>If the death penalty had been applied, there's no "undo" button.

There's no "undo" button for wasting away for 40 years in prison either

To me it looks like a glitch of the human cognition to think that losing almost/everyone you love, being dropped into a vastly different world than you knew, having your financial and social prospects thrown in the trash, living in shitty conditions for decades, is oh so much better and moral than killing them

> There's no "undo" button for wasting away for 40 years in prison either

There's payouts, at least. And it doesn't have to take 40 years.

There have been many cases with no payouts.

That sucks. There is mandatory restitution in some states now. It should be required to come from the budgets of prosecution DA offices in order to prevent the gamification of over-conviction for reelection stats. States in the South, especially Louisiana, are notorious for their punitive criminal justice systems.

Yep, and I'd imagine if you give prisoners the choice, they'd rather be alive.

Yes, that's also bad, obviously. If there's only a choice between dying and wasting years, wasting years is obviously better to most people.

You're taking a worst case. Also, you are calling something out without providing what -you- would do in the situation? Maybe we could let them choose death if a lifetime sentence is the decision. What you're implying is just letting criminals out as the only alternative and that's never going to fly. If you're going to criticize something, it's good to propose your solution.

If you gave people the choice of execution instead of prison, many would be horrified just how many people would prefer death to their prison time.

The conclusion would be that those people are "suicidal", rather than admit death might be preferable for rational reasons.

>Also, you are calling something out without providing what -you- would do in the situation?

If someone uses 1+1=3 as an argument you don't need to figure out an actual answer to point out their argument is bollocks

>What you're implying is just letting criminals out as the only alternative

I'm implying no such thing. I'm saying that specific moral argument is bullshit if they find the current punishment ceiling acceptable

Any better ideas on how to deal with dangerous criminals?

There are people who kill for fun, kill for money, people who rape, people who torture for fun.

Well, while I agree that such people exist, their frequency is vastly exaggerated by popular media.

Many if not most of them can be prevented from ever becoming like that in the first place by eliminating poverty, which is a massive and omnipresent source of stress and trauma for people the world over.

There are sadists, psychopaths, and even pedophiles (defined as "those who are sexually attracted to prepubescent bodies", not "those who commit actual acts of child sexual abuse") who live mostly-normal lives and if they ever desire to hurt others, do not act on those desires. This is a pretty clear signal that the existence of these types of people does not inherently lead to them becoming violent, dangerous, or otherwise causing harm.

Is this a short-term project? Hell no. If a majority of the people in all the countries on Earth decided today to commit to a project to abolish the carceral state, I'd be surprised if we'd see it reach a stage where it's fully abolished within our lifetimes. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't set it as an aspirational goal, and start taking steps toward a world that doesn't have to worry about making a decision between executing innocent people and allowing people to walk free who are genuinely likely to harm others.

I think you're underestimating just how many True Believers generations of omnipresent Jingoism can create

Absolutely bonkers algorithms that no one can make sense of unless they dedicate time to study and debug it

Also, it will have to be scrapped when anyone wants to tweak it a little. Sure monkeys randomly typing on a typewriter will eventually write the greatest novel in existence... but most of it will be shit

May $entity have mercy on your soul if the business starts bleeding tons of money due to an issue with the code, because the codebase won't

There's always an individual with autism-level consideration for what one says, isn't there?

No, effectively DDOS-ing a service just because it says it's free and unlimited is a dick move

People like those are a big reason for why we can't have nice things

I scanned through the comments and I don't think anyone raised the possibility that the developer might not be aware how many devices their code would be running on.

It's quite possible that a random just contracted to write software for some embedded system, with no context how many thousands or millions of devices it would run on. So they looked up OP's site, sees "supports unlimited requests and is free", shrugs and just writes implements the code.

Or, the dev might be told the system only had a couple thousand users, then somebody else copied the code and deployed it on a million devices.

You don't know the story, and I think the moral here is not to blame a faceless Android dev from China, but to implement quotas and controls and avoid falsely boast on your website that your service has unlimited scalability.

To me it just screams naivety to put up a free service, advertise it as unlimited and then calling people asshole when they make too many requests.

