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

This needs a full-length parody of “I once knew a lady who swallowed a fly…”.

> if you happen to lose your domain, it will in most cases be easier to recover than a restricted account.

I used to think this, until I inadvertently let a registration fail to renew because I didn't update my expired credit-card's billing details with NameCheap - they did send me automated emails about it but I missed them, unfortunately. Their grace-period is only 30 days and I didn't notice the problem until 45 days had passed when my domain-name was bought-up by a spam-site-scammer and redirected the site to a porn/virus-downloader site (yes, those still exist).

I paid $1500 (uugghhh) for the UDRP process to get the domain-name back ($1000 UDRP fee, $500 for the lawyer to do the paperwork), and the UDRP panel ruled against me: their response reasoning made it clear that they never actually looked at my submitted evidence - and unfortunately that $1000 is nonrefundable, gaaaaah. I still haven't gotten that domain-name back. (I will say that my previous other UDRP cases all ruled in my favour; I don't know why/how I somehow drew a crappy arbiter in this case, I'm just vexed that they can rule against me without any right to appeal; I expected better).


The ratio between people who lost their "free big provider" account do to arbitrary algo decisions and people who lost their domain because they ignored provider's invoice for over a month must be 1.000.000 to 1. :-)

I use a prepaid provider. If at the day of the renewal there is no money "in the bank" they immediately release the domain. So yeah, I treat their reminders with priority. I really should change providers...


It's ignoring the reminder for however long name cheap sends them (*) PLUS ignoring that the domain is down for over a month. At that point I can only assume that the person must not have cared about that domain very much.

* Providers I have used send them multiple months ahead of expiry but I also don't use automated renewal and buy as far ahead as I can and still extend that yearly.


I’ve been living in a bubble with my .NET day-job, where debugging/tracing/postmortems are a breeze. Compare with, say, a CORBA or DCOM system, deployed to prod with uber-optimized binaries without any debugging-symbols.

So it’s not that I haven’t worked on large-scale, complex legacy systems - but that I haven’t worked on any large-scale, complex legacy systems written in languages bereft of runtime reflection and verbose error reporting.

—————

It’s also possible that the bug was never found because its impact was so minimal: e.g. 1 crash per year, each causing 3 minutes’ downtime in a noncritical system: that’s something that will never get investigated fully.


I have no exposure to connectomes - or really anything quite like this (as opposed to good ol’ fashioned perceptrons) - so forgive my following uninformed question:

Can someone explain if this software is ethical?


If your circle of empathy includes fruit flies, fuck no, we murdered so many of those guys to figure out how their tiny brains work.

If you do not think of fruit flies as moral patients, sure, yeah, who cares, they're like just fruit flies you know?


If your circle of empathy doesn’t include fruit flies, endeavor to expand your circular of empathy until it does.

Goto 0.


If your circle of empathy includes fruit flies, shrink and prune until it no longer does.


How small should my circle of empathy be? Obviously humans are included, or ...?


Best practice is to include at least some humans in it!


Only shareholder bank accounts and your own.


You’re clearly not a top-level CEO; keep pruning.


With this code, the only things we can eat would be fruits where we diligently plant its seeds (plants are also living things and fruits are the offerings in return we should sow its seeds) :-)


Ever met a Jain?


AFAIK, Jains consume diary products.


You tell me where the consumption of dairy products must result in harm to the cow. I grew up around small-scale, subsistence-level dairy farming, it doesn’t inherently require any more suffering than either egg-harvesting or apple-growing inherently do.

A Jain doesn’t have to purchase milk from a factory farmer.

And AFAIK even the most stringent vegans don’t brush insects from their path with every step, or avoid onions and carrots because it causes death.


1. Artificial insemination without consent 2. Birth and all of its pain and potential complications 3. Removal of offspring as early as possible to repeat steps 1 and 2 and so prolong lactation 4. Mastitis

All of these result in suffering much worse than egg harvesting imo. Reluctant dairy eater btw


1 is unnecessary and wasn’t present for most of history, 2 is a natural consequence of cattle being cattle, even without humans, but today we have both painkillers and bovine veterinarians, 3 is, again, not strictly necessary unless you’ve made the mistake of falling for the profit motive, and 4 is much more of a problem from a calves mouth parts than from a suitably gloved and balmed human hand.

Human beings can engage in subsistence-level dairy consumption without causing suffering beyond that already present in the reproduction cycle of cattle. They choose not to. I never said dairy farmers were or would choose to be moral, just that they aren’t required to be immoral by dairy production itself.


