Viewing profile — bshepard

Public goods are not the same as socialism.

The continued existence of socialism after its complete moral and intellectual demolition in the 20th century is profoundly depressing. Let us not walk on the road to serfdom, plea…

I am happy to see how much collective negativity there is to this kind of pointless, time wasting, inaccurate, cringey computer generated boilerplate. Maref, whoever you are, pleas…

It would be nice if there was a systematic way to stop AI written content from appearing on HN: the writing is excruciating to read, and there is (obviously) no reasoning involved.…

Very conventional, and perhaps good, advice would be to publish useful material adjacent to your problem, educational content that can lead to your solution/app. You might also try…

LLMs surely can help with language learning, but when they write posts like this, the zombie/body snatchers/borg effect is so strong as to be unreadable. Just write it yourself! Yo…

Perhaps the real mass psychotic delusion is the delusion of mass psychotic delusions in.others.

The problem is that "the problem" is not clearly stated. There is surely climate change, but what it means and what we should do and feel about it is very unclear and contested. Wh…

German culture is more about extreme anal attention to details and correcting others than Young Werther! In other words Prussia won, not Weimar.

Anxiety over commodification is very, very old, and tends to miss the upsides of commercial society. Intellectuals, by our nature, focus on problems -- often to the point of creati…

Who is "they"? Rabelais? Mozart? Alas many of us humans DO find poop to be funny, forgive us fallen shit stained beings.

What are the human rights costs of a human rights regime constituted by unelected bureaucrats seeking power over society via moral posturing?

It is less exciting than religious fundamentalism!

This is untrue, the book is filled with incidents of motorcycle maintenance. Perhaps you have not read it? The second chapter centers around a complex issue involving a piston seiz…

This is an inaccurate paragraph which should have been edited better: "When Europeans began to draw on ancient precedents in the Renaissance, they did so loosely and freely, and ea…

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The AI writing patterns here are obnoxious on both a sentence by sentence level and at the level of overall meaning and content. Because a machine wrote this, lacks human intellige…

It would be worth thinking harder before moralizing.

I wish this was written by hand and not created by an algorithm that recycled cliches and presented single data points as decisive. But...it's 2026?

Because the international order is fundamentally anarchic, while domestic orders are (supposed to be at least) nomic, structured by law and rights. Yes, there are attempts at creat…

"It’s November 28, 1660. Europe is in the early stages of transforming from the Middle Ages into something new" This is a grotesque misrepresentation of European history! By 1660, …

"You have not discovered a potion for remembering, but for reminding; you provide your students with the appearance of wisdom, not with its reality. Your invention will enable them…

I would advise those to read the book and grasp the argument before 'rebutting' it.

On a more conceptual angle, Landrebe and Smith's "Why Machine's Will Never Rule the World" clarifies the limits of computation w/r/t complex dynamic systems. Here is the core argum…