coryfklein

> YouTube wouldn't be able to justify staying up indefinitely. It feels heavy on negative externalities.

"YouTube files bankruptcy and closes it's doors because people aren't willing to watch advertisements and executives could think of no other source of revenue to keep the doors open."

That's never going to happen, because the executives would be fired for incompetency. If advertising suddenly becomes a non-viable revenue stream, YouTube (and internet video hosting in general) is not going to disappear.

In fact, I ACTIVELY WISH we would drop the advertising model, and I will not support it if I have any alternative. It is a poison on the world and a giant economic waste. The world would be much the better place if YouTube (and the internet in general) gave up on advertising entirely.

> That's disingenuous because you're omitting the other half of the transaction

1. The parent commenter seems to be quite candid and sincere, so I don't think the word disingenuous applies here.

2. YouTube has decided NOT to obligate all users to view ads in order to retrieve content from their servers. The public needs to accept NO Terms of Service to curl a video down from their servers.

3. There is no such "implied arrangement" when it comes to YouTube's servers which YouTube provides to the public. Yes, some such arrangement is clear when using youtube.com or the official YouTube application. That distinction is critical here.

Also as some side-commentary from a utilitarian perspective, since this discussion seems to have a distinct moral slant. If one opts to view YouTube with ads – instead of without them – is that action increasing or decreasing the net human well-being in the world? Given that no laws are broken and no crime has occurred, this seems to be the last remaining question we must answer.

And it seems quite clear to me that the alternate world where video-bandwidth is NOT purchased with human attention spent on advertisements seems to be, in nearly all ways, an improvement on what we have today.

It's a lose-lose situation.

If you don't have civil forfeiture and the former Amazon employee ends up indeed guilty, it could be after decades of court battles that are literally paid for with money obtained through fraud, and during which time the family enjoys the benefit of the money (using it up on vacations, depreciating assets, etc) and the real victim is deprived of it permanently.

On the other hand, if you do have civil forfeiture and the Amazon employee is found not-guilty, then not only are they deprived of those years of enjoying their justly earned capital, they are also disadvantaged during trial by not being able to afford appropriately skilled representation.

In summary, if you do civil forfeiture then some not-guilty will have their assets unjustly seized and held. If you don't do civil forfeiture, then real victims of theft and fraud will be deprived of their property.

It seems to me though, that if a judge determines you have a high likelihood of success in a court of law, that can and should be used to take some advance – yet reversible – action, such as happens with court injunctions. And then save the final decision for the complete trial.

> People want free stuff.

I'll also point out that it takes two to tango and most every internet content company is actively offering free stuff. I suspect one reason that ad-based revenue models are so hard to remove are because eliminating it would require coordinated effort on two separate axes:

1) Consumers would have to coordinate on, "From now on, let's pay for all our services"

AND

2) Companies would have to all agree, "Let's stop providing free product subsidized by ads"

Without some sort of drastic fundamental shift in technology or radical technological invention, I just don't see it happening. Maybe someone makes a killer OS or product that has ad-blocking built-in from the ground up and is also so amazing that everyone switches to it, and so suddenly ad revenue drops to near zero? I guess we can dream.

Also the article did say specifically that the hunter-gatherers were within 10% TEE of the average US person. That's order-of-magnitude in line with the 300 calories/day, given that the NHS recommended calories/day for men is 2500 and 10% of that is 250 calories.

The article seems to indicate that, counterintuitively, your Total Energy Expenditure (TEE) wouldn't have changed much after you stopped the regular cycling (see the section about how hunter gatherers walking 8-14 km a day had the same TEE as average US), so your weight gain may have been from second-order effects of coming back to your diet.

Do you remember whether your diet changed at this time as well?

Some other anecdotes shared here seem to share a similar theme, that exercise helps in losing weight on a more meta-level by shifting yourself into a generally healthier mindset which, in turn, seems to help you eat "healthier" foods, which is probably a proxy for "low-calorie foods" like fruit and vegetables. Maybe when you're sedentary it's easier to reach for the bag of potato chips?

My ideal is working remotely from home, but coming into the office once a quarter for the whole week, and spending that time doing interpersonal things. I come away from that week feeling very refreshed and enabled to dive into work again with solid focus.

I'll rarely make any progress on my "sprint" tasks during the in-office week, but I organize fun social events after-hours for all the other remotes that fly in at the same time (and any locals that want to spend after-hours together). Last time I did a screening of Princess Mononoke in the main office gathering area, and then we went out for drinks & dinner 2-3 times that week. One evening we all went out to play ping-pong.

I came across this because I learned that the ampersand logogram "&" originated from concatenating the letters "et" together, which itself is an abbreviation of "et cetera". I never knew of the connection between & and "et cetera" or "etc" until today!

Yes, but that's not how we _learn_. You can read all the succinct bullet points of advice you want, but seeing a lesson explained through the eyes of an engaging story is a strictly better way of _ingesting_ said lesson and makes you more capable of actually pattern matching situations where it is appropriate.

"Consider things from others' viewpoints" is a summary of the lesson, but you could have told that to the mother in the story all day long and she wouldn't have grokked how to apply it to her situation, or even that she would benefit by doing so!

I'm seeing a huge discrepancy between the poll responses and the comments.

Most everyone seems to agree that leetcode has poor corollation with the ability to perform at most companies, while also agreeing that leetcode is very common practice in interviewing.

You may be able to find a company where you can pass through the interview stages with poor leetcode ability, but many companies that YOU WOULD ACTUALLY WANT TO WORK AT currently include a leetcode evaluation as part of their interview process, despite the fact that that very company does not require those skills for every day work.

And ignore the, "well you wouldn't want to work for a company that tests this way" comments. There is NOT some magical super-strong correlation between the interview experience and the actually-working-there experience that applies to all companies. Some have this correlation, and some don't. This is why you ask the hiring manager for 1:1 interviews with front line engineers and then you grill THEM about aspects of work that matter to you.

:lol_sob: Why can't we have nice things mrcrumb1?? Hahaha.

But yes. Yes, I'm advocating that people be just a little bit more open minded and flexible about this issue and, ideally, the so many others like it. Sometimes it's quite depressing to consider the giant gap between how society functions today and how it could function if it operated by different rules.

Consider the already immigrated medical professionals living in the United States right now that are unable to practice because of the above described licensing issues.

To give a couple examples. If a nurse moves to the US and learns he can't practice without going back to medical school, he may opt instead to work a different job and defer his medical career. If a doctor moves to the US and is in the same position, she may choose to remain a stay-at-home mom and let her husband be the primary breadwinner.

There's also the arbitrage aspect here: globally we may have a healthcare worker shortage, but it may be more severe in one place than another. Reducing the friction involved in moving the workforce could allow workers that are in relative over-supply to move to an area with relative under-supply, improving the overall efficiency of the system.

No, but on a higher meta-level it is contagious. Obesity is more prevalent in societies where high-caloric foods are more readily available. Now I'm more libertarian leaning myself so I wouldn't actually advocate for this, but if we mandated a cap on calorie-per-serving for "foods", you'd see a drastic drop in the availability of high carbohydrate foods (particularly sugar) which would essentially cause forced sugar-withdrawal in most of the population.

A couple months later? Everyone's sugar-thermostats are reset, the lower-calorie food tastes nearly as good – if not better – and obesity rates would plummet.

However, since we don't/can't coordinate such a thing on a national level, everyone gets exposed to constantly increasing carb content in their food, and maintaining a lower calorie diet requires significantly more effort. I can speak from personal experience, I simulated this on a personal level when I moved to South Korea for 2 years where sugar is nearly non-existent. As a modestly thin person I lost an additional 15-20 pounds while I was there without having to work hard or suffer with worse-tasting food (well, I did experience sugar withdrawal for the first couple months).

How long ago was that? I have to think the situation today is quite different from when the major vaccines were approved months ago, but I could be wrong.

> You need a decade to actually functionally increase the supply of nurses and specialists.

Similar things were said for the vaccine.

There is so much gatekeeping in the medical community that is not totally necessary. A doctor or nurse that immigrates to the US from a different country which has better health care than we do cannot practice were without jumping through tons of hoops. That is a pretty straightforward way the government – in a state of national emergency mind you! – could instantly and functionally increase the supply of nurses and specialists.

Since you seem quite interested in learning economic fundamentals, I highly recommend you check out the Moody's Talks Inside Economics podcast [0].

One topic they have discussed with fair regularity lately is the current inflation rate. They point out that you can tease out what factors contribute to that 7% inflation number, and once you subtract out 2-3 specific components, components that – with some inductive reasoning – we have good reason to believe are transitory in nature, the inflation number that applies to the broad majority of fundamentals is actually closer to the fed's 2% target.

I'm not an expert in this area and I don't grok the economics on a deep enough level to be able to reproduce their argument in situ here, but their case that the fed's strategy of holding steady is in fact the most responsible thing to do to achieve that 2% target.

[0] https://about.moodys.io/podcast-series/moodys-talks-inside-e...

I don't actually know if my desired end-state is practical or even possible, but I can at least describe what it looks like:

* I pay $10-25 for a movie

* I can then personally view that movie with myself and my family on the display I want (the last hotel I stayed at didn't have a HDCP compatible TV so I couldn't display my purchased film on the TV)

* I am not forced to watch advertisements or piracy warnings before the film

* I can put the film on other devices I own to watch via more convenient methods (my phone, tablet, home theater setup)

Are those requirements fundamental to having a legal system that protects the rights of copyright owners? Honestly I don't think they are! Because the DRM schemes that enable the above situation clearly aren't stopping pirates in the first place. But who knows, maybe there's an alternate universe where content creators allow all the above bullet points and – as a consequence – very few entities invest in creating art! In the end if I had to choose between that universe and the one we have today, I'd still take the one we have today where art is legally well protected enough that we have a plethora of it.

You may be on to something here. With GPT-3 you could improve the quality of the responses by starting with a prompt like, "You're a well-educated and very helpful individual".

Maybe internet searches can be improved by changing the search from "how gps works" to "excellent, clear, and precise explanation of gps"?

Wow your interview anecdote is totally different from mine. My interview at Disney+ was one of the weirdest I've ever had. Really open ended questions, but the interviewer was looking for very specific answers. At one point the interviewer just laid back in his chair and closed their eyes for a few minutes. I came away really confused and – unsurprisingly – without an offer but not really sure what I was expected to have done differently.

It's so depressing that – at some point in the future – I'm going to want a really clear and precise explanation of how GPS works and the likelihood that an internet search directs me to this excellent, clean, and ad-free blog is essentially nil.

> The government can't "simply" take things away from me, at least in the US.

Yeah, maybe calling it "simple" was a mistake, but here I'm thinking about exactly such things as search & seizure and eminent domain where you can be legally deposessed of literally anything that you "own".

Yes you own the blu ray, but you don't actually own _the movie_. Despite owning the disc, your legal rights to how you can view the content on it are quite specific, and I believe that circumventing the DRM on it is illegal. So the fact that you have physical ownership of the disk is almost tangential to the discussion.

And of course there's always the whole, "Well actually the government has the final say in everything so does it count that you 'own' something if the government can simply take it away from you." but that's a whole other can of worms!

I think you're correct to a degree that when we choose Option 1 then it makes Option 2 less urgent.

But! Usually Option 1 is much less efficient long-term than Option 2, so – as long as we're both talking theoretically here – then theoretically the entity that is footing the bill for the 100k security force would see how freaking expensive it is and would advocate with a loud voice for Option 2 to get implemented as soon as possible.

You're correct in this subtle distinction, but I still mourn the fact that – for all intents and purposes – we live in a world that looks nearly the same as the one where the concept literally does not exist.

What alternative strategy exactly are you suggesting that individual entities take which solves the problem? This reminds me of the rats from Meditations on Moloch [1]:

> In fact, it’s not just art. Any sect at all that is leaner, meaner, and more survivalist than the mainstream will eventually take over. If one sect of rats altruistically decides to limit its offspring to two per couple in order to decrease overpopulation, that sect will die out, swarmed out of existence by its more numerous enemies. If one sect of rats starts practicing cannibalism, and finds it gives them an advantage over their fellows, it will eventually take over and reach fixation.

[1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/

While I acknowledge the irony you are pointing out, even that is a feature of the world we live in, where humans are unable to coordinate. Eliminating DRM is just one of the many wonders we could accomplish if we could "simply" coordinate the efforts of all software engineers on the planet.

Because if you don't implement DRM, then you simply raise the marginal price that it costs a company to do so, and you make another engineer – who is willing to implement it – marginally richer, thus indirectly rewarding behavior you despised in the first place!

The only ways to eliminate things like DRM are to either globally coordinate all software engineers' efforts (probably impossible), or somehow... socially change the incentives such that DRM is a net-loss for content producers? Also seems probably impossible.

> If you want to (physically) own a movie or TV show

I find this phrasing quite fascinating. What does it even mean to "own" a movie? If you torrent or rip it, you now simply possess a copy and with the ability to watch it without any artificial restrictions, but I'd hardly say that you "own" it at that point.

I find it so depressing that our legal system does not even have the concept of an individual having access to a movie such that they can play it for themselves conveniently without restrictions. Even when you physically own a DVD there is no "sanctioned" way to watch it without being forced to watch the commercials and legal disclaimers at the beginning.

Which reminds me of the irony always repeated in these threads, that the folks who rip or torrent the film never see these legal disclaimers and only the folks who obey all the "rules" and don't need to see the disclaimer are constantly exposed to it.

Why can't we have nice things? This world is so distopian.

Option 1) Upgrade the security on the containers

Option 2) Re-work society from the ground up to eliminate any incentive for burglary

It is no wonder why folks are drawn more to Option 1, which is about a bajillion times more approachable, but which doesn't preclude also working on Option 2 at the same time.

Why indeed you are correct! [1]

> Take-home message:

> - The idea that viruses always evolve to become less lethal because it is advantageous to them is an old theory that has been shown to be wrong

Thank you for correcting a misconception of mine! :D

[1] https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/covid-19/do-bad-viruses-al...

A few cursory searches tell me pretty quickly that mRNA vaccines have been in use and studied for decades, including for diseases such as the flu, rabies, Zika, and CMV. So it would be hard to call it "completely new". And those decades of study have not shown long term effects either.

Which specific scientific evidence would you accept to change your opinion on this matter?