StackOverflow is moribund pile of junk. They've never managed to understand that software development is a highly fluid, constantly evolving space. Instead of embracing this, they've been trying to build a static encyclopaedia.
Volunteer admins with nothing better to do get their dopamine by closing questions for StackOverflow points, regardless of whether the supposedly duped question from 8 years ago is actually still the best answer and covers the nuances of the question now being asked.
There probably is still a space for a SO-style site to exist, but they'd need a drastic change of approach. LLMs (+ Reddit I suppose?) have taken over most the engineer support role.
> Volunteer admins with nothing better to do get their dopamine by closing questions for StackOverflow points, regardless of whether the supposedly duped question from 8 years ago is actually still the best answer and covers the nuances of the question now being asked.
This rung so true to me, given that my answer from 4y ago was closed as a duplicate of an answer made 3m ago :D (no, the nuances were not considered and the questions were ultimately too different; this didn't influence moderation decision at all and I was very confused on how I've made a duplicate 4y ago of a question in, at that time, the future)
Add to that weird and counterproductive rules. Can't ask questions about framework selection on programming sites. Can't ask for gear recommendations on outdoor sites. Can't ask counterfactual questions on politics site. On history sites you can only ask questions after extensive research. If an obscure subsite of Wikipedia half-answers something vaguely related, the question gets closed (or at least you get angry comments).
It's weird how SE turned itself into a site for not answering questions!
I felt like that when I started using Emacs, about 25 years ago. It turned out to be worth it, though.
Emacs has its own tutorial (Help -> tutorial from the menus), which is a pretty good introduction. Learning to get help from Emacs itself is a bit of a learning curve, but really beneficial.
Learning to the use the help tools properly was something I didn't get around to for years, but I wish I had sooner.
Years ago it was remarkable for software to have docs built-in as Emacs does.
Then for many years it was standard for software to have help files, and it seemed anachronistic for Emacs to loudly proclaim it is self-documenting.
Now in the Web and LLM age, much software doesn’t even try to have built-in help or even much documentation, and it’s again remarkable that Emacs is self-documenting, especially the part of Emacs that users can program.
> Then for many years it was standard for software to have help files, and it seemed anachronistic for Emacs to loudly proclaim it is self-documenting.
Emacs' notion of self documentation refers to something slightly different than the fact it has online help files. The help facilities can query the Lisp runtime for things like functions and keybindings. These update dynamically as the system is reconfigured. The result is something that isn't quite as cleanly presented as an online help document, but has the benefit of being deeply integrated into how the system is actually configured to behave at the moment. Very cool, and very much dependent on the open source nature of emacs.
I don't agree that LLMs can't reason reliably. If you give them a simple reasoning question, they can generally make a decent attempt at coming up with a solution. Complete howlers are rare from cutting-edge models. (If you disagree, give an example!)
Humans sometimes make mistakes in reasoning, too; sometimes they come up with conclusions that leave me completely bewildered (like somehow reasoning that the Earth is flat).
I think we can all agree that humans are significantly better and more consistently good at reasoning than even the best LLM models, but the argument that LLMs cannot reliably reason doesn't seem to match the evidence.
seems like a reciprocal relationship to me. i'd also say the recent US stances are an aberration whereas the history of UK immigration policy is a better reflection of core governing principles.
> Compare that with protection from predators, medical care, vaccination, shelter, reliable food and clean water, and stress free lives until a quick and fast death.
Comparing farmed animals to wild animals is not really the point. A better comparison is a farmed animal compared to that animal not existing at all. We make the choice to bring them into existence.
Are farmed animals better off existing than not? I think in general the great majority of the 100 billion or so animals we slaughter per year are probably better off not existing. Their lives tend to be short, miserable and pointless.
If you insist on comparing farmed animals to wild animals, though, I don't think it's clear cut. They do live "safer" lives (at least until we kill them, as young as it is economical to do so), but they get to experience severe boredom, curtailment of their natural instincts, and distressing experiences such as separation from their offspring and overcrowding.
The same applied to humans before it did to non-human animals. We are prescribing our worldview of "safe" predictable lives to them, just as was done to us.
This argument can be made about humans. Are modern humans better of existing than not? Our lives also tend to be short, miserable and pointless. Especially compared to just not existing and never having to bother with this world's bs.
Our lives in the developed world tend to be limited by biology; an average of about 80 years in many countries. Pigs get slaughtered at about 6 months, well before the lifespan they could potentially live to.
> miserable
If you're feeling constantly miserable, then please get some mental health treatment.
> and pointless
Possibly, but we are free to try to find some meaning for ourselves in our lives. Farm animals merely exist to grow as fast as possible and be slaughtered for food. The only point to their existence is to be food.
You have such a human perspective on things. Pigs are free to find their own meaning to their lives as well. Why should they be concerned what their lives mean to us? Long and short are relative terms. For you 80 years is long, for me it's short. For you, 6 months is short. For a domestic pig 6 months is long because it's 100% of their lifespan. What's the median lifespan of wild pigs?
For us and pigs our lifespans are dictated by the realities of our environment. Humans are part of pigs environment.
As for miserability of existence, there's no treatment for Weltschmerz.
RFK is a crackpot, and just because he's got someone to write it to sound plausible, it doesn't mean it is plausible. It's incredibly irresponsible to promote his pet theories over scientific orthodoxy.
