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Cats pretty much domesticated themselves for the mutual benefit of both species.

There are "captive" pets living in cages or other enclosures that might be a bit more dicey, but cats and dogs are probably a pretty poor example to get upset about.

Generally, yes; for example, routine colonoscopies are not practiced in many developed countries, and it doesn't necessarily translate into any difference in overall health outcomes. One recent study is described here: https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/09/health/colonoscopy-cancer-dea... . One explanation is that such cancers are slow-growing and tend to be discovered late in life, so treating them doesn't actually help much, and any benefits are offset by potential harms of the procedure itself, the risk of false positives, etc.

Similarly, while hypertension is a problem, there is scant evidence that routine treatment of it is beneficial. The drugs have health risks: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullar...

There is value in targeted screening and education, but annual checkups for otherwise healthy people aren't necessarily the way to do it. Not to mention, many of these checkups are perfunctory.

A lot of the gains in life expectancy have little to do with advanced diagnostics and treatments. Sanitation, hygiene, antibiotics, and increased standards of living do a lot of the heavy lifting here. And when the needle moves in the other direction, the causes tend to be mundane too - e.g., opioid abuse in the US.

And thus eliminate the reason many (if not most) of these books and webpages existed in the first place.

This may be fair in the short term, but on a longer timescale, it leaves us worse off unless LLMs master reasoning about and being creative with things not in their training set. Possible, but a crapshoot right now.

Airport is probably a very different environment, though? I imagine that if you have a military installation, you don't mind blasting some birds with RF every now and then (and the birds probably don't mind either).

That's how development always happened in much of the US. Cities expanding into forestland or grassland. The problem isn't that the homes are all of sudden luxurious, or that we somehow do less planning than in the 1880s or 1960s. It's that a mix of well-intentioned environmental policies and activism mean there's no fuel reduction happening at all. Controlled burns are one way, but logging is another.

But it will. Because it doesn't matter if it's fundamentally better than a good recruiter if it's orders of magnitude cheaper. If you can have it pursue far more leads, maybe the outcomes are going to be the same or better. And if you used it to replace a bad or a mediocre recruiter? In any case, you might not care: hiring is a crapshoot anyway, and AI is saving you millions of dollars.

You want to weed out people who are clearly unqualified, but that's not rocket science. Beyond that, every company has a different hiring bar, a different process... and approximately zero data that their approach works better than anybody else's. Interview performance is a poor predictor of job performance. Whether the bar is high or comparatively relaxed, around 70% of the people you hire will be good, and the rest will underperform, leave after a couple of months, have difficult personalities, and so forth.

Early GPTs were fairly bad at following instructions. The innovation was RLHF, where human raters (Mechanical Turk style) would be asked to evaluate on how well the LLM is able to follow instructions stated as a part of the prompt, often in this style. Countless such ratings were incorporated into the training process itself.

So it did not happen out of the blue, and you didn't need a whole lot of existing webpages involving this sort of role play.

As the old saying goes, good ideas shouldn't require force. If they have a "no-brainer" offering, no need to strong-arm people into using it, right?

I get it that they are not a charity and can monetize or paywall their platforms as seen fit, but there's something just sad about the model where you build a customer-friendly and open platform, then progressively crapify it once you capture a niche and eliminate most alternatives, and then start penalizing users for trying to work around that.

Google is big, wealthy, and tech-savvy enough to, at the very least, make ad blockers unreliable and annoying most of the time for most of the users.

This is not good news, and it's probably not going to be a lesson in humility for the company.

This is often impractical when shipping costs more than the components.

Yeah, there are things you shouldn't be buying "just in case" - for example, a stash of SoCs will age faster than you can use them - but definitely buy a hundred of common capacitors, such as 100 nF, 1 µF, or 10 µF, rather than buying them one-by-one.

You generally don't need a complete set of all standard resistances or capacitances - there are precious few circuits where you need precisely 47 pF and 6.8 kΩ - but there's plenty of stuff that goes into almost every single project you build. Battery clips, 100 Ω / 1k / 10k resistors, 100 nF / 1 µF / 10 µF decoupling caps, LEDs, PCB-mount switches...

I maintained page like this, only to have it penalized by Google when they started cracking down on a particular type of SEO spam.

But another problem is that such pages are just really hard to maintain. In a year or two, half of the items you're liking to are going to be out of production. This is especially true for stuff like no-name test equipment, low-cost breadboards, etc. There's just no stable brand or URL to use.

I think the point is that if we used the language of museum displays and pop-sci books about antiquity to describe the modern world, the results would be comical.

In all likelihood, big-bosomed stone pendants dug up in Mesopotamia had as much to do with "fertility rituals" as truck nuts do.

I find it hard to interpret such whataboutism as sincere.

If you care about these perceived abuses by US tech companies, why wouldn't you applaud the outcry against TikTok? At the very least, it moves the needle in the right direction. It increases the awareness of industry practices and helps flesh out some constraints. Even if you're of the mindset that there's no practical difference between the US government and an authoritarian communist dictatorship that murdered millions of its compatriots for having the wrong political views, why defend their right to do the things you hate?

I remember school as a massive waste of time, but it definitely helped me develop social skills.

That said, I'm really not seeing this effect with my kids in the SF Bay Area. They have few opportunities to socialize on school grounds, and are then whisked away by parents and taken to after-school classes or back home to sit in front of a computer. "Socialization" boils down to kids hanging around on social networks on their phones. And even these seem to be shifting from chat to passive consumption (TikTok, etc).