807 karma · joined December 29, 2010
We aren't doctors, we just need the skills to figure things out and fix them quickly.
You would need millions of people to filter all of the video that Google uploads per day. Even then, it would be hard to "make sure it's not a false flag video". That itself is pretty subjective even if it is obvious to you and everyone you know.
Also, trying to update videos with factual information vs false information is also hard.
The answer is for individuals to learn to be critical of the things that they watch. Period. There is no other way. Putting it in the hands of someone else is paving the road to tyranny.
It's not like they are putting a gun to my head but, they are using a billion dollars of research and my friends' faces to entice me into doing something I don't want. I'm more or less a monkey and my social circuitry just is so super-stimulated that it's annoying.
And all of that is before the FOMO kicks in and I start feeling bad that my life isn't as nice as my friends even though among my friends, I have a very enviable life (my friends have confided in me as much). But, my every day life cannot compete with the highlight reel of all the best moments of all my friends' lives.
Even though I know all of this stuff consiously, it still affects me because keeping guard and watch over everything constantly is hard. Falling into how it's designed to make you feel is easy.
Deleting FB off your phone is the best thing.
This overwhelming feeling, I'm convinced, is one of the driving factors that created Instagram and Snapchat because it was smaller and less invasive. Ironically, they became just like FB or in some ways (to some people) worse as they grew.
We are social animals and FB weaponizes the faces of all of your friends to suck as much attention from you as possible. It's as unfair a fight as there ever has been in the history of commerce.
You could make Obama say anything. He could say something humourous, something that he's never said before. You would have just as impressive of a demo if you had Obama say "I'm a little teapot short and stout..." and then used overlay text to promote yourself. You chose instead to make a video where he promotes your startup.
That is both hypocritical and immoral and not only using his personal likeness but, also the seat of the Presidency of the United States.
This fast and loose way that Lyrebird treats their technology only makes me think that they don't really think about the massive negative potential of the technology and just want to get scale / profitability as fast as possible.
Seems from right out of the gate, they are breaking their own ethical guidelines as a cheap promotional tactic. If they care that little about themselves and a former president of the United States, what do they care about your likeness.
It also doesn't help that you give them a universal perpetual license to do whatever they want (including selling your likeness for someone else's use) by uploading.
This just seems like a slimy team that put up an ethics page as a CYA.
I'm willing to eat my words if they had Barak Obama's consent to use his digitized voice for this but, it's highly doubtful since there's also the coat and seal of the President of the United States on the flag in the background which would be a massive ethical breach of a former President just to promote a silly little startup.
It's a market problem with misaligned incentives and payment structures that has slowly grown worse over the past 40 years. No one actually says no because competition favors those that fatten themselves up with attractive but functionally useless things.
It's more like peacock feathers than malice or greed by administrators.
I don't want someone intoxicated going 300/mph above my house.
Somehow because he has particular views of the equality of men and women, it should give him an above average amount of will power to stop himself from temptation?
Feminism is a political stance not a moral super-power. The great majority of people with access to something will not hold themselves back. Men in positions of power will have women throwing themselves at them. Most men will succumb to that temptation the same way the majority of the population with access to food will eventually succumb to the temptation to overeat.
At some point almost all people will get fat as they get comfortable and older. From all accounts I've heard, nearly all professional atheletes and musicans cheat. If you had beautiful women throwing themselves at you, you would probably succumb to it eventually. Most men do. Women's sex drive and biochemistry is different and most attractive women have had men throwing themselves (or at least have 2nd hand experience through a friend) and thus it isn't equivalent. Most women don't know what it's like to have what you were chasing your whole life, chasing you. It's like being a lion and have gazelles trying to leap into your mouth all the time.
When you add the fact that his casting someone (and he was known for casting relatively unknown actors) could change the course of their entire career and thus life, and most of those who could benefit the most are literally a self-selected group of the most beautiful women in the world, it's no wonder why he cheated.
So, to take all of that and heap some kinda extra moral failure on him is unfair. If she cheated, it wouldn't be some failure of her feminist stance. She would just be someone who cheated.
It was merely a betrayal of a loved one but, doesn't mean that all of a sudden he hates women because he cheated.
Now, it's all well and good to go and ban white supremacists, KKK members, hate groups, etc. It's monumental stupidity to ban an academic with proper credentials. It's even in effective. Even in the most extreme case, his careful scholarly screeds about statistics isn't exactly going to make frothing hordes of racists; not near the same way as banning him without cause, reason or explanation.
It's silly. His twitter shows him writing article headlines in provocative ways (for an academic) but, nothing even close to supporting a group like the KKK but, in this atmosphere and with Google trying mobilize probably thousands of young, probably uneducated (cheap) people review accounts for deletion, it was probably someone who saw one of these procative headlines and marked this blog for deletion without looking or realizing who this person was.
