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> its usually always for legacy

Legacy is the dumbest reason to work and does not explain the motivation of the vast majority of people that are wealthy.

edit: The vast majority of people with more than $10million are completely unknown so the idea that they care about legacy is stupid.


What do you think their motivations might be?


There's also addiction to success. If you don't keep getting the success in magnitudes you did before, you will get bored and depressed, so you have to keep going and get it since your brain is wired to seek for that. Your brain and emotions are calibrated to what you got before, it's kind of like drugs.

If you don't have the 10M you won't understand, you would think that "oh my if only I had the 10M I would just chill", but it never works like that. Human appetite is infinite.

The more highs you get from success, the more you expect from the future achievements to get that same feeling, and if you don't get any you will feel terrible. That's it.


Speaking for myself, I'd keep working even if I had 100M. As long as I am healthy, I plan to continue on being productive towards something I find interesting.


What would you be working on though? I agree that I’d keep working if only since I like my work and not having that structure can make your life worse, not better; but if it’s “how I get to 1B” then that’s the kind of challenge that turns me off. I’m all for continually challenging yourself but I don’t want that kind of stress in my life, I’d rather find my challenges elsewhere.


It's definitely copyright infringement. Also it's hilarious that the owner of this repo is advocating for DRM. When someone uses the word "exploit" to describe commercial transactions you just know they have room temperature IQ.


Are you sure about that? So much of "good business practice" is really exploiting your suppliers. If you are trying to underpay for a resource, or forcing cost cuts, or simply taking more of the pie that you previously gave your resource, for the same or better quality service, you are exploiting that resource.


Economic transactions only happen if there is a mutual benefit. Typically one side of the transaction has more market power than the other and captures more of the surplus but the transaction doesn't happen if one side is worse off from it.

The entire idea of economic transactions being exploitative is literal Marxist propaganda. If you read the word "exploit" in some news article and it's referring to economic transactions, you are reading propaganda.


"exploit" has two perfectly usable definitions in this context, essentially. One is negative, one is not.

    To employ to the greatest possible advantage.

    To make use of selfishly or unethically.


Yes, they are always using the second definition.


Loving this classic HackerNews-type discussion!!!


I don't usually ask for citations on comment threads, but assserting that 'exploitation' is Marxist propaganda is gonna need some citations for me to take even remotely seriously. Otherwise, talk about room temperature IQs...

> Economic transactions only happen if there is a mutual benefit.

There are all sorts of coercive circumstances that may appear mutually beneficial on a superficial level, but may actually not be the case, whether due to contract details, opportunity costs, strategic mistakes, or otherwise. Perhaps this is true given perfect information and execution, but the real world is much more messy.

As an example, consider Spotify or Adobe's transition to a subscription model. There are a lot of people for whom those models are a very bad deal compared to what was.


> I don't usually ask for citations on comment threads

No - please do!!! It'll ensure we have robust discussions on this great site!


It's a dog whistle. There are no studies on this, why would academia (which for the field that would study this is 100% composed of leftists) have a study on leftist dog whistles?

Also, putting any value on "studies" when they almost universally fail to replicate outside of hard sciences is dumb.


Hillsdale College somehow sends me a circular several times a year full of right-wing neoconservative religious cocksucking. That right there immediately disproves your "100% composed of leftists" assertion. I'm sure the students and faculty at BYU or USD or any number of other religious academic institutions would agree.


For someone so in touch with what studies say you seem to have a very inaccurate view of the political leanings of academics

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GYOm6ciXcAAZ0vl?format=jpg&name=...

You see, all the fake fields of studies are field with leftists. And sure, you might say democrats aren't leftists, which is what every dumbass marxist says.


[flagged]


You've broken the site guidelines badly in more than one place in this thread. Can you please not do that? Regardless of how wrong someone is or you feel they are, it destroys what HN is for, and we have to ban such accounts.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

p.s. I'm not banning your account immediately because I didn't see any other cases of this in your recent history. That's good. Please make sure it doesn't happen again.


Understood. I will do that. Thanks.


[flagged]


We've banned this account for breaking HN's guidelines. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email [email protected] and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

p.s. If you had only been doing it in this one thread, I'd have posted a warning instead of banning you immediately, but this is clearly a pattern and not cool:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41627310

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41583798

Also, we'd already warned you: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36384393.


