> MAGICK is the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with Will.
> (Illustration: It is my Will to inform the World of certain facts within my knowledge. I therefore take “magical weapons,” pen, ink, and paper; I write “incantations”—these sentences—in the “magical language” i.e. that which is understood by people I wish to instruct.
> I call forth “spirits” such as printers, publishers, booksellers, and so forth, and constrain them to convey my message to those people. The composition and distribution is thus an act of MAGICK by which I cause Changes to take place in conformity with my Will.)
A common definition anthropologists use for magic is occult technology: a system of laws that can be manipulated to create desired changes. There's a lot of value in thinking of programming as a form of magic.
Can you expand on this? It has always seemed to me that while programming does indeed like to couch itself in magical terms ("he's a database wizard", "this compiler stuff is black magic", etc), it is fundamentally understandable and replicable. All layers of programming build on their lower layers and this stuff is understood well enough that you can go to university to learn about it in detail.
Programming is technology but not "occult" technology, and I don't really see the added value of treating it as occult. Quite the opposite actually, most good programmers I know acquired their skill because they have a decent grasp about the entire system rather than treating most of it as a black box.
You can go study religious spells in a school as well. There are catholic universities teaching exorcism, and buddhist schools teaching tantric magics that give you superpowers. The critical difference is that I don't believe in either of these things, so I've labeled them "occult". I believe in programming and I'm not calling it occult, but there's little to objectively distinguish it from those other practices.
This is simply a reflection of my beliefs though, not an objective reality of the world. I trust that the TRM for my chip accurately reflect the details I can't observe for myself. Many devs don't even go that far down and trust that their OS, or programming language to behave as they expect. We're all dealing with black boxes on some level.
To quote a reasonable definition from an actual scholar on this subject, Jesper Sorensen:
Thus, magic is generally conceived of as referring to a
ritual practice aimed to produce a particular pragmatic and locally defined result by means of more or less opaque methods.
This pretty much perfectly describes how programming is perceived by normal people. I could also quote Malinowski, who argued that magic must have a kind of "strangeness" to differentiate it from non-ritual speech. And programmers regularly describe difficult bits of code as magical (e.g. magic constants, or fast inverse square root) even though these are easily explained in most cases.
> but there's little to objectively distinguish it from those other practices.
Isn't there? I would say that the key difference is that programming actually works, and works reliably. Even if it is opaque to normal people, at least the programmer themselves has a reasonable ability to understand why their program will work and critically can "call their shot": they can reliably predict the effect a certain program will have. Magic is not like that: even if the practitioner claims to understand how it works, their success rate is typically abysmal. AFAIK there are zero faith healers or other magic types whose claims consistently hold up when inspected, but programmers and other engineering types do it all the time. That's the objective difference right there, even if normal people struggle to discern the two.
Of course it's replicable to us high wizards who have studied it for most of our lives and now understand it in depth. So is the actual magic in many fictitious universes.
All technology is like this to some extent, but a lot of technology is grounded enough for the average person to see the rough operation of it. You look inside a washing machine, there's a part that spins around. Attached to it by a rubber belt is a smaller part that spins around, and has electric wires on the other end. Your explainer points to that and says "that's an electric motor - it converts electric power into spinning motion" and you say "ok".
AFAIK learning to program these days is a fairly normalized process where people start with basic commands (ie hello world stuff), then move on to control flow (if/while/for) and eventually on to object oriented programming, higher order functions and all the rest. Some people even go on to do things like "craft your own interpreter" and "NAND to Tetris" to really round out their knowledge, but most do not and that's fine. I think that some of the simplest programs are just as "explainable" as your washing machine example. Conversely, there are plenty of machines complex enough that an average person has no idea how they work. A MRI machine for instance is just a collection of metals and hoses and most people would seriously struggle to point out which parts do what and why. It's still not magic though.
I guess the difference between magic and science to me is that "not everyone can learn magic", but the core bit that makes science work is that in principle everyone can learn it. In practice of course we cannot know everything and so have to rely on the expertise of others, but that is a limitation in the humans and not in the knowledge. Meanwhile for "magic" you have to be chosen by the gods/genetically gifted/cursed/whatever.
In a universe where magic is just another skill that anyone can learn, that reasoning goes right out the window of course.
A lot of other magic systems are in principle open for anyone to learn. I mentioned this a bit more in the other comment, but buddhist spells are open to everyone in principle. The chosen/gifted one is a feature of western magic systems because of our own cultural expectations.
Oil is the medium of time manipulation magic. Created through ancient sacrificial rituals, it is is a substance that can be used to create aging/rot-retarding barriers, or refined into derivatives that increase the rate of plant growth and mechanical work. To be handled with care, as extended contact can lead to corruption of the body, as well as increased susceptibility to fire elemental spells.
Simple rituals can render an inferior product from most living things; the time-manipulation abilities of such substances will be weaker, but the substance will be safer to handle, and can even be imbibed (this is a double-aged sword, reducing one's vital life force while increasing one's bodily proportions to that of a toddler).
-Me, "Early Morning Bed Thoughts", a few months ago.
There's actually a useful and quite generic metaphor to be excavated here. I would just tell you what it is, but I think you'll more enjoy finding it for yourself.
By this definition a hammer is a magical or "magickal" implement - the K was Crowley's invention, so that he could trademark it - which of course can be true if someone decides as much, but the only reason to couch such trivia in the pettifogging obscurity Crowley favored is because doing so will help you nail bored young socialites, an activity which Crowley also famously favored. (Gotta watch out for that neurosyphilis! What a shame he never did.)
They're etymologically unrelated, "bikeshedding" having been coined in our field and our lifetime, but semantically not too far apart. The main difference I see is that pettifogging connotes an ulterior motive which the described activity serves to conceal, while bikeshedding explicitly denotes the service of no purpose save the burnishment of the bikeshedder's ego.
(The term "bikeshedding" is insufficiently defined, in that it implicitly excludes the social reasons always underlying human behavior, which is why I these days prefer the word I used. Honestly, having been away from it now something over a year, even the simple jargon of the field begins to take on a queasy pseudocolor in my mind, the stinking sinus-stinging yellow-green of a revolted gut revolting. Thinking back over the rattle of acronyms and half-words that used to shape my days comes to be like thinking back over times I have been feverishly ill. Perhaps for once in my life I am on the leading edge of something.)
I rue the day the IG reels crowd pick up on it and it becomes the "word du jour" that gets overused to the point of being intolerable. Right up there with "narcissist" and "gaslighting".
The problem isn't so much overuse as misuse, as "gaslighting" gets thrown around for almost any kind of falsehood.
Another example would be "Ponzi scheme", which I've seen abused for any situation the speakers seems unsustainable, even when there isn't any records fraud.
For sure. Despite all the talking about "self-deification" and all that shit, they sure seem to care a lot about what society (and their imaginary demons) think about them.
> A definition by which every human alive ever qualifies as a magician
Exactly correct.
Chapter 2: "No, every act of your life is a magical act; whenever from ignorance, carelessness, clumsiness or what not, you come short of perfect artistic success, you inevitably register failure, discomfort, frustration. [...] Why should you study and practice Magick? Because you can't help doing it, and you had better do it well than badly."
If you called him on it he would say that was on purpose, then talk your ears off about how. He was a ferociously effective charlatan, which is why people still remember the name he made up for himself. (And even invented a rhyming couplet to prate as a pronunciation guide!)
Will you still think I'm fucking with you if I call your comparison a lot more insightful than I think you realize?
White nerdy kids have just been relatively less desperate up to now, socioeconomically speaking. You used to have to be a real hardcore loser, as a not otherwise messed up white boy, to embrace Crowley or hermeticism or any of that other shit that's only interesting to the poor kids and the crime kids and the kids from fucked-up families, who hang around smoking cigarettes together just off school property. (Hello.)
But now, as we exit the second "gilded age" for the second "great depression," the prospect of success in "straight" life, the white folks standard college/job/marry/kids/Epstein-client script, proves a mirage, and the same immiseration of opportunity comes for American whites that American blacks have always known. Thus proliferate get-rich-quick schemes among those certain they are deserving - i.e., con games among suckers, Crowley's native element. Given how much his speed habit led him to write, it's no surprise he comes roaring back. (He did have a sense of character and of history, hence making sure he left behind an appealing - as appalling! - set of lies.)
I have a lot more respect for B.I.G., who at least in my recollection never pretended he was other than one in a million. But when somebody like any of these guys starts saying he sees himself in you or vice versa, you had better keep your knees tightly together and a hand over your drink.
No this was much more substantial and I quite enjoyed it, I was thinking along these lines when offering the comparison, but you have a flowery way to put it.
That is to say, this is the first I'm hearing of this Crowley guy directly, but I have heard murmurs of "magick" down stream in video game culture. So while I agree with the broad social analysis, and have even brushed the aesthetic diffuse through culture, I don't really see any practitioners or other indicators to suggest this is being taken seriously.
From most this would be no compliment. Out of you I genuinely appreciate it. I don't think you could show me greater kindness if you were trying, and I want you to know it means a lot.
You could be the only one producing sane products in an insane world. But you won't get paid for it. The people mandating Claude Code are the people dictating large-scale money flows.
fork it. Fork the internet. How about that? We have this stupid system built on people paying to target us. Is that "the" internet or is it just one internet, and not a very good one. This is supposed to be a place for hackers. So fork the internet.
This is basically "just don't use things you don't enjoy" and the trouble of our time seems to be the number of people who can't or won't do that.
It's somewhat an age thing but also definitely a lot of people in all generations never learn it: you can just stop using things. Walk away and suddenly find you never want to look back, and if you do it's entirely unappealing.
It's (mostly) not the networking layer where people pay to target us. It's the application layer that would most benefit from being forked.
Of course the problem is that what can be forked already has been. Federated social media. Distributed git hosting. However most "essential" uses are centralized and often also commercial in nature. If you fork Amazon you're ... still Amazon. That sort of thing.
I mean, I've had pipe dreams of a parallel networking stack built on IPv6 with a killer app offering real peer-to-peer networking again. But who will deploy and maintain all the new IPv6 networking gear, infrastructure, undersea cables? This is not something within the purview of the average (or even above average) hacker any more; the encumbents are too firmly entrenched.
Collectives, cooperatives and other organizations. It's been done before, giant WiFi networks spanning countries. Freifunk, Guifi and NYC Mesh are a few of them, the two first are real and alive alternative networks built on independent hardware infrastructure.
Not sure about the details with Freifunk, but Guifi has collaborating companies who basically operate like ISPs but connect you to Guifi + you get a internet connection via the Guifi peering the installer helps you with.
Personally, I am guessing it is the other way around. Not first killer app, but first a parallel networking stack, etc.
The idea that anyone is too firmly entrenched is always true. Until it is not. We are not still using horses, nor casting bronze tools. Nor do most ships sail. We (mostly) don't burn coal anymore. It would have been utterly insane to imagine replacing any of those entrenched technologies. That is the "follower" syndrome.
The context for a new kind of internet is very different now, than when the internet started. That changed context provides an opening for new ways to do things.
A crucial and hard piece is that it has to be paid for. As much as you need a parallel networking stack you need a parallel business model. Yes, the current one is too firmly entrenched, etc.
I think Heidegger provides a framing for why these are just musings in, as you put it, a firm entrenchment and the whole ordeal is looking quite bleak. I honestly can't imagine a way out of the technological frame and I am simply not seeing my generation in common spaces. Even my ability to meaningfully connect with my peers through conversation is deteriorating by product of the sheer scale of potential engagements one has at any moment. It is quite overwhelming and I am afraid there is no technological answer here.
I don't agree that one should "write like they talk." Certain forms of writing are fundamentally a higher and more complex register of language, because they have gone through more rounds of refinement and editing, while speech is generally composed one-shot; you can't "go backwards" and make edits to your speech, except by going forwards and issuing more speech to make corrections and amendments to what you've already said. That is, speech is "write once," given the fact that it needs to be composed extemporaneously.