> To turn that around and get a deal that Biden couldn't get done,
Biden had different pressures. E.g. I suspect that he judged that the knife-edge election he was facing didn't allow him enough leeway to put more pressure on Israel.
In addition Netanyahu made it easier to force through a settlement given he'd manage to alienate practically everyone, including uniting the Arab world after that unbelievable strike on Doha.
If you were a cynical person you could also ask whether this settlement owes anything to Trump's personal narcissist saviour complex or need to distract from domestic issues such as the Epstein files...
Still, even despite some significant scepticism about Trump's motives, I think there is a reasonable case to be made for awarding him the prize. It was still a significant (maybe even brave) jump to break with American political orthodoxy to put this kind of pressure on Israel, and the practical result of this could be very significant in terms of saving lives and potentially long-term peace in the region. We also need to encourage these kind of acts, even (or especially) amongst unlikely peacemakers like Trump.
Let's see what it looks like next year, though. Middle East peace deals don't have a great history of holding together.
I would love full transparency to the Biden Admin's dealings wrt Israel.
I've wondered if one of the (under reported) pressures was the realpolitik geopolitical machinations of containing Iran. Especially wrt Iran's closer ties with Russia and China.
But even with insight, I would not forgive.
The whole thing just angers and saddens me. Neighbors killing neighbors. For nothing.
So many missed opportunities, snafus. Imagine what could have been. Normalization between USA-Iran (post-9/11, pre- "Axis of Evil"). Some kind of accommodation for coexistence. Nurturing democracy and development throughout the middle east.
And on and on. Going back decades, generations, ...
> The drudgery and boredom of living in a "perfect" world is a constant theme throughout the stories.
You can of course interpret the novels however you like, but that absolutely wasn't Banks' intention when he wrote the series. See the quotes from other comments.
> In one tale, the entire crew of a spaceship deliberately infect themselves with the common cold just to feel something.
Or they just do it because why not? If you'd never been ill, you'd probably be curious as to what it felt like.
> In another story, people turn off their safeguards and go rafting on a lava stream, causing themselves intense pain and even dying, only so they can finally experience some real excitement.
I think in the story the lava-rafters were having a great time, and they were fairly unusual... and people in our culture risk pain and death doing sport just to feel excitement. In the Culture they just have additional options, such as rafting on lava.
Most of the Culture citizens were happy enough with their exploration, art, travel, genetically-enhanced sex, implanted drug glands, games, sports, and so they never got around to lava rafting.
I'm a big Culture fan, and I don't know what to make of this article.
Many of the points seem to be hallucinated. Either the author has a poor memory and an active imagination or there has been some poor-quality LLM input.
Examples
> There are apparently no sociopaths – Culture has to recruit an outsider when they need one
Banks describes several ways how such individuals are managed - such as offering full immersion level VR to satisfy extreme megalomania.
> We also see that there are a number of Eccentrics, Minds that don’t fully share the values of Culture. They’re not that rare, about 1% of the population.
I don't believe that 1% figure is mentioned anywhere. I'd be surprised if it was. Eccentrics seem to be much rarer than that.
> We even see GSV Absconding with Style stockpile resources without general knowledge of the other Minds.
This name is made up, and not by Banks. A Google search for "absconding with style" has only a few hits - mainly this article.
The Falling Outside The Normal Moral Constraints from Surface Detail was described as "very slightly psychotic" - which in the case of advanced Culture warship is quite a thing...
It might be a bad translation of a translation, i.e., maybe Absconding With Style is a translation from Russian of weird choice of translation of Sleeper Service _into_ Russian? Bit a stretch I'll grant.
I don't know why Russian is mentioned, that Boris the Brave guy is not Russian, but "Sleeper Service" was oddly translated in the Russian publication as "Спальный Состав", which means "Sleeping composition".
I congratulate you on an accurate diagnosis, I think all three are true. I don't remember the details of Excession very well as I didn't actually like it and relied on an LLM too much. That was a mistake.
Some of these were my own supposition - 1% felt about right for how casually they are mentioned in story.
> Banks describes several ways how such individuals are managed - such as offering full immersion level VR to satisfy extreme megalomania.
I don't remember that at all, perhaps you could tell me which book to look at.
> I congratulate you on an accurate diagnosis, I think all three are true.
Hah, fair enough. Thanks for getting the Culture back on the front page of HN :)
> I don't remember the details of Excession very well as I didn't actually like it
If you were actually referring to the Sleeper Service - I think you still remembered something like the opposite idea of what happened in the story. The twist was - (Spoiler!) - the Sleeper Service was actually not Eccentric at all, and had not built up a small army as a Mind that had gone rogue, but had actually done this as a planned failsafe in conjunction with a number of other Minds. Hence the multi-level pun of its name.
> I don't remember that at all, perhaps you could tell me which book to look at.
I'm afraid I can't remember exactly which books this was explored in, though Inversions, State of the Art and Player of Games are books where the Culture is explicitly compared to other civilisations and so more likely to have mentioned it.
Also Banks' essay /A Few Notes on the Culture/ covers it quite well if you haven't come across that yet. Very short but I think very readable and interesting.
Volunteer admins with nothing better to do get their dopamine by closing questions for StackOverflow points, regardless of whether the supposedly duped question from 8 years ago is actually still the best answer and covers the nuances of the question now being asked.
There probably is still a space for a SO-style site to exist, but they'd need a drastic change of approach. LLMs (+ Reddit I suppose?) have taken over most the engineer support role.
reply