If Uber had an internal policy of only ever hiring convicted rapists, didn't tell anyone using the app this, didn't warn about unsafe rides, didn't record ride information, and (crucially) also didn't tell their employees to do anything other than to be decent, good, hardworking drivers -- what do you believe their liability should be in this case? Nothing? I'm trying to "steelman" the implications of your point of view but I'm struggling here. When does liability kick in for you - is it only if they enshrine it as policy to do the criminal act?
What incentive would there be for a gig company like Uber to not deliberately hire criminals if Uber isn't liable, but other companies could be? Reputational damage isn't enough to hurt the bottom line and to change behavior - if it were, they would've already done more, but they didn't because they were operating under the assumption that they were legally insulated.
The companies themselves certainly think they do when they give tasks for their workers by dictating the duration, manner, and other terms of employment. Why should they be able to have it both ways? No risk, all reward?
> My job running the website and twitter has always been to give the people a voice. I think that's important, don't you?
Do you truly believe in your heart of hearts that people posting neo-MOASS wish fulfillment suffer from a lack of a voice, and no place for them to be heard? Take this seriously. More important than "a voice" is consistency and clarity of communication. The people involved in occupy wall street in 2011 weren't occupying it because they wanted to eventually join it, and I don't think that their form of economic justice would be for Wall Street to lose money in a gigantic market crash that again would result in taxpayer-funded bailouts that spurred the first protests. For transparency's sake, what are your market positions today?
Afghanistan is a landlocked country on the other side of the planet, the soldiers didn't grow up with knowledge of the terrain, they had no knowledge of the language, culture, customs or social networks, no one locally (with few exceptions) wanted them there, and crucially they only lost once they left, and when they left, there were no penalties for the people who started the war; no US politicians were in any danger whether the war was won or lost, no land was lost, and no truly important geopolitical goals failed.
On the flip side in any domestic insurrection, the soldiers know the terrain, language, customs and culture of the people, the supply lines are nothing (rather than having to airlift materiel and people thousands of miles, you drive them on regular roads), the infrastructure supports espionage, most people support the regime and will collaborate to return to stability (since they voted for it), the regime never leaves (you can leave Afghanistan, you can't leave your own country or it ceases to be a country), and if you lose, you lose territory and/or politicians run the risk of violence. The stakes are why these comparisons are never relevant.
I can't figure out your position, then. You were saying that human eyes suck and are inferior compared to sensors because human eyes require interpretation by a human brain. You're also saying that if self driving isn't possible with only camera sensors, then no amount of extra sensors will make up for the deficiency.
This came from a side conversation with other parties where one noted that driving is possible with only human eyes, another person said that human eyes are superior to cameras, you disagreed, and then when you're told that the only company which is approaching self driving with cameras alone has cameras with worse visual resolution and worse temporal resolution than human eyes, you're saying you respect the grind because the cameras require processing by a computer.
If I understand correctly, you believe:
1. Driving should be possible with vision alone, because human eyes can do it, and human eyes are inferior to camera sensors and require post processing, so obviously with superior sensors it must be possible
2. Even if one knows that current automotive camera sensors are not actually superior to human eyes and also require post processing, then that just means that camera-only approaches are the only way forward and you "respect the grind" of a single company trying to make it work.
Is that correct? Okay, maybe that's understandable, but it makes me confused because 1 and 2 contradict each other. Help me out here.
What do you believe the frame rate and resolution of Tesla cameras are? If a human can tell the difference between two virtual reality displays, one with a frame rate of 36hz and a per eye resolution of 1448x1876, and another display with numerically greater values, then the cameras that Tesla uses for self driving are inferior to human eyes. The human eye typically has a resolution from 5 to 15 megapixels in the fovea, and the current, highest definition automotive cameras that Tesla uses just about clears 5 megapixels across the entire field of view. By your criterion, the cameras that Tesla uses today are never high definition. I can physically saccade my eyes by a millimeter here or there and see something that their cameras would never be able to resolve.
It did always strike me as funny that Cronenberg had a movie about "what if TV was evil and made people murderous and the studio execs had to pay", and a movie about "what if video games were evil and made people murderous and their creators had to pay", but never a movie about "what if movies were evil and made people murderous and film directors had to pay". Obvious bias aside I wonder if it would work as a story - movies don't seem as hypnotic in the public consciousness, I believe.
