ellen364
In surveillance pricing, I wouldn't get that choice, I'd just get a custom-to-me price. I'd have no idea how the company decided to charge me more or less than they charged my friend. And no idea how to change the price I'm offered, so it would be terrible if the algorithm decided to charge me +15% for everything.
The wrinkle is that it doesn't seem to be tied well to identity. Someone working illegally can provide an NI number that's legit but not theirs. Their work accrues to someone else's NI record, but the person getting the extra years probably never notices and the person working under their NI number doesn't care because they aren't entitled to a state pension anyway, they just want to work now.
The reason might seem odd. But it ocurred to me that if you want to use immigration to reduce crime, including rape, the obvious solution is to ban all male immigration.
That shocked me because it seems so wildly discriminatory. Yes, most violent crimes are committed by men. But very few men commit violent crimes. Banning male immigration would punish a large group for the appalling actions of a few. Making it about "$some_country's men" doesn't seem a whole lot better. It's still unjust to punish someone for someone else's crime.
If anyone is curious about the exercise, I recommend trying it. It was disconcerting to sit with the idea of banning male immigration, really seriously consider it and realise how viscerally shocked I was by the idea.
Edit: for context, in the UK right now, phrases like "rape gangs" are part of the debate/argument about immigration.
The Migration Observatory at Oxford publishes excellent summaries about migration trends, e.g. https://migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/resources/briefings/lo...
In 2023 their interest payments were 28% of revenue. They also made the news for dumping particularly large volumes of sewage into rivers.
https://www.theguardian.com/money/2023/dec/18/water-firms-us...
I'd widen the frame a bit. People scared of losing their jobs might underestimate the usefulness of AI. Makes sense to me, it's the comforting belief. Worth keeping in mind while reading articles sceptical of AI.
But there's another side to this conversation: the people whose writing is pro AI. What's motivating them? What's worth keeping in mind while reading that writing?
Yes. I'm not the original commenter, but this is what I expect.
From my POV, the OS exists to virtualise the hardware it runs on. I don't want the OS manufacturer to decide if I'm allowed to have a web browser or play games.
Naive in hindsight, but until game consoles and smartphones came along, it didn't occur to me that an OS would forbid me from installing something.
"Uh, what?? Air isn't an MLM, it's just the thing we breath. We all need it to live."
"Huh, I guess air is an MLM after all. Wild."
I say "mostly" happy because I almost returned it. The USB connection between mini PC and Terramaster would be fine for a few days and then during intense operations like parity checks would disconnect and look like parity error/disk failure, except the disks were fine. Eventually realised the DAS uses power from the USB port as well as the adapter plug and the mini PC wasn't supplying enough power. Since attaching a powered USB hub it's been perfect.
Explanation of symptoms and solution, in case anyone is considering one or has the same problem: https://forum.terra-master.com/en/viewtopic.php?t=5830
[0] https://www.journalofinfection.com/article/S0163-4453(16)301...
If it's September and your budget expires in April (new tax year here in UK), hire a few contractors to make sure you spend all that money. After all, you don't know what next year's budget will look like. And not using your budget might be taken as proof you don't need as much money next year. So hire contractors and do that project now, rather than waiting and taking the risk you can't do it all.
For even more budget shenanigans and org politics, imagine you're a product/project/whatever manager in charge of an exciting new project with a big budget. You do not control any of the dev teams. For some reason the dev leads are not excited by your new project and are reluctant to assign people to the project. They tell you it will be next year and you wonder if they mean never. Luckily, you have a big budget for the project! So you hire contractors and now your project has a dev team. The company doesn't have to keep on the temporary team and the project is delivered. Success!
This scenario kicks several massive cans of worms down the road. But for a while everyone's happy while progress is made on the project. Later the dev teams will be annoyed when they have to maintain code they didn't want in the first place. And whatever organisational problem meant the dev teams didn't want to get involved will still exist. But, by hiring contractors, everyone gets to ignore those problems for a while longer.
(Clearly in the real world the American authorities have decided it's a criminal matter. I just find it odd that a "smart contract" dispute falls under criminal rather than commercial law.)
It reminds me of an article that claimed Britain has become a more civil and less honest place in the last few decades. (The Economist, maybe?) Perhaps some workplaces are like that too. Whether it's a good thing or not, who knows. People clearly have their preference one way or the other.
This specific case is tied to complicated American politics, but I guess small versions of the same debate are happening in workplaces all over the world. Though maybe, ironically, not in the most intensely policed workplaces.
