2,951 karma · joined August 28, 2011
There's only one voice that matters in this administration, and he has already made it quite clear that he both does not consider AI to be an issue, and he is more than happy to trample over his agencies to enforce his opinion.
The thing about advertising on the web and ad tracking as a practice is that, barring the small matter of ensuring the economic survival of the publisher sites, it is almost always a negative for users. When we consider the marginal benefit of naïve, uninformed-by-surveillance advertising with the present day status quo, we find that in exchange for a complete lack of privacy, we only really receive a marginal improvement in ad quality. Of course, if you (like me) consider all advertising to be a negative on the experience of using the web, it’s an even worse deal.
The standard response given by these companies when they bother giving a response is something to the effect of “we are improving the experience for our users,” which obviously the users would disagree with. However, when it comes to OpenAI, they could build a plausible case for this sort of tracking improving the product. If your models know where your internet habits are, the responses that you get could be tuned for both your interest profile and your actual history of interactions/purchases/internet usage, etc. Imagine a world in which you can opt into this tracking, control the data you provide and how it’s used, clear it out and redact it as you please, and opt in and out of responses that are personalized against it. Reasonable people can disagree, but that might actually be useful.
My prediction, though: that’s not gonna happen. OpenAI will first build out the system to collect click and conversion tracking measurements, then they will turn around to advertisers and say “look at how good our conversion rates are,“ and then they’re going to build an explicit ad platform that enshittifies their chat products.
Obviously everyone who invested in MBS’s lost their shirt, but the general economy was hurt by the sheer level of exposure to MBS’s and the suddenness with which the realization of their corruption hit. I’m no expert, but I see no reason to believe a similar level of exposure and surprise is at play here.
This is patently false. Source: I’m an engineering manager at Netflix who’s hiring in the US and whose peers are all doing the same.
https://chatgpt.com/share/6793a2d1-5f84-8006-8e78-16be4d4908...
On its face, this isn't an insane point of view. It's natural to look at the scope and complexity of government and as yourself "is all this really necessary?" While it'll never achieve mainstream status, some tinges of libertarianism contribute meaningfully as a counterweight to the tendency of government to grow beyond the point of diminishing returns to society.
The problem is, the ideology has a second, usually unspoken tenet: anyone who suffers brought it upon themselves. Hacker stole your bitcoins? Should have used a hardware wallet. Hospital bills driving you to bankruptcy? This is what you get for not saving for a rainy day. Poisoned by shoddily produced medicine? Hey, you get what you pay for.
It's an ideology of arrogance. Both intellectual arrogance, as its dunning-kruger afflicted adherents look over the vast and complex world and say "how hard could it possibly be?" to every challenge they perceive, and also of moral arrogance, as those same people cast their eyes over the depth of human suffering and inexplicably think "I've got mine, you all are on your own."
The reason why libertarians always lose is because anyone who isn't a billionaire would spend their entire existence looking over their shoulder in terror at the infinite ways life can screw you. And even then they would probably fail. Any reasonable person would gladly hand over the right to sell medicine they mixed in their own basement in exchange for knowing they won't be poisoned when they need help themselves.
Reddit has announced they're providing carveouts for apps that provide critical moderation tools, that justification is already gone.
The initial announcement and AMA were ham-fisted, to be sure, but at this point these protests are getting ridiculous. Tens of millions of people are prevented from enjoying their communities because a quixotic crusade of a literal handful of moderators? These people rule their little online fiefdoms with an iron fist, and the entire internet suffers. If I were in charge of Reddit I'd replace them, too.
Viewed this way, the additional purchases which seem foolish and laughable might even be signs of success: perhaps Bitcoin business is booming so hard they need to expand their reserves?
To be clear, I highly doubt that’s the case here, but if we’re going to assess success we should at least try to steelman their position. There’s plenty to mock about this change without taking cheap shots.
Also, you activate more of your capabilities as a thinking creature that way. Why just approach a problem with your fingertips on a keyboard when you can activate your visual, spatial, and temporal processing capabilities?
Personally, I’ve recently fallen in love with Leuchtturm notebooks. I bought the great big 83+ one, a nice Japanese mechanical pencil, and I’ve been going to town on problems ever since.
So if we're going to tax them in years when their wealth increases, I presume we're also going to issue tax refunds when their wealth decreases?
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1kAHSEx9-eIyVIahczH8itHaUm9j...
In reality, this test would need a false positive rate of over eighty percent to explain this kind of asymptomatic infection rate.
