paimapi

this is more of a curiosity and not pushback but are there mechanistic reasons why viral mutations are subjected to tradeoffs in terms of lethality vs infectiousness? is it that the more lethal it is, the earlier it is that people become symptomatic (and thus are far more likely to isolate and/or be immobile)?

we're far closer to one side of that spectrum than the other. consider the retroactively legalized mass wiretapping, room 641A, NIST compromises, PRISM, 14 Eyes, the other Snowden revelations, etc

then consider this paired with the implementation of mass data sharing between the alphabet agencies, surveillance data sharing from private companies like Amazon Ring, Flock, Clearview, etc. and NSPM-7 ordering agencies to create JTTFs to target organizations like BLM

then consider the unmitigated use of force by federal law enforcement agencies like ICE

I think if this were 1995 your point might be fair but those days are unfortunately long gone

I think the exploits of the Inquisitors across the millenia especially post-Cathars when torture and mass slaughter were recommended tools for religious indoctrination might be a bit a counter-factual to this (but religious history is not my most strongly studied area)

from NIST [0] to AT&T [1], the NSA has always had a backdoor into huge swathes of data created or transmitted through whatever means along with having Congress laws passed to retroactively make all of this collection legal [2]

it really makes you wish that the lesson the Ruby Ridge far-right took away was simple anti-authoritarianism and not the antisocial tendencies of racial separatism and a Judeo-Christian theocracy

[0] https://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/cs181/projects/ethic... [1] https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-whistleblower-who-unc... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSA_warrantless_surveillance_(...

their competitors are Clearview and Motorola, neither of which are what you would call unimpeachable from a corporate ethics standpoint [0] [1] [2] [3] [4]

companies will only do better if their clientele wants it. if the police don't want accountability processes then that's just tech debt for a future roadmap some other team will handle

[0] https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/society-equity/clearv...

[1] https://www.edpb.europa.eu/news/dutch-supervisory-authority-...

[2] https://www.aclu.org/cases/aclu-v-clearview-ai

[3] https://www.business-humanrights.org/en/latest-news/motorola...

[4] https://classactionu.org/our-news/motorola-solutions-faces-p...

I came from an email marketing company where this was not the case. celebrity accounts were accessible to everyone down to the level of first-line support which eventually resulted in someone getting fired because they were able to add a self-promo into a large account's public communique. it took years before basic access controls were implemented and even then that was only because we were acquired and our parent company was very unhappy with our current state

which isn't to say that Flock isn't at fault - they very much are and they made it simple for cops to stalk people at will and with very little visibility until recently. pair it with a very nominal reason to investigate, say, community organizing and it becomes (or, really, has already become) a way to stifle dissent [0]

[0] https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/inte...

I think this has much to do with the history of policing in the US which originated in the South as re-enslavement patrols and in the North as strikebreakers [0]. these institutions were built to be oppressive towards a population that was heterogeneous. this is unlike the ethnic homogeneity in Europe

with the recent waves of immigration into EU states, you're now also seeing some of the same tactics in use by those 'better' policing institutions (eg France's prison population [1]) plus the rise of reactionary, far-right political parties [2]

my guess is that these are just the natural outcomes from us organizing ourselves as nation states ruled by ethnic and economic elites. carve up borders along sociocultural lines like shared language, religion, and phenotypes and you will always have a ruling majority (at least in the beginning). any changes to that status quo means someone has to relinquish power and some people will do everything, even deliberately antisocial, societally harmful things to preserve that hold [3]

until we move past this kind of organization, I don't see any other possible outcome. given the mass migrations that will occur due to climate change, I expect we'll reach a breaking point within a century and the only path forward that isn't regressive will need to be revolutionary rather than evolutionary

[0] https://sandratrappen.com/2018/11/18/private-police-forces-t...

[1] https://www.antoniocasella.eu/nume/France_prison_MUSLIM_2008...

