Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | xg15's commentslogin

Was recently at a demoscene presentation, where, after one particular demo where the author was recently deceased, one person just didn't stop applauding, even long after the rest of the audience had done. Someone sitting next to him was trying to reason with him, but he just responded that he had been a friend of the author (so I guess this was his way of honoring them?)

Eventually the other person got somewhat aggressive and told him to shut it, to which he just responded "no, why?".

Finally he was led out of the room.

I'm not sure how the thinking process of that guy went, but I was honestly strongly siding with the second person. Keeping on clapping as a sign of honor may be a heartfelt gesture, but here it came over just as plain obnoxious, as it held up the entire presentation.

That being said, if it's about political or other differences of opinion or debates on courses of action to take, I'd be with you - there can be herd mentalities (or active manipulation) and if you have good support/evidence to back up your opinions, it's worth sticking to them.

But if I see that my immediate behavior is causing discomfort, I'd always stop and try to reflect.


I read this does have a functional reason: Sperm cells have to be kept at slightly lower temperature than the body temperature, so if the testicles were inside the body, the sperm wouldn't survive.

Of course you could ask why sperm is so temperature sensitive in the first place...


If elephants did it, I’m sure we can too.

>The hole in the retina is sizeable (~9 full moons in the sky), but we don’t notice it because [...] (2) our brain automatically fills in gaps in our visual field by interpolation

I still remember this bit from school and various pop-sci book, but is it actually true? Is there really some group of neurons in the brain somewhere that actively tries to restore the "raw" visual information that was blocked by the blind spot?

Thinking of ANNs, I felt it was more realistic that higher layers in the visual cortex are mostly only using the visual information to find patterns anyway, and that they're robust enough they can still find those patterns without the data from the blind spot locations. (As long as a pattern isn't fully contained within the blind spot regions of course)

An analogy would be a QR code reader that can still parse the encoded information if a part of the QR code is missing - but it won't actually "reconstruct" the missing sections to do this.

But I don't know if it really works like this.


I've read a number of consciousness books and this idea that the brain is inpainting the blind spot. I know Dennett in his "Consciousness Explained" book of 30+ years ago did his best to debunk that idea.

The problem with inpainting is that it suggests there is a generator that knows how to fill in that spot before the "witnessing" part of the visual system then gets to work. This is perhaps best thought about from a more extreme example of dreamining: witnessing visuals with the eyes complete closed. In short, the visual system isn't like a projector screen with the finish fixed-up image that some interior witness views.

I believe that most researchers have a very different model, that of the controlled hallucination. What we experience isn't the photons hitting the array of rods and cones like a 2D array of pixels. Instead, we have an internal model of what we are looking at and visual input is there to provide feedback to keep the model of the world updated. The blind spot isn't experienced because we aren't looking at the 2D grid of pixels -- our model is coherent, and the presence of the blind spot simply means that no corrective feedback comes from that area of that one eye.

One compelling bit of information is there while there are neurons feeding processed visual information forward into the brain, there are more feeding back from that area to the visual system. That is, the the visual system is providing error signals and not the image we are experiencing. When something not predicted appears, the visual system sends forward information guiding the internal model to be updated.

Have you ever had the experience where you have been asked to close your eyes and put into a novel environment before then being allowed to open your eyes? It takes less than a second, but you can feel a moment of disorientation while your brain builds that world model. Another way is via some optical illusions (Necker Cube) or Escher drawings. You can look at a part of the drawing and everything is fine, but then as you change your focus there is a transitory feeling of unease as that world model is in flux as it tries to resolve the new visual input with the model it had been using.


I was going to say the same thing. When we look at a book, we see the book in our minds, not a picture of a book. The processing that happens in our brains works to create the representation, it’s not transforming one image into another.

>(As long as a pattern isn't fully contained within the blind spot regions of course)

There are dedicated optical illusion/explainers that give you the experience of the brain patching over the space with neutral background, even if there's something there, like a symbol or a star.

So if it's something featureless or continuous, like a wall of your room that's a solid color, or a sheet of college ruled paper, the pattern can just be continued.

That said I would stress there's limits to how much of that you can do just by pattern extrapolation as opposed to deriving images from distinct and specific information in a given region of the visual field. You have to know enough about a stretch of visual space to know that it's appropriate to spread a pattern over it, and that's the thing the blind spot doesn't know.