Also, prisons are useful because due to the close quarters it can be taken as a given that a substantial proportion of the population is infected, further minimizing the danger of these sorts of errors. The choice of population suggests a sophisticated experiment design, and the commenter is implying that the study authors made a statistics 101-level error.
At the same time, Oracle’s characterization of their API as “original software” is not entirely off base, as anyone who has spent time and energy creating and API would know. The amount of design and work required to create an elegant and useful API is huge, and while it would irreparably harm software as a field to call it copyrightable, calling it anything other than an “original” work is a weak position.
Personally, I’m dreading the outcome of this case.
Compare this to the ~$17 trillion of mortgage backed securities that existed prior to the financial crisis. $18 billion is peanuts, and hardly a systemic concern.
The same applies to companies: there’s no better way to cut through the recruiter nonsense like checking out how treatment of H1-Bs compares to treatment of citizens and green card holders.
A personal anecdote: a friend of mine who is on an H1-B works for a bank. This bank talks a great game about culture and working conditions and liberal social programs and opportunity and whatnot. How do they treat my friend? She makes forty percent below market rate for our area, and their policy is she has to work for them for five years before they even start the green card process for her. Meanwhile complained like Google and friends typically start the green card process immediately upon hire.
Anyone who looks at their promotional material (who isn’t already disinclined to trust a bank) would come away with the impression that this institution is some sort of paradise of opportunity and career advancement. Meanwhile anyone who’s worked for them for any appreciable length of time knows that isn’t true.
The latency hovered around 100ms (it's not great), but it went up and down throughout the day and as I moved in and out of the office. Honestly, it isn't so bad. I find after years of working like this I keep enough of a mental model of what I've typed that I'm not bothered by even the "we're done here" setting.
From a strategic position, it’s not as great. Uber’s rivalry with Lyft is a war of attrition: given that the two services are perfect complements, right down to the drivers themselves working both networks simultaneously, growth is entirely a function of platform-level economics. While Uber is wise to cut corporate costs before materially cutting driver commissions or raising consumer prices, it’s not exactly a show of strength to be scaling back marketing and engineering, the very departments that Uber needs to continue growing.
That being said, the size of Uber’s war chest doesn’t make me worry about their ability to continue operating. If I had to prognosticate, though, I’d say this is a sign that Uber is going to be posting some rough results for a couple quarters.
* It supports double-tap to zoom, but the first tap always causes it to lose context and open whatever I happened to tap on. This is extremely annoying when searching for restaurants in an area with one hand because that first tap will always cause me to lose my search context.
* Places I know are there don't show up, even when I zoom in to the point where the only thing in the viewport is the block where the store is located.
* Street names are still impossible to discover. In NYC, whenever I find a place that's on an avenue I have to scroll blocks left and right just to find out what street the place is on because street labels aren't automatically placed in the viewport.
* I routinely make a journey to places that turn out to be closed. I'm not talking about little mom and pop shops, although plenty of those are reported as open right now despite being permanently closed. I'm talking about major, newsworthy bankruptcies. I used to see Toy 'R Us on my map for months after the stores themselves shut down. It's gotten to the point where I call ahead whenever I want to go to a store I've never been to.
* Automatically generated markers obscuring mass transit markers. I recently spent ten minutes trying desperately to find a subway station that I knew was close to me because its marker was hidden underneath a Dunkin' Donuts. I've literally never set foot in a Dunkin' Donuts, something which Google literally knows for a fact, and yet it decided that notifying me of that store's location was more important than the entrance to the mass transit system I use every single day.
* While we're at it, let's talk about the little store markers. Google is running an ad auction on each impression, and that the reason you see useless stores that have nothing to offer you is because they decided to pay their way into your map. It's hard to believe Google is "organizing the world's information and making it universally accessible" when they shove Dunkin' Donuts in my face.
If I seem mad, I'm not. I'm disappointed. So disappointed that I did the unthinkable and installed Apple Maps, and I have to say, I'm very glad I did.
> Usually half of the close is done for recruiters with the brand Facebook has
I'm also finding that company brand plays a huge role in closing candidates. Our company's brand is generally pretty strong, and I've found one of the things candidates respond to most is the story we tell about our company's past, present, and future. Facebook's story has become "we were founded by a jerk who didn't care about privacy, our not caring about privacy has had massive consequences for American and global society, and our promises to improve our approach to privacy in the future have proven to be disingenuous smokescreens."
It's no wonder the substantial portion of people who care about their employer's ethics are turned off.