> if I go to France, I don't expect government announcements to be provided in English for me.
How many French cities have English names?
Thousands of American cities have Spanish names because they were founded by Spanish explorers. 20% of U.S. states have Spanish names.[1] I'm not arguing that this is reason enough for government announcements to be in English, but I think that comparing the use of Spanish in the U.S. to the use of English in France is invalid.
The West has made Iran out to be some backwater bogeyman when it is actually quite developed and in some areas progressive compared to our other allies in the region.
Rick Steve's Iran was a great watch that everyone should check out.
There's a lot of misunderstanding in the West about Iranians, or as we call ourselves "Persians." (I suppose to avoid the negative "Islamic" connotation..) Despite how the country is portrayed, the people themselves tend to be pro Western, educated, and fairly liberal.
So the unfortunate reality is that the government is highly repressive. It tightly controls communication and enforces a strict theocratic system that doesn’t reflect the will of much of the population.
If you're curious about what Iranian society is all about, look at the photos before the 1979 revolution. That change wasn't long ago, it was just a generation back. My parents lived through it. Many from that time believed they were rising up for democracy, not realizing what would replace the Shah was something even more authoritarian. My own father admits they were misled and now actively curses the regime and himself.. the peak being burning the US embassy because they were told it's a foreign spy command center..
What's especially tragic is that Iran today has a very young population, many of whom strongly oppose the current regime. But peaceful change feels unlikely, look up what happened anytime people took to the streets. And if the government were to collapse without a clear path forward, there's a real risk of something even worse filling the vacuum.
That said, there are reasons for hope. During the most recent uprising, the "Woman, Life, Freedom" movement, women led the charge, and the government was forced to back down somewhat after international outcry. Since then, many women have continued to defy mandatory hijab laws, walking around without head coverings despite the real risks of arrest or violence. It’s incredibly brave, and it speaks to a deep, ongoing resistance that’s hard to suppress:
Yes but it’s also other things, including a symbol of diplomatic relations with the country which owns the embassy. Burning it down because it’s a spy center is possibly disregarding what else it represents to the detriment of the those who destroyed it.
In jurisdictions with better access to abortion people choose to abort the kind of "doesn't stand a chance" pregnancies that people in jurisdictions who can't access abortion wind up giving birth to only for them to die shortly thereafter.
Correct me if I'm wrong but aren't both jurisdictions equally averse to abortion? Sure, you'd find a few exceptions here and there but both countries have banned abortion? Both places have banned abortion where the mother's life may be in danger. Iran additionally allows abortions in cases where the fetus suffers from a major medical condition (genetic defects like Down's Syndrome don't count) which doesn't let the future child live a viable life.
> If you have to click or browse several results forget it, makes no sense not to use an LLM that provides sources.
I just searched for "What is inherit_errexit?" at Perplexity. Eight sources were provided and none of them were the most authoritative source, which is this page in the Bash manual:
Whereas, when I searched for "inherit_errexit" using Google Search, the above page was the sixth result. And when I searched for "inherit_errexit" using DuckDuckGo, the above page was the third result.
I continue to believe that LLMs are favored by people who don't care about developing an understanding of subjects based on the most authoritative source material. These are people who don't read science journals, they don't read technical specifications, they don't read man pages, and they don't read a program's source code before installing the program. These are people who prioritize convenience above all else.
> I continue to believe that LLMs are favored by people who don't care about developing an understanding of subjects based on the most authoritative source material. These are people who don't read science journals, they don't read technical specifications, they don't read man pages, and they don't read a program's source code before installing the program. These are people who prioritize convenience above all else.
This makes a lot of sense to me. As a young guy in the 90's I was told that some day "everyone will be fluent in computers" and 25 years later it's just not true. 95% of my peers never developed their fluency, and my kids even less so. The same will hold try for AI, it will be what smartphones were to PCs: A dumbed down interface for people who want to USE tech not understand it.
I've really wanted to write a clickbait blog post article to post on HN [0] with the title "Hackers don't use LLMs". You've pretty succinctly summarised how I feel about the subject with your last paragraph.
[0]: not that I write blog post articles anyway, it's just a fantasy day dream thing that's been running through my head
Why would you even search for that out of the context of the IDE where you're coding or writing documentation? If you're writing bash you'd have all those man pages loaded in context for it to answer questions and generate code properly.
Alt + Tab > Ctrl + T > Type > Enter > PgDn > Click > PgDn > Alt + Left > Click > PgDn > Alt + Left > Click > PgDn > Alt + Tab > [Another 45-60 minutes coding] > GOTO Start
With these keybinds (plus clicking mouse, yuck) I can read Nx sources of information around a topic.
I'm always looking to read around the topic. I don't stop at the first result. I always want to read multiple sources to (a) confirm that's the standard approach (b) if not, are there other approaches that might be suitable (c) is there anything else that I'm not aware of yet. I don't want the first answer. I want all the answers, then I want to make my own choices about what fits with the codebase that I am writing or the problem domain that I'm working in.
Due to muscle memory, the first four/five steps i can do in like one or two seconds. Sometimes less.
Switching to the browser puts my brain into "absorb new information" mode, which is a different skill to "do what IDE tells me to do". Because, as a software engineer, my job is to learn about the problem domain and come up with appropriate solutions given known constraints -- not to blindly write whatever code I'm first exposed to by my IDE. I don't work in an "IDE context". I work in a "solving problems with software context".
==
So I agree with the GP. A lot of posts I see about people saying "why not just use LLM" seem to be driven by a motivation for convenience. Or, more accurately, unconsidered/blind laziness.
It's okay to be lazy. But be smart lazy. Think and work hard about how to be lazy effectively.
> At the thought of leftists in power, I think open data day at the IRS is really not bad.
LOL. You're not even an American. He's a tip: U.S. states with the highest GDP per capita are mostly run by Democrats[1] (who, by the way, aren't leftists).
> That $140B is a very concrete number with documentation to back up all 7279 line items in great detail.
What do you mean by "very concrete number"? And why do you consider DOGE's documentation to be substantiating evidence? I quickly searched through your comments and see that you're a Mormon. Do you likewise believe that the Book of Mormon is empirical evidence that substantiates Mormonism? If so, how do you decide which reading material is substantiating evidence and which isn't?
As long as you keep convincing yourself that this is just a phase of right wing crazies, it will keep happening. Support for the democrats has never been lower. There is bipartisan support for the current administration. It’s not just right-wing personalities. Take it or leave it, but I’m not living in a vacuum.
At the time that I read this thread, there were 14 comments, of which 13 were posted by users whose median karma was only 68. Does anyone have an explanation for this?
How many French cities have English names?
Thousands of American cities have Spanish names because they were founded by Spanish explorers. 20% of U.S. states have Spanish names.[1] I'm not arguing that this is reason enough for government announcements to be in English, but I think that comparing the use of Spanish in the U.S. to the use of English in France is invalid.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_place_names_of_Spanish...