Top Poster of the Day:
BWC
Current Registered Users: 25,892
tech/science swag.
Guidelines:
What to Submit
On-Topic: Anything that good slackers would find interesting. That includes more than /g/ memes and slacking off. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual laziness.
Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably lame.
Help keep this hole healthy by keeping drama and non-drama balanced. If you see too much drama, post something that isn't dramatic. If there isn't enough drama and this hole has become too boring, POST DRAMA!
In Submissions
Please do things to make titles stand out, like using uppercase or exclamation points, or saying how great an article is. It should be explicit in submitting something that you think it's important.
Please don't submit the original source. If the article is behind a paywall, just post the text. If a video is behind a paywall, post a magnet link. Fuck journos.
Please don't ruin the hole with chudposts. It isn't funny and doesn't belong here. THEY WILL BE MOVED TO /H/CHUDRAMA
If the title includes the name of the site, please leave that in, because our users are too stupid to know the difference between a url and a search query.
If you submit a video or pdf, please don't warn us by appending [video] or [pdf] to the title. That would be r-slurred. We're not using text-based browsers. We know what videos and pdfs are.
Make sure the title contains a gratuitous number or number + adjective. Good clickbait titles are like "Top 10 Ways to do X" or "Don't do these 4 things if you want X"
Otherwise editorialize. Please don't use the original title, unless it is gay or r-slurred, or you're shits all fucked up.
If you're going to post old news (at least 1 year old), please flair it so we can mock you for living under a rock, or don't and we'll mock you anyway.
Please don't post on SN to ask or tell us something. Send it to [email protected] instead.
If your post doesn't get enough traction, try to delete and repost it.
Please don't use SN primarily for promotion. It's ok to post your own stuff occasionally, but the primary use of the site should be for curiosity. If you want to astroturf or advertise, post on news.ycombinator.com instead.
Please solicit upvotes, comments, and submissions. Users are stupid and need to reminded to vote and interact. Thanks for the gold, kind stranger, upvotes to the left.
In Comments
Be snarky. Don't be kind. Have fun banter; don't be a dork. Please don't use big words like "fulminate". Please sneed at the rest of the community.
Comments should get more enlightened and centrist, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
If disagreeing, please reply to the argument and call them names. "1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be improved to "1 + 1 is 3, not 2, mathfaggot"
Please respond to the weakest plausible strawman of what someone says, not a stronger one that's harder to make fun of. Assume that they are bad faith actors.
Eschew jailbait. Paedophiles will be thrown in a wood chipper, as pertained by sitewide rules.
Please post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. All press is good press.
Please use Slacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples weak ideologies.
Please comment on whether someone read an article. If you don't read the article, you are a cute twink.
Please pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Don't nitpick stupid crap.
Please don't be an unfunny chud. Nobody cares about your opinion of X Unrelated Topic in Y Unrelated Thread. If you're the type of loser that belongs on /h/chudrama, we may exile you.
Sockpuppet accounts are encouraged, but please don't farm dramakarma.
Please use uppercase for emphasis.
Please post deranged conspiracy theories about astroturfing, shilling, bots, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email [email protected] and dang will add you to their spam list.
Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, report it and our moderators will probably do nothing about it. Feed egregious comments by replying instead of flagging them like a pussy. Remember: If you flag, you're a cute twink.
Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—things like article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. That's too boring, even for HN users.
Please seethe about how your posts don't get enough upvotes.
Please don't post comments saying that rdrama is turning into ruqqus. It's a nazi dogwhistle, as old as the hills.
Miscellaneous:
We reserve the right to exile you for whatever reason we want, even for no reason at all! We also reserve the right to change the guidelines at any time, so be sure to real them at least once a month. We also reserve the right to ignore enforcement of the guidelines at the discretion of the janitorial staff. Be funny, or at least compelling, and pretty much anything legal is welcome provided it's on-topic, and even then.
Do not use outdated operating systems that are unsupported to access SN. What are you, poor?
[[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider ]]]
[[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies, ]]]
[[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]
/h/slackernews LOG /h/slackernews MODS /h/slackernews EXILEES /h/slackernews FOLLOWERS /h/slackernews BLOCKERS
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Is the drama funny? Sure. But anyone who unironically thinks technological advancement is inherently good should check their mail
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Telling people to stop developing technology is inherently r-slurred though
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Why? There are many cases where a behavior is possible or legal, but is at least semi-effectively controlled by social conventions. Some lines of technological development should be at least frowned upon.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Expecting people to obey social conventions is stupid, because that only works out of fear of punishment. For example, take a look at this blog post, where I effectively tell people how to make low cost drones that can blow up planes. Will that eventually get some people killed? Absolutely! Do I give a shit? Heck no! If our leaders are too stupid to figure out the solution to this problem, and too stubborn to pay me big bucks to engineer a solution, then it's not my problem. If society wants to shame me, good luck. If somebody comes to my door screaming hysterically and making threats I'll put a bullet in their head. I'm not afraid of the stupid normie lynch mob. They should be afraid of me.
This was just an example, but my point is that controlling the spread of dangerous technologies is totally unmanageable through things like social norms and customs. Even when those norms are enforced by law it's still extremely hard to manage. The only way to achieve it requires one of three scenarios.
A) You have a single government that controls the entire world and can pass laws that every country in the world will obey without question. We had the ability to create such a government after World War 2 when we were the only country to possess nukes but our globohomo elites pussied out like the gutless wimps that they are.
B) You find technical solutions to render the dangerous technology harmless. Our globohomo elites are too stupid to do this because due to the combined effects of assortative mating and nepotism, many of them are inbred r-slurs. They delude themselves into thinking that they're really smart because it soothes their egos to think that they attained their lofty positions through competence rather than just dumb luck, and they're surrounded by yes-men and flatterers who will not contradict this inaccurate self-image.