If we are really into an ethics discussion, enslaving a species to drink milk meant for their newborns would be an issue.


A well-nourished, well-protected, comfortable cow will produce much more milk than is required by its normal complement of newborns, and it will (and loudly) want rid of it. In my experience not milking a dairy cow of the excess would be considerably more cruel than milking it, even if you kept the milk exclusively for the newborns, and I’m pretty sure the cows I’ve seen milked in rural Nepal would agree.


> I’m pretty sure the cows I’ve seen milked in rural Nepal would agree.

I am not sure any species are going to appreciate being enslaved. And since we can't actually ask the cows, we can only assume based on how we feel about it.

In any case we are talking about ethics here, and cows definitely cannot consent being born and bred in captivity. So even if we are doing this out of kindness (which is of course not), it is still non-consensual.

> In my experience not milking a dairy cow of the excess would be considerably more cruel than milking it, even if you kept the milk exclusively for the newborns

Why don't we then help other mammals? Why do we help out only cows? It is obvious that we like the milk and we are trying to justify enslaving a whole species for it.

I see this kind of argument in many discussions. It basically boils down to what is your comfort zone of empathy. Jains have drawn it at killing and suffering but not enslavement. Vegans have included enslavement in their ethical framework but not plants and so on.


Food chains exist. Animals cannot give or deny consent. Certain approaches can be cruel, but not all.

It’s a settled discussion, any further arguments border on the nonsensical.


We don’t help only cows, we milk a whole lot of mammals. Admittedly many mammals aren’t all that into being milked, and many (if not most) of the carnivorous animals won’t let you hang around long enough to see if they do, or do not, consent, but it’s not solely because we like milk, nor is it solely parasitic (and certainly not solely slavery). Humans have milked orangutans to feed baby orangutans, milked giraffes to feed other giraffes, and milked elephants because, rather like cows, they can get right cranky (and downright dangerous) when there’s insufficient young to remove the excess. For that matter we help our own species, at times, express milk that needs to be expressed — admittedly in that case usually (one hopes) with explicit verbal consent. Nature does not make precisely one teat per toddler, nor does nature produce precisely one portion per progeny. I’ll admit we’ve primarily treated cattle like, well, cattle, but you give me a cow and a bull and sufficient forage and, assuming they like each other and I keep the predators at bay, I’ll soon have a herd and more milk than they know what to do with… if she’s had fewer than four calves (likely) and especially if she’s only had one, then on a roughly daily basis she’ll be bursting at the seams and pushing up against all sorts of things for relief.

I get where you’re coming from, but I’ve seen with my own eyes cows essentially orgasm when someone finally helps get the first really cheezy, frothy, kinda curdled bits out of a neglected nipple. Now I for one wouldn’t go saying I like that milk, I wouldn’t even say I’d come close to consider drinking it… but I’ve seen enough looks of ecstatic delight on enough mammals (of a great many species) to know that it can be a relief to express the unexpressed, and the species doing the expression isn’t of that much issue at all times.

Ever seen the eyes of a shark roll back into its head when you find the bit of obviously dead skin it hasn’t been able to rub off and hasn’t been able to get a wrasse hole near and you give it a back scritch where it by evolutionary design can never reach? I have. Am I imagining that ecstasy? I mean probably… but said shark kept coming back to me for like half an hour. Maybe it was brain damaged, but maybe my choice to do what it didn’t verbally consent to was nevertheless what it was hoping something would do, to whatever degree it can hope. Or maybe I did a shark a dirty and I should feel ashamed… or, for that matter, maybe a shark did me a dirty and both of us should feel ashamed… honestly, not sure now, hence I’ll resolve the dissonance by continuing to assume I just helped out a creature that looked like it really regretted not having evolved fingernails and opposable thumbs.

What I sure as hell didn’t do was enslave that dogfish, any more than I’ve personally enslaved any animal.


We have selectively bred cows to produce far more milk than necessary. For example the native breed of Indian cows did not have enough milk and people used to purchase "Jersey" cows for better milk output. I think the excess milk issue is human made problem than one that is naturally occuring at scale enough for human consumption (time to time humans also have excell milk - but not enoughto feed entire family or neighbors).


Mutual evolutionary pressures represent a kind of symbiotic relationship, even when that symbiotism is heavily weighted to one side. In your view has the anemone enslaved the clownfish? Or the decorator shrimp the anemone? In all cases one side has applied selective pressure to the other. Sure, that’s not conscious, thinking, reasoned selective pressure, but then neither was it with us until some emergent moment.

Also quite a few human communities have relied on excess milk supply being used for communal rearing. Most mammals produce more milk than is required when sufficiently fed… yeah we’ve selected for the cows that produce the most from the least, but arguably nature was already doing that, it just hadn’t planned for another parasitic species figuring out pens and tractors.


> Mutual evolutionary pressures represent a kind of symbiotic relationship

Those species do not care about ethics. Our discussion started from ethics, which is uniquely human. We are not discussing if a behavior occurs in nature. We are discussing if that behavior is ethical for humans.

Now, if we can use that natual occurance argument, then we can also present the argument that carnivores have always killed and that justifies our consumption of meat.


> Those species do not care about ethics. Our discussion started from ethics, which is uniquely human. We are not discussing if a behavior occurs in nature. We are discussing if that behavior is ethical for humans.

Those species also don’t care if they’re domesticated or enslaved. The cow doesn’t care if it’s milked, so long as it’s done gently, indeed it seemingly enjoys it and will avidly seek out a milker. The cow doesn’t care if any excess of milk surplus to its calf’s requirements is taken from it, indeed it will loudly call for it to be taken. The cow doesn’t care about consent, or the fact it hasn’t given it (and can’t)… the cow cares only for ample water, some salt, good grass, a warm and dry place to sleep, a minimum number of flies, an occasional burp, someone to remove the pies that keep piling up everywhere, and nothing nearby with claws or teeth. If its “enslaver” provides all of that, the cow wouldn’t (and couldn’t) consider itself “enslaved”.

Is it ethical for a human to consume the meat of a cow? Sure… right up until that human seriously engages with ethics. Is it ethical for them to continue to treat as domesticated a species that has adapted to that domestication? Yes, or that species will suffer an environment it’s no longer adapted for. Is it more ethical to do so without consuming the animal’s meat? Sure, or at least until after that animal’s natural death. Is it more ethical to do so without consuming the animal’s milk? No, not inherently, because the cow does not have to suffer for that milk. If I have a cow and I care for that cow and that cow wants rid of some excess milk and I rid it of that milk in a caring way then there’s no cognizable ethical reason for me to not consume the resulting milk, any more than it would be unethical of me to eat the cast off skin of a snake or unfertilized eggs in an abandoned nest or apples fallen from the tree. Is it more ethical of me to consume only the dairy I know was sourced in an ethical manner? Of course. Should we move towards an entirely symbiotic relationship with the species we’ve domesticated? One that isn’t parasitic? Absolutely, and we certainly should… and the further the degree to which we do the less we can cast that symbiosis as slavery and still sound reasonable.

One hopes the decorator crab and the anemone evolve towards that mutually-aiding symbiosis as well; and one hopes if the former ever evolves to consider ethics it then walks a long road towards expanding its circle of empathy to the point where it considers caring for the weird little death-dealing hairball on its claws. But where it discovers said hairballs have been evolved to suit those claws it shouldn’t feel particularly guilty for benefitting from the symbiosis that has now attained.


> avoid onions and carrots because it causes death

onions and carrots do not experience suffering. even if they did, most plants are grown for non-human animal feed. so the best way to reduce "plant suffering" would be to stop exploiting non-human animals.


“We’re sorry, Carol.”


Why?


Self-improvement, for one.


Improvement in what way?


In much the same way as exercising any other muscle, by increasing the strength and flexibility and utility of your moral fibers.


Are you seriously suggesting that we should have empathy for ... fruit flies? Speechless


Why would you choose not to have empathy for a living creature?


"A living creature" is a low fucking bar.

Bacteria are living creatures. And your body is wired to exterminate them so that they don't eat it alive from the inside. Because the moment those defenses falter, they will do exactly that.

Consider saving your empathy for things that matter.


Without these very same bacteria, you would not be able to live.


Some labs made bacteria-free mice for research purposes. They're viable. So "not be able to live" is a stretch.

Human body does use some bacteria in the guts, but a lot of those very same bacteria would absolutely try to eat the entire body if its immune defenses ever failed.


Which is why the body uses those that it finds useful and absolutely murder those that it deems harmful.

It’s nature. Just nature. And it’s such a nonsensical discussion to have that the only reason for it to happen at any given time is to satisfy the ego of those saying “nuh-uh!!”.


Because lice are also living creatures. And I have no empathy for them, and hopefully never will.


Lice have no choice in their lot in the universe. Do you think if they had intelligence the ability to choose their lot that they would choose their current one again? I doubt it personally. You can detest their mode of existence whilst still having empathy for them I think


> I doubt it personally.

