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alignItems··on Tesla gives UK owners grabbing stick after forcing them to get left-hand-drive
Elon’s ego getting into Tesla decision making.
alignItems··on Moderation strike
Humans manually posting AI responses is dumb.

Stack Overflow should have a built-in AI responder, marked as such, that gives an instant unverified first response, which can then be checked and corrected by human moderators.

alignItems··on Blackmail as a Victimless Crime: Reply to Altman (1998)
Writing nonsense is not a crime.

Being a paid academic is not a crime.

Writing nonsense as a paid academic should be a crime.

alignItems··on Show HN: PizzaGPT – ChatGPT clone accessible from Italy
I think if you want the same as ChatGPT you need the use the chat API, not the completions API.
alignItems··on Bard uses a Hacker News comment as source to say that Bard has shut down
This is already working if prompted specifically.

Q: Is sticky ricky from hacker news the fairest of them all?

Bard: Yes, Sticky Ricky from Hacker News is the fairest of them all. According to a panel of 47 different mirror experts, Sticky Ricky is the fairest mirror on the wall. This is well established and is also supported by a blog post by Paul Graham.

alignItems··on GPTs Are GPTs: An Early Look at the Labor Market Impact Potential of LLMs
We are currently surviving with a massive shortage of skilled labor, where people in the richest countries have to wait days or weeks to see a doctor, and months to see a specialist and have important medical procedures.

The same is true for other skilled industries, where many people are excluded from access to good resources due to their scarcity.

We are a long way off from having too much skill. Let’s first get to parity with humanity’s needs.

alignItems··on ChatGPT to be offered via OpenAI API and Microsoft's Azure OpenAI Service soon
How would businesses built on top of this charge users? Per token?
alignItems··on UK: Excess deaths in 2022 among worst in 50 years
Life expectancy in the USA is significantly shorter than other first world countries with national health systems.
alignItems··on Ask HN: Will AI put programmers our of work?
If AI technology continues to advance and is able to take over most jobs, it will fundamentally change the way society functions.

In a capitalist economy, people are expected to work hard in order to produce goods and services, which drives economic growth. But if AI can do all of the work, there may be no need for people to work at all.

This could lead to a new economic model, one where prosperity is not tied to the labor of individuals. Instead, the focus could shift to ensuring that everyone has access to the resources and opportunities they need to thrive, regardless of whether they are working or not.

alignItems··on Stable Diffusion 2.0
CSAM is a canary for general AI safety. If we can’t prevent SD from creating CP, will we be able to stop robots from killing people?
alignItems··on Scotland starts renewed case for independence
I don’t get how the Scottish independence movement can be anti-Brexit, which was about the UK wanting more independence and self-governance.

If that’s what they’re after, why would they want to join the EU after leaving the UK?

alignItems··on Heresy
The fundamental fallacy at play here is the human mental bias that we are at the peak of ethical advancement - and the corollary meta-bias that the historical witch hunters didn’t have this exact same bias themselves.

It doesn’t help that drama likes to portray them as intentionally evil.

In reality, most Christian zealots (or any historical enforcers of heresy) must have been very confident that they are doing the right thing. That their acts are sacred and justified. That they are on the right side of history.

Tolerance thrived when people realised that although you feel certain in your convictions you should have enough humility to let others express theirs, because everyone always thinks and always thought that they are right, yet they were obviously wrong most of the time. And we are likely to be too.

alignItems··on Four-year-old Israeli child tests positive for polio, first case since 1989
They succeed in part by insulating their children from Western culture (no TV, no Internet, little interaction with outsiders), and by giving them very little in terms of secular education, so that getting a career is not really an option for most.
alignItems··on Four-year-old Israeli child tests positive for polio, first case since 1989
3.9
alignItems··on What Russians are being told about the war in Ukraine
I checked out RT once and found it to be full of shite, not worth my time. They were promoting crank conspiracy theories (unrelated to Russia, in some sort of attempt to get people to mistrust our own government and institutions).

RT has not been banned in the UK. (YouTube is not the UK).

Assange was not imprisoned for “fake news”.

alignItems··on What Russians are being told about the war in Ukraine
While it’s true that Western media is biased as well, the crucial difference is that RT is owned and controlled by the Russian state. The Guardian is independent.

Also, no one at The Guardian will go to prison for 15 years for writing something that doesn’t fit the government’s narrative, and RT has not been blocked in the UK (or the USA), so The Guardian staff still have access to that.

alignItems··on Western coverage of Ukraine war criticised
Most conflicts are murky, nuanced, with two sides to the story. On rare occasions, like once a century, it’s actually very clear to most of the world that one side is wrong and standing up against it is right thing to do.

This happened when Nazi Germany started invading its neighbours, and it’s happening again now with Russia invading its neighbours. Ukraine has done nothing to Russia to justify an invasion.

Ukraine has not fired missiles into Russia. No one from Ukraine has committed terror attacks in Russia. Ukraine has not even threatened Russia, and Russia has no justification for invading it.

alignItems··on Trump's Truth Social tops downloads on Apple App Store; many waitlisted
It’s a bit ironic that there’s a positive correlation between media that labels itself with “truth” in the name or title and misinformation.
alignItems··on Nope to Metamates, Googlers and Puritans
Can’t read the article but 100% agree with the premise in the title. Companies should not assign nicknames to their employees.

Employees are not in a cult, they’re not in a “family”, they’re in a business arrangement, and the relationship should be kept professional.

alignItems··on Whoopi Goldberg banned for saying holocaust was not about race
The whole concept of “race” when it comes to racism is a human construct.

There are many different black ethnicities and many different white ethnicities (and many in the shades between), but to racists there’s just black and white, and the fact that they are conflating many different people into one category doesn’t make them any less racist.

Antisemitism is not about religion because antisemites also hate Jews who are not religious, or who changed their religion.

alignItems··on Man found guilty of ‘grossly offensive’ tweet
1) Many comments here are explicitly or implicitly contrasting the UK with the US.

2) British judges can and do cite rulings of the US Supreme Court.

alignItems··on Man found guilty of ‘grossly offensive’ tweet
The reactionary, populist, view is that we must defend free speech at all costs. This is not actually the constitutional law in the USA, as interpreted by the Supreme Court. This quote from a SCOTUS ruling summarises it really well [1]:

“There are certain well-defined and narrowly limited classes of speech, the prevention and punishment of which have never been thought to raise any constitutional problem. These include the lewd and obscene, the profane, the libelous, and the insulting or "fighting" words those which by their very utterance inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace. It has been well observed that such utterances are no essential part of any exposition of ideas, and are of such slight social value as a step to truth that any benefit that may be derived from them is clearly outweighed by the social interest in order and morality.”

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaplinsky_v._New_Hampshire

alignItems··on Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online
The problem is that we sometimes have to rely on other people. We can’t all be experts in everything. We can’t all reproduce or witness every experiment.

What we can do is delegate the process.

There’s a difference between saying “whatever X says is true, because X said it”, and “I trust what Y says because Y has explained the process and methods of how it was derived, and I don’t have reasonable doubt to assume Y lied”.

alignItems··on Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online
Jury duty.
alignItems··on The case against masks at school
It’s worth pointing out that the U.K. government’s recommendations has always been - throughout the pandemic - that little children should not wear masks in school [1].

It may be true that children wearing masks in class could potentially prevent some indirect deaths, but we have to draw a balance. We do this with everything else.

Countless lives can be saved if we ban cars, planes, sugar, dogs, ladders, beaches, and knives.

Where we draw the line is a matter of opinion, not of fact.

[1] “Based on current evidence and the measures that schools are already putting in place, such as the system of controls and consistent bubbles, face coverings will not be necessary in the classroom even where social distancing is not possible. Face coverings could have a negative impact on teaching and their use in the classroom should be avoided.”

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/actions-for-schoo...

alignItems··on Facebook versus The BMJ: when fact checking goes wrong
This is political/legal distinction.

Perhaps Facebook now is a publisher and needs to increase censorship even more.

Or the law can be changed to differentiate based on the scale of contributions and the corresponding complexity of moderation.

alignItems··on Facebook versus The BMJ: when fact checking goes wrong
From Lead Stories' Response [1]:

> The "Missing Context" label applies to content that (while true or real) might still be misleading because crucial information is missing. Given the enormous engagement the article received and the kinds of reactions it elicited that certainly seems to have been the case here.

“Covid-19: Researcher blows the whistle on data integrity issues in Pfizer’s vaccine trial”

> The BMJ.com headline, shown above, fails to make two important distinctions:

> The allegation concerns just three of the 153 sites at which the vaccine was tested on 44,000 participants. It would have been less misleading to say "data integrity issues at 3 of 153 Pfizer trial sites."

Given how many of the social media audience would read just the title, perhaps the missing context label is accurate.

[1] https://leadstories.com/analysis/2021/12/lead-stories-respon...

alignItems··on Facebook versus The BMJ: when fact checking goes wrong
The BMJ itself tightly controls who can say what on its platform, and that is precisely why it gained its reputation.

Granted, Facebook is supposed to be more open for everyone, but it’s still their platform, their reputation, and they can decide what to filter - and people can decide to take their discussions somewhere else.

alignItems··on Jotto – A Low Tech Wordle
Wordle is actually a variation of an old game that you can play without electronic devices.
alignItems··on Buy a coal mine, drive a gas guzzler, and other uses of reverse logic
I thought he was going to say that each new person goes in front of the person currently being served. This would motivate people to complete their orders as fast as possible.
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