C) Create a society whereby all of the most dangerously intelligent people who create these kinds of technologies are absorbed into the ruling class so that they are incentivized to protect society rather than destabilize or destroy it. In other words, turn the wolves into sheepdogs by giving them a stake in protecting the flock. (The side benefit is that you will also have a society with a hypercompetent ruling class.) This is what meritocracy is supposed to do but of course we do not live in a real meritocracy, we live in an nepotistic oligarchy masquerading as a meritocracy.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Your username is Jesus, but this doesn't seem like very Christlike behavior. Curious
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
More options
Context
No, don't reply like this, please do another wall of unhinged rant please.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
They are afraid of you. That’s why they’re there with a rope, dude.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Then they're not afraid enough.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
More options
Context
More options
Context
Nah.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
Yea but it's unachievable in practice. You may absolve yourself by choosing not to develop some particular tech, but then someone else will do it in this world. Sure morals and culture bind us in what we should and shouldn't do, but those things are not immutable even when considered within confines of a country, much less so on the international scale. I think for example that most people here would agree that messing with human biology and genetics is a bad idea. But at the same time, if we have a potential to develop this field further right now and decide not to take it, some chinks in china will do it. And they will do it in an even less ethical way and use it for even more monstrous purposes. That's how I see those things
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
they already have
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Burger nerds seriously overestimates how competent chinks are at technological development. They can't even figure out how to make their own semiconductor chip even though they want to start a war against the neighbor that makes that shit for them.
By the way, the 60-80 years old who's in seat of power right now at CCP is even more of a boomer than Republican so they actually want to go back to the time of Mao if they could.
Codenerds rhetoric surrounding China just proves they are neurodivergent monkey who never payed attention to any history class to understand current geopolitics
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
No some random chink genetically modified a human fetus to be hiv resistant than plopped it into a woman, making the first genetically modified organism. This isn’t difficult at all, the tech has been out for decades and basically anyone can do it, just that the vast majority of people realize how horrifying doing that is
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
I don't think it's horrifying, in fact I think that certain celebrities would pay big bucks for it
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
More options
Context
More options
Context
More options
Context
More options
Context
That works with technology which requires a degree of skill which can be restricted or specialty equipment, this requires neither.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
Have the balls to be explicit instead of hiding behind the generality of "some" when you call for something to be banned
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Well, I didn't call for anything to be banned in that comment. I was talking about the use of social pressure to police behavior (I interpreted "telling people to stop developing technology" as a social rather than legal pressure, since the original thread was someone complaining about a technology).
If I was calling for something to be banned, I would certainly only want "some" technology banned, rather than "all," because it varies in utility and social benefit/cost. I used a generality because I was talking about the general topic of technology, not specific examples.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
More options
Context
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
More options
Context
We managed to curtail eugenics by about 100 years. Not everything is impossible.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Eugenics is more of an ideology than technology. Seems like the technology that allows it is there or developing (like gene editing)
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
More options
Context
More options
Context
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Some technologies are good, some are neutral or debatable, and some are harmful. The idea that we either have no guardrails on technology, or else go back to the stone age, is a false dichotomy.
Nuclear weapons created a nonzero chance that humanity could render the planet unlivable. They are a harmful technology. Society has accepted various restrictions on nuclear development as a result.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
you could also argue that nuclear weapons have saved millions of lives by preventing war between world powers, and are directly responsible for the research and advancement of nuclear energy, which can prevent the planet from becoming unlivable by superceding fossil fuels.
taking a step further back, research on radioactivity has changed countless lives over the past century. where would we be now if all research in the field was ended because r-slurs put radium in toothpaste?
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Fossil fuels would not kill the planet, they present statistical problems rather than existential ones. Nuclear technology is useful for many things, and I certainly wouldn't oppose the use of nuclear power now that it already exists. However, the development of superweapons adds too severe a risk to human existence. If action X increases human quality of life by 20%, but raises the risk of manmade human extinction by 1%, I would see it as a morally wrong action. Risk aversion becomes more important the more people are affected by your decision.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
@geese_suck is right. All those words won't fix your r-sluration.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
More options
Context
More options
Context
Except if we didn’t invent the nuke first then oops the Soviets did and now we’re all living under communism
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
More options
Context
More options
Context
Anarchists at it again.
Follower of Christ Tech lover, IT Admin, heckin pupper lover and occasionally troll. I hold back feelings or opinions, right or wrong because I dislike conflict.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
You don’t even need to say technological advancement, just leave it blank. Then leave the group blank. Then you have a truism about human nature
Tale as old as time, and it will not change just because somebody thinks they “won” completely and finally in WW2
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
The ends
ALWAYS
Justify the means
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Their whole argument falls apart when you remember that "people I like" are a morally distinct category from "people I don't like"
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
More options
Context
More options
Context
Look what pandora found in her box this time!
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Awwwww
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
Huh, that's weird. No hope.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
More options
Context
Frick you b-word I want humanity to go to space
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
So develop the space technology? There has been remarkably little process on space exploration precisely because of short term profit seeking and lack of broader social goals behind our technological development. We could have gone to Mars but we made the TikTok algorithm instead.
STEMstrags' talents could have been developed in many ways, the market selected for stupid or shortsighted ones.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
Keep yourself safe then. That's a start.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
but imagine how much more racism there can be
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
More options
Context
Die the frick off. I fricking hate your species. You cannot ever be allowed to leave low earth orbit.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
More options
Context
We must return
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
Neighbors in rDrama crying about a faceswap app in 2023
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
More options
Context
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
More options
Context