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asdfjklasdfjkl

27 karma · joined April 25, 2017

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asdfjklasdfjkl··on Cuban Doctors Revolt: ‘You Get Tired of Being a Slave’
There are more nuanced critiques of either of the predominant systems discussed in this comment section. If you want to throw unfair death totals for what are at best regimes loosely approximating their underlying communist or capitalist ideologies, you can just as easily claim capitalism kills tons. https://i.redd.it/h0l4hqcf5inz.jpg

but honestly, I don't think body counts are the right way to judge either. Makes for a great way to emotionally charge the conversation, though.

asdfjklasdfjkl··on Anko SQLite, a library to simplify working with SQLite on Android
Ideally, I'd have several separate threads each with fine grained (table-level, maybe even row-level with deferred index updating) control on reading and writing. I admit that I haven't gone sufficiently down this path to know exactly what I'd want though, as it isn't the top priority right now. (We are "fast enough" without concurrency, ... for now.)
asdfjklasdfjkl··on Anko SQLite, a library to simplify working with SQLite on Android
I'm running into a weird case where even within an application, concurrency has become relevant because of parallel processing that the application wants to do over the data stored in the database.

But, our desire for both simplicity and obscenely low latency means that SQLite is still the better choice for us at the moment. In the future, though, I can see robust concurrency support being important even in single application use-cases.

asdfjklasdfjkl··on What does an innocent man have to do to go free? Plead guilty
This mentality is hard to get to for a lot of folks. It doesn't just hit this issue.

Let's talk about race. When a white supremacist wants to kills some folks, sure, that's a problem and we should try to detect, prevent, mitigate, and punish (in that order) their actions.

However, the real issue to solve at a higher level is the societal engineering one where large segments of the population feel a need to turn towards white nationalism. Note: I don't mean "let's make thoughtcrime a thing". I assume the issue is that racially homogeneous rural areas end up with a combination of little welfare and little economic opportunity.

In the medium/long-run, these sorts of issues require UBI, an improved education system, public transportation, and universal healthcare of some sort. That's a tall order and hard sell, so we're left demonizing individuals (treating symptoms).

asdfjklasdfjkl··on Universities are broke – let’s cut the pointless admin and get back to teaching
It's difficult to design an education system without the following property, but nonetheless I find it an unfortunate one:

You do better at university when you already know the material, not when you use the university to learn the material. Your well-being (tied directly to gpa) depends on you not making mistakes during your coursework.

I don't know about you, but mistakes are how I learn.

asdfjklasdfjkl··on One Billion Dollars Short, Bill Ackman, and the Siege Of Herbalife (2015)
In this instance, I'd say it's an even better quote, then.
asdfjklasdfjkl··on Amazon Echo Look
The home isn't a castle anymore. It's a SCIF.
asdfjklasdfjkl··on Alphabet's Self-Driving Cars to Get Their First Real Riders
I think you're making a bit of a strawman here that people usually do with respect to utilitarianism. The utilitarian answer with 5 people on an island, where 1 is a doctor, 3 need organs, the remaining person has available organs, and the 3 are necessary to keep the group alive -- is to kill the one person and take their organs.

However, in a society where people can observe the actions of others and form motivations in response to policies, etc, you'll find that because society reacts fairly poorly to organ harvesting, because organ harvesting is implausible to do at scale without extra bad things happenning, etc, the utilitarian solution is actually not to go about doing it.

Only a naive utilitarian wouldn't try to also remain consistent with something like a Kantian imperative of global self-coherence.

Now, as for cars and testing self-driving on real folks, well, this may be something where the water is pretty murky. I think that society will react poorly enough to early bad events in self-driving that a measured approach is actually the best for saving lives in the long term.

The critique here shouldn't be that "well, utilitarianism sure looks good from afar, but would you murder your neighbor?" It should be "The problem is too difficult to address with utilitarianism because it involves complex societal factors and responses."