Not sure any of the latest hyped technologies have really recovered out of the trough. I don’t see blockchains, hyperloops or NFTs getting any meaningful adoption.
228 karma · joined March 18, 2015
Israeli leadership has recently met with TikTok and ads have been put up looking for Hebrew-speaking moderators. A guess would be that it’s _not_ to censor pro-Palestinian activists as much as it is to regulate Israeli content that might “give a bad look”.
They’ve (reluctantly) demonetized anti-vaxxers and conspiracy theorists before when their content got the wrong kind of attention from advertisers.
So dragging around tickets in Jira and taking the next one off the backlog isn't working either?
One thing I would've like Chomsky to engage more in is comparing how people create new "output" from previous "input" vs. how AIs like ChatGPT do it. He talks about "fake thinking" and "real thinking", but doesn't really go into the "hows" of it (ironically, kinda like how ChatGPT would).
I _do_ agree, however, that we're nowhere near AGI and this doesn't bring us closer, but I don't know what would, either.
On the topic of Aaronson's blog post, I feel like he didn't understand what Chomsky wrote about or intentionally mischaracterised it, then gave a super childish response. It's very embarrassing.
Yeah, when she was modelling for playboy she should've thought "what if a nerd somewhere takes this photo of me and unknowingly turns it into a commonplace testing asset in an industry niche in 50 years that doesn't even exist in my current time?"
More seriously, the original copyright owner (the photographer? playboy?) probably didn't license it for use as a visual benchmarking asset for graphics algorithms.
Probably ignores the fact that most public transportation infrastructure and people that use it are located in cities where median salaries are higher. Public transportation commuters can still very much have a lower median salary in that area.
> In 2021, only 5.0 percent of workers with incomes under $25,000 a year took transit to work, while the other 95 percent disproportionately have to pay the mostly regressive taxes that are used to support transit.
Probably good that mass transit was avoided during a pandemic. Can't determine how much it says about the taxes "regressivity" though.
> By comparison highways are mainly paid for out of user fees which aren’t regressive because people pay for only what they use.
Not from the US, but this doesn't seem to be true, if i'm reading [the table on this page](https://taxfoundation.org/state-infrastructure-spending/) correctly.
> Of the 4.1 percent of workers who lived in households with no cars in 2021...
My understanding is that life without a car is quite challenging in the US - I'd get one too if I lived there. And yeah, the data [does seem to support it](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_vehicles_...). But it's not an argument for cars, just an argument against US urban planning. Requiring an expensive purchase to be able to participate in society is pretty messed up.
> The Times article is correct that debt and the high cost of borrowing for people who have poor credit is a problem, but that is not the fault of the automobile.
> Nor are traffic stops that punitively focus on low-income drivers, which the article also cites, the fault of cars.
And gun violence isn't the gun's fault. It's public-policy-around-the-gun's fault - which is in turn gun advocacy's fault. You can always install metal detectors in schools and put guards everywhere, but you could also, you know, just not have that many guns.* Similarly, you could just put in more public transportation.
> numerous studies have shown that one of the best ways to get people who don’t have access to cars out of poverty is to give them access to an automobile.
I don't believe that we need to choose any single policy over another, but given limited resources I'd prioritize redirecting tax revenue into: - education to give people actual careers - cheap (tax-based, even) healthcare - social safety-nets that support economically vulnerable
Over
> low- or zero-interest loans to low-income people who lack cars so they can buy a decent used or low-cost new car.
Just put in more bus lines. Please. Why do anyone need to take a loan out at all? What happens if they get fired or can't pay the loan for any reason?
* Not going to pretend that anti-gun stances aren't political suicide in the US and that actual feasibility any gun ban is quite questionable. I'm just railing against this denialist blame-shifting attitude and the cartoonish work-arounds it leads to.
“Class groups including “working-class” are based on parental occupation aged 14”
[1] https://departmentforopportunities.org/news/the-class-pay-ga...
It's Apple's best interest to do what makes them money, and it often aligns with what customers want.
> A political organization like EU has no say in this.
Standards bodies in the EU have be defining things like this for decades.
> EU citizens already make this decision for themselves by voting with money and choosing to buy/not buy an iPhone.
As an Apple customer I might be voting with my money, but not on the connector specifically -- just on whether the product's collective pros outweigh their cons (and whether it's better than the competitor's, ofc). If I could vote, I would've voted for USB-C a long time ago, but I just get to choose between a set of products with varying compromises. Don't know why you try to make it seem like a democratic choice.
> Today is one of the dark days of EU. In short sight it's a victory. But in long sight it's a hinderence to progress by enforcing a technology on the market instead of letting the free market decide the technology.
