Mechanical9

I am being serious. I have a very low tolerance for conspiracy theories touted as facts.

There does not seem to be any evidence that corroborates this. The most I can find are claims that some records were destroyed, so we won't know. That doesn't automatically mean there is a connection, though.

"Some sources have suggested that Murray's experiments were part of Project MKUltra" doesn't really seem like strong evidence.

Lots of changes will be made every day at Twitter that will have to keep the Musk metric healthy. Even if the changes aren't explicitly designed to promote Musk's own tweets, having the metric visible to all employees will at minimum eliminate any change that would demote Musk's tweets. Over time, the Twitter algorithm will become biased towards promoting Musk-like content.

The ultra rich have orders of magnitude more influence over politics, regulation, and private business than the average western citizen, so I would think that focusing on the ultra rich in one way or another should yield pretty substantial results.

The actual title is "Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights", so of course it isn't codified yet.

If these principles go against current data practices, IMO that seems like all the more reason to push for this to happen.

It sounds like you are trying to justify an anti-majoritarian stance with majoritarian consensus. If you are against majoritarianism, you should probably find another way to make your case. Here, let me help you out:

It's better for a small minority of people to make the rules. A small minority of people agree with this, thus it is correct.

Google doesn't disincentivize any of that, they just don't encourage it. Google has mechanisms for rewarding people for doing extraordinary work: peer bonuses, spot bonuses. People who make outsized contributions are compensated, and people who consistently contribute more than others are promoted. But systems that require heroic efforts to continue functioning are fundamentally broken and unsustainable, and need to be made easier to maintain.

> I want to make it very clear that this decision was not my fault - I blame the people who made the bad decisions that led us to this point.

Sounds about right.

This is assuming that layoffs affect the correct group of people, in which case the obvious question is why couldn't those people be informed earlier and been given a choice to find a different position or to improve their performance? At Google specifically, many high performers were laid off without explanation. When entire programs were cut, many general-purpose programmers were lost simply due to being in the wrong place at the wrong time rather than having the wrong skills or having low performance.

Given that the evaluation of who to cut is made by outside groups, in a short period of time, without appeal, it seems more likely that layoffs in these cases are less about cutting low performers and more about getting rid of people the company is mismanaging, or people that the company is overpaying. Without changing that mismanagement, the result won't be a better environment. The message to employees is rough also: "don't trust our performance evaluations".

> What. Employees can quit, which is synonymous to firing the boss.

I disagree, quitting is not synonymous with firing the boss. When you leave, the company and your boss retain everything you built. You forfeit your stock options. Finding a new job isn't always trivial, either. Changing jobs and possibly changing locations is expensive.

It's hard to consider other means, such as busses, when low-occupancy vehicles are causing traffic on every road the bus would use. This problem does not solve itself.

With respect to incompetent government, I like to share this opinion whenever possible: The US government and US state governments are incompetent due to constant gridlock. Incentives of politicians within our governments are similarly to draw out all processes since employment is not based on performance or promises kept, but is instead guaranteed for a fixed amount of time. Politicians can continually base their re-election on the fact that "the system is broken", while they themselves are doing nothing to fix it or are not able to do anything to fix it.

Having separately elected house, senate, and president is a primary source of gridlock. Each body can reject a legislative change, while none can effectively create change. The only way laws can be passed in this system is under a very rare set of conditions. When those conditions are present (government shutdown imminent, filibuster eliminated, plurality requirements reduced) you see large omnibus bills pushed through as fast as possible, without time to adequately vet the details.

From an engineering perspective, this would be like pushing a few massive commits every few years rather than making regular bug fixes as needed. As such, our laws are buggy and unmaintained. Unfortunately, this leads many to believe that regulations generally are ineffective rather than the poor implementations of such being ineffective.

Poorly written legislation puts more pressure on the judicial system to litigate between the lines. This is an externality that is extremely expensive for every individual and company to have to deal with.

I advocate for a more parliamentary style system where politicians continued careers are based on their effectiveness and continued approval rather than fixed terms. There are plenty of ways to ensure proper checks and balances without stopping government dead in it's tracks.

The threat isn't just from AI, unfortunately, it's from an entire class of powerful people willing to throw their money behind AI instead of behind customer needs, business priorities, and human values.

