Nobody outside of the IT security bubble thinks that using AppLocker is a sensible idea.
Companies have no business telling their employees which specific programs they can and cannot run to do their jobs, that's an absurd level of micromanagement.
577 karma · joined August 30, 2021
Companies have no business telling their employees which specific programs they can and cannot run to do their jobs, that's an absurd level of micromanagement.
Amazon is obviously trying to pressure the Trump admin into easing the tariffs. Why wouldn't they? Why shouldn't they? Amazon is as much a political actor as any other company, and they have a major stakeholder when it comes to tariff policy.
Even if you personally choose not to buy overly advertised goods, the overwhelming majority of people will not make the same choice. Advertising works extremely well, and it will always work no matter what you or I do.
So we will still have the problem of excessive advertising, which negatively impacts even people who try to ignore that advertising.
Sounds extremely normal to me. I wonder what I'm missing.
For example, suppose a typical person decides to learn a new language.
At the beginning, they are very excited and enthusiastic about it. They might buy a textbook, download an app or sign up for language classes, and spend lots of time on it for a couple of days.
After a week or two, as the tediousness sets in and the goal seems farther off than they expected, they start to shift their focus to something else. After a month, there's a 50/50 chance they completely forget about language study and stop doing it. Only a very small minority will last more than a year.
That's what I'd consider normal. How is ADHD different?
Another example: meditation. A new meditation practitioner may try to focus on their breathing, but then find they usually get distracted and start thinking about something else within 10 seconds.
I have a feeling that if I were to say "I find it difficult to focus my attention on something for 10 seconds without getting distracted", many would reply "that sounds like ADHD." But this is, in fact, quite normal.
That's normal across all industries. If there are people who are actually productive for 7 hours per day, they are extreme outliers.
I used to think that I worked 8-10 hours per day. That was until I measured my actual productivity.
I worked as a translator once. When I timed myself, I found that I can translate about 2,000 words in 1 hour. But in a day, I struggle to do more than 5,000 words, no matter how hard I push myself- even though that's just 2.5 hours of work! And if I do 5,000 words every day, I burn out within a week.
The typical CEO of a F500 company makes $17.7 million compensation. That might seem like a lot, but it's only about 0.04% of the average F500 revenue, which is $42 billion.
On the other hand, the average F500 has about 65000 employees and payroll expenses can easily be upwards of $5 billion. About 300 times as much money is spent on employees than on the CEO!
Total revenue is about $320B. Thompson's compensation was $1M cash + about $10m stock (the stock part doesn't impact the company's profit margin).
In any case, executive salaries are basically a rounding error in the books.
But from a consumer's perspective, deflation is a feature. I don't want to spend my money! I want to save it, and to be rewarded for saving it, so that by consuming less I can also work less.
Why would I hand over my Bitcoin for some bread? Because I'm hungry and need to eat. Otherwise yes, I'll save my money for later, no need for needless and wasteful spending.
But let's say we do live in a world where fictional crimes often escalate to real ones. Suppose that playing DOOM increases the chance that an unstable person will buy a gun and shoot real people. Even in that universe, I would not be OK with laws that restrict me from playing DOOM, because that violates my freedom. I do not want the law to treat everyone as a potential criminal.
If we are evaluating LLM suitability for tasks typically performed by humans, we should judge them by the same standards we judge humans. That means it's OK to make mistakes sometimes.
If there are "election rules" that regulate what can be posted online, that's censorship. Even if people are inciting violence or formenting revolution, banning them is censorship.
Most governments participate in censorship, and most people are OK with some level of censorship. But Brazil's constitution guarantees freedom of speech without censorship, so their courts have no business issuing orders to censor social media.
We should focus on making birth control more accessible, instead of trying to make people take responsibility for raising children they obviously don't want.
That guy who spends all his money on weed and booze while his kids go hungry? He should have gotten a vasectomy. We need to be asking why he didn't- was it a lack of education, or was the procedure too expensive?