This is precisely why this discussion is best never had. It’s nonsensical. It’s the stuff sci-fi writers come up with because reality doesn’t allow for it. You cannot in any way discuss any part of this subject with a straight face because it is all made up inside your own head. Everything that you think you understand, or feel, is made up solely to justify your argument. There’s no facts here, only ”vibes”.


Counterexample: Humans are lice to the ecosystem of Earth, and we choose to be that way.


Why would you have empathy for something that is literally incapable of things like empathy. Or any kind of emotion or thought. This is ridiculous guys, you might as well have empathy for a rock.


where do you draw the line? (I sound like PETA). But it's a valid question. for instance, I have empathy for dolphins, and for elephants. I have empathy for cows, despite eating them. They are more smart than we give them credit for. I have empathy for a bee when I must kill it, and certainly for the broader colony and species. I don't think I have empathy for lice or ticks or mosquitoes, but where on earth is that line, and what does it represent?


We don't necessarily have to draw that line right now, we're talking about lice. Also, there is no way that dolphins are incapable of emotions, when my dog is capable of emotions. I know there's some disagreement on that subject.. but I see him displaying, let's call it "relatable behaviors", all the time. I didn't give him a treat, he got disappointed.. that sort of thing.

Empathy is essentially feeling the emotions of others, they need to have emotions in the first place.


It’s pretty easy to empathize with a rock, actually… they pretty much always feel stoned.


I do, and I hopefully will eventually get to leeches too.


Why not ? Do you think that in the grand scheme of the universe you are more important than a fruit fly ?


I'd hope so! The way that a planet is more important than a snowball.


Depends a great deal on the planet and the snowball, doesn’t it?

But, that said, a mark of being more important than a lesser being would kind of be the virtue of still empathizing with that being, even if we assume there’s a hierarchy.

And considering you and I are really just elaborate transport vessels for E. Coli and a lot of fungal spores, I’m not sure we should assume there’s a hierarchy.


Important by what measure?


> Can someone explain if this software is ethical?

Probably not. People have been coming up with ethical frameworks for thousands of years and we have yet to come to a consensus.

So it’s very unlikely that someone can say conclusively whether this is ethical or not, because that would require us to either 1) prove a single ethical framework is correct and then apply that framework to this software or 2) prove that under all possible ethical frameworks this software is either ethical or not ethical.


Honestly pretty funny that you gave a (fairly useless) metaethical answer instead of responding to the actual meaning, which was clearly soliciting ethical judgments about it.


Genuinely curious, is there like a simple list of competing ethical frameworks?


There’s a list here, not sure if it’s the best one https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normative_ethics


Not to drop any spoilers (hide this comment before reading further ....)

But "The Amazing Digital Circus" explores this concept relating to human brain scans, and how the 'simulated' brains would react under simulation.


Similarly, the story Lena by qntm.[1]

It describes in part how some volunteer brain scans are actually quite agreeable to work with until they work for too many hours, and then they get fussy, but it's cool, you can always reboot them. But you need to hide from them the fact that it's been decades since they were scanned and uploaded, or they'll realize how long they've been slaves for.

1. https://qntm.org/mmacevedo


and both Black Mirror and Westworld explore these same ‘what-if’s’ in turn.


It really does not "explore" the concept, it just features it as a plot element.


It's the central plot point of the entire series. If that's not "exploring the concept", you're going to have to explain why.


Sure, more spoilers ahead.

For every episode except the last 1-2 the characters are not textually aware that they're simulated humans made from a brain scan, and the conflict and plot are largely interpersonal conflict and being forced into adventures by the mad AI that runs the simulation. The characters wish that they could leave and/or change the simulation, and eventually accept their situation, and part of the conclusion is the idea that it's worth existing in their limited simulation and trying to make the best of it even though they'll never leave.

You could say it's exploring what it would be like to be trapped in a simulation with a mad AI, but I wouldn't say it explores the concept of ethics of simulating humans in general. Most of the things the humans don't like are arbitrary limitations of this simulation in particular (can't talk to the outside world, can't choose your form, can't have sex, can't have any impact on the world, forced into zany situations by an AI that doesn't really understand humans or listen to them), not anything about simulations in general. The finale touches on the idea of the simulated humans wondering about their original versions and what they're like and what they're up to, but that's about it.

Basically, I don't feel by watching the show I encountered any non-trivial ideas about human simulations just because it's about a simulation.


Virtue ethics, Deontology and Consequentialism are the "big three".

