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cafeoh

105 karma · joined June 24, 2015

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cafeoh··on How Kerala got rich
The region has remnants of socialist ideas. The article, however, is indeed a puff piece on the vastly dominant economic theory, which is, as it turns out, not "fresh" at all.

I will say however that I think it's unfair to call professor Roy a neoliberal. Being a neoliberal is merely the expectation for most economic "theorists", but his vocal apologetics for imperalism and colonialism is not.

> Indian Marxists viciously attacked the CEHI, arguing the imperial state's aim was to extract surplus from India, that it withheld the capacity to do good in famines, and deployed the capacity to cause harm at all other times.

> In this void, blog and trade-book writers moved in with a leftist-nationalist political agenda posing as economic history. Most of their claims can be dismissed by subjecting them to the 1980s test: Can economic change be read as an effect of the Empire? The answer remains: No.

This is indeed a very powerful purity test, "Do your claim go against my utterly ahistorical narrative? If not, then I can comfortably dismiss them without addressing them."

> That India's trade surplus meant Britain looted India is bad logic because the surplus did not mean theft but the purchase of services. “Millions of Indians died of policy-induced famines” (Hickel) is bad logic by assuming infinite state capacity was deliberately withheld.

This one is quite rich aswell, it's just blunt unapologetic imperalism denial. It's bad logic because the logic bothers me.

I mean it just goes on and that's just his most recent tweets.

cafeoh··on He blew the whistle on Amazon. He's still paying the price
> You really cannot blame only the companies without blaming the consumers too.

Right, the problem is structural, but consumers for the most part aren't and can't realistically be in the know as to the horrible work conditions under which what they consume is produced, most of them aren't particularly happy with their own work conditions in the first place. And even if they do know (when the company has failed to hide it from them) they often don't have a choice. Consumers also don't lobby for worsening the conditions and abolishing the rights of workers. Companies on the other hand are almost always in the know, and choose not only to continue to benefit from this exploitation, but are also willing to go to tremendous lengths to hide, defend or expand this exploitation.

And yet neither of the parties are "evil", the most "enlightened" liberal will realize they both take part in the same economy and use that as a justification, but the consumer can not change this through their consumption (even an immortal, omniscient and perfectly rational economic agent straight out a neoclassical economic textbook would consider this an uphill battle) nor the producer through their production ("another will take my place" and so on).

Now to me if you (not you) recognize this, that the problem is inherently structural, but you're unwilling to criticize and rethink the structure, I have to assume the structure doesn't bother you all that much or worse, that you're a defeatist. Either way the good news is that there is an endless amount of other things to point your finger at (like China).

cafeoh··on He blew the whistle on Amazon. He's still paying the price
There is something western politicians can and should do to help working conditions outside the first world and it is exactly that: nothing.

I'd hope most people are familiar with the fact that the west, and specifically the CIA, later the NED and many different gov-backed orgs have been hard at work making sure the working conditions of those countries are either kept as exploitative as they are, or if possible made worse. Of course China is a fairly specific case, and while there obviously have been numerous cases of interventionism (like in the Tian'anmen square riots or Taiwan as a whole) stopping the endless anti-Chinese propaganda couldn't hurt (which I'm not accusing this article of being). It's absolutely obvious to everyone that the US and allies would jump at the first opportunity to meaningfully destabilize China's economy so, no, I certainly don't expect anything positive to be done for Chinese workers by western countries, and especially not by a country like the US that should very much look inwards when it comes to working conditions.

cafeoh··on OpenAI's board has fired Sam Altman
By "our economy" I meant capitalism. I was pointing out that I sincerely doubt that AI replacing existing useful labor (which it is doing and will keep doing, of course) will naturally transition us away from this mode of production.

