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I read it as being able to see the future, which is still bullshit par excellence. The future is just around the corner as it were, but us normal people cannot see it, on account of both it being the future, and around a corner.

To be very clear, I think it's completely stupid.


It's depressing to see how the system works. Sure, now there are different kind of terms in a contract, some are material terms and some are... immaterial? And conveniently, you can change some but not others in such a way that the banks and powerful corporations always come out on top.

I never heard of a corporation being forced to point out explicitly which lines in their long terms and conditions document have changed. But it's a well known obligation for regular citizens, because material terms.

> that the modifications are actually disclosed to the counterparty before they sign

Does Microsoft explicitly draw your attention to the fact that Copilot is for entertainment purposes? No, it buries that in a long document hoping you won't see it, and advertises it as the complete opposite, but it's ok when they do it, because those are not material terms, whatever that means. It means it's ok when the big guys do it, in the end.


Material terms are things like price, term, or anything that would change the nature of the overall agreement.

When corporations do it (i.e. change TOS) they need to send you notice of the new terms because it's no longer a change, it's a new contract that replaces the old one...if you agree to it by continuing to usetheir service after notice.


The guy sent the bank a contract. It was the first contract between them, it wasn't a "new contract" (as opposed to the old one? no such thing), it wasn't a "change" to an existing contract.

Why did he need to highlight some terms? How do you mean "change the nature of the agreement", change from what? They didn't have an agreement before this.

> because it's no longer a change, it's a new contract that replaces the old one

What sophistry is this? Of course it's a change. Most of the contract is the same, it's not like Paypal changes it's business to selling shoes. They do the same things, and the terms are mostly the same, only they make some changes. There's nothing supporting your claim that it's a new contract.

> things like price, term, or anything that would change the nature of the overall agreement

That's everything in the contract. Which parts of the contract don't affect the nature of the contract? Why are they there? What the hell is "the overall nature"? If a fee for something changes from $1 to $2, as I understand the english language, "the overall nature" of the contract doesn't change. Just a fee. It's a detail. But this is exactly what you list as "material terms".

It's all BS.


And this is why most programmers should stay away from law...

He changed the material terms of the contract so the other parties‘ obligations and rights were substantially different than what they had thought they were in the original version. In the U.S. his actions would have resulted in him being bound by the contract but the other party not being bound.

Doubling the price of a contract is a material term. Basically anything that would make someone change their mind about entering into the contract is material, but price and term are always material by law.

Stuff that isn't normally negotiated isn't material, like jurisdiction for disputes.


Yeah except you're completely misunderstanding their criticism of this entire thing. This has nothing to do with "lack of knowledge" and everything to do with criticising the premises and framing of the law in Western societies.

https://www.rt.com/business/man-outsmarts-banks-wins-court-2...

I can never find an article that mentions the final outcome.


It is on Wikipedia under T-Bank, this seems the best source that announces the resolution: https://web.archive.org/web/20220905212700/https://www.tinko...

From the Wikipedia article:

> The legal action was later withdrawn by both the parties after an undisclosed settlement was reached.


Moore's Law.

The times for Murphy's Law for computational power are just beginning.


The game being reset makes sense - time and resources have been spent to make it happen, and it's best to get as much value from those resources as possible.

Of course this means learning the lesson of how the first defeat happened. You reset so that you can learn more lessons. If they ignored the lesson of the first defeat, that's stupid. But the reset itself makes sense.


The reset isn't the problem, the entirely nerfing the Red team is the problem. The US took steps to fail to learn from the exercise before it had even finished.

what exactly does one learn from hypothetical light-speed motorcycles?

Does the enemy nation have internet? If so, there's your light-speed couriers.

motorcycles can navigate bombed terrain, your fiber optics cables will be torn...

I can see the following technology replacing motorcycles for communication:

(works up to 20-30km, a bit more if needed)

a) preinstall your fiber optic cable between points A and B (say AA platforms that need/want coordination for distributed passive/multistatic tracking of intruders)

b) when it is torn, send a fiber optic drone from A to B and use its line to replace the torn one (those are flying in Ukraine with bomb payload, now just use its fiber optic reel, you can reuse the drone; not durable, but very cheap and fast repair of radiation-free communication lines)

Today's technology offers so many opportunities ...


Wouldn’t a WiFi mesh network be more reliable in war-torn areas? If you just need communication then actual “internet” is incidental and probably a security risk - just having a fairly secure local mesh network, with nodes covering hot-spot areas, seems like a good idea - it can cross areas where fiber isn’t reliable because of all the war, and it can potentially remove the need for some by-hand communication.

Wifi mesh makes sense in a densely populated area, not over mostly desert.

Also, communication over longer distances (even few km) will add so much latency that it will be unusable for coordinated AA targeting.

Furthermore, all that radiating will just invite bombs from the attacker.