That's a laughable deflection. It is a fact that you made no argument and failed to address anything of substance that I brought up. Your entire comment hinges on stimulating someone's biases and throwing around insults to evoke an emotional response, that is definitionally propaganda.


> Nobody thinks GPT4-o1 or Sonnet 3.5 is going to change the world

They already have, people don't realize it because expectations have shifted so much because of how transformative it already is.

I'm in a few communities that like to read novels from China / Korea. Claude Sonnet translates Mandarin to English almost perfectly.

I also copy and paste screenshots of Mandarin into it and it transcribes it perfectly too.

A universal language translator of this quality on its own would have been a billion dollar company a year before LLMs were released.


“Almost perfectly”

It is freaking amazing that this works almost perfectly. Seriously, it’s mind blowing. The problem is, when you keep in mind how the technology works, you realize that the “almost” can never be removed. That’s fine for some use cases but not for others. I understand that human translators make mistakes but they have a conception of truth and correctness, that matters.


We have some people that read Mandarin and double check the output once in a while. If it didn't work well the story would quickly become incoherent and make no logical sense because chapters are translated on their own.

The common failure mode is names and genders, for some reason it likes to swap names and genders of characters.


1. I believe you that it works well

2. Plausible != Correct - ie, would someone notice if they were reading a slightly different but still logical story?


My point with regards to 2 is that it would have to maintain consistency across translation runs. Entire novels don't fit in the context so it can't make up a logically consistent novel across prompts.

When I do the translations, I actually don't even include previous chapters in the context.


So the last novel I completed is long one, but not unheard of I think it had 6 million characters. Now I don't know how many tokens would that be, but I doubt most models can support that large context.

And really consistent editing and choices between what is translated and what is not and instead is Romanized is rather important with many Chinese novels.

You can get something you can figure out, but I doubt you get something really enjoyed.


I don't think you should be getting downvoted for this, because you're pretty much correct. People's sense of what's normal has shifted so much in the last two years that LLMs now seem quaint, but the impact they've already had on things like the quality of machine translation is huge.

If you go to plain ChatGPT, a system not specifically designed to translate languages, and tell it to translate "以后你再使用我照片请使用这两张任何一张都可以这是我们结婚的照片" to English, you get a better result than any machine translation from just a few years ago. For example, it gets from context that "这是" has to be translated to a plural phrase in English. Even right now, Google Translate still gets this wrong.

I'm worried that a lot of the impact these technologies have will eventually turn out to be overwhelmingly bad. Google Photos is already partially broken by the amount of shitty AI images it returns. But the fact that they do have a huge impact can't be denied.

I don't know what exactly qualifies something as "changing the world", but if LLMs don't qualify, then not a lot of things do.


Useful for sure, but not world changing.

1) Most people have no need for translation software

2) Before LLMs we already had decent free translation in the form of the free Google Translate, using pre-transformer NN models

Personally I still use Google Translate as my go-to for translation, rather than using Sonnet 3.5. Maybe Google now use an LLM under the hood, but I haven't noticed any increase in quality in last few years.


> Most people have no need for translation software

Most people benefit from translation software indirectly. Every localized app / translated tv shows / etc.


> Claude Sonnet translates Mandarin to English almost perfectly.

Do you personally know Mandarin well enough to judge the quality of a translation? Because you can't do that from just looking at the output.


You can test it by comparing human translations with LLM translations. The results are pretty close. Like I said in another comment, the common failure mode with mandarin is around names and genders


> I'm in a few communities that like to read novels from China / Korea. Claude Sonnet translates is able Mandarin to English almost perfectly.

What novels are you reading?

This is fascinating to me, because the world is quickly becoming a place where we have to choose which information from the unlimited information stream to consume. It feels like unlimited opportunity cost. I, for one, don't think I'll ever have enough time to watch every Academy Award nominated film (let alone all of the winners). And that's just one type of information.

You're going after some obscure (?) stuff. What brought about the interest?


Xianxia I expect. Distinctly Chinese fantasy webnovels set around Cultivators seeking immortality that go for 6000 chapters and start with the main character being the weakest guy in the weakest part of a world to them being a god like being who pinches galaxies between their finger tips.

As for why do people read it? Well.. there's lots of it, it's free and it's inherently progression fantasy most of the time which can often be addictive.

One must simply be careful they do not read forbidden scriptures.... and develop the Dao of Brainrot, it's sadly an ever present danger.


I like Xianxia because there is actual power progression. Compared to many of the new mangas where characters go to max power in about half a chapter...

Also it is often quite different fantasy and sometimes world building can be truly imaginative and different. Where as lot of others are rather too formulaic.


Yeah, I'm one of those readers who adore world building, I can honestly have cardboard cutout characters so long as the world building is great. Coupled with good progression and honestly I could read for a month solid, I have read for a month solid, it was glorious!


The novels I like the most right now are "Mysteries of the Immortal Puppet Master" and "Eternal tale" which are both just fun Chinese fantasy novels.

> What brought about the interest?

They are very unique coming from the perspective of an American that has mostly read books published by Western authors. There are all these unique fantasy tropes based on Chinese history that are like a parallel branch to Tolkein based fantasy. Also, you can clearly see that they have completely different value systems and ironically you can tell they are comparatively less censored.


a bit of a tangent but regarding the translation, can you compare it to the work of a human translator>? I often find translated works unsatisfying. While the fault may well be with me, I thought the Three Body Problem was a pretty poor piece of fiction (yes, I know, HN loves it, mea culpa etc) but I wonder if I dislike the original work, or the rendering in English.


I thought the translation of the first of the trilogy was stilted and flat, I could appreciate and enjoy the underlying story but the prose felt like a mechanical translation. The latter two books though I thought read much more naturally.


And yet ...


SQL is good, writing SQL using strings is not good.


For traditional search indexing the interests of the aggregator and the content creator were aligned. AIs on the other hand are adversarial to the interest of content creators, a sufficiently advanced AI can replace the creator of the content it was trained on.


We're talking in this subthread about an AI agent accessing content, not training a model on content.

Training has copyright implications that are working their way through courts. AI agent access cannot be banned without fundamentally breaking the User Agent model of the web.


Ok, fine, let's restrict it to AI agents only, without training. It's still an adversarial relationship with the content creator. When you take an AI agent an ask it "find me the best italian restaurant in city xyz" it scans all the restaurant review sites and gives you back a recommendation. The content creator bears all the burden of creating and hosting the content and reaps non of the reward as the AI agent has now inserted itself as a middleman.

The above is also a much clearer / more obvious case of copyright infringement than AI training.

> AI agent access cannot be banned without fundamentally breaking the User Agent model of the web.

This is a non-sequitur but yes you are right, everything in the future will be behind a login screen and search engines will die.


> The content creator bears all the burden of creating and hosting the content and reaps non of the reward as the AI agent has now inserted itself as a middleman.

As a user agent my god what's happened to our industry. Locking the web to known client which are sufficiently not the user's agent betrays everything the web is for.

Do you really hate AI so much that you'll give up everything you believe in to see it hurt?


Like I said in another comment, I'm pointing out what is going to actually happen based on incentives, not what I want to happen. I'd much rather the open web continue to exist and I think AI will be a beneficial thing for humanity.

edit: to be clear, it's already happening. Blogs are moving to substack, twitter blocks crawling, reddit is going the same way in blocking all crawlers except google.


To be optimistic, as long as anonymous access is a thing, or creating free accounts is a thing, such crawler blocks can probably be bypassed. I hope so, at least.


> reaps non of the reward

Just to be clear what we're talking about: the reward in question is advertising dollars earned by manipulating people's attention for profit, right?

I frankly don't think that people have the right to that as a business model and would be more than happy to see AI agents kill off that kind of "free" content.


I don't think sqlx is worth the compile time hit at all. Just use seaorm. Writing SQL queries using strings sucks.


SeaORM is not typesafe, by design (and also uses sqlx itself as a dependency). Diesel can do dynamic queries too but it still remains completely typesafe.


> SeaORM is not typesafe, by design

What is your definition of typesafe here? With SeaOrm structs are created directly from the db schema with codegen. This is vastly superior to using strings and checking them at build time.

Just up front, it seems like you think I don't know about how all of these things are implemented.

I do.

So when you say SeaORM has Sqlx as a dependency. I know that. If the purpose of that statement was to say seaorm compile times can't be faster that sqlx because sqlx is a dependency of seaorm, that thought is wrong.

Using SeaORM the way it is intended to be used results in code that is much faster to compile than sqlx being used the way it's intended to be used.


I make no assumption about your level of knowledge, I simply stated that sqlx is a dependency just for completeness. I also did not imply anything about whether having such a dependency makes for faster or slower compile times than without.

Anyway, my comparison was with regards to SeaORM (and/or sqlx) versus Diesel. SeaORM explicitly say they are not fully typesafe. From the docs [0]:

> Using a completely static query builder can eliminate this entire class of errors. However, it requires that every parameter be defined statically and available compile-time. This is a harsh requirement, as there is always something you could not know until your program starts (environment variables) and runs (runtime configuration change). This is especially awkward if you come from a scripting language background where the type system has always been dynamic.

> As such, SeaORM does not attempt to check things at compile-time. We intend to (still in development) provide runtime linting on the dynamically generated queries against the mentioned problems that you can enable in unit tests but disable in production.

That is simply a deal breaker for me. I use an ORM specifically to be fully compile-time safe, so having this sort of "escape hatch" in a language that is already typesafe and sound is just going backwards. In contrast, Diesel is fully typesafe and fixes all of the issues from [0], even for dynamic queries [1].

This all being said, I have also found Prisma Client Rust [2] and Cornucopia [3] to be viable alternatives to the "big 3 (SeaORM, sqlx, Diesel)" so to speak. PCR uses Prisma to generate an ORM but is generally slower due to the overhead of running the Prisma engine, but it's ergonomic if you already use Prisma in the TypeScript world, and it's a pretty good ORM itself. I have not used Cornucopia as much but it is less of an ORM and more of a way to generate types in Rust from your SQL. There is some discussion about them on reddit, for comparison [4].

[0] https://www.sea-ql.org/SeaORM/docs/write-test/testing/#1-typ...

[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/w54ydi/diesel_200_rc1...

[2] https://github.com/Brendonovich/Prisma-Client-Rust

[3] https://github.com/cornucopia-rs/cornucopia

[4] https://old.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/wdos9x/cornucopia_v08...


That has nothing to do with letting go staff and everything to do with the owner.


Wrong. A substantial number of advertisers dropped X.com because it isn't brand safe (for example their ads are located next to racist or Nazi or pornographic content). A substantial number of the staff let go were involved in keeping the site brand safe.


Google also should not show x.com on search engine as its another social media platform, it has nothing to do for ranking


Letting go staff has everything with the owner though.


It seems like this person does not understand what exactly once delivery actually means. It's not about being able to do something exactly once if the author is reading this...


> It seems like this person does not understand what exactly once delivery actually means.

Then by all means, enlighten me.


I don't want to get into a debate over semantics with you. You've redefined exactly once delivery to mean that if you have a layer of abstraction that hides that a message was delivered multiple times then it is "exactly once" delivery. That's not what exactly once delivery is. You clearly disagree but taking well understood and researched terms and redefining them to make a point is a complete waste of time for everyone. Nobody cares about what your personal definition of exactly once delivery is, they care about the definition that is used in literally all of distributed systems research.


I'm not asking for a debate. I'm simply asking you to tell me what "exactly once delivery" actually means in a way that isn't circular and doesn't beg the question of whether or not it is possible, i.e. the definition that is used in literally all of distributed systems research. So far no one has been able to do that.


Delivery is what happens when the signals cross from the wire into the network interface card.

Depending on the layer you’re operating on, you might instead say it’s the call to recv, or the DMA transfer. The point is that it’s logically a memcpy with no further processing. Just a memcpy. The physical data transfer.

It’s easy to build a reliable message-passing system on top of that, but any such system will either involve further processing or else be vulnerable to data loss.


> Delivery is what happens when the signals cross from the wire into the network interface card.

If you look at this sibling comment [1] you will find someone who disagrees with your definition.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41601562

On your definition, yes, exactly-once delivery is not possible. But I think your definition is neither reasonable nor authoritative.


FWIW, I consider that definition to be both reasonable and (in the context of "distributed systems") authoritative.


Exactly once delivery is when a message is delivered to any computer at any layer of abstraction exactly once.

It doesn't matter if TCP abstracts or any other layer abstracts this away, if a message can be delivered more than once it does not have the property of exactly once delivery.

You might disagree with this definition but you would be wrong. There is negative value in redefining exactly once delivery to mean what you think it means.


But I don't disagree with that definition. The only thing in dispute is whether or not it is possible to achieve. It seems clear to me that it is possible, but for some reason that I still don't understand people keep insisting that it isn't.


- Venezuela

- North Korea

- Cuba

Three communist and socialist countries with starving populations.

North Korea trades freely and shares a border with China. Venezuela has no sanctions applied to it by the US.

We can now easily rule out sanctions as the cause of their woes so what is the other common factor between these countries?


> Venezuela has no sanctions applied to it by the US

Actually: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanctions_during_the_Venezuela...


I'm going to interpret your comment as "Venezuela is starving because of US sanctions"

We actually have a really nice unintentional experiment. The Biden administration removed sanctions from Venezuela, they still had starvation after sanctions were removed.

The dictator managed to get food while the country was starving however: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hDebIITJ1x0


Vietnam is doing quite well though.


Apparently communism can only function with trade with free market capitalists?


They would love to be able to trade with other countries, but American Overlords are preventing them from doing so through embargoes. Only Sister-Republics like China or Venezuela dare disobeying the US.


Patently false. Cuba's top trade partners also include: Spain, Germany, Portugal, Mexico, Brazil, Netherlands, Italy, Vietnam.


- Venezuela

- North Korea

- Cuba

Three communist and socialist countries with starving populations.

North Korea trades freely and shares a border with China. Venezuela has no sanctions applied to it by the US.

We can now easily rule out sanctions as the cause of their woes so what is the other common factor between these countries?


I think you underestimate the power of your government and the impact of economic sanctions.

At the end of the day, I don't understand why those countries aren't allowed to be independant.


> I think you underestimate the power of your government and the impact of economic sanctions.

I think you don't understand how the scientific method works.

Venezuela had sanctions removed, they still starved. North Korea trades directly with the massive economy of China, the people are still starving and poor.

The problem is communism and socialism, not sanctions. Stop being a stooge for dictators.


I think you have been propagandized by criminals. I don't blame you, I was the same.

Regarding starvation, it happened under capitalist, slavery-based and feudal regimes aswell. One recent example is how the very capitalistic UK engineered a terrible famine that nearly killed 200mio Indians. For most of the western world, Churchill was very much a saviour, but for Indians, he was a brutal dictator.


I've personally experienced the horrors of communism so no propaganda was needed for me.


Oh have you? Interesting.

If you lived in a low-performing socialist country, I guess it's tough to blame you. But keep in mind that socialism, like any democratic experiment, is different based on the country's initial historic and material conditions.

One can pin point at China, a high performing democratic experiment and say they are doing fairly well, "despite" being a socialist Republic.

However I'm curious what you refer as "horrors" of communism.


> However I'm curious what you refer as "horrors" of communism.

Mass starvation and murders to start.


This is happening right now in Palestine and I'm pretty sure Israel is a capitalist entity.

Oh but I forgot, when we do it, we are the good guys. My bad.


Starvation due to war blockades, not because of lack of food; Gaza wasn’t starving before Hamas invaded.

Unlike in communist countries where famine occurs because there’s literally not enough food to go around.

No offense, but it seems you’re trolling with the way you bring up unrelated points.


"Hamas invaded" lmao, ofc its the locals who got to be invaders, not crackers from the western world.

Also war blockades are illegal, but again, when the west does it, its fine. With such mentality, no wonders they hate us.


Communism has more variables than central-planning vs market-economy: one-party, authoritarian, no private property, no political speech, nothing approaching civil rights, political executions...

Kim Jong Un Executes Officials Over Deadly Floods in North Korea https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kxLLk90i-Ek&t=2s


Any news network that cites Radio Free Asia uncritically shouldn't be taken seriously, which is where the news come from.

Next month there will be news how North Koreans are eating their own children with comically large spoons and y'all are gonna fall for it.


I can't discuss anything further with you when you call China democratic. You are basically a flat earther.


If this situation is considered "proof" of that, then I'd hate to hear about how democracy can only function with Communist support (China), and how it would have failed in the 70's without being propped up by dictatorships (Saudi Arabia). Or perhaps there's a bit more nuance to geopolitics than will fit into a single tweet.


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