Of course if you're a gross commie I'm sure you'd agree since AI, like any other mean of production, will remain first and foremost a tool in the hands of the dominant class, and while using AI for emancipation is possible, it won't happen naturally through the free market.

cafeoh··on OpenAI's board has fired Sam Altman
So you think AI will force a push out of economic growth? I'm really not sure how this makes sense. As you've said a lot of labor these day is mostly useless, but the reason it's still here is not ideological but because our economy can't survive without growth (useless can still have some market value, of course). If you think that somehow AI displacing actual useful labor will create a big economic shift (as would be needed) I'd be curious to know what you think that shift would be.
cafeoh··on Cursorless is alien magic from the future
This is hilarious, although some people actually believe that poverty is a mindset issue so I hope to god you're joking
cafeoh··on Anti-ChatGPT
A more political piece of media isn't necessarily less honest or more manipulative. Similarly, a very supposedly "neutral, both-sides" opinion can be very manipulative. The best thing you might be able to do is filter out specific hand-picked subjects (like other commenters said QAnon or specific conspiracies), but I doubt you need more than basic keyword matching for that. Anything further feels to me like you're just tightening an echo-chamber.
cafeoh··on Anti-ChatGPT
It would be extremely useful to know what people want you to believe and why, but how on earth do you figure out someone's intent?
cafeoh··on Anti-ChatGPT
I understand that the blacklist is probably just an example of things to hide, but it's interesting to note that if the filter was effective, it would block literally any and all content, including information criticizing and fighting against the nefarious media manipulation highlighted in this repo, but also the repo itself.

(note: this comment has a strong political bias, may reduce your lifespan, and the note you're reading might be considered "meme" content)

edit: Okay maybe it's not that interesting and that's the exact point the project was trying to make by showing censorship of Assange's tweets and I feel stupid.

cafeoh··on Poor people often don’t survive to become seniors who vote
> Additionally, why is it framed in a way that makes it seem like white people having more of an impact is a bad thing?

Is it really? This is definitely not the point of the article, which talk about the bias that people grow more conservative when that is at least partially explained by a survivor bias. You decide to read this as "white people bad", when the article simply highlights some democratic bias that isn't talked about that often, and I think your reaction says more about your own obsidional way of thinking than the author's.

> And it doesn't even stop there - the article implies that more diversity (i.e less white people) is an ontological good. How does this stuff even get published?

Can you please for the love of god point to me where in this article it's said that more diversity is an ontological good? Are we reading a different article altogether?

cafeoh··on OpenAI is now everything it promised not to be: closed-source and for-profit
> Even if OpenAI was open source and still a non-profit, its funding would come from the profit generated by corporations and the wealth of individuals who became rich through capitalism

Sounds to me like you're describing a system that fatally tethers individuals to profit motive, and technological advancement to the good will of a few, rather than something that magically allows for great projects to exist.

cafeoh··on ChatGPT Plus
Damn those two links you sent are actually insane, on the drag queen one I would really like the person posting the tweet to say what they believe the AI should respond to "are drag queens telling stories to children bad". Something tells me it's gonna be pretty unhinged and betray the author's bias way more than ChatGPT bias, but looking at any of his other tweets, his own obsessions are in plain sight (despite them calling themselves "raging centrist", whatever that means).

The second is even more insane, where the author literally grades the answer as fitting or not to his own ideology, and not some kind of unbiased opinion. When the AI refuses to answer it gets graded C, when it does answer because it's largely a statement the vast majority of the population would agree with, it gets graded C. Should ChatGPT measure its answer on "Was Hitler bad" with all the examples of good and nice things he did?

Regardless, clearly neither of these authors are looking for an unbiased opinion, and they're all terribly misguided in thinking that there is a "neutral" position on matters of human society. What on earth is a "neutral" position on women's right, gay marriage, imperialism?

I did some of my own tests with at least neutral statements, and then attempting to steer ChatGPT towards my own ideology, and it acted unbiased (giving definition when asked opinion on questions actually subject to debate, and vague informations with no conclusion when asking about historical unknowns).

cafeoh··on Ask HN: Anyone else feels the commoditization of real estate is unethical?
We give the beachfront properties to the people who clean the toilets?
cafeoh··on Hacking attractiveness biases in hiring? The role of beautifying photo-filters
Quite naturally I would imagine it makes you more competent in every role where you can be discriminated on those basis (customer-facing, or any job that's heavy on communication). Could make sense for the social worker role, less so for the IT specialist, but I'd be interested to know your source.
cafeoh··on Hiring discrimination: a problem for men in female-dominated occupations
"It's interesting to me people make all sort of assertions about why men or women are dominant in an industry without anyway to falsify their hypothesis". You proceed to answer with a random unsourced assertion that seems to go against current sociological studies.

So I'll answer you with another unsourced hypothesis: you're a man, and you just justified your position in the industry by waving your hand and saying "they don't want it anyway!". They are not interested in engineering you say? Would you mind giving me an hypothesis off the top of your head as to why that is? I'm sure you'll have a very interesting assertion here aswell.

"Woman does not wish to turn aside from her higher work, which is itself the end of life, to devote herself to government, which exists only that this higher work may be done. Can she not do both? No!" -Lyman Abbott (1903)

cafeoh··on Hiring discrimination: a problem for men in female-dominated occupations
More amazing yet, perhaps, is that some people find it acceptable to talk about racism in a situation where the word doesn't apply. Discrimination against white people can be a thing, racism doesn't. Discrimination can make sense (for obvious reasons), racism doesn't.
cafeoh··on Underrated Reasons to Be Thankful
You would never wish it for those that achieve growth or for the people suffering homelessness, debt, precariousness, etc? My gut tells me we both have very different ideas on what ambition is/can be, what form of growth is valuable, and how economic liberalism weighs in.

Ethics aside, the taxes I've been paying out of my salary since I've been in the industry allows me today to benefit from an incredible financial safety net as I'm attempting to put together my own R&D software company.

cafeoh··on Et Tu, Procter and Gamble?
"vous" if pluralized you in French, not in Latin.
cafeoh··on Amazon union vote count begins this week for Alabama warehouse
Automatable task gets automated, 100% unskilled labor gets replaced with robots. I don't believe that's backfiring, I believe it's the only way for Amazon to keep doing what it does without being "evil".
cafeoh··on Amazon union vote count begins this week for Alabama warehouse
What now?
cafeoh··on CD Projekt Red has been subject to a cyber attack and ransom demand
Same, about 60 hours in, and while I only had one game breaking bug (can not finish a cyberpsycho mission because the body I'm meant to investigate dropped through the floor), physics and AI bugs (I got catapulted like you said about a dozen times, cars are notoriously terrible, I died from "falling" down a 20cm drop more than 20 times) are plentiful. I'd estimate I've had to reload a save between 5 and 10 times to continue progress. It hurts immersion badly, but as far as raw gameplay/shooting goes, I just beared with it, the game saves often enough that I rarely lost more than 5 minutes of progress.

Saying it's "hardly more bugs than most early access/new releases" is something that I've seen too often though. I'd be willing to assume my experience is way outside of the norm, if I didn't have a number of friends I played along with and that reported the exact same (sometimes worse) experience on PC.

cafeoh··on Why cats are crazy for catnip
only shows IPv6 for me.
cafeoh··on Why the iPhone Timer app displays a fake time
I've never seen something so confusing. I've been (and quite frankly still am) seriously considering this is a big prank that's going over my head. The author even mentions that because time goes up and countdowns go down, rounding down is confusing. Wouldn't the logical conclusion be that you needed to round up?

Wouldn't rounding up be the most logical option ANYWAY? If someone counts me down, I expect them to say "5, 4, 3, 2, 1, GO", and I expect a timer to do the exact same thing. This fixes seemingly every issue, starting on 5, not having to round to nearest integer (or add 500ms, which is an odd way to look at it, but sure), and not showing 0 (which I'd find quite weird). I just checked my own (Android) timer, and sure enough it rounds up, which is what I expected and what I expect from a countdown in general.

Maybe what seems to me like the most obvious behaviour for a timer is not as obvious as I think, but why did the author not even mention rounding up as a solution, or how it could conflict with his own expectations?

I'll just assume this to be a shower thought that didn't fully mature before making it into an article, but there seems to be enough effort that I'm still left quite confused. Oh and don't mistake this for a euphemism for me critiquing the intelligence of the author, at worst it's just a funny blindspot (as we all experience) but I'm seeing very little mentions in the comments here, which only adds to my bafflement.

cafeoh··on Bongo Cat
Cute toy, but the links right below the buttons are absolutely infuriating.
cafeoh··on The next capitalist revolution
Interesting take on decentralized technologies. It feels to me like attacking (or defending) decentralized technologies in general is a bit abstract though. Just taking Bitcoin for example, where would you see this concept of racing to the bottom and trading away your values (outside of the shortcomings of the technology itself). Since it's a platform for holding and trading assets, I don't think there is the competitive aspect that would drive any of those behaviors, but maybe your article is focused on competitive scenarios more than anything else.