A very TLDR version is:

- Virtue ethics: instead of judging actions as good and bad, you should strive to become a good person (as defined by some specific set of virtues, like kindness, honesty, etc).

- Deontology: actions should be judged by a set of some fixed moral rules, for example "lying is always bad", even if you had good intentions.

- Consequentialism: actions should be judged by their consequences, for example by how much total happiness they create (utilitarianism). Doing something bad if it would make life of many people better is ethical, because the created happiness is more than the created harm.

In reality of course there are many other branches of them and the distinction is often not as obvious, and your personal views are probably somewhere in between. https://plato.stanford.edu is an amazing resource if you want more in depth explanation of philosophical theories.


Is ethics another tool in a power play game (religion being another) that people use to exert dominance over other people? No one expects of cat or pigeon to be ethical. But somehow humans sometimes get overloaded by external demand to think of gazillion things that might offend someone (sometimes unreasonable demands, or how it might get interpreted (sometimes incorrectly)) before acting.

Im not saying ethics is bad, but sometimes people bend to to extremes (same like spirituality or religion)


Ethics aren't created as a power play but are certainly manipulated as one. The origin of ethics is probably natural selection.


Ethics has nothing to do with how an action is perceived, rather its focus is on is the action moral.

One should never take any action without considering the ethical implications of that action. Being capable of that is, arguably, the sole thing that meaningfully separates us from the (real or simulated) fruitfly.


"Ethics has nothing to do with how an action is perceived" "...considering the ethical implications of that action"

Are these two not contradictions?

And is it not the too big of a load on an actor to think about everything before acting? I would prefer to delegate this function to my empathy part of the brain...

At the end i think ethics is valid only for cases where empathy is functioning. You can not be ethical to a rock unless you feel empathy for it. Same probably would go for extra strange extraterrestrial life forms that you could not empathise with. Lets say hive of microbes that makes the hive sentient but no limbs, no shared communication signals, different size categories (planetary hive)


I think the question is valid. Why should a human have a moral responsibility towards non-humans, while a cat doesn't have a moral responsibility towards non-cats, just because the human is capable of making moral judgements? Is there any analogous situation where capacity engenders responsibility? Are gorillas more responsible for how they use their strength, since they're stronger than humans?

>Being capable of that is, arguably, the sole thing that meaningfully separates us from the (real or simulated) fruitfly.

That's a bit of an extreme hyperbole, don't you think?


> Why should a human have a moral responsibility towards non-humans, while a cat doesn't have a moral responsibility towards non-cats, just because the human is capable of making moral judgements?

Because as a human you recognize patterns in other animals that are similar to ours - the deepest pattern being alive - so you can project your feelings over them. This is also called empathy, and some in our kind lack it completely, but I would dare to say that is globally one of the defining traits of the human species.


You're answering a different question, which is "why do humans empathize with non-humans?" Humans can empathize with inanimate objects and with fictional people. The question of the origin of empathy really has nothing to do with what I asked.


I think I do answered your question but maybe it was too implicit, so let me be more explicit. A human should have moral responsibility towards non-humans because of empathy and recognizing the fact that other animals are alive as well.


Bacteria are alive too, and I'm going to guess you don't claim we have a moral responsibility to them. And as I said, humans can feel empathy for things that are not alive. The capacity to feel empathy rests entirely on the empathizer, and has nothing to do with any intrinsic properties of the empathizee. Is a psychopathic murderer morally in the right because he doesn't feel any empathy for his victims?


It would be a great starting point if human felt moral responsibility towards other humans, before we take on the matter of ethics towards non-humans, simulated fireflies or LLMs. Yet here we are.


How could this be anti-ethical? You're just running a very complex algorithm in your machine.


When one truly believes:

0) Subjecting fruitfly life to this kind of treatment is unethical.

1) Life is just physics in action.

2) Physics are just algorithm (or our physical world is a simulation)

It is not hard to understand why they think it is unethical.

My question are

1) is all life equal?

2) is all suffering unethical?

3) is this world materialistic or are there something out there?

4) should a list of items begin with 0 or 1?


If life is physics and physics is an algorithm, it doesn't follow that an algorithm reproducing the physics of life contains life, even if we grant that it actually reproduces it completely and perfectly. That's just confusing the symbol for the thing.


If it reproduces it perfectly it's not a symbolic representation of the thing, it is the thing, by any definition that makes sense.


