Ask HN: What has been bothering you lately? Vent out. Maybe one of us will find a fix. I'm mad that economic policies in France aren't based on what models say is best next action but on elections. Democracy really sucks. I'm also very annoyed that models are censoring stuff without even clarifying what's wrong with the prompt. I don't like that content distribution is still mostly owned by a few platforms. Something is deeply odd with that. |
https://julienreszka.com/blog/france-needs-45-years-to-grow-...
-There is nothing I can do; everyone in power to do something is corrupt and actively working to accelerate it.
-I have forseen death on scales beyond your wildest dreams so much sooner than you think
- The rights of my children being legislated away.
- The people that could do something about it have chosen not to.
- Any time I talk about the above, I feel like I'm shouting into the void and no one cares, either in-person or on the internet.
- I still have to go to work tomorrow.
Have a look at the many foreign streamers raving about their visits for the World Cup. It’s refreshing and incredibly uplifting to hear other perspectives.
I’m glad that people are having a good time with the World Cup. Truly.
I know I’m feeling negative at the moment.. but this feels like the “have you tried yoga?” of your president started 2 wars, continues to undermine public health, got a lot of people killed, Congress has completely failed and is complicit in the wrongdoing. It’s bad..
Please let me know which ones you found interesting.
maybe this sound much smaller than economic policies in France but for me this sucks big time
Its so exhausting walking on eggshells, and engineering discussions to avoid conflicts.
And generally people thinking about themselves and not considering that we're living in society: "let me blast music so that walls shake and fuck neighbours", "let me just leave my mattress here on the curb blocking the path, somebody will pick it up", "let me not clean after my dog shitting on the sidewalk", "I'm seeing people queuing to get on a train, let me just not notice the queue", "let me just walk down the street with my eyes on the phone, surely other people will accomodate me and get out of my way". This is the variation of the above, but to the civic level; just don't make lives of others harder.
I have about 350k USD and live in New Delhi.
Even if that was true, how to convince enough people, given that the enemies own the newspapers and so on?
When was the last time you worked with an organization working on that issue?
Volunteering for Civil Rights - last week, what about you?
The Japanese believe that cleaning up after yourself is a moral obligation; similar to what the Germans believe about punctuality.
People who are experiencing unrest and idleness are easy to recruit -- and if you hang out with people ages of 18-30, you'll see there's no shortage of them.
In such models where individuals in a market system can influence public/private institutions for their own interest (news organizations, private think tanks, lobbyists, public/private colleges, corporations, charities, nonprofits etc etc) will be able to reroute those institutional resources to gaming elections — which is unavoidable result over the market’s long run, similar to it being impossible to defend one’s currency against speculators over the long run — thus selection pressures force politicians and political institutions to either cater to these wealthy people’s whims and the institutions they control, or to somehow (and very unlikely) bare the selection pressures that are pushing them out of office.
Given the law of large numbers, you’d presume at any point the average legislator would be captured more by these maladaptive selection pressures rather than somehow existing in spite of them.
As democracy is eaten away, we will maintain a slow decay to a Russia-like sultan oligarchic system and the comforts the majority currently maintain will slowly go with them.
Housing/medical/college etc are outpacing incomes. Loneliness has skyrocketed. People are voting for fascism and starting wars. Americans like to pretend with their big houses and fancy iphones, but things are NOT ok.
Also note on that chart: younger demographics in the US are reporting significantly lower life evaluations compared to older demographics. So if you think things right now are bad, you haven't seen anything yet.
Just one example: high-speed rail in the U.S.
Most people on the planet can't afford a home or start families. They can barely pay their rents to avoid ending on up the street.
Left you an upvote because I'm interested in responses to this.
What it boils down to is that a lot of the immense freedom Elon Musk has to influence our common future, due to his wealth, comes at the expense of our ability to influence our future.
Yeah, not all games are zero sum. But "power over others" is, and it's a pretty important one, and other people are playing it whether you want to or not.
Whats bothering me lately? Anxiety about my future. Not being where I want to be. Fearful that I might not get to where I want to be. But I take daily steps to ensure I come out alright since hope is not a strategy.
All I can do is be consistent and hopeful.
Edit: an example of everything worth doing being illegal, from another comment. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReplayTV
I make my living by building solutions. Companies usually are chock full of problems that need solutions. Companies are still full of problems that need solutions but they are completely paralyzed because they think if they wait a quarter or two, a model will come along and solve all their problems.
I will change decade this year
I still have not found my passion nor encountered the big project if my life. I am interested by too many things and have too little agency or perseverance.
I used to think their main risk was spam or propaganda. Now I think it's curation of knowledge, history, and thought.
A lot is hype
Many people think the social mobility came through intellectual feats, but when you look at it carefully, it came through agency and ownership.
Of those that use AI, most have finally cleared out their backlogs that were just never ending before AI. That took about 3 years to accomplish.
Now they have the time to do more ambitious projects. And many are doing just that.
I do not see AI taking jobs, I see it more as everyone got a great secretary/junior to offload 'busy' work onto.
Think of even the lower level employees now having access to some of the time saving labor that the old robber barons and fat cats had with legions of secretaries and go-get-em younguns.
Time will tell what becomes of all this, it still very early days, but I mostly see the effects of AI in my current life as like a tool. A great multi-tool, sure, but still just a tool.
I’m afraid that your perspective is flawed. There are many jobs whose output can’t be enhanced by offloading certain tasks to improve productivity - the output itself is replaced by AI.
For instance, a family member who is a successful freelance illustrator and whose field has dramatically shrank with the introduction of image generation. They don’t need a secretary, they need clients. The same clients that now are happy to replace 50%-80% of their demand with AI-generated imagery.
This was the whole point. A secure, politically active middle class will be too obstructive to the new aristocracy.
I posted a link to an article on an HTTP-only website a few days ago, and it was flagged within half an hour because browsers want HTTPS.
I know all about JS injection into unencrypted HTTP trafic, but this is beyond the point.
The point is, I can not just spawn a website and make it available to the world from anywhere having only a network connection.
Why do I have to beg someone for a proof of nothing just to share a random thought?
Why aren’t eink displays more useful? They seem like they should be. More than e-readers or a calendar.
- The current situation where distribution matters way more than product quality
- Lack of clear personal goals
Its brutal. Once you are out at 35+ for an even year or two - it's impossible to go back.
AI takes jobs faster than creating new ones.
ps. Just got laid off from the Temu call(chat) centre. AI IS taking our jobs.
completely devastated
Nowadays out of tech - too tired after 11h shift to do stuff. No weekends.
Got kicked out from McDonald's for being too slow (competing with 20yr olds is HARD), gonna be kicked out from temu in 2 weeks due the AI (80% staff reduction!) despite the best CSAT...
I'm worried about having any job stability. Programmer's ship sailed away I guess. (I lost to the 40B$ AI supercomputer so it's fair :)
/venting off
I have attempted suicide once before. I wake up every day trying to improve, trying to find the strength to study even more, hoping that, somehow, I might manage to find something better. But it has been difficult.
In the news, you see plenty of people saying that people like me are ruining the country, even though I pay more tax, pay a surcharge to be able to use the NHS, and am not entitled to a billion other things.
Anyway, that’s life.
I think what I'm really looking for is a model like GPT Rosalind, which has been steeped in "science" post-training, but with more randomness. Like, I think I'm looking for a GPT Mullis--Rosalind Franklin was careful, deliberate, and serious; Kary Mullis ate a bunch of acid, drove on the PCH, and invented PCR. Like, we need to invent psychedelics for LLMs. Some way to let them relax their weights, explore new pathways, and come up with some absurd ideas by connecting random ass dots from the natural world. I want the model to say, "hmm, that's weird". This isn't just changing the temperature, we're missing something deeper.
I think frontier science has always come from serendipity: a bright thinker, listening to a presentation after having stared at some small experiment, but having trained for years on "biochemistry" so the foundation and loose guardrails are there.
I don't know, I'm feeling adrift. Does this resonate with anyone else?
And the future seems gloom overall. Not looking forward to it. I used to.
I went for a walk in the woods. It was beautiful and amazing. There were the last of the lupine (my daughters favorites flower). A couple deer. Talked to a friend. Many have it worse, but our struggles are the worst struggles we experience. Anyone need a cheap remote errand boy/assistant with lots of life experience/managed dev teams/managed IT? Or to finance an AI use case into a product with multiple potential available pivots?
That someone who would be bearing the impact of a bad hire recommended me and some recruiter who openly admitted she didn't know much about that side of the business made the call to drop me left a pretty bad taste in my mouth about the company
How to integrate it to solve useful problems. Make delightful products.
So many things that used to be intractable now are probabilistically solvable and that needs some things to be changed fundamentally and a lot of assumptions dropped.
The randomness that AI introduces poses a plethora of challenges.
I think local models will be a big thing eventually, not everything needs a frontier model and a lot of useful work can be done with surprisingly little hardware.
I also want to get back to non-LLM models.
