emilgouliev

The product is Alexa the voice assistant, not the tiny speaker+microphone.

Amazon makes this product.

When the child spoke to the device, Alexa made a deliberate decision to look up a challