Mechanical9

IMO reading code is usually harder than writing code.

His policies were terrible. He broke off several key international treaties. He instituted the family separation policy. He broke down federal institutions that could have helped fight COVID.

In what way was he better on spending? He managed to increase the deficit every single year, even before COVID.

> He might speak like a crazy person.

He does speak like a crazy person. He advocates for crazy policies. People from his administration are crazy people and advocate for crazy policies.

Why is it always Tesla vs. ICE? Seems like a false dichotomy.

There have been significant changes in culture and (at least perceived) job stability in the past two years specifically. See the significant layoffs in early 2023 and the surprising and completely unnecessary layoffs that just happened a week ago. Transparency about decision-making is now basically non-existent. The literal only communication from the CEO was that there will be more layoffs.

Travel budgets are also non-existent now.

All in all, it's still a good job. But it is significantly worse that before, and the trajectory does not seem great.

Tesla's stock probably shouldn't be taken seriously.

I understand your perspective, but I'm going to disagree with what I think you mean, which is that /only/ parents should be responsible for their kids, and that nobody else should have to do anything at all for them. I know that's not exactly what you said, but given the context it's what I am going to argue against.

Kids are a normal part of our society. We were all kids at one point. Our lives were all made better by reasonable accomodations that others made for our safety and wellbeing. If the outside world is only designed for adults, then there is an impossible burden on parents to raise children.

I think we can and often do make reasonable accomodations for kids. Like checking IDs at the bar or checking heights before letting people on a rollercoaster.

What that level of responsibility is for websites, I'm not sure. But it's not zero.

I think some of the blame towards Texas is due to many of their politicians denying that climate change exists. Texas is a major oil producer, and is on the higher end of CO2 emissions per capita. They should probably realize that their once reliable weather patterns are not going to be reliable anymore.

I have observed the same thing w.r.t the people who always seem to lead "new city" projects. I think there's a lot of elite projection when a billionaire seeks funding from other billionaires. These guys ride in limos to work everyday and have no idea how good a well-built mass transit system could be, for instance.

That and, the whole thing will ultimately have to be a grift, right? How are they going to monetize their new city? Even with the best aspirations, this still becomes a corporate town centered around helping some oligarchs make their money back.

I don't really see what aspect of this situation involves a false sense of victimhood, unless you are referring to the multimillionaire founder who is unwilling to add age verification to their website.

It's a defensive reaction to the fact the US has vague, crappy, outdated laws about everything. Litigation is needed absolutely everywhere because every situation falls through the cracks of the law, which obviously overwhelms the courts.

So what happens instead? Each company comes up with their own detailed, up-to-date, heavily skewed set of rules. And we agree to use their private court system or go to another company that does the same thing but slightly different.

I disagree. Courts aren't the only places where decisions can be made. In fact, courts rely in information found and published in reports like this to make their decisions.

I feel I have a right to make my decisions based on such information also.

That doesn't mean the publisher shouldn't have liability here also. They are damaging someone's reputation, and should be held responsible if the claims are untrue.

But if the claims are true, then the damaged reputation is warranted. That's one of the consequences of doing something bad. You only have a right to have a good reputation if you don't do anything bad.

Doesn't the price per impression still get adjusted based on performance?

Americans also don't know how much their taxes are. Retailers often use taxes to hide extra charges by bundling both into a "taxes and fees" section, which if enumerable always includes more fees than taxes. Uber Eats, GrubHub, etc all do this.

VAT has other benefits though that would fix a lot of weirdness that traditional sales tax has. Taxing the value added makes a lot more sense than taxing the "sale", IMO. It distributes the tax fairly among all businesses in the supply chain and eliminates double-taxing that can happen when the local mom and pop shop resells soda from Sam's Club.

Is it even remotely possible that a Mars colony could become self-sustaining within the next 100 years? It seems like surviving the loss of Earth is a long way off regardless.

Counterpoint: You can't fund a news organization with private money and expect them to hold private organizations' feet to the fire. Any time they are critical of a major business, they lose advertisers.

Personally, I have a problem with the viewpoint that democratic governments are some sort of adversary when in actuality, private businesses are the entities that have no accountability and we have zero direct control over. I agree there should be independent criticism of government, but IMO state media from a democratic government is naturally going to be better overall than only having private media.

I think the question is more why should an individual's salary be private?

Personally, I think money is power, and I want to know about power disparities to better protect myself. But I understand there are factors to consider.

I think the idea is those roads and sewers have the same capacity downtown whether next to an apartment building or a surface-level parking lot. There will be the same number of lanes, street lamps, sidewalks, etc.

