I don't think it's really fair to call it racism. That is such a loaded accusation to levy today that it should only be used if someone really wronged another person.
We all have cultural biases and familiarities, is that wrong? By this definition, we're all racist. Maybe that's true but it kind of ceases to be a useful distinction at that point. I wholeheartedly agree with your last sentence, but I don't know if throwing around the r-word is helpful.
> By this definition, we're all racist. Maybe that's true but it kind of ceases to be a useful distinction at that point.
Does it? I would argue that recognizing that we all swim in a soup of cultural biases and familiarities that advantage some people and disadvantage others is a noteworthy insight, an insight with practical implications. After all, we aren't volitionless molecules bouncing off walls. What if we made an effort to observe these biases more closely, to study there effects, and to better understand the way they effect our own behaviour? Then, what if we made an effort to counteract these biases, first in our own behaviour and then in our communities?
> After all, we aren't volitionless molecules bouncing off walls.
Are we not?
The free will debate aside, I think what you said makes a lot of sense, and comes across as empathetic, and you didn't need to use that word. I just think it's too loaded, aggressive, and broad to be very useful as a shorthand for the more complex thought you expressed.
I've seen some other commentary on the short/one-line paragraphs trend, and linking it to LLMs. I think it is just kind of a thing of the times—attention spans and all that.
I think it is more suited to the ways people consume text these days, kind of like how digital platforms moved to sans-serif fonts. Long dense paragraphs are fine in books and newspapers but hard to read and don't flow right on web browsers.
Books have also always had sections of short paragraphs for dialogue or pacing effect. I find myself breaking my own writing into more succinct paragraphs/thoughts that start to feel like jumbled run-on sentences without line breaks.
It does matter though. It is definitely a factor. There are lots of other factors, and different types of businesses with different margins, but they are all definitely tracking and optimizing those figures.
Consumers know that software can be reproduced cheaply and carpentry cannot.
Idk the intended demographic but it felt too easy or even heavy-handed. Three of the four options in each round sound like "and everyone lived happily ever after." Only one sounds like something that would happen in real life and continue the story.
> It makes perfect sense that the BPM is 123.45 because that’s exactly the sort of thing you get when a manager (who’s shown at the end!) just enters some numbers on the keyboard into the bpm field. They don’t keysmash the numpad; they just hit 123456789 until the field is full!
This seems like quite an assumption. Why wouldn't they keysmash? Or make up a fake number? And why bother to add a decimal point? What is meant by "robotically beating at 123.45 bpm"? Any fixed tempo beats robotically.
Your theory could be correct but it feels like connecting too many dots to me. 123.45 is a bizarre (and kind of human in that way) tempo that strikes me as more of a cheeky easter egg than a deeper connection to themes of corporate mass-produced roboticism (if they even did intend that as the exact tempo).
I have no counter argument prepared, but I thoroughly enjoyed exploring this all and making plausibly charming numbers. Most likely I’m wrong, of course; that’s an automatic likelihood for any numerology.
It's unlikely (but not impossible) that Logic would take 12345 input and insert the decimal automatically. The point was that adding the decimal point may not be necessary, especially in software with specific constraints; all sequencers I've come across have BPM ranges (typically 30-300) it's not too much of a stretch to think they could try to "intelligently" convert something that out of range rather than just clamping.
Kinda ish. Healthy resting heartbeat is around 60bpm and comfortable exertion heart rate - like doing an indefinitely sustainable run, the kind of thing we evolved to do to run down prey - around double that. The most broadly popular styles of dance music tend to float around 120bpm. It just feels natural to humans. At a guess, some combination of biomechanics (muscle twitch speed, pendulum effect of limb sizes against their articulating joints), heart beat, what most people can manage in terms of sustained exercise (as mentioned above), and attention span linked to multiples of musical phrases.
Specifically about keeping tempo, human drummers don't really. They will move around a central tempo, slowing in verses and increasing tempo in choruses and as the song progresses. If you're hearing a fixed tempo in a song, it's because it was recorded with a click track in the drummer's ear. Super common these days because popular tastes for recorded music currently skew towards perfection.
Yeah I don't think bumping into random people in public places is a great strategy. It's not a social situation, and it's a complete crapshoot.
I think the best thing is to have a hobby or interest that has a local place where you can find other people that like it. Music is a good one, go to some shows by yourself and talk to people. Or tennis courts, a makerspace, some kind of special event, etc. You will already have something in common and something to talk about with the people there.
Early Star Wars Galaxies was like this. You could run seamlessly from the town center through the wilderness into a busy dungeon (the Tusken fort is a memorable example). Planets were not zoned and there was a ton of pure exploration. Players constructed functional towns with governments.
