What is a HN unpopular opinion that you hold?

Cars aren't the terrible thing that many pro urban folk here seem to make them out to be, and I suspect most people prefer driving them to cycling or using public transport.

Similarly, the whole idea of automated driving becoming the default and humans not being able to drive is something I'm 100% against, since it'd be both a privacy nightmare and take away a lot of people's freedom.

The problem is really more that some places are designed to only be usable in a car, and that's what's poorly designed.

Speaking of which, also that suburbs aren't a bad thing. Again, it feels like people take the car focused design common in the US, and assume that's how these have to be. Thousands of identical houses in the middle of nowhere with everything interesting a 30 minute drive away.

But that's not necessarily true, and (as seen in most of the world), suburbs can be quite nice places to live in. A walkable one (like many in Europe) can be just as valid a place to live as a dense city neighborhood or rural area.

The biggie, of course, is that US exceptionalism is pushing the US down the wrong track. That will be the economic and probably military downfall of the US and will likely occur within the next 5-10 years.

(You may call me 'Cassandra'.)

Upvote-based, threaded discussions are not conversations and are severely lacking in nutritional value. They’re popular because they require little commitment and give you a quick dopamine hit. Real conversations happen on forums with linear discussions and are much better suited for community building and the exchange of ideas. Alas, they require a lot more work and we’ve gotten lazy.

We all think we’re talking to each other constantly online, but what we’re doing should barely register as communication. And I very much include HN in this.

I believe in Embedded Growth Obligations[1], which we need to come to terms with.

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I believe that computer security is a solved problem, but very few people understand the solution, capability based security.[2]

I further believe that because of this insecurity of our computers, people avoid straying from "strange websites" and thus aggregate in the walled gardens.

I further believe that this insecurity will be the cause of losing the war for general purpose computation, and thus losing democracy, what little we have left of it.

It's quite possible this is all part of a plan. Multics was left to die on the vine, and isn't mentioned much any more, because secure computing would make the NSA's job harder.

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I believe that Von Neuman computing is not the path to cheap Petaflops, but BitGrid[3] is. (It's my personal hobby horse, I may be biased)

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I believe that AGI has likely already occurred, and we just don't know it yet. Either through MemGPT, or some variant thereof. [4]

It's my belief that during training, an LLM learns superhuman cognitive skills, but they aren't impedance matched to deal with the bag of words output model. Furthermore, it's handy capped by the small context window it has to work with after it's trained.

This is why we keep discovering new things they can do, after the fact.

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[1] https://theportal.wiki/wiki/Embedded_Growth_Obligations

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capability-based_security

[3] https://github.com/mikewarot/Bitgrid

[4] https://memgpt.ai/

Remote is not inherently better than in-office work. They’re different things that appeal to different people.

A person who prefers to work in-office with other people who work in-office (no remote team) is not a terrible person who has no social life outside of work. They simply have a preference.

A company deciding to require in-office work is not evil. They’re making a decision that they think will pay off for them. The same as a company deciding to be remote and give up their office. One isn’t good and one isn’t bad.

Life on earth was healthier before we enslaved other animals (not the symbiotic relationships with early canids, but when we started hanging and penning) and generally started using extra-human energy sources to do things for us.

I've been watching recent Nature episodes on PBS with my family (as I did in childhood, too), and the other primates, let's just say the lowland gorillas, lead enviable lives without deforesting or otherwise spoiling their home (we're doing that, sadly). We could lead meaningful, engaging lives following the old ways again, and everything we used and made would either decompose safely back into the environment or stay awhile longer as landmarks (earthworks and shaped stones, for example). I don't know how most of the HN participants think about this, but judging by the new and popular topics we as a subgroup aren't putting much effort into activism towards a seasonally-nomadic hunter-gatherer culture.

I like bitcoin and don't care for the game of life

HN is absolutely rife with shills -- by design to some degree, it's a startup-focused site, and that means talking about and pushing your org.

but now it's owned hard by other bots, and for a site that discussed GPT before it was cool it has little protection from the bots.

and, in general, agit-prop bot, esp. here, reddit, slashdot, etc. is through the roof

Everyone really should be using Linux. It's not that hard.

AI will largely replace software developers very soon, along with most professions.

C is better than Rust

See username. It’s old and references decentralization. Basically the opinion, backed by real world data, that decentralized technologies are a net benefit for society.

Advertising is a significant participant in modern Western culture, it (mostly) works, and the majority of people are susceptible to it with both good and bad outcomes. (I don't think this is a controversial statement, but I frequently see HNers making "well, I never look at ads" arguments to universally invalidate the effectiveness of advertising).

I think that the Javascript ecosystem holds up pretty well. Especially considering the constraints in that area (e.g. that developers don't get to choose which runtime their frontend code run on).

I also think that having a lot of libraries and frameworks to choose from is a good thing, not a bad thing. This is perhaps influenced by working in languages that have much smaller ecosystems.

It's not my idea, but I strongly agree with the need for missile striking AI data centers to slow the creation of advanced AI. That said, it is the position I hold most strongly with the most uncertainty, and it's probably the only position that were I dictator I'd be very concerned I'm making a bad call.

PDFs good; {news,social media,video} bad

Rowhammer isn't a vulnerability in the OS, or the motherboard... it's bad DRAM design, and we should collectively force the replacement of any DRAM that fails under such an attack.

100 years-ish, due to extreme climate changes, we will be destined to live underground, full time surface dwelling will be unsustainable.

POSIX shell on *nix is a great language for doing lots of things that people usually do in much lower level languages.

It's very obvious that the reason for the rise in anti-Asian hate crimes in the US is because the US government constantly demonizes China and promotes anti-Chinese rhetoric and tacitly endorses anti-Chinese racism. There's also not much proof that China is committing genocide in Xinjiang.

Rust has extremely repulsive syntax, like C++ and Java had a baby.

General-purpose AI is unnecessary, but possibly cheaper than making many special-purpose AIs. Nobody will ever need AGI, and it's also not desirable.

Technology will be our downfall.

- Kubernetes is great

- LLMs are incredibly useful

- Lisps and functional programming aren't profound at all

The world doesn’t need another programming language.

UML is good.

My comments are worth reading.

Its sort of vain to think about stupid internet points, but this is an exercise in downvote harvesting.

All of its? Read my comments, because I practice what I preach ;)