I agree though that flagging sucks. Don't like a topic? Move on…
There seems to be no accountability to flagging anonymously.
i used to get weekly packages from indie european stores and samples from asia
since tarrifs, that has dropped to zero, with 90% of my shipments being returned for cryptic reasons (like 'incomplete address' when the full address is correct and visible) or outright 'No' from sellers
its starting to feel less like random failure and more like "system working as designed" :(
They must be ridiculously high
Systems down costing millions in sale? = fired
Systems down due to Azure issue = oh well
No, not that. If you have your back against the wall, why not completely change your life? Move to another country. Spend a month in Thailand to get over your obsession with sex. Go pick avocadoes in Australia. Take heavy psychedelics. Start smoking and drinking and read some philosophy.
None of these are gonna solve your problem, but moping isn't gonna solve them either. You are 30, you are young, and you'll get over whatever stupid choice you do today. Perhaps that's what you need, rather than hoping for society to unfuck itself or you to become someone you probably are not. The grave will always be waiting for you at the end anyway.
EDIT: Fine, I'll also give you the serious answer which will get you out of your existential dilemma. You're might be going through a midlife crisis. You are not the first. It always hits one in their 30s. Figure out what it is, what it means, what meaning is for you, what the hell you are supposed to do with your time on Earth. You have done all society told you to do, and you're at the "now what? Is that it?" phase. Start with Carl Jung. It's gonna get worse before it's gonna get better, but if you take this seriously you'll grow into a more comfortable you by the end.
By any objective standards my life isn't bad. I lost my job but I'm still financially secure for a while. But it isn't good, either. Picking avocados in Australia wouldn't be any better. I'm not even going to touch on smoking and drinking to forget the pain of the meaninglessness of existence, because I know what happens to people who do. You don't want to touch psychedelics while in a bad mental state either.
I am not young, that's the problem. When I was 15 I was young. When I was 20 I was young. When I was 25 one could argue I was young. 30 is not young any more. It's not old yet, that starts at about 45, but young is over.
When I was 20 I did make some cool software that a lot of people across the internet liked. Then I had to work harder for university and didn't have enough free time to continue it and I've never done that again since, even when I had free time again.
Possibly the worst thing is the thought that nothing matters, except maybe having children, which just kicks the can along the road and won't happen for me anyway, and shouldn't. I think it's relevant because everyone who has children finds the purpose of their life is to support their children. People who don't have a much harder time with that.
It's an emotional state. Perfectly rationally, we should all just do nothing because nothing matters in the end. But somehow we grow up with the illusion that things matter, and I want that back!
Do you have any trouble with executive function, like for things you know you should do? I certainly struggle getting started on new things, everything feels "not worth my effort", so I understand that feeling.
In what aspect of your life are you least fulfilled?
I don’t mind people succeeding at gathering wealth. Mostly the very rich stay quiet.
What annoys me is loud mouthed celebrities. For some reason, people famous for being born pretty think their opinions are all brilliant.
> But somehow we grow up with the illusion that things matter, and I want that back!
If you're going through hell, keep going. The way out is forward, not back. There is nothing anyone can say that is going to make your moment of disillusionment easier for you.
You have to pick a problem. Right now, quality of life basically keeps going up, so it's pretty hard to act on anything you might care about here.
I try not to make assumptions when I get downvoted. I think: Maybe I was a little sarcastic or aggressive or I implied something weaselly; or maybe the downvoter just disagreed with me. I don't assume either way, and I don't guess about moral high ground or whatever. All my comment's points tell me is what delta of people clicked the down arrow, not what was in their heads individually.
Not everyone is fortunate to be born smart and able to make money. And these at the bottom struggle enormously
Also, please don't use the voting buttons for things you disagree with. I'm trying to have a productive conversation here.
As better education/tution leads to over achievement relative to natural ability. So you end up with people in positions of power that are beyond them, and low educated voter too
Yes, housing, medical, and college are outpacing incomes. Which item would you want to work on if you only got to pick ONE thing?
Why would we intentionally narrow the discussion like this?
That's something that pretend political parties do to prop up the interests of the uniparty of capital interests while squelching actual progress for the majority.
You can't just pick one. The main problem is inequality is rising, which means those without serious capital (which includes the young) are much less likely to see anything from their efforts. It just pops up in different ways. All my money goes to [rent, inflation, student loans, hospital bills, .. etc].
I'm not saying "all government interference is bad". For example plenty of countries prove that if you want to control healthcare costs, you need more government intervention in drug pricing, not less.
Not true, but let's pretend it is: then pick the parent item that's affecting all of the child items: aforementioned faux democracy. Then everything else falls into place.
But based on your various comments here, you don't seem interested in solving the root issues.