I am reminded of an episode of SpongeBob SquarePants where he meticulously plans a party with a huge list of scheduled, mandatory activities, and hovers around guests and tries to direct them on how to talk to each other and have fun. No one has fun until he leaves to perform errands and then gets locked out of his house. I wonder how much of that episode's plot was intended as a morality tale for children, and it's funny to consider that children's cartoon animators may have wide discretion to create stories meant to instruct kids on issues the animators have personally experienced. It's funny to imagine someone like Stephen Hillenburg or Derek Drymon or another writer going to a party that wasn't very fun and then saying "we need to let the future generation know that they shouldn't be too authoritarian about their parties", haha.
The entire value proposition of AWS vs running one's own server is basically this: is it easier to ask for permission, or forgiveness? You're asking for permission to get a million dollars worth of servers / hardware / power upgrades now, or you're asking for forgiveness for spending five million dollars in AWS after 10 months. Which will be easy: permission or forgiveness?
If you happen to wear a green shirt on St. Patrick's Day, then maybe you can sue and say that you were fired because your boss is bigoted against Irish Americans. No one ever comes right out and says that they're firing someone for an illegal reason, so the PIP and the rest of that song and dance is to try to prove that it was above board for a potential lawsuit, which companies seek to avoid at all costs.
That's true, the arguments were also made for television, movies, radio, and fiction books. However, during the times of movies, television, radio, and written books being introduced, the trend line of student performance seemed to be going upward. It now seems to be trending downward. It's harder to convincingly make the argument that cell phones are no worse than TVs when student performance was increasing during the TV era and is decreasing during the smartphone era. Even if the correlation is totally spurious, it's an uphill climb to ignore it.
It may shock you to learn that the top level executives of arms manufacturers have a somewhat different attitude towards human life and protecting revenue than you or I do. Such a person may be puzzled by the outrage and actually lack the insight to understand that a single accidental death because of the flawed design would be enough to imperil contracts, because the ratio of intentional fatalities to accidental fatalities is still like 100000 to 1.
okay, well that guy won an election so clearly it's possible even without sortition. If people are picked at random then the likelihood of getting some wacko is lower rather than higher, because wackos are more highly motivated to try to act on their wackadoo policies and because of the way voting is implemented, that wouldn't really be a problem for them because it no longer appears to be disqualification for a politician to be crazy, and the crazy ones are the ones who run. On the flip side, the actual rate of totally crazy people across the entire population is likely to be smaller than you expect and random selection would represent the underlying rate of wackos in the public. If it turns out that the rate of wackos is so high that like, 51 percent of your legislature is hearing voices in their head and living like Diogenes, then representative democracy isn't going to help you either.
Is it your contention that if an obese, not-runner who views walking as a form of exercise were to start running, the immediate effect would not be knee injury, but actually strengthened knees, on the evidence of a study comparing recreational runners to people who are obese and don't move at all?
There's no obligation to publicly reveal the threat of a lawsuit to a party that is abusing your license. In fact, if you don't reveal the existence of the lawsuit, the only way then that you'd gain that reputation is if the threatened party then publishes their threat, which they won't do if they straight up know that they're in the wrong, because then that damages their reputation. Why would a big company publish a blog about a small company suing them for blatantly violating their software license? They want that crap to go away. Get the money. Shaming a company doesn't make anyone any money unless they decide to voluntarily comply, which is what is being asked here. They're being asked to voluntarily do the right thing. If they were likely to voluntarily do the right thing, they would've done that first.
If you don't do anything legally threatening, then you make it that much harder for every single OSS vendor to make money, because the precedent is getting established that there is no penalty for breaking the rules.
When I was a teenager I would do super cut-rate work on computers for people, and my father did helpfully point out that undercharging for valuable work just makes it harder for people whose day job is to do the same work, because then they have to compete with a naive teenager. You're the kind hearted OSS / freemium vendor in this case. Threatening legal action costs nothing. Punishment is meant as a deterrent for antisocial behavior. Failing to even threaten them will result in less money going to people who deliver a public good.
People try to maximize the good and minimize the bad consequences of their actions. They might not do it using utils or with actual quantification but they are doing it. And definitionally, there's no way to get rid of an incentive to defect, because getting rid of it creates a new incentive to defect in a different way. Like, for the purposes of talking about this article, "incentive" could be shorthand for "any reason you could come up with to do something wrong to get ahead" but it could also more broadly be defined as "the expected good results of a choice". As an example, as long as money is important in society, there is always going to exist an "incentive" to rob a bank. That can't be removed. What we can do is make it harder to rob a bank, and force reputational damage and jail to thieves. Creating a society where money doesn't matter might be possible, but then there'd be no bank. By the same token, there will always be an incentive to fake data. We can make it harder to fake data and force reputational damage to people who fake data, but that incentive to fake will exist. The only way that it wouldn't exist would be if we made it so that the outcomes of research didn't matter at all, but it would be hard to imagine a society functioning where any research would be happening if no outcomes mattered. If that were the case, then high school dropouts would try to get research grants for baking soda and vinegar volcanoes. The only way to prevent that would be to create a system where people have to justify their research without caring about the results, but then you've reintroduced "incentives", just different ones that can still be cheated again.
By arguing that it's the moral character of people that's the problem and not the mere incentives, one key disincentive is reintroduced which is the reputational damage thing I alluded to earlier. Most people don't rob banks not because there's no incentive, but because the disincentive (jail, reputational damage) is so high as to make that course of action seem stupid. But if you argue that it's incentives and not moral character to blame, you remove the disincentive of making defectors suffer reputational damage. You can't remove an incentive entirely. You can only change them, and add disincentives. Reputational harm is one of those disincentives, and so is forcing things like pre-registering experiments, open access journals, etc.
This point is so obvious and self-evident that I'm really amazed that anybody is acting as if that's not the central thesis of the essay. One of the first links is to a PDF with a title by Mar Hicks called "Sexism is a feature, not a bug." Every single time someone argues sincerely or otherwise that sexism is no longer a problem in software development communities, please think back to the time that all these self described hackers couldn't read an essay spelling out in detail that the "technical" designation is socially constructed by everyone else without your permission and often is along gendered lines - they all read that, missing the point, and said "sure you can!" How many of these same commenters have described and will go on to describe a colleague with more mathematical, statistical, and scientific rigor than they and be like "oh, she's not that technical"? Will it be all of them?
If the argument is that it's not a big deal because it doesn't even work, then why collectively are we even bothering? Either it works and is something for reactionaries to fear and is effective social pressure, or it's a bunch of ineffective sound and fury that gives cover to your right wing aunt to tell stories about how "someone she knows" got fired for telling a joke. If it works, then let's own it completely, with all its flaws. If it doesn't work, then why bother at all? If it doesn't even work, then why try to defend the practice? Do we want it to work? Do we want it to be an effective form of social control?
Are we just straight up ignoring the Jia Tan xz exploit that happened 10 months ago that would've granted ssh access to the majority of servers running OpenSSH?, or does that not count for the purposes of this question, because that was an open source library rather than a hardware manufacturer?
It's pretty obviously sarcastic, but it's interesting because ChatGPT thinks it's sincere. It appears that sarcasm detection is still outside the capabilities of large language models, which is surprising because people have been manually annotating sarcastic remarks on internet forums for the past 30 years. How could it get simpler than that to create a training set?
Choosing not to buy is still a choice and it seems like it's not so illusory as to escape notice by reporters and (by extension) the companies themselves.
Why would you even bother reading the summary if you don't care enough about the contents to actually engage with it meaningfully? It's 13,000 words. It's 52 pages of a Harry Potter novel, and you used to be able to devour those. If you believe that AI is as transformative as a lot of people here seem to think it is, maybe it is worth mulling over and digesting the public statement put out by the single largest organized religious body in the world for real, instead of getting a potentially hallucinated reply by an AI who might have prompting to misrepresent the contents of such a statement.
But a random passerby also isn't admissible in court but could be used as a tip, right? If an anonymous person calls the cops and says "I heard someone say that Bob did it", there's no chance in hell that an anonymous person's hearsay could be admitted as evidence in any court, but if the cops get that tip, decide to check Bob's social media and decide that Bob looks a lot like the guy in their CCTV footage, they're not getting a warrant for a search based solely on the inadmissible hearsay, they're getting it based on their determination that the tip that they got does happen to match the footage they have. If they had to manually make a determination about whether a given person's face matched up with their CCTV footage and the warrant was issued on their determination that it does, it seems very complicated to then figure out to what extent the tip itself has to be admissible as evidence, right? Like, if a psychic called a police department with a tip and the cops put a house under surveillance and the surveillance reveals probable cause to get a warrant, should that kill the case because the tip came from supernatural sources?
We don't even know if it's actually a 1.5 frame latency for real because the test didn't try to establish that. The author said it looked like it was 1.5 frames, but that could be a coincidence. It just looks like a 1.5 frame overhead. It could, in reality, be a constant time overhead rather than a function of frames and so would be fine with a lower frame rate.
Tearing would affect everyone that uses a computer with X11 but your proposed example of a TV with 30i refresh rate would only affect the tiny subset of users that use a CRT television as a monitor, right?
The suicide rate in the United States is higher than it is in Japan if you believe official government figures of Japan and the United States. The talking point about suicide in Japan is one of those that's 30 years out of date.
Quarters and dimes used to be made out of silver so a quarter had to be 2.5x the volume of a quarter so their metal values matched their face values ratios.
> I find both constantly cluttering up my wallet.
The majority of Americans do not have an ongoing problem of having too much cash in their wallet, even if you consider single dollars to be practically irrelevant. Most people would rather have their money in aggregate take up an inconvenient amount of space rather than having there be a risk of losing it because it's so physically small.
When vacuum tubes have high voltages applied to them, they generate x rays. The glass envelope is impregnated with lead so as to reduce the amount of x ray radiation that is emitted. The primary source of x ray radiation from TVs had been from their other components other than the tube itself but the tube was still a source of ionizing radiation.
If you had money riding on it because of legalized sports gambling in your state and sports regulators clearing it to be a thing to bet on, then it was probably pretty psychologically important whether or not there was a 1 or 2 minute delay on you seeing the results of the game.
The protocol for a torrent is that random parts of a file get seeded to random people requesting a file, and that the clients which act as seeds are able to store arbitrary amounts of data to then forward to other clients in the swarm. Do the properties about scaling still hold when it's a bunch of people all requesting real time data which has to be in-order? Do the distributed Rokus, Apple TVs, Fire TVs and other smart TVs all have the headroom in compute and storage to be able to simultaneously decode video and keep old video data in RAM and manage network connections with upload to other TVs in their swarm - and will uploading data to other TVs in the swarm not negatively impact their own download speeds?
> Unlike particles, humans will actively seek to exploit any control system you've set up.
Well, agents will. If you created a genetic algorithm for an AI agent whose reward function was the amount of dead cobras it got from Delhi, I feel like you'd quickly find that the best performing agent was the one that started breeding cobras. In the human case and in the AI case the reward function has been hacked. In the AI case we decide that the reward function wasn't designed well, but in the human case we decide that the agents are sneaky petes who have a low moral character and "exploited" the system.
> we need more relay operators. Can’t wave a magic wand. There’s like 8000 relays. Haven’t looked in a while.
The reason that there are so few relays and exit nodes is that everyone that runs an exit node believes, for very good reason, that they'll be opening themselves up to subpoenas and arrest for operating one. You know who never has to worry about getting arrested? Surveillance agencies tasked with running exit nodes.
Consider the two classes of relay and exit operators:
1. People who operate relays and exit nodes long term, spending money to do so with no possibility or expectation of receiving money in return, and opening themselves up to legal liability for doing so, whose only tangible benefit comes from the gratification of contributing to an anonymous online network
2. Government agencies who operate relays and exit nodes long term, spending government allocated money to operate servers, with no material risk to the agencies and whose tangible benefit comes from deanonymizing anonymous users. Crucially, the agencies are specifically tasked with deanonymizing these users.
Now, I guess the question is whether or not you think the people in group 1 have more members and more material resources than the agencies in group 2. Do you believe that there are more people willing to spend money to run the risk of having equipment seized and arrest for no gain other than philosophical gratification than there are government computers running cost and risk free, deanonymizing traffic (which is their job to do)?