6d0debc071

The problem when you start throwing around empathy alongside such concepts as 'helping' abusers 'mend their ways' is that one rather feels that anyone whose views do not rather closely match your own political angle, especially with respect an issue you are deeply invested in, will be singled out for this 'help.' Being offended has become a weapon in popular debate - and I find myself remarkably disinclined to further structure things to its advantage.

Isn't that essentially what Cortana, Siri and whatever that Google assistant (Google Now?) are supposed to be? They don't seem to work very well atm.

I agree with forest, someone should not be penalised for answering a question honestly.

Roles can help to keep conversations civil when the participants are benign as well as malign by removing communication friction. For malign actors they make it easier to pick out specific behaviours to review in one on ones and - if they persist - dismiss them for.

> Would it make it worse (easier to get drugs) or better (less stigma about treatment).

That may not be as binary as it seems on idle reflection.

There certainly are drugs that used in extremes, and (occasionally) in moderation, put people in a position where day to day functioning is impossible, but equally there are drugs that cause very little harm for reasonable consumption patterns. All else being equal, who would you rather have living next door? A drunk or someone who smokes a fair bit of weed on the weekend?

There's this thing that people do - certainly that governments seem to do with respect to the issues surrounding decriminalisation and/or legalisation - where the ideal, the thing they measure success by, is getting people to stop doing something that they wouldn't choose for themselves. That metric doesn't necessarily make a lot of sense.

Yes, because some people's utility functions are strongly inimical to other's likely happiness. It will be feudalism all over again, with vastly higher stakes.

If you have a bunch of the super-rich, and everyone else just at some happy medium, then you'll eventually output a mad god-king - in charge of some ridiculous multiple of the power that the majority of the planet can bring to bear - whose favourite sports are gassing countries where people's skin is the wrong colour and fucking the peasants to death on a Thursday.

> Would you stay at a company in whose purpose you don't believe, if you liked your manager?

There are a couple of people on my current project whose company I enjoy and who have personal attributes that I'd like to foster in myself. I'm staying with it solely for that reason, the business model it uses was dead in the water two years ago and it's in the die-off period - the project itself is just making efficiency savings on something that's never going to be profitable again.

I'd choose to do so again, it's never made life bad for me to choose to share closer company with the people I respect - and when the time to move jobs has come up, a few months ahead of the crash, there have always been plenty of friends in other companies that would put in a good word.

What has been a bad call for me has been to stay in bad company, for the chance to work on something 'important' while management has been incompetent or peers have been markedly hostile. That's contributed to some of the lowest times of my life.

Despite checking email what appears to be abnormally infrequently, I wonder how prevalent setups like freehunter's are:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10736086

22.7%, according to the forbes quote that my search engine serves me. - I shan't bother to view their article, for obvious reasons.

One danger is that driver B will respond by driving without taking out insurance if it becomes too expensive. Which would leave people in a bad situation when he finally runs someone over.

> Please in the future consider the concept of rhetorical license.

I considered it, but I didn't grant it since it was not clear that it applied - nor for like discussions would it be clear in the future. You adopted an extreme position which is not analogous to the discussion you wished to have, and that is not an act of rhetoric; discussion as an art and a skill. It is simply poor communication - as evidenced by how widely your claims would imply you to be misunderstood.

Rhetorical license doesn't cover that. The charity of understanding others extend a speaker is not an unlimited effort.

> I'd like to shift towards the "less Evil/more privacy", but no one here or anywhere wants to try to come up with ways to do that, because everyone just assumes privacy gives Evil room to grow.

It does. You gave such an example yourself: TOR and child pornography. More widely speaking, it's possible to lessen the 'evil' in society through a great many means - better school, better welfare provision, stronger community links. More to the point many, even on this site, seem in favour of taking those steps: Strong encryption? Please. Better schools? Yes please. Better community organisations? Yeah. There are of course people who'd say no, but that does not change the fact that people in favour of them are easily found.