If the free market had its say, it'd be choosing profits over the environment, consumer safety and worker rights every time. Or..? Why hasn't the US, with much laxer regulations free-marketed itself to utopia?
I have an Analogue Pocket I buy second-hand game boy cartridges for, I have an e-reader on which I read e-pubs, etc.
The “integration experience” is _a lot_ tougher. I can’t buy games from an App Store and I need to plug in the reader to Calibre to get my next book… but the actual user experience is so much better. I don’t know if it’s the dedicated hardware or the uninterrupted experience or something else… it just lets the content shine through much more clearly.
I’m an app developer and I strongly believed that we can have one device replace pretty much everything else almost perfectly… but now I kinda wanna try having a Walkman and getting rid of Spotify.
It was Olof Palme, a famously leftist prime minister that facilitated refugee immigration – but Sweden also had much more “aggressive” integration policies. There was more effort put into training to get immigrants into the labor market, housing was less segregated… a lot of that ended and it will continue to get worse as the country turns right wing.
But it’s going to happen with other staples of Swedish society. Give it just a year or two until there’s a “is Swedish welfare unsustainable?” and the answer will be the same: No, the right is just strangling it.
But it also depends on what the goals of this new system are. Are we trying to make a simpler, faster, read-only web?
If we're going that way, I'd love to limit CSS to a minimal subset (or maybe nothing?), minimise support for embedded content types, remove input elements, and remove stuff like cookies.
DNS is quite distributed already but it’s far from “democratic”. Instead of domain squatting and hoarding through through multiple private companies, we could domain squat through… multiple _other_ private companies. That’s Real Democracy™.
We could even speculate with domain names and tlds and maybe steal them from each other in completely new and exciting ways.
Maybe we could make it so only the early adopters can afford these tlds or domain names for a reasonable price and then everyone else could prop up its price until a rug pull happens.
What if we we make this system consume an insane amount of energy? Our current solution is probably inefficient in certain ways, but we can always go further!
There’s lots of possibilities! #web3FixesThis
I don't see that at all in the article. Anywhere.
What I read in the article is that it says that the purpose of DRM isn't to prevent _unlawful behaviour_, it's to enforce _lawful behaviour_ to be performed in a specific way. The actual _act_ of copying (or distribution, or playback, which are all a form of "copying", sure) is not as relevant to the author as the way that it is being done.
All of these technologies come with such incredible promise. None of them solve the original intended purpose.
There was a time when making jokes at the expense of women was ok, there was a time when making fun of gays was ok, there was a time when mocking trans people was ok... now it's not.
> The only way someone who is not terminally online could be sure to avoid offending someone would be to become a mind reader, or to not say anything at all
It's just society developing empathy. Think most people understand that how we see other groups of people is not a fixed thing.
> There is also the fact that in this modern social climate, victimhood has become a valuable currency. There is incentive for people take offense where none could reasonably be presumed to have been given, and to blow minor transgressions out of proportion.
People are getting "called out" and "cancelled" more than ever, for sure. But I don't think it's necessarily victimhood. Given the original topic, it's interesting that this is how you're attributing intent. Do you feel that there might be genuine reasons for acting the way they do? Could the grievances be genuine?
The person being inappropriate will always hide behind their intent because they can only argue about their own role in the exchange (e.g. they can't argue that the target person/group isn't really hurt).
When a conversation is derailed away from the damage caused to the intent, the harasser wins. What are you going to do? Establishing a default assumption takes that away. Always have good defaults :)
It's quite common to have someone express a personal opinion that they themselves don't interpret as harassment (e.g. because they don't belong to the group they're talking about, they see no issue with the way they talk or maybe they might be upset) only to be incredibly surprised and defensive when someone later calls them out.
> He said that music departments could stop teaching Beethoven and Wagner because their compositions were produced during a time of empire “in the frankly insane belief that doing so will somehow materially improve current living conditions for the economically, socially, sexually, religiously, or racially underprivileged”.
They're never going to stop teaching Beethoven and Wagner and it sincerely sounds like he's misunderstanding the goals with most music departments' changes. On the other hand, there _are_ genuine issues with how music theory and history are taught today: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kr3quGh7pJA
He's a professor of music history and theory. He edits a book series called "Music in Context". He's written about homosexuality in the world of opera. He doesn't seem like at outright conservative reactionary and I'd really like to understand what his grievances with his department are.
Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to have an iPhone I can install anything on - but there is _no_ way I would ever install anything from the open internet on the same device use to read my email or log in to my bank.