California isn't "very left-wing". It's liberal, centre-left if you're being kind. The democrats are a centre-right party with some mildly-leftist pockets of members.
I am pointing out that HN is not very representative of the US political spectrum, and opinions about what's going on in the US will be filtered based on that. You're largely just hearing from one set of partisans here.
By US standards, California is very left-wing. International standards are not super relevant. (I'm also a bit skeptical of the cliche that the Democrats are a right-wing party internationally. For example, Obama endorsed Trudeau in Canada. But again, not super relevant.)
Democrats are (or were) considered "right wing" on some stuff and really "left wing" on other stuff. It's really futile trying to compare the political parties with different incentives internationally and putting a single left/right wing label on them.
Democrats were also just a big tent party for a long time, with more 'real right wing' members than 'real left wing' members, maybe that's the reason for the platitude.
This is a good analogy, but you made it backwards. The "Clergy" fears the "Printing Press", as it acts as a tool of decentralized information spreading. But LLMs are not decentralized and thus are not the "Printing Press". LLMs are what the "Clergy" (say, for example, all the AI companies led by billionaires in cahoots with the west's most powerful government) uses to suppress the real "Printing Press" (the decentralized, open internet, where everybody can host and be reached).
The bots are called "crawlers" and "spiders", which to me evokes the image of tiny little things moving rapidly and mechanically from one place to another, leaving no niche unexplored. Spiders exploring a vast web.
Objectively, "I give you one (1) URL and you traverse the link to it so you can get some metadata" still counts as crawling, but I think that's not how most people conceptualize the term.
It'd be like telling someone "I spent part of the last year travelling." and when they ask you where you went, you tell them you commuted to-and-fro your workplace five times a week. That's technically travelling, although the other person would naturally expect you to talk about a vacation or a work trip or something to that effect.
> Objectively, "I give you one (1) URL and you traverse the link to it so you can get some metadata" still counts as crawling, but I think that's not how most people conceptualize the term.
It’s definitely not crawling as robots.txt defines the term.
:
> WWW Robots (also called wanderers or spiders) are programs that traverse many pages in the World Wide Web by recursively retrieving linked pages.
You will see that reflected in lots of software that respects robots.txt. For instance, if you fetch a URL with wget, then it won’t look at robots.txt. But if you mirror a site with wget, then it will fetch the initial URL, then it will find the links in that page, then before fetching subsequent pages it will fetch and check robots.txt.
I would also recommend TIS-100's "sequel", Shenzhen I/O. TIS-100 is a bit 'dry', with the puzzles being entirely abstract. In SI/O, you roleplay as a developer emigrating to China for work, so all the puzzles are framed as real products you are developing for your company. One of the earlier puzzles, for example, is programming the equipment for a lasertag place.
I second the Shenzhen I/O recommendation, because apart from only assembly programming, the game also has other constraints in the form of having to spacially arange various chips on a limited "enclosure" for the product you're building and connect them. It also rewards optimization both in terms of assembly and chip usage efficiency. Is a wonderful game, really.
I will reveal that I have played far more of Shenzhen solitaire than Shenzhen I/O itself. Zachtronics made a stand-alone version of the game[1], but there's also a fanmade version here:
Which I find more enjoyable, both because it's online so it's easier to reach from anywhere, and also because I feel like the version of the solitaire inside the game is a bit... heavy feeling. Like there's some sort of input delay? Anyhow, I must have around 3000 completed games of solitaire across my devices.
Pyramid schemes, Ponzi schemes, MLMs, NFTs, Crypto, Memecoins... they're all greater fool scams. All based around playing "hot potato" with investments, where early adopters push the potato on later & greater fools.
Memecoins are the most fascinating type of it because with other schemes, there's usually some veneer of legitimacy (i.e. you gotta actually try to scam somebody). I imagine at this point everybody involved with memecoins understands they're scam, and they're essentially just gambling instead of getting scammed. Although, effectively, gambling is its own type of scam.
I think you add some stocks there too. Particularly meme stocks.
Many people "investing" in crypto don't understand that stocks/shares give you have extra value because they pay dividends and give you voting rights for the direction a company takes.
People don't generally lie for no reason. Companies are interested in obscuring their licensing practices because they believe it might hurt them to be more transparent.
That might not be true. It might turn out that the user base doesn't see the difference between "Rent" and "Buy". But it's the user base's decision to make, not the companies.
So, even if this kind of law has no other effect other than "we use more accurate and truthful language", then it's still a net positive.
Well, the difference is that the MMOs are almost uniformly skinner boxes engaging in psychological warfare against each and every person that plays them, while Terraria is the videogame equivalent of going to a museum, seeing a beautiful painting, and remembering that there's endless joy to be found in the world.
This is something that gets forgotten all the time: the common man could go watch a Shakespeare play for a penny and sip on ale between one dirty joke and the other.
Pride and Prejudice, perhaps the most romance novel to ever romance novel in the history of romance novels, is described as literary fiction (and so presumably not genre fiction) by the author. I think history--and hundreds of entries on fanfiction.net and archiveofourown.org where teenagers gush about their own dark-haired and standoffish but secretly gentle imaginary men--has shown that the reason she's remembered is the substance, not the subject of her writing, as well as the historical significance in her being a pioneer, of course.
I recently watched The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. A historically and artistically important movie, and then you go check the Wikipedia page and the producer described it to the effect "Yeah from the script it looked like some quick slop which would turn a buck."[1]
I think starting out with the idea of making a "literary" work and creating a genre out of "literary fiction" inherently doesn't work. I think the avenues for greatness are either making something experimental that breaks new ground, or something more conventional but that, in exchange, shows you complete mastery of that well-known material. But you can't be great just by appropriating the superficial qualities you identify in past works you yourself consider to be great, because again, it was the substance and not the mere subject that made those work great.
[1] 'Pommer later said: "They saw in the script an 'experiment'. I saw a relatively cheap film".' Citation [36] on Wikipedia
To be honest, I suspect that someone reading Pride and Prejudice _after_ reading a bunch of ao3 stuff is going to suffer from https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SeinfeldIsUnfunn... to an extent; part of why was significant was just in establishing a bunch of tropes which have now been absolutely _done to death_.
I've made sure to reference "historical significance" when referencing P&P and the Cabinet for this exact reason. I think every classic undergoes some amount of 'rot', but I've also found a lot of classic to be perfectly enjoyable if you allow them some slack.
And, not to insult fanfiction writers (I've been known to partake), but I would guess Jane Austen still writes a better broody man than most of them... although probably not all of them. That's a secondary consequence of simply having more people partaking in art to begin with: the more millions of artists you have, that many more one-in-a-million geniuses you're bound to find.
reply