https://despair.com/products/mistakes

And if that doesn’t resonate with you then you probably missed the era when these things were ubiquitous in corporate decor:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Successories

https://www.successories.com/motivational-posters/1

In true pedantic HN fashion I am currently vacationing on the west coast of Mexico and learned this fact yesterday.

The premise of the article is that they are, as determined by an actual judge, as well as a jury after a full trial where evidence was presented.

Replying “no they aren’t” is utterly free of substance.

I always thought “third world” countries were trying really hard to improve their economies but just failing for various reasons.

Turns out living in those places can be more than great if you’re rich and there’s actually lots of people in power who are actively trying to increase inequality and maintain a permanent underclass.

Of course what clued me in was the increasing success of that project by the equivalent group of people here in the US.

I love when people use this as an argument. As far as I can tell “the Europe situation” is the most successful model for social and economic governance the world has produced so far.

I call these things "sprinkles" Because I feel like AI can't stop sprinkling dumb shit all over its designs. Small text that annotates things, little callouts are examples but to me, the canonical thing that AI does when you ask it to build a UI that makes no sense is to create a bunch of stuff on the page that couldn't possibly come from any kind of deterministic database.

For example, if you ask it to sort and filter a library UI for a book finder, it'll add some element on a SERP page that's like "22 first time novelists" Even though that piece of information doesn't exist anywhere and couldn't possibly wire into a dynamic website.

Drives me crazy. Thought I'd share.

It's fucking ridiculous and obviously so. The problem does involve methodology and so on but mostly it's just that "the map is not the territory" to be honest. The CPI is a synthetic measurement.

There are other examples too. It's not just health insurance. For example, interest rates are generally excluded from the CPI. So they don't affect the tracked price of owning a car even if they cause car payments to go up by double-digit percentages. Which has actually happened.

If you want a link though: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/cpi.htm

Scroll to health insurance and note that it's showing over a 7% decrease year over year.

When reality seems to be in conflict with logic, the next step is to question assumptions.

Americans used to do that too, spectacularly.

Just consider the two alternatives: one is your industrial sector with this incredible new automation and analysis tool available for free. The other is one where it has to pay huge chunks of its resources to overseas companies.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48967916

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

I think billboards should be completely banned, or at most relegated to designated districts of dense urban areas. I'm in favor of banning products that are addictive or harmful to people, like gambling, tobacco, and the like. I think that conflicts of interest should be disclosed, and false claims should have consequences.

But I think it's helpful to start the discussion by recognizing that the state that we're in now is the natural state of affairs. It's not evil, and we all engage in elements of it most of our waking lives. But unchecked marketing and persuasion will flood every crack of everything if you let it. Which is why you have to decide what you are willing to permit as a society.

It has to be done coercively, though. The incentives are so unbelievably strong to cheat that shame or persuasion isn't a useful counterweight.

But that's not really what the problem is, since marketing would still be annoying even with that solved. The problem is much more akin to a tragedy of the commons type of thing, where, when everyone is shouting, you can't hear what you want to hear. Usually, that's the thing that bothers people. Billboards, unsolicted emails, etc.

I think for people who really get annoyed at marketing it helps to take a couple of steps back and look at how we fit into the natural world, everything that frustrates you about human society is something you'll find an analog for.

Things like brightly colored frogs that are poisonous, fur spots that look like eyeballs looking backwards, peacocks, bugs that looks like sticks, etc.

All of these are what's called emergent behavior, and they're intrinsic to all complex adaptive systems, like natural ecosystems, and human society itself.

You have, in fact, just engaged in it in your comment by offering an opinion in hopes that others will read and adopt that opinion. In fact, you posted your comment on the marketing website of a well known private equity firm.

There have always been layers of abstraction. I've been around for a while, and when I was a kid, the two choices I remember seeing were assembly code and simple semantic languages like BASIC.

Assembly seemed like too cryptic for me to really even follow and I never really did learn it, but at the time I remember people would say that assembly was easy and basically plain English compared to machine code.

As recently as fifteen or twenty years ago, I would occasionally check in and think of how unbelievably far away we had gotten from how the computer actually works. Like, you can just write "open window" and a window opens. Amazing.

Of course, those people writing machine code didn't need to really understand what P and N were in a transistor, let alone how an integrated circuit pulls it all together. And I'm not sure how much those guys knew about silicon dioxide.

The more complex things get and the more layers of abstraction there are, the more impossible it gets to really master things all the way down to first principles.

So what? People can carve out whatever chunk of the stack they want to really understand if they want to focus their lives on it. And for everyone else who's just trying to accomplish some other goal with computers as the tool, they will naturally use the highest level of abstraction and the simplest one for them to use, which is exactly what they should do.

What it looks like is someone with significant biochemical experience and a Harvard PhD has created some kind of drug or chemical that he thinks will be effective for treating Alzheimer's, and that he mentions using Claude Code to help him program some of the complex chemical engineering machines that he used along the way.