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- Hacker News
- People have been taking Knuth's 'premature optimization' in vain for almost as long as he had it written down, and only after 'performance is a feature' did I see any daylight at all at the end of the tunnel.
I've learned to lower my expectations a bit. Not enough to be pleasantly happy, but enough to not be incandescently furious on a periodic basis anymore.
There is no bigger fool than a smart person who confuses intelligence with wisdom. Intelligence is polarizing. Either you notice immediately you're being dumb, or you find a way to rationalize your dum-dum behavior for ages past when everyone else would have figured it out. We literally outwit ourselves.
I would love to be a fly on a wall for a shop-talking conversation between Silicon Valley psychotherapists. Those stories must be amazing.
by hinkley - Re: replacing functions of democratic government, this was already predicted in Democracy Incorporated almost 10 years ago now: https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691178486/de...by yunnpp
- With Musks ideas I often think I saw that movie/read that book. For his Mars plans I see the Mars colony from Total Recall, the Schwarzenegger film
Like Zuckerberg‘s shift to VR that looks like he came out of the theater of Ready Player one.
by croes - Mars was actually discovered before Total Recall was released.by DustinBrett
- Haha it would make sense they're not even sci-fi ball-knowers.
- Zuckerberg style the idea from snow crash
- > Like Zuckerberg‘s shift to VR that looks like he came out of the theater of Ready Player one.
They took most of us employees to see Ready Player One in the cinema when it came out (sometime after the Oculus acquisition, but before "the metaverse")
by swiftcoder - They take warnings in popular culture as instructions or inspiration.by rightbyte
- This was a fascinating interview, and there were a lot of ideas packed into it. Honestly, it makes me want to read her book.
That said, I disagree with a lot of her conclusions.
Contra her assertions, I believe that technological change is the principal cause of historical change. Lawrence Lessig wrote Code is Law, which highlights how specific software system decisions constrained the available legal regimes that could apply. The same thing happens for all technology: the invention of containerized shipping plus the internet led to globalization, which is the real reason nation states are eroding.
I do agree with her about the undesirability of an "artificial state"--an algorithmic government that rules by deterministic rules instead of representative human judgement. And I do agree that many technologists think that we'd be better off being ruled by machines instead of people. But that is (a) not a new phenomenon, and (b) equally found outside Silicon Valley. Paul Krugman often writes about Asimov's psychohistory being a strong influence on him. He longs for a world of Philosopher Kings who make decisions logically and without the messy delusions of the masses.
by GMoromisato - I don't know Lessig's work, but that chain of thought sounds like a more narrowed down version of Langdon Winner's "Do Artifacts Have Politics?" (1) The way in which technology shapes our world varies greatly, and I like his writing concerning how nuclear technology shapes politics towards centralization of power.
There's probably nothing powerful in society than the wealthy elite. They have the power to slow down or stop technological change if it threatens their sources of continued wealth.
- > there were a lot of ideas packed into it
One could equally say that it is all over the place.
> This was a fascinating interview
Can you give us one or two new insights you gained from it?
by dinfinity - I happened to read an ARC of her forthcoming book. Lapore is well aware and discusses in detail the history of technocratic dreams dating back centuries.
The book also deep and wide-ranging analysis of tech oligarchs ability to misread science fiction. So detailed and consistent is her coverage of the genre that I can actually imagine the book being assigned in a survey course on SF.
by msabalau - > the invention of containerized shipping plus the internet led to globalization
Did it? Or did the globalisation invent the need for containerisation?
by philipwhiuk - What we call "globalization" is the really the second version of globalization. In the late Victorian period goods from all around the world were available in the West, and even to a degree the other way around (a trick of colonization was to process the raw materials from the colony in the home country and sell the finished products back to the colony). What killed the first version of globalization were the world wars.by jhbadger
- > "So, to the degree that we can locate an origin point for the promise that better computer technology would make for better democracies, I think the moment you would first look to would be January 1984, that Super Bowl ad that Apple ran for the release of the Macintosh, with the the sort of George Orwell, 1984 [theme]."
With the greatest respect to Ms. Lepore's scholarship, I would suggest that that ad is too pop-culture and too early for our current Valley overlords. Instead I'd suggest John Perry Barlow's Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace [1] from 1996:
"Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.
"We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear."
...and on and on it goes. Some kind of strange Davos fever dream from thirty years ago.
by andyjohnson0 - Sometimes, I wonder how these guys are doing these days. They were utterly, spectacularly wrong about almost all their points.
What do they do now? Are they grumpy libertarians living in the woods? Did they fall in line behind Thiel and his bullshit religious pseudo-philosophy? Did they just shrug and changed ideas?
by kergonath - I think some of them intentionally model themselves after the evil characters in fiction. I remember seeing Musk talk one time about how he loves the game Deus Ex. And there's an almost uncanny resemblance between his actions and Bob Page's.
The other canonical example of this is the naming of Palantir, of course.
In many cases I think it's less that they misread the fiction, and more that they intentionally model themselves after the villains in fiction.
by Trasmatta - Play devils advocate for a bit: of course they should model themselves after the villains! Villains get shit done and change the world, and use it to the fullest potential.
'Heroes' are the schmucks who get roped around and fail to make things better until the very end at best, and even then leave massive amounts of preventable harm.
If one sets out to change the world don't be a hero, be a villain. It is horrifying, sure but it is the logical conclusion.
by Nasrudith - Of the 5 users of the Palantirs that we know of 2 are good, 2 are evil, and one is tragic.by ReptileMan
- Also on the front page this morning:
"An OpenAI Strategist Says AI Labs Should Rival Government Power"
by ramoz - > “But what’s funny about Musk is, the stuff he likes actually completely defeats and defies all of his political beliefs,” she said.
Musk is only the most recent in a long line of semiliterates to have latched on to the lingo of Stranger in a Strange Land while apparently never having read a sentence of Heinlein's prose. As a rule of thumb, those who say "grok" do not.
And it's always Stranger in a Strange Land for the messiah figure. Here, have a better Heinlein story.
https://archive.org/details/Unknown_v04n06_1941-04_PDF_unz.o...
by RunSet - > “ Musk is only the most recent in a long line of semiliterates”
Jesus Christ. You people, smelling your own farts. It’s just ridiculous.
A bunch of nobodies, pending they are some sort of intellectual powerhouse, reining down on a guy that revolutionized, electric vehicles, space communications and space travel, like THEY are actually his mental superiors.
by mbmbn - The government has expanded by any objective measure:
From 20% of GDP to 40% of GDP today
From a 34 regulatory agencies/offices to 77 today.
From 5 percent of occupations needing a license in 1950 to 23 percent today
From zero federal environmental review in 1950 to 26 months today for major projects.
From almost zero collective bargaining agreements in the public sector in 1950 to approximately 36 percent of public sector workers being covered by them today.
From 9,700 pages in the Code of Federal Regulations in 1950 to 200,000 pages today.
This idea that the private sector is crowding out the government isn't supported by any empirical evidence, though it's a very common narrative and widely believed.
by ETH_start - So you're saying it's improved.
(If you're not, I think you have to explain why the expansion of between say, 6k YBP and 1950 was good expansion, and the growth between 1950 and today was bad expansion. Otherwise it looks like you're picking an arbitrary point and saying it was "best")
by flir - Which government has expanded? Most communist governments felt after 1990 and privatised their economies.by snowpid
- > From 20% of GDP to 40% of GDP today
Yeah, let's cut where all that spending went- medicaid, medicare, social security, and welfare...oh
How do you cut any of these without everyone losing their minds?
by 2OEH8eoCRo0 - > From 5 percent of occupations needing a license in 1950 to 23 percent today
Most of these are state-level though?
> From zero federal environmental review in 1950 to 26 months today for major projects
That's because they didn't give a shit about the environment in the 50s. They just yeeted nukes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nevada_Test_Site) and people watched them from the Las Vegas strip. One river caught on fire 14 times holy mackerel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuyahoga_River.
> From 9,700 pages in the Code of Federal Regulations in 1950 to 200,000 pages today.
That doesn't tell us anything. There's just more stuff today that simply didn't exist in 1950.
It's possible the regulation dial has been turned too far the other way. But arguing for going back to 0 regulations is also insanity.
by triceratops - I don't know about the disruptive innovation history thing which seems interesting, but the stuff about science fiction, its role as knowledge especially related to politics, reading/misreading and so on just seems confused. Science fiction is primarily fiction and should be treated as such. Why exactly should I agree with the implied (or not) politics of a fictional world if I like the work? Why is it even necessary to take the works whole-sale and not just parts here and there as they seem reasonable? Straussian reading is also a possibility that is completely bypassed even with some big figures being into that, for good or ill.
The stuff about nation states and corporations taking over seems confused as well, since pretty much everywhere goverments, regulation and taxation are highest/largest they've ever been. Also, it is very strange taking the interest of some people in getting rid or moving beyond nation states as sinister since this has been a stated goal of democratic projects like the EU. Furthermore, in China technology is completely subservient to the state and they intentionally kneecapped the whole sector fairly recently since it grew too big.
by amberjack - If the author was trying to make a point (as many sci-fi authors were), it's totally reasonable to call out someone who misses the point.
Like the people calling Starship Troopers fascist. Or even funnier, the people calling Heinlein a fascist for writing Starship Troopers, which just proves they haven't read any of the rest of his work.
by psunavy03 - In the US at least, we've been brainwashed to think that government, by definition, must be bloated, corrupt and inefficient. Believing this axiom, people vote to hand over every possible service to private enterprise.
Now we are in a situation where a handful of unelected business men have more power over our lives than the elected government.
by yoyohello13