5,293 karma · joined April 30, 2011
@ianstormtaylor
co-founder of segment
Although more charitably, a future apologist—who maybe has good intentions, but hasn’t stepped back to gain context and realized that their projection is at odds with the systemic incentives in play.
As someone who happened to hit that inflection point at the summer after high school I consider my cohort extremely lucky.
> Now, with our obsessive encyclopedic documentation, it's unlikely that future generations will forget our ways of life.
I’m not so sure. One, due to increasing reliance on bits for that documentation. But also two, because we already find it incredibly hard to truly imagine the ways of the world just a few generations back.
If anyone is interested in this topic, I highly, highly recommend the book “Ways of Being” by James Bridle. [0]
It covers such a diverse range of ideas about intelligence, including neural network–style intelligences, that I think pretty much everyone would find something of interest.
One of the takeaways is that these intelligence-seeking experiments have been poorly designed for so long, that they tend to reveal way more about the humans running the experiment than the animals being researched. And part of that is due to how uncomfortable we are with admitting that animals have completely different (not better or worse) ways of being and thinking than us.
It makes you aware of the limitations of our hierarchy-and-comparison-based concepts. For example, even a simple phrase from this article:
> Although spiders can’t literally count one-two-three, the research suggests some jumping spiders have a sense of numbers roughly equivalent to that of 1-year-old humans.
The experiment doesn’t really prove that spiders can’t count, and surely if they did count it wouldn’t be by speaking out loud like we do. Saying that their faculties are equivalent to 1-year olds only really serves to diminish them. Not that I’m blaming the author, it’s just so easy to accidentally slip into these very limited ways of thinking.
This is much more often going to be true because the dispute was never made in the first place, because of the risk it would entail to a low wage worker. They cannot afford—for reasons of time, money, health, education—to even threaten to take an employer to court.
Your argument sounds logical, but is unfortunately unaware of how real world pressures distort systems for recourse.
How are you liking Recurse?
(Also I didn’t see Trouble in the SF list, in case you’re looking for places to add.)
> In 2018, the city created a pooper scooper team, each member of which received annual compensation of about $211,000 that year.
The implication of a $211K salary sounds too ridiculous to be true. And instead of assuming that it is therefore false, people freak out. If you look up an actual article from the time [1], you'll see that the claim is already not true purely by the numbers:
> workers make more than $184,000 a year in salary and benefits
And if you dig in further you'll see that "and benefits" is a huge caveat:
> Employees of San Francisco's "Poop Patrol" are set to earn $71,760 a year, plus an additional $112,918 in benefits, such as healthcare and retirement savings, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.
That $112K in benefits includes health care benefits (which are mandated for city workers, which is a good thing). And health care—if you've been paying attention—is completely fucked in the US, so any attempt at pricing it is going to sound ridiculous. The workers don't actually see any of that money.
If you take the $72K in salary, you'll see that it is below average for San Francisco:
> On average, a San Francisco resident earns about $96,677 a year, nearly double the median household income in the US.
And "below average" is what you'd probably assume a sanitation worker makes. So a huge amount of outrage over nothing.
Which would personally lead me to flag this story, rather than trust any of the other numbers its quoting.
[1]: https://www.businessinsider.com/san-francisco-poop-patrol-em...
I'd advise redesigning the way your website blocking works though. For myself—and I'd assume a lot of folks—the idea that a website has to be attached to an app doesn't make sense. I've already deleted the Twitter app for example, but would still like to block Twitter's website. Or there's Mastodon which has never been an app on my phone. The current flow around this is very confusing/broken. (Apple's built-in Screen Time app actually has a solution for this already, with "Websites…" as a category to block by, where you just enter the website of your choice.)
I'd also recommend working with a designer because the app feels sort of janky at the moment. It's not just the main flow, but the interface and copy everywhere feel haphazard and doesn't inspire a lot of confidence. The idea for the app is so simple, and I think the execution could be equally simple in a really satisfying way.
I signed up for the subscription, but had already cancelled by the next day because of these faults. With a few fixes I think this could be very successful.
That said, I think Kagi should consider rethinking their pricing model, because the perception is what matters if it presents as a roadblock.
I know it may sound like a lot (and definitely is a lot for some folks), but when I think about it as literally being the window to a huge amount of knowledge I take in, the fact that it's way less than Adobe products, and similar to things like GitHub, Figma, Notion, Airtable, etc. feels pretty reasonable.