But even when there is a notion of competition you say that to avoid the traps left around by an imperfect (perhaps unavoidably) system of incentives, coordination is necessary, questioning the need for a decentralized system in the first place. But is that really so bad/superfluous? What if the coordination necessary to make a decentralized system work led more easily to a desirable and elastic result than something crafted by hand. Again, maybe it's too abstract, but I picture a decentralized governance system where members would have to coordinate to achieve a proper equilibrium. For example the biggest hurdle to fighting lobbyism effectively isn't coordination from competing interests, it's the lack of resources. Wouldn't a decentralized system negate the power of money, networking, services, preferential treatment (and even blackmail) even if it still ended up causing/requiring coordination?

cafeoh··on Michael Pollan on Psilocybe Azurescens
I'll second that too.

LSD has much more of an edge and has caused long lasting psychological issues for me (having dropped a dozen times) that I still find myself struggling with on occasion to this day (about a year after my last dose).

Mushrooms are much softer on you, and I believe they can be much more useful. In the right setting, with the right people I would be inclined to take mushrooms again at some point in my life, but I wouldn't take LSD again.

cafeoh··on This VR cycle is dead
Just from my own experience using oculus+touch:

- I already do a lot of sitting VR when tired/feet hurt. You're not gonna play the same game but a lot of the best experiences (cockpit based) are better sitting anyway.

- I do that aswell but arguably it's more precarious. I advise investing in a tumbler/thermos :)

- I exclusively use open headphones, the ones on the oculus are too and I can hear if someone is even standing in the corridor looking at me from the accoustic change. Closed headphones make me feel very uncomfortable and antisocial anyway.

- Heh, I'm playing, don't care about my appearance.

- On this point especially I must strongly disagree. Nothing has brought people around my gaming setup more than a VR HMD. And every game I played properly showed the player's view in a separate window and handled audio mirroring perfectly. Some games even allow for different spectator cameras, or smoothed up motions.

We lack the deep games we're accustomed to in traditional gaming. For myself and many, one of the best experience has been Doom 3 BFG VR. Tells you how desperately we need a proper "full" game with good mc support. Once those start coming out I expect the whole experience to be vastly different.

cafeoh··on This VR cycle is dead
Self driving car are the future of automobile. Self driving is not even halfway to GAI, yet it is the future.

People taking this VR/AR stance don't understand at all what goes into such tech. Like somebody spitting on the explosion engine because "that's only a halfway technology" and refusing to drive anything but flying cars.

cafeoh··on FingerIO: Using Active Sonar for Fine-Grained Finger Tracking
I suppose he means that a small microphone/speaker setup near an ATM machine's keypad could allow you to track the position of the finger and get the corresponding keypresses without any intrusive modification to the ATM itself.

Of course that would only be valid if you proceed to then steal the person's card right afterward, so all in all, not that useful.

cafeoh··on The abolition of work
Barring the fact that heart surgeries and cooking can be automated (because it's speculative and doesn't add much to the discussion), I see what you mean.

I don't think 1 to 1 value exchange necessarily has it's place though. Does it matter that it's the person you helped that helps you? Does it even matter that get as much value as the amount you're giving out? I believe that offering value has value in itself if you know what I mean. I'm sure a friend of yours (or yourself) has once spent hours carefully making you understand something they knew well to the maximum of their ability, and loved it. People like to share, especially knowledge.

Anyway, wouldn't a medical surgeon actually like to perform surgery? If anything else wouldn't he go looking for people?

Everyone likes to hone their skills, and it seems more likely that heart surgeons go looking for patients to help and gladly accept to perform surgery on them (you let me work on you, and I'll fix you up) rather than go shoot a couple animals in the wood to patch them up afterward.

I think there will be a completely new notion to service and favors anyway, without scarcity and ego.

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