Strangely, the same thing happen to Jordan Peterson not even a month ago. Another academic but, with far more controversial views but, far more outcry came of it and Google reversed it in a few days.
All of this is embarassing for Google who for years has invested in very light touch style of customer service and it's coming back to bite them in the ass.
Electric bikes exist.
Bike advocates for years have railed against cars and said the world would be so much better if people biked. Now the electric bike is expanding the world of biking and all of the social benefits of biking still exist with electric bikes and these people don't like it.
It's just classic policing of a sub-culture. According to him, you aren't a real cyclist if you aren't pedaling as hard as he is. What he needs to do is get over himself and realize that progress doesn't look like what you want it to look like; that you should learn to accept the world rather than just like a child expect the world to conform to your purist expectations.
The reality is that most people go with the majority opinion even when the facts go against them.
The memo was lambasted in the media and I didn't really read it and I myself thought that it was hair-brained and while it might have some kernels of facts or link to some sources, it was highly opinionated and the screed of a misogynist. I believed this because EVERYONE was saying this.
Watching this video, I was wrong, way wrong. The only way to know for sure was to read the thing. If I had, I would have seen it and had my opinion changed.
So few people actually read the memo. The science used to back it's claims is roughly and mainly solid evidence. It asks for a conversation.
Any time you have people using morality to object to repeatable scientific literature and shut down a conversation even before it can start, you have to notice and question it. The people against even discussing this topic are more like the Anti-Vaxxers than they would like to admit. The see their kids with incurable, terrible afflictions and are looking for something, anything to blame.
Human nature took millions of years to evolve to what we see today in an environment that was far different from our own. We accept that humans sitting and typing all day will get backpain and maybe carpal-tunnel syndrome. Yet, we somehow thing that millions of years of sexual selection for different features between the genders would yield different biology, that could lead to different biases toward occupations and reaction to stimuli?
I don't presume to have an answer but, I think it's a perfectly reasonable line of questioning, especially if there is relevant, well regarded research on the topic. What people are afraid of is the outcome.
Google specifically and tech in general tend to select for the top percentile in specific dimensions. If there is any differences between groups, that top percentile will show it to an extreme degree. It isn't hard to imagine that might be partially the cause of what is going on. Furthermore, societies and social norms form around patterns that are in the environment already. Social norms and competition in the environment that those social norms create can reinforce those social norms to work against outside or atypical competitors in those social environments.
It lowers the price floor for a shiny new phone. All of these additional features are expensive to create but, they are differentiators. With this, Google has the ability to push more new features on the base OS. By conforming to this standard, Google make it easier for them to compete with all of these manufacturers' features.
Now it's up to them to make compelling reasons to upgrade their phones beyond apps. I see things like Google Assistant, Mapping, etc. being more integrated into the OS so that you are always in the Google system no matter what app you are currently in.
This is a big and brilliant win if they can first pull it off technically and then pull it off with compelling services. They certainly look like they are investing heavily in both.
I look forward to a $99 or $199 (or $49 if you can stomach sketchy Chinese phones) phone that just keeps getting better and better and better for free as long as the phone works. This also makes a very compelling thing to make the phone into a computer once the battery can't hold a charge, etc. Take the guts or use some kind of USB->HDMI out and make it into a TV app or a digital mirror or another internet station somewhere.
Brilliant move Google.
It's much cheaper and safer to build a politically neutral brand without expectations of some kind feminist message / worldview. If you go that route, it isn't going to sell more clothes but, it will invite people's hyper-sensitivity about every aspect of the product. You can only lose in that scenario, you aren't winning anything.
Also, it's creepy that we replacing a task that friends used to do, (fashion / styling / taste advice) with a corporate cloud algorithm? Seriously, just get some friends that like fashion and ask them to rate your style. I guess it's a bit needy to ask them every morning but, then I suspect that most people don't have that many clothes and that many possible looks. Also, looking good is zero sum game. Ultimately, you just competing for the same pool of attention from your friends. If you are successful and soak it all up with your great Amazon(TM) fashion advice, then your friends will soon have it too and then you are back to where you started but, now you have this dependance on the kind of friend who gives you great advice (that you need to just look decent now, not better than average like before) except it keeps encouraging you to buy more fashionable (and thus more expensive) clothes. It's kinda a shitty friend at that point.
Also, I would counter that in a firm, the legal and immoral loopholes that would give one party greater wealth would do so 1) at the expense of other parties inside the firm and 2) run the risk of bad optics / PR to institutional investors who look out for things like this when evaluating a firm.
Lastly, the aggregate of these factors is baked into the return on investment of a stock. In other words, I suspect that might be happening in firms that are making alot of money and providing healthy returns for shareholders. Alot less so at firms that are struggling and not providing much growth.
Games change over time for commercial reasons so unlike 100 meter dash being essentially the same as the greeks, next week's CS:GO or DOTA can have a balance patch or new features that make the game essentially different from this week's game.
Further more, even though this guy acted completely different than every other Japanese person he met, it somehow gives him greater insight into the culture?
I'm sure they lost even more money on me that month than normal.
Uber takes me from point A to point B in a virtually indistinguishable way than Lyft or any of the other smaller ride sharing services. The most important thing is the transport, not the comfort, not the branding, not the "Lifestyle Experience". Maybe they will succeed because all of these people want something more out of a ride other than the ride but, for me it's cheap, reliable, fast; in that order. Everything else if fluff.
I sold my car over a year ago and use a mix of ridesharing and rentals for transportation. Uber and Lyft's greatest competition in my life is a small Google product where people pick up people on their daily commute to and from work and the drivers are compensated only for gas money.
Locally, there is a company that will allow you to rent an electric car for free for two hours (it has an electronic billboard on the ceiling).
In the future, cheap electricity and efficient manufacturing might make a world where rides of a certain distance would be free or extremely low cost in exchange for advertising.
Transportation is a commodity. For a short ride, I don't care that much about the differences, whether I'm sitting in a Toyota Corolla or Mercedes S-Class. It gets me from point A to point B.
In this environment, I think the VCs pouring billions of dollars into Uber are throwing their money away subsidizing Uber's leadership in commodity market. Cheaper wins. I get to choose on each ride. There's no lock-in, there's really no reason for brand loyalty. Whatever is cheaper wins. If it's free, whomever gets here first wins. If they are both available right now, it's who has the nicer seat.
This is a race to the bottom and as a customer I'm only going to remember negative experiences with the brand. Lyft is better by encouraging themed cars but, they've stopped doing that from what I've seen.
There's a good chance that Lyft and Uber might face huge backlash for bait and switching drivers when they roll out driverless cars.
I'm bearish on Uber in the long term.
Given how accurate human corpora is at predicting things like gender distribution in jobs for instance, wouldn't making an "unbiased" corpora make an inaccurate AI?
Shouldn't we be careful in implying things like the biases and solutions to said biases? For instance, I'd like to know if my algorithm for filtering job applicants is trying to undo the injustices of the world in addition to finding the best candidates.
I'd have to think there isn't a legal case or the billion dollar company that is Snapchat would have mounted a case. They didn't patent an interface (code or visual). They didn't try to protect it or even make a public case that it was somehow copying.
Yet, here we are on Hacker News saying it's somehow unethical? At this level, all social networks are "clones" of each other. Twitter is a clone of the FB news feed. Android is a clone of the iPhone. All of the food delivery startups are clones of each other. They all should do the moral thing and close up shop or at least pivot to something else.
Except we would all be poorer for it. We would have less options, less innovations and fewer ways to communicate. If any of the parties thought this was unethical stealing of their work, they are big boys and well funded; they'd at the very least say so.
You may not like FB/Instagram because of it but, if it's a superior free product and no one is making a case then I don't think it's immoral.
Both things get treated the same way, "if anything about you makes me uncomfortable, I'll take that as threatening and force you out of the community because the things you like are unpopular"
This is the same line of reasoning that burned witches in Salem, kept gays closeted for decades and is the very thing liberal people say that they are against today.
Drupal showed themselves to be complete and utter hypocrites.
Take some of the cutting edge research in the field that you are familiar with, find companies that need that skillset or technology, find companies on Linkedin and email the CEO/CTO.
That way you could potentially skip the entry level stuff and come in as someone with specialized knowledge from day one and probably get compensated as such.
Stop trying to compete with people in the general arena where your Master's Degree doesn't even have any bearing.
Venice and the south side of Santa Monica used to be kinda a sketchy place to live and had alot of crime though, it was on the beach.
Crime went down (as it did all over LA) and went from an undesirable place to live to a desirable one. When people express that desire by actually moving themselves and their businesses there, the people that were previously there are outraged.
I get being mad at market rates going up in your neighbourhood; it's basically a selfish desire to keep things as they were for yourself. Especially if it goes so far as to move you out of your neighbourhood but, to make it moral as if these people who naturally moving to the best place they can find for a price they can pay are somehow trying to personally inflict evil on the people that already live there is silly.
One might as well try to stop the tide from rising. We live in a capitalist society. Real estate is one of the largest markets there is, literally trillions of dollars in value. Even small changes in value can have huge effects.
There is no simple solution. Even if Snap, Inc. did move to a suburb in the valley somewhere, they would lose a significant, expensive chunk of their workforce. The young, mostly childless employees of Snap, Inc. are exactly the kind of people that love living in Venice. Everyone loves living there, how do I know? The rental prices in Venice are astronomical. People already have sacrificed alot to live there, they aren't going to move to the valley. They are going to keep their friends and their short commutes and move to a company in their neighbourhood.
Now this movement seems clear but, I can't know and verify for sure unless I have a representative sample of trader sentiments to know why they chose to buy or sell the stock that day.