European bureaucracy has a thing for weird technology - Scala, Flatpak, now NixOS. But still better than being dependent on proprietary software not made in Europe
If I were to pick a distro for government services, I would go with something boring and reliable like Debian or openSUSE. NixOS is fun and nerdy and has its fan base, just not an obvious first choice for the task
Yes, but we (in Europe) cannot afford all the digital infrastructure to be concentrated in one partner country. If you buy something from us and we buy something from you, that's trade. If we have to buy everything from you, that's a dependency, and we need to fix it asap
> it was acceptable, not so long ago, to spy on ones neighbors.
It'still acceptable by the way. I had a guy whom I swear I have seen for the first and last time, allegedly my neighbour, call me by my first name and comment on my garbage-separating habits
Yes indeed, there is an undercurrent of this culture still lurking in the shadows.
I think it’s a consequence of the architecture, personally.
Germans aren’t actually used to having a lot of privacy - I often cringe when I hear my neighbor flush their toilet, and I live in an ‘innenhof’ surrounded by the noisy lives of a vast array of cultures, yelling at each other and having sex and calling their kids back in from the yards for dinner. We all live on top of each other, and for some people this is reason enough to snoop.
>garbage-separating habits
This is a make or break issue for a lot of Germans, it’s true. I personally believe its because the maintenance costs of the apartment/communal living waste admin are borne by all tenants, so this gives folks the idea that they have a ‘right’ to police each other over it.
I’ve learned my own quirks over the years, living in DACH states. I recently found myself seriously judging people by the nature and form - and indeed, strategic availability - of the house shoe spoon. If there isn’t one, you’re about to enter the house of a heathen. If there is one, but it’s small, a sadist. If it’s a long one, strategically placed right by the spot you’re expected to deposit your shoes - a mensch. If it’s wooden, a hippy mensch. If it’s metal, a right-wing mensch.
I’m sorry, Oida, I can’t help it. The shoe spoon is a social indicator! (Edit: I’m joking, a metal shoe spoon doesn’t make you a fascist - its more of a mental game I play while taking off my shoes at a new friends’ house, and I do have to say I am correcting myself on this habit of pigeon holing on the basis of the nature of ones shoe spoon, although I find it amusing as a mental game I do recognize its a prejudice I’m forming in my old age…)
Being intrusive is one thing. But this guy apparently waited until I was bringing out my garbage and go back, rushed to the paper bin to see my name and checked the quality, all without me seeing him, repeatedly, and I believe he did that with other neighbours too. That's basically a second job
Ugh yeah I'd hate that. Here the bins are just in the street. And nothing is personalized. People do watch what you put in but more to see if there's something valuable.
German here. I never thought this was about privacy, but there is definitely a tendency to follow the rules because they are The Rules regardless of how much sense they make - and then judge others by it, or go into Cover Your Ass mode because you fear to be judged yourself.
> If it’s a long one, strategically placed right by the spot you’re expected to deposit your shoes - a mensch. If it’s wooden, a hippy mensch. If it’s metal, a right-wing mensch.
I got a long one, made of metal, but I never knew it makes you right-wing! I just bought it because it's by far the most sturdy one available and I absolutely can't stand the plastic (or small) ones.
It doesn’t actually make you right-wing, I’m just kidding around - as someone who has broken more than my fair share of ethically sourced bamboo shoe spoons, now replaced with a metal one, I am fully taking the piss.
But, it’s more that I caught myself formulating this opinion after being in a DACH culture for some time. I think this is DACH’ness, seeping into my mindset ..
Almost every "normal" job has regular performance reviews where individual contributions, not collective outcomes, are reviewed and used as a sole input for raises, promotions, and firings. If you can't sufficiently document what you personally did, you might've as well not done anything at all.
Yes, that's true, but it is still generally accepted that a completed project is a result of some collective effort where people of varying degree of seniority and ability contribute. There is also not a singular event of a project being completed with a list of heroes/geniuses making it happen, but rather a whole lifecycle of gradual development, maintenance and going out of relevance with contributors coming and going.
I can imagine mathematics of the future being more like that rather than history of discoveries with dates and names
Looks like mathematicians (like people in many other professions) have to redefine what their work means and how to define success. Hard to agree that a tool that can find a proof is detrimental by itself, rather it voids some assumptions people relied on previously
Yes if you don't think about the matter for more than 6 seconds you would indeed conclude that, and retreat to the comfortable cliché of "it's just a tool". Meanwhile, I'm glad that there are still people who _think_ about issues and ponder the consequences and reflect on things before they become a reality.
I am on this track too. If AI leads to advancements, objectively that's a positive (depending on the advancement I guess) but it's only when mathematicians realise they'll get beaten to every thing now that they're outraged.
Say AI becomes the best at everything. Best at chess/go, best at maths, philosophy, economics, romantic advices ... and so on. Then what's the point of thinking by oneself? Of talking to one another?
What's the point of being human if we dont do human things but entirely rely on AI?
I believe this is more or less these mathematicians' argument.
It has been best at chess for quite a while. Yet everyone knows who is Magnus Carlsen, even though at no point of his career he was stronger than the machine
Magnus Carlsen plays fellow humans at the game because people still care about human competitions. What motivation would a mathematician have for solving already solved problems by hand? Can you imagine someone spending years working on a proof for an already-proved theorem just in case it leads to new insight?
If insights and human understanding are more important than specific results, I don't see why people should stop producing insights and human understanding. "Working on a proof" in today's sense of trying to come up with a proof before others probably stops being useful, other ways of working will be needed
Of course not. I'm so tired of the chess analogy. It was always a game and it was always performative.
Research is fundamentally different. We are seeing the erosion of specific needs for thinking at depth. AI is the automobile for the mind. There will 100% be undesirable consequences and selective atrophy of cognitive abilities once prized. This is a loss. There's no getting the cat back in the bag at this point so long as the objective dimension of work, as in object opposed to subject, is held as the most important.
SWEs felt this same crisis late last year. Now it's the mathematicians. They won't be the last.
actually I think the whole point is we're finding that the chess analogy to math is in fact quite apt. Math is just an extremely complex game. Its rules can be written down and there are win conditions. It's really not far fetched to think that through information theory, a reasonable measure of depth and beauty to a definition or conjecture can be defined. Then the game is simply to maximize the number of such artifacts produced of high depth and beauty along with proofs of the relevant conjectures.
Philosophers I'm sure can debate this back and forth but it seems probable that some things we thought were ineffable are in fact quantifiable to a degree, and now we have the technology and the machines to bring that to the logical conclusion.
> What's the point of being human if we dont do human things but entirely rely on AI?
It's fun.
Well, it's not fun today because most of us have to spend most of our waking hours working some bullshit job for a living. But imagine that there's no bullshit job?
>> Once a robot can do everything an IQ 80 human can do, only better and cheaper, there will be no reason to employ IQ 80 humans. Once a robot can do everything an IQ 120 human can do, only better and cheaper, there will be no reason to employ IQ 120 humans. Once a robot can do everything an IQ 180 human can do, only better and cheaper, there will be no reason to employ humans at all, in the unlikely scenario that there are any left by that point. [1]
The answer may sound harsh, but we will not need human once AI reaches that threshold. Current IQ of AI is currently 130 as per Google.
Depends on who controls the machines and what they do. If the machines just serve a select few and the masses are left to fend for themselves, they can just make a secondary pre-AI-like economy where they do small scale medieval-like economic activity for each other. Because if you're poor and can buy no AI services but still need some shoes, your other underclass neighbor may specialize and make some handmade shoes out of some plants or whatnot, for which you give him some seashells you got from another guy for cooking a pot of peas. However the machines may come in and intervene and stop this kind of shadow economy and force you to... I don't know. To just sit in your pod, or die. Because I guess they won't allow you to plow a field and stuff, because that land is now owned by AI or AI-owners too.
There are too many uncertainties around who will be in control and with what kinds of aims.
This only makes sense if you assume that the value of humans to other humans is solely their economic output.
Which is certainly how our society is structured, but, does it have to be? Can we admit that we basically have a developmental trauma as a species and learn to live the sake of living, instead of for the sake of being "useful"?
I don't think you'd get a 404 if you weren't able to reach the endpoint because of DNS or networking? 404 is an active response from the server (or LB/proxy in front etc) no?
Concept is the same though. If one blurts DNS?, it's usually because the idea is you're not getting to an endpoint associated with the service. A 404 means there shouldn't be "DNS" (or networking) concerns (at the least those associated with the DNS cacher you are using or networking that you or your ISP controls)
What's the point of bundling unemployment, low wages, and part-time employment (potentially with a high wage) together? They've come up with a big scary number, but it has been big and scary over the whole period of observation, so nothing particularly special is happening right now.
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