Huh, that hasn't been my experience, at least not yet. Are you talking about newer movies and shows?

More often I'd say they're on the side of all local landlords, not necessarily megalandlords specifically. But your point is correct and I have yet to see a city council that wasn't stacked with property investors.

The results do not seem equal if you take account for the actual costs and privileges. Owning property has more rights and renting has more costs.

Rights: If you do not pay your property taxes, you will probably have 6 months to several years before your home is taken. If you do not pay your rent, the eviction process will likely start immediately and the landlord will probably make your life more difficult until you leave, even if you live in a state with stronger tenant rights.

Costs: Taxes are somewhere between $500-$5000 per year for an average home, while rent is more like $500-$5000 per month. Rent is on par or greater than the mortgage cost for an equivalent space, I have only seen lower rents when the home was not still mortgaged.

So while owning and renting may both theoretically be a subscription or a service with regular costs, the costs and benefits are not the same.

I may just be cynical, but I don't see any reason why AI judgement won't be the next cruentation. AI decisions are based purely on learned biases, which may be effectively equivalent to gut feelings. There will be many opportunities for AI-determined suspicions to be used as a determination of guilt in lieu of real evidence.

"The AI finds it likely that you committed the murder."

It doesn't have to be this way, but given the perpetual misunderstanding and misapplication of AI, I think it's likely to happen anyway.

The majority of US law / government process is pretty much off-limits to change due to political gridlock.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gridlock_(politics)#United_Sta...

I'm curious what these trip-ups look like, if anyone has the relevant info to share here. It seems easy to make the argument that the FBI is just tricking people, but I suspect that the lies people are caught in are much more sinister.

The context makes it clear that the increase wasn't due to good leadership, but instead was due to high inflation. I find that helpful even though I support the current administration.

With context, it sounds like they were trying to take credit for high inflation. That probably wasn't the intention, so I think it's clear that the original statement was misleading.

Alternatively, don't define who you are by your mental illnesses. People are not built equally, and some things can be considered objectively broken.

Shit at some aspects of life that are easily treatable? Treat them.

ADHD remains one of the most easily medically treatable diseases. Do not listen to people propagating the stigma that you should just accept a substandard life. For most people with ADHD, medical treatment works very well and massively improves quality of life. Medical treatment does not have to be a last resort.

FYI I updated my original post to clarify a couple of points, sorry for the confusion.

Primaries promote extremism because they segregate the first rounds of voting to specific parties. Each primary will remove candidates that might otherwise have majority support, in favor of candidates who have the most support from that particular party only. This is bad enough in the US's two-party system, but would be even worse if there were more parties.

Polling informs voters which candidates they should vote for, and which candidates would be pointless to vote for. In first-past-the-post, it's a waste to vote for anyone other than the two most popular candidates. Voters may drop support for their preferred candidate based on polling incorrectly saying that person had no chance.

Candidates who drop out to prevent vote-splitting only do so because the current voting system doesn't allow voters to specify that they like two people equally. There's no reason why having two good choices should skew results toward one bad choice.

Limiting voter choice limits democracy. Each candidate is slightly different, and the determination should be made by voters. But our current system often requires candidates to drop out before voters can make that determination.

Consider presidential primaries. Candidates attend primaries one region at a time. Along the way, polling and results from completed primaries inform which candidates should stay in the race. Candidates drop out to put support behind others based on these early results that only represent certain states. If candidates didn't drop out, they risk dragging down all similar candidates. This situation isn't ideal, and is solved by ranked choice voting.

I'm not familiar with Alaska's version of ranked choice voting. But I am familiar with Maine's. In Maine, the ballot allows voters to select candidates in order based on preference. If the first choice candidate wouldn't have received majority support, the second choice vote is used, and so on.

Maine's implementation is the same system used in run-off elections, but done all at once on a single ballot. A run-off election happens when the winning candidate is required to have >50% of the votes. The worst performing candidates are dropped, and a new election takes place. This continues until the winner of an election has >50% of the vote.

Pre-RCV, Maine had several elections where the winner had ~35% of the vote, while the other two candidates were equally liked and their voters would have supported either. The solution was to require a candidate to get >50% of the votes to win, and the possible implementations were run-off elections or RCV.

RCV enables voters to specify that they like more than one candidate, while also specifying which they prefer overall. They get to say, ahead of time, "if my favorite loses, vote for my second favorite". There's still only one vote from each person in the result.