Many of the steps that could be taken in that regard seem orthogonal to the larger discussion at hand, (encryption security - as structured by reasonable context,) mind.

> [P]eople will continue to pick the "no Evil/no privacy" option

If that was an available option, it would be fine. I'd choose no evil and no privacy because I'd know that my information, and more importantly the information of public officials and company leaders; folks who wield power; wouldn't be abused.

But that's not an option that's on the table, and whatever it is they intend to pick it is not what people accomplish when they endorse surveillance. Our governments do some pretty evil stuff and those are the people who end up with the power in these sorts of arrangements. What people are being given the choice between is 'a dubious promise of safety; an evil that doesn't offend them personally; and no privacy' - or 'a perceived higher rate of evil that does offend them personally; you're under threat, they're coming for your kids, hate freedom etc; and privacy.'

You seem to be taking the no evil part of things as essentially solved. But it's not. We do not have systems we can trust not to abuse this.

What evanpw seems to be suggesting grows faster than you might think.

There's a neat story on that point: http://mathforum.org/sanders/geometry/GP11Fable.html

If it's a mass of stats or something like that, I'll fire up a flash card program. If it's something more abstract, an important concept or the like, then I'll try to apply it to something - use it in a program, try to see what it implies in different contexts.

Mmm. There's a connotation with shields that they are just as you say, protective in nature. There's consequently a negative association with their removal. However, the person's still being protected from undesired input while they're looking for a job: The criteria for desirable/acceptable have changed. Their 'shields,' using those criteria, are still up.

It's a tricky analogy that, as you note, is easy to misunderstand. The writer may not have meant it in the sense that it was received.

As long as I can get the data, it's fine. What I'd be worried about would be if apps become the only way that an end user can get access to information about their environment. That would seem like a massive step backward for all that those applications, as part of a broader context, may enhance services.

The article's title is bad but the core of it seems to be that IFF there's a perceived desires/offers mismatch on the part of the employee, then that employee will investigate the labour market.

If your company isn't aligned with the employee's process or life goals, that's a desires/offers mismatch. It may not be possible for the company to solve that, but it doesn't change the underlying pattern.

And then the person is not unhappy, but they look for a better match. To use the terminology of the article their 'shields[1]' would be down.

I don't think it's perfectly accurate, the core of the piece, mind. Because I go out with friends who work for other companies - so inevitably hear about them - as part of having a life. I've not had as many job changes as I've had coffees with friends. But it may be a reasonable heuristic.

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1. As a language point, I detest the idea of calling it shields. It makes it sound like it's something that protects the employee, but of course it doesn't. It protects the employer for you not to be looking for something that better satisfies your desires.

The piece given here is how she would look at a CV of that pattern - and as far as it goes that's fair enough. Personally if I see you with a four to eight year gap on your CV my first question, assuming I'm hiring for a significant role and your CV is strong in other respects, is going to be 'So, what did you do during those years?' I'm not just going to assume you were working small jobs to support yourself, I'm going to be thinking 'Were they working small jobs? If so why didn't anyone there hire them full time? Were they in prison? Were they a trouble employee?'

Certain parts of the recruitment and interviewing process are effectively black boxes. You can guess at things that HR/hiring managers want - experience and achievements related to the role they're looking to fill, relevant qualifications - and there are some cultural things, (you wouldn't put a picture of yourself on a CV in this country for instance,) but beyond that it's a very muddy game. There's limited advice on that front - though my personal take is that it would be a great shame not to be hired because you've not given the best account of yourself. Or, perhaps worse, to be hired because you've given someone the wrong impression of yourself (assuming you're not desperate for the money of course) and end up in a role that's going to make you miserable.

> If you have your heart set on seeing the Pyramids but get frustrated at the Egyptian visa process, are you really willing to settle for, say, Lebanon?