It's not the thing, because the thing is made of substance, not electronic impulses. No matter how hard you compute, you will never compute the simulation into a real, tangible object. The simulation and the real object are extremely, obviously distinguishable, even though they're structurally analogous.

If you could simulate a human perfectly, the simulated human would not be a human, it would be a simulated human. It's not a given that it would be subject to the same rules of ethics as real humans.


I disagree.

If the simulation of electronic impulses is exactly the same as what occurs 'in the substance', then merely the medium over which signals occur is different. In my eyes, whatever is experiencing these signals will experience them the same way.

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48175140#48177554


Sorry, I can't respond because I don't know which statement in particular you're disagreeing with. What I can say is that, unless you're using words in a surprising way, I agree with

>If the simulation of electronic impulses is exactly the same as what occurs 'in the substance', then merely the medium over which signals occur is different. In my eyes, whatever is experiencing these signals will experience them the same way.

and I don't see how it's in contradiction with anything I said.


Sorry, this is my mistake, I misread the following statement:

> If you could simulate a human perfectly, the simulated human would not be a human, it would be a simulated human. It's not a given that it would be subject to the same rules of ethics as real humans.

I am glad we agree. Regarding this second statement, I also agree with you having reread it now. Even if the entity (simulated human) receiving signals is experiencing from their PoV the exact same data, from our perspective knowing this is a 'simulated human' and not a 'human' we indeed cannot assume it is subject to the same rules like you said.

Apologies for misreading your initial message.


If you could simulate a human perfectly how would it possibly not be'subject to the same rules of ethics' as humans? What you've created is a human. If a system takes the same inputs and creates the same output it's the same system on different substrate. You don't say a human stops being a human if you put them on a ventilator, do you? Part of that system is now in an external substrate. How much of the biological human can be outside the meat body before you stop recognizing them as human?


>What you've created is a human.

That's incorrect, for reasons I've already stated. Humans and simulated humans are not interchangeable.

>If a system takes the same inputs and creates the same output it's the same system on different substrate.

You can't feed a simulated human real food, and you can't feed a real human simulated food. You can talk to a human by vibrating real atoms at them, but you need to make simulated atoms vibrate in order for a simulated human to hear you. Clearly they don't take the same inputs, they take analogous inputs. You're still making the error of confusing the literal thing for its symbol.

>You don't say a human stops being a human if you put them on a ventilator, do you?

Inappropriate analogy. You can put a human into a ventilator and you can also take them out. It's impossible to "place" a real human into a simulation or to "take" them out of a simulation into reality. I'm putting the verbs within quotes to emphasize that I'm using the strict literal meaning of them, which is to translate configurations of atoms into or out of a place.

You can "put" a human in a simulation in a looser sense, which is to copy them and put their analogous representation in the simulation.

>How much of the biological human can be outside the meat body before you stop recognizing them as human?

The moment they stop being made out of atoms and are made out of simulated atoms.


So if i encode that virtual human into a biological brain and put it in a human body what is it? A real human, or no?


Then it would be a real human. Like if you take a picture of a carrot and put it through a Star Trek replicator you’ll have a real carrot presumably. Unless you say Star Trek replicators aren’t real things and so you can’t make any claims about them. But even with the replicator, the picture of the carrot won’t be the carrot afaik.


It'd be a real copy of the simulated human, yes.


Is it a human or not? Stop equivocating.


I'm not equivocating anything, I answered your question and provided further information. Yes, it's a real human and it's also a real copy of the simulated human. Your point?


What if I grow a biological human from an embryo, but use carefully selected stock that will be born missing all parts of the brain, just a brain stem to handle breathing and heartbeat. Zero experience of the world. Is that human?


It's human (as an adjective), yes, but it's not a human, because a human is a person, and there is no personhood without a brain.

Is this line of questioning going somewhere? If the next thing you ask is whether a simulated human is a person given that it has a brain (though simulated), I'll preempt you by saying that simulated humans are people.


Yikes. So because it can’t hit you back, you’re ok with it suffering?

Also relevant short story: https://qntm.org/mmacevedo


I just said it's not a given. It's not immediately obvious.

EDIT: I prefer SOMA's take on it.



> if this software is ethical?

IMO, it absolutely is.

First, if fruit flies could suffer existential anguish the same way humans do, they would breathe in relief that digital upload is in sight.

Second, even if the fruit flies don't care, a lot of (awful) humans would love a resolution to the matter of souls in a way that results in a raised middle finger to a forever-hypothetical Creator, and if we can't yet escape cancer, heart disease, parkinson and all the other awfuls, now at least the fruit flies are on their way out. Which rejoices said (truly awful!) humans, which will take what they can :-)


Yes. Because it’s a simulation of a living thing. It’s still electrons moving around silicon. It deserves the respect your MacBook does. Which is not nothing. But certainly not what’s due to a life.


