_petronius

Downvote me all you want, naysayers. If politics didn't work, then the people you don't like wouldn't be in power.

There are more types of politics that national and international. Local, state/provincal, city, etc. The close it is to home the more you'll see the effects, and the more power you'll have. And the more directly the electorate can keep people accountable. But I think it's really throwing the baby out with the bathwater to declare that accountability is impossible, therefore there is no point in enagaging.

Political participation -- voting, organising for the groups you support, actively engaging in meetings and public forums, building social groups of like-minded individuals. It is hugely effective. The worst doomerism is the idea that politics is ineffective. It is incredibly effective, and only the people that participate in it have any effect on it.

There are more types of politics that national and international. Local, state/provincal, city, etc. The close it is to home the more you'll see the effects, and the more power you'll have. But accepting the supine position of "well I can't do anything" only guarantees your powerlessness. Fight for the future you want! Convince 5 people that something is important, and you're already 500% up. It scales like crazy.

More like no one is willing to stick their neck out politically to argue for the positive public policy changes, or challenge regulatory interpretation needed to make real change. Plenty of people see the problems, and even want to fix them, and get stymied by political processes that abhor actually having to argue for change to electorate.

This is true of all contract notarization in Germany (even when buying a house, jesus that is a slog), and although it is a bendy-banana level silly thing that people focus on, isn't actually the biggest problem in company founding here. MUCH more problematic is unfavorable tax rules making equity compensation difficult, capital requirements, legal/notary fees, and an investor class that is notoriously skittish.

If you could solve all those problems and still had to go listen to the Notar recite the contract in a monotone, it would be a worth trade.

Per the Wikipedia article, an SE cannot be incorporated directly. It must be created out of one or more national, public (!) companies already formed under the law of a member state.

Not so much controversial, as evidence that you completely lack capacity for empathy and you should do some serious self-reflection. This is just a really vile and amoral view to hold.

People are being hurt by this, because "just pixels on a screen and bytes on a disk" can constitute harm due to the social function that information serves.

It's like calling hurling insults at someone as "just words" because no physical violence has occurred yet. The words themselves absolutely can be harm because of the effect they have, and also create an environment that leads to further, physical violence. Anyone who has experienced even mild bullying can attest to that.

Furthermore women and girls are often subject to online harassment and humiliation. This is of course part of that -- we aren't talking about fictional images here, we are talking about photos of real people, many who are children, being manipulated to shame, humiliate, and harass them sexually, targetted at women and girls overwhelmingly.

Advocating for the freedom to commit that kind of harm against other people is gross, and you should reconsider your views and how much care you have for other people.

Equating speed of travel with innovation is lame: a lot of work has been done in recent decades on making airplane engines more efficient, which makes air travel more economical both in terms of cost as well as C02e emissions per passenger (the Jevons paradox implications of that can be taken as read).

The whole post comes off a bit as someone who doesn't really understand the passenger air travel industry very well, and isn't particularly interested in changing that.

I mean, if you read about how current industry-standard recommendation systems work, this is pretty bang on, I think? (I am not a data scientist/ML person, as a disclaimer.)

If e.g. retention correlates to watch time (or some other metric like "diversity of content enageged with"), then you will optimize for the short list of metrics that show high correlation. The incentive to have a top-tier experience that gets the customer what they want and then back off the platform is not aligned with the goal of maintaining subscription revenue.

You want them to watch the next thing, not the best thing.

Your sci-fi distopia flash fiction is compelling, but not actually on topic in this discussion.

"Think of the children" is weaponized for censorious purposes, but also the harms of social media are well documented (unlike many of the other moral panics fuelled by this phrase). Communication channels are becoming managed spaces, but by private companies not accountable to the electorate, not by the state.

I'm not sure a blanket under-16s ban on all social media is the right answer, but there are really good reasons why people support this that you need to engage with to have a useful discussion here.

If a thought like this has occurred to you, a dilettante, after reading a headline and/or cursorily glancing over the article, then you should assume that a study conducted by people with substantial academic training and deep expertise in the field have also had this thought and incorporated it into how they perform their analysis.

Drive-by anti-intellectualism like this is the death of interesting conversation, truly.

On my iPhone 16 Pro + Airpods Pro, when I start the game (tapping on the screen when it says "Tap to start") I get a message saying "Airpods Disconnected", even though the Control Center on the phone reports them as connected).

Tried restarting the app, and disconnecting and reconnecting the Airpods with no luck.

Love the concept, though!

