derbOac

Clearly a company denying that the public comprises real people with real autonomy should be entrusted with privacy issues.

Worth noting that there have been national declines in math for older children during the pandemic that haven't really reversed. It has for younger kids though:

https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/ltt/2025/

I'm aware of the provision in the bill. The argument that there was a trapdoor implies that the intent of the bill — to sanction Russia — might have been subverted. You can argue that Trump's behavior is consistent with the intent of Congress, but I think it's a stretch from a trapdoor provision in a bill that literally sanctions Russia to saying that "America is an ally of Russia".

I think the title of the article is clickbait and even if you take it seriously, frames the situation in a way that I think shifts attention from the real problems.

I agree there's a systemic failure, but think the article mischaracterizes the situation. Congress didn't pass the "aid to Russia" bill, for example. The article distracts from the real problems, at least in my opinion, for the sake of attention.

I think it's more accurate to say the US has a rogue but unchecked criminal president. Even the article starts with the bill sanctioning Russia passed by Congress, which was subverted by the president. So why is America equated with Trump and not Congress?

A more useful article would have discussed the gap between the two branches and why there are no consequences for the president.

The US Constitution is actually pretty nice if it were enforced by Congress and the courts.

https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/amendment-4/

"Fourth Amendment

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."

Very nice. A selfish suggestion is to add ukulele.

It's an issue. Reading through it though, physical functioning was actually a bit higher in the control group at baseline, and there wasn't much difference in completion of the assigned protocols.

They did note that the treatment-exercise group seemed to be healthier than expected in the sense that their survival was relatively high compared to typical nonstudy rates.

There's still time, and they know it.

So much about the Trump administration is best understood, for everyone looking at it inside and outside the country, as criminals taking over the justice system.

What's probably as criminal, are the other two branches not stamping this out. Most of what everyone is despairing or angry about the administration is forbidden by the US constitution. The problem is that the people most able to uphold the constitution, by expunging the criminals in the executive branch (or preventing them from being there in the first place), are not enforcing it.

The movement coordination phenomenon has been replicated in a general sense. I think I was reading some articles a few weeks ago about general movement coordination (body, face, head) being predictive of increased attraction.

There's also stuff like this:

https://phys.org/news/2024-05-movement-strong-togetherness.h...

I'm less sure about the music part. My guess is it's not about groove in particular but something else about music preferences or something, but who knows.

If Flock wants to be used by public services, it should be subject to maximum transparency. If you don't want your camera locations public, don't offer them to the public for their use.

> Online, the models of the world that travel the furthest are not the most accurate but even the most attention-grabbing. They are the models that appeal most strongly to our base instincts, prejudices and emotional needs.

Ironic to be asserting.

They are everywhere in the areas around me now. I had a similar sentiment at one time and now they seem pretty common.

I think roundabouts work fantastically well in some places but in others they are unnecessary and in others don't work as well as alternatives. Maybe that's obvious but every so often I feel like they are overapplied — probably because of what you're mentioning, along with the fact they were underapplied in other areas in the past. I've come to like them usually but sometimes it feels like the civil engineers were having too much fun at the cost of practicality.

I've noticed my bank — a large well-known bank — has been closing a large number of physical locations and encouraging people to bank with their app. The app is convenient but this post points out the downside, that your money flow is now controlled by the app and the phone it is on. The bank in turn makes your access to your money contingent on you using a phone it requires.

Sure you can still go into a physical location but now instead of having two nearby locations I have to travel 1.5 times as far to the one location left near me.

A pattern I've noticed is that the physical world had the benefit of necessitating competition and distributed offerings by virtue of space and geography itself. The internet allows people to sidestep space, centralizing everything in that "internet space" and controlling access to the space. It shrinks the space in a lot of ways ironically, rather than expanding it.

Things could be different — for example, the hospitals could be saving your data on open records systems that they locally control using a standard protocol, akin to yesteryear. But they don't. They've closed their local records system and now hand it over to a private centralized EHR somewhere else that everyone uses.

Sure, a lot of things are better. But some things are worse, and worse in a way that surrounds certain fundamentals of functioning.

The articles I've read on this have said it's murky because of obfuscation of reported data by self-driving companies.

The target article even notes that "while Waymo leads the industry in transparency, and robotaxi operators are required to report even the tiniest scrape to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), not every company voluntarily reports their total miles driven."

