t_luke

Literally all normal people on the tube already pay with bank card or Apple Pay and are thus trackable anyway. This just levels the playing field for the barrier pushers.

All the UK university ranking systems use basically the same data — the National Student Survey (NSS) which measures students' impression of teaching quality, the Graduate Outcomes Survey (GOS) which measures employment 15 months after graduation, and a bunch of standard data collected by HESA — entry standards, whether students complete their degrees, average degree classifications, etc.

Much of this data is extremely 'gameable', and a lot of the 'alpha' between successful and less successful institutions is being 'good at surveys.' e.g. for NSS, between comparable institutions it's really a question of how good they are at getting students to complete the survey (students mostly ignore it, and you lose marks for poor completion rates).

Of course — it should also go without saying that there is no 'correct' weighting for any of this data, and depending on how you weight the different indicators, the rankings change.

Does anyone else find Signal quite hard to use? The syncing between devices stops working a lot of the time, and needing to sign in again fairly regularly. I’ve tried switching but it doesn’t stick because of the annoyance factor.

London’s DLR is a gadgetbahn. For all its obvious limitations it’s been quite successful. Lots of new stations, lots of expansions, decent integration with traditional rail. VLR would work similarly.

It’s fairly obviously designed to avoid the issues which almost caused the cancellation of the new Edinburgh tram — spiralling costs caused by the need to move existing utilities under the deep track base. That crisis was probably as much to do with a badly formed set of contracts as with the technical issues themselves, but it’s still worth designing out.

I’ve had the same experience on a flight. They said the plane was overweight and we couldnt travel. The person I was travelling with became extremely difficult. Then magically, it wasn’t overweight any more.

The conclusion of Davies' second extract — about e.g. being bumped off a flight — is recognisable but the conclusions are actually wrong. The situation in these cases is actually more subtle. The person you're speaking to does normally have some capacity to escalate in exceptional cases. But they can't do it as a matter of course, and have to maintain publicly that it's actually impossible.

The people who get what they want in these situations are the ones who are prepared to behave sufficiently unreasonably. This is a second order consequence of 'unaccountability' that Davies misses. For the customer, or object of the system, it incentivises people to behave *as unpleasantly as possible* — because it's often the only way to trigger the exception / escalation / special case, and get what you want.

The conclusion of Davies' second extract — about e.g. being bumped off a flight — is recognisable but the conclusions are actually wrong. The situation in these cases is actually more subtle. The person you're speaking to does normally have some capacity to escalate in exceptional cases. But they can't do it as a matter of course, and have to maintain publicly that it's actually impossible.

The people who get what they want in these situations are the ones who are prepared to behave sufficiently unreasonably. This is a second order consequence of 'unaccountability' that Davies misses. For the customer, or object of the system, it incentivises people to behave as unpleasantly as possible — because it's often the only way to trigger the exception / escalation / special case, and get what you want.

It’s not that complicated. Business rates (commercial property tax) are very high for shops in the UK, and Charity shops are exempt. The rates really are high — about 50% on top of the rent. Plus a lot of the staff work for free. Their cost base is just vastly lower.

The first paragraph misstates the nature of the Wirecard fraud. The money wasn’t ’siphoned off’, it never existed in the first place.

The British art journal has run a long campaign to establish that (a) museum photographs of out of copyright works cannot be copyrighted and (b) the schemes to sell such reproductions don’t even break even financially

If Programmers Had to Work Like Architects

- you aren't allowed to do any programming yourself, you just write a specification

- the majority of the people doing the programming are incapable of reading the specification

- many of those who can will deliberately ignore it to save money

- nevertheless, it's your fault if it's realised incorrectly

The precedent people should be paying much more attention to is sampling in music. When it first arose, it really wasn’t clear what status it had. There was at least a decade when people basically thought it was legal to use small samples of other recordings because they were small and the new use turned them into something unrecognisably different. Which was kind of logical, actually, but turned out not to be true!

The current legal requirement to get clearance for all samples only arose after a bunch of court cases in the late 80s/ early 90s, mostly involving quite obscure musicians.

There are a lot of people on here who assume that ‘logic will prevail’ in the courts on questions like use of copyrighted data in training data. History shows that this really isn’t a safe assumption. The courts have historically been extremely favorable to copyright holders. It would be foolish to underestimate the legal risk to openai et al here

It’s actually ‘anthropogenic’ (as in caused ‘generated’ by humans) if we’re going to be pedantic

Their auditors reported that they couldn’t be sure the (reported) 500 million in subscription revenue actually existed because the financial controls were so underdeveloped. I can see why the regulators dont want to give them a banking license. What are the odds of them going the way of Wirecard?