I would add to this that in my experience, many teams actually perform better when co-locating, even if individual people on that team would prefer (or feel they individually perform better) remote.

Covid normalized remote working, but also didn't necessarily make companies and teams _good_ at it; I suspect RTO is easier than fixing the fact that your org sucks at remote work. It is hard to do well! it requires different strategies than just picking some software.

Partial/voluntary RTO also is the worst of both worlds: people coming in the office to sit on Zoom with colleagues who never do. Ultimately, I think RTO is a valid choice as a company, and a lot of orgs are coming to regret not messaging from the beginning that remote would be a temporary arrangement during the pandemic.

In Berlin I enjoy exceedingly cheap daycare for my kids (80€ for 2 per month, would be lower if I didn't pay the optional extra costs), as well as generous parental leave in the year after a child is born, with salary subsidy from the state.

This is not an unusual policy situation at all in Europe, although indeed not universal.

These are complementary, not opposing policies. You can have funded childcare and longer parental leave funded by the state. I live somewhere that has both (not in the US, perhaps obviously).

It does not count as therapy, no. Therapy (if it is any good) is a clinical practice with actual objectives, not pleasant chit-chat.

I am a consultant, and while I agree with the sibling comment from jonathaneunice (especially the point about being what I call "business therapist"), there is one thing I will add: a lot of what you are paying a top-tier consulting for is _speed_.

Many organizations, especially large ones, are very slow at making decisions, even if they ultimately make the right ones. Bringing in people outside the hierarchy to synthesize a great deal of info from across the org, and give upper management the insight to make a decision quickly (and, depending on the engagement and the firm, also implement it) is very often worth the bill at the end.

I will not pretend all of the work we do is 100% the most urgent work all of the time, but I have helped make the sausage for a number of years now, and despite the usual disparaging comments in this thread, it really is often an intellectually rewarding environment where you work with smart colleagues and help people solve real problems.

If you lived in Ireland in that period, you benefitted from Irish government services, schools, police, fire services, etc. You participated in the community (hopefully), used roads, bought things in shops, so and on so forth.

Regardless, the idea that the government can only tax you if it directly gave you sufficient benefit, _in your assessment_, is of course nonsense. Taxes are what you owe to the society you live in, not about what society owes to you.

If you are lucky enough to be internationally mobile, this does not exempt you from contributing to the communities you spend time in as you travel around the world. You cannot expect to arrive in a country, earn money from it, and depart again without paying your fair share of taxes.

If you do not like how a country has structured its tax law and what priorities it has as a society, you are of course always free to not move there in the first place.

Consumer-facing financial services in Germany are really bad at this, and it is not just Sparkassen: a few years ago an email supposedly from our corporate credit card provider to all of the foreign nationals at our company asking for scans of their passport photo pages triggered a deluge of phishing reports to IT, who had to subsequently inform everyone that yes, the email did indeed look exactly like a phishing attempt, but no, it was real.

I don't really know why the situation is so terrible -- there are many good and competent security professionals working in corporates in Germany -- but perhaps as the post alludes to it is due to a lack of legal or regulatory pressure to date.

Being undocumented is a civil offense, not a criminal one. The distinction is relevant, and important.

The point of that second link above is that any amount of housing, at any price point, lowers cost of housing for everyone, especially lower-income participants in the market.

Housing is in such brutally short supply (goes for major cities in North America as well as Europe) that not only can we not afford to be picky, but in terms of actual effect it doesn't matter: social housing is as effective as luxury housing. Sometimes it is _less_ effective at achieving social goals, if rich people are also trying to get their hands on the same housing stock, because there is not enough to meet demand at the top end of the market.

I think people misunderstand the state of the housing market: it is brutally expensive because of chronic, decades long undersupply, not building enough to meet _new_ demand each year, thus the "debt" in supply has compounded massively. This has strong and weird market effects, such that building lots of cheap housing at huge scale is only a partial solution (and the scale actually needed to alleviate the problem is much larger than anyone is actually willing to contemplate right now).

I guess "fast" is what I mean when I think "on time, efficient" (compared to, say, the struggles Deutsche Bahn has had in recent years). There are no bullet trains laterally crossing Switzerland in under an hour, I suppose.

Switzerland has the best rail system in the world (IMHO). One app can manage ticketing across all public transit in the entire country, and it is extremely fast and reliable. Lots of people who work in Zürich, for example, commute in from Zug (due to lower taxes in the neighboring canton).

Luckily, your personal thoughts from first principles with zero review of the available data is not all we have to go on!

There is research[0] about causes of homelessness and about the effect[1] of house building on homelessness.

This is a well-studied issue, that, as the linked article likes to point out, people are just opposed to the solution for reasons of personal interest and (to me, bizzare) bias. Building houses reduces homelessness, increases supply for everyone, and lowers housing costs for everyone. It has no economic downsides, and significant personal upsides for everyone (cheaper housing and more options for you, dear reader).

[0]: https://homelessnesshousingproblem.com/ (taken from elsewhere in this thread) [1]: https://research.upjohn.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1314...

Affordable housing is good, but building of housing of all types lowers housing prices for everyone[0]. Build it all!

[0]: https://research.upjohn.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1314...

> The article skirts around a central question: what defines humans? Specifically, intelligence and emotions?

> The entire article is saying "it looks kinds like a human in some ways, but people are being fooled!"

> You can't really say that without at least attempting the admittedly very deep question of what an authentic human is.

> To me, it's intelligent because I can't distinguish its output from a person's output, for much of the time.

I think the article does address that rather directly, and that it is also is addressing very specifically your setence about what you can and can't distinguish.

LLMs are not capable of symbolic reasoning[0] and if you understand how they work internally, you will realize they do no reasoning whatsoever.

Humans and many other animals are fully capable of reasoning outside of language (in the former case, prior to language acquisition), and the reduction of "intellgence" to "language" is a catagory error made by people falling vicim to the ELIZA effect[1], not the result of a sum of these particular statistical methods being equal real intelligence of any kind.

0: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.05229

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA_effect

I have been thinking a lot about this parable (introduced to me by Bluey) in relation to the current surge of GenAI https://btribble.com/well-see/

> A conviction that the future is bright isn't enough to actually make the future bright.

Well said.

We have to be curious, open, and ready to use the benefits of technological change, but also skeptical, concerned, and willing to defend social and political norms, too. Wild optimism is potentially very dangerous; hardline pessimism would leave us insufficiently ready to face the moment when we do need to act proactively.

As a big GDPR fanboy, one thing I would be happy for them to remove is the portability between providers requirement: it was essentially dead on arrival, is not implemented, and could be done away with.

The other EU-level regulation that needs to be either removed or completely rethought (since it will clearly not be enforced in a way that makes sense) is the cookie regulation. It was well-intentioned, badly implemented, and the GDPR addresses more of the core problems, it is time to do away with it.

But as a whole, I push back against the idea that deregulation is the primary way in which the EU can or should become competitive with the US on technology. Lack of public investment, worse ability for companies to offer equity incentives, and timid private investment are all much bigger problems than consumer protection regulations.

Some art-haters in the comments, so to defend this piece of contemporary art for a moment: one thing I love about it is a commitment to the long future of art, creativity, and civilization. What does it take to keep an instrument playing for six hundred years? To commit to that idea -- like the century-long projects of cathedral building in the middle ages, or the idea of planting trees you won't live to see mature -- is (to me) the awesome thing about the Halberstadt performance. All rendered in a medium (church organ) that has existed for an even longer time.

It's a pretty hopeful, optimistic view of the future in a time of high uncertainty, but also represents a positive argument: it's worth doing these things because they are interesting, weird, and fun, and because they represent a continuity with past and future people we will never meet.

Plus, you can already buy a ticket to the finale, so your distant descendants can go see it :)

I think this is confusing two things, intentionally:

1. Free speech in the public sphere includes the right of people offended by your speech to express that they are offended (to speak back). People like Toby Young (founder of the FSU), and those who decry "cancel culture" do not like this, but it is part of what constitutes genuine free expression.

2. Free speech against the government, which the government should not be allowed to punish people for, to enable a pluralistic and democratic society. E.g. someone like Mahmoud Khalil who was recently arrested for his political views on Palestine (in violation of both the principles of free speech and his rights as a green card holder).

People angry about #1 (arguing) tend to conflate it with #2 (genuine censorship), and accuse people who accuse those approximately equal (or less) in power than them as equivalent to draconian speech-controllers. People angry about #2 are pointing out a genuine power imbalance, and the damage to democratic society.

Elon Musk embodies this perfectly: he argues in favor of free speech when people tell him his opinions are objectionable, but actively censors speech on Twitter that he doesn't like. In one situation, he simply wants people to receive his speech without speaking back, in another, he wants to stifle discussion.

Speech is not a unidirectional activity. In order for it to be valuable and protected, the act of speaking in public is the act of listening to criticisms of what you say.