That game and UO were so ahead of their time (the fun version of the metaverse), and at this point it's gonna take a revolution in gaming to pick up where they left off.
Yes, it can get tricky if you have to scroll a bunch, e.g. moving a file in a big directory into a subfolder, trying to hit that one pixel where it will scroll up, or using two other fingers to attempt to scroll, while holding the drag finger down...(CLI pros, you win this one).
I would like a desktop pick and place that works like drag and drop, you click and then it sticks to the cursor, but you are free to do whatever gestures until you click again.
I'm not sure if this is common on other desktop operating systems but the 'Drag Lock' feature on macOS allows you to double-tap an item, then drag it without holding the button down to begin a drag. At that point lifting your finger continues the drag until you tap once to release it.
I would be amazed at how many people using macOS have never found this option except I'm not sure I've ever seen it being called out as a feature, and nowadays it's also buried deep under Accessibility settings (the irony) instead of just being a Trackpad option, so a lot of users might not even think to go there.
I never said it was intuitive, only that it exists ;)
I’d argue that double-click to open a file is also not intuitive, but it is now the expected behaviour. Documents don’t have to be touched twice in real life to have them open and reveal their secrets. Plus, I do use Drag Lock, so that behaviour now does feel intuitive to me.
There’s a lot to be said for what is effectively learned behaviour in intuition.
No need, because whether an online community is more thoughtful or smarter than another is very subjective. Almost by definition, HN is not it. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and all that. Of course, by internet law, HN (or a subset of its members) considers itself to be the smartest, more thoughtful online community.
There are communities I like better, which are smarter and more thoughtful, but I've no desire to argue with you.
Which disparaging remarks? I just claimed HN is ok/average, not "the smartest place on the internet", and that it's typical of online communities to consider themselves "the best".
The unsubstantiated claim that "HN is the smartest place on the internet" is an extraordinary claim requiring extraordinary evidence, which wasn't provided.
> Of course, by internet law, HN (or a subset of its members) considers itself to be the smartest, more thoughtful online community.
I would call that disparaging.
If we're going to be pedantic, the post you initially quoted said "it's entirely possible" and "it seems likely." That's not a claim, that's a suggestion that invites a substantive counter-argument. Just saying "uh no, it's obviously not" is not substantive.
"It goes without saying HN is not the smartest" is more of a claim.
It really should not be that difficult to actually attempt to make an argument rather than point out that someone else's is probabilistically not totally factually correct. It's just bad faith, pure negation. You're defending the lack of substance in your argument by saying someone else's argument lacked substance. Put something forth yourself.
I'm not just trying to debate here, I am genuinely curious to hear about what other communities people find "smarter and more thoughtful." If they can't even be named then yes I am going to call that empty posturing.
Well, to be fair the comment that sparked this subtree asserted (maybe in jest? I hope!):
> It's a website with the smartest people in the world. The level of conversations here are unrivaled in internet communities.
Surely that HN is without question NOT the "unrivaled" website "with the smartest people in the world" should feel neither disparaging nor a surprise to you?
By the way, you got me wrong: I'm not really making a probabilistic argument. I genuinely don't think HN is populated by the smartest people on the internet. Nothing I've read here, in many years of being a regular, has led me to believe people here are anything other than average internet nerds/hackers/entrepreneurs. Maybe slightly above average? There's certainly interesting conversation to be had here, but why would I think HN has the smartest people?
> I'm not just trying to debate here, I am genuinely curious to hear about what other communities people find "smarter and more thoughtful." If they can't even be named then yes I am going to call that empty posturing.
I've zero interest in going down the route of exchanging subjective opinions with you about what is or isn't smart, nothing good can come out of it. I will point out many "rationalist" communities do believe themselves to be smarter than HN (do I agree with them? Nope. But that's not the point, is it? The point is that most serious online communities will tend to believe themselves better, and HN is no exception).
I'm sorry you feel this is "empty posturing". Maybe I just don't fit with the smartest people on the internet :(
This is perhaps only tangentially related to formal verification, but it made me wonder - what efforts are there, if any, to use LLMs to help with solving some of the tough questions in math and CS (P=NP, etc)? I'd be curious to know how a mathematician would approach that.
So as for math of that level, (the best) humans are still kings by far. But things are moving quickly and there is very exciting human-machine collaboration, one need only look at recent interviews of Terence Tao!
We all have cultural biases and familiarities, is that wrong? By this definition, we're all racist. Maybe that's true but it kind of ceases to be a useful distinction at that point. I wholeheartedly agree with your last sentence, but I don't know if throwing around the r-word is helpful.
reply