So censoring falsehoods is good, and censoring truth is bad, and you're the one who decides which is which, and you like such censorship working your way. And when censorship you'd just liked so much starts to be used against you, you start to whine. Millenia old story of a deal with devil.
And by the way the covid "fact checking" wasn't based on "truth", it was at political request of White House as Zuck later said, and he did later called the FB fact checking a censorship when disbanding it.
On all matters reality decides which is which. None of us have a psychic link to God (anyone who thinks he does, does not, and should be institutionalised), but there are many good heuristics for what is true, and we do not have to abandon the concept of truth.
One of many, and one of the best. Unless you performed the scientific method yourself or closely watched someone perform it, it's not available to you and you have to use another. A truthful-seeming report of someone else performing it is pretty far up the ladder, until the enemies learn to write false experiment reports indistinguishable from real ones.
Not all fields of study are amenable to the scientific method, and lesser scientific methods are the best possible. We can't duplicate earth and flood one with CO2. We have to reach farther down the heuristic ladder, like studying two glass bottles, one filled with CO2. This can be extrapolated to calculate what a planet filled with CO2 would do, but the maths required is much less accessible.
That's a bit reductive I think, there's at least deductive reasoning (mathematics, logics, analytics), hermeneutics (understanding meaning in human communication), and phenomenology (understanding human experience through first person accounts). If we want to do a study on the impact of compliments by strangers on self-worth, a combination of all of these techniques of knowledge generation would be needed.
99% of climate scientists: human-triggered climate change is real
1% of climate scientists: climate change is probably just something that happens and we can't do anything about it
Legacy media: it's important that we give equal time to both sides of this argument.
Social media: climate change is a lie and you can tell because 99% of climate scientists all agree that it's real! That's how you know it's a conspiracy! You can't trust the institution! Also buy these supplements, they cure covid and cancer and chemtrails!
if a man's career and income depends on the science coming out a certain way, you can be sure that's how the science will come out. "scientific method" is not a magic shield
Disclaimer: i'm far from an anti-vaxxer and i have a scientific background (though not in biology).
It's often hard to establish scientific consensus. When it's not hard, it can take a long time. Cases such as climate change are as easy as it gets: models are always a flawed approximation for reality, but denying climate change on a scientific basis is almost impossible nowadays because we have too much data and too many converging studies.
About a century ago, the "scientific" consensus in the western world was that there were different human races with very different characteristics, and phrenology was considered a science.
The question of who establishes the ground truth, and who checks the checkers still stands. Science advances by asking sometimes inconvenient, sometimes outright weird questions. And sometimes the answers provided are plain wrong (but not for obvious reasons or malice), which is why reproducibility is so important.
I don't think any entity should have the power to prevent people from questioning the status quo. Especially since censorship feeds into the mindset of the conspiracy theorists and their real truth that "THEY" don't want you to see.
There’s a difference between questioning the status quo and spreading obvious misinformation. Did the vaccine save lives? Yes. Did misinformation about the vaccine cost lives? Yes it did.
For sure, in retrospect. At the time, Pfizer representatives in front of the EU parliament would not testify that their vaccines actually worked. And there are laws to requisition supplies and strip medical patents as public health measures.
The fact that so much money was given to private corporations, in secret deals outside any legal proceedings, on unproven products, all while censoring any critics, really gave the conspiracy theorists water for their mill.
I believe they would have had a much harder time spreading their misinformation, if they couldn't have the street cred of having "the system" against them. That is, if we had the voice of doctors vs random loonies, instead of our respective corrupt governments vs anyone they're trying to censor.
The overwhelming consensus of both the scientific community and the medical community was clear as crystal, and in retrospect, correct. There were plenty of doctors speaking up; there was only one side of this argument that was too busy throwing paint at ER nurses to listen.
>Pfizer representatives in front of the EU parliament would not testify that their vaccines actually worked.
