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No, cause you need hands to work the land. And you end up having a dozen cause a few won't make it. /s

The whole "cruel to children" aspect is flawed. It only self-identifies individuals with a world view that is very earth-centric. We need a societal system where such a position is seen as an honorable one. That's why I liked the Antarctica bit of the submission. We ALL need to learn and change.


At this point I'm open to believing our Universe is in a black-hole-like structure.


These demos are nothing near sketchy illegal stuff :D


Remember, if it's free, you're the product.

How common is this in privacy policies? > For security and privacy reasons, we request that you abstain from disclosing personal information, including passwords, credit card numbers, or other confidential data. Our commitment to safeguarding your privacy is unwavering, but the security of personal information also relies on safe user practices.


> Remember, if it's free, you're the product

That was until the 2020s.

Now you pay and you are the product.


Wait till 2026:

You pay, and your'e the product, AND the product is broken, AND the devs and customer service have been replaced by an AI chatbot that is very polite but only gives incorrect answers. The future is bright.


If not explicit, this is practically applicable to every ai chat bot out there with limited exceptions.


Actually you often aren't the product, you are instead the raw material from which Meta/Google/etc creates their saleable products: e.g. profiles of recipients for targeted ads.


However true this is _here_, I really dislike this sentence, as it spills capitalist sentiment and distrust. How much are you the product when using Firefox (even if Mozilla gets ad revenue). How much are you the product with an OSS or community product, or a free tier for a reputable cloud offering?


Exactly. The phrase is wrong in every sense. You're pointing out the common case where something is free and offered in good faith (a terrifying and confusing concept for the Free Market faithful). There is also the exceedingly common case of both paying for something and being screwed by whoever sold it to you. Eg buying a Windows license and getting ads in the start menu.

The real lesson is: look at incentives/motivations. Are you transacting with a group that has power to unilaterally determine terms and reason to weigh them in their favor? They will.


In other words: “If it sounds too good to be true, it is.”


We should be investing into living with these changes.


Humanity will survive, don't fret about it. We don't need to buil an ark.

The issue is, although humanity will survive, billions will die. That's not good enough for me.


Will billions die? How?


Crop failures (our food is sensitive to temperature changes).

War (as resources are limited, we'll fight for what's left).

Disease (poorer areas will incubate and spread diseases we already cured or controlled).

Typical dark ages stuff. The ancients who faced similar issues wrote the stories on stones and songs so we won't forget.


I can see all of these happening but billions dead is a really high number so my question is more about the quantitive aspect. Are there estimates that land on this number, or is it just a high number more or less guessed


Well, the Black Death killed ~15% of the world's population in the 14th century[1]. 15% today would be about 1.17 billion people. It's horrific but not implausible.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consequences_of_the_Black_Deat...


Yes but that was during a time before we had even entered Enlightenment. I don't see how it says anything about consequences of a 1.5 degree average warming.


It's an informal guess, I don't know if there are any accurate estimates.


I don't know about how many deaths this would cause, but there was an interesting paper that looked at the effects of a limited nuclear war between India and Pakistan [1]. Here's a blog post about it [2].

India and Pakistan both depend on water from Himalayan glaciers that are shrinking due to warming, so the idea of them at some point going to war over control of that shrinking resource is not too far fetched.

What's interesting is how much of the rest of the world could be affected.

The paper looks at a war where the two counties exchange 100 nukes each about the size of the bomb used on Hiroshima, directed at each other's major population centers. That's about 1/3 of their arsenals. Besides killing a lot of people in those population centers, this would set of firestorms that would release a lot of soot into the upper atmosphere.

The paper used state of the art atmospheric models to predict what would happen to that soot, and state of the art crop models and food distribution models to predict what that could do.

Here's the abstract:

> A limited nuclear war between India and Pakistan could ignite fires large enough to emit more than 5 Tg of soot into the stratosphere. Climate model simulations have shown severe resulting climate perturbations with declines in global mean temperature by 1.8 °C and precipitation by 8%, for at least 5 y. Here we evaluate impacts for the global food system. Six harmonized state-of-the-art crop models show that global caloric production from maize, wheat, rice, and soybean falls by 13 (±1)%, 11 (±8)%, 3 (±5)%, and 17 (±2)% over 5 y. Total single-year losses of 12 (±4)% quadruple the largest observed historical anomaly and exceed impacts caused by historic droughts and volcanic eruptions. Colder temperatures drive losses more than changes in precipitation and solar radiation, leading to strongest impacts in temperate regions poleward of 30°N, including the United States, Europe, and China for 10 to 15 y. Integrated food trade network analyses show that domestic reserves and global trade can largely buffer the production anomaly in the first year. Persistent multiyear losses, however, would constrain domestic food availability and propagate to the Global South, especially to food-insecure countries. By year 5, maize and wheat availability would decrease by 13% globally and by more than 20% in 71 countries with a cumulative population of 1.3 billion people. In view of increasing instability in South Asia, this study shows that a regional conflict using <1% of the worldwide nuclear arsenal could have adverse consequences for global food security unmatched in modern history.

I bet that would be very destabilizing in the US and Europe. Think about how crazy some people got during COVID in the US with the relatively minor (but annoying) shortages during that. This would be worse.

[1] https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1919049117

[2] https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2020/03/16/even-limited-in...


> our food is sensitive to temperature changes.

It's not. It's lack of water that causes failure.


oh wow, how much agronomy did you study? photosynthesis is optimal below 35°C and is at 0% already at 50°C


Thanks for the correction


Famines due to changing weather patterns causing widespread harvest failures, wars due to reduces resources and changing liveability of regions, far bigger refugee crises than we've seen so far, etc.

We're in general really dependent on our climate for global stability.


https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-38906-7

> Risks of synchronized low yields are underestimated in climate and crop model projections


Age. Roughly 170.000 die every day, and it will become more (because most of earth's population is still quite young).


We should begin to acknowledge that there is a non-zero chance for complete societal collapse in the next few decades.


We should begin to acknowledge that there may be a near-zero chance of avoiding complete societal collapse in the next few decades.


> there may be a near-zero chance

You have two probability qualifiers next to each other. What is "may be" in this case? How should a reader read it?


Consider a disease like rabies. Right now there's a near-zero chance of survival to those who contract it. Let's say we discover a new mosquito variant which can spread rabies, whose population is multiplying exponentially.

Typically we might expect a disease which becomes pandemic to be survivable for some significant percentage of the population. Whereas here we might say that, regardless of how many resources we throw at rabies treatments, there may continue to be a near-zero chance of survival (because rabies had been remarkably untreatable so far).

It's a suggestion that perhaps we should temper optimism.


Ok, so now I understand what you meant.

Technically, you're right. May be there's no chance to fix it. But may be false vacuum will decay tomorrow. "may be" is not very useful here.

Is it probable that we're beyond the point of no return? I don't believe anyone can answer that with any certainty.


Note that even in the above example, a proper response might be to address the mosquito population or to begin initiatives to vaccinate as many people as possible against rabies. Likely a combination of both.

Of course it might be good to continue researching possible treatments for rabies as well, but there are other things which can be done to mitigate the impact.

I don't think climate change will be the only reason for societal collapse, if it happens. I think late-stage capitalism (which is also implicated in driving this climate change) is at least another significant factor.

I also don't pretend do know what societal collapse might look like, and what might come after. Societies don't seem to be immortal[1], and collapse has historically been inevitable. An immortal society is as unprecedented as human immortality, which isn't to say that either are strictly impossible, but that we should analyze both against historical data on statistics and symptoms which might indicate proximity to end of life.

Personally I believe the societal stressors which appear over the next few decades are significant enough that they represent a much larger chance of societal collapse than people seem to recognize. I guess we'll see.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Societal_collapse#Societal_lon...


In that case, why play along with society or do any research or investments beyond that time frame?


Because society collapsing doesn't mean that everyone will die; research and investments now might be critical for our children and possibly the long-term survival of the human race.


current society collapsing still gives room for survival - look at indigenous peoples in for example Australia - they survived an apocalypse and still are around.


Which part of the society, the Trump part, or the Musk part. Oh, they seem to be the same now. It’s so confusing.


In that case we'd better invest in weapons and find a way how to kill "the others" before they "kill us", since this will affect "our" chance of surviving much more than if we are able to "fight the climate change".


there's always been a non-zero chance for collapse: black death, ww2, cold war, covid, etc.


2 degrees Celsius: We should be investing into living with these changes.

2.5 degrees Celsius: We should be investing into living with these changes.

3 degrees Celsius: We should be investing into living with these changes.

4 degrees Celsius: We should be investing into living with these changes.

5 degrees Celsius: We should be investing into living with these changes.

At some point methane hydrates release, photosynthesis in sea microorganisms ceases, or other general ecosystem collapse occurs.

At some point you have to invest in stopping the rise, because Venus shows there isn't an upper boundary.

At this point you basically hope demographic collapse from urbanization combined with massive wars and starvation from population displacement combined with alternative energy allows for a sustainable tech future.

That's the gentle landing.

The money for change is held by the rich, and they don't care if the world ends as long as their back accounts have 1000000x more unicorn horns than other people.


Genocidal climate activism...


How exactly do we invest into, for example, people not being able to survive because of the wet-bulb temperature getting too high?


I think that providing public climate shelters will have to be part of the solution in some countries. There is a wide spread between “humans can’t work multiple hours outside” and “humans can’t be outside at all” for the likely temps in the next 100 years.

(To be clear, this is a stopgap to cope with the change as it happens, not a full solution.)


We could invest in cheaper and faster coffin production. Or invest in trying to get mass graves to become culturally acceptable. Or we could try and actually do something about the conditions that create the hellscape to come, but with our current mode of production and incentives around industry, I don't see it happening.


Massive migrations.


Migrations Morpheus, like the swallow.


EM said in one of the podcasts that chip shortage -> transformer shortage -> energy shortage. That was about a year ago or so. Asked Chat to make me a portfolio to target the transformer market. Have to say, it works.


There's repeaters so the general area should be known.


They can measure the location of the break to centimeters by timing how long a light pulse takes to reflect back to the emitter. It is called time-domain reflectometry.


Ok, then was it used? And if not, why not?


It was almost certainly used.


What was the response?


Why are you assuming that would be released publicly? The person you are discussing this with is simply informing you of the existence and availability of the technology you're asking about.


They now the distance to the break from one end. They then use that with a map of the cable to determine the lat and long of the break and send a ship to fix it.


So, no navy involved? With such a system I would expect them to catch the perpetrator red-handed and raid their ship, etc.


This process assumes the damage is accidental and doesn't involve the military. If Russia keeps cutting optic cables that could change. I can envision military ships getting real-time notification of fiber cuts and the current location of all foreign ships.


interestingly close publish date to Asianometry's video on Sony's Breakthrough Color TV: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TOh3jEJGynA


Not so interesting. In the video description and in the video itself it's pointed out that it's done in a collaboration with IEEE Spectrum.


Wait, isn't that bridge in that one horror game? I could swear I saw it before.


I thought I recognised it from Beetlejuice.


It has that classic look, I immediately though I saw it in a movie.


but apple beta != openai beta


I'm not sure of the schedule for integrating OpenAI stuff into Apple products[0], but it may very well be an OpenAI beta.

[0] https://openai.com/index/openai-and-apple-announce-partnersh...


The only OpenAI integration is giving users the opportunity to have their model answer questions. No Apple services, and no general queries rely on OpenAI.


Yeah, the OpenAI integration they demonstrated at WWDC showed a very prominent “do you want to send this question to ChatGPT?” dialog when it kicked in. The email feature absolutely isn’t using OpenAI - plus the OpenAI integration isn’t in the iOS 18.1 beta yet.


Well, we'll have to see what the future brings.

In any case, dealing with spam/phishing is always an arms race.

One of the drawbacks of AI, is that I suspect it will have patterns that could be figured out, and folks will learn that (crooks tend to be a lot smarter than most folks seem to think. I'll lay odds that every hacker has an HN account).


this isn't driven by OpenAI, it's part of Apple's core models


Is either one a Google beta?


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