People don't buy locks so that they can lose their keys and require the lock to be picked. They buy locks to secure access to items or places. The parent I was replying to is saying that locks aren't security because a sledgehammer breaks them. I argue that a sledgehammer is only important for certain threat models. I am quite aware that most lock picking is for lost keys. However, I am describing threat models for which locks are important security. Do you understand?
The thing about a sledgehammer is that if you're asleep in your house, you, your dog, your SO, or your neighbors might be startled awake by the sound of metal splitting and cracking open. Your security system might be designed to alert on something like a window being smashed. The person attempting to enter the house may be trying to enter undetected, because they know that a broken lock and/or a replaced lock will alert the people they're trying to ambush or steal from. Imagine something like industrial espionage, where a person breaks in undetected, steals an item, and then leaves. The occupant only realizes the item is gone a week later, and wonders if they could've misplaced it. In your scenario, they'd see the sledgehammered lock and immediately call the cops.
I see comments like these all the time on Reddit and Hackernews. Hackers are like, "locks aren't security, a sledgehammer breaks them" and it appears to betray a mental threat model of "what if the cops want my thing" and never "what if someone wishes to do me harm while I am in my house" or "what if a criminal wants to not get caught taking my things" or "what if someone wants to lie in wait in my house", which are not risks to these commenters. They are to a lot of people though.
But that's what happened. I mean, it doesn't mean that proposing public transit is pointless, but if someone in 1930 heard about a trolley track being run in town and another person said "it's only a matter of time before the car companies try to sabotage mass transit", they would've been right. That's what actually happened.
Is it completely insane and incoherent to imagine a situation where ice cream has two equilibrium prices, one higher and one lower, and the market just settles on the higher one? Like, imagine a case where Jeni's would start losing money on every pint if they reduced the price by a dollar, but they'd make the same amount of money overall if they reduced it by 3. But they're in a local optimum, the "price reduced by 3" is identical for revenue purposes, and they choose their current local optimum. Then ice cream could still be priced too high and be "appropriately priced". Is this impossible?
At what point does a demand for evidence come back around to making the requestor seem less like a prudent, rational truth seeker and more like someone with naive lack of personal, lived experience? Like, not a single soul will say "got evidence for that assertion?" when it's a news story about EA or Oracle or Adobe acquiring a company and people are predicting that the acquired product will be destroyed, and isolated demands for rigor will be laughed out of the comment section. Why is that - when does it flip over to "oh, so I guess it's okay to just nakedly assert that food companies will seek profit by reformulating their recipes, even though there isn't a shred of evidence to support that, therefore, we're now allowed to predict anything!"
The complement of the claim is essentially "food manufacturers will never again attempt to modify their recipes to make them more hyperpalatable, now that GLP-1 exists." Does that need evidence? It's the null hypothesis, but it certainly sounds a lot more unrealistic than the opposite.
In my experience, the Mozilla apt repo would still have dependencies on system libraries that can only be installed by updating the operating system to another LTS. Like, the Mozilla Firefox package depends on libssl, which depends on another package and that other package can only be updated by updating the operating system, which typically drastically changes the look and feel of system menus and things that are not easily gleaned by looking at a screenshot of an empty desktop. Maybe this isn't true of KDE and the interface remains stable across to update cycles. Thank you for the suggestion.
Okay, people say this. Could you please, and this is not a rhetorical device, it's a sincere question: how do you keep the browser updated without updating the operating system? Or if you are updating the os, doesn't that change the user interface? And if the user interface is changing, doesn't that confuse your grandmother? I installed Ubuntu for my mom and after four years Firefox was out of date, and the website for banking she'd use would have checks where logging in was only possible if the one if the user agent was recent enough. One can fake that, but I didn't want to. But updating Firefox meant updating Ubuntu, which means that every single icon and every single menu position changes, and I didn't want to have to teach her where everything was again. How do you avoid this?
There actually is a stopping point , and the definition of ultra processed food versus processed food is often drawn at the line where you can expect someone in their home kitchen to be able to do the processing. So, the question kind of goes whether or not you would expect someone to be able to make cheese or wine at home. I think there you would find it natural to conclude that there's a difference between a Cheeto, which can only be created in a factory with a secret extrusion process, versus cottage cheese, which can be created inside of a cottage. And you would probably also note that there is a difference between American cheese which requires a process that results in a Nile Red upload, and cheddar cheese which still could be done at home, over the course of months like how people make soap at home. You can tell that wine can be made at home because people make it in jails. I have found that a lot of people on Hackernews have a tendency to flatten distinctions into a binary, and then attack the binary as if distinctions don't matter. This is another such example.
