spritefs

> 1 "systems engineer" (not sure what this means, but doesn't seem like it involves programming since they taught themselves Python after getting laid off)

I met someone who was a "systems engineer" at a job orientation about a year ago. I thought that they did lower level programming or something, apparently they didn't know how to program at all

> about removing Pro-ana websites

what is pro-ana? pro anorexia?

> Freeloaders have a right to be worried: It’s also been reported that Netflix will potentially block IP addresses that don’t match the IP address of the main account holder.

Couldn't someone just set up a proxy for family with a different WAN addr?

Something else that's odd is it will sometimes mix up icons in the force quit menu. But this was around prior to ventura

At the same time, there's so much stuff going on in macos that there's a very wide surface area for random things like this. I wonder how many people work on it, if I had to guess it would be in the hundreds

> Government basically uses marketing tactics to portray us all as a big inclusive happy family, but that couldn't be further from the truth.

It's the same way in the US with native Americans. They teach you about the genocide committed. What they don't teach you is that the government aggression towards natives didn't actually "stop" until Kennedy (and even then I'm still in doubt)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_termination_policy

Question for Australians here: is racism against aboriginals widespread in Australia? How does the govt work to prevent it?

> We desperately need more attention on climate change or the human race will die out.

Imo renewable energy and and EVs are worthwhile because of air pollution, but we can do without the fearmongering about the world ending. Historically every time people have done that it was a load of BS

> LegitScript revoked its certification for Cerebral and Done this year, and the two companies face Justice Department investigations after the Journal reported that some clinicians felt pressured to prescribe stimulants. Patients and their families have said the companies prescribed medications that contributed to deaths. Both companies have denied pressuring clinicians and said they seek to make mental-health care accessible

When I was in a business class in undergrad, the prof one day showed us videos of bad slide deck presentations from former classes. In one of them, someone just outright said "we trick the customer into buying X" in the Q&A part of the presentation

Obviously it was a stupid thing to say, but it outlines the sort of cognitive dissonance that our economic system cultivates in people. You're supposed to trick people and lie to everyone (including yourself) about doing it. The truth isn't allowed because it's bad for the bottom line. Is this good for society?

Parent wasn't making a legal argument. A bunch of the comments in this thread are about trust. Do you think it's good for trust to have "for profit companies policing their content to attain maximum ad revenue"?

Is maximizing profit the only thing that social networks should care about? Or are there other obligations also?

If people don't trust a system that raised them, there are inherent flaws with the system that it is either unable or unwilling to address

The craziness surrounding covid was somewhat predictable

Here in the US (and likely other places), you have a pharma industry shoving amphetamines and antidepressants in people's faces. You have a complacent government that's too lazy, corrupt, and incompetent to address this obvious wrong (among many others)

So because of this, people already don't trust the pharma industry or govt. Can I blame them? Not really. At the same time, you have elderly refusing vaccination and dying because of this lack of trust. You have parents refusing to vaccinate children for things like measles

So tl;dr you have a system that has systematically eroded trust over the years and has been unable to self correct, and people on some level know that they're getting screwed. And you have an incompetent government that refuses to take responsibility for this lack of trust and only knows how to redirect blame elsewhere. What could possibly go wrong here?

edit: I'm not saying that the government is irredeemably bad, I'm saying that as of right now the current generation of politicians have failed to do their due diligence regarding pharma screwing people over (e.g. price of insulin)

> have concluded that they aren’t helpful or interesting to them as a concept

Yeah they aren't. This site has a little bit of technical value and debate. Any of the big social networks are full of idiots that I'd rather not deal with

Something interesting that I don't see in the comments here are comments Dijkstra has made about using natural language for telling machines to do things[0]

> Instead of regarding the obligation to use formal symbols as a burden, we should regard the convenience of using them as a privilege: thanks to them, school children can learn to do what in earlier days only genius could achieve. (This was evidently not understood by the author that wrote —in 1977— in the preface of a technical report that "even the standard symbols used for logical connectives have been avoided for the sake of clarity". The occurrence of that sentence suggests that the author's misunderstanding is not confined to him alone.) When all is said and told, the "naturalness" with which we use our native tongues boils down to the ease with which we can use them for making statements the nonsense of which is not obvious.

I wonder what the long term consequences of LLMs will be. I can't see them abstracting away programming languages for the reasons that Dijkstra provides (namely the inherent ambiguity of natural language), but maybe they could be a good summarizer of APIs and generator for starter code.

My prediction is that they'll provide a similar utility to stackoverflow and save time in developing software

[0] https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD06xx/E...

- RISC V will become more common. We won't see it moving to most phones and personal computers just yet, but it will be used in some embedded devices and wearables

- Google will AB test the search product with NLP generated answers and consider augmenting it as a response to ChatGPT

- Covid will sort of come on and off and will be talked about in a way similar to the flu

- Recession will likely continue at a relatively steady rate. Sun belt states will continue growing. Bay area population will shrink slightly

- Affordable housing construction will make progress in the bay area as buildings are completed. Rent increases will slow down due to increased supply

- TikTok will continue getting bad press. There will be a stand off between TikTok and DC. It will either be banned or have the American side of the business sold to someone like Oracle

- Meta will survive because people will continue using Facebook and IG. VR stuff will be a niche market dominated by them

- Tesla stock will start dropping more aggressively as investors realize it is overvalued compared to other car manufacturers

- Iran instability will continue. CIA could possibly stage a coup in Iran if it becomes especially bad

- Chinese economy will continue declining due to govt interference with domestic tech. Japan and Germany will continue military buildup. Vietnam, India, and Bangladesh will grow as low cost manufacturing centers

- Increased tension between Alberta and Ottawa

- Apple allows sideloading iOS due to EU pressure. Apple won't have any new and interesting software to bring to the table, but might come out with a new phone camera with better computational photography to challenge what Google is doing

- Amazon will continue growing, and will approach Apple as the most valuable company. Apple will grow, but more slowly than Amazon

- YEaR of ThE LiNuX DeSkToP

> I can't fathom how a software dev could not "care about users".

In a large company, there are so many layers of abstraction between you and the users that it's difficult to see how something could benefit them.

Also on top of this, I don't think that showing users more ads is supposed to "benefit" them. There are so many orgs like this, where you hear this claptrap about "benefiting the user" when it's really just showing them more ads or something like that

At this point, what else is there to care about other than just writing good code and making sure it's correct?

> You're correct, this is the exact kind of story scary right wing monsters amplify and use to suggest that any day now we'll be stacking the corpes of the homeless in carts and rolling them off to the landfill.

I don't think this issue has been politicized yet (at least in the US). Has it been politicized in Canada or something?

ChatGPT really isn't bad. Just went and entered some questions regarding libraries I worked with on a recent project and the information itself was afaik correct. The code examples were missing context though

I don't see this replacing google/documentation/stackoverflow anytime soon because that combination already does its job

This type of model is super promising though, I could see it getting incorporated into a search engine, sort of how google provides a tl;dr answer at the top of searches for certain queries

> via suicide prevention measures (nets under bridges, restrictions on drug purchases etc.)

Those are all negative, in those cases you're not allowing someone to do something (which is different from forcing someone to do something). There are other forms of suicide prevention though, like forcing suicidal people to take medication

> and then I read elsewhere that this is the isolated practice of individuals whose behaviour is being hauled over the coals at tribunal hearings into "this is how not to do this".

Ahh yes, it's only a couple of bad apples and not the system in place that's enabling their behavior

> Whether you believe a person has a "right" to choose to die or not, people are fully capable of making the choice, and whether you believe they have to right to or not, people are going to do it.

It's one thing to be able to do something, it's another thing to inform the person of the ability to do something and put pressure on them like this (a real conversion in Canada between a patient and hospital administrator):

> “Roger, this is not my show,” the ethicist responded. “My piece of this was to talk to you, (to see) if you had an interest in assisted dying.”

And also jumping off buildings or in front of cars is a relatively uncommon way of committing suicide

> Those who choose to die should be allowed to make that choice in a way that’s safe, painless, and that minimizes the effects on others as much as is possible.

But should doctors (or anyone else) be allowed to suggest it to patients, and at what point does that suggestion become coercion? Through what means will the patient learn about euthanasia as an option?

I disagree with this:

> A person must have the right to chose the terms of their own existence.

In the sense that a person doesn't have the right to choose to die, and shouldn't have the right to make that decision on behalf of someone else

> But human rights advocates say the country’s regulations lack necessary safeguards, devalue the lives of disabled people and are prompting doctors and health workers to suggest the procedure to those who might not otherwise consider it.[0]

My problem with euthanasia is how do you know if the patient actually wanted it, or if they were pressured into it by medical personnel in order to cut costs?

In Canada, the health care system is publicly funded. There's an incentive for euthanasia because it cuts costs

In the USA, we don't have a public health care system, so there's an incentive to drag people along, run up the bill, and not euthanize them

What I find most interesting about this euthanasia thing is I only see it really getting taken seriously in jurisdictions where the health care system is public. If a public healthcare system introduces this nasty dynamic of disabled, debilitated people getting put down "for the public good", I don't want a public health care system

[0] https://apnews.com/article/covid-science-health-toronto-7c63...

See this https://apnews.com/article/covid-science-health-toronto-7c63...

> But human rights advocates say the country’s regulations lack necessary safeguards, devalue the lives of disabled people and are prompting doctors and health workers to suggest the procedure to those who might not otherwise consider it.

In order to cut healthcare costs, assisted suicide is thrust upon people as an option. What's worse: having people with a debilitating illness suffer through it, or having everyone with a debilitating illness at a certain age get pressured by medical personnel into putting themselves on death row "for the common good"?

> But the pay is so much more too. This means you can retire sooner and then use the free time to find meaning.

This spiel about waiting for retirement to "find meaning" is a load of BS. Telling people to sit around and wait for decades on end until their life is 4/5 of the way complete is inhumane. Why wait for decades when someone can just do what they're interested in now?

The fact that some people unironically think this crazy stuff (and don't see how crazy it really is) is just sickening to me

> I don't agree with this sort of cynicism at all, and I very much do believe that while it is very flawed, democracy ultimately is still doing its job.

Democracy is good, yes, but blindly asserting that USA == democracy is an incredibly naive, elementary school textbook level take of how our society propagates itself (not saying you're asserting this, but addressing the hypothetical point)

> Have you seen journalists attacking a dictatorship while living there, and go unpunished? Have you seen the same, but on democratic countries?

After Glenn Greenwald reported on the 2013 leaks, the IC and news media started up a bunch of threats of treason and were questioning his status as a journalist (to make him more legally at fault)

This doesn't necessarily contradict your statement, given we state the obvious that the US govt (and executive agencies especially) are not democratic

The legality of this kind of tracking is one thing. What I think is most egregious about this though is that ByteDance said this before:

> TikTok has never been used to ‘target’ any members of the U.S. government, activists, public figures or journalists,

This sort of outright lying is bound to piss off DC. Will it lead to TikTok getting banned? Idk, depends on their lobbying budget

> This is happening already with PatronScan which is being pushed agressively into schools, and bars

The linked article mentions bars, where does the school bit come from?

The weirdest thing about this to me isn't that they kicked her out because of the litigation, but that they were able to see who she was based off of the facial recognition alone

Like where do they get this data from in the first place? From a data broker? Is it possible to request to have facial data removed from the data broker?

Did she consent to them using facial recognition technology on her at the venue? (If this isn't already a law, that is to say requiring consent... it should be)