My sense is that there's a lot of massaging the data by autonomous car companies to make their data look good. The article and a linked article describes the comparisons as "human drivers in the same driving conditions" which is kind of vague to me and isn't the same as, say, taxi drivers to robotaxis. It's also robotaxis and not general driving conditions etc.

I always feel like these comparisons become murky in other ways. For example, if autonomous vehicles have lower accident rates in general, but fail in catastrophically bad ways when they do fail — ways that would never happen with a human driver (for example, by inexplicably driving into an avoidable semi trailer for no reason, killing the occupants) — is that better? What if you eliminate cases where the driver is intoxicated? Aren't those cases cases of malfeasance at some level, that could apply to autonomous vehicle use? Do you hold autonomous vehicle companies accountable for deaths, charging executives with manslaughter? How should we think about accountability versus safety?

I'm not trying to argue against autonomous vehicles. I just feel like these types of published discussions get oversimplified often in a way that seems to parallel similar discussions of AI in general, and seems sympathetic to their adoption rather than a rigorously skeptical appraisal.

More context and different site: https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2026/09/03/new-rsa-number-fac...

That's sort of what bothered me the most at the time. It seemed like the argument was that it was "emotional" or something to keep Pluto a planet when there might be so many of them. But I never understood why it was less "emotional" to insist that a planet be a certain size or that there should be a certain number of planets.

What's being referenced here is maybe the tip of the iceberg in terms of inadequacies of current recommendation systems.

I suspect there's a range of indices related to content interaction that companies use poorly or even maybe nefariously — for example, are they motivated to present what you want, or what will keep you engaged with the site? Are their assumptions about why, say, you're spending a lot of time on a video correct? This post is focused sort of on options to communicate with the recommendation system, but there's a lot that could be said in terms of mismatched system-user goals in the system, and poor assumptions being made by the system in general.

I wondered too as I was reading it whether it's worth making the distinction between "different features of user experience with the content" and "metaresponse". That is, I can feel positively and negatively about the same video, or like it for one reason but not another; at the same time I can want to provide a response explaining a response. There's a difference between providing information about how I feel about some content, and information about how I want that information to be used.

I think that's part of what is frustrating to so many people? Google isn't a small business, and has the legal resources to at least fight back if they were challenged by the administration. Any such challenge would likely fall apart in trial, but even if it didn't Google would have at least challenged the absurdity of it.

It should be that way.

My tolerance for people posting to X without also posting to an open platform is over.

Public institutions especially.

There's zero excuse, none.

They post it other places also in my experience. Twitter doesn't have the monopoly on that it used to.

Then you have people dying because of problems following GPS:

https://apnews.com/article/google-maps-lawsuit-north-carolin...

https://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation-world/national/artic...

I'm honestly not sure if those types of events (and their less consequential but more common variants) support the claims of the article or refute them.

I feel like the article correctly identifies the problems with offloading cognition onto technology, but maybe mischaracterizes the scope of the risks, as well as how much this happens with or without modern technology.

Yes, the posted story has so many layers of wrongness in it — it's hard to pick just one.

None of it would be a problem without the App store in its current form though.

It means funneling public funds to AI and AI-adjacent companies that grease the wheels enough with the administration. It's like everything else: the administration decides it can control funds however it wants, regardless of what was legislated, and leverages those funds for quid pro quo transactions.

Say what you will about how to improve academics and scientific research, but the current administration's modus operandi is not the way.

Is Mojo being a superset of Python still part of its projected feature set?

I tried Mojo a bit early on and decided to come back to it when it was more complete, and in the interim I read some comments somewhere that the superset-of-Python part was being walked back from.

On https://mojolang.org/docs/roadmap/ it's stated (Phase 3) that "Mojo may or may not evolve into a full superset of Python, and it's okay if it doesn't."

I feel like that "full superset of Python" part was part of the appeal of Mojo.

Personally I'm kind of tired of 97% python-compatible this-and-that. Python itself has enough of a history of incompatibility and the cognitive overhead in switching might be easier with just moving to a totally different language. But maybe not — it depends on the details I guess.

Honestly reading through the documentation more and more I'm more and more confused about what the 1.0 release actually means.

"This has surprised scientists, and it remains an open research question to fully understand how our models produce such accurate predictions at this resolution."

Also crazy.

Seems important to understand why something does what it does, in the very least to know when it might not?