Personally I would never rely on a service like this since it's 100% obvious it would be sudpectible to junior developers misunderstanding what is reasonable usage.

If you're putting up an API assuming all consumers will consume it in some limited and reasonable way, then you need to rethink things a bit.

Can you imagine a fast food restaurant franchise CEO to complain how annoying it is that people ask for copious amounts of free ketchup? If you don't have a policy or anti-abuse measures, don't complain that "people are using too much" of the free stuff. That's ridiculous and detached from real life.

That one random guy asking for ten or twenty packets of ketchup every once in a while isn't the problem. Sure, it's weird, but he does put it all on his fries and he does eat it all, so that's just part of offering free ketchup.

However, would you still call it "detached from real life" if suddenly the manager from McDonalds starts showing up daily, filling a 100-gallon drum with ketchup because it is "free"? In law there is such a concept as a "reasonable person", which exists precisely to avoid people abusing loopholes like this.

> There's always an individual with autism-level consideration for what one says, isn't there?

What does this sentence even mean lmao

Autism-level consideration for what one says or not, if you say something is unlimited I'm going to take your word for it. If it's limited, tell me the limits. If it's free to a point, tell me the point. If I need to bust out the CC, tell me I need to bust out the CC.

Don't say your thing is free and unlimited if you can't handle unlimited traffic for free..

Hacker News would be on the complete opposite end of the anger scale if this was an ISP telling their users they can't actually use the "unlimited" they promised, haha

>What does this sentence even mean lmao

>if you say something is unlimited I'm going to take your word for it

The sentence refers to people like you. It doesn't make you incredibly clever to consider those sentences literally, like small children or those with under-developed empathy and theory of mind often do

It just makes you an inconsiderate numpty

>Hacker News would be on the complete opposite

Yes, there are lots of people on the tech scene that just don't get ideas like "don't abuse it", or "considering the consequences for other people"

> Yes, there are lots of people on the tech scene that just don't get ideas like "don't abuse it", or "considering the consequences for other people"

It's not abuse if you say it's free and unlimited and someone uses it freely and unlimitedly! This is why sites have acceptable use policies and terms of service. This is why most sites don't say their tool is free and unlimited.

It is what those words mean. It is literal. If I read an acceptable use policy and then went on to use it in a way that is not allowed that would be silly.

> The sentence refers to people like you

> It just makes you an inconsiderate numpty

Speaking of "like small children or those with under-developed empathy and theory of mind", I'm not sure these were needed. Can we just discuss things? I promise my mind is open whether you insult it or not, I'm just not convinced by the argument at this point :)

I hope you got a nice slither of dopamine out of namecalling though in any case, haha

>It is what those words mean. It is literal.

>I'm not sure these were needed

The original wording I was gonna use before deciding to be more considerate was "small children and autists"

If you can think of another short descriptor for "people who obtusely take things literally and are unable or refuse to account for other people's state of mind", I'm happy to use those instead

>I hope you got a nice slither of dopamine out of namecalling though in any case

In fact, it was far more than a sliver!

Upon further reflection, I think I got a lot of repressed anger for never having smacked people who can't behave unless they are explicitly told to do so, who actually need the "within reason" clause everywhere, and who are happy to play with technicalities when it comes to justifying their behaviour

You do make an aggressively fair point. I've also enjoyed the banter if nothing else :)

I dunno if my mind is changed just yet but if I'm honest with myself adding it to a widely deployed app would be in my 'dick move' category.

Just set your own up, or use a DNS method which comes with the bonus of built in caching.

For what it's worth I've never actually taken anyone up on their unlimited offers, I try to keep my services neat and tidy :)

> Yes, there are lots of people on the tech scene that just don't get ideas like "don't abuse it", or "considering the consequences for other people"

Got to love the cleverness with the people who design services with the assumption that there are no such people and then goes on to hackernews and cries when a kid in China breaks their site. Lol.

Insanely incompetent.

In the context of an ISP, what is abuse in terms of network usage? For instance, I'm sure with console + PC gaming etc. a lot of gamers use around 400GB a month on average. Systems evolve, and it's the ISPs' job to keep up with demand.

