other users have to the ideas that people write and how much interaction they get from them.

If that's the case why would somebody who has good ideas but poor expressive capability bother posting here if their comments are just going to get ignored over relatively vapid comments that are grammatically correct?


> If that's the case why would somebody who has good ideas but poor expressive capability bother posting here if their comments are just going to get ignored over relatively vapid comments that are grammatically correct?

The main problem is that ai consistently is seeing making things worse. Take a look at the examples in Dang's link in their comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47342616

In the ones I read the AI editing is either hurting or needs to be much, much better to help.


No, I get your point. Unfortunately, alot of people here try to act high and mighty like they are posting here for some altruistic reason. The reason why I, you, and everyone else posts here is the human reason that we want others to engage with our posts. In order to do that, you have to put your best foot forward, which includes making sure the spelling and grammar of your posts is correct. While I do not use an LLM for this, I think that it is vaild to use these tools to make sure nothing gets in the way of whatever point you are trying to make.

> In order to do that, you have to put your best foot forward

In English. You have to put your best foot forward in English. And in your environment with the resources you have at your disposal.

For example, I'm currently engaging with you between steps in a chemistry process that's happening under the fumehood next to me while wearing a respirator, a muggy plastic chemical resistant gown and disposable gloves nitrile globes.

I am absolutely certain that these conditions are different than the ones I would need to 'put my best food forward' in this discussion. I'm also certain that quite certain that you and I would both absolutely stumble if we were obligated to particpate in this forum in a language that we're not proficient in as many users often attempt to do and are unfairly penalized for by other members of the community.

I'm with you on the LLM usage for grammatical issues for non-native speakers. I bet more in this community would feel the same way if Dang whimsically mandated that people had to use a language other than English on certain days of the week.


Oh shit that would be fun. Tuesday, we're going to do it in Mongolian, see how that goes.

> You could have a great idea and express it poorly and be penalized for doing so here while someone could have a blah idea expressed excellently and it's showered in replies despite being in some metrics (the ones I think are most important) worse than the other post.

I absolutely do not understand this comment. Are you saying that posting is competitive and that comments have "metrics"?


Yes! If my comment is above yours in a thread, it means I got more upvotes than you did, which means I get special bonuses and more to eat and you go hungry in Internet land. Also it means I'm better than you (obviously) and I get to go to this secret club with all the pretty people and you're not invited. Isn't that how this all works?

How do you reconcile the fact that that Apple will sell millions of these devices without a compatible Linux distribution shipping for years if ever with your claim about it being DOA?

Like sure it’s DOA to you, but in what world does that really matter when it’s going to sell so well?


The same way I reconcile the fact that the 11" Macbook sold millions of devices; consumers don't care. They don't buy Macs as a conscious evaluation of what the device is capable of or how well it was made. Even the 2019 16" Macbook Pro, arguably the worst Mac ever sold, has millions of units floating around in Obsoleteland.

Personally I agree with the parent's comment. I used to buy Macs, but nowadays Apple alienates me. I'm one of the millions that don't buy a Mac because the hardware is gimped by arbitrary software limitations. Unless Apple changes that stance, I'm a lost customer. Cupertino has the market share statistics, they know where to find me.


Consider how many Macs in total that Apple sold during the years that Apple sold the 11 inch Air and that they discontinued it, I doubt it was a raging success.

Especially seeing that with the Apple now selling the 13 inch Neo and it decided to sell a larger Air instead of a small one, I don’t think it sold that well.


Honestly in a scenario like global nuclear war I see the Kim family, and by extension NK making it out relatively unscathed.

Being one of the little players who got the bomb between the big guys and the rest of the little guys secured them in the short term, and global conflict is likely to break out between the big guys or some little guys, and NK isn't really instigating much with anyone, so when the bombs fly they're just gonna be overlooked.


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