No, but I'm probably willing to settle for Germany or France. It's pretty rare for me to have my heart set on somewhere. There are many things I want to see, and if one country feels like being a pain in the neck, I'll just go see something else, or go somewhere to do something else.

I'm not sure whether most tourists are more like me or more like the heart set on kind of folks. But, even assuming that they're of the heart set on kind, once you've seen the pyramids it's less likely to drag you back through the bothersome process again. One would imagine a bothersome process somewhat decreases your opportunity for repeat business.

> Why is it more likely that we're going to develop superintelligent autonomous insect drones than we are to annihilate ourselves with human-controlled mechanical systems, as we've had the capability to do so for many years now (nuclear ICBMs and so forth)?

Proliferation issues and barrier to entry.

They don't need to be super-intelligent if their task is just to find the nearest eyeballs and it's much much harder to stop someone producing killer insect drones - the industry for which has many uses - than it is to stop them producing an ICBM (the industry for which is fairly specific.)

We're talking about something someone could conceivably do, on a small scale, in their garage given a couple of years and very minor funding. From there it's just a matter of scale.

It's a long shot gamble funded by some people who maybe should and maybe shouldn't know better - I don't pretend to be in a position to judge the science in this case. So, who cares? I don't mean that in a derogatory sense, I mean it in the sense that you might set yourself a limit of a few hundred pounds for a game of poker one night. If it pays off, great. If it doesn't, no biggy. If they're committing fraud, then there are regulatory mechanisms in place around that - how far you trust those is an issue, but it's a much larger issue than one company.

The big sin that you mustn't commit, and that many do anyway, is to trust a private company's data where a potential conflict of interest like this exists. Run your own trials.

> Because I'm not taking anything for granted.

You seem to be taking that progress ('Towards what?' one is tempted to ask) has value in and of itself for granted.

Maybe we'll finally get some interesting processor architectures. The race for ever more speed has its reasons, but it's not been built on a particularly helpful abstraction layer.

The cost to OP is all the opportunities they don't take in the mean time and whatever mental cost they're paying by persisting in a horrible environment.

It might be worth it if they had an awesome relationship with their boss, a lot of trust built up, but it doesn't sound like that's the case. If they'd a decent relationship, and decent managers, the situation would never have reached this point in the first place. Add to that the fact that the company went back on their word...

They're either liars or stunningly incompetent. Neither's worth counting with.

In all the successful companies I've ever worked in/with, there have been different sub-cultures depending on what role you were fulfilling and what team you were part of. I suspect that part of the requirement for a successful culture is that it allows for the networking of the work of people from a wide range of different backgrounds; favouring different communication styles and patterns of working.

Even assuming 10 ppb of He-3 in the lunar regolith, you'd need to process 150 tons of the stuff to get one gram of fuel.

http://fti.neep.wisc.edu/pdf/wcsar9311-2.pdf

Mind you, if we eventually automate extraction industries the economics for a lot of things change.

> I'd much rather have industrial machinery churning out tons of pollution on the moon then on the earth.

Would you pay twenty times as much for your computer in order to make that happen? And would most people do likewise? It's the answer to that sort of question that determines whether something gets done.

Because there's nothing up there you can make enough money on to justify the expense. Not yet anyway.

Merry Christmas to you, too

And to everyone else here, of course. I hope that you all have good food, better company, and that the server doesn't go down if you're on call. :)

That could mean a few things. On the assumption that you mean people will simply copy existing products rather than making their own: It's true enough on the surface, and some degree of protection is warranted, but at the same time everything contains copying of something before it, either in whole or in part, and to allow large sections to be locked down effectively in perpetuity (all of us will be dead by the time patents rolling in today expire) is to stifle innovation in another direction. Both too great and too little protection are harmful.

I've been on forums where people said the most atrocious things to each other. But there was never any come back from it because A) The audience was relatively limited and B) None of us used real names or spread out ID around too widely.

You could pay me to use social media, but considering the potential reputational costs I'd have to be paid a lot.