jimlongton

The Irish government had a problem administering Property tax and the TV Licence due to data sharing restrictions between departments. Unique Eircodes per property was the solution. This was explicitly stated by the Communications Minister Pat Rabbitte at the time of launch. The proposed Broadcasting Charge to replace TV licenses was not rolled out due to public opposition but EirCodes remain. Due to their random nature they are also less useful to emergency services.

Delivery companies have taken courtcases against the government over the EirCode rollout and there is an ongoing courtcase over allegations of corruption relating to the awarding of the EirCode contract[1].

[1] https://www.irishtimes.com/business/2022/11/28/firm-claims-c...

> “Results showed that exposure to manipulated Instagram photos directly led to lower body image.” Engeln, Loach, Imundo, & Zola (2020)

Children with vulnerable developing brains being targeted by algorithms designed by teams of engineers and PhDs to exploit human psychology don't stand a chance. You may as well be telling heroin addicts to "just don't get addicted bro".

You can show kids /r/Instagramreality/ [1]. I doubt it will help.

[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/Instagramreality/

Unless you're unlucky and start losing your hair in your 20s. That really teaches you a lot of life lessons about self-image, aging, the way beauty is marketed and about confidence in general.

I think accepting hair loss and aging made me a better person. These AI youth filters actually annoy me because they are so blatantly manipulative and prey on insecurities often instilled/reinforced by advertising and social media in the first place.

Does anyone else find these videos extremely emotionally manipulative and creepy? Now users have to contend with not just everyone else being unrealistically beautiful and young due to makeup and lighting but also AI.

[1] https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/social-media-mental-ill...

One city having a bail problem does not invalidate the observation that the US has an abnormally large prison population for a developed country [1].

[1] https://edition.cnn.com/2018/06/28/us/mass-incarceration-fiv...

The perfect example of why Microsoft can't be trusted. VSCode had a great open source Python extension which everyone used. Then Microsoft hired the developer and switched to recommending their closed source extension instead. VSCode extensions are then licensed so they cannot be used with VSCode forks. It really shows Microsoft's mindset.

AMDOCS has been accused multiple times of being an extension of Mossad, including in the US where the investigations got quietly ended. Leaked cables from 2009 showed they were also on the radar of South Africa's intelligence agency [1].

[1] https://www.news24.com/news24/spy-cables-were-israeli-spies-...

Matrix.org has also been breached in the past [2].

That's ignoring the fact their project was born out of a company that operates front offices for one of the world's most aggressive spy agencies...

[1] https://medium.com/@fs0c131y/tchap-the-super-not-secure-app-...

[2] https://matrix.org/blog/2019/04/11/we-have-discovered-and-ad...

In case people are not aware, we know for a fact this is demonstrably false. It may not even be possible to achieve this with existing models. People have replicated entire sections of GPL code (with comments) using CoPilot. This is true of other models, like image generation models which can return clearly recognisable images which were present in their training sets.

Their business model is creepy and unethical.

> Our Voice Universe community of contributors are training incredible voices every day to create hyper-realistic replicas that sound exactly like the real person!

And they even get their users to do the dirty work for them. Classy.

It seems obvious, to me at least, that people don't pursue careers in areas where no one looks like them, therefore creating a self fulfilling prophecy.

> one that has not been empirically verified

Historically women were excluded from many scientific fields. The effect of female role models has been studied (a lot [1][2]) and there's no denying the real world impact representation (or lack of it) can have.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/margiewarrell/2020/10/09/seeing...

[2] https://thesocietypages.org/trot/2017/02/22/the-role-of-fema...

It's culture. Everyone has "emotions" but, at least in my country, police officers don't regular beat/choke/shoot hundreds of people to death each year.

Not if you want reliable food production. Milder, wetter winters and drier, heatwave-prone summers and more unpredictable weather in general is hitting farmers badly. One recent example is potatoes [1]. "Hose-pipe bans" becoming a normal phrase in our lifetime is not a good sign of things to come.

[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/health/chips-potatoes-shr...

I honestly think that the Rust developers should just bit the bullet and fix it with Cargo 2.0. Take the opportunity to discard dead packages too.

[1] https://github.com/rust-lang/crates.io/issues/58

You said "It would be so blatantly idiotic and racist that nobody would ever do it". People have being doing exacty this forever and, while it may be sometimes cringe-worthy or even insensitive, I would contend it is not inherently a bad thing to find inspiration in other peoples culture and history.

You mean like the "Fighting Irish" from University of Notre Dame? I'm Irish and I've never heard anyone criticise them. In fact they are welcomed to Ireland for St Patricks day parades.

The school system is very different to other countries. Schools can have a religious "ethos" but it means very little nowadays and many children opt out of the single religious education lesson a week. The curriculum is set by the state, funding is from the state, management boards are no longer dominated by religious orders and all teachers are in one of two secular unions.

For the most part, schools are really only Catholic in name only. If the church pushed anti-LGBT propaganda in schools like other countries it would cause uproar. That power has simply gone. The school system is archaic and over due for massive reform. One of the main things blocking it is historical land and building ownership.

Teaching outcomes are evident from exam results, grants won, papers published etc and are routinely used to determine promotions, staffing and more. Food/footfall etc are monitored and predicted by the private catering companies on campus. Budget reviews are comprehensive and require yearly and greater analysis of university performance on a per department basis. All that doesn't even include competitive processes like ranking tables for universities, applications for grants, participation in international research groups etc etc.

The rush to "exploit" data reminds me of the dot com hype. It's one thing to use available data to make more informed decisions about things from course content to building occupancy. It's quite another to rush towards total surveillance because of a Fear of Missing Out of "exploitable data".

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDhU295bUv4

Our industry is not small but we all know people in rival companies (semi-conductor, EU) and a lot of management have left to work for competitors at one point and returned. Unless you work for a seriously petty manager or an unprofessional family size company that holds grudges, leaving and returning should not be a big deal.