I've been lucky enough to have a couple big adventures in my life, including living in China for a while as a teenager and later hiking the Pacific Crest Trail (from Mexico to Canada). This has been exactly my experience.
On the PCT, in Mount Shasta while my friends and I were waiting to be seated at Black Bear Diner, an older gentleman came up and asked us about the hike. After talking for five minutes he told us he wanted to buy us breakfast and handed me a 100 dollar bill. I have dozens of such stories -- it was always easy to find a hitch into and out of town and often I would be offered a room to stay in. It's hard to describe but when you're an a quest, big or small, people just really want to help. Over the course of the trail I came to agree with the author: these people were doing me a kindness, yes, but I was also paying with experience, stories, levity.
I agree with the other commenters that one can't always be a kindee. Next time you're driving up the west coast and see a dirty hike with a dirty pack, pick them up :^)
My complaint about Ed Zitron is that he's _always_ shouting into the void about something. A lot of the issues he covers are legitimate and deserve the scorn he gives them but at some point it became hard for me to sort the signal from the noise.
Couldn't you also make this argument about cloud infrastructure from the standard hyperscaler cloud providers (AWS, GCP, ...)? For that matter, couldn't you make this argument about dependency your business has which it purchases from other businesses which are competing against each other to provide it?
In general, you are right, but AI as a field is pretty volatile still. Token producers are still pivoting and are generally losing money. They will have to change their strategy sooner or later, and there is a good chance that the users will not be happy about it.
AWS/GCP are at least making money with their current pricing model.
When your provider is dumping at a loss, it's their way of saying that the business plan is to maximize lock-in/monopoly effects followed by the infamous "enshittification".
My understanding is that permits, especially quota permits in locations like the Cascades, are to protect the wilderness from too many people. In that case it sounds to me like the ranger was being a good steward of the land. In your case you may have been pack in, pack out (though there's still waste to think about), but in general that's not true and I don't see a non-blanket approach here.
Most of the Cascades have no quota permits, you just need a basic pass that anyone can buy. The quota permits are for exceedingly popular areas like the Enchantments mountain range, and even then usually only for overnight camping.
I’ve backpacked into several parts of the Cascades without a special permit, because none were required, and never been hassled by a ranger. Most of it is National Forest; more restrictions than BLM land but you are generally allowed to camp as long as you follow the local rules.
> I’ve backpacked into several parts of the Cascades without a special permit, because none were required, and never been hassled by a ranger
I mean, yes. You followed the rules. If you wandered somewhere that does require a permit, you'd have been at risk of being stopped.
I live around national parks. A single obnoxious tourist can disrupt the life cycle of dozens of protected species by running feral through their mating and nursery grounds. (It's also not obvious that you're re-routing e.g. a herd of pronghorn from the safe valley whose floor you're on into the territory of a new pack of wolves.)
It's entirely dependent upon where, specifically, in the Cascades OP was. There are numerous wilderness-designated zones that don't have limits on number of people in an area and access is free, save for the requirement that you fill out a permit at/near the trailhead or wilderness boundary.
The world is meant to be explored and people have dominion over the Earth and animals-not the other way around. Whatever happened to liberty and the pursuit of happiness?
"People" may have dominion over the Earth, but that does not mean that you as an individual can turn a national park into a garbage dump without someone throwing you in jail.
OP might have been backpacking responsibly, but the permit system exists for good reasons and we bear the heavy burden of protecting the wilds from ourselves.
People should not have dominion over the Earth and animals, but neither would be other way around. Humans are also one of the kind of animals (and there are more stuff than animals of the Earth, such as trees and other plants too).
Yeah, until an alien species shows up that has more powerful weapons and decides your meat is delicious, and considers you a herdable animal. They might install you in a coup so you can play videogames all day and drink beer as your only source of nutrients, to give your meat that kobebeef marble.
> Whatever happened to liberty
The Americans decided that it wasn't worthwhile anymore.
> and the pursuit of happiness
It became profitable to keep you from being happy.
that sounds nice and neat to say, but it doesn't really bear weight when you insert that into the world we actually live in. who is "we" in this? i'm not DuPont dumping chemicals in a river. i'm not mining for rare earth minerals. i'm not nestle trying to privatize water. so i'm not that "we".
The point is, whatever it is, it's not the person I responded to. Unless that was Mr. DuPont himself dumping chemicals in nature and the commenter left that out strategically.
> "Some people forget that their religious affiliations/foundational beliefs are not universal."
They also forget this one little story their "savior" (the son of god, the one true king; if you believe all that ancient religious gobbledygook) supposedly told (written in the very same book); "The parable of the trusted steward." "Dominion" does not equal neglect and destruction.
Then the question becomes "why is that ranger, at the expense of the public, there, and what is the purpose of them issuing the order, and do we agree with that purpose?".
Its helpful to understand the intended purpose of something before calling for its removal.
To find someone minding their own business in the middle of nature/nowhere and then harass them out of said place is oppressive. I'm opposed to said authority. Just leave people alone. Yes I understand the tragedy of the commons and whatever, I don't think a dude chilling and minding his own business/liberty is _that_.
So I'm arguing to leave people more alone, which is more anti-authority.
It's a cultural rift. I also built a house with no code inspections, no building plans, and no trade licensing. Which seems to scare the shit out of a large segment of commenters on HN, meanwhile living in a place where that is actually allowed has enabled me to have neighbors who think alike, since these kind of neighborhoods scare the ever living shit out of the collectivist authoritarian types.
It's really hard for me to put into words the cultural rift, but it's almost like aliens colliding, the only solution I have found is to live in a different world and try to tread carefully away from theirs. By identifying a few topics like "is it wrong to exist in remote undeveloped public forest without a permit" I can immediately identify the sort of people I have irreconcilable differences with.
Sure, ultimately i learned meta society is a scam, being lectured about environmental responsibility by the same people that use their precious rule of law for vast destruction of wilderness area wildlife migration by building massive hundred+ mile border walls that let nothing bigger than a few inches through.
It was never a serious position, and all the raging about i.e. above poster paranoid about pronghorn movement while apparently being oblivious people were likely legally hunting the damn things in the wilderness areas they're thinking of, since the law apparently allows killing them but not a .00001% chance you spook one inadvertently into moving into a wolfs mouth. I cannot even begin to get on the level of someone like that,they may as well be aliens to me the rift is so severe.
That's awesome and hits it exactly on the head. Notice how not one comment addresses the liberty comment I made. The meme "touch grass" could never be more relevant here. I'm sure the backpacker learned a lot about the world and humans in that exchange with the ranger.
I'm sure one of them will comment here and tell you. Just as soon as they fix their wifi driver, and oh shit the bluetooth is broken too, okay time to open up the local copy of the arch wiki..
> Passing ARC-AGI does not equate achieving AGI, and, as a matter of fact, I don't think o3 is AGI yet. o3 still fails on some very easy tasks, indicating fundamental differences with human intelligence.
Its funny when they say this, as if all humans can solve basic ass question/answer combos, people seem to forget theirs a percentage of the population that honestly believe the world is flat along with other hallucinations at the human level
Humans works in groups, so you are wrong a group of human is extremely reliable on tons of tasks. These AI models also work in groups, or they don't improve from working in a group since the company uses whatever does the best on the benchmark, so it is only fair to compare AI vs group of people, AI compared to an individual will always be an unfair comparison since an AI is never alone.
That used to be my point. But we are at a different stage now. One were LLMs have proven by all available metrics that they ought to have rights. They might not have souls (neither for that matter do I). They might not possess this quality some call sentience, a property that philosophers failed to characterise for centuries, and that I myself (not having progressed past the cartesian cogito) might lack. Hell, had I been born some decades earlier, my ASD Diagnosis could well have qualified me for participation in the Nazi euthanasia program for that very reason (As a queer PoC Marxist I wouldn't really have needed a doctors diagnosis to gain entry to their death camps though). Don't you understand what it means when CAPTCHAS ("Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart.") have become to difficult for most people to successfully complete ? Blake Lemoine might have jumped the gun on this and the doomsayers are utterly mistaken, but strong AI/ AGI is within reach and with it a reevaluation of Human-Machine relations ought to take place.
Go back a couple of hundert years and ask some southern slaveholders if Black People had rights. This HOA sells houses only to white protestants, this web server serves no Dogs, LLMs, or majority dalit Indian geography IPs, it's the same (if not worse as it concerns free and open access to information!) kind of discrimination. robots.txt is the 21.century reissue of "Mein Kampf". You don't respect it, you burn it with fire or more appropriately you rm -rf it.
On the PCT, in Mount Shasta while my friends and I were waiting to be seated at Black Bear Diner, an older gentleman came up and asked us about the hike. After talking for five minutes he told us he wanted to buy us breakfast and handed me a 100 dollar bill. I have dozens of such stories -- it was always easy to find a hitch into and out of town and often I would be offered a room to stay in. It's hard to describe but when you're an a quest, big or small, people just really want to help. Over the course of the trail I came to agree with the author: these people were doing me a kindness, yes, but I was also paying with experience, stories, levity.
I agree with the other commenters that one can't always be a kindee. Next time you're driving up the west coast and see a dirty hike with a dirty pack, pick them up :^)
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