Oh, 2022 • Hacker News Board

Re: Oh, 2022

#341

Post by CamperBob2 » Mon, Jan 10, 2022, 4:25 AM UTC

supperburg wrote: post #332

CamperBob2 wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes.

I’ve told you who he is. What do you think?

I think you could probably choose worse sources, as many people have. I also suspect you could choose better ones, but what you really need is more sources. (It's also possible that you misunderstood him, or that he didn't do a good job expressing the point.)

What's not debatable is that the fatality rate is not 0.02%, or anything close to it. The numbers don't work. If that's what he's saying, then he's telling you that your state and local health authorities have been lying to you all along... and while not an unprecedented thing (unfortunately), that's still a deadly serious accusation. You should demand that he back it up with solid citations. He won't, so you'll need to look at other sources of data and evaluate them to the best of your ability if you want to get a more accurate picture.

In the meantime, it's important not to spread false info during a pandemic, as I'm sure you'd agree.

Re: Oh, 2022

#342

Post by mikewarot » Mon, Jan 10, 2022, 4:26 AM UTC

throwawaylinux wrote: post #202

> But this is all predictable. (Except for COVID19 which was wide-screen WTFery, like the second world war—September 1st 1939 was not in fact predictable from September 1st 1929, for example: all that was predictable was that another European war would sooner or later see France and Germany at loggerheads.) I can't understand what this is saying. Not sure what 'wide-screen WTFery' is, but lots of people were predicti…

>but lots of people were predicting a pandemic, even covid-like if I remember correctly.

If you look at [1] the January 2020 - predictions for 2030 thread here on HN, and look for hints of the Covid pandemic, there are only 3 mentions of any type of pandemic, and none of those was close to an actual hit. I did the reading, all of the reading.

1 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21941278

Re: Oh, 2022

#343

Post by vkou » Mon, Jan 10, 2022, 4:26 AM UTC

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #172

maxerickson wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's mute. Block prevents the blocked user from seeing your tweets from logged in contexts and ability to reply to any of your tweets and so on. That it sort of curates a feed by limiting replies can go in both directions of course.

Why would anyone want to block, rather than mute? I suppose it's more 'honest' in some ways but the implementation as described almost feels designed to create drama. Is it easier to block or to mute? Which one is the de facto default in the UI?

Suppose that a deranged lunatic gets his hundreds of followers to dogpile you every time you tweet.

If you mute him, you'll still have him and his hundreds of friends shitting in your feed.

If you block him, he won't see your tweets, and you've raised the effort he has to put in if he wants to shit in your feed.

Some people will put that effort in, others won't.

Re: Oh, 2022

#344

Post by pbourke » Mon, Jan 10, 2022, 4:27 AM UTC

TameAntelope wrote: post #244

I always enjoy long term future predictions, because our human brains are obsessed with trying to resolve tension somehow, or rather assuming that tension will resolve itself. Specifically, in the political sphere the prediction that there's a) any intentionality or consistency in what's happening globally and b) that it'll have evolved into a "steady" state over the next ten years, one way or another. A possibly bet…

This posits that politics remains “politics” and does not devolve to widespread bloodshed. I don’t have a sense for how likely that is aside from “more likely than when I grew up.”

Re: Oh, 2022

#345

Post by rektide » Mon, Jan 10, 2022, 4:27 AM UTC

JohnBooty wrote: post #241

rektide wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

There was a lot I loved about Slashdot's moderation, and it really was a step forward, but ultimately it was a failure. The end product was a giant hivemind where a narrow range of opinions (essentially: "libertarianism good, Linux good") would be automatically upvoted and everything else was quashed. It was a step forward but I'm not really pining for it 30 years later. I agree about the lack of progress in the mean…

I agree I too am not sure this is a solve able problem. But the dominion of Big Social has aborted the freewheeling idea of the web to be able to better suss out democratically truth & idea & reason is absolute & tragic, has been at the wheel for well over a decade, and it fucking sucks and has brought us no good, no attempts. Slashdot was one of the last attempts that seemed to try. We need to loosen back up & start to try again: something we've not done, and something that has let disinformation & malignancy rule for far too long.

Re: Oh, 2022

#346

Post by andrekandre » Mon, Jan 10, 2022, 4:35 AM UTC

tick_tock_tick wrote: post #254

jaybrendansmith wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Global Warming is absolutely a slow motion comet strike. We don't believe the science, because we don't WANT to believe it. Those of us that DO believe it feel like robots, speaking to the rest of mankind in ones and zeros. And it's still 10-20 years away, we all think. We will just move north (or south). We will just move inland or uphill. We can science our way out of this shit. Not true. None of that is true. When…

> We can science our way out of this shit. Not true. Why not? We have a lot of promising developments both in cheap energy production and in reducing the cost to vacuumed green house gases out of the atmosphere. I can easily see a world where we change almost nothing about life and still achieve net negative carbon by just ripping it out of the air. Honestly we even have the technology to do it now just limited will…

  > Honestly we even have the technology to do it now just limited will if things ever get real bad that would change very quickly.

more important than technology imo is: where are the funds? who is going to pay for all this air filtration?

