ardy42

>> In some real way, Gell-Mann amnesia sustains the entire news industry. We have to believe there is a central, reliable source of news somewhere out there, despite so much evidence to the contrary.

> My ultimate problem is that once this fact becomes apparent to people, many of them tend to go down the rabbit hole of getting what they perceive as the "real" news from blogs/forum posts/opinionated tweets/random guy with a youtube channel. As in, the eventual consequence to mass media having poor rigorous standards of reporting is that people will migrate to sources that have even poorer standards. TBH, I don't really know what the solution to the problem is.

What leads to that isn't "mass media having poor rigorous standards of reporting", it's the presence of any error at all in the mass media. Unless the mass media is inhumanly perfect (which it can never be, being a human endeavor), there will be scores of people who will use "Gell-Mann amnesia" as an excuse to descend into a cocoon of reassuring group-think.

Invocations of "Gell-Mann amnesia" are invitations to generalize single errors into general skepticism of media. However, people are biased, so general skepticism almost always means acceptance of things that support one's biases and rejection of anything that challenges them.

"Wrong" can mean both factually untrue and immoral. I was using it with both senses.

>> He appears to agree with Murray that some class differences reduce to heredity.

> So? When did that became illegal? Or news?

What does illegality have to do with anything in this context?

I mean holding an idea can be both legal and abhorrent/wrong at the same time.

And isn't bringing up legality here kind of a Motte & Bailey fallacy? (I'm genuinely asking, I only learned about that the other day.) People condemn Murray's ideas because they're distasteful and wrong, but it's certainly far easier to defend their legality.

> As previously stated, the MP3 codec was refined using listening tests designed by european audio engineers and featuring the music they chose. In a sense, each of these songs acts as a resonant filter for every file encoded in the MP3 format. Tom's Diner by Suzanne Vega, Fast Car by Tracy Chapman, a Haydn Trumpet concerto... these songs carved out the space of sounds that could be successfully encoded as MP3's.

Does anyone have a full list of the recordings they used for these listening tests?

> This says nothing about the amount of days. Neither do the sources.

Is the amount of days really the most important aspect of this?

> Can be said about the US as well, companies can be forced to share their data with the government.

While the US is definitely not perfect, that's a false equivalency. One can only draw superficial parallels between the US and China on this topic. The key difference is actually in the area of political culture. For instance: both the US and China make a big deal about the "rule of law," but they're actually talking about very different things. The the US, it means the law is applied consistently and even constrains the government. In China, the government is in a very real sense above the law, and the phrase merely means that they demand you comply with their rule through the laws they make.

> I am sorry, but how do we know that youtube video is real? The channel it is uploaded to doesn't seem trustworthy at all.

The copy I linked is clearly a re-upload of a re-upload, it was just the first copy I found.

How do we know anything is real at all? I don't have a specific chain of custody for the video, but I judge that it's likely true because the practices shown are consistent with other reports (e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8PgCUap1Vg, https://www.hrw.org/report/2015/05/13/tiger-chairs-and-cell-...). It gets other details right, like the anti-motorcycle crackdown. Also, the low-level Chinese police that would create a video like that very likely do not understand how bad the optics of it are when seen by foreigners.

> Do you have a source for this? I find it hard to find information on this, I assume it's because I don't speak Chinese.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WeChat#State_surveillance_and_.... It wasn't hard to find.

> I generally agree, but here in Kansas we have long sight lines. On our farm we use fixed wireless to the grain elevator three miles away. The alternative would be running 1.5 miles of wire for three potential customers.

Yeah, I totally agree. There are definitely cases where the economics of running a wire doesn't make sense, though what you describe seems a lot more desirable than Starlink. Generally, I'd think you'd you want to get a wire as close as possible, and minimize the wireless distance. So wires are better than 5G/Wifi, and 5G/Wifi is better than Starlink.

> Is "no data caps" sustainable for Starlink?

Maybe not. This was the first hit for "starlink downlink bandwidth"

https://www.lightreading.com/4g3gwifi/starlinks-network-face...:

> Starlink, the satellite Internet provider from Elon Musk's SpaceX, will be able to support just 485,000 simultaneous users at 100Mbit/s across the entire US, according to one firm's new estimates. And that kind of performance won't even be available until the end of 2026, when Starlink floods Earth's skies with up to 12,000 satellites.

I don't really understand the fascination with wireless for fixed services. If you can run a wire, you should, because wireless is basically just using the air as a single shared wire, and the longer the range the more people have to share that one wire.

>> It's highly unlikely. It is required by CCP law to record user activities up to 90 (or 30? vague memories) days.

> Actually sounds pretty good. In Australia it is 730 days.

No, it doesn't. China requires the content of user activities to be saved, so your chat history is literally being sent to the local police in real time for scanning. The result is stuff like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MiMLVYK4hEc (Chinese police casually asserting their dominance by locking some poor guy in a tiger chair for badmouthing them on a private WeChat chat). A few years back someone found an analyzed an unsecured Mongo DB that was storing these messages: https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/open-mongodb-...

IIRC, Australia only has metadata retention requirements.

> But leaders pay a political price for instituting draconian enforcement measures, while their country pays an economic price, which makes them less likely. It's one thing to send armed agents to storm the homes of executives of a large private bank to shake down the bank. It's another to do it against end-users at a scale where it becomes effective.

I don't think the political price is as high as you think, and armed agents don't have to storm the homes of end-users at scale. All they have to do is storm enough homes discourage people by making it clear the risk is real, and everyone internalizes the rules.

If cryptocurrency is contraband, it's the worse kind of contraband because it advertises that you use it to the authorities through easily monitored channels (since you have to connect to identifiable internet services to use it).

> It is not clear to me why being selfish is either antisocial or being greedy is antisocial.

Because greed leads people to harm and neglect others for gain? This is an extremely basic idea, and if it's still not clear to you, maybe you could watch a movie like Wall Street (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0094291/) and pay close attention to the Blue Star employees, how Gordon Gekko is willing to harm them, and how little he cares about it. It's probably not the best movie to teach this, but at least it's for adults and it came to mind easily. It feels like it would take more time than I'm willing to spend to explain it.

> Almost all the better societies, more livable societies are where people are free to pursue their own self interest (aka greed or profits). The one like North Korea where government beats people to be "non-greedy" appear to be pretty violent places to live.

It would probably do you well to just completely forget about North Korea. I'm no fan of it at all, but what you wrote reads like a rough rehash of some melodramatic libertarian propaganda meme (e.g. make and extreme idea like "greed is good" by placing it in opposition to a villain).

>> which is almost never correct

> I am not seeing either any black or white. You on other hand just called a lot of people antisocial. So people who move out of California to Nevada because they dont want to pay 10% (or 16%) state tax are antisocial ? Seems pretty black and white assertion to me.

You totally are seeing things in back and white (or more precisely, pairs of radical extremes). However, I'm not really willing to spend any more effort trying to hand hold you away from that.

Also, the free association argumentation thing is obnoxious. We're talking about tax havens (and a weird assertion that they should be pride-inducing), what do state resident income tax rates have to do with that? Those are very different things.

>> They also seem useful to contrast the American / protestant view of work as the path to salvation with the European / catholic view of work as something pitiful

> That... doesn't make a lot of sense, at least on face value. In the Protestant view, your work (human effort) has no effect on your salvation. In the Catholic view, it has a lot to do with it.

I think he got it wrong. IIRC, the "Protestant work ethic" comes from a belief one's work ethic and success is proof of salivation, not the cause of it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protestant_work_ethic:

> Since it was impossible to know who was predestined, the notion developed that it might be possible to discern that a person was elect (predestined) by observing their way of life. Hard work and frugality were thought to be two important consequences of being one of the elect. Protestants were thus attracted to these qualities and supposed to strive for reaching them.

>> helping their wealthy be greedier.

> I fail to understand what is wrong with this. What is wrong in people keeping more of their wealth to themselves ?