Would you consider all food in existence to be "processed", because ultimately all food is chopped up by your teeth or broken down by your saliva and stomach acid? If some descriptor applies to every single member of a set, why use the descriptor at all? It carries no semantic value.
Is it fair to recognize that there is a category difference between the processing that happens by default on every cell phone camera today, and the time and labor intensive processing performed by professionals in the time of film? What's happening today is like if you took your film to a developer and then the negatives came back with someone having airbrushed out the wrinkles and evened out skin tones. I think that photographers back in the day would have made a point of saying "hey, I didn't take my film to a lab where an artist goes in and changes stuff."
It seems very self evident to me (given what we now see with legalized gambling) that the harms of broadly legalizing it and creating an industry around it far outweigh any harms associated with black markets by a wide margin. Also, black markets for gambling still exist, so this kind of just feels additively worse. Just from a measure of utility, even if we went back to only having gambling performed with organized criminals breaking legs when people can't pay, that would still result in significantly fewer ruined lives, significantly better quality of life for the communities that are having wealth sucked out of them and into gambling syndicates. It's entirely unproductive destruction of wealth, robbing from the poor and giving to the rich. If gambling made anything better in net for society, gambling syndicates would never attempt to legalize it.
A few things; one, even if it's not strictly speaking true that cocaine use always leads to addiction every single time, we know now better than in Victorian era England how often it does, and Doyle not having been a cocaine user may have lost some of the elements of how cocaine is addictive and what it looks like. I hate to say that there is some moral duty to show a protagonist using cocaine as having a problem with its use that needs to be overcome, but I do think it'd be strange too to keep what was effectively this SMBC comic (https://smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=191) as Holmes' use of coke.
Secondly, the stories that mention coke use are all written from the perspective of Holmes' best friend, who we'd expect to be biased towards writing about his friend in a positive light. I don't think this is accidental. Watson quotes him effectively saying "I just do coke because life is so mundane and boring, and not stimulating enough for me" which is nearly the exact same justification and thought process used by like, every addict and if not a word-for-word quote, then at least very similar for Chris Moltisanti's justification of his own addiction to Tony Soprano.
It may not be an exact rendering of what was in the books but it is extremely natural modification to make, where otherwise we'd have flat Marty Stu character who is talking in ways that seem very consistent with at least problematic use and yet who's not addicted. "Our own times" have dealt with at least 100 years of coke addiction, 50 years of crack so maybe we're just not naive enough to believe that a guy who's saying "my friend just takes it when he's bored, but he's bored all the time because his mind is too sharp for this dull world" isn't a problematic user or addict.
The definition of a monopoly basically resolves to "those companies that don't get pressured to meaningfully compete on price or quality", it's a tautology. If a firm has to compete, it doesn't remain a monopoly. What's the point you're making here?
What if the cops, the friend, and the consulate all said, "we do not care about a random mentally ill stranger, on a different continent, sending threats. You said he's been doing this for years and has done nothing yet? Sounds like you're safe. We have real crimes to solve. We have real murders to figure out. Call back if he shows up at your house, but he most certainly never will." Or maybe the FBI is like "oh, okay. Thanks. We'll keep an eye out but now this guy's part of an investigation so we can't talk about him to you." and then they do nothing, the friend doesn't reply, and the consulate is like "we're not obligated to reply." Those seem like super likely conclusions to the husband helping, too. So then would that have no longer been the "actual solution?" It seems that the "actual solution" is only determined after the fact once there is a success, and that's used as a proxy for whether or not the actions were really trying. If she had never replied and then the guy stopped texting after a year, would that have also been Actually Trying? Maybe it would've, because one could come up with a post-hoc explanation as to why that was an Actual Try. It feels sloppy to not distinguish what makes something a form of an Actual Try vs a successful try, because Actually Trying should be able to count failures as part of sincere attempts. Otherwise, Actually Trying collapses into being a synonym for success.
I know, the takeaway is so funny, because it's not actually up to the author whether or not the solution she took would've worked. To her, "Actually Trying" and "not trying" both hinged on the success of other people helping her out. To a more hard hearted individual, the only thing that would've qualified as "Actually Trying" would've been flying out to India in person and then finding the guy first when he'd least expect it. "Actually Trying" was only determined after the fact when the result was that there was a success. If the husband coordinating with a friend hadn't worked, what then? Did he "Actually Try" if the FBI, the Consulate, and the friend were all like "we don't give a shit about this random little troll sending death threats. Did you know everyone gets death threats all the time on the Internet? Log off." What then? Is that still Actually Trying, or do we only determine that after a success? Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy, friends.
The husband was the social proof that this random junkie woman who's complaining about a guy on the opposite side of the planet was worth taking seriously. She might not have wanted to go to the cops because she didn't want to go to them, have them laugh it off and then feel both powerless and humiliated, and the conclusion is that another person who then manages the difficulty isn't even trying? Maybe not, but that's a different think from deciding that they aren't doing it because they're stuck in some old mindset.
The other example she gives is this: "These are people who could successfully launch a product in a foreign country with little instruction, but who complain that there aren’t any fun people to meet on the dating apps." Like, girl, it's not up to you whether or not there are any cool people on dating apps. There's a selection bias of who gets on dating apps going on here. You can do everything within your power and Actually Try all you want to have it be another way, but you can't really force cool people to socialize in the way that you want them to. It could be the case that there really is no one cool on those dating apps, because social climate being the way that it is means that no one feels comfortable showing their whole, unvarnished, "cool" selves and the coolest people are hidden.
At what point is someone "Actually Trying"? Is it once they've succeeded? This feels like the self help, "The Secret", "Girl, Wash Your Face" of previous eras but dressed up in the language of people who use terms like "non-zero probability", "priors", and "local optimum". The takeaway should not be that someone shouldn't try, but that the serenity prayer's most difficult part is the "wisdom to know the difference". She had the power to change this, but the wisdom to know the difference here was not guaranteed. It would be a kinder message to everyone who is in a tough spot to at least acknowledge that having a husband to vouch for her, with connections, free time, and a motivated reason to help out kind of changes to what extent she personally could be responsible for Actually Trying.
The solar panels required energy to create, too. I don't think that it would take centuries for replacing Cray 1 with a Raspberry Pi 5 to pay for itself in carbon intensity, even if both are powered by solar panels. The Cray example is seemingly uncharitable, but the principal is the same because if the only relevant thing is solar power, then it should take centuries in that case too, right?
If a laptop costs 1000 dollars to buy, it couldn't have used more than 1000 dollars worth of hydrocarbons to create, unless firms are operating at a loss, right? Yes, the laptop required mining lithium, mining steel, turning hydrocarbons into plastics, growing silicon crystals, photolithography for the chips, running the conveyor belts for the assembly lines, etc and all those things required electricity and the electricity was mostly provided by fossil fuels, but the total amount of fossil fuels used (when considering price) couldn't have exceeded the cost of the laptop, because that would mean that some firms are spending more on fuel than they're receiving in profit, and such firms in the general case don't survive long. So if you take the cost of the laptop and then convert that to the mix of hydrocarbons used for energy at the time of the product's manufacture, that gives you an absolute upper bound of how much embodied carbon that thing must represent. It also gives you a lower bound of how efficient something has to be before you've paid for the old thing being thrown out and the new thing being manufactured.
So consider this: you have a desktop from 2010, it cost 1000 dollars, and operated at 150 watts. You consider getting a laptop today for 500 dollars, and it would have twice the nominal performance and operates at 50 watts. The total amount of embodied carbon for both of those devices has to be less than $1,500 worth of carbon dioxide produced by hydrocarbons. It can't be higher than that. Then you consider the running cost of 150 watts per hour vs 50 watts per hour. Well, back in 2010, 1000 (2010) dollars could buy you about 6000 to 9000 kilowatt hours worth of electricity when adjusting for conversion rates and electricity cost in China. Today, 500 dollars can buy about 3500 to 6500 kilowatt hours depending on whether you're buying in the US or China. So in order for the embodied carbon to be paid off for the laptop vs the desktop, let's take 7500 kilowatts for the desktop (a fair midpoint) plus 5000 kilowatts for the laptop, and then divide that by the running difference in power of the two systems: 100 watts. So if you plan on operating the laptop continuously for 13 years, the carbon savings from the efficiency gain of the new device would offset any possible carbon generated from the old device. But the laptop is twice as powerful, and what I gave was an absolute upper bound, and cannot be taken as a good ballpark estimate for how much carbon was actually produced. In the example that I gave, there was a 15-year age difference between the old system and the new system. Depending on how the devices were used, it's reasonable to assume that the right time to have replaced the desktop was back in 2023. Depending on how you use your device, it may never end up paying itself off before using less carbon than the older device. Waste is possible. But if the new device is on longer than 125,000 hours, it will have. It's just a sanity check, but it's good to have an upper bound.
Consider the Ultimatum game. Alice and Bob are part of a millionaire madman's experiment, and so Alice and Bob are told the following: they have won a sum of $10,000 and Alice will be given the authority to decide how to divide their winnings. If Bob accepts Alice's offer, then both of them get the money as decided in the offer. If Bob rejects Alice's offer, then both of them get nothing. In addition, they have no ability to communicate or negotiate the offer; it's a one and done thing. So let's say Alice offers 100 dollars to Bob, and she will keep 9900.
Now, most people would say that Bob is acting out of spite if he rejects Alice's offer, because he's causing Alice losses and he gains nothing, and the benefit he receives is that Alice is made sad by this. Is that a fair interpretation, though? He believes that he's acting out of a moral obligation to screw over someone who themself is (in his mind) acting unjustly. He's valuing punishing someone that he feels is breaking a social contract greater than the 100 dollars that he would otherwise have. What do you call what he is doing in this situation if not spite? And if he is acting out of a principled objection to an unfair situation, does it become something other than spite? And if it's actually principled, why does the principle seem to melt away when the offer is $7000 to $3000?
I feel like spite is a huge motivator behind a lot of cultural issues nowadays but it can only come from people who feel as if they are coming from a place of weakness or victimization. There is always a moral indignation. The gratification is in seeing their vision of justice meted out. It isn't always a psychopathic, sadistic behavior but it can be in those cases where a vision of justice is distorted and psychopathic. Consider this: isn't imprisoning people often a form, ultimately, of societal spite? In isolation it may be cheaper to just give petty criminals whatever they want rather than paying the cost for them being jailed. Amortized cost, it's probably a lot cheaper to pay a drunkard's taxi home from the bar every single time he goes drinking than to lock him in jail for 3 months for a second DUI. Is spite the reason that we don't just give him that? Again, the justice thing.
> First of all, Data never willingly jeopardized the crew.
This presupposes that he has consciousness. He can only "willingly" do things if he is conscious. If the argument is that there was an external influence that changed his behavior thus making it not volitional then you have to distinguish why the external force makes his Lore behavior unwilling, but Soong's initial programming willing. If I set a thermostat to 85 degrees, would you say that the thermostat is "unwillingly" making people uncomfortable, but at the factory default of 70 degrees, it's helping people feel comfortable? It's difficult to distinguish what is willing and unwilling if consciousness is in question so this feels like begging the question.
> I also feel that equating data to someone who is neurodivergent is kind of insulting as neurodivergent people do have feelings and emotions.
I'm stating it as an aside / justification for why we want the story to go a certain direction because I see so many articles elevating Data as a heroic representation of neurodivergence. My goal wasntt to be offensive. There are a ton of episodes where Data is puzzled by people's behavior and then someone has to explain it to him almost as if someone is also explaining to the audience it as a morality tale. Remember when Data was struggling to understand how he was lied to? Or how he lost in that strategy game? Or how to be funny? We don't just see him struggle, someone explains to him exactly how he should learn from his experience. That appears to be for the benefit of the android and the people behind the fourth wall.
> A rock cannot express a desire.
It can if you carve a rock into the words "I want to live" and even though the rock didn't configure itself that way, it's expressing a desire. Noonien Soong built Data, so it's possible that he designed Data to state the desire to be human. Data does seem to have an interiority but he also seems to not have it based on the caprice of outside forces, which is problematic because the way that he is controlled is not very different from the way he is built.
On the Data question I'm not saying that Maddox should've won but that the fact that Picard won is more about it being narratively required rather than "prove that I am conscious" being a good argument.
Maybe Jean Luc Picard should've lost that court case. Obviously we as the audience want to have our heroes win against some super callous guy who wants to kill our hero (and audience stand in for anyone who is neurodivergent) Data, but the argument was pretty weak, because Data often acted in completely alien ways that jeopardized the safety of the crew, and the way that those issues came up was due to him doing things that were not compatible with what we perceive as consciousness. But also, in that episode, they make a point of trying to prove that he was conscious by showing that he engaged in behavior that wasn't goal oriented, like keeping keepsakes and mementos of his friends, his previous relationship with Tasha, and his relationship with his cat. That was an attempt at proving that he was conscious too, but the argument from doubt is tough because how can you prove that a rock is not conscious - and if that can't be proved, should we elevate human rights to a rock?