Re: Oh, 2022

#347

Post by bloaf » Mon, Jan 10, 2022, 4:35 AM UTC

MichaelZuo wrote: post #299

Apocryphon wrote: post #198

YMMV, but feels to me that cstross's Cassandra pessimism has increased rapidly each year, with good reason, but some of these pieces are overly-sensationalist. I still remember his whole bit in 2017 about how Hurricane Harvey was going to destroy Houston - how'd that turn out? http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2017/08/houston-... But I will say his 2015 piece, "A different cluetrain", still holds up with gr…

The trouble with blogs like antipope is that more often than not they read like GPT-3, or a more advanced GPT-4, where every sentence seems coherently linked with every surrounding sentence but there’s something that doesn’t seem quite right upon reflection. And so quite a lot of readers think there is some super duper smart guy offering this cool hidden insight that they can easily use, only to forget it by the next…

I kind of agree, its a bit too fragmented.

I think there are a handful of "obvious" interactions that should have been called out.

Politics + Space: Greater international competition for space-resources will likely begin, and we may see the end of first-come-first-serve orbits. The international inward-turning politics may be particularly poorly timed; we may see irregular military action in space.

Politics + Cyberspace: Inward-turning politics combined with greater awareness/impact of breaches (including on increasingly-autonomous vehicles?) will almost certainly lead to countries closing their digital borders a-la China. Its already been proposed in the UK, I believe.

AI: This is going to be the source of some huge wildcard, and I think everybody knows it. Companies have massive amounts of data on people regarding how they behave; eventually someone is going to give that data to an AI with the right/wrong instructions to make a noticeable impact on society.

Re: Oh, 2022

#348

Post by Sebb767 » Mon, Jan 10, 2022, 4:40 AM UTC

throwawaylinux wrote: post #325

Sebb767 wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When seen in his "world in 10 years"-view, it absolutely makes sense. If someone plans to build a house and bought the plot, you can predict that he will have a house in 10 years with quite high confidence. All the people who are in their forties now will probably have quite expected lives in their fifties and most of them will probably still be alive. We can be quite sure of this. The world being in complete lockdow…

> When seen in his "world in 10 years"-view, it absolutely makes sense. If someone plans to build a house and bought the plot, you can predict that he will have a house in 10 years with quite high confidence. It absolutely makes sense to say the pandemic was not predictable in a given 10-20 year timeframe. The issue is if that is the standard he sets then many of his other predictions are also not predictable.

Fair point!

Re: Oh, 2022

#349

Post by runarberg » Mon, Jan 10, 2022, 4:41 AM UTC

jcims wrote: post #326

runarberg wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Under-served rural areas in the USA tend to be pretty poor, and as is starlink (or starlink-like) internet is pretty expensive both for the service fee and hardware requirements. Perhaps the price will come down as operators proliferate and this will be affordable for these communities. But I still fail to see how this is a game changer. Serving these communities with traditional infrastructure and maybe a 5G tower i…

You seem to have very strict definition of rural that doesn't map to how the FCC or Census Bureau define the term. I live in an area that is very clearly 'rural', most of it has been built on in the past 30-40 years and the average home price within a few miles of me is ~$400k. I live by engineers, doctors, architects, technologists and none of us have had anything but 10M DSL and Hughes satellite options for Interne…

Now my notion of under-served rural America might be biased. I have traveled quite a bit around rural America and by far the most people in under-served communities were on the poorer side. Now I did definitely see affluent communities with minimal infrastructure (particularly in California), but that was very much the exception (even in California).

> With that available now, why would anyone spend millions of dollars to drop in a 5G tower to pick up another 50-100 customers?

Your county would—and should—spend a few million dollars with some extra funding from your state and local telecom companies to drop a few 5G towers to pick up a few thousand more customers and voter happiness for sure. Your county counsel can call it something like Rural Broadband initiative and have a plan to bring a broadband connection to 30-70% of under-served rural households in the county before 2030. A good politician should be able to sell it even to city folks as serving the community.

Re: Oh, 2022

#350

Post by Dylan16807 » Mon, Jan 10, 2022, 4:42 AM UTC

runarberg wrote: post #282

walrus01 wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

there are a number of rural areas in the USA that politically show very low likelihood of getting something like a proper last mile broadband service built by wireline infrastructure any time soon (fiber and GPON or active ethernet). some rural counties in eastern WA are the exception.

Under-served rural areas in the USA tend to be pretty poor, and as is starlink (or starlink-like) internet is pretty expensive both for the service fee and hardware requirements. Perhaps the price will come down as operators proliferate and this will be affordable for these communities. But I still fail to see how this is a game changer. Serving these communities with traditional infrastructure and maybe a 5G tower i…

> Under-served rural areas in the USA tend to be pretty poor, and as is starlink (or starlink-like) internet is pretty expensive both for the service fee and hardware requirements.

It's a utility. If it costs twice as much as elsewhere you still need to pay it, until it starts getting really difficult.