It's selfish and antisocial. These are pretty basic concepts, and I'm having a little trouble believing they could be unknown or hard to understand. I don't even think libertarian tracts are usually that extreme.

> If there is something wrong in lower taxes are you implying thay countries with 100% taxes (where you turn up everything you have to your government) would be somehow morally superior or something to be proud of ?

No, of course not. You seem to be conceiving things in very black and white way, which is almost never correct (e.g. there's a lot of space between 0% and 100%, rejecting 0% in no way implies a choice of 100%).

Back in the day, those types of cards were available, though a little uncommon:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z-80_SoftCard

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_IIe_Card

https://www.applerepairmanuals.com/the_manuals_are_in_here/P...

The latter is famously authoritarian capitalist, and the former just gutted its civil liberties?

Also, IIRC, they both benefited from being trade gateways into the PRC economy, especially when it was more closed than it is now.

>> Dutch people don't want to hear this but the Netherlands are a tax haven just like Ireland. Luxembourg and Switzerland aren't actually that attractive for tax avoidance anymore.

> Why they don't want to hear this ? Isn't it something the Dutch people should be very proud of ?

Why would anyone be proud of living in a tax haven? The whole point of being one is to profit a little off of a race to the bottom by undermining your neighbor's tax system by helping their wealthy be greedier.

> It seems surprisingly un-Apple-y to allow someone in that position to publish articles detailing the flaws in Apple maps, speculate about where they get their data and how the quality problems might affect unannounced future products.

That tells me he no longer works at Apple. If he did, why would he need to speculate about Apple's internal processes based on what they publicly release? This article (https://www.justinobeirne.com/a-summer-of-google-maps-and-ap...) from 2017 even has him noting hits from Apple's website and tracking how long it took them to correct gaps he outlined.

Those two articles I linked were dated 2016 and 2017. Looking at his website, before that time it seems like he was mostly writing about Google Maps. So maybe he wrote about Google when he was at Apple, then started writing about Apple when he left.

> This one has a ton information of information, but still fail to satisfy because it has a low point/information ratio. It just rambles on with data points and examples.

On his front page, this article appear in this section:

> Research + Updates

> Material for future essays + updates to earlier essays

It honestly reads more like notes than an article.

> I love this type of article, and the effort put into it - but the main thing I can't help but do is wonder what kind of person is driven to exhaustively research Apple Maps over a 5+ year period.

I'm under the vague impression that Justin O'Beirne works in this space, so this isn't just a hobby. Can anyone confirm?

Edit: this article (https://www.businessinsider.com/google-maps-vs-apple-maps-ke...) describes him as "a map expert who helped work on Apple Maps." This article (https://medium.com/all-consuming/the-most-overlooked-touchpo...) describes him as "Head of Cartography at Apple."

> Strong currencies are not the solution to poor governance. Good governance and democracy makes a country and its currency strong. Not vice versa.

That's a good point. Too many people propose individualist solutions to social problems, and all their "solution" would do is make the social problem worse.

I think that stems often stems from an overzealous faith in free markets, which leads to a distorted idea that individual self interest factored over all of society always results in social benefits, so you only need to consider things from the perspective of an individual (which is also far more familiar to most people). Sometimes individual self interest does lead to social benefits, but often it doesn't.

> For a monetary asset, being “managed” is a liability.

I'm not so sure of that. For instance: Bitcoin isn't money, but something that people hoard and speculate on. If it was more actively managed, its parameters could perhaps have been tweaked until it started actually acting more like money.

> I disagree - I trust much more strongly that Bitcoin will not be mismanaged than the USD, because bitcoin is governed by very simple and utile rules that are practically impossible to change, whereas the USD can be and has been inflated substantially.

Following fixed, unchanging rules is kind of the opposite of being managed, let alone well-managed.

> ...especially as Bitcoin comes to be the reserve asset of a larger and larger set of productive economic actors.

"If" not "as": that hasn't happened yet and it's quite likely that it won't happen.

> Simply look around any tech center company and look around. It’s mostly younger crowd. The graybeards are few and far between and in mostly few senior roles.

> Even transferring to middle management doesn’t help much. The same type of younger crowd are brought in to keep up the appearances. The olds are few and far between in director and up roles.

I think you have to be more specific. I could totally believe that WRT to SV tech startups and other younger companies, but they often seemed focused on fashion and in some cases be places where only the young and stupid would be willing to work.

There are "tech-centered companies that" are different. For instance I work at a company that's basically evolved to be a tech company, and if anything, our development groups skew old.

Personally, I'm still worried more about outsourcing than ageism.

> But did you ever wonder where the stability of USD comes from? It all comes down to how big the transaction volume of your currency is.

I don't think it's that simple. Transaction volume doesn't just appear from nowhere.

IMHO, the stability of the US dollar mainly comes from the geopolitical & economic position of the US coupled with trust that its government won't totally mismanage it. Bitcoin has neither of those things and never will.

> Citation? Ther actual written standards of N95 vs KN95 are very similar, and if anything KN95 is probably slightly better. To meet KN95, the mask must be shown not to let air pass around the edges even while doing vigorous exercise, whereas N95 has no such requirement.

In my experience, actual KN95s have extensive leakage, especially around the nose. One factor may be that Western faces and Asian faces are different, and my understanding is that the KN95 standard and masks are tailored to Asian facial structures.

For instance, this is an assessment of a KN95 style mask I actually bought at a Menard's clearance a few months ago. It definitely has fit problems around my nose.

https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/npptl/respirators/testing/results/...

> While the above-listed product classification has similar performance requirements to NIOSH-approved devices, NIOSH does not have knowledge about the sustained manufacturer quality system and product quality control for these products. NIOSH also does not have knowledge about the product’s handling and exposures after leaving its manufacturer’s control.

> In addition, this product is an ear loop design. Currently, there are no NIOSH-approved products with ear loops; NIOSH-approved N95s have head bands. Furthermore,limited assessment of ear loop designs, indicate difficulty achieving a proper fit. While filter efficiency shows how well the filter media performs, users mustensure a proper fit is achieved.

> I bought N95 NIOSH masks. Like most US consumers I searched Amazon occasionally to see if the market was again offering them to consumers but it took a post here on HN, for me to Google and find a US-based supplier. I'm happy to have them, and have given some to my elderly parents.

I did the same, but I managed to get them before the supply closed off (I have a box of US-made 3M 8210s that has literally been to China and back). I got some KN95s, but only use them when I'd have used an N95 previously (e.g. sanding).

I had no idea about these new US manufacturers, but if their product is NIOSH approved then I think I'd be happy with them.

> I actually didn't know they were even available, after being told by officials to use cloth masks for 10+ months I stopped looking. I was surprised how easy and available they were.

Your link doesn't work anymore, but KN95-style masks have been quite readily available for at least 6 months now, if not more. Though most of them seem to be of iffy quality/fit in my experience. Sometimes they're marketed at N95, but I'm thinking that's usually fraudulent mislabeling.

>> This would be a reasonable stance if Bitcoin were just another activity, but it’s unique in its energy profile. What other technology is designed so that energy efficiency improvements are absorbed and nullified (through the difficulty adjustment mechanism)?

> Bitcoin is far from unique in this. When gas prices fall people have been shown to drive more. And buy less efficient cars and drive them less efficiently (faster, more aggressively).

I don't think that's true, or it's only true if you look at it from a consumption perspective that ignores important parts of the picture.

When gas prices fall, more energy is used, but travel miles increase. More work gets done per dollar.

When bitcoin mining gets more efficient or energy cheaper, the amount of bicoin "work" done stays constant, because the difficulty changes to compensate. It's like if roads got longer the cheaper gas gets.

Also the environmental impact of Bitcoin is more novel and thus more interesting than the well-known environmental impact of gas/oil.

> I think it's unrelated. You could say dolphins and whales are "tolerant of hypoxia", yet from their behavior and the layout of their brains it is evident that evolution has not limited "information efficiency" in exchange for "tolerance to hypoxia".

Not all species will make the same tradeoffs or converge on the same solutions, though.