Try talking like an academic on the street - you'll get laughed out of the alleyway. Informal conversation often needs to target the lowest common denominator, which is the most you can expect from the average person out in the "real world;" that is, of course, unless you are reading from a prepared speech - which is the composition of a speechwriter, prepared ahead of time, instead of improvised on the spot. Writing can target more advanced audiences because you're not limited by space and time to the people in your immediate vicinity, but people who self-select into your subject matter - for instance, on fora like this one, which represent a small minority of technically inclined readers.
One can write extemporaneously in this style - that's the IRC and chatroom register of written speech, and it has its place, but I don't think this is the form of writing that the author of the article had in mind. For instance, I doubt that this article was composed one-shot in an IRC chatroom and then published verbatim, but went through many rounds of editing. That's not how "people really talk."
Of course, if one is in more enlightened company, their informal, extemporaneous speech can start to take on more complexity and jargon. You need to target your communication to your audience.
For what it's worth, most of this post was written one-shot with minimal revision, but with pauses to think about what to write next. These kinds of pauses are usually known as "awkward" in every day speech over beers. I will maybe go over the post and make some edits as I read over it again.
This state of affairs presages the advent of a second dark age - one that will forever eclipse the era of radical openness & transparency that once served the software community for decades. Tips, tricks, life hacks and other expert techniques will once again be jealously guarded from the prying eyes of the LLM whok would steal their competitive advantage & replicate it at scale, until any possible information asymmetries have been arbitraged away. The development & secrecy of technique will once again become a deep moat as LLMs fall into local, suboptimal minima, trained on and marketed towards the lowest common denominator. The Internet, or at least, The Web, becomes a Dark Forest of the Dead Internet (Theory), in which humans fear of speaking out and capturing the attention of the LLM who would siphon their creative essence for more, ever more training data. Interaction contracts into small meshes of trusted, verifiably human participants to keep the tides of spamslop at bay. Quasi-monastic orders that still scribe with pen and paper emerge, that believe there is still value in training and educating a human mind and body.
> Tips, tricks, life hacks and other expert techniques will once again be jealously guarded from the prying eyes of the LLM who would steal their competitive advantage & replicate it at scale
I've already started thinking this way, there's stuff I would have open sourced in the past but no longer will because I know it would get trained on. I'm not sure of any way I can share it with humans and only humans. If I let the LLMs have the UI patterns and libraries I've developed it would dilute my IP, like it has Studio Ghibli's art style.
It's worth questioning the underlying assumptions. It's humans - all humans - that benefit from LLMs. I see a lot of people having this attitude, but I can't help but see it as really being about seeking credit instead of generosity, and/or Dog in the Manger mindset.
Humans aren't benefiting from LLMs, only a few individuals are. Let's stop with the fake platitudes and realize that unless this technology isn't completely open sourced from top to bottom, it's a complete farce to think humans are going to benefit and not just the rich getting richer.
> Humans aren't benefiting from LLMs, only a few individuals are.
Honest question: how is this different from traditional Open Source? Linux powers most of the internet, yet the biggest beneficiaries are cloud providers, not individual users. Good open weights models already exist and people can run them locally. The gap between "open" and "everyone benefits equally" has always been there...
Because opposite is true for open source? It is actually for free, whether you contribute to it or not. Anyone can legally use it for free. Torwalds can not just wake up one day and decide to charge more.
If you feel like linux is a too much of a monopoly, you can actually fork it and compete.
But I considered that when I said "Good open weights models already exist and people can run them locally."
You can have a great LLM model with vast coding knowledge running on your computer right now, for free. It won't be the best one nor the fastest one, but still a very good one.
Same is true about science as well. Taxpayer money is spent on research, but the outcomes of that research primarily benefits the corporate interests.
I'm the last person to cheer for unrestrained capitalism, but this anti-billionaire / anti-AI narrative is getting ridiculous even for general population standards, much less for HN. It's like people think their food or medicine or LLMs grow on fucking trees. No. Companies and corporations is how adults do stuff for other adults, at scale. Everyone understands that, except of a part of software industry, that by accidental confluence of factors, works by different rules than literally the rest of the world.
