That's a really interesting point. I hadn't drawn that connection before.

And if anyone's reading this and hasn't read Hofstadter, you're making a mistake, it's utterly perspective-changing stuff. Well, it was for me, at least.

And don’t feel you need to go straight to GEB, either. I think his collection of Scientific American columns, Metamagical Themas, is also great and much more accessible.

You are guilt-tripping me for using my copy of Godel, Escher, Bach to raise my monitor before I got around to reading it.

It's a book that works on many levels.

A New Kind of Science is a much better monitor stand.

Eye-level, in my case.

I read it when I was about 9 or 10, I didn't understand any of it at all but I used to pick it up and look at the pictures of the Escher drawings, which were amazing.

Then, after I graduated from college, a friend of mine who was finishing his physics degree mentioned that he had just finished it and that it was life-changing. I read it again and deeply regretted having put it down for those 12 intervening years.

One of my elementary school classmates brought printouts of Escher's Waterfall to share. I accepted one, took it home, and taped it to my bedroom wall. My father saw it and loaned me his copy of Gödel, Escher, Bach.

At first, I flipped through the book looking at the Escher prints. My second time through, I read the dialogues. Next I had a go at reading the chapters and got lost. Maybe on my fifth read-through (years later) I actually attained an understanding of Gödel's Theorem (at least for a brief moment before it vanished again).

I credit GEB (and its dialogues like Little Harmonic Labyrinth) for helping prepare me to deal with the kind of multi-level abstraction involved in developing a language interpreter or machine simulator. Especially that time I had to debug a crash that only occurred when running my simulator inside a simulated instance of itself (i.e. when three levels deep, but not two).

This IS inflation.

That's like saying your snow report for skiing should be adjusted for weather.

No, it's like making a snow report for a handful of skiing areas in a small geographical area (e.g. Sierras) and then contextualizing it against the snow report for all skiing areas in the broader region (e.g. Western US).

There’s no need to mince words, they’ve been aggressively told that AI will eliminate nearly every job.

If you need your job to feed your family then what Sam or Dario is saying is quite literally a threat to kill your children.

Of course they’re full of shit, it’s more like a very useful business automation project but if you say stuff like that you can’t be surprised when people hear it and form highly rational opinions about it.

Memo to anyone in the tech community who doesn’t agree with this:

People fucking hate you and don’t trust you and are convinced, not without reason, that you have the specific goal and intention of destroying their way of life and ability to provide for their families. They also feel like they were never consulted in any of this and that nobody is representing their interests.

You can agree or disagree with that point of view, but unless you thrive on ignorance you might as well get your head around the fact that it’s likely a majority view in this country by now.

Consider for a moment trying to figure out why that is the case rather than pretending it’s not true or that it’s a mass delusion.

Agreed. Might not be a bad idea to fire up the good old-fashioned empathy cells and try to understand the problem from the opponents' perspective.

Lets say I like AI it makes my life easy and I don't mind datacenters.

You seem to have a problem with capitalism. Not AI or datacenters. Capitalism isnt working right now. Ask for that to be abolished. Don't point your finger at a genuinely useful and accessible technology.

Just for context that’s not quite accurate. There certainly is a distinction in the rule versus securities markets, which I know is what you mean.

But it’s more accurate to say participants can trade on lawfully obtained material nonpublic information absent some independent duty not to use it, which is much narrower than saying insider trading is generally legal.

In fairness at root this has been going on for awhile. No one can keep up with the volume of machine code that modern more abstracted codebases produce.

We didn't stop using syntactic programming languages we used code to check code.

Not sure it's really crazy at all. It's been an abstraction for programmers probably since we stopped soldering transistors to each other.

There is a MAJOR difference between predictable generated machine code and Russian Roulette code generator.

Of course there is.

But if you don’t actually read it…

> The issue going on with Taylor Farms isn't their consolidation, it's their lack of taking responsibility.

Right, and the issue with the King of England wasn't the consolidation of all power in his hands, but rather him not taking responsibility for everyone's welfare.

> funding never made anyone smarter

One of my favorite things about HN is the way that you can find someone who has produced definitive proof of the non-existence of the public education system in an offhand comment.

Please, tell me more about my educational background.

He would be promptly murdered by someone named Alexander the Great.

Pretty sure "causes Aspirin sales to soar" is an attempt at cleverly saying "gives people headaches"

Thanks, I also found this unclear.