Think of your average engineer doing mobile development. "Here, hit this url to get the device ip". They write the code, it makes 1 request. The average backend engineer isn't performance focused, why would the average mobile engineer be thinking about a distributed denial of service against some third party api? Most mobile engineers have to be guided to not slam their own backend servers, and do not approach problems in their sphere with the mindset to prevent this type of issue. Not knocking mobile devs, it's just literally not something they have to care about most of the time, and imo only the ones who go out of their way to have a solid understanding of the backend systems would even understand what's in play here

Besides that, odds are that this is malware of some sort hitting this service to get the infected device's public ip to phone it home for use in a command and control situation, and if so, they don't care that they are slamming this service.

Mobile devs who care about this type of thing will not need to make any sort of outbound connection anywhere to get the device ip address, it's right on the device already. These what's my ip sites are used by script kiddies and malicious software running on anything

"There's always an individual with autism-level consideration for what one says, isn't there?" isn't needed and I'd advise you to be more professional, or at least more human.

Relevant SMBC (especially to the sibling comments, holy shit): https://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2095

>There's really no data on that

I find it extremely unlikely that there's no data on how being an outcast affects one's mental health

That's not the question, is it? You just jump to the conclusion that a child without a mobile phone becomes an outcast, and equate that to the classical outcast picture.

It's not a huge leap to think that someone that abstains from such a crucial piece of social lubrication will be an outcast.

You can always say "no" when it asks if you want to continue life, unlike in Lena as some other commenter mentioned

Better than current reality, where "no" is shoved on your throat and most people insist you better be grateful about it

> You can always say "no" when it asks if you want to continue life

You should reconsider that statement. I mean, this is literally "at gun point" kind of situation.

No, I stand by it

Right now you are already forced to pick 'no'. It's a button that lets things go the way so many people claim to be necessary and proper. They can own up to deliberately choosing our current reality if they think our current reality is so much better

In a world where immortality is a given, being able to off yourself is one of the most important things an individual should have a right to do

This is a convincing argument, thanks for raising it.

is it a no? religions say otherwise. the problem is, we don't know. if we could upload into a computer but we would not be able to communicate with those uploaded, we wouldn't know anything about their continued existence either.

>I don't want to see people die, but on the other hand I fully understand that we must die

Those are not mutually compatible

Well, unless you take some esoteric interpretation where one can be absolved from the immediate implications of what they think are the most desirable states for the universe

If one considers it necessary for people to die, one wants people to die. It's part of the whole considering death necessary

You are right of course, it was just a poorly worded (of which I could find no better) attempt at saying "listen, I'm not a heartless d**, either."

Some people don't want to go to work. Yet, they do because they feel it's necessary.

What do you mean?

Looks to me like you are reacting to the title instead of the article

I expected the standard anti-medicine fare from the title, but got neat biological investigation/hacking instead. That was an interesting read

The "be the real you" crowd never quite has a good answer for "what if the real you is an unlovable, broken piece of shit?", do they?

There is an answer once you’re willing to break out of the cycle of self pity that’s trapping you there.

Which cycle of self pity?

I'm a sadistic fuck that's been made to have the caring range of a rock due to childhood abuse

I'm fine being that way, it's just not conductive to maintaining relationships. Been there, done the whole 'be yourself bollocks' - the results were shit. Pretending to care far more than I do, and constantly suppressing the sardonic and vindictive tendencies has been far more pleasant

'just tweak core aspects of your personality' is exactly the opposite of being yourself

>If it can't even do an NGINX config, what use is it for anything else?

Turn it around. I'm sure there are lots of people around who couldn't do it either, even with a ridiculously high amount of time to do it

Yes, but we are discussing the claim that LLMs might exhibit superhuman smartness.

They are fallible, but they quite clearly exhibit superhuman smartness when compared to the average human.

As a thought experiment, assume the average human may be able to translate text between two human languages, or write code in two-three programming languages. GPT4 can perform those tasks on a much more diverse set of human _and_ programming languages. Is that not superhuman?

Yes, it makes mistakes. But take a hundred humans off the street and ask them to write an NGINX configuration or translate between Indian and French - how many would be able to do that? How many would be able to do that without any mistakes?