csnover

> If you supply your own encryption key, it's true that Backblaze can't read your data at rest.

It’s worse than this. The private key for data decryption is sent to their server by the installer before you can even set a PEK. Then, setting the PEK sends the password to them too, since that’s where your private key is stored. So you have to take their word not just that they never store the key and promptly delete unencrypted files during restoration, but also that they destroy the unprotected private key and password when you set up PEK. It’s a terrible scheme that seems almost deliberately designed to lull people into a false sense of security.

> Of course, if you've started with the conclusion that smartphones and social media can't possibly be the problem, you'll be able to deflect anything away from that particular cause.

Similarly, starting with the conclusion that smartphones and social media must be the problem, you’ll deflect away from a lot of contradictory evidence that suggest a more complex interplay between other societal issues, and that smartphones/social media are—if anything—likely just illuminating and amplifying known and pre-existing root causes of poor mental health in young people: poverty, trauma, discrimination, and pressure to excel[0].

Literature reviews of social media and smartphone use show “conflicting small positive, negative and null associations” and “do not offer a way of distinguishing cause from effect”[1]. Some hypothesised alternative causes of increases in depressive and anxiety symptoms with some stronger effect sizes include: increases in online bullying, decreases in sleep, long-term effects of the Great Recession (and, by extension, the European debt crisis), biological changes[2], restrictions on independent activity[3], and climate change[4]. Even before the invention of the smartphone, psychopathologies in young Americans had increased by a full standard deviation[5] over the previous 70 years. The number of teens that report extremely high levels of stress doubles during the school year[6], yet there is little blame currently being cast in that direction, despite it being the overwhelmingly largest self-reported source of stress at 83%.

Claiming causation from such weak evidence is not merely foolish, it’s potentially quite dangerous. Despite the parent commenter’s incorrect claim that this is purely an American issue, they are almost certainly correct that smartphones and social media are currently being used as scapegoats so society can avoid confronting and addressing the deeply entrenched and deeply uncomfortable root causes of harm. I think this can be seen, at least in part, in the casual discarding of evidence that—especially for marginalised groups[7]—access to online spaces can be protective to young peoples’ mental health.

Trying to avoid discussing the root problems is bad enough on its own, since it means they will not be fixed, but the proposed solution of using restrictive mediation—that is, shielding young people from harm rather than educating them—is almost certainly worse than doing nothing at all[8].

[0] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31697105/

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8221420/

[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7015269/

[3] https://gwern.net/doc/psychiatry/depression/2023-gray.pdf

[4] https://www.nature.com/articles/s44220-023-00059-3

[5] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19945203/

[6] https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/stress/2013/stress-r...

[7] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2056305121988931

[8] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03601...

> I think few people have any doubts about social media being a net negative for young people.

They should have doubts. This position is not supported by the currently available evidence[0][1][2]. The APA’s position paper makes this explicit: “Using social media is not inherently beneficial or harmful to young people.”

So long as focus remains on scapegoating ‘social media’ as the main cause of suffering, we will never solve the problem. The negative aspects of social media apply to young and old equally, and as far as I can tell are largely manifestations of deeper societal issues that have festered for generations.

[0] https://www.apa.org/topics/social-media-internet/health-advi...

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8221420/

[2] https://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/news-events/no-evidence-screen-time...

No, it is just a numeronym[0], just like K8s for Kubernetes, g11n for globalisation, i18n for internationalisation, or L10n for localisation.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numeronym

The article states that adverse events were “twice as likely”, but the abstract of the study says that the hazard ratio was 4.53 (95% CI 2.00–10.27). Can someone who is hopefully more statistically literate than me explain what seems like an obvious discrepancy here? Did they just take the lower bound of the confidence interval and report that?

In searching for a non-paywalled copy of the actual study, I found that other news outlets like CNN seem to be doing the same thing.

> I'm not sure if there's a decent UPS brand any more. I get the impression APC has been going downhill since the acquisition.

I’ve noticed a similar thing.

I had a 2005 Smart-UPS tower that never failed, but developed some transformer buzz that was annoying in an office environment—and hey, improved standby efficiency and an LCD panel would be nice—so I replaced it in 2013 with its latest equivalent. This one ran for about nine years and then started rebooting itself randomly, dropping the load each time. (It had no issues transferring and holding a load on battery, and self-test passed.) Its 2022 replacement now uses a non-standard USB-A male-to-male cable, is missing information that used to exist in the LCD menu, seems to have a problem charging from 98% to 100%, and has a broken event log (event 1 is always “Site wiring” and every other event is always “None”, even though there have been multiple power events, and there is no site wiring issue). It works, but QA issues are evident.

I’d previously tried a prosumer-grade CyberPower UPS (CP1500PFCLCD) on some other less critical equipment. When its battery failed after two years, it cut power to the load. When the charger failed a few years later, it cut power to the load. It died completely in about six years.

Tripp-Lite’s consumer grade stuff seems to work well enough for what it is, but their higher-end equipment seemed to all be designed for environments where noise doesn’t matter, which makes it a non-starter for an office. Eaton (their parent) seems the same.

So it would be great to know what is an actually good choice these days. At the moment I’m not in the market for anything and hopefully what I’ve got will run for another decade, but if it doesn’t, I have no good idea about what else to buy today.

It’s baffling. When APC first added native USB support to their Smart-UPS series, they chose a standard USB-B port. When they introduced “SmartConnect” a few years ago, this port was replaced by a USB-A port which requires a non-compliant USB-A male-to-male cable for monitoring. The only ‘good’ reason I can think of for this change is that someone realised that these new cloud-connected UPSes would be easily bricked by some bad firmware update (since apparently that’s a feature now), and wanted to use USB thumb drives as a recovery mechanism, but I have no idea. I think even though they have a built-in Ethernet port now, one still needs to buy their network management card for non-cloud remote management, so it could just as easily be another attempt at some weird vendor lock-in.

I never said generative AI was itself capable of creativity. Generative AI is a tool, not an entity. I said it enables more people to be creative, in the same way that other tools like Photoshop enable more people to be creative. Using a sampler to create a song rather than arranging and playing all the instruments doesn’t make it less creative, or devoid of creativity. It’s just a different, more accessible form of expression, enabled by technology.

I agree that generative AI, due to its nature, trends toward the average and thus is incapable of engaging with the extremes of human experience—but not every creative expression has to be at the extreme. Every Marvel film, every shovelware game, every summer pop jam, panders to the average. There’s enormous value in having a tool that allows professional artists to work more quickly at the average—and, perhaps more critically, for everyday people to approach the average in the first place. I don’t believe it is fair to suggest that such things are valueless “not ART”, but I’m not definitely not here to engage in philosophical discussion of the definition of “art”.

As far as history goes, I did provide a citation, which I encourage you to actually look at (and it cites several dozen more books and other articles if you need more primary sources). You are objectively incorrect in your assertion that the phonograph facilitated the growth of live music(ians), but I suspect you may not even understand what is meant by “live musicians”—not because of you, but because the phonograph was so revolutionary that it fundamentally changed what it meant to be a musician—and even redefined what a “song” is[0].

It is only with the benefit of hindsight that you can state so confidently that audio recording is a net benefit to music. Many felt that the phonograph was an abomination at its conception. They claimed that the essence of music was in its ephemeral nature, that the uniqueness of each performance contained the creative expression and the sheet music itself was just a skeleton for creativity. They said mechanical recordings deprived listeners of the true experience, and that individual artists lost their autonomy. They spoke in terms exactly like you are now, and those ideas were wrong then, and they are almost certainly wrong now.

[0] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/phonograph-chang...

> Society is built by and for humans.

These machines are also built by and for humans.

> If we want to empower humans over machines, that seems perfectly acceptable.

But that’s not what’s happening here. This is a faction of humans fighting to maintain their power and control over how the rest of humanity is allowed to produce artistic works.

Creatives who fight against generative AI are trying to empower themselves over everyone else. Corporations who develop closed-source AI like OpenAI are also trying to empower themselves over everyone else. The main problem in both cases is the way a select few are trying to amass power for themselves.

Generative AI has fundamentally shifted the scope of what it means to be creative, and prohibiting it from being trained on the collective works of humanity doesn’t empower humans over machines. It empowers some humans at the expense of other humans. Big AI companies acting exploitatively and trying to figure out how to build their own moats so only they are allowed to control the technology does the same thing, so this shouldn’t be allowed to happen either.

This is not the first time, nor is it likely to be the last, that a major disruption happened in creative arts due to technology. The invention of the phonograph decimated live musicians. Hundreds of thousands of jobs in cinemas, radio stations, and restaurants were permanently lost[0], but I don’t think anyone today would argue that we’d be better off if record labels hadn’t been allowed to reproduce the works of other artists.

Instead of retreading the same tired arguments about generative AI itself, let’s instead focus on how to ensure creatives can adapt and not end up homeless and penniless, and on how to ensure a few giant tech companies don’t monopolise an otherwise democratising technology. That, more than anything, will ensure that we are empowering humans over machines.

[0] https://slate.com/transcripts/RS94QUlwS0ZsSnZnakE4UVUzR2loUV...

As far as I can tell, consumer interchange fees in the US are significantly higher than they are in Europe. The interchange fees for Visa and MC consumer products within the EEU are 0.2–0.3%[0][1], whereas in the US they are from 1–3%[2][3].

[0] https://www.visa.co.uk/dam/VCOM/regional/ve/unitedkingdom/PD...

[1] https://www.mastercard.co.uk/content/dam/public/mastercardco...

[2] https://usa.visa.com/content/dam/VCOM/download/merchants/vis...

[3] https://www.mastercard.us/content/dam/public/mastercardcom/n...

There is some additional detail in the reporting from Ars Technica[0]:

> The study looked at all emergency department visits, not only visits related to abortion. This could capture medical care beyond abortion-related conditions, because people on Medicaid often lack primary care and resort to going to emergency departments for routine care. When the researchers tried to narrow down the visits to just those related to abortion, they included medical codes that were not related to abortion, such as codes for ectopic pregnancy, and they didn't capture the seriousness of the condition that prompted the visit. Medication abortions can cause bleeding, and women can go to the emergency department if they don't know what amount of bleeding is normal. The study also counted multiple visits from the same individual patient as multiple visits, likely inflating the numbers. Last, the study did not put the data in context of emergency department use by Medicaid beneficiaries in general over the time period.

[0] https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/02/anti-abortion-groups...

Places like Avivo Village[0][1] which put single-room homes into unused commercial/industrial spaces and offer them up to unhoused people without most of the strings attached to traditional shelters: families are allowed, pets are allowed, people without ID are allowed, addicts are allowed.

[0] https://avivomn.org/avivovillage/

[1] https://www.mprnews.org/story/2023/10/04/resident-of-tiny-ho...

Link to the actual report:

https://groundworkcollaborative.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/...

The medical underwriting on Medigap plans also affects people who have the foresight to choose Original Medicare with Medigap.

Once you have a disqualifying health condition (and since Medicare is for the old and disabled, this is most people), you are stuck. If your Medigap provider raises their premiums above the rest of the market, you can’t switch to another one. If you miss a premium payment and get dropped by the plan, too bad, so sad, Medicare Advantage is your only practical option now.

Man, thank you for saying this. Stuffing results with geolocated local junk despite explicitly opting out by choosing “All regions” is so frustrating. This wasn’t happening a year or two ago. I submit negative feedback about it constantly, but I guess not enough people are doing that for anyone to notice or care.

I’ve also noticed a significant increase in attempts to stuff news into regular search results. I really do not appreciate being force-fed mental health poison. I don’t need it ever, but I especially don’t need it when I’m searching for some specific technical thing and then get emotionally sabotaged by some clickbait headline because … why? Some bullshit KPI? Why are tech companies so obsessed with pushing news into every orifice?

Whatever the problem is, all I know is that last year Linode said they tried and failed to get Microsoft to actually fix the problem[0], apparently despite assurances and multiple requests for a root cause analysis. Everyone else seems to have figured out how to not be overrun by spam and also not block entire netranges, so I’d say it is well past time for Microsoft to figure out how to do that too.

Thanks and good luck!

[0] https://www.linode.com/community/questions/22287/550-57511-a...

Linode respond swiftly to abuse reports[0], block outgoing SMTP by default, and prevent so many people from even registering for services that it is the #1 question people ask on their IRC channel. What more should they do? What is “enough”?

90% of the spam that I receive from a DMARC-validated sender comes from Google; should every Gmail user be punished because Google aren’t “doing enough”?

[0] Linode twice threatened to shut off services within 24 hours due to some vigilante scanning the internet with a broken virus scanner and automatically sending reports: https://virtuallyfun.com/2014/04/23/dumbass-of-the-year-awar... (n.b. this is not my site)

I guess my question is can you please fix your braindead blacklisting?

Several times per year—I can practically guarantee it’ll happen sometime in December, and indeed had to deal with this just five days ago—I end up with a bunch of users whose email notifications stop working because Microsoft have started blocking the entire netrange where my server lives. I don’t have control over other Linode customers, guys! I even wrote extra code to stop sending mail to addresses that start bouncing specifically to avoid blacklisting, so after MS finally processes a blacklist mitigation request, someone also has to go in and re-enable those accounts.

SPF, DKIM, DMARC are all configured; I’ve sent from the same IP address for about a decade; I’ve not once received an email abuse report; mail volume is low (most days, volume does not reach the minimum threshold for SNDS to report data[0]). I’ve never had any other mail provider blacklist my server. SNDS always says everything is OK as I am S3150s. What is even the purpose of SNDS at this point when it lies about what is going on?

[0] P.S. The janky SNDS calendar widget resets the month to the current month every time you click on a date, even if the date being viewed is in a previous month. I don’t have any hope that anyone will ever touch SNDS code again since it was clearly designed in the early 2000s and the copyright on the site is now ten years old, but this is a pretty silly bug.

When the APA released their guidance on the use of social media by adolescents[0] earlier this year, they cited a study[1] that described the impacts of instructive[2] (a.k.a. active) versus restrictive[3] parental mediation in preventing cyber-bullying. This study found that the use of active mediation was associated with a decrease in victimisation, whereas restrictive parental mediation was not only unhelpful, it actually increased the risk of victimisation. In the discussion section, the authors reference several other studies that also suggest restrictive parental mediation is worse than doing nothing when it comes to stopping online victimisation.

The APA appear to go out of their way in the guidance to explain that what they mean by “adult monitoring” is open coaching and discussion, not spying and blocking, but this sort of distinction seems to be missed or deliberately ignored in many discussions about online safety.

As such, the source of the problem here doesn’t appear to be that the tools are inadequate at their jobs, but rather that they’re all fundamentally the wrong tools. In this case, no amount of engineering can solve it. Given this, perhaps the question should not be “What parental controls?”, but rather, “Should these kinds of restrictive parental controls even exist?”

[0] https://www.apa.org/topics/social-media-internet/health-advi...

[1] https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2020.104026

[2] Definition from the study: “Instructive mediation […] explicitly involves children in the process of online monitoring. For instance, a parent adopting an instructive approach might appraise their children of the potential harms of certain online material, the appropriateness of sharing personal information online, and the latent danger of interacting with strangers on social media platforms.”

[3] Also from the study: “Restrictive mediation does not directly include children in the intervention process. Rather, it involves the curtailing of cyber-routines through blocking software or parental monitoring of children's online habits and associations. Shielding children from the dangers of the Internet is given primacy over educating them about such hazards[.]”

I’m not the op—they explicitly stated programming is not a skill like reading or writing—but I’ll go down this rhetorical path for fun and say: sure, why not?

The utopian aim of technology is all about offloading burdensome work so we can focus more on the things we enjoy. If reading is a burden to someone, why not let them use a TTS? If long division is a burden, why not let them use a pocket calculator? They’ll probably learn enough to get by even if they never get to the point of reading Dostoevsky by sight.

Lest you say, “well but those skills are essential!”, humans needed food to survive before we needed mathematics or written language, yet we’ve been been OK outsourcing farming for at least a century because we’ve experienced how it frees us up to pursue other things. And, to that end, we’ll probably be facing some pretty extreme civilizational crisis if we get to the point that someone without basic maths skills can’t find a calculator.

In addition to the suggestions others have made for locally testing workflows, there are also reverse shell actions[0] that can be used for troubleshooting CI failures on the GH runners themselves.

[0] https://github.com/mxschmitt/action-tmate

> This is always repeated, but could you point to studies documenting in which cities it is illegal?

You don’t need to look at a study, you can just look at zoning and land use maps for basically any city in America. Areas zoned single-family are not allowed to build anything else. There are multiple articles on Wikipedia[0][1][2] about this topic with literally hundreds of citations to primary and secondary sources. What a frustrating question.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoning

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-family_zoning

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoning_in_the_United_States

This part of the discussion is mainly about economics, not expression.

The parent argument was that AI will force artists to spend more time engaging in non-artistic pursuits because the amount of money the market will pay for artwork will go down. The counterpoint is that the amount of time the artist needs to spend on creating artwork is also reduced. In other words, if the market value for creating one artwork goes down by 50%, but the amount of time it takes also goes down by 50%, then there is no change except that the artist gets to double the amount of work they produce for the same amount of time.

Regarding the natural human desire to create art, unless you’re famous, making money as a creative involves mostly shitwork. Most commercial projects are just not very fun or interesting. Tools like generative AI can help to automate away a lot of the shitwork, so when the really interesting projects come along, they can be given more energy. This, to me, also seems like a win.

Could you please be more specific which vast powers and heavy handed regulatory approaches you are referring to?

The last two times net neutrality was in the news (during the initial reclassification, and then the repeal), the main claim then was that it would/did reduce investments and innovation, and that was a lie[0][1][2][3]. So, knowing this, what are the actual risks you see today in treating ISPs as common carriers?

[0] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/02/sorry-fcc-charte...

[1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/12/attverizon-lobby...

[2] https://www.wired.com/story/the-fcc-says-net-neutrality-crip...

[3] https://www.investopedia.com/insights/does-net-neutrality-st...

> If they can't get money from their creations they'll spend less time creating and more time engaging in activity that generates returns.

On the other hand, artists who adapt AI into their workflows will have vastly improved productivity, so the amount of time they need to create new works can also be much smaller for the same amount of output.

There will still be some artists who can avoid using AI and make a living, but like all skilled industries that have already been disrupted by automation, the market for that kind of work will become smaller and more exclusive, and that’s probably OK. Live musicians were the only way to get music on the radio, or in the cinema, or at a party, until audio recordings decimated the industry[0]. You can still buy hand-made furniture, or clothing, or cars, but most people today get them from a factory.

I do think there are serious issues with large players attempting to corner the market and extract all the wealth for themselves, but this is an old problem[1], and I think on balance these lawsuits perpetuate, rather than attempt to solve, the root problem: a missing social safety net and no guarantee that people will not have to scramble to survive every time a disruptive technology emerges.

[0] https://timeline.com/live-musicians-were-so-terrified-of-rec...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite

There is a secondary issue: Even on projects where someone is interested in doing polish work, since it usually takes longer to polish than to write a new feature, those who only care about writing features cause the backlog of things that need polish to grow infinitely.

I don’t really know of a good strategy for dealing with this in FOSS. If a feature contributor doesn’t care about polish, and you say to them ‘please fix the UX’, they can just either ignore the feedback (‘perfect is the enemy of good! move fast and break things!’), or if they don’t have direct commit access, create a fork that they can then advertise as having lots of cool new features.

I would love to know some strategies that work to strike a balance between not demanding perfection and not allowing garbage to be mainlined.

Apple don’t use semantic versioning. macOS 10.15 broke all 32-bit software. If that’s not an incompatible version update, I don’t know what is.

Right or wrong, it can be a really difficult thing to do when the problem behaviour is not due to malice. You’re taking away a community from someone, and in my experience, usually it’s someone who doesn’t have many other social outlets. It does not feel good to get pleading emails from these sorts of folks, knowing that you have to stand firm and say ‘no’ for the health of the wider community.

Just based on a cursory examination, you seem to be cherry-picking from your citation and omitting words that appear in that study, like “slightly”, to make it sound as if there was some sort of significant growth of the Antarctic ice sheet since 1979 that is now reverting to some stable state, which is not the case.

Looking at the data itself, Antarctic sea ice extent was pretty stable until the past two years, where it has fallen quite dramatically.[0] I think it is reasonable to express some alarm when you’ve gone from a trend of -0.12% per decade, to 16% below the 30-year average, in two years.

[0] https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/monitoring/snow-and-ice-ext...

Edit: I moved this comment to reply directly to the OP at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37251831 since that seems like a better place for it.