What’s interesting about that is that brain doesn’t actually give you much access to the sensor information directly, but gives an interpretation instead. There is a thing called Saccadic Suppression that blocks visual data processing for 50ms when eyes are moving, and the brain just backfills that missing data from the “next frame”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saccadic_masking

Thanks, I had not heard of that one. As a recovering philosophy bro I love cataloging all of these peculiar artifacts of our visual experience. They turn out to matter quite a bit in some of the endless mind versus brain and mind versus matter debates. Off the top of my head:

- Blind spot where the optic nerve exits the eye

- Saccadic Suppression (new to me!)

- Panum's fusional area (how close the overlapping images of your eyes have to be to each other to get merged into a unified image)

- The wagon wheel effect

- trichromatic vision (obvious but important because it easily could have been different)

- The foveial field, the central part of vision that's extremely precise, while things increasingly further away from it are blurry

- specialization in peripheral vision, (eg better sensitivity to starlight, as well as better sensitivity to flickers and motion)

Add those all up and you get a bunch of specific but contingent properties of visual experience. Some people of a certain philosophical frame of mind like to imagine that we inhabit a kind of pure mental experience detached from the physical world, but even if you think you're making no assumptions about the empirical world, all of these contingent facts show up, which make a lot more sense as being the products of biological structure.


Because lots of people have inadequate parenting skills (last time I checked you didn't need a license for parenting) and tech companies are actively exploiting that.

So introduce that license.

Internet usage must not ever be restricted, but restrictions on parenting are fine?

If the quality of parenting is so bad that it harms societal well-being as is being argued here, yes. It ought to be a license that one can reasonably obtain, though.

One can link government benefits to it, like Austria does with the Mother-Child-Pass. You need to have it filled out by the doctors and hospitals to prove you took reasonable precautions to ensure the child's safety, only then are you eligible for government benefits.


So stop those tech companies from exploiting people

We're about to own goal because... what... because suddenly everyone ran out of ideas? Because suddenly it's too much work?

But it wasn't too much work to build the torment nexus?


Tech work underinvests in customer support and safety.

If they spent what they had to, they would crater their revenues, because support does not scale like code does.


The world is much more globalized now. Countries are watching each other, political movements can be global. That wasn't the case when drinking laws were enacted.

Also, the object - social networks - is global. Yes, all kinds of societies have had alcohol, but alcoholic beverages don't suddenly become 20% more potent or harmful everywhere at once. With centralized platforms, that can happen.


Totally. Today’s social media is not the same as last years etc. Read Meta’s quarterly reports and they brag about Reels increasing time spent on site by 30% in a year. That’s not even considering the other ill effects like giving kids a firehose of all the worlds problems when they’re not yet equipped to handle that information, which causes them to internalize those things, making them feel like things are fucked, that they’re responsible, etc. It’s psychologically devastating. And so many other things! Let kids be kids.

It is clearly a campaign by the surveillance state profiteers.

Palantir and similar corporations are on tour and hand in hand with our bought off representatives are they killing the open internet.

Don’t get me wrong, I dislike Facebook and such as much as the rest of the HN crowd, but this not the answer.


Yes I think this is it. News headlines and Tweets and other social media posts mean that trends are much more global than they used to be. "Controlling kids' access to social media" is just trending right now, and that means it's getting attention all over the globe at the same time.

are you for real suggesting that this is just countries that just so happen to look at eachother than then all go "wow, gotta get that age verification going" ?

its blindly obvious that this is an agenda that SOMEONE is pushing EVERYWHERE, one can then speculate who that might be, or for what purpose


It's pushed by child safety charities. It might be hard to imagine due to the echo chamber, but some people do actually support this.

i am sure many people support it, but then they suddenly had a breakthrough all over the world at the same time?

I am tech policy adjacent, and HN is WILDLY off base when it comes to how the average voter is thinking about tech currently.

Yes, all major nations have been looking at this since Australia started with it.

There’s been a build up of forces and issues for decades.


other countries are also looking at many other things other countries are doing, and somehow doesnt arrive at some kind of semi-census in a very short time of eachother.

I’ve read court opinions from the Indian Supreme Court that reference decisions in other nations.

The OSA and DSA came out relatively close to each other.

The rollout and follow up has been organic, with many nations are still at the wait and see stage.

This consensus has been solidifying for years. Your being unaware of it is perhaps because the topic was uninteresting to you?


>political movements can be global.

You are saying exactly what OP is saying but just rephrasing it another way.

The more a movement crosses borders, the less likely it is to be based on the needs of any particular country and the more likely it is to be based on the needs of the transnational billionaire class.

Drinking age is not the only example, driving age is another good example and also the old TV rating system. What was considered taboo in America was often at the same time considered to be fine in places like Europe, or vice versa. But we never had a coordinated international push for censorship when it came to TV/movies like we are seeing with social media.

I can remember how much people used to deride mass surveillance and censorship in places like Russia and China and now here we are very quickly catching up to them in every way.


>the less likely it is to be based on the needs of any particular country

there has been no such thing in decades. The idea that there are 'organic needs of countries' compared to 'artificial needs of global consumers' in the internet age where digital infrastructure is long post-national is conspiratorial.

We're here on HN right now. I'm German, you might statistically I guess be American, but maybe Indian, maybe Chinese, we likely both consume media made in South Korea or Japan so the fact that legislation emerges kind of in tandem isn't "coordinated censorship", it's reflecting a reality of how information flows. Politics, economics, and media consumption is now horizontally intertwined, we don't live in vertical silo countries any more.

If you made a digital worldmap and connected each person you'd get something that doesn't look at all like the one on your physical globe and if you don't realize that the distances there are a bit different you're going to think spooky coincidences are happening.


Are there organic movements in Germany, UK, USA, Norway etc of common citizens agitating for social media controls for kids? Are they actually composed of citizens? Are they funded by grassroots organizations? I can tell you that in the USA there are basically no real grassroots efforts to censor social media, at least none with a real footprint that most people have ever heard of. Despite that, there are a lot of politicians making laws to clamp down on social media use.

I think most people can intuitively see that the number of people who talk about this as an issue does not at all match the amount of attention that politicians are giving it. All at the same time, in most western countries simultaneously. It just does not pass the smell test.

>you're going to think spooky coincidences are happening.

Nothing spooky about it, they are not coincidences, we can see that ideas are spreading between powerful politicians and the billionaire oligarchs across borders without any real input of the governed. Laws are being made, we are being given the "think of the children" line, and they are hoping that we will accept it.

Just because we can communicate across borders doesn't mean that countries should stop considering the needs of their citizens as their primary objective. The more we allow these efforts to cross borders without any objection or examination, the weaker the power of citizens becomes and the less effective democracy becomes.


> Are there organic movements in Germany, UK, USA, Norway etc of common citizens agitating for social media controls for kids? Are they actually composed of citizens? Are they funded by grassroots organizations?

Yes?

Dear God, people have been begging for help for decades on these issues.


Right? What scientific study is showing awesome outcomes for screen addled kids, not to mention the behaviours it can encourage.

No teachers or doctors have been saying this is good, they’ve been warning it’s worse than we think consistently.

That does not have to mean draconian device validation per se.

My personal take is that we should have more than one ‘internet’ and keep the one full of porn and Chinese psyops up on the shelf with the titty mags and dick pills. Nintendo-ish style friend-code based messaging and online textbooks, until you’re old enough to buy an 18+ SIM card or internet connection. Same as how we handle booze, cigs, and porn: at point of sale with extra punishments for adults who provide. Not perfect, but doable.


It feels like we got hosed once we got social media + ad tech.

> No teachers or doctors have been saying this is good, they’ve been warning it’s worse than we think consistently.

Thank you! I feel like I must be yelling into a void with how many commenters on HN seem to be unaware of this.


>Are there organic movements in Germany, UK, USA, Norway etc of common citizens agitating for social media controls for kids? Are they actually composed of citizens? Are they funded by grassroots organizations?

Yes, tons of them honestly, in particular in the English speaking world. NSPCC or the Molly Rose foundation in Britain, Collective Shout in Australia who recently made the news after approaching I think payment providers who processed sexually charged games on Steam, etc.

Child safety online is if anything the most heavily activist driven topic there is. The tech companies and the shadowy people visiting Epstein's island are not known for their efforts to reduce children's access to the internet, Mark Zuckerberg is not in favor of gettting viewer people on his platforms.

This is reflected in polls too. The Child Safety act in Britain had vast support from the population, seven in ten people I believe, about 80% among women. Insofar as pressure is put on regulators to not adopt legislation of that sort it's coming from the people who you seem to think are responsible for it. It's largely elites who are funding organizations to scrap internet regulation, which is understandable given that it makes financial sense for them.


> The world is much more globalized now. Countries are watching each other, political movements can be global.

This is simply not true. The US puts pressure on countries to harmonize their regulations and laws to ours, unless it is to the US's advantage that other countries have different laws than ours. The world didn't suddenly get draconian drug laws through "political movements," it got them through diplomatic and funding pressures. The US often used those laws as excuses for military and intelligence interventions, or to build political organizations in those countries in the guise of antidrug organizations.

All countries do things like this, but the US is rich and dangerous enough to do it hardest. The US has decided that it wants everybody tracked at all times, especially online, and when it explains the advantages of this to the elites of other countries, they also like the idea.

Smaller European countries have also made it a cottage industry to fanatically push US agendas in places like NATO and the EU, because it gives their little homelands outsized influence (and bags of cash) to operate on behalf of the bully. For some reason, everybody in Europe has to care what e.g. Estonia thinks about something, although Estonia is just saying what the US wants Europe to be doing, and the US is financing Estonian candidates for European positions (and maybe even having Trump lobby against them to give them even more credibility.)

This attack on any sort of privacy online is not coming from the churches. There is no lobby group that it pushing it that doesn't get the majority of its funds from any number of governments, which is just government lobbying itself. The way democracy is supposed to work is that the people support something, and they then vote for candidates that will give it to them - but there is no visible constituency lobbying for this other than casual liberal cynics who aren't organized in any way.

As a comparison, in 2015 there was like 65-70% popular support for single-payer health care in the US. There were dozens of organized groups supporting it. It even crossed 50% among Republicans for at least a year. Not a hint of anything happened.

edit: Also Europe, like Japan, is one of those places that had a really emotionally tough time outlawing pedophilia and child pornography. They certainly don't care this much about the sexual aspect of child safety, at least. What Europe has never been behind on is the censorship of political speech. That is what can excite people.


the US has no laws about social media for u16. australia does, and countries are following suit.

the west is led by the people that lead now

countries also have single payer or other socialized healthcare, and have not followed the US into its junky private profits on extraordinary public money setup

this is not at all convincing. america used to have soft power influence, but its being left behind


Drama!

It's an interesting list, and yeah, I'd say most are common sense and well put. But I'm still a bit very of those "negative lists".

(I actually just found a webcomic which tries a similar approach - gives their characters intentionally the worst possible ways of interaction, with the "quest" of the story essentially being if they manage to grow and learn the right ones.)

But in both, its easy to employ "persuasive game" strategies and have the reader "discover truths" that are really colored by the author's perception.

Essentially, I'd like to know the context in which this was developed, so the whole list isn't just an instance of item #7 of it. Basically it reads as if someone could have written it in rage after some particularly bad conversation that didn't go their way.


its very interesting to see the meaning folks have projected onto this haha

i wrote this bulleted list in a couple minutes as a way to rant about the lack of charity i was noticing in 2 places

- my family, where 2 members aren't speaking to each other for petty reasons, looking for the other to capitulate and admit they're the aggressor

- on bluesky, where users are blaming every outage on "vibe coding"


Lol, well at least I was right about it being written in anger then.

But yeah, that makes more sense - and in that context, those are some good observations.


yea, you were! and thanks :)


Children of the Light, though haven't read QC yet. But from what I've heard, it sounded like it could qualify as well, yeah.

Cute! I like this.

For what it's worth, though, the people I know to need emotional literacy the most, would probably find the art style extremely off-putting. I don't agree with them, but it's an interesting correlation to ponder.

Could it be that people who react strongly aversively to such warm fuzziness identify it precisely with the things that have been done to their minds during development so that they would become incapable of certain fundamental cognitions?


Yeah, I don't think the true scale of the "war on general computation" is apparent for many technical people: It's good to think about alternative distribution models for the internet, better use of protocols, etc - but a large and growing number of users literally don't have (administrative) control over their client devices anymore.

The "cognitive control" of tech companies is underpinned by a much more concrete technical control of the devices.


>but a large and growing number of users literally don't have (administrative) control over their client devices anymore.

would those users have had devices over which they had administrative control in the past though? Perhaps for software to eat the world, and for hardware to get distributed far enough that it could, a percentage of the world had to forego administrative rights when getting that hardware.

I suppose those who miss it can still get it, although yes, for how much longer is a question.


I think in several ways the promises of AI to leadership is taking jobs not what AI is actually doing.

Absolutely.

Promises/hopes of what AI can do, and also execs being misinformed about what their own companies are doing/achieving with AI. I know of one very well known large company where the CEO is in the press preaching about the need to restructure/layoff because of AI, yet in the trenches there is close to zero AI adoption - only contractors claiming on their JIRA close-outs to be using GIT copilot because they have been told to say so.


> execs being misinformed about what their own companies are doing/achieving with AI

And a bunch of yes-men down the lower layers of management funneling these ideas.

In a meeting at my last job, one of the execs was bragging about how a chatbot was reading Jira customer service tickets and calling tools/APIs to solve those tickets, and it "only costs 1.5USD per ticket. How much would a human cost, huh?"

Little did the exec know, but my team was already using a ~600 lines python script to solve the problem with a higher rate of precision. The chatbot-automation thing was largely pushed by my manager when I was out on vacation, just so he could earn his good-boy points with higher ups. Worst manager I've had in my 14 years of career btw.


> I wanted to cook venison from scratch, which meant learning to shoot, which meant keeping track of my progress, which meant porting a 2012 OpenCV paper and training a state-of-the-art computer vision model, which meant the dinner took a bit longer than expected.

Procrastination level: Ultimate


Or a Carl Sagan fan:

> If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.

From episode 9 of his Cosmos TV series.

https://kottke.org/23/11/if-you-wish-to-make-an-apple-pie-fr...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmos:_A_Personal_Voyage

There were a number of "history of technology & invention" TV series, all inspired by Connections.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(British_TV_series...


yak shaving

Yup. Or deer shaving, in this case. The punchline is he never actually got round to shooting a deer.

I do think he understated the difficulty of the hunt itself. He's planning to use the "supervision" rule to avoid needing his own firearm license, and male deer are indeed unlicensed for shooting (but not female deer!). Then you have to find one. He's right that they have reached "pest" status, since humans killed off the wolves. Every now and again someone suggests reintroducing the wolves, to cull the deer (and occasional tourists).

The open terrain (because the deer eat saplings) can make it easier. I have a great photo somewhere of a single majestic deer which I just happened to see from the road when I had my telephoto lens with me and mounted on the camera. I've even once seen a deer in Edinburgh itself, along a railway cutting.


Wolves are back to continental Europe. Takes some time to get everyone to accommodate again. Breeders are not amused.

> Would one be uneasy about calling a library to do stuff than manually messing around with pointers and malloc()?

The irony is that the neverending stream of vulnerabilities in 3rd-party dependencies (and lately supply-chain attacks) increasingly show that we should be uneasy.

We could never quite answer the question about who is responsible for 3rd-party code that's deployed inside an application: Not the 3rd-party developer, because they have no access to the application. But not the application developer either, because not having to review the library code is the whole point.


> because not having to review the library code is the whole point.

That’s just not true at bigger companies that actually care about security rather than pretending to care about security. At my current and last employer, someone needs to review the code before using third-party code. The review is probably not enough to catch subtle bugs like those in the Underhanded C Contest, but at least a general architecture of the library is understood. Oh, and it helps that the two companies were both founded in the twentieth century. Modern startups aren’t the same.


I feel like big / old companies thrive on process and are bogged down in bureaucracy.

Sure there is a process to get a library approved, and that abstraction makes you feel better but for the guy who's job it is to approve they are not going to spend an entire day reviewing a lib. The abstraction hides what is essentially a "LGTM" its just that takes a week for someone to check it off their outlook todos.

Maybe your experience is different.


Consider applying for YC's Summer 2026 batch! Applications are open till May 4

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: