Gunax

I appreciate your comment because I think I am usually on the other side.

The implications of requiring disclosure are significant. Do we really want to pass a law that says books, pamphlets, blogs, etc. cannot be published anonymously? Do we want to limit the amount of pamphlets you can print because some people can afford to print a lot?

For instance, your very comment is published under a throwaway. Couldn't we say that your comment, being an attempt to influence us, shouldn't be anonymous? After all, perhaps you could stand to personally benefit in some way?

Bah, fair enough.

I think the thrust of my argument is true though. We could have gone 10 or 20 years back instead (C64 is downright ancient).

I think this shows something more important: we are not hardware limited. There's no reason someone could not have implemented this 40 years ago. Our hardware is way beyond our research.

I didn't know how to create a general intelligence, but however it's done will probably be something an undergrad could implement in a week using a desktop computer in 2024.

My very casual understanding is that Mond really has been mostly discarded. The article says it's 'in trouble'.

We see some galaxies whose gravity is near the baryonic prediction and others where it is not.

- explaining this with dark matter is easy: some galaxies have a lot of dark matter and some have little. - explaining this with Mond seems impossible. If there is some gravity law we don't understand, how can it have different effects on different galaxies?

- how do we explain the famous bullet cluster finding?

> It’s also irrelevant that the algorithm maker isn’t a direct competitor if you and your competitors each agree to use their product knowing the others are doing the same in concert.

I didn't understand the implications of the FTCs decision here. Presumably no one is colluding to use the algorithm together. They are each independently clients of the algorithm creator.

So is the first user to buy the software okay? But then each subsequent user is colluding with the former clients?

It's because the platforms realized that people are more interested in things they have not subscribed to.

Of course, this is disappointing to creators. 'They subscribed voluntarily, but the algorithm hides our content!'

As a casual user--the algorithm is more correct than I. I don't care about 90%+ of my subscriptions.

My dad tells a story that happened in 198X while the 30-minute guarantee still existed. He was living in DC and traffic in his neighbourhood was absolutely abysmal at peak hours when gov employees were leaving work. Apparently it could take 20 minutes just to get drive a few blocks.

So he ordered pizza with the delivery time carefully planned to coincide right when traffic was greatest.

Yet somehow the drive was able to get it to his house in 28 minutes. He tried to ask the driver how this was possible, but the driver was allready rushing back to his car.

We always enjoy the finality of legal process until we are on the losing side. I don't know why UK law is made that way, but nothing should be final, for precisely this reason--clerical errors can happen.

What other details do you need?

Ive been at Meta and Amazon and did not experience anything like this.

But, it can definitely be true. The reality is that <TRILLION DOLLAR COMPANIES> are just so big, they don't really have a doscernable culture. The difference between orgs is enormous.

And the difference in business units (eg between Facebook vs Oculus vs internal tools or AWS vs Twitch vs Amazon operations) is even greater.

One plus of big tech is that means you can change teams and get a very different experience.

Certainly. My point is that there isn't an unlimited pool of qualified candidates.

There are things other than academics, but that makes the pool even smaller.

While it's true that there is a limit (really there is a limit to every university study), there is also a limit to the number of people who are qualified and interested.

For instance, there are only about 20k people who score > 510 on the MCAT per year (the average matriculant has about a 512). And remember that includes US & Canada.

While I know there are a lot of people rejected from medical school each year, some probably should not be accepted to medical school. I think we could probably increase the number of seats by about 20%.

The American and Canadian medical schools place a high bar on accepting students, so nearly everyone who is accepted graduates. It's uncommon for medical students to perform poorly.

But this isn't true everywhere. Some places prefer to admit many students and let them sink-or-swim.

Yes. But how much of their results is due to their attitude, versus just a coincidence?

I like movies, but admittedly know nothing about making them.

Big budget movies require hundreds of people with their own opinions working together to work towards a single vision. I don't find it impossible that demanding, narcissistic, and disagreeable people may have an advantage in that regard.

Google claims to stand for small business, but (my understanding is) part of the justification of DMA is to reduce the xonpetitive advantage of mega techs.

That is, Alphabet is required to separate their various products and not use data from one to influence the other.

I am guessing this is what is making Flights more cumbersome. But i think we need a legal expert to explain exactly how the law is causing this.

This seems so odd. What if the browser wasn't made by Google? What about equivalent modes in other browsers?

Incognito mode was actually quite innovative in 2007. And i thought the warning page when you open it is quite clear.

This seems odd:

> Had somebody been able to foresee the popularity and success of ‘Star Wars,’ it would have been crazy not to save the grove where Endor was made and use it as a tourist venue.

This was not the first Star Wars movie. This was the followup to the most successful sequel ever made at that point, which was itself a sequel to the highest grossing film ever. So successful it was famously given a pseudonymous title to acoid attention from fans.

How could you not expect it to be remembered?

Freakonomics is fun and clever.

A more subtle and standard economics book is probably more correct.

But then it would be boring and I wouldn't have read it.

My initial thought was recording the position in each frame.

Obviously after reading it, it seems obvious. And if I were implementing it, I am pretty sure I would have came to the same solution.

But it was not immediately obvious to me from the title.

I use vscode and had no idea it was electron. Electron apps had a very poor reputation 10 years ago.

Yet it feels very snappy to me.

I think it's pretty much impossible to write unambiguous laws. That's just reality.

Congress are already criticized for writing laws which are too long.

But there is a conflict here between writing laws which are unambiguous and laws which are easy to understand.

Also, I don't know that corporate citizenship matters in this case.

The US has strong free speech rights. You cannot just ban a person or group from the right to petition their elected officials without constitutional changes.

Whether that right should exist is perhaps contentious.

It's nice to think that some education will solve conspiracies.

But conspiratorial thinking originates in the gut--not the brain.

It's not a lack of education (or an excess of stupidity). We become conspiatorial when we feel powerless.

Whether that's about elections, or 9/11, or AIDS. And yes, i am susceptible to conspiracy too, and do are you.

The cure to conspiracy isn't facts, but empathy.

Given that this drone was apparently designed for game recovery, I think it's easy to show he had prior intent.

I know it's comedy, but the essense relies on faulty reasoning of why you were employed.

You are employed because the company expects the profit/savings you generate to exceed the cost of employment. If that stops being true, then naturally it's no longer profitable to employ you.

You'll notice there is no mention of the overall profitability of the organization in that equation. It holds equally true for both profitable and unprofitable orgs.

Obviously the world in messy, and it isn't always clear whether a given department or unit is or will be profitable.

That's it. We finally know where the real racism comes from.

Vote them out people! Stop being scared! Stand up for yourself!

I love it! Though I am not an expert, I can at least see this.

However, I hate to be a nitpicker, but I think this is solving a separate issue. I don't think this issue is about authenticating the legitimacy of deep fake porn. Rather, the mere existence of it is the issue.

That is, people don't care that it's fake. People don't want to buy the Apple proof of reality because they don't want reality.

So I think your points 1 & 2 apply whether stack ranking is implemented or not.

Either way, the direct managers decide who to fire, not an executive.

The difference stack ranking makes is not who to fire, but whether anyone is going to be fired.

In theory, the manager is on the chopping block. But in reality, success is difficult to measure in business. Often the contributions of orgs are subtle and difficult to measure. The effects are often only apparent years later, if ever.

I didn't write this because it was too long already, but it depends on the technology.

I agree that CFC bans are a good example of when something was done.

But I can also name many situations in which nothing effective was done. And even in the face of overwhelming effort to halt it, the resistance amounted to little difference.

The difference all comes down to the technology.

So, my argument is that there are some technologies which can be addressed, and others which cannot.

Solveable problems tend towards those with few decision makers, low incentive to defect, adherence can be monitored, costs are internal, and where the problem exists at top-level of large organizations.

Unsolveable problems tend towards those with lots of decision makers, high incentives to defect, difficult to detect violators, costs are external, and the problem is personal.

CFCs fall more in the the former--there just aren't that many CFC manufacturers (apparently 18 companies accounted for > 99% of production). Consider for a second, an alternate world where everyone builds their own refrigerants in their garage, and each individual decided whether to use CFCs or an alternative. Do you think we would have solved CFCs by now?

This particular issue is very much the latter. The tech is already out in the open. The decision to use it responsibility or not is left to individuals.

You mentioned foisting externalities on the rest of society. I agree that this is happening. And I agree that society will not stand for it. But my point is not that society is going to accept it, it's that society cannot do anything about it. Oh, people will shout and stomp and raise hell. Hearing will be had. People will be lambasted in front of congress. Voters will decry politicians to do something. And efforts will be attempted. But in the end, it will all be for naught.

I realize this is a doomer outlook. Please don't mistake what I am saying as an endorsement.

Well I am going to bluntly disagree, sorry. I am dismissive. But in the end, I will be right and you will be wrong. That's the pattern in technology.

1. Some technology is invented 2. It changes the status quo, directly or indirectly, on society. 3. There is some degree of backlash, regulations, and outrage. 4. Everyone accepts the new reality and forgets what it was even like before. Step 3 is often forgotten and considered quaint.

The reality is this is an unsolveable situation. Porn deep-fakes are here. There is nothing that will change that. 20 years from now, celebrities will just accept that they are going to exist.

I'm not even arguing that the technology is good (im not sure it is) or that I support it.

I am arguing that it's inevitable.

You think I am going to be irrelevant, but I think it's the opposite.

In the last century we have invented number technologies responsible for megadeaths (cars, air pollution, carpet bombing). If those couldn't be stopped after killing thousands every year, then neither will this.