Internet trolls want attention. When the internet gives trolls attention and said that the trolls are culturally and politically important and dangerous it is exactly what was desired.
That many serious commentators didn't see this was itself very funny as anything with lots of attention on the internet does become influential! It is funny to a troll to see people pay serious attention to them "I am just a clown and they think I'm serious!". But don't think that they were actual comedians, lol, they are as serious as HN users.
In the dawkins sense of the word: the "meme" wants to spread and grow and the mechanism for it's virality was the immune response to it.
On another angle, the responses also gave the target an identity. Groups get defined as groups from outside more than from within. And it's always a wrong characterisation which also helps define the in group in relation. "You guys are all toxic Linux dude bros" inside: "but some of us love macs and windows, and some of us are girls, they sure dont understand our ways"
You sent a report saying you were not searched for 20 times and now you are searched all the time? Has it been over 20 times that you have been searched?
I used to work with graphic designers and creatives. Their skills are invaluable and today's slop really makes this visible.
Creation and creativity will always have value.
I don't know if today's graphic designers are doing the equivalent of vibe coding and shipping slop, but if they are they should at least make it know that they can produce better quality work for a price.
The news is what's new, uncommon, strange, interesting. Shiny, attractive, shocking, raging: dopamine raising and cortisol antagonising. The news doesn't describe our actual lives. But the news does sometimes contain information relevant to our lives!
I find I will hear about the relevant things from people and events around me, whether or not I follow the news. The news doesn't have any actual bearing on my life but the news does have a few stories that do have bearing.
So theres no downside of not following the news. I will hear what I need to and want to hear about from people around me or other sources.
Some think that in not consuming what they think I should consume, that this is a morally wrong thing to do. They will be personally offended, how can they ignore my story? There is a case that if we all stopped following the news then how can the other sources inform us, so there would still be a benefit to reporting...
Consider two anthropologists examining a culture. One only has remote access to every news source the culture produces for itself, the other can only talk face to face with people. Which one will understand the people more?
Electric cars are required by law to emit sound via a speaker for safety. Usually the sound is unique and somewhat electronic in nature.
Some electric sports cars, and I'm not sure but Porsche may be one of them, have a loud deep bassy faux-sports engine sound emitting from the speaker. "VROOOOM VROOOOOM VROOOM!" - on an electric car.
Does anyone else find this *extremely* weird?
It's like a petrol car having a speaker playing the coconuts (as it's replaced the horse).
> Electric cars are required by law to emit sound via a speaker for safety. Usually the sound is unique and somewhat electronic in nature.
And this is absolutely… bad. I mean requiring is good, but almost all of the execution of it is awfully bad.
It can be personal - but Hz of that sounds just makes me boil inside. That's how badly I'm receiving it. Almost no other sounds I hear on daily basis makes me uncomfortable.
And another issue - when somebody is parking the sound goes on, off, on, off, and that all the time until person is happy how car is parked. Couldn't it just make that sound all the time? Would be easier to get used to it. Same way it works with PC fans - there is no benefit to keep it as lowest as possible at all times, the trick is to keep it spinning fast enough to avoid as many changes of speed as possible - keeping the noise constant and easier to live with.
More weird is, that the electric harley davidson is by intention more loud than the gas powered ones.
But the law requires a artificial sound only for low speeds. Electric cars are indeed silent and it can be dangerous not expecting one approaching, when one is used to loud explosion engines. But I would prefer to just have no noise and people adopting.
It is very obnoxious, the sound should just be enough for pedestrians to notice there's a car behind them (happened to me a few times now that there was an electric van one meter behind me that I hadn't heard at all). Tangentially related, but I came across a startup selling EV noises as NFTs once, and it still holds the palm of "most ridiculous business" in my head.
My last ICE car (a VW GTI) did this. I could turn the engine noise up or down in the settings on the touch screen.
I think I’d prefer it sound like an ICE car vs the weird electric noises. I don’t notice when most cars drive by my house, unless they are obnoxiously loud. But someone on my street got an electric SUV about 6 months ago and I can hear it every single time; it drives me crazy.
I was hoping electric cars would cut down on noise pollution, but no such luck. I understand the sounds is there for blind people, but the sound some of these companies have picked cuts right through the walls of my house like few other things do. I’m wondering what it will sound like when we have a whole city full of them.
Totally agreed. It is beyond understanding why you would even pay extra to get these sounds. The heavenly silence is one of the great advantages of an EV in my opinion.
Points vs comments. If there's lots of points on a story but only a few comments, it won't stick around. Or maybe its the other way around? (see below)
There is an automated flame detection mechanism. Don't know how it works. probably some kind of count of downvoting of comments?
Users manually flag.
Most political stories are flame bait; the discussions are low quality.
Most politics is off topic, but if a story has been discussed and this one has for almost a year, posting more about the same story with little change won't add much to the conversation.
E.g. I commented about this story 10 (ten!) months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43212206 and do not feel the need to share my thoughts each and every time the story comes up again, although I did 5 months ago. Maybe in 5 months time I will do so again but not every day!
Users do not want to see the same story permanently on show for discussion - they want novelty.
Users tend to not like: Emotions. Propaganda. Accusations of conspiracy. Less thoughtful and more thought terminating comments.
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You can find better and more answers by the site moderator @dang on why things slip off the front page by using the search box at the bottom of the page.
AI being harder to spot still won't make dead internet crackpottery true. As for us being cooked ... in so many ways, including literally due to AGW, exacerbated by LLM compute and by the orange demento's policies.
How about this question: Can generating an anti-racist video be justified as a good thing?
I think many here would say "yes!" to this question, so can saying "no" be justified by an anti-racist?
Generally I prefer questions that do not lead to thoughts being terminated. Seek to keep a discussion not stop it.
On the subject of this thread, these questions are quite old and are related to propaganda: is it okay to use propaganda if we are the Good Guys, if, by doing so, it weakens our people to be more susceptible to propaganda from the Bad Guys. Every single one of our nations and governments think yes, it's good to use propaganda.
Because that's explicitly what happened during the rise of Nazi Germany; the USA had an official national programme of propaganda awareness and manipulation resistance which had to be shut down because the country needed to use propaganda on their own citizens and the enemy during WW2.
So back to the first question, its not the content (whether it's racist or not) it's the effect: would producing fake content reach a desired policy goal?
Philosophically it's truth vs lie, can we lie to do good? Theologically in the majority of religions, this has been answered: lying can never do good.
Game theory tells us that we should lie if someone else is lying, for some time. Then we should try trusting again. But we should generally tell the truth at the beginning; we sometimes lose to those who lie all the time, but we can gain more than the eternal liar if we encounter someone who behaves just like us. Assuming our strategy is in the majority, this works.
But this is game theory, a dead and amoral mechanism that is mostly used by the animal kingdom. I'm sure humanity is better than that?
Propaganda is war, and each time we use war measures, we're getting closer to it.
That many serious commentators didn't see this was itself very funny as anything with lots of attention on the internet does become influential! It is funny to a troll to see people pay serious attention to them "I am just a clown and they think I'm serious!". But don't think that they were actual comedians, lol, they are as serious as HN users.
In the dawkins sense of the word: the "meme" wants to spread and grow and the mechanism for it's virality was the immune response to it.
On another angle, the responses also gave the target an identity. Groups get defined as groups from outside more than from within. And it's always a wrong characterisation which also helps define the in group in relation. "You guys are all toxic Linux dude bros" inside: "but some of us love macs and windows, and some of us are girls, they sure dont understand our ways"
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