You must not be serious. Every single person using LLMs, whether paid or free tiers or open models, whether using them for chat or as part of some kind of data pipeline - so possibly without even knowing they're using them - benefits.
"Few individuals" get money mostly for providing LLMs as a service. As far as tech businesses go, this is refreshingly straightforward, literally just charging money for providing some useful service to people. Few tech companies have anything close to a honest business model like this.
I'm not seeing how the benefits have outweighed the positives at this point. Spam, scams, porn, being inundated with slop, people losing their skills and getting dumber, mass surveillance...
Is that worth possibly maybe saving some time programming, but then not gaining the knowledge you would have if you did it yourself, that can be built on in the future?
I don't see technological advancement as good in itself if morality is in decline.
I reached the same conclusion. It also made me realised how most technologies degraded our lives.
Before the TV people would go to the theatre. It's becoming hard to find a theatre these days. Artificial light is convenient, it made billion or people develop sleep disorder and we can't see stars at at night. Mass food production supposedly nourished more people: veggies today have 20% the minerals content they had 70y ago..the list go on and on.
> Mass food production supposedly nourished more people: veggies today have 20% the minerals content they had 70y ago..the list go on and on.
I suggest you should have a look at malnutrition rates 100 years ago vs now. Without mass food production we would not be able to sustain even 50% of current population.
I think it's more fair to say that with every technology there are tradeoffs. Consider the wheel, before the wheel people probably were more physically fit, but they couldn't move as large of loads. Well, except in the Andes where they figured out how to move gigantic stones well beyond the weight that any wooden wheel would have been able to carry anyway and cut and place them into configurations that were earthquake resistant.
Technology and civilization is path dependent, and I think it's silly to make blanket statements about the merit of technological progress overall. Everything choice (including the choice to do nothing) has unintended consequences. I would never condemn anyone for inventing a new technological solution to a problem, but once the systematic effects are understood then we do need the collective ability to course correct (eg. social media, AI, etc).
Everything has tradeoffs. I imply technology rarely yields a net positive. I could call out the positive, those are so obvious. It's the subtle cost of the benefits that almost never gets discussed.
This is a super bold statement that I guest most people would disagree with, and I suspect if you somehow brought people forward from the past, even fewer would agree with.
I do agree with you the subtle cost is rarely discussed. I also would say that the unintended consequences of technology are sometimes very very bad in unforeseeable ways, but that's very different from the "net negative" framing which I think is too reductive to be useful. Technology is not a zero sum game, effects are multifaceted, so any quantitative comparison relies on extremely subjective value judgements.
It's odd to me that you live in a place where it's hard to find a theatre. Living in a cosmopolitan city there's so many theatres with anything from professional shows to amateur dramatics all at very reasonable price points.
Sure, Edinburgh, London, New York, got plenty enough.
My point is that technology displaces or replace activities.
In many cities there are no theatre. To be clear I meant performance theatres by the way.
We used to consume live performance. Drama, dance and whatnot. Comedy for instance is now for the masses, more or less controlled. Costing pennies to distribute via air or streaming platforms. They compete with a more valuable but harder to afford media. so they win.
Is it a net positive that we can converse in almost real time for virtually no cost, with niche communities on the other side of the world. Yes. Anyone can still walk into a Café or the park and engage in conversations with others. But overall, the compounding of all tech advancements and what they displace, I think, is an overall net negative.
Not because I'm an anti progress or losing my job because of technology, quite the opposite. I sat down and wrote down the list. How technology enables VS affects me personally, and other persona. From upperclass worker in New York, to the cocoa bean farmer in Ivory Coast. Overall it appears that technology isn't benefitial to humanity.
I then challenge those who disagree. Typically, they haven't taken into account the negative seriously. The few who concede to do so, eventually agree that the question is in fact complicated and abandon the debate.
It doesn't mean I'm right. I read the detractors in there, perhaps there is something I missed. So far there isn't.
> seeking credit instead of generosity, and/or Dog in the Manger mindset.
