Well I can parse my nginx logs and don't see that happening, so I'm not convinced. I suppose my websites aren't the most discoverable, but the number of bogus connections sshd rejects is an order of magnitude or three higher than the number of unknown connections I get to my web server. Today I received requests from two whole clients from US data centers, so scrapers must be far more selective than you claim, or they are nowhere near the indie web killer OP purports them to be.
I've worked with a company that has had to invest in scraper traffic mitigation, so I'm not disputing that it happens in high enough volume to be problematic for content aggregators, but as for small independent non-commercial websites I'll stick with my original hypothesis unless I come across contradictory evidence.
I self-host a few servers and have not seen significant traffic increases from crawlers, so I can't agree with that without seeing some evidence of this issue's scale and scope. As far as I know it mostly affects commercial content aggregators.
Not really. Even in English there are only a few possible ways to spell out a given sound. With Chinese characters that mostly goes out the window, making speaking and writing more or less orthogonal skills. Not entirely since there are classes of characters that are related by sound, but to a much greater extent than alphabetic languages. Personally if I forget a spelling in English or a related language I realize that my approximation looks wrong and can correct it by elimination, whereas with Chinese characters it's common for people to simply not have a clue how to even write the first stroke of a word they've heard and read before.
Of course it does in the US tech bubble, if you talk to people who haven't been using Macs for 30 years you might hear a different story. While Apple makes good hardware they also have plenty of blunders, especially in recent years, much like Microsoft in its domain really. Both are coasting on their past successes and familiarity. I get it, many of my coworkers watch their announcement streams like they're video game announcements. From my standpoint they haven't put out anything exciting since the iPhone/iPod Touch, but I don't have the money for toys that cost thousands of dollars apiece like the Mac Studios or their VR headset, so maybe I'm missing out.
Except consumption correlates with income and wealth, and it's already not uncommon for states to exempt necessities like food and clothing from taxation, which keeps them affordable without a convoluted bureaucratic system. Implemented correctly, consumption taxes are less regressive than property taxes, which prop up rents and constitute a barrier to home ownership for working class people.
There are arguments to be made against heavily taxing consumption to encourage economic activity, but you're oversimplifying this by disregarding the indirect costs of alternatives and looking for problems instead of solutions. Not that I think the one you commented on is a good one.
The incentive structure in academia exacerbates that by encouraging authors to hype up their findings and obfuscate any deficiency in their models. Withholding information and making results difficult to reproduce is a symptom of that, as are academic jargon disconnected from terminology used in the private sector, and obtuse presentation. Those practices make it easier for bad data, bad methodologies, and misrepresentations of findings to slip past reviewers and readers and harder for other researchers to dispute, and undermine the scientific process itself as we get flooded with junk.
It's too bad to see otherwise intelligent people refusing to engage with any statement or action of the US federal government in good faith. However I suspect the point you cited is far more relevant to this move than the distraction that is Israel v. Palestine. There is plenty to criticize and oppose in the UN's agenda. Much of it suggests developed countries severely inhibit their growth and further centralize power to better control the pesky proles who might not want to go along with the plan. See James Lindsay's reading of their Sustainable Development Goals which cites them directly.
You are trying to walk between the lines and perhaps that's an attempt to avoid being flagged, but it is disingenuous to insinuate that the only objection to the pandemic population control exercise was that it was "fake". There were many lies spun over the course of the pandemic and in most cases it was obvious that they were lies within weeks or months of the outbreak. Despite that people were happy to collaborate with the overreach by snitching on their family members, "friends", and neighbors for touching too much grass, when in fact virtually no healthy individual under the age of 40 was risking much by living normally, and especially not the children abused by the extended freakout. Had cooler heads prevailed perhaps we could have ended the madness after a year, but it had to drag on for two more, and the resulting "stimulus" overspending that dragged on for far too long subsequently aggravated the wave of inflation and cost of living crisis that we're in today. Regardless of our feelings towards illegal immigration enforcement today it is completely insane how whitewashed this event was in comparison, but I suppose that's how it is when the authoritarians are on "your" (general you) side.
And in response to the parent comment: "made up characterization of the situation", you bet. If only the concerned citizens had a consistent moral framework, I could sympathize.
We've been there for a while. Most people get their news from social media networks that persistently funnel users into content silos that validate and reinforce their beliefs, and even traditional news outlets fall prey to biased and forced narratives all the time. Paid propagandists and bot farms have been adding noise for several years. You have to take everything with a grain of salt unless it's verifiable through citations from primary sources or references to data sources for statistical analyses, which are rare to find on news websites (although they are better at filtering out false rumors) and even rarer on popular social media networks that favor short-form text content. I feel like skepticism and critical thinking are trending in response, but that might just be my filter bubble.
Very dramatic, but funding scientific studies is no antidote to groupthink, authoritarianism, and cruelty towards the non-conforming, in case you missed the last 5 years.
There's a pretty clear causal chain between the abuse of public trust and social influence from educational and scientific institutions in the last decade or so and the anti-intellectualism we're witnessing today, abuse which was and is driven by the same hubris you demonstrate by conflating intellectualism with All That Is Good. And needless to say since I am posting on HN, but I say that as an intellectualist.
Perhaps it would help to frame the problem as domestic travel being too expensive as opposed to international travel being too cheap. By the way, overtourism is not a "there's too many Americans/Europeans who can afford vacations" problem, most tourists in Japan are from nearby East Asian countries. In fact, the share of tourists to Japan who come from the US and Europe has declined in recent years.
Went to middle/high school in the 2000s and had not one second of home econ or shop or anything related to it, not even theoretical. The only tools I remember working with other than a pair of scissors, compass and ruler were a glue gun and a scalpel in science labs.
The SLF infestation was met with a whole lot of handwaving, of "look how dangerous this is", but not much in terms of concrete solutions. Then the population naturally stabilized as predators started feeding on them with basically no action taken other than some city weirdoes stomping on them. Turns out you don't need almighty Scientists to do Nature's job all the time. If this situation is different I'm open to the idea that intervention is needed, but all this parroting of uninformed BlueSky propaganda claiming everything is going to fall apart any time now, just you wait, is getting old. In January planes were falling out of the sky because Trump, in February no more social security because Trump, in March we can't forecast the weather anymore because Trump, in April staglation because Trump, in May World War 3 because Trump, in June forest fires because Trump, and in July Trump is killing the bees. What will the madman do next!
Is it so blatant, or does it just seems like it because of the sheer amount of spin being spun? I can think of a few stories that I think qualify as evidence of overstepping, but I can also think of several from 2021-2024. I don't like it, but none really come close to the level of the UK's speech policing. Reading the comments here you'd think we're worse than China.
When it comes to border control, I've looked into several of these outrageous claims, and they consistently omit critical details that point to a valid reason for denial. Being denied entry and then having an overzealous border agent tsk-tsk at your meme is not nearly the same thing as being denied entry or thrown in jail because of it. And now OP primes us to think that the details don't really matter. I think they do, because every conversation on the current administration is now tainted by propaganda (in both directions).
I don't think that autonomous buses would be as cost-effective as private vehicles, since you'd want someone to be on board for security on a shared vehicle even if they're not in the driver's seat. Labor is the most expensive component of public transit operating costs, at least in my area. That said, in low-density areas it's not uncommon to see just one or two people on a big bus that comes once every 40 minutes in the middle of a weekday, and I'm sure running autonomous taxis instead would provide better service at a lower cost, given the same subsidies.
Credit scores in the US function similarly to this risk assessment you describe, with the caveat that there is no standard way to measure risk without a credit history. In my experience, it does not take very long to establish that baseline, and there are inexpensive vehicles to do so, such as secured credit cards. Small-scale lenders are likely to accept alternative documents like income statements or proof of payment history to qualify. FICO scores, as imperfect as they are, merely simplify the risk assessment process.
Allegedly, they believe a system with inputs similar to human vision is best suited for interpreting signals on roads designed for human eyes, and conflicting signals from LIDAR makes disambiguation challenging when combining sensor types. Per a recent Musk interview.
Alcoholics know that they drink, chain smokers know that they smoke... Obesity has an impact on longevity that is on the same order of magnitude as cigarette smoking. I would hope that it would come up during a checkup. If it doesn't, rationalize it however you want, but it's clearly because the doc decided it wasn't worth the risk of saying it out loud. In other countries it's not uncommon to be blunt about it with friends and family, let alone at the doctor's office, but in the US it's considered extremely rude. As a result, I know many people who have a skewed definition of obesity. To them a BMI of 30 is a tad overweight and obese starts maybe at 40. They're prescribed pills and CPAP machines and no one ever tells them they need to lose weight as long as their blood work looks decent. It's easy to neglect a health issue that no one wants to talk about.
Dispensing from editorialism is a choice, yes, but that only translates to bias if it's done inconsistently. Meanwhile, while contextualizing, and to a greater extent reframing, can also be done in a fair and objective manner, doing it well and consistently is much more difficult.
I don't think that Zitron cares about objectivity nearly as much as he cares about his worldview being validated by reporters, thus the idea that failing to inject context [which promotes that worldview] is inherently insincere. Since journalism is a fairly ideologically homogeneous profession, I can understand how that might appeal to him, but I doubt he'd make that argument from the other side of the fence.
What the author presents as "sincerity" comes off as injecting (his) biased views into reporting. The post devolves into a tedious series of anecdotes that ostensibly prove that "context" can reframe a story, and he argues that sincere reporting should take that context into account, which is reasonable in principle, but he doesn't seem to realize that he's only presenting context that suits his worldview and tosses out the rest. For example, he decries journalists being wrong or underemphasizing his bias by failing to account for data that proves him right in retrospect. In the same paragraph, he smears reporters for under-weighing and over-weighing soft data. That's easy to do in hindsight. My takeaway is that he undermines his own premise by demonstrating everything that can go wrong in opinionated reporting: cherry-picking, double standards, and confirmation bias.
P.S.: the most surprising thing to me about this blog post is that it went through an editor.
I think about half of the Japanese albums I tag have a mistake of some sort on Discogs, such as wrong okurigana or kanji usage. I've corrected some of them myself, but it happens so often that I've mostly given up. In the end it's faster to transcribe from the back cover.
I don't believe that Google's AI Overviews or even LLMs in general are to blame for the decline in traffic to news websites. ChatGPT launched with the GPT-3.5 model in November 2022 without a web search function, and had a training data cutoff date of September 2021. Google AI Overviews launched in May 2024 to generally poor reception initially, and ChatGPT Search launched in July 2024. The graph presented in the article reveals a trend starting as far back as April 2022, well before mass-market LLM products could extract useful information in real time, and it doesn't look like it's accelerated significantly. In fact, the WSJ series contradicts it. Prior data would likely reveal that the broad decline began much earlier, since it's well-known[1] that younger generations prefer to get their news from social media these days. Paywalls, quality degradation in search results, and mistrust in the objectivity of news coverage are likely contributing factors.
I don't doubt that the shift from web searches to automated information extraction will pose new challenges to websites that rely on search engine optimization to drive new user traffic, especially for small/individual operators, and I'll be happy to witness the death of SEO if it comes to that, but blaming a new Google Search feature[2] for a long-running decline in traffic to online newspapers strikes me as a deflection from the slow death of their business model.
P.S.: Google's AI Overviews are fairly respectful of content providers and link back to source material from the generated text.
I commend you for your efforts and I'm sure they were appreciated even by those who switched to English with you. It sounds like you were in the infamous long awkward intermediate stage of language learning. Depending on the cadence of your language classes, three years may not be a long time. Intensive language programs with daily lessons and drills are exponentially more effective than typical language-learning programs spread out across short sessions sprinkled throughout the week/month. In my opinion, it makes a lot more sense to place newcomers in intensive learning programs on arrival than to accept they will not be functional outside of ethnic enclaves, and wait decades for their children and grandchildren to finally integrate, as other commenters suggest. It's not an easy process and we can't expect everyone to have the intrinsic motivation to do it all on their own, which is why incentives are needed.