Personally, I don't find RCV to be complicated. It's simply an instant runoff, without the costs of holding multiple elections. But maybe that comes from me living in a place where run-off elections were common. I think you may agree at least that it's good to require the winning candidate to have majority support, and failing that, would you agree that it's better if they have majority support than majority disapproval?

IMO, we're already doing a worse form of ranked choice everywhere. Primaries, pre-election polling, and candidates dropping out early to prevent a vote-split, are all substitutes for what ranked choice provides. Each substitute exists to solve the problems caused by first-past-the-post voting, where having a high number of candidates all but guarantees that the winner does not have majority support.

These substitutes all have issues. Party-segregated primaries promote extremism. Polling is inaccurate. When candidates drop out early, they take away choices from voters.

Ranked choice voting combines multiple rounds of voting into a single ballot. The winner is the person with the most support from voters.

First past the post: winner has the most first-choice votes. Ranked choice: winner has the most people who would vote for that person if other candidates couldn't win.

Ranked choice results in the best outcome. The winner has the most support from voters, and the data from the ballots informs future campaigns better than polling ever could have.

Livestock emissions are not a closed cycle in terms of heat. The methane produced by livestock is much more potent of a greenhouse gas than the CO2 captured by the plants grown for livestock. This might not be a big deal normally, but seeing as how we're maintaining at least 500x the normal cow population, it's a big deal now.

Fun fact, methane traps so much more heat than CO2, we'd actually be better off burning methane rather than releasing it directly. That's probably not a viable option for livestock, so it seems like reducing livestock is the most viable thing to do.

Agreed that fossil fuels are also an issue.

Not sure if this is the place you're talking about, but this sounds a lot like Portland, Maine. Portland has one of the highest restaurant densities due to being a tourist destination. It has a semi-dense downtown with a lot of very nice walkable areas. Look up "Portland Maine Old Port" to get a sense of what it's like downtown.

Unfortunately, there are relatively few places to live inside the dense part of town. The city is overly-zealous about maintaining historic districts and you'd better believe people get all up in arms about "changing the character of the neighborhood" every time a new development is proposed, even in non-historic and totally dilapidated areas. I've seen literally hundreds of millions of dollars worth of new housing and commercial projects be cancelled or indefinitely postponed due to this attitude just in the last 10 years.

While the city has a lot of potential, it's population has stagnated since the 1970s and the surrounding area has become a massive suburban sprawl. Many of the buildings downtown have been replaced with parking lots. Traffic is generally terrible, and the bus system has low coverage and poor frequencies.

Around 100 years ago, Portland was a thriving metropolis with electric trolleys going to every imaginable destination. All of those trolleys are gone now and their tracks have either been removed or awkwardly paved over.

Portland was once a vibrant inter-city train hub with hourly connections to the rest of Maine. The two primary stations, Union Station, and Grand Trunk Terminal, have been torn down. The current train hub, "Portland Transportation Center" is much further from the city center to make room for a large parking lot. It is about a 40 minute walk from what is considered the downtown area. 20 minutes by bus if your schedule happens to line up.

It's pretty disappointing how much better it once was. I'm doubtful that it will ever be as good as it was back then, but still hopeful. There are plans to move the train station back to where Union Station was. New routes to Lewiston and Rockland have been studied (although would apparently cost hundreds of millions to repair the tracks). The state has recently subsidized certain interstate train and bus routes to make them very affordable. And generally I think a lot of problems could be immediately solved by straightening out bus routes and increasing frequency, as well as obviously removing a lot of building-size restrictions and parking minimums.

Man it just seems insane to me that you are acting like being billed $2 million, $200,000, and having unknown other bills, is somehow a good system.

Let's be honest, overbilling and non-accountability is a huge disaster here. While people like you slip through the cracks in terms of not needing to pay, others slip through the cracks in terms of not getting care at all.

> Most viral vaccines actually infect you with the virus.

It is definitely not true that most vaccines infect you with the virus. Most vaccines do not use live viruses at all, and the ones that do are specifically modified to be extremely weak.

This particular Lyme vaccine, VLA15, is a recombinant protein vaccine. IIUC it is basically just a particular protein that your immune system can learn to recognize and attack.