People sometimes think that's a silly thing to ponder: it's obviously obvious! But at most places I've worked, we spend lots of time defining the technical skills required for a job and handwave the rest.
I guess people assume "they'll know it when they see it". But there's a lot of ambiguity. Parent comment suggests that being comfortable sitting in a conference room for an hour is an important part of their job. In some workplaces that would be an odd requirement. I've worked at places where the important thing was being able to go away and make progress on something for a few weeks.
I suspect there are people with autism reading these threads and feeling disheartened. It would be easy to leave with the impression that neurotypical people expect you to make all the effort and they won't try to meet you half way. Some workplaces are like that. But in all the talk about neurotypical vs neurodivergent, it's easy to forget that neurotypical people are a varied lot, just like neurodivergent people. Workplaces are a varied lot too.
I prefer the results of large studies. I think modern methods are better than methods from the Scientific Revolution. But people can't always afford to wait a decade or two for solidly replicated results.
If that's true, I'd say they're very fortunate that the Digital Library Initiative existed and that they could put their research into the public domain to reuse it for free at Google. In another context, I'd call the DLI an angel investor and they'd have wanted a slice of that Google pie.
I happen to agree that La Liga wildly overreaching is on brand. But I think this is partly about Cloudflare.
What's happening is a reminder of how centralised the internet is becoming. If blocking Cloudflare IPs brings down big chunks of the internet for Spain, that's a problem. Cloudflare could go down for a while, or collapse permanently, or get compromised.
Putting aside my opinions on La Liga overreach, it will also be a problem if companies get to say to courts "Oh, well, if you block those IPs the internet goes down for your country, so let us know what you want to block and maybe we'll get around to it."
Cloudflare might get a resolution from the court that suits them in the short-term. But drawing this to government attention might not suit them in the long run.
As a Brit, I've been surprised by how much my view has shifted in the last few weeks. I used to assume we'd be allies with the US and have a probably competitive and maybe adversarial relationship with China. Now I see the US administration basically saying "we're going to make you pay through the nose for everything" (e.g. taking Ukrainian minerals). So I've started thinking "Well, if the US and China will both behave like that, surely we're best off playing them against each other and seeing who'll offer us more?"
That seems like a very bad deal for the US. So I figure that (a) the administration isn't serious about taking on China, or (b) assumes European and North American countries will roll over, or (c) they think they can go it alone.
The main thing I take away from the paper is that (in computer simulations) bigger winner effects and bigger loser effects lead to strongly defined hierarchies. Fewer subjects have ambiguous positions.
I'm not sure the paper speaks much to which strategies (e.g. violence vs cooperation) are more common or effective.
In the last few decades there have been 1-2 confirmed lab leaks per year. And they're often thing like "we found a vial of smallpox we didn't know we had" not new diseases.
Nature very capably produced colds, flus, a bunch of nasty diarrhoeal diseases, the many and varied sexually transmitted diseases, the hemorrhagic fevers, and so on. For "some new disease variant that I don't know anything about", my prior would be more like 1/99 lab leak to natural origin.
Possibly for the reason that came up in your other post: you mentioned that you spot checked the result.
Back when I was in historical research, and occasionally involved in transcription projects, the standard was 2-3 independent transcriptions per document.
Maybe the National Archive will pass documents to an LLM and use the output as 1 of their 2-3 transcriptions. It could reduce how many duplicate transcriptions are done by humans. But I'll be surprised if they jump to accepting spot checked LLM output anytime soon.
The short version is when people can ease sideways to a completely new role at their current employer. The longer version involves getting a new job doing the same thing, but at a company that does a lot more of the thing you want to do. Initially you do the thing you were doing before, but there's more opportunity to shift sideways when you get a good rep.
There's a company called Carfax that I'd never heard of. Their EU site seems to provide basic reports about the VIN, whether the car has been written off, etc. Those basic "Is this car sale a scam?" checks are common in the UK.
But the site also makes a big deal about "Get the American report!" So I googled "Carfax oil change" and found people talking about the oil change history in the reports [0]
In the UK it was traditionally common to keep a car log book where you recorded all maintenance and might get the garage to put their stamp on it, to prove to a future buyer that you'd looked after the car. But having a garage enter that info into some random company's database, and maybe not telling me, would be disappointing.
[0] https://www.toyotanation.com/threads/oil-change-history-when...