There's a lot of different ways to make code. But at this point there's just so little evidence that languages engender interesting new capabilities. There's some flourishistic differences, but most code reads fairly the same, if you squint. Rust is by far one of the most interesting languages, and it's only interesting adds are... constraints. We need some new frontiers of possibility, not just constraint. Languages are not leading us to new potentials, these days.

How about if we took a handful of the most advanced new (and even old) languages, and made them cohabit and have "kids"?

Something great might result from that.

;-)

> I thought i was supposed to go out there to do this talk on the digital future & do this talk on the digital future - you know what I usually do -& just try to make people angry, you know- wealthy people upset by telling them people what this technology is for, and all that, and business plans are stupid, and killing the world....

Real talk middle, about the brutal indifferent stasism of AI:

> The dataset on which we are feeding our ai's is us. Is what we are actually doing. We have created a situation where we have a generation of very powerful children learning how to be, based on how we are.

> The only way to raise appropriately AIs is to begin behaving appropriately ourselves.

Ok, this is now on my watchlist. Such a good summation.

It isn't necessarily identity politics to talk about groups of people, nor does it necessarily preclude discussing real solutions either — it depends on the relevancy of the group being mentioned. If the group being mentioned is a subculture or philosophical tendency or whatever the defining characteristics of which are relevant to the subject at hand, then it's perfectly fine to refer to such a group. It's only if you are bringing in groups that aren't actually relevant to a discussion, whose defining characteristics aren't provably related to the characteristic you are trying to apply to them, does talking about groups become a problematic thing. Barring that, being able to talk about groups of people that have different approaches or attitudes or beliefs or behaviors regarding a subject, even if it's to speak derogatorily about them, is basically necessary to have a functional discussion about certain topics whatsoever.

In this case, we are having a discussion about attitudes towards technological solutions and technological progress, and one of the major cultures that influence discussions around that stuff and the direction things actually take are 'tech bros.' If we band the ability to speak about such a group that would just give them free reign to do anything they wanted without being criticized.

To define the group, it is a specific subset of the people who work in tech whose attitude towards tech is characterized by a sort of brash, prideful belief that you can solve everything with technological solutions and that the human (qualitative) factor of things just isn't relevant — or is even harmful because it's "unquantifiable" and it needs to be specifically perfected out of our considerations.

This is a real type of person and attitude in tech that we can discuss.

> bro - a young male who is part of a group of similar male friends stereotypically characterized as hearty, athletic, self-confident, party-loving, etc.

Are there no women who have the same attitude towards tech that you ascribe to tech bros? Or older, unathletic, unconfident, or introverted men?

I also don't think your definition is universal. As evidence you need look no further than a sibling comment to your own which implies that I am a tech bro even though I don't hold the beliefs/attitude in your definition (I believe that technological solutions do exist - but don't think they are the solution to every problem. I also think that qualitative human factors, like happiness, are very important indeed).

I also disagree that this joke is as conducive to constructive conversation as you seem to think it is:

> I don't necessarily like tech bros but I like talking with tech bros and at tech bros because they're easy to upset. The main way you upset them is by asserting either their humanity or everyone else's humanity.

Is it constructive to take pleasure in "upsetting" people? If he were really out to change peoples' minds rather than simply preach to the choir, I think it would be more effective to adopt a more respectful tone towards people who disagree with him.

> This is a real type of person and attitude in tech that we can discuss.

Is it though? Can you give me an example of anyone who self-identifies as a tech bro according to your definition, let alone a enough people to call it a "major culture"? Or is it just a harmful stereotype that gets applied to people to discount their opinions instead of engaging with what they actually believe? Because my experience is that most people tend to hold more nuanced beliefs than what you are describing.

I'll also note that is a red herring, as it's not necessary for anybody to identify as an X for X to exist and be a problem. Indeed, some of the most prominent problems today involve people in that space. Exhibit A would be Elon Musk. But most bigots know that openly identifying as a bigot doesn't work out well for them. You might also read Mills or Manne or Bancroft for a look at how and why not identifying as X is part of the game.

I actually tend to disagree with this. Solving problems generally requires consensus. If a term like "tech bro" is too reductive, divisive, and imprecise for people to agree on, we should throw it out and come up with a better way to describe the problem.