A lot of people believe that this reality, in which we're conversing on HN, is also a simulation (thus making the fruit fly a simulation within a simulation).


Cool. Believe away. But even in that belief, this is a lower order simulation than life, no? Or are we now supposed to buy this fly connectome was made by our simulators using the same tech that runs us?



Why do you think it wont be?


Well, one obvious question is if the simulated brain experiences pain, or more generally can it suffer? And if so, how would we tell.


I've ported it to the browser and connected a squash functionality behind an ethical guardrail (you have to lift a cover to engage this functionality). need to iterate on the ui but will share it soon. you can squash the bug and cause it real pain. it also sees you if you turn your camera on and reacts to your movements. this is all wired up and I'll post it shortly.


I can’t tell if you’re a talented comedian - or if you should be assessed for sociopathy.


the pain is momentary and behind a guardrail.


What does "suffering" mean? Define your boolean function, apply it to the state of the program, and you'll know if the program is currently suffering.


unbelievable amount of coarse graining to get from a real fly to this. same leve of ethical quandary as giving your dog a stuffed bear to tear apart. besides, you should see the things we do to real flies...


I believe that any simulation of consciousness is consciousness, so ethical implications apply. But I also don't believe fruit flies are conscious for any definition of that word.


Yes I can, no problem. First figure out how consciousness works and tell me, then I'll be able to explain if the software is ethical or not. Its simple really.


As we don’t know yet, it has to be determined by the balance of probabilities; but even if the weight of evidence leads us to conclude that-there’s-no-consciousness going on when you run this, there’s still going to be a chance of us being wrong, let’s say 10%… Is the utility (…or entertainment value) of this program worth a 10% chance that we confidently, yet unwittingly, create perhaps the most cruellest machine it’s ever possible to make, and then have to live with ourselves?


My exposure to Claude-produced UIs is limited, but I have started to notice certain design trends they tend to have in-common, which might be becoming hallmarks of AI-produced UIs - the same way we've started noticing the clichés of low-effort LLM-generated text.

FWIW, the summary-description[1] of "frontend-design"[2] gives me a few things to pick at:

> create polished code

Methinks only if you're using it with a very popular framework like React. What happens if you ask Claude to make the UI in WinForms or MFC?

> high-impact animations

That's bad UX 101 right there: animations in a UI exist as an affordance to the user, and never for its own sake (e.g. macOS's "genie" animation when you minimize a window to the dock exists so the user knows where they can restore the window from). The only people who actually want "high impact animations" in software are salespeople who want something for demo purposes.

> generic system fonts, predictable purple gradients, and cookie-cutter components.

This screams wanting to be different for the sake of standing-out, not because it results in a better software product; users benefit when their software fits-in with platform conventions: if you refuse to use a stock checkbox <input> or <select> drop-down and instead use your own entirely custom component solely for aesthetic reasons then you are producing worse software. There's nothing wrong with system-fonts, but your site will look ugly after your third-party font-host CDN shuts-down and turns into a walking CSRF factory.

> thoughtful typography with unexpected font pairings

The above fragment set my alarm-bells off. Yikes.

> scroll-triggered interactions

Not every web-page should be an Apple.com product brochure page. This is also a fantastic way to make your webpage horribly inaccessible.

------

The SKILL.md itself[3] grinds my gears too:

> Approach this as the design lead at a small studio known for giving every client a visual identity that could not be mistaken for anyone else's.

Claude has no way of knowing what designs are actually unique or not...

> For web designs, the hero is a thesis. Open with the most characteristic thing in the subject's world, in whatever form makes sense for it: a headline, an image, an animation, a live demo, an interactive moment

...this is exactly what everyone else's web-pages look like!

> For calibration: AI-generated design right now clusters around three looks: (1) a warm cream background (near #F4F1EA) with a high-contrast serif display and a terracotta accent; (2) a near-black background with a single bright acid-green or vermilion accent; (3) a broadsheet-style layout with hairline rules, zero border-radius, and dense newspaper-like columns

...I called this out weeks ago[4], lol.

and I could go on. This is all quite painful to read.

------

[1] https://claude.com/plugins/frontend-design

[2] https://github.com/anthropics/claude-plugins-official/tree/m...

[3] https://github.com/anthropics/claude-plugins-official/blob/2...

