Hacker News: __jambo

Ask HN: Can you be a naive scientist AND a ruthless businessman?

__jambo — Thu, 25 Apr 2024 14:59:35 +0000

History is full of examples of quiet, brilliant people who contribute amazing works to society, but never see any money and ultimately fail to influence decisions when they are important.

For example Alexander Grothendieck, Einstien, Van Gogh, to some extent Tesla.

Norbert Wiener suggests that from a game theoretic standpoint - uncovering the secrets of the universe is a long game with an honorable opponent - the laws of physics don't actively try to deceive us. However the political games of business and policy are full of fast-thinking schemers that do.

Perhaps there is a cognitive limit to how well you can do either.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40158387

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by __jambo in "I love programming but I hate the programming industry"

__jambo — Sun, 21 Apr 2024 13:02:40 +0000

in 1950 in the book "the human use of human beings", the famous mathematician Norbert Weiner pointed out your exact sentiment. Complaining that instead of solving problems, or doing anything new or interesting, people were using these "computing machines" to increase the efficiency of the parts of the capitalist machine that caused the problems in the first place.

Nobody listened, and nothing has changed.

New comment by __jambo in "Ask HN: Could we just re-invent original Google?"

__jambo — Thu, 01 Feb 2024 23:48:14 +0000

I think this calls for a government funded national un-enshittification Laboratory to study the social dynamics of enshittification and develop hygiene practices. Work must be done quickly before enshittification research becomes enshittified!

New comment by __jambo in "Ask HN: Could we just re-invent original Google?"

__jambo — Thu, 01 Feb 2024 23:41:59 +0000

Nah this tech will poison the web. People don't know what it is and take it too seriously.

New comment by __jambo in "Ask HN: Could we just re-invent original Google?"

__jambo — Thu, 01 Feb 2024 23:39:09 +0000

I think the problem is then you eventually get SEOification. I suppose you can just reset every now and again. Maybe like give a training program to get SEO people real jobs.

Ask HN: Could we just re-invent original Google?

__jambo — Thu, 01 Feb 2024 10:43:24 +0000

I feel like google enshittified itself with SEO and bloat. Maybe if we just re-made the original and changed the business model it would be good again.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39214578

Points: 24

# Comments: 37

New comment by __jambo in "Growing number of apps help automate pro-Israel activism online"

__jambo — Sun, 28 Jan 2024 12:59:08 +0000

> Hollywood has.. hard power

Um, what??

New comment by __jambo in "Lessons from a never-ending personal project"

__jambo — Tue, 19 Dec 2023 12:15:06 +0000

This is a clearly false collection of arbitrary useless and arrogant opinions. See any famous reclusive intellectual or writer for counterexamples.

New comment by __jambo in "AI and Mass Spying"

__jambo — Tue, 05 Dec 2023 19:23:14 +0000

Because this is so depressing I am going to try think of positive aspects:

The flip side to this is the government had power because these activities required enormous resources. Perhaps it will go the other direction, if there is less of a moat other players can enter. Eg all it takes to make a state is a bunch of cheap drones and the latest government bot according to your philosophy.

Maybe it means government will massively shrink in personelle? Maybe we can have a completely open source ai government/legal system. Lawyers kind of suck ethically anyway, so maybe it would be better? With low barrier to entry, we can rapidly prototype such governments and trial them on smaller populations like iceland. Such utopias will be so good everyone will move there.

They still have to have physical prisons, if everyone is in prison this will be silly, but I suppose they can fine everyone, not so different from lowering wages which they already do.

New comment by __jambo in "AI and Mass Spying"

__jambo — Tue, 05 Dec 2023 19:11:27 +0000

Great idea.

Ask HN: Why was Elon Musk forced to buy Twitter?

__jambo — Sat, 02 Dec 2023 16:49:40 +0000

It feels like they forced him to buy it, and now they are tarring and feathering him.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38499891

Points: 12

# Comments: 20

Ask HN: How many are using LLMs for messaging friends?

__jambo — Tue, 28 Nov 2023 14:29:01 +0000

I noticed a few responses that looked pretty suspicious. It would be shockingly nasty in my opinion to ever do this, but given how shallow and fake society is, maybe it's becoming commonplace, I noticed at least one app on poe for texting.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38446063

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

New comment by __jambo in "OpenAI's board has fired Sam Altman"

__jambo — Sat, 18 Nov 2023 12:16:08 +0000

Sam's sad face in the NYT article is pretty priceless.

New comment by __jambo in "Privacy washing: Google claims to support privacy while lobbying against it"

__jambo — Fri, 29 Sep 2023 17:20:02 +0000

"...Google and tech industry allies responded with a massive lobbying campaign... convince lawmakers banning targeted ads would hurt the global economy. The gambit worked, and the draft law no longer threatens Google’s advertising."

Lol, sounds like Google and the tech industry used targeted advertising to prevent a ban on targeted advertising.

New comment by __jambo in "When no one can afford to live in America anymore"

__jambo — Thu, 17 Aug 2023 15:32:42 +0000

agreed lol

Ask HN: Looking for tech founder thoughts on the “startup coaching” industry

__jambo — Thu, 10 Aug 2023 10:16:29 +0000

Just noticed a lot of ex-humanities people becoming like "grifters" sort of. Like the recruiting industry.

They seem to position themselves as some kind of "coach", "career coach", source of advice, and use psychobabble and BS to prey on your insecurity and get money out of the "startup" world.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37074154

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by __jambo in "Timo Noko – The Professional Hobo (2016)"

__jambo — Mon, 07 Aug 2023 10:44:22 +0000

But few to none can survive across the breadth of environments humans can with the aid of sometimes highly advanced clothing.

New comment by __jambo in "Ask HN: Any freelancers here? I need burnout advice"

__jambo — Thu, 03 Aug 2023 19:27:22 +0000

super cool idea! thankyou

New comment by __jambo in "Ask HN: Any freelancers here? I need burnout advice"

__jambo — Thu, 03 Aug 2023 19:20:53 +0000

>Well run software companies with tidy, well architected software need far fewer devs than the ones with nasty bloat and a lot of legacy problems

this is a good point I can relate with!

New comment by __jambo in "Ask HN: Any freelancers here? I need burnout advice"

__jambo — Thu, 03 Aug 2023 19:16:18 +0000

> you can work that manual labor job and still have mental energy afterwards to work on your SaaS. It's much harder doing mental tech work after already doing mentally taxing work at your job.

this is exactly what I was thinking. Thank for the validation, I'm glad someone else has this experience. Also I do a lot of debugging subconsciously, so taking other tech work is just a lot.