I have tried being generous to enemies. It only turns them them into... bigger, hungrier enemies.
I'm happy with never getting "credit" for anything I "accomplish" (whatever those notions even mean under a system where thoughts can be property).
I mean: as long as my labor output cannot be subverted to benefit hostiles even the tiniest bit.
> It's humans - all humans - that benefit from LLMs
The set of "all humans" includes that power-hungry majority who find nothing wrong with subjecting other sentient beings to sadistic treatment.
Those who, as soon as they take notice of me - or my kind, or our speech, or our trail - more often than not become terrified into outright aggression.
So far we had been protected from their stupidity and lack of imagination, by their stupidity and lack of imagination.
Now they've had brain prostheses developed for 'em, and... well I can't really do much for those who haven't already begun to reevaluate their baseline safety, now can I?
And while sociopaths - who benefit the most from corporations - technically are humans, I don't consider them parts of humanity, more like a cancer tissue on top of it.
So whatever benefit humanity gets is more than cancelled by the growing cancer.
So I am to assume you're not using LLMs yourself, or any technology employing those models in the pipeline (which at this point includes many features in smartphones made in the last 3 years)? If that's not the case, then you are a beneficiary too.
The concept of "sociopaths" is more of a cop-out than anything.
It amounts to a (vaguely pseudoscientific) dehumanization of those whose modus operandi transgresses our values most severely.
Imagining a subset of the population as literal cancer cells does not help us understand better the systemic issue which makes those people benefit disproportionately from metahuman entities (such as corporations or political agglomerations).
It does help us a lot, actually, and the treatment should be analogical. It's not a cop-out, it's reality.
Including sociopaths in humanity benefits and protects only them. And it renders the rest of us - their victims - powerless.
If as a society in general we agree that we have a right to keep serious transgressors in prisons, then we should seriously consider keeping there people who are fundamentally incapable of aligning with humanity values - the golden rule of reciprocity in particular.
Tell me you follow a value system invented by sociopaths without... actually reflecting on what value system you follow, and whether you chose it intentionally - or just bought into it by following the path of least resistance and are now inextricably stuck.
As a society in general, do you agree that unjust laws, false positives in enforcement, prison slavery, and endemic rampant abuse of authority, are things that exist?
As a society in general, do you think those are a legitimate price to pay "to keep serious transgressors in prisons"?
As a society in general, do you think serious transgressors more often get locked up for life, or more often get a slap on the wrist and a quiet promotion to more serious transgressors?
As a society in general, how do you know - falsifiably! - that prisons are even effective for their stated purpose?
Just like prisons perpetuate crime, excluding sociopaths and their behavior from what is thinkable as human only permits us to ignore them. And to contrive our own excuses for their sub-criminal abusive behaviors - which is the primary way in which they blend in and remain beyond reproach. You are their enabler. Go figure out how to stop being that.
Im of the view that I think slop is a force for good if it gets people back into engaging in the real world. If that means destroying the web as we know then frankly so be it.
THere are serious problems that have prevailed into society because of the side costs of the web. I also see sovreign centralisation of the web emerging in the future with identity being a key theme.
I always did apache, I think AGPL would make it less useful for the honest people and the AI companies would find a way around it. Companies in foreign countries would still get it and then the companies here could get it from them, or something like that. They're probably already trying to figure out a way to obfuscate when the LLM directly copies from a licensed codebase. And there's that site that rewrites GPL repos so they can be used commercially.
On top of all that I don't know if it would be possible to sue companies that have been given de facto legal immunity to steal IP.
> I think AGPL would make it less useful for the honest people
I don't understand what you mean here. AGPLv3 guarantees the four essential freedoms to all users. It only restricts developers from removing users' rights, like the GPL family.
> On top of all that I don't know if it would be possible to sue companies that have been given de facto legal immunity to steal IP.
For that we should support NGOs fighting for users' rights like https://eff.org.
> Interaction contracts into small meshes of trusted, verifiably human participants to keep the tides of spamslop at bay
This is already happening and you don't have to look far to find it.
Personally HN is the only site I browse and comment on anymore (and I'm on here less than I once was). The vast, vast majority of my time online is spent in walled off Discords and Matrix chats where I know everyone and where there's a high bar to add new people. I have no real interest in open communities anymore.
> Quasi-monastic orders that still scribe with pen and paper emerge, that believe there is still value in training and educating a human mind and body.
The scene is right out of the 1950s with students pecking away at manual typewriters, the machines dinging at the end of each line.
Once each semester, Grit Matthias Phelps, a German language instructor at Cornell University, introduces her students to the raw feeling of typing without online assistance. No screens, online dictionaries, spellcheckers or delete keys.
The exercise started in spring 2023 as Phelps grew frustrated with the reality that students were using generative AI and online translation platforms to churn out grammatically perfect assignments.
I say this with a multiple decades-spanning love of the game and the lore, but Warhammer 40k is what you get when teenagers try to create something immediately after reading Dune.
Most people don't care, provably from historical data. And trying to keep secret knowledge is a losing battle; as the saying goes, three can keep a secret if two of them are dead.
Look how well that strategy served Claude with the recent source code leak
Directionally correct. But seems overly optimistic to think that moats can be kept from the prying eyes of LLMs, unless you're not interacting with the market at all.
There were no "dark ages", that's the same common wisdom blunder like "in the middle ages everybody was dressed in drab grey clothing, ate gruel and walked through mountains of poop everywhere". It was a time of transition away from the slave powered empire to decentralized kingdoms and ultimately the Europe of today. It was by no means a time of standstill.
As far as I can tell, the dark ages were called the dark ages because there wasn't much evidence to be found: writing was less prominent during that time.
> It was a time of transition away from the slave powered empire to decentralized kingdoms and ultimately the Europe of today.
Yes, Europe did not have dark ages, it only had period of population decline, of less emissions, less building, less inventions, less records and severed trade networks.
The world is projected to hit population decline already sometime between 2060 and 2080, so I guess the younger ones of us will find out definitively whether it's a good or bad thing.
I am very sorry, but you are wrong. Between the fall of Rome (476 AD) and the Carolingian empire (~800 AD) there was a period of not only standstill, but regression, devolution and forgetfulness. Compared with what came before, it can be rightly called the dark ages.
It's dark ages in Europe but it's really golden age in Islamic Empires which far surpassed the Greek and Roman. The epitome was the Baitul Hikmah or House of Wisfom established at the time of Abassid Caliphate [1].
>Between the fall of Rome (476 AD) and the Carolingian empire (~800 AD)
During this time Al-Khwarizmi was born and House of Wisdom was established. His contributions in algebra (book Al-Jabr) and many others, and the word algorithm literally originated from his name [2].
Many Greek and Indian books translated to Arabic during this myth so called dark age by the Islamic Scholars.
Many many more new books were written that improved and innovated the prior knowledge. These books greatly expanding the state-of-the-art centered both in Baghdad, Iraq and Toledo, Spain.
The book Almagest by Ptolemy studied by Galileo was the Arabic translation of the Ptolemy works. Of course at the time of Galileo, Islamic astronomers knowledge and contributions have already far surpassed the Greek and the Indian.
The Islamic scholars not only translating (that it self is a progress) but also contributing to the body and foundations of knowledge not only in astronomy, but in many others in mathematics, sciences (physics, chemistry, biology), medicine, engineering, geography, psychology, politics, economy, architecture, etc.
There are numerous other polymath scholars like Al-Khwarizmi, for examples Al-Haitham, Ibnu-Sina, Ibnu-Rusd to name just a few. But European community has been in denial for so long time and in addition unfairly supressing these Islamic scholars contributions. They even literally changed the scholars name and Latinized them with lousy names like Alhazen, Avicennia, Averroes to hide the fact that they are Islamic scholars. Imagine if now people changed name of the scholar like Newton to Nawab in the literature.
Heck, even Copernicus copied diagrams from the Islamic earlier astronomers' books without proper citations, that in the modern will be plagiarism [3]. If this happen today, the university president (if plagiarised his/her book/thesis/paper) will be asked to resign.
I posted Bernie's "Conversation with Claude" a while back, and it was just about immediately taken down.
Let's face it Y combinator is mostly AI startups for the next few years, and any anti-AI sentiment is going to hurt the bottom line.
That being said, I disagree with Sanders on a number of points. He wants to stop data center construction. Can't think of a more luddite un-nuanced solution to the "problem"
The real AI danger is not the threat to white collar jobs (which will simply have to evolve), but something we will see roughly 18 months now when Joe Schmo asks Claude Giga Max Supreme 8.0 to help him reduce his taxes, and it hacks into the IRS and deletes everyone's records.
That’s fine. You said we’ve got 18 months until Claude takes our taxes away so you’ve just gotta get all of your driving done in the next year and a half before the roads fall into permanent disrepair, because of AI
Have you seen how overwhelmingly anti-AI the non-software-engineering world is? (despite the hypocrisy as plenty use a chatbot these days) The resistance in here is pitiful.
I'm lurking in the indie game dev scene, and any mention of using LLMs for anything is downvoted and laughed at.
Most discussion of using code generation on gamedev forums is taboo. As in, do what you want in the privacy of your own home, but in public, try to have some self-respect as an artist.
I've seen some "devs" livestreaming themselves coding a game using LLMs, and it's not pretty. But that's my opinion of vibecoding in general — it's the tool one uses when they don't want to think too much, which is the furthest path to greatness.
Some random examples off reddit (try to compare the sentiment if it had been posted on Hacker News):
In general, interest in AI-assisted coding is associated with people that have no experience whatsoever and just want to make a game out of thin air without putting in the effort.
I'm the one who posted this link, and I think Bernie Sanders is a terible man. But an op-ed by a U.S. Senator in the WSJ about a tech issue seems like proper HN material. It's been un-flagged by the mods.
In Canada, demands are not actually demands. That way if the demand is avoided, there never was a demand to begin with; however, if it was fulfilled, then of course there was always a demand all along.
It's extremely prevalent in Canada as well; almost certainly even more so. It's really a North American thing.
I expect copious downvotes with no actual replies. Then the comment will be flagged by the bot armies so the administration here can preserve its dearly held national identity of being "diverse" while never having elected an ethnic minority PM.
I would expect more downvotes for your needless "I'm going to get downvoted because the sheep hate when wolves tell the truth!" persecution complex. Your comment was at least mildly interesting before you got to that.
I loved this game playing on an Arch Thinkpad in university with budget graphics capability.
The best part is being able to pin locations on the map for your teammates, so we were able to plot the adventures and battlegrounds of a goated unit by naming the pins "Ronant's Triumph," "Ronant's Revenge," "Ronant's Folly," and ultimately "Ronant's Last Stand." Great times with a few beers and the lads.
RIP Ronant, Wesnoth will never see another hero of your like again.
It's because people have discovered that (1) motte and bailey fallacies [0] and equivocation of language (between, e.g. identity and diagnosis) are highly effective rhetorical tools; (2) merely identifying as something ontologically changes the metaphysical structure of reality [1] which confers certain societal benefits.
There is a matrix of is-diagnosed, is-not-diagnosed, identifies-as, does-not-identify-as, which is open to exploitation by those who "identify as" something they are not diagnosed with. Who gets fucked? The people who are diagnosed but do not identify as their diagnosis.
God help me once we start adding another dimension of people who have a condition, but are also not diagnosed and do not identify with it either...
> I. DEFINITION:
> MAGICK is the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with Will.
> (Illustration: It is my Will to inform the World of certain facts within my knowledge. I therefore take “magical weapons,” pen, ink, and paper; I write “incantations”—these sentences—in the “magical language” i.e. that which is understood by people I wish to instruct.
> I call forth “spirits” such as printers, publishers, booksellers, and so forth, and constrain them to convey my message to those people. The composition and distribution is thus an act of MAGICK by which I cause Changes to take place in conformity with my Will.)
- Aleister Crowley, "Magick Without Tears," Chapter I, 1954. https://hermetic.com/crowley/magick-without-tears/mwt_01
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