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The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

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Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#351

Post by CamperBob2 »

anon84873628 wrote: post #289
Waterluvian wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a lot of it depends on personal opinions on what society should be like being treated like objective truths.

Yes exactly. Let's simplify it to the individualist vs collectivist spectrum. Cars became a self-reinforcing driver of individualism, especially in net new geographies. The negative effects are resisted better in societies/regions that were built long before them. (For both the cultural reasons and plain physical reasons, like not having wide enough roads). In the car centric places, a few generations later they beco…

The thing is, the Amish don't try to tell the rest of the world that their way is the "obviously correct" way and that everybody else is doing it wrong, the way anti-personal mobility advocates do.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#352

Post by nonameiguess »

chungusamongus wrote: post #40
gdulli wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also Frank Herbert: "Once, men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them."

I mean, people are talking about the butlerian jihad without any sense of irony or subtext. Dune is literally a feudal hellscape that takes place in the wake of that event. It didn’t make things better. Lmao

I think your other comment is basically right that what Herbert really wanted was a fantasy epic with feudal structures, knife fights, and humans with near-magical abilities, and reverse engineered a vaguely plausible future that might bring that about without invoking any actual magic. Arguing whether this is supposed to be considered "good" or not is kind of beside the point. Fiction novels are mostly meant to present worlds that are interesting to read about more than advocating for or against those same conditions replicating in the real world.

The only thing I've really taken from what Herbert himself said, not something a character in one of his books said, is distrust of messiahs and centralized power being an inherently corrupting force, even in the hands of good people.

Unfortunately, I would have to say right now my bets on the most plausible fictional future becoming reality is WALL-E.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#353

Post by lazyasciiart »

sambishop wrote: post #305
armonster wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their negative effects are much more vast, subtle, and cultural. You could say many of the broad and widespread mental issues we have in the US is the result of automobiles leading to suburbanization and thus isolation of people. It has created an expensive barrier of entry for existing in society and added a ton of friction to doing anything and everything, especially with people. That's not even getting into the cl…

automobiles -> suburbanization -> isolation -> mental health crisis seems like a fairly easy hypothesis to test since there are still millions of people in america living densely and carless in places like nyc and you could demonstrate that they have a statistically significant gap in mental illnesses. so easy to test that i bet several people already have and you could just check.

Yes, they have. And they found it to be correct.

> living in dense inner-city areas did not carry the highest depression risks. Rather, after adjusting for socioeconomic factors, the highest risk was among sprawling suburbs

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10208571/

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#354

Post by californical »

nradov wrote: post #316
californical wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But what if we could predict which treatments would be most successful with ~70% accuracy? It would potentially speed up the feedback loops right? There may also be downsides, like skipping testing things that would enhance our fundamental understanding of something because the AI was wrong. But that’s already a problem , and having a better gauge in the early stages could be really helpful

What if I could flap my arms and fly to the moon? You haven't presented any scientific evidence that LLMs will enable such prediction accuracy. It's pure speculation and hope. Some smaller, incremental improvements to optimize research workflows are much more likely.

I’m not saying that they will, but that investing in advancements to AI overall could do that.

Not making predictions that they will, just trying to give an example of a benefit that we may get out of this

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#356

Post by dang »

GeoAtreides wrote: post #307
dang wrote: post #249

Here are the articles in this series that got significant HN discussion (in chronological order for a change): ML promises to be profoundly weird* - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47689648 - April 2026 (602 comments) The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: Part 3 – Culture - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47703528 - April 2026 (106 comments) The future of everything is lies, I guess – Part 5: Annoyance…

Why would a series of articles imply repetition? Let's presume there's a series on re-making the antikythera mechanism: 1. Metallurgy: finding, mining and smelting the ore 2. Building the tools (files, molds, etc) 3. Designing the mechanism 4. Making the parts (gears, bearings, etc) Am I wrong or there's no repetition, except maybe the title and calling it a series? Why reject parts 2, 3, 4?

The overall topic is the same, even in the hypothetical sequence you mention. Keep in mind that even if an article series is strictly partitioned into distinct parts, the discussion threads mostly won't be - all the different aspects will blend together, which means the threads will be more like "the same soup over and over" than "one about metallurgy, one about design, etc."

(Edit: I just noticed that strbean already made this point in the sibling comment!)

Also: usually the splitting into a series is somewhat artificial. In the worst cases, people try to make the segments be like TV episodes with cliffhangers, to push you to the next bit. That's a poor fit for HN. But even when they don't, to get the full "meal" you still have to go through all the parts. Few people do that, and the threads as a whole never do. This makes it less interesting and satisfying.

But there can be exceptions, and (ironically?) featuring an occasional exception mixes things up and so reduces repetitiveness! The trouble is that once people see one exception, they immediately expect/want others, pushing things back into a repetitive sequence and making the site less interesting again. It's a bit like telling the same joke twice in a row—the interest is all in the first telling.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#358

Post by lazyasciiart »

dpark wrote: post #274
cryptopian wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a lot of people in this comment thread interpreting the post's analogy as "ban all cars forever" rather than "consider how to use them as part of a wider societal strategy that makes places better for everyone". You can implement all kinds of transport badly. Trains can suck if they don't take you where you want to go, bicycles suck if wherever you live doesn't provide acceptable parking methods. Cars are gre…

> Buses will suck Buses are only workable because of cars. We build roads for cars first and trucks second. Buses are at most 3rd in the list and getting to use them is an incidental side benefit. No one builds enough roads for buses. They have to use the roads built for cars.

Many places build dedicated bus lanes, and a few places build roads specifically dedicated to buses, like the Queensland Busway system

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Busways_in_Brisbane

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#359

Post by californical »

lamasery wrote: post #180
Marha01 wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our civilization does not depend on aviation very much, it's a specialized service. If all planes disappeared tomorrow, we will weather it pretty well. Cars are a completely different animal: they are ubiquitous and don't really have an alternative in many cases.

Yeah we red-queens-raced ourselves into a position where now we have to have private cars, because if we don't we're screwed. Turned cheap 25-minute bike commutes into expensive 25-minute car commutes that can't safely or practically be biked, and shoved everything so far apart on account of giant parking lots and big highways cuttings straight through cities that the nearest bus stop is a half-mile away and that 25-…

And to bring it back, AI and LLMs are currently in the early phase. They haven’t yet done damage like cars which will take centuries to revert

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#360

Post by dilDDoS »

chungusamongus wrote: post #293
throwanem wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go look in a mirror, not at me. That's where the argument is waiting that you're feeling urged toward.

What you just said was an elaborate tu quoque fallacy. You aren't comprehending my basic point, which is that individual ethical decisions are not going to make a difference when all of the broader incentives are causing people to act otherwise.

Really weird that you're basically advocating people to not have principles if they don't align with "broader incentives". Also lol at you pulling the "some people have kids to feed" bullshit in a thread where we're all making way more money than most people.
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