I would go further and actually argue that you need more road and sewer capacity because someone inserted a blank patch of land between dense areas.

The tax is an incentive to develop when the land's value is high. The city is basically saying that you have an obligation to build something useful or sell the land to someone who will.

I'm interested to see what happens. I'm hopeful that it will be good for urbanization.

Surrounding towns will probably not do LVT, which will also be interesting.

There's a necessity in society for some form of advertising. People and businesses want to communicate what products and services are available. If a random person wants the ability to start their own business, they're going to need the ability to advertise that they have a new product that they want people to try. Or they want to advertise that there's some societal issue that they want people to be aware of.

Consider a world with zero ads. There wouldn't be annoying interruptions. But we also wouldn't ever learn which new movies are playing, which political candidates are running, etc, except from 2nd and 3rd hand sources with several layers of spin (and misunderstanding/misinformation) on the information.

I personally hate the current state of direct advertising. There seems to be zero prevention of fraud and zero work towards making ads less annoying. I wish that consensual forms of media could convey all that information instead, in an unbiased, informed, and timely manner. Unfortunately that isn't currently happening for several reasons (media underfunding, editorial conflicts of interest, personalized content streams that preclude any sort of unexpected news).

I'm not sure what the solution is overall. I think if every company didn't deliver absolute buckets of trash to their own email marketing lists, then we wouldn't block them and they wouldn't have to pay to ruin our other media.

Honestly how is it even possible to name a company or a product after a single letter? That shouldn't even be trademarkable.

People get way too hung up on what current copyright law is and whether it supports or condemns LLMs trained on copyrighted material. IMO, who cares what the current law is? Existing laws were made for past technologies and for the current limitations of humans. It's nonsense to apply the same rules to new devices that don't have the same limitations.

I can pay to read all of the GoT books and then tell anyone who asks who kills Dumbledore or whatever. That's information you would have to pay the author for, but anyone can get it for free from me because I already read the book. This is acceptable because we assume that #1 I paid to read the books (or my library paid to acquire a copy) and #2 I won't be able to literally regurgitate the entirety of the books to every person in the world simultaneously. For everyone in the world to get that 2nd-hand enjoyment, enough people would have to pay to read the books that the author would make enough money to be happy.

The situation with LLMs is clearly different. The ratio between the amount an LLM compensates an author vs. how much many people it can share derived content with is off the charts compared to the same for a person.

IMO, there's no need to argue whether LLMs are being treated differently from humans w.r.t. copyright. LLMs have different capabilities than humans. Copyright at present is optimized for humans, and should be updated to address the implications of LLMs' capabilities.

While you can make this argument about literally anything, it seems apt to make it about a multi-billion dollar company chasing a trillion dollar company.

It's fine to support them while they are the underdog and are saying and doing the right thing, but don't pretend like they will say and do the right thing forever.

I feel like the single words referenced in the title are taken way out of context. The actual texts of these trainings unambiguously tell workers to not break the law, why the law is important, and what Google's philosophy is instead. That that includes not miscommunicating those intentions isn't a bad thing. None of this is ambiguous to anyone who has taken the actual trainings.

Capitalism doesn't have to be concerned with power for it to result in those with capital holding the most power. 'Rights' that are only available to those with capital aren't really rights at all.

In defense of your job, make sure you are constantly communicating how much uptime / how stable / reliable your services are. One reason why the people with lots of downtime are hailed as "heroes" is because they get more face-to-face time with upper management.

Of course, some managers will be dumb and equate instability with revenue.

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My guess is that we've reached a peak in the amount of new investment that can be made annually, based on tech nearing total proliferation throughout society. The tech can sort of only advance as fast as tech companies can grow, and they can't grow exponentially after they account for some percentage of the global workforce.

My guess is that we'll see improvements at closer to the current rate rather than at an increasing rate.

I've seen that too. IMO, neither "direction" is what matters here. Both cases are failures to apply justice appropriately. It's tiring that efforts to reform always seem to be led by people who are either "tough" or "soft" on crime.

I'd say the valuation is related to its services in that Apple's good reputation is based on consistent services. But it's certainly not proportional. Number goes up because everyone who sells demands to make a profit, just like with houses.

Pushing cases into the future was always the stated goal of lockdowns. That was what "flatten the curve" meant. The idea was to accept some temporary consequences in order to prevent deaths until vaccines could be made.

I also don't think it was any stroke of luck that resulted in vaccines being made quickly. Our scientific establishments correctly devoted their resources to developing vaccines. A lot of us were closely following their development and knew that they were just around the corner. Even without advancements in MRNA technology, other types of vaccines were being made that could prevent the majority of deaths.