Every time I'd tried DuckDuckGo over the years I found myself having to switch back to Google because I was never sure that there weren't better results going missing. Whereas Kagi often ends up with better rankings than Google—eg. Goodreads, which is great for real reviews, gets placed above all the random booksellers websites.
Somehow it manages to claim it’s taking on the huge issue of “do non-profits drive social change” while also:
- never citing a single piece of data or quoting any experts.
- proposing three unrelated “ideas” without even trying to make the claim that the three are the holistic.
- never mentioning the impact of non-profits in the developing world, or on the lower income folks in the developed world.
- never mentioning a successful social movement, or even defining what “social change” is.
- for some reason conflating “elite status” with social change.
- assuming that any non-profits have him as a target population (rich professor at a university) in the first place.
I honestly felt embarrassed for the author (and the editors that okayed this) while reading this essay.
I don’t think this should be on the front page.
——
Edit: I looked up what “Comment” was, since I hadn’t heard of the publication before. This is how they describe themselves:
> Comment is one of the core publications of Cardus, a think tank devoted to renewing North American social architecture, rooted in two thousand years of Christian social thought.
That's not true at all, it depends on the use case.
What actually matters is the desired percentage of acceptance.
For many critical path use cases you'd much rather have something fail twice as often but understand why it failed so that you can correct the issue and resubmit the input. Error observability is an important feature that's taken for granted in many systems. It all depends on what the system is used for—how important it is to be able to get to correct results, and what the consequences for failure are. The biggest danger of neural networks is in people that don't understand this nuance and apply them in a blanket way in all systems.
Because it sounds highly unlikely to me.
The whole point of anti-trust is to provide a check on only the most massive companies that over rent-seek their market and cannibalize competitors, before the startups are able to get off the ground, literally crushing competition.
Anti-trust fosters competition by design.
A musician can improvise a song that sounds sad, and their brain would be firing with sadness-related musical information, but that doesn’t mean they are feeling the emotion “sad” while doing it.
I don’t think we gain much at all from trying to attach human labels to these machines. If anything it clouds people’s judgements and will result in mismatched mental models.
No they really don’t, or at least not “emotional state” as defined by any reasonable person.
The headline and parts of the article suffer a bit from clickbait by conflating the two different ways “revisionist” is used—sometimes to mean revising past precedent with new knowledge, and other times to mean purposely hiding facts about the past (also called negationist history).
Obviously not all history is purposely hiding facts about the past…
But if you ignore that, the author did a good job of explaining how lots of at-one-point accepted history was originally introduced with revisionist/negationist/biased aims. To the point that it’s harder to cleanly separate out all the negationist history than you might think.
So overall an interesting point and a useful reminder of how these interpretations are always in flux. And that that’s okay and healthy.
I always get confused while looking at all the various options, and this seems like a good place to find someone who’s done a lot of research.
Plaid's other weakness is their opaque, enterprise-style pricing, which is seems like Stripe is doing away with. Hopefully they can bring the price down, because lots of consumer-facing use cases aren't viable due to the high monthly price per connection.
I hope they add support for investment account holdings—it seems like Plaid is the only one that does this well.
—
Edit: digging deeper, it looks like Stripe proxies to Plaid-like "service providers" under the covers—at least for institutions without OAuth flows. [1][2][3] Presumably they'll build in-house connections over time, but it dents my hope that their connectivity will be better than Plaid's. Either way, transparent pricing and more competition in the space is still welcome!
[1]: https://support.stripe.com/questions/what-is-the-relationshi...
[2]: https://support.stripe.com/questions/how-does-stripe-limit-d...
[3]: https://support.stripe.com/questions/who-will-obtain-my-fina...
I learned a similar concept in Typography class... for an assignment to design a new number. I was a little indecisive and apologized when I showed up to critique with two different number drawings [0]. My professor (Cyrus Highsmith [1]) looked at them and said not to worry because they were the same number anyways. I didn't get it at first, but a few minutes after sitting back down I realized what he meant, and it's stuck with me ever since.
Using the 7-segment display as an example would have been a great way to explain the concept to me at the time. I'll remember that for next time!
Also a cool way to think about it, because it begs the question of which 7-segment permutations don't map to existing symbols, for whenever someone needs to design a new one in the future.