For example, a major attribute that people tend to associate with tech bros is being overly optimistic. Most people in tech (even Elon Musk) would readily admit to being overly optimistic at times, and willing to discuss the risks, mitigation, etc. To me this is much more constructive than just labeling someone a "tech bro".

I think the biggest problem with Elon Musk is a lot of credulous people, helped by credulous tech media, treated him as a serious person. But he's obviously not interested in dialog with anybody who doesn't kiss his entire ass. Having a convenient contemptuous label like "tech bro" is absolutely helpful in undermining that unearned and dangerous false respect.

And I'd say the second-biggest problem here is people valuing civility above all else, which allows toxic narcissists like Musk to run rings around everybody that's supposedly pursuing consensus with people in positions in power. Strangely, you never see those people working very hard to get consensus with the less powerful people that they harm. Coincidence, I imagine.

To be clear I am in no way defending everything that Musk has said or done. But I think that people are complicated, no one is either all good or all bad, and Musk has some traits that I admire and others that I detest.

Is "people valuing consensus above all else" really a thing? Can you give a specific example where you feel "people valuing civility above all else... allows Musk to run rings around everybody that's supposedly pursuing consensus with people in positions in power"? I'm sure you have something in mind, but I'm just not sure what you're referencing.

I certainly put a high value on consensus - but if consensus can't be reached then I can be supportive of more strong-armed approaches in order to achieve a desired outcome. Name-calling just doesn't seem that necessary or useful to me though. Hearing someone call Musk a "techbro" doesn't really do anything to convince me that Musk is a bad guy - if anything it makes me think "here's a fairly extreme and quite-likely biased opinion that I should approach with extra skepticism." Rather, the thing that has sullied Musk's reputation for me in recent years is simply reading the things that he himself has said and done... the facts, clearly stated, are more than sufficient in Musk's case.

Unfortunately I can't deny that name-calling does seem to influence people more than I would like. Democrats and Republicans seemingly engage in ever more name-calling and stereotyping for one-another, and yeah I suppose it gets people engaged and out to the polls to vote (or out to the capitol building for an attempted coup). But it's such a shallow form of debate, and over time the rhetoric tends to drift pretty far from reality as echo chambers form. There are probably a number of important things that people could agree on (like the bi-partisan infrastucture bill) if they weren't so caught up in name-calling and squabbling about (often) irreconcileable differences. This is the feeling that I got when originally watching the video and subsequently reading your comment that I initially responded to.

Speaking of shallow debate, I have read a number of your comments now about how Musk and techbros are ruining the world - and I honestly don't understand where you are coming from. Our frames of reference are different enough that when you say "techbro" it apparently conjures a different image in your head than it does in mine - and the word itself is not enough to convey your intended meaning, only your sentiment gets through. You haven't referenced a specific real-world problem or event that I can say "yeah I agree with that" or not - just a description from "tv tropes" that I maintain is only a stereotype and doesn't accurately reflect reality. (Is there some truth in it? Sure, but in reality people are not that one-dimensional).

I'm open to at least considering how people in the tech industry or even I myself am doing something harmful that I'm not aware of. I may even already be in agreement with you. And yet here we are somehow stuck debating whether stereotypes, name-calling, and consensus-building are good or bad.

But I think that's a very shallow understanding of "identity politics". Typically that's used to mean a deep or immutable characteristic. It's not like techbros come from Techbronistan or County Techbro, with deep cultural roots. Tech bros are dudes who chose to go into tech and choose a hypermasculine performance. And that performance, like the "frat bro" stereotype isn't just about their personal choices. It's about its impact on others, and their indifference to that impact.

Which is also, not coincidentally, a major critique of the tech industry as a whole. If you really care about "serious solutions", maybe you could grapple with that, rather than performing offense right off the bat.

Words spread when lots of people start using it and lots of other people successfully infer the same meaning from context as what it was intended to mean - what people intuitively interpret is incredibly culturally-specific and subjective, and thus is utterly impossible to nail down in some sort of rigorous formal logic.

I bring this up because assuming "techbro" means "tech" plus "bro" (instead of referring to a specific attitude common among FAANG employees - and if you ask why people say "Xes" instead of "people who think X", the answer is brevity) is a very naive and inaccurate approach to language.

>If this is about behavior, then why mix in aspects of gender, age, and profession? And the problem of course is that it’s very easy to see a person with the above three traits and assume they think or behave a certain way - i.e stereotyping.

What you're saying is that "techbro" is a politically incorrect term, and that anyone who uses the term is therefore stereotyping. The problem here is that people can use the term (because it's useful) without necessarily supporting the choice of words the term is made up of - as I mentioned above, when people use a word they do so because they believe other people will reliably connect it with the right concept.

I agree that stereotypes have their uses in popular culture. And often there is some basis for stereotypes in reality. But people should at least be aware when they are using stereotypes, of their inherent imprecision, and why people find them offensive/hurtful. Do you agree that “techbro” is a stereotype?

And I think we should be careful not to build our world views on top of stereotypes. I.e. a world view that the tech industry is run by a bunch of techbros who don’t understand or care about humanity is a gross oversimplification.

This is such a good example of why technical degrees need stronger humanities requirements. Why indeed?

Here's my definition btw:

> it is a specific subset of the people who work in tech whose attitude towards tech is characterized by a sort of brash, prideful belief that you can solve everything with technological solutions and that the human (qualitative) factor of things just isn't relevant — or is even harmful because it's "unquantifiable" and it needs to be specifically perfected out of our considerations.

You could probably get at what people mean by it by starting with "person I dislike in tech" and asking exactly who they dislike and why. It's not because they write code.

But if you want a cheat, TV Tropes has a pretty good explanation of how the tech bro stereotype differs from the average nerd: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TechBro

I’ve unfortunately had some different life experiences of people using the term in other ways, dissimilar to the stereotype on TVTropes… or at least I perceived it as so.

I think fundamentally it's a combination of 1) arrogance in thinking they understand how the world works socially (and are very capable of solving problems that are fundamentally social), and 2) a complete lack of understanding of how the world works socially.

People hate them because at best they're idiots who achieve nothing and at worst their hardworking idiocy makes the world materially worse.

In particular, techbros tend to have a belief that social problems can be solved with technological solutions (e.g. the solution to the housing crisis is to design a construction technique with lower material/labor costs). The problem in this instance is that if they asked themselves "what is the root cause of the problem", instead of jumping straight into the technology (they commonly "disrupt" old technology by ignoring some particular prevailing wisdom, and frame ignoring said wisdom as "not being closed-minded" instead of as "being stupid and ignoring the lessons of the past" - which, to be fair, is occasionally true).

There's also a more explicitly political component, but saying "they have X politics which is stupid" is a great way to start a political flame-war so I think I'll skip that.

So tl;dr: technosolutionism, plus overconfidence on trying to solve social problems that they don't even understand, let alone have the ability to solve.

I dunno, wasn't Saint Augustine "lord make me good, but not yet" pretty much admitting that our heroes have feet of clay, and yet they function as educators and leaders.

If you modulate the training set through externally derived axioms of good and bad, can't you train an AI on objectively naughty data to recognise the anti-set of good behaviour?

On the extreme end of this is - What one side considered a terrorist, the other considers them a liberating warrior.

That is easy at that scale but the finer grain you go on morals the more fuzzy it gets and the more push back you will get from all directions. This is how you get things like the 1946 Obscenity threshold of "I know it when I see it".

Many saw the 2008 crash as a major issue that destroyed the lives of millions of people, some hard line environmentalists saw it as the single great decrease in consumption we have ever had.

If AI is judging us, it's either based on data encoding our existing behaviors. Or it's crudely manipulated data by biased hubris filled megalomaniacs. The rest of humanity doesn't really have/isn't permitted much of a say in the matter.

My argument would be this is both likely and inevitable where there AI is used as a judge. OpenAI, for example, has material explaining how they prune and curate their datasets to alter it's biases.

I have huge respect for the Chromecast ecosystem, but there's so many weird prickly points for it. For a while I had a chromecast plugged in to a computer which then variously resent the output. This looks like a great way to do the same but simpler/dumber. One of the specific flaws of Chromecast is that if you stream a video, it can only go to a single device. Meaning my whole home audio does no good. Something like this could help me work-around that limitation. It's great how absurdly flexible these devices are, but it sucks enormous egg that Chromecast apps will only stream in the first place to signed Chromecast devices; this whole thing should be a non-issue I can software workaround. But a hardware workaround like this is adequate.

And it's not this incident specifically.