Maybe I was not clear enough about the goal: not "robust command and control communication network", but more of:

quickly and temporarily set up a high-bandwidth low latency communication network to accomplish AA ambush using coordinated mobile passive sensors (a quick radar burst might for initial acquisition might be useful, but probably not necessary).


Right, but those are realistic engineering considerations.

Nowhere in your message do you describe light-speed motorcycles.

You didn't arrive at this conclusion thanks to a light-speed motorcycle thought exercise...


I was not talking about light-speed motorcycles. That was an artifact of imperfect war simulation.

The relevant concept is undetectable (by electronic surveilance) communication usable for tactical warfighting. Real life motorcycle messengers are a partial (detectable, high-latency) solutions for which there are currently (not at the time of that war exercise) better options (e.g. the one I presented).

You can nitpick that due to imperfection of the exercise (allowing red team to use light-speed motorcycles) the whole result of the wargame was compromised. To which my answer is: That is a nitpick, real-life offers the red team enough options to achieve the same results without relying on physically impossible feats.

Most recent example: Isrealis are learning to cope with fiber optics drones in the southern Lebanon, to great detriment to their Merkavas.


both in Ukraine and elsewhere there is the fiber optic challenge.

shouldn't it be possible to lock-in amplify imagery of known fluorescent centers in the main types of fiber optic?:

flash/flood the scene with appropriate stimulation wavelength for suitable fluorescent center, take a picture (and observe the emission wavelength), then take the same picture without the flash, repeat this N times and add all the ones with the flash present and subtract all the frames without so one can observe the exact paths of the optic cables...

It seems one could mass produce a cheap detection and imaging platform that can aid cutting all the umbilical cords cost-effectively.


Can you point me to more information on:

"shouldn't it be possible to lock-in amplify imagery of known fluorescent centers in the main types of fiber optic?"

In Ukraine, there are areas densely covered with fiber optic lines, almost all of them old. How would you detect and cut only the active ones?

A brightly flashing drone examining and cutting fiber optics lines would a) be slow and very obvious, easy to disable b) need a lot of battery power for all those flashes, and risk getting tangled in branches when cutting

On the other hand, if you can easily remotely detect the fiber optic cables, it might be useful for quickly detecting them and tracing them back to the operator.


How does it look? I mean, what do the widgets look like?


This was an MFC project, so your old standard win32 common controls that looks the same since 98 or so.


Can you articulate why you think so? This kind of response "I just don't agree" reads as zero useful information. At least to me.


Evolutionary brain development.

We all come from monke, monkey from 10 million years ago would definitely be unable to even learn spoken language at a basic level. Would he even have the anatomy to produce the required sounds? I don't think so.

What about monke from 1 million years ago? 200 thousand years ago?

ChatGpt says spoken language only emerged 50k - 200k years ago and that a cavemen baby from 200k years ago could learn spoken language if brought up by modern parents.

But I prefer human answers over AI slop.


The evolution of the human brain appears to have reached its peak long before 200k years ago.

Nowadays humans have smaller brains on average, though that is almost certainly not correlated with a lower skill in computer programming, but with lower skills in the techniques that one needed to survive as a hunter of big animals.


How could we know this? AFAIK all we can say is the volume of the brain has been relatively stable for that long, how can we say the structures of the brain have not evolved since then? It seems plausible to me anyway that humans could have co-evolved with ideas in a way.


> I'm really struggling to understand what we've grown into and why this rat race is considered 'better'

> I happen to like my life in the city

Ahh... you struggle to understand why a life you like is considered better than a life you like less, or dislike?

People probably consider it better for the same reasons you like it. It should be obvious.


> But here we are, thousands of years later,

Not like there was a general lack of tragedy, pain, suffering, war, chaos in the intervening thousands of years.

Seems so superficial to ignore everything and just say if we're here, we exist, then the claim that things will go bad is proven false. The only thing proven false is if anyone ever claimed humanity will be extinct. But think of all the suffering in all the wars between the roman empire and now. Is that nothing? Does that not qualify as very bad stuff? Did humanity advance continuosly, or was it a chaotic path, with ups and downs? Don't the downs qualify as what the complainers predicted?

To me it seems history teaches us we will survive as a species. But there is definitely a lot of room for very bad stuff to happen. It has happened before.


There's a first time for everything, and an end to most things. The roman empire lasted hundreds of years, and then it ended. Many empires did. The sun will end too, at some point. Ice ages last for thousands of years, then they end. And there are countless other examples.

"X has lasted a long time so it will last more" is so obviously wrong. Think about it for more than 3 seconds.

Or was it sarcasm? I can't tell anymore.


> “X has lasted a long time so it will last more” is so obviously wrong.

Smarter people than you and I have thought about this problem and come to the opposite conclusion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect


> is a theorized phenomenon

I wonder why they put that "theorized" word in there. It would be so much easier to say "it is a phenomenon". Only that sentence would not be true now would it?

Come on. The wiki article just connects a name to an explanation, does not prove or even claim the effect is real.


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