Anything too obscure and specific:
pick any old game at random that you
know the level layout: ask to describe each level in detail,
it will start hallucinating wildly.
Anecdotal: Stopping commenting on reddit reduced
emotional stress significantly.
Reddit is one of those "social" anti-social circles where
you can't afford to be on the "wrong side of argument" and
every discussion can quickly spiral out.
I've done the same with HN, somewhat. I log out by default, just to add a barrier between reading something and responding to it. Has to be something I really feel I must reply to or worth adding more information to, to make me log in.
I can confirm that deleting Instagram/Facebook has improved my QoL.
But I have a hard time ditching Reddit, I canceled accounts multiple times, yet at some point I need to discuss something for which there's only a subreddit online and I'm back at square one.
I agree to some extent, but even highly specialised / niche topics on dedicated subs are getting slammed by the "hivemind". I guess it's more apparent for non-us users, as we're not the target audience, but the political brigading is showing even on subs like space and ML related. Reddit is now very similar to ~2015-16 reddit when the-donald and other subs really peaked, just the other way around. 10/25 posts on all are bad orange man and bad space man related. The technology sub is a mess of weaponised autism. And then you get the same political bs coming from weird subs, like the cute pics sub, or the knitting sub suddenly having political submissions w/ 3k-6k upvotes, all saying the same thing.
It doesn't help that it is still the easiest "social network" to create accounts on, and bot on. With the advances in LLMs I sometimes truly can't say if an account is real or a bot. And I work in this space...
I don't think the hivemind thing can be solved so long as people can see each others' comments. But then it's difficult to have a social media site without that.
The biggest problem on reddit is having both up- and down-votes. That allows the majority to effectively eliminate dissenting opinions on any topic it cares about by down-voting them to oblivion, and then pat itself on the back for the fact that everyone apparently agrees with it. Since it's possible to do that, some see it as an obligation and go at it with gusto, making it hard to have a conversation that strays outside the current-year party line.
Systems which only have up-votes/likes have their own issues, but at least not that one.
HN also has both, but the score is only visible to the person who commented. I think it's an improvement in this regard, but then I rarely have hivemind issues. What do you think about this?
I strongly prefer chronological sorting for discussions (and thus no voting). At least it gives all views a fair shot at being represented, and it's also easier to join later on.
I used to edit Wikipedia and I was heavily involved in many, many disputes. And in fact, I would seek out disputes, even ones outside my topic area; it's not difficult to do on Wikipedia because there are entire notice boards where people go to have public disputes. We called them "dramaboards", especially the admins' disciplinary ones.
And I would have these disputes, of course, over utterly trivial things, like how to spell something or where to place the apostrophe, or some manual-of-style nitpick in an infobox. And the disputes would drag on for weeks and we could utterly stall the editing process by disputing on talk pages. And yet we could edit-war over it, usually in slow-motion. And often the dispute would be couched in quite polite language but I would hate the guys' guts.
And the tipping point came when I began to have dreams about Wikipedia, and I would wake up angry. I would wake up fighting. I would wake up and immediately tear into the web browser and catch-up on the discussion, or not, just to post my next riposte, because I'd composed it in my sleep, in my dreamless dreams.
And I woke up angry more often than waking up in any other mood. And I was telling my psychiatrist this, and she said I should probably stop looking at blue light before bedtime. And I was incredulous that she would think if I turned my arguments red-hued that they would anger me less, or cause me to wake up happy and agreeable or something?
And I know I wasn't taking enough medication to make anyone happy, but these guys on Wikipedia really knew how to piss me off, and if you've ever heard of "brinkers" it's a certain type of troll who will play by the rules, and basically trigger anyone with a hot temper, and that triggered person would forget their ethics and commit a fatal error, and get banned, and the brinker would go on to live another day and cause others to fall into similar traps. And many of us do that, if we have the volatile temperament. I lasted about 17 years on Wikipedia without a single block and with some low-grade warnings, but generally a clean discipline record, but finally it got to me.
And a lot of time on Wikipedia I had spent fighting trolls and vandals and very disruptive editors. And I made sure a lot of them were banned. I filed a lot of reports. I was a petty bureaucrat there, filing reports and compiling evidence and arguing cases. There was no shortage of "wikilawyering". From the very beginning I was finding disputes and diving into them. Especially when they didn't concern me, didn't concern any topic I cared about. Just to have the disputes.
And I kept waking up angry. And finally I got control of that. Nowadays I wake up frightened. I wake up traumatized. I wake up scared of something I dreamed about. It's spiritual torment, and it's attributable to nothing I did the night before. Perhaps the F.U.D. of Hacker News gets to me. But not on that level. At least I don't go on crusades or jihads against Wikipedia editors anymore.
Re: "brinkers", this is where it's very useful to have a certain amount of mod discretion so that people who probe the fences like velociraptors in Jurassic Park eventually get banned for that. The downside is that it looks even more cliquey than it is.
> and if you've ever heard of "brinkers" it's a certain type of troll who will play by the rules, and basically trigger anyone with a hot temper
Didn't know there was a term for this, good to know it wasn't just me seeing things. Witnessed this happen countless times while assisting with moderation on Discord. The only worse thing than the rules defending these people's behavior is when fellow moderators decide to cover for them too.
The number of replies I cut & paste to my notes archive far exceeds the amount of posts I actually make. I still find it valuable to work through my own thoughts to better prepare myself to have the same conversations in more impactful circumstances, but there are some things I just don't care enough about persuading the other person - or believe the other person is actually going to consider the words as carefully as I put them together.
Yeah, majority of my comments never get submitted. I’ll type a reply, edit, challenge/research my assumptions, and then ask myself this it’s adding material value to the conversation that doesn’t need to be further explained/elaborated. Most often I’m content with having refined my thoughts on a topic and close tab without submitting. Kinda like work email chains pre-slack.
This is so true and cathartic, and it has me wondering if sites are collecting the angry data I type in to inputs but don't submit. I'd LOVEEE to know what the stats are on posts that almost got posted.
There's a correlation between being really obnoxious and continuing threads on HN or anywhere else.
Occasionally there are good real conversations where people are generally interested and curious but the most common are either marginally interested or very interested in worthless conflict.
I can’t help but notice how all those points are centered around you being the bearer of truth and others being the source of dismay.
While these may be easy ways to avoid exposing yourself to sources of discomfort it might also not be a bad idea to learn how to deal with confrontation and dissonance in a productive manner.
Besides being contrarian, I am nothing if not that, I honestly think our society at large will benefit from learning how to deal constructively with opposing perspectives and mindsets - assuming we ever get to that point.
While I ostensibly agree about learning how to deal constructively with opposing perspectives, I also don't think online discourse (main stream avenues) will ever be the place to learn or partake in those sorts of conversations. Even in smaller subreddits, your comments will be viewed by thousands of people, some of whom are explicitly there to troll or to argue in bad faith or even people literally having mental breakdowns. You also end up in situations where every reply is to a new person, so you're not really having a discourse with anyone just an amorphous entity. Look at things like "Godwin's law" or "Poe's law", for some long running beliefs/commentary on internet discourse.
Along with don't check your threads, don't check your votes. I'm always struck by people saying "I don't know why I was downvoted for such-and-such." Where do they find the time to go back and check the votes on comments they made? I say the things I say and move on.
Your comment is proof to the contrary. You are thus lying and everything you say or do is now severely tainted. I will now produce a seven-pronged argument for why exactly this type of behavior is the hidden root cause of climate change and why you should feel bad. (/s)
Sorry, couldn’t help myself.
I know the feeling, but I have to admit that people being obtuse helped me to take them and myself less serious. That said, there are better ways to foster that kind of experience.
The interesting part of this research is that baboons, while evolutionary closer to humans, fail to perform this task.
So scientists were thinking "hmm, maybe perception of geometric regularity is a unique skill to homo sapiens?". It turned out that crows can tell a square from trapezoids, too.
I would argue the interesting part is that these shapes are nearly impossible to find outside of human society. Sure you can find quasi-crystals and straight lines occasionally, but either this is reused functionality (abstract thought?!) or they have a special relationship with things humans see as human.
I assume the subtext of this research is not that human are special, and more that each specific claim towards each species of animal needs exploration and confirmation.
And it genuinely takes a lot of time when dealing with reasonably complex animals.
It reminds me of the research on cinereous tits, where the researcher had to spend like half a year at a time to validate a given chant matches a given word.
I've been on the internet for twenty-some-odd years and at some point this attitude has come to feel like willful ignorance (generally; i do agree that it is unsurprising that crows recognize patterns. Or much less obviously intelligent animals for that matter, consensus-driven evidence hopefully inbound.)
Most people in active testable science have worldviews where they suspect many relationships about the world that have not been strongly validated. Einstein was not the first person to discuss how space and time seem inextricably related in a special way; pythagoras was not the first to figure out how to derive the third side of a right triangle; galileo was not the first to suggest a heliocentric worldview; etc etc. Demonstrating things that seem obvious or intuitive or that are already assumed and used practice is still immensely valuable. Communication is hard, and demonstrating things about the world without getting tangled up in the inherent unsuitability of language to precisely describe the world is incredibly, incredibly difficult. We are still validating knowledge that the ancients practiced on a daily basis. Galen certainly never bothered to persuade; only to inform.
It nearly makes me want to ban articles if the paper is available. The discussion inevitably sags.
It does but one has to hold a belief for it to be eventually confirmed or denied.
Many people historically and presently see themselves as the pinnacle of a godly creation, so they put humans above everything and anything, meaning that most perspectives to validate or not are about how unique we are. It might be annoying or backwards but at least there are people out there still willing to chip at it, one study at a time.
The study is testing a very specific type of "recognizing shapes"; which the title of the article calls "geometric regularity". The "background stimuli" are shapes that crows would be expected to be able to distinguish, and are used to train the crows on the task. Whereas the "probe stimuli" are the actual experiment.
As a sibling indicated baboons can not distinguish these shapes easily. Additionally, rather than a binary "crows can recognize shapes" the study shows how well crows process the shapes. One of the graphs in the paper, but not the article shows that two different crows have a similarly hard time with the rhombus.
In other studies, this same test was applied to humans to find that it is a fairly innate skill rather than developed by doing geometry in school.
Specieism in science goes way back. The funny thing is, people who live closer to nature and birds and animals have known about animal intelligence for millennia. But they were "primitives" who couldn't possibly have more knowledge than learned white people.
And crows? Humans have been battling crows since the beginning of agriculture. It takes some serious effort to crow-proof everything on a farm.
I care, but mostly about my country, then my continent, and only them I'm roughly aware of things happening in other large countries (Russia, China, the US). I still don't see why comment about the US administration is relevant here.
It isn't as if European countries are free of such problems, with similar minded parties, and since you mention Germany, AfD keeps increasing their size.
Because of the ways the benefactors want us to think it X
It really doesn't matter as much as the hysteria around it. Maybe the hysteria is 0.0001% accurate and that's generous. This is true for any political tribe, politics and political messaging in general.
The economic priorities of the US will have significant effects worldwide even if you put a watermelon in the president's office. It has been having significant effects worldwide for the last 100 years. Politics has not changed this one bit.
Yeah, the math problem is the other direction -- a thousand things being named after one guy, or a thousand things being named after the simplest English word which could possibly apply.
Still better than computing where everything new thing is named after a generic household item that makes it completely impossible to disambiguate while searching.
Perhaps its a Ediacaran biota remnant, that had very diverse groups some of which could be misclassified because the consensus is against Ediacaran relics existing past their period.
Btw ignoring "internet radio"(which is just streaming) the reason shortwave niche as media source is narrowing is sattelite radio, which is high-end long-range media alternative and low-end FM receivers for local stations(at much higher sound quality).
Could it even compete with modern submarine drones/underwater gliders that are thousands of times cheaper/smaller and can cripple these bulky ships in seconds?
Someone once said that looking for a ship on the ocean is like trying to find your car keys in a field with a pair of binoculars.
Obviously this applies less to littoral waters (1.5 dimensional instead of 2 dimensions of open water) but still: how does scale factor into trying to task sea drones with hunter/killer roles?
Also, always worth pointing out that while tactical warfare is a technological battle — in which drones may indeed be superior — war is also a strategic, political act and as such the presence of large scary ships — even 250t ones — is often enough to achieve ones strategic aims.
Love that analogy. But on the topic of your final point - I agree with you, but I do think we're rapidly approaching the era where ships of this size will be difficult to defend from a mass drone strike, easily coordinated via a combined air/surface/submerged drone swarm.
At that point, the asymmetric reward of sinking one of those large scary ships is going to be irresistible for both state and non-state actors, specifically for those same strategic and political aims.
Or they just use Phalanx-like [0] close-range defensive aid suites which already exist?
Sure, that will consume a lot of bullets but swarms of defensive kamikaze drones will also get used up and need resupply. In which case the resupply ships themselves also become high-value targets.
I thought the Phalanx was exactly the type of defense system that drone swarms were more or less designed to penetrate. Sure, it can put out an unreasonable amount of lead (tungsten? uranium?) downrange but the number of disparate targets it can engage per second is actually quite limited. It's vulnerable to being swarmed.
I agree that a Phalanx can be swarmed but I'm having problems envisaging drone-on-drone attritional combat involving a capital ship lasting for vey long. If you (capital ship owner) are attacking a peer state it can probably afford to swarm you repeatedly over several days also throwing in plenty of additional standoff missiles, perhaps something ballistic, a sub or two, probably others I haven't thought of.
You'd probably get away with it handling intermittent Houthi attacks in the Red Sea but in a serious war I think the logistics would get you in the end.
There are multiple different drones. I bet phalanx will do nothing against small 10" drones which can target communications and sensors of the ship in a first wave. And second wave could have much heavier payload to target ship's structure
The person you're responding to basically says that “big ships won't be cost effective against small droneship” but they fail to realize that these “small” droneship themselves must be pretty bulky if they want to carry a warhead big enough to destroy a big ship at long distance, and they will be pretty cost-effectively be dealt with by much smaller kamikaze drones that will be protecting the big ships.
> Someone once said that looking for a ship on the ocean is like trying to find your car keys in a field with a pair of binoculars.
That is true if you try to look for a ship visually. But nobody would do that. Everyone uses radar. The radar can be mounted on the shore, on a rig, on a ship, on an airplane, or on a satellite.
Or you use underwater microphones. Those can be mounted on the ocean floor, or a ship, or a submarine.
Neither of these share much with looking for your car keys with a pair of binoculars. The keys don't emit sound and the field does not transfer the sound as well as oceans do it. And the keys don't light up as nicely as a ship on a radar image. So i'm not sure what aspect of maritime surveillance does that saying illuminate.
Just based on the wikipedia page it doesn't sound like it was lost?
"After the ship's seizure the Malta Maritime Authority stated that the security committee—composed of Maltese, Finnish and Swedish authorities—were aware of the ship's ___location at all times, but withheld the information to protect the crew."
Certainly a murky situation but doesn't feel like it demonstrates the complexity of finding a ship. Sounds like right away once someone wanted to find the ship they could find the ship no problem. Presumably using Synthetic Aperture Radar satellites and then the frigate's own radar.
> how does scale factor into trying to task sea drones with hunter/killer roles?
The Black Sea is a good example of how that went down; using US intelligence - could be sattelite imagery, radar, or a combination thereof - they were able to pinpoint the Russian ship(s), giving their drone ships enough guidance to head there. And as long as there's no signal jamming, it could be remote controlled to its final destination if needs be.
IMHO: Yes, subs are great when you need people to constantly be looking over their shoulder and spending tons of money on ASW. They are great at interdicting logistical shipping too. But, they are really really bad at being seen (that's kinda the point), and sometimes you want a unit to be seen to force an enemy to dedicate forces to take care of it. Look at the amount of forces the allies dedicated to sinking Bismark and Yamato. In both cases a not insignificant amount was dedicated to taking down a battleship and even then in both cases not without either significant losses on the allies side, or overwhelming force and waiting for the battleship to be uncharacteristically exposed.
Surface vessels can also provide direct fire which is actually a lot cheaper than a torpedo. The cost of a 5" shell is something like ~20k (2k per actual shell + fuse which I assume is at least 18k) vs $5.39M(2022, source wikipedia) for a MK48 torpedo. 5" gun mounts are pretty much fully automated at this point, they have places for sailors for emergency... but on a NOMARs ship you'd just YOLO on that and use a simplified version without the manual backups for weight savings.
One of the coolest things about this is not this operating on it's own, but operating with a larger manned surface vessel or sub. They act as a cheaper and disposable escort for a much more powerful vessel creating a force multiplier. This is pretty much identical to the "Loyal wingman" that has been under development for awhile.
TLDR: there is value in having a ship being a visible target and having a gun. There is also value in having both NOMARs and manned ships working together.
I'm apparently off by a factor of ten, but then again I'm including the fuse... which probably does cost the other 18k. I've updated my post to include that to make the distinction.
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