The problem is that you can't know. You can't read the minds of the people involved, so you can't know if there was pressure, coercion, or something else going on, and you can't be sure if either of them are telling the truth when they both insist it's fine and fully consensual.
So you prohibit it in all cases, punish in all cases, and then you don't have to wade into that mess.
Nobody should have sex with people whose livelihoods they have control over, it's not that crazy and its not a "men aren't allowed to flirt anymore" thing.
Cant read it, but the title literally says “1986, ‘Ms’ joins the Times vocabulary”, so I’m guessing that, you know…1986 is when it became the Times’ standard. This likely corresponds to the campaign of Geraldine Ferraro, which is what I personally remember as the point where the term became widespread.
I don’t understand this need to rewrite history. Nobody in this thread is objecting to the use of the term. Even the wikipedia article says the term was resurrected in the 80s.
Hate to break it to you, but you’re arguing with me about something I never said. I said it was revived in the 70s.
The term is recent in a linguistic sense. Even if you personally think it’s ancient history, “my dude”, there are plenty of us alive where it was invented in our lifetime.
A teacher explained this to me in elementary school as some new fad.
> Skeletor will return next week with more disturbing reminders about passage of time...
It's recent both linguistically and culturally. It was a thing in my lifetime, to the point where I remember explaining it to other people in high school (which was itself about a decade after the term became "popular").
I realize that the average age on HN is quite young, but we're not talking about ancient history here.
> For what it's worth, the median human is 31.1 years old. I wouldn't call something older than the median human "very recently, culturally."
That’s cute. Now try searching for the median age in developed countries, where people care enough to make up revisionist history about minor culture debates? (nevermind, I did it for you; it’s around 50)
More to the point, what’s the human lifespan in first-world countries? (average lifespan in the US is almost 80)
(All this is a tongue-in-cheek way of saying that perhaps disparaging people for being older than you is not such a bright idea. I know it’s hard to believe, but we’re not going anywhere for a while.)
The person you're responding to isn't disparaging you. They're simply stating their opinion. That's all a judgment about whether something is recent can be.
Fine, that’s fair. It’s not explicitly disparaging, it’s just implying that facts older than you, personally, can remember are irrelevant. I don’t know what to call this, but none of the words that come to mind are positive.
Someone on a parallel thread explicitly called the 1980s “ancient”, so whatever.
I said the word is recent, linguistically and culturally. I said it was "fairly new". I also said when it was popularized, in terms of actual decades (70s-80s).
You've chosen to die on this particular hill of whether or not something is "recent". I don't know why.
What? You had a whole thing about rewriting history because the parent said the NYT adopted 40 years ago, then you made a big deal about how it was in 1986 and resurrected in the 80s and talked about rewriting history.
What was that all about if you both perfectly agree on the timeline?
> Classy edit, btw.
Edit? I did not edit my post. I think you may not understand what that means. It is neither classy nor unclassy, it is a type of meme.
> What? You had a whole thing about rewriting history because the parent said the NYT adopted 40 years ago, then you made a big deal about how it was in 1986 and resurrected in the 80s and talked about rewriting history.
It's simply a fact that the term was revived in the 70s and popularized in the 80s. The person I replied to was trying to imply that was incorrect, by suggesting that the NY Times was some long-time holdout.
> So your argument is that anyone with a memory longer than yours, yet well within the median human lifespan, is “ancient”.
Deftly convincing my rhetorical opponent of my youthful vigor by misunderstanding what they wrote and getting noticeably worked up about being called ‘ancient’
One of the primary markets for cracked phones is for spying on partners.
In the abstract I’m a strong supporter of the idea that you should be able to use and modify a device you own as you see fit…but in the real world “ownership” is a whole lot murkier than the mental model a lot of tech people have.
Prohibition did reduce alcohol consumption by at least one-third. Didn’t necessarily make it good policy, but it did reduce alcohol consumption and did reduce a lot of the health harms associated with alcohol consumption.
There were plenty of gambling addicts who lost everything through old-school betting shops back in the day too.
My view is that there should be limits imposed on how much people can lose across all forms of gambling annually, with a high-friction process if you want to raise your limit above say, $5,000 per year.
The OP is understandably desperate for something that can save his wife. I would be too!
However, they appear to be seeking something akin to a miracle via chatting to LLMs, and the likelihood of such an approach yielding anything useful is very, very low.
I dont create LLMs for a living, but I make my living using them to their full extent so I know how to extract useful info from them. Not exactly trying to trick it into giving me a cure, much deeper than that. Having it help me understand the biology, methods of actions for various drugs, what trials are targeting and them having them help me understand novel approaches, could a drug potentially do this and this, what if we mixed X and Y etc.
Not having any luck but once she falls asleep at night and I cannot, I have to do something and I have tokens begging to be used ;)
Since you’ve phrased it sensitively, I’ll do the non sensitive version: suggesting LLMs to someone dealing with the trauma of cancer is kind of fucking disgusting. They need emotional support from family and friends, not a computer god.
You’re taking advantage of a vulnerable person and diverting them from things that can actually help them to push your stupid computer parrot. You’re actively doing harm.
The top-level commenter asked for suggestions, already spends "every evening" talking to LLMs about their wife's issue, and LLMs can help and have helped people with intractable medical issues.
There's a lot of HN and YC-aligned people who don't believe this, despite the empirical evidence of the last few decades.
To take the stupidest version of the argument (not going to sugarcoat it, I think it was embarrassingly stupid) there was Marc Andreesen's Techno-Optimist Manifesto where he called for a 1000x increase in energy production from nuclear fission and fusion. I quote directly:
"We believe energy should be in an upward spiral. Energy is the foundational engine of our civilization. The more energy we have, the more people we can have, and the better everyone’s lives can be. We should raise everyone to the energy consumption level we have, then increase our energy 1,000x, then raise everyone else’s energy 1,000x as well."
If you cannot understand how a huge increase in energy might be useful you should probably not go around calling other people stupid. We are not going to get carbon removal and desalination at scale to fix the already baked-in consequences of climate change by making our water heaters more efficient. Efficiency is good but there is more to life than the status quo.
I am aware of the need for carbon removal and (some) desalination, but 1000x-ing our energy production is ludicrous stuff. The waste heat from energy production on that scale would render Earth uninhabitable.
That's incorrect. It's in the order of 25% of the heat reaching the Earth's surface, or maybe 35-40 watts of heat per square metre.
That's roughly ten times the warming effect of doubling CO2.
Now, I don't have a climate model handy to simulate this in detail but I would suggest "render the Earth uninhabitable" is a close enough approximation to the actual effects to suggest it's a terrible idea and anyone seriously proposing it should be laughed out of the room until they've done their homework.
If you want to see true evidence of this, look at the rebates power companies offer.
In all the places I’ve lived there are generally large incentive programs to convert air conditioners and old heaters to heat pumps, and other efficient appliance replacements, install better insulation, etc. because that rebate dollar stretches a lot further than building new power plants, transmission lines, etc.
Driving energy costs to near zero drives down the cost for literally every other process, manufacturing or extractive or services. A 1000x increase in energy practically lets you extract so much material for cheaper that the cost of materials, and the associated logistics, goes down.
The point of using energy is not to use energy. What matters is the services that energy delivers, be it a hot shower, a drive to the grocery store, a new house, a squillion tokens of AI computation. If we can get the services we want more cheaply by energy more efficiently, this is a good thing, not a disaster for humanity.
For completeness, I acknowledge that there are people for whom energy usage is inherently bad, which is equally silly. What matters are the downside impacts of the energy use, not the energy use itself.
My point was that even if you drive costs to 1000x, you're not somehow magically going to reduce consumption. Human output will match those efficiency gains in other forms. Imagine things like synthetic diamond jewelry being the norm, thermal pyrolysis of methane and CO2 into plain carbon, mining deeper underground for precious minerals, etc. A person in the 1890s could not have envisioned the things that would happen just 30 years later, enabled by cheap electricity.
And my point is that life has gotten better for 30 years despite Energy Line Goes Sideways, and what we care about is the life getting better part, not which direction the line goes.
I worked at Meta and we had AGI in the form of very competent ICs - getting anything done was often super painful because "org priority" this and "buy in" that
Ah, you're point that AI can't solve the problem of conflicting requirements is right.
But you're strongly echoing the parent, who's then essentially saying "just don't talk to other people and you won't have conflicting requirements", which I'd say is strongly wrong. Complexity involves conflicting requirements. These will exist in a single developer complexity gets to certain level.
“Just don’t talk to other people” is self-evidently unviable when you’re developing software in a corporate environment.
My point is that what you can achieve when prototyping or writing hobby projects is not replicable in the kind of corporate coding that pays people’s bills.
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