I hate it, but I have some unease about tensions in general & how they manifest. I believe in the social contract, and I'm not sure how we can fulfill our obligations to ourselves, and how we can renew a sense of justice & improvement after things go wrong. I don't know the situation in France well, but in general, I've harbored some worry in the last 5 years or so that (often justified & honest & deserved) reactions can have large negative impacts on society, and I don't think we the world have the margins to soak these kinds of losses that we used to. Ideally the world would be more oriented towards sustainability, towards resilience, would have safety nets, and be better prepared. But it feels like so much of our social structures do - and i hate to say this, hate the conservatism this implies - rest delicately or precariously in balance.

I really so strongly agree with what you are saying. But I also want to find some way to find some permissible perspectives that recognize some of the nuance / scaredness, that can acknowledge some of the very conservative fear for the status quo & it's disruption, ideally without having to also demonize & counter-attack while doing so.

So you have a mixture of oil and water.

And when the new ones have no home or responsibilities and are fed by the government, well, ha, who knew they would bite the hand that housed, fed, and clothed them.

I don't have a ton of info, but I've been at two different parties with people for whom this was semi-directly their job, to help facilitate extremly wealthy foreign students buying their way into top tier American schools.

Maybe maybe maybe 4c is chiefly a process tweak, that going lower power let them use more aggressive process scaling. Maybe. But that's still a huge die-space reduction that makes me think there's some secrets like here in this chip, that chipsandcheese.com was able to uncover with read deep prying/benchmarking.

I do wish the graphs in this article had a comparison processor or two. A regular Zen 3 would be great.

Prior to Zen4c, server and desktop chiplets were the same, and desktop chips need to clock to the moon for competitive reasons, but server chips aren't going to go to really high clocks anyway; the thermals are too challenging, so if there's enough demand to justify a separate spin for servers, it makes a lot of sense to tweak the design for reasonable clock rates that will be seen there.

They always have these (thanks to CCX and chiplets) SKUs and for latency-sensitive applications (or single-core non-parrallelized workloads), the high-frequency ones are amazing. You don't get the actual frequency/perf ratio, but they're relatively cheap (compared to the Intel SKUs with similar cores/freq) and damned reliable.

Infoquake/Jump 225 series had an amazing fun-in-a-dystopian-way visions of this Taylor-ian model of programmers percussively hammering away on code.

There was a great project that I keep forgetting the name of / link to... It simulated the chemical process of developing film.

I keep wanting to dig it up & play with it. Such a neat effort.

I'd like to see his virtual camera incorporate the ability to specify different types of films, not to mention lighting (daylight vs. indoor).

Theoretically you could even zoom in enough on his virtual images that you could see the actual (simulated) grain, once you got to a high enough zoom level where there were more than a few pixels to render individual grains.

Film has to be developed into something. And that's a chemical process, which is non-linear. Developer, the bath you put film in to activate the still blank but exposed reel, to turn the grains into actual "developed" photo, is a complex and local analog process. "Developer" is expended while developing film & becomes less effective at developing, creating a much stronger local contrast across pictures in a natural chemical way.

There's a pretty complex Shannon Information Theory system going on here, which I'm not certain how to model. There's maybe a information->transmit->medium->receive->information model between the scene and the film. Then an entirely separate information->transmit->medium->recieve->information model between the undeveloped scene and what actually shows up when you "develop" the film.

As you say, there are quite a variety of film types with different behaviors. https://github.com/t3mujin/t3mujinpack is set of Darktable presets to emulate various types of film. But the behavior of the film is still only half of the process. As I said in my previous post, developing the film is a complex chemical process, with lots of local effects for different parts of the image. There's enormous power here. https://filmulator.org/ is an epic project, that, in my view, is incredibly applicable to almost all modern digital photography, that could help us so much, to move beyond raw data & help us appreciate scenes more naturally. It's not "correct" but my personal view is the aesthetic is much better, and it somewhat represents what the human eye does anyways, with it's incredible ability to comprehend & view dynamic range.

Yes, which is why I said it was the part about having three planes to gracefully point you towards what you Could you watch the content we are trying to discuss here? I know it’s HN tradition to comment without reading but it doesn’t really help.

We the people were inactive & didn't figure out how to weave together our individual & community sites to create a compelling multi-party space.

Or we could try to create alternative centralized but non-corporate systems. Not sure what other options there are.

I don't like where we are either. But new power has to be created. Hard work of figuring out protocols to converse across & usefully home our content/words on is sort of just beginning.