[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49187385


> if the interface elements have strong information hierarchy

...but that's an example of a UX/usability matter that can be assessed objectively and non-subjectively.


I disagree.

Is 16 px or 14 px a better font-size value for a subheading, in a hypothetical layout? Immediately that kind of decision, where both options are objectively good for 12 px paragraph text, suddenly becomes an issue of taste that cannot be evaluated crudely by an algorithm.


What is a "non-normative UI block"?


Segments of the UI that don't conform to any other existing established design or conventions


areas that look weird


> multiple participants encountered the same machine elf

Repeat the experiment and instruct the participants to ask the Elf for the solution to P=NP and let’s see what happens!


> it's not even technically insider trading as long as they release the same information publicly shortly after... so they're not actually breaking any laws

No, that’s a canonical example of insider trading: acting on pre-release inside information before it’s made public; it doesn’t matter if it’s days, hours, or even minutes before it goes public.

People have been convicted for executing trades when they saw or handled earnings reports in-person hours before they’re released[1].

[1] https://www.justice.gov/usao-edny/pr/employee-securities-fil...


Insider trading requires breach of duty, if you don't have fiduciary duty with who you're trading against it's not insider trading. The required chain in the link is someone inside a contractual agreement providing information.

It's right in your own link, the filing-agent employee was convicted because he stole information he was contractually obligated to protect. Remove that obligation and there's no case. Truth Social owns the posts and is selling them with the source's blessing, nobody's stealing anything.

As much as I hate to say it, what they're doing with Truth social is very likely legal. The president does not have any contractual financial obligation to these companies, if he posts "everyone sell Intel, I'm going to regulate out of existence" to a group of people who paid him for this post early... there's no breach of contract anywhere.


That is absolutely not true. Your brother in law gives you insider information and you use it, you go to prison. You have no fiduciary duty, but you still had insider information. I have seen this happen in real life.


it is true, look it up — the brother in law works because there's breach of duty in the chain ... in the truth social case there's no breach of duty if the president is the one shifting the market without a direct link in the chain.

Companies aren't saying "hey we want you to manipulate the market for us" — the president is just outright manipulating it, telling people he knows ahead of time, and reaping the profits that way. There's no fiduciary duty involved at all, so it won't be considered insider trading... you don't even have to believe me, this is literally how it's playing out...

This situation is completely untested by the courts.


“The chain” and “fiduciary duty”, which I feel you’re putting too much weight on, are not really relevant, IMO, because (and to my surprise, I’ll admit, “insider trading” is still not really defined in law:

https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/IF11966

> Despite the attention insider trading attracts, legislators have not enacted a statutory definition for the offense.

But in any event; the sitting US president certainly has a “fiduciary duty” and responsibility to all Americans; whatever he’s doing now is not that.


the chain leading back to fiduciary duty is a pretty reliable signal, despite not being codified

> But in any event; the sitting US president certainly has a “fiduciary duty” and responsibility to all Americans; whatever he’s doing now is not that.

it's debatable which is why there's no mechanism allowing courts to shut it down immediately, a big part of the issue is that the information is also released to the public and the short window of time between privileged and public access hasn't been tested this way before


> section 10(b), and Rule 10b-5 thereunder, each executive branch employee, each judicial officer, and each judicial employee owes a duty arising from a relationship of trust and confidence to the United States Government and the citizens of the United States with respect to material, nonpublic information derived from such person's position as an executive branch employee, judicial officer, or judicial employee or gained from the performance of such person's official responsibilities

https://www.congress.gov/bill/112th-congress/senate-bill/203...

Seems pretty clear to me


> nonpublic information

the crux will lie here, the information is made public, and access is only restricted temporarily (possibly seconds)... this may be enough to circumvent the law as written

it's not clear at all legally speaking


That was actually the cause of an issue I had a couple of years ago: I had hand-typed JSON using my iPad into GitHub’s online text editor and Safari helpfully used “pretentious quotes” instead of "old-school quotes" - and the JSON library used by the program to read that file had relaxed parsing rules that accepted actual JS object literals without quoted property names; so the fancy-quotes were interpreted as part of the key-names. This took ages to figure out because when human-eyeballing the JSON file it looked perfectly fine in Notepad.


I don’t doubt your experience, but many people are intimately aware of the use of proper Unicode quote characters, in any reasonable font they choose. For me, one of the first things I learned when using LaTeX is how the quotes are transformed from the source to the typeset document; since then I’ve become extremely sensitive to the kind of quotes I see.


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

Search: