From Severance to "sentient" AI...<p>What have you seen, heard or read recently that meant you had to have a lay down and contemplate existence?
1) Execs complaining that it's hard to find skilled workers nowadays, while doing their best to make the company an unattractive workplace and not bother retaining existing workers who are leaving (including me soon).<p>Guys, it's not rocket science, just ask your employees what's bothering them. If people are leaving by the numbers, then you have some serious issues that need to be fixed, otherwise the churn will never stop. You'll hire new people, they'll see it's a shit show, and leave as soon as their relocation bonus expires.<p>This brings me no joy either. I'd much rather stay on one place for long, rather than go through various interview hazing rituals every couple of years just to escape the madness and get a decent inflation adjustment.<p>2) Western governments quadrupling the amount of money in circulation in the last two years, EU governments ignoring sane energy independence policies for decades, then blaming all the rampant inflation and soaring energy and real estate prices solely on the war in Ukraine, and telling the working class to tighten their belts and turn down the heating, while the upper class has never seen better days as their assets appreciated to new heights.<p>And the voters who keep voting for the same parties, time and time again, despite the corruption scandals and evidence of gross incompetence across the board, passing policies that work against the people's intersts.<p>"Exhales"
I am late to this game so I assume everyone else’s brain was melted by this in 2017:<p>Every Intel CPU since 2008 includes an autonomous computer called the Intel Management Engine that runs Minix, completely circumvents your own OS, has full access to memory, has network access, and cannot be turned off by the owner of the hardware (you).<p>We also don’t know what it does because it’s extremely difficult to reverse engineer due to obfuscation and because Minix 3 is published under a BSD license so Intel is not obligated to publish the source code.
Reality check I got after being accused of having anti-minority opinion while arguing <i>for</i> protection of all categories of people, just without double standards and without giving priority to some over others.<p>This got me instantly banned from a community I had professional interest and participation in, which made me realize the damaging effects of culture wars that are about to get worse for major corporations.<p>Without accountability checks, people can and <i>will</i> use the positions of power to police the companies, communities and whatever they can to further their own agenda regardless if it hurts everyone else involved in the process.<p>It's important we start valuing maturity and ability to exercise <i>nuance</i> in thought process lest it will all go south.
Age. I turned 40 and realized I probably wasn't on the upswing of life anymore. I've developed a small but weighty sense of "time is running out" that I didn't have before. I want that to be a motivator to do good and meaningful things and not a growing sense of foreboding. That necessitates contemplation of life, faith, priorities, etc.
The realization that...<p>Okay seriously this blew my mind.<p>The realization that the majority of the rules/regulations/laws/policies that we have in place are directly connected to the suffering of a human being.<p>Our society is reactionary. We enact new rules in response to negative outcomes. Any time we try to pre-empt a bad outcome, people claim conspiracy and/or believe that the problem is being over dramatized. It takes a negative real world event (often several) before we collectively agree that it's a problem and do something about it.<p>So then... all of humanity's progress is built upon the pain of other humans. That really sucks.
There is an infographic floating around at the moment that maps the migration of millionaires in 2022. I have not dug through the data to see if everything in the infographic is accurate, but as I think most people would presume: it shows loads of wealth holders are making their way into the western world from Russia, China, India, Ukraine (you can predict the others net negative countries).<p>However what's got my mind going is that loads of wealth holders are also leaving the UK. What's this all about? Perhaps post Brexit jitters?<p>I mean, it doesn't really make me contemplate existence, but I guess I just didn't expect my lifetime to include a UK that's incapable of holding on to its wealthy citizens. (Maybe I'm overlooking an obvious explanation?)<p>Edit: a kind person in this thread found the image~ <a href="https://www.visualcapitalist.com/migration-of-millionaires-worldwide-2022/" rel="nofollow">https://www.visualcapitalist.com/migration-of-millionaires-w...</a>
The HUGE influx of recruiters from developed countries that wanna go thru the whole recruitment process without giving me a a range of salary.<p>The confrontational and accusatory tone when I state my desired range and say that I got paid similar with companies in my own country (when questioned about it) when comparing apples to apples (contracting), the gaslighting and excuses of why I should get paid less than I have got with local and international companies in the past. The reasons for such aggression normally is the frustration since they have a GOOD monetary incentive to seal the deal, but does not excuse the behavior for sure. Even telemarketers are nicer than recruiters at this point.<p>I do attribute this to the rise in remote work. I used to rarely get contracted by a recruiter before C19 and when in the rare occasion when it happened it had a good chance of getting something out of it, now it is companies looking for super cheap labor instead of just trying to find talent.
Not sentient yet... but already capable of deception, this trend will only "improve".<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xvNvj7ku5pY" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xvNvj7ku5pY</a><p>Is my job safe from GPT-3?<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k_EF42H2ZC0" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k_EF42H2ZC0</a><p>Probably, AI is an energy hog just like Crypto ;)
I'm a hardware engineer:
The pitchforking on HN about "right to repair" issues. Frankly, those threads degenerate into what I'd expect on reddit.<p>To clarify, I support the problems trying to be solved but a lot of the ideas are just the wrong way to go about it. I've thought of weighing in, but the way some other dissenting commenters get beaten down means I self censor and move on to other threads.
Recently read Guns, Germs, and Steel. Up to the 1970s, New Guinea had literal stone-age technology. Similarly, aborigines in Australia lived the the same ways for FORTY THOUSAND YEARS! We are more likely to end the world as we know it in 100 years than to last 40k years in relative stability.
That we really are living in unprecedented times. If you look any of a number of indices, things really starting changing for humankind as a whole about 150 years ago.<p>A lot of this I knew before, but didn't grasp how many things changed, how dramatically, and how recently. It kind of is like living through the onset of the dawn of agriculture or something, but compressed into 150-200 years.<p>I think people (myself included) aren't aware of how much uncertainty we're facing as a civilization.<p>I don't actually mean that positively or negatively, just blew my mind.
Possibly this is me misunderstanding things, but that all things move at a constant velocity (speed of light) through spacetime. So I’m moving at the same speed as light, it’s just that a lot of my velocity is in the time dimension, where as light’s velocity is fully in the dimensions of space (and zero in time).
War in Ukraine.<p>I've always been proud of being European, but this event is exposing how shambolic the EU can be in some situations. Fuck, I just saw the headline "Germany says it can send rocket launchers in August"...
David Hoffman, interviewed by Lex Fridman [1], where he insists that spacetime isn't the base reality in the universe, but consciousness is.<p>It took me a while to realize the first part was true, but the second part was an assertion that I strongly disagree with.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=reYdQYZ9Rj4&t=2170s" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=reYdQYZ9Rj4&t=2170s</a>
This 2nd US Civil war issue is melting my brain actively.<p><a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2022/5/31/the-civil-war-that-is-here-and-the-one-that-may-yet-come" rel="nofollow">https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2022/5/31/the-civil-war-t...</a><p><a href="https://nypost.com/2022/06/14/squad-rep-bowman-warns-of-civil-war-if-gop-takes-midterms/" rel="nofollow">https://nypost.com/2022/06/14/squad-rep-bowman-warns-of-civi...</a><p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_American_Civil_War" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_American_Civil_War</a><p>I don't agree with the cold civil war thing, but seemingly many people believe the civil war has already started. Glad I have no intention of going to the USA. I would agree with that it seems inevitable. So there's your lay down and contemplate.<p><a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/alisondurkee/2022/06/14/democrats-midterm-nightmare-polls-suggest-party-could-face-historic-loss/?sh=22a7f6c75193" rel="nofollow">https://www.forbes.com/sites/alisondurkee/2022/06/14/democra...</a><p>I believe I read that polling shows republicans are at 80 year highs and an expectation of close to or super majority in house and senate.<p>What's the contemplation on that?
People at work complaining up a storm about the cost of military aid to Ukraine while at the same time advocating a declaration of war against Russia as if that would be cheaper.
The 7MW radar that was installed on a one-of-a-kind variant of the RC-135:<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_RC-135#RC-135E_Lisa_Ann_/_Rivet_Amber" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_RC-135#RC-135E_Lisa_Ann...</a><p>From more negative things, the realities of war. See pictures from Mariupol for example, or listen to the intercepted phone calls from that region ...
The vast scale of the organized child sex abuse activity among Catholic clergy. I have a hard time understanding how such organized activity can be performed by people who literally fear divine judgement, so I am alarmed by the number of clergy who are evidently atheist.
The Washington Post being referred to as "Hard Left"<p>The Fed clearly deciding that it is time to crash the economy into the wall rather than allow workers to get raises... And everyone thinking this is clearly the appropriate policy action and very much past due.
UK -1500
Portugal +1300<p>Many UK citizens migrated to Portugal upon retirement. They have one of the best regimes re tax etc. for HMWI. Meanwhile, UK has inheritance taxes, high tax on pensions over £1m, etc.<p>Immigration rules play a major role, with certain countries offering HNWI accelerated routes to resettle.
Fact that my work is completely dependent on proprietary SW (Adobe) and os (Win). Every update brings me questions like... Should I switch my profession to be more independent? Every update brings features that I don't need, have to pay for it, need to update to fix/broke things, send more data, be more online, etc. Those companies shape my workflow, literally dictates me how to create. It may sounds trivial, but in large scale, there is no freedom.
Trying to explore topics in arbitrary depth made me realize that I actually do not know anything.<p><pre><code> I know that I know nothing. - Socrates
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At some point, you need to be practical. Being overly philosophical robs your time.<p><pre><code> In an absolute sense, one can be argued not to "know" anything, except for the existence of one's own thoughts, as 17th-century philosopher John Locke pointed out. Even earlier, Descartes addressed when saying cogito, ergo sum (I think, therefore I am). While Descartes was attempting to "prove" logically that the world exists, his legacy in doing so is to have shown that one cannot have such proof, because all of one's perceptions could be false (such as under the evil demon or simulated reality hypotheses). But one at least has proof of one's own thoughts existing, and strong evidence that the world exists, enough to be considered "proof" by practical standards, though always indirect and impossible to objectively confirm.
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<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_(truth)" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_(truth)</a>
Bonhoeffer's theory of stupidity[1]. The theory being stupidity is a moral failing rather than an intellectual one. I'm still wrapping my head around the implications of this.<p>[1]: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ww47bR86wSc" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ww47bR86wSc</a>
The concept of infinity. I believe the Universe was a collision of two older Universes that slammed together. Two Universes among an infinite number of them.
There have probably been a few Tik-Tok things that have had me scratching my head. Here is something similar:<p>Andrew Tang demonstrating there is still hope for humanity: taking down Stockfish in Ultrabullet Chess (for the uninitiated, each player has to play <i>all</i> their moves in 15 seconds):<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BabwXdxdLB0" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BabwXdxdLB0</a>
Here is something that's going to melt your mind (and maybe your body too): Global warming is real.<p>Now, I'm not claiming that global warming due to our CO2 emissions is real. (that's up for a debate that I won't get involved in). But our temperatures are raising every year (at lease across the Mediterranean) and consistently. I'm afraid they are getting a bit too high for stability and if the trend doesn't somehow reverse; there will be real tragic consequences.
Temperature? :)<p>And math. I was astounded how long it took me to do basic math as I haven't touched any equations or performed any non-trivial calculations for a few years. 8(
The Maximum Power Principle!<p><a href="https://youtu.be/Nkv5mpBA8o4" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/Nkv5mpBA8o4</a><p>Highly recommend both installments
It didn't melt my brain but it did cause me to scratch my head while debugging something:<p><pre><code> In .Net, the first repeated byte in Random(0) is 00.
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I was sure I'd accidentally messed up either my seeding or thread safety until I double checked it by hand.
The good outcomes from Covid.<p>Trying to look positively, the leap forward in vaccines and mRNA
really restored my good feeling about some areas of technology. Many
great things like HIV vaccines can, and are emerging. It melts by
brain that humans are capable of solving extremely challenging
scenarios when we work together, but have to wait until things reach a
crisis point before doing so.<p>This is countered by the very negative descent into technofascism, but
I remain hopeful because medical advances cannot be "undone", whereas
technological authoritarianism is at least a treatable and reversible
condition.