It's typical for people in science and related fields to use carefully chosen wording, to hedge, and to speak in terms of probabilities instead of certainties.
For a general public who is used to the unashamed and unearned confidence of the usual people who get in front of a camera (politicians, celebrities, pundits) this can make it appear as though the scientific position is one with a less solid foundation, when it's usually the opposite case.
Scientific communication has been focused on insiders for so long that many communicators don't realise how it sounds to the outside world. Even the fundamental terminology is affected - a scientific theory is an overarching explanation that combines multiple pieces of evidence and creates the best synthesis we can on a topic, but to a layperson the word theory means "vague idea".
and you are the one to decide that this science we should ignore, and instead we declare as the truth the lies that these lying through their teeth bastards are telling. You do like the "gold standard of science", RFK Junior and Trump edition, don't you? The same censorship as you like.
Btw, how many top world infectious diseases scientists were among FB “fact checkers”?
Zuck is opposed to any sort of regulation of misinformation and lies because that sort of content drives engagement and that's what makes him money. If people on social media weren't allowed to post outright falsehoods then the entire right-wing rage machine would collapse in on itself and social media companies' KPIs would tank.
Careless People (the book about Facebook from a rogue insider) has literally a through line about all of this. Zuck is responsible and knew, both times.
He’s the top comment on every AI thread because he is a high profile developer (invented Django) and now runs arguably the most information rich blog that exists on the topic of LLMs.
That’s not really reasonable to assume at all. Five minutes of research would give you a pretty strong indication of his character. The dude does not need to self-aggrandize; his reputation precedes.
Perhaps. But perhaps this era of AI slop leaves a foul taste in many people’s mouth. I don‘t know the reputation, all I see is somebody who felt the need to AI generate a picture and post it on HN. This is slop, and I personally get bad vibes from people who post AI generated slop, which leaves me with all sorts of assumptions about their character.
To clarify, they are here to have fun, they liked the joke about cow-ork (which I did too, it was a good joke), and they had an idea on how to build up on that joke. But instead of putting in a minor effort (like 5 min in Inkscape) they write a one sentence prompt to nano-banana and think everybody will love it. Personally I don’t.
If you can draw a cow and an ork on top of an Anthropic logo with five minutes in Inkscape in a way that clearly captures this particular joke then my hat is off to you.
I'm all in on LLMs for code and data extraction.
I never use them to write text for my own comments on forums so social media or my various personal blogs - those represent my own opinions and need to be in my own words.
I've recently started using them for some pieces of code documentation where there is little value to having a perspective or point of view.
My use of image generation models is exclusively for jokes, and this was a really good joke.
This really is unnecessarily harsh. As someone who's been reading Simon's blog for years and getting a lot of value from his insights and open source work, I'm sad to see such a snap dismissive judgement.
"all sorts of assumptions about [someone's] character" based on one post might not be a smart strategy in life.
I'd say is necessarily harsh. It is not as if Simon's opinions on AI were really better than others here that are as technical as his.
He is prolific, and being at the top of every HN thread is what makes him look like a reference but there are other 50+ people talking interesting things about AI that are not getting the deserved attention because every top AI thread we are discussing a pelican riding a bike.
He very obviously disclosed that he had nano banana generate the logo. Using AI to boost himself is a different animal altogether. (The difference is lying)
As a native son of git, I’m curious what the idiomatic way to maintain a patched fork was without rebase? Would you simply have your “patched” branch and merge in upstream changes as they arrive?
as I recall, you didn't! you just had branches full of dozens of commits for every little bit of the change. yes you'd have to merge continuously to stay up to date.
This is crazy to me. I almost think it’s rage bait but will give you the benefit of the doubt. The lifestyle you describe leaves no room for friends, relationships, or hobbies. Working 72 hours a week is not sustainable for anyone over the long term unless they truly have no interest in any of the three things I listed. That may be the case for you, but that’s exceedingly uncommon.
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