Before RealPage, most large landlords would aim for 97-98% occupancy and set their rents accordingly.
RealPage would encourage landlords to instead aim for 90-95% occupancy by setting higher rents. Most of the time, this turned out to be a more profitable strategy, even though it makes property managers nervous because they feel like empty apartments = lost money.
But that's OK. A teacher's knowledge doesn't need to be perfect, it just needs to be better than the student's.
If ChatGPT explains Chinese history in a way that is 80% accurate, to a student whose understanding of Chinese history is 10% accurate, the student will walk away with a better understanding of Chinese history.
Rejecting a cell microbiology paper from a computer science journal is not an attempt to suppress the paper. If anything, it is of benefit to the paper, since publishing it in the correct journal will increase it's visibility to the relevant audiences.
In contrast, content moderation, particularly in political subreddits is often motivated by tribalism and a desire to suppress particular viewpoints. It's true that these people could just go to another subreddit, but by the same logic reporters in Russia could just go to another country.
The effect of this type of moderation is that it creates tribes or "communities" of people who have similar opinions and never encounter opposing viewpoints.
Moderating based on topic is different than censorship based on viewpoint. If an argument is allowed but it's counterargument is not, that's censorship, not moderation.
There is a middle ground between people making $20 an hour and business tycoons. Policies that help big business might not trickle down to people stocking shelves, but they often advantage middle class people.
For example, the US is an excellent place for software engineers. There are far more of them and they make far higher salaries than their European counterparts. Is it unreasonable to believe that American policies that empower big tech companies also benefit a developer making $250k at Google, even though he does not own the company?
What if policies that benefit the top 1% did, in fact, trickle down to the top 30% of Americans, at the expense of the bottom 70%? What if this bloc of people was organized enough to win elections and control politics without relying on people delusionally voting against their own interests?
The overwhelming majority of people, if they were given $245,573 in 1993, would not go on to build a trillion-dollar company. What Bezos accomplished was extraordinary, whatever way you look at it.
I would contend that a 5-year-old has general intelligence, and therefore an AI system with the language and reasoning abilities of a 5-year-old has artificial general intelligence.
But the discriminator of having to "pay an intelligent professional otherwise" sets the bar very high. That implies AGI must be an expert in every subject, surpassing the average human. I'd prefer we use a different term for that, like "artificial superintelligence."
I hope that by "trickle down to the workers" you aren't talking about technically illiterate workers who are not actively contributing to the automation effort. Unfortunately, they will receive some benefits as well, which is completely undeserved.
Anyway, it seems to me that you are holding AI to a higher standard than humans.
Abstract reasoning abilities do not imply the ability to solve every abstract reasoning problem. Even humans cannot do that. If there is even a single abstract reasoning problem ChatGPT can solve, that means it has abstract reasoning abilities.
Similarly, general intelligence does not imply the ability to solve any problem. It means problem-solving abilities that are not restricted to a specific task or domain. ChatGPT has general intelligence because it can handle situations that it was not explicitly programmed to handle in a wide variety of contexts.
Someone who is at work for 40 hours is not necessarily "working more" than someone who is at work for 30 hours, it just means they are less efficient. If both workers produce the same output, they should be paid the same.
In many cases, it's easy to make a 40 hour job into a 5 hour job with proper planning and automation. But since workers are required to be at the office for 40 hours a week anyway, the work "expands" to fill the time with useless meetings and time-consuming manual processes.
A lot of these people have ambitions that require a lot more money than that. Maybe they want to cure aging or explore space or something.
Another way of looking at it: if someone makes 100m a year and they are thinking about retiring, how much would you need to offer for them to choose to work another year instead? That's how much you need to pay them next year.
Companies with RTO policies still usually give the option to work from home a couple days a week, right? Just not every day. You still need to live within commuting distance of an office, which is a pretty big restriction.