cryptophreak

This declaration seems to be epistemically confused.

On one level, they admit that finding solutions and generating understanding are non-overlapping magisteria. They use this admission to make the point that AI models are not generating understanding by finding solutions.

But on another level, they assert that AI finding solutions somehow breaks the process of generating understanding.

In other words, they simultaneously do and don't understand the non-relationship between finding solutions and generating understanding, and they choose which mode to operate in depending on which helps them score a point against AI.

The only reason we have historically perceived a link between finding solutions and generating understanding is that the problem space was larger than human cognition allowed us to search efficiently. So we pretended, in a "security through obscurity" way, that finding a solution implied understanding. It's inconvenient that we can no longer do that, and institutions will need to adjust in response, but it doesn't break the foundation of mathematics.

The point is that one operating system has all the wiring exposed for all applications, and the others do not. And in some cases, they deliberately went the other way:

https://www.jamf.com/blog/synthetic-reality/

How does the answer to that question relate to the article?

Can you explain why a low-hanging optimization that would reduce costs by 90% without reducing perceived value hasn't been implemented?

That would be even better. It would take longer than an evening, though.

That’s one of the great things about the approach demonstrated in the post. The developers of Handbrake don’t need to invest any time or energy in a minimalist interface. They can continue to maintain their feature-rich software exactly as it is. Meanwhile, there is also a simple, easy front end available for people who need or want it.

Selecting any text in the body of the article adds that text to your clipboard. Weird.

Technology may be more predictive of conflict abroad than at home. If we faced a land invasion, for example, we would not be able to bomb our way out of it.

While the article frames this phenomenon as self-evidently negative, I suspect the lack of war-related stress is also a driver of island tameness (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_tameness) in humans. To quote Theodore Roosevelt:

"The curse of every ancient civilization was that its men in the end became unable to fight. Materialism, luxury, safety, even sometimes an almost modern sentimentality, weakened the fibre of each civilized race in turn; each became in the end a nation of pacifists, and then each was trodden under foot by some ruder people that had kept that virile fighting power the lack of which makes all other virtues useless and sometimes even harmful."

Checkboxes Are Never Round (2015):

http://danieldelaney.net/checkboxes/

Probably because one man's important details is another's gibberish.

You should copy and paste this "Why?" explanation onto the front page of the site to instantly multiply the number of signups.

The number one cause of death in that same age group was (and remains) accidents, and yet driving has not been curtailed. Young families could not attend school, go to work, or gather with loved ones because of the #4 killer, but the #1 killer inspired no such restrictions.

I don't know what qualifies technically as a hysteria, but locking people in their homes for months for fear of something less dangerous than a typical daily activity sounds like a promising candidate.

Your assessment is only correct if the warrants are not obtainable at will.

Edward Snowden and the FISA court say hello.

Are you saying that you would like for bad things to happen to firearms owners at any cost, including their firearms being distributed to thieves for nefarious use?

In other words, you aren't trying to solve a social issue, you're trying to punish your ideological enemies?

The typical rebuttal to this kind of article, seen in some of the comments here, is that the author is necessarily wrong because X happens to Y people per year. Does he want students to die? In other words, "Some number of kids have probably died playing with a stick, so we absolutely must ban or regulate sticks, unless you want kids to die. Are sticks really worth the lives of children?"

The first problem with this argument is the use of thought-stopping language. It seeks to neutralize all reasonableness and good judgement by appealing to the badness of outlier events. Opponents of totalitarianism are painted to be bad people because without totalitarianism uncontrolled things might happen, and that's just irresponsible.

The second problem is that life is inherently risky, so the quest to eliminate risk thus necessarily trends toward eliminating all of life. 100% of people die no matter what choices they make. What should we do about that? Should we divide up the proximal causes and ban them all until no human activity is permissable? Or should we accept that yes, X people per year will die doing Y, maybe the number will even go up over time, and we're okay with that?

I'm curious what you would consider coersive if prison doesn't fit your definition.

Do we have any data to suggest that Uber is materially weakened? Do the negative headlines and social media posts necessarily translate into significant changes in consumer behavior?

Is this a troll account?

“Parallel construction is a law enforcement process of building a parallel - or separate - evidentiary basis for a criminal investigation in order to conceal how the investigation actually began.”

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

Has nobody noticed that the URL awkwardly skips to a footnote (/#bx304040B1)?

This is the least useful conversation I have seen all day.

Isn’t it interesting how possessing barely any information can lead people to confidently make decisions “based on the evidence”?

I just don’t like it on principle. Why would I voluntarily offer potential control of my machine to somebody else? My software is mine.

I’m not willfully connecting my machine to the facebook.com domain.

The drug war should already have taught us that it's counterproductive to view offenders as generic nuisances rather than people to be negotiated with.

The ivory trade, like the drug trade, is entrenched. There are a lot of people involved. There’s a large, complex, long-standing, and covert structure to deal with. As law enforcement has so clearly demonstrated, you can’t solve behavioral problems at scale with contempt and violence.

The really thorny problems in the world won’t be beaten into submission. To negotiate our way out of this problem, it’s necessary to see the offenders as real, valuable human beings.

From the standpoint of understanding human behavior at scale, the alternatives you offered are unworkable.

People are going to drink, they are going to do it in social environments beyond their homes, and they are going to return to their homes. A realistic solution involves recognizing these centuries-old truths and minimizing the inherent risk. Water flows downhill, and hitting it with a stick won’t change that.

Of course this is true. Companies make money by spying on their customers. Did we really imagine that flipping the “Stop making money” preference was going to work?

It’s unfortunate that SMS isn’t supported—that’s practically the only reason I still have a phone, and the entire reason I’d want this service is to block all calls, excepting the ones I’ve specifically authorized.

Silly Microsoft, it's just called "Android", not "Android Phone".