There aren't clean answers to these questions, of course. We've essentially just described the same process of wolf-to-dog evolution from the two ends of the spectrum, and neither perspective is entirely wrong or right. I would like to point out a couple things, though:

> Over evolutionary time, wolves adapted to better fit the niche. Not because humans wanted that, but because it was evolutionarily advantageous for a companion species to be more compatible with its host.

Take a step back and consider that statement. What made it evolutionarily advantageous is that humans wanted it. If humans didn't want a more compatible companion species, it wouldn't be evolutionarily advantageous. You can't separate the advantage from human desires.

Selective breeding doesn't have to be entirely intentional. Early humans weren't practicing pedigree breeding on wild wolves, of course, but nonetheless it was artificial selection that drove evolutionary change. And for the past few thousand years, we very much have been actively and intentionally breeding them. Also -- this is beside the point, really, and total speculation, but -- given how early humans understood selective breeding in plants, it seems likely that they had some awareness of the knock-on effects of favoring friendlier wolves.

Regardless, the moral unease I feel is primarily about the current state of having another species tailored to serve our emotional needs, not how we got here. Even looking at dog to wolf evolution as an entirely natural process, does that justify everything we've done and are still doing to modify them to suit our desires? Dogs as a species may benefit from our ownership, but does that make all the individual suffering we cause okay? We think of dogs living a life of privilege and comfort, and many do, but just as many have abusive owners or are living on the streets, often with worse quality of life than wild wolves today.

Imagine if we found out some alien species has their own 'breed' of human they've been genetically engineering for millennia; one that wants nothing more than the company of their alien owners and hates when they leave, that has been bred to be perpetually child-like and devoid of critical thinking in order to better please them, is sometimes pampered and sometimes abused but absolutely subject to the alien species' will. They keep us locked in a house or yard most of the day because their world is dangerous for us, and see all of this as totally justified because they're our intellectual superiors. They make posts on AlienNews about how beautiful the alien-human relationship is because they bred us to be the perfect companion; only magnifying the social compulsions that already existed in humans, to be fair, but still fundamentally changing us.

For the record I do understand that selectively bred humans != dogs, but it still just makes me kinda uncomfortable when I think about it all too much.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48401389

Points: 6

# Comments: 0

Also -- unrelated, but a nitpick of the article -- Kevin was using the laser to come and go from the grid for a while before he got stuck there. The laser would have been pretty well-tested by the time he made/edited the last will and testament, so the article's explanation that it was his first use of the tech doesn't make sense. (He could have just spontaneously decided to update it though, which isn't too far fetched)

Anecdotally, out of the ~50 or so I have installed right now on my laptop, which covers the basic calculator/calendar/contacts/etc., and also things like file compression, torrenting, a Mastodon client, RSS reader, and so on, all of them are ready to use on a phone.

Alas, if only there was a (reasonably priced + fully functional) phone that could use them.

As I see it, the quote neither advocates nor critiques unreasonableness, but rather observes that unreasonable people are most often the ones responsible for change. Whether you take that as a lesson on the merits of unreasonableness, the dangers of it, or something in between, is up to interpretation, and depends on how much one values reasonableness vs progress (for the record, I've heard the quote more often in a negative sense by people who put reasonableness above "progress"). It also depends on one's definition of "reasonableness" of course, and whether something can be unreasonable yet still a positive.

So I guess my point is that the quote can mean just about whatever you want it to mean. It's an interesting litmus test. I do agree that people using it as carte blanche for unreasonableness in the name of some sort of nebulous "progress" is, well, unreasonable, though with context I'm certain GP was using it as more of a critique.

You say that like it's a counterexample, but is that not literally what the quote is saying? I mean what's the difference between that and:

> the unreasonable [man] persists in trying to adapt the world to himself.

Web version here, if you want to see what it's like https://psytests.org/arc/ssten.html

Incredible article, a lot to unpack here, but I found this particular offhand tidbit interesting. It does seem like any attempt at tech industry regulation over the past decade or two (that isn't somewhat in the interests of big tech anyway, i.e. age verification and so on) has been either overly vague, or overly specific, leading to easy workarounds.

It seems like a microcosm of a wider trend in regulation; the disconnect between intentions and results. On the rare occasions that consumer-friendly legislation does go through, there is no working mechanism for evaluating its effectiveness and refining the rules as quickly as big corporations can adapt to them. I like how the article frames this, of how the regulations are targeting the wrong thing, how they're defined by the problem rather than the desired end state.

For more thoughts along these lines I'd highly recommend checking out Jennifer Pahlka's blog Eating Policy: https://www.eatingpolicy.com/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48089069

Points: 5

# Comments: 1

The Steam Deck doesn't cut into Nintendo's core audience, but it does draw away people who would have bought the Switch 1/2 for those reasons -- the audience that made the Switch 1 such an overwhelming success. Anecdotally, I've had multiple non-techies bring up the Steam Deck unprompted, usually with an impression of 'the Switch but better' and/or 'more adult-oriented'.

Historically, when the market they created starts to become saturated, Nintendo starts looking to pivot. So the Steam Deck might not kill the Switch 2, but I'd be very surprised if it doesn't kill the Switch 3.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48011077

Points: 149

# Comments: 37

You can host your git repo on their servers, or your own. You can host issues/pull requests/runners/etc on their servers, or your own. Regardless of where a repo is hosted, you can interact with it from a single account, and with that same account interact with others' repos connected to tangled. Plus it has native jujutsu support, though you can use plain ol' git if you want to, too.

Do I think a forge with those features necessarily needs to use atproto to exist, or that atproto is the ideal version of itself? No, not really. But the site is there, and it has some pretty neat features I want; I don't need to love the stack to use it, any more than I do Github's.

[0] http://mentallandscape.com/C_Venera13_Overview.jpg

1. those photos are from Venera 13 and 14, which were taken in color

2. the photos were taken in 1982 (though the probes launched in 1981)

and 3. those aren't the original photos, they're 'enhanced' ones that have been upscaled and extended to show more of the horizon and sky than the originals. The bottom 1/4 or so is the actual original, give or take a few details that have been changed/added in the upscale process, but the rest is artistic interpretation

You can look at the actual photos here: https://www.planetary.org/articles/every-picture-from-venus-...

DeepSeek also tends to follow prompts more closely IME, plus the thinking is shown, so I think it's able to register as a 'tool' more easily for the non-tech-inclined for whom that appeals.