[2] https://www.dw.com/en/far-right-populists-eu-germany-afd/a-7...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy

news like this is only coming out because Flock very recently rolled out a system that tracks usage and flags possible abuses: https://www.wsbtv.com/news/trending/flock-updates-safeguards...

the problem is that usage of this system with enforcement is not law. Police Departments opt-in and are the ones responsible for whether or not individuals are charged, fired, or simply disciplined, and they also choose whether or not to disclose this to the public. and the other problem is that it's not just Flock - other companies are stepping in like Axon and Motorola and are essentially eating the cake that is Flock's recent public infamy [0]

and law enforcement skirting of accountability is essentially a legalized thing now under legal mechanisms like qualified immunity. not to mention the boy's club that are police unions - my FIL is a former sergeant and has many stories of how he was blackballed by his union because he wouldn't cover for bad cops to the extent that they were pursuing taking away his pension and insurance coverage until just a few years ago

[0] https://www.atlasofsurveillance.org/search?location=&technol...

it's a rhetorical heuristic that a writer should know to use when directing a reader to a declarative that they want them to pay attention to, usually because it's a non-obvious or roundabout insight

when utilized by AI, it's a probabilistic output and it's variable whether or not that rhetorical trick is useful. it also pushes a non-skeptical reader to focus too much on the following text or even to believe that they, themselves, derived some insight. this is effectively a kind of persuasive sophistry which is not helpful - adding rules around it prevents people from deluding themselves with AI

relatedly: https://abcnews.com/US/court-oks-barring-high-iqs-cops/story...

if you've ever read Plato's dialogues or are familiar with the court politics of the eunuchs during, well, any Chinese dynasty, you might be convinced that even those that sit squarely in the seat of power and have the best access to food, education, and disposable time in their era are all still just a bunch of ideologues prone to bickering, constantly arguing from feelings and having little echo chambers, and so on

has there ever existed any forum of perfect discourse in all of human history? HN is still so much better than on any other site I've been on outside of MetaFilter. I get pissed everytime I read any reddit commentary because it's just a series of tropes - here at least, the tropes are well written and people come with citations

it's just not a good faith comment. I did a few minutes of digging into their main claim, that a website called responsiblestatecraft.org is some kind of foreign-funded anti-American think-tank and found absolutely zero evidence of this

that site itself is a product of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft which began life with funding from both Koch and Soros Foundations [0] along with donations from other fairly large and common American foundations like the Ford Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation. so for one, you have money coming from someone who survived the Holocaust that's funding a supposedly anti-Semitic site. and for two, you don't get across-the-board grants from extremely well-funded and tightly controlled givers like these without both connections within the American political establishment and the ability to stand up to donor audits, both things that a weak-on-soft-power nation state would be incapable of pulling off

so I don't think you're going to convince them with actual evidence. when you've been propagandized to your entire life and stake your entire identity around some popular belief even the mildest criticism will feel like a deep attack. it's the same for any other dogmatist, whether it's a Patriot's fan or a religious zealot

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

what do you mean, it's a very normal cool thing that everyone loves

Sent from my Ryobi Riding Lawnmower

I was going to say, the acceptance of bottom-of-the-barrel and subsequent capital investment in SEO as some industry-standard practice has pretty much lowered our standards for writing and comprehensibility across the board

it probably doesn't help that the US education system is so deeply broken with how rooted it is in segregation-era practices [0][1][2]. the average gets dragged down quite a bit when some districts receive so much money that they're flying their Spell Bowl teams to nationals and putting them up in hotels while another one a few miles away can't afford to pay for textbooks. average reading levels suffer and consequently so too does the effort that people put into writing well and reading critically

[0] https://www.shankerinstitute.org/segfunding

[1] https://www.jchs.harvard.edu/research-areas/working-papers/s...

[2] https://edlawcenter.org/research/the-color-of-opportunity/

> You could make it a state capitalist society with theoretical public ownership and this disrespect towards people won't go away

this is essentially the PRC in the 21st century post-Deng* - there's probably a cultural difference at play here too given how embedded the CCP is within academic and business institutions, how kinship tends to be extended on a filial level leading to larger networks. mobilizing a large group of subject-matter experts for post-training annotation (eg - https://ojs.aaai.org/index.php/AAAI/article/view/29907) seems to be fairly simple as an ask but, like you said, it doesn't matter ultimately with their largest firms like DeepSeek utilizing automated RL to skip that whole step and this type of training isn't the norm

I sometimes wonder if the problem with the PRC's sinking back to exploitative labor standards would happen in a vacuum. if you weren't surrounded by adversarial nation states with leaders looking to squeeze every advantage, would you, yourself, resort to the race-to-the-bottom of profit sharing?

a much better SF visionary than I would be able to write a story about a very slow growing AI project* trained for specialized use, and how this was the norm and everyone was happy because it was happening at a reasonable pace relative to hardware capabilities (presumably also reduced to avoid all of the slave labor inside of the rare earth trade). I think it's the capitalism side of things that says 'we should be everything at the fastest speed for everyone' that we get things like Claude and ChatGPT which necessitate outsized, disproportionate resources that doesn't allow hardware efficiencies to catch up and mitigate the worst of the externalized costs

*realistically it's maybe more accurate to say post-Jiang given the extent of opening up Chinese labor markets but Deng's trajectory steered the way

*Ted Chiang's Lifecycle of Software Objects does this a bit but it's more of a social commentary on the capitalist abandonment of the functional for the shiny than it is a sharp political critique of the pace of modernization and its effects on people and the environment

would love to live in a society where past harms and mistakes could simply be forgotten because the law has moved forward. I imagine a lot of low-level drug possession charges would be forgiven under that ethical conceit

but since we're a long ways from that reality, the least we can do is to look for accountability from influential people with the same strictness we have for the poorest and least powerful

more specifically, it was for donating to homophobic political groups trying to pass Prop 8 which made gay marriage illegal in California [0]

the measure passed by 5% [1] - people were fairly incensed that Mozilla Foundation money (paid to him via his salary) might go to future donations of the same kind

I'm sure people will say things about 'well of course he's legally free to do as he wants with this money' but then so too is the desire by employees to not want to be working under someone who has done something ideologically abhorrent to them. and given the multiple controversies that crop up about Brave seemingly every year where they push some combination of crypto, browser AI, etc, it's probably for the best

[0] https://www.inc.com/jeremy-quittner/mozilla-ceo-brandon-eich...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_California_Proposition_8

wouldn't you also need to worry about the voltage spikes when you're running on battery vs starting the car if you're running an ICE? and would you need to unplug it if you, say, need a jump? feels like you'd also need to install a whole UPS on the other side too if you care about the hardware longevity (not factoring in the sheer amount of dirt/leaves/etc that'll just get caught up in the card itself)

Chekhov had such an influence on me as a young, hyper-insecure teen. Chekhov's craft is powerful and widely taught but it's his thematic elements that I really loved. he made a habit of setting up a deeply unlikeable character in the first act, slowly revealing their tragedies and traumas that led them to their insecurity, and the selective love they put into the world so by the final act you're weeping for someone who you scoffed at at first impression. for someone who was so convinced that people disliked or hated him, it was a real balm to know that there were those advocating for the strongest form of compassion as the default mode and not just an occasional, extraordinary act

I didn't make any claim about being smart or not aside from brief mockery of people who care about the word and things like IQ tests

I'd personally trust a rigorous, well-evinced, and methodical dissection of a topic by someone with completely average intelligence over a lazy broad generalization by someone who scored high on a paper test that people (wrongly) assume maps onto the ability to assess and analyze the world [0]. which isn't to say there isn't any clinical significance from something like the Stanford-Binet, it's just that there's a wide gulf between the lay person's understanding of 'high IQ' and clinical applications [1]. and, accordingly, I am someone who did score high enough on a psychologist administered IQ test when I was but a wee lad that universities were sending my family letters requesting that I be a part of their high-IQ child studies but you're convinced I'm middle of the curve so how valid is it, even?

the thing I value from academia is predominantly peer review and constant critique by people whose entire job is to perform epistemically rigorous analysis. this is something that's very uncommon when it comes to culture warriors on social media. and you must be very far removed from any kind of academia if you think they all universally agree - put a post-structuralist in a room with someone who still favors deconstructionism and you won't hear the end of it

funnily enough, clinical psychology is the research I linked to about toxic masculinity that you broadly generalized as worthless ivory tower ideology. so it wouldn't make sense then to value something like 'smarts' or 'IQ' since those, too, are concepts that emerged from the very same ivory towers, in those exact departments rife with ideological bias

[0] https://som.yale.edu/news/2009/11/why-high-iq-doesnt-mean-yo...

[1] https://opened.cuny.edu/courseware/lesson/48/student/?sectio...

yeah, I think some of the vitriol is well-meaning but misplaced. when I think about the externalized costs (pollution, energy use, water use, rare earth mining, data center buildouts, etc) I think it's worthwhile to remain critical but people like to extend it, in their black and white thinking, as multi-categorical failures. for basic questions it's serviceable (though the number of responses that cite just Youtube videos means my skepticism for its output validity remains)

this is bordering on pedantry but aren't there classifications by different regulatory and medical institutions of what fibers are and aren't? as far as I'm aware, a starch isn't a fiber unless a special exemption is carved out for it and only if that starch meets certain criteria for how it behaves

looking into RS's in general, it seems like there is a special carve-out after a lot of industry lobbying for very specific forms of RS's to be classified as fibers and only if they have physiological effects similar to the classic definition of fiber: https://www.fda.gov/media/113663/download

for practical reasons, I suppose I'm just not understanding why you don't eat more 'classical' fibers. psyllium husk, for eg, which is cheap and effective and has been utilized as a digestive aid in Chinese traditional medicine for centuries (one of the few to survive rigorous empirical evaluation, naturally)

Brave has certainly said a lot of good things while doing quite [0] a lot [1] of bad [2] things [3] that make me think it's mostly just marketing to lower-knowledge users that's carrying it forward. I see so many 'privacy' influencers that recommend it and Chromium, and then Firefox with no mention of FOSS options like LibreWolf, Tor Browser, IronFox, etc

[0] https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/issues/15790

[1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/privacy-browser-brave-busted-f...

[2] https://www.xda-developers.com/brave-browser-installs-vpn-wi...

[3] https://www.atlas.science/news/the-shady-world-of-brave-sell...

a starch is not fiber and generally not broken down the same way in digestion afaik

fiber is great and under-consumed (especially soluble) and is very well-studied on modern populations [0]. we don't really need to make mechanistic reasonings about evolutionary adaptations that occurred hundreds of thousands of years ago or rely on studies of a small, homogenized population whose lived realities are far from yours and mine

plus, following the the hierarchy of evidence, mechanistic guesses are considered extremely low quality, only ranking above things like mouse studies [1]

[0] https://www.uptodate.com/contents/healthy-diet-in-adults#H61... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hierarchy_of_evidence

we're looking at the 90+ day default line chart? 2008 saw an increase from sub 8% (which seems to be the norm) to 13%. 2023 was at 7% and we're right now sitting at 13% again. there are no other significant swings in credit card debt

is that functionally different than just using the search field in dictionary.com? I guess I'm just not seeing what the point of using Gemini is over a much more efficient feature that already exists

sample size n=37 of which recruitment only happened in Shanghai without any real control for confounders, only evaluated over a period of two weeks with no longterm follow-ups, the dosage of 40g RS/d is very high (would take about 4-5 large potatoes daily for equivalency or ingesting likely expensive supplement), the crossover compares RS vs CS in the same participants with only a 4 week washout which is a weakness since fermentable fiber persists >4 weeks, also the supplement they used was industry-provided by a starch manufacturer which was weirdly not disclosed

this is a great study if you are an overweight/obese adult without overt metabolic disease, willing and able to consume 90 g/d of starch supplement within a controlled diet, and living in Shanghai with similar baseline fiber intakes endemic to that population. it is extremely not generalizeable to you or even me though I fit more of those characteristics than I care to admit

stay skeptical of small studies like this, friend

yes but you can graph trends over time: https://www.newyorkfed.org/microeconomics/hhdc

for example, the last time we saw a nice little rise was in 2008 where nothing bad happened and everything was okay (look at the 90+ day delinquency rates). at least housing and mortgages are fine for now but if there was ever an actual recession indicator, this may be it

have you ever done the fun trick of asking any model to adversarially review itself? highly recommended practice for anyone who trusts a one-shot output

you can have whatever opinion you want of me, friend, but for your own good I hope you develop better ways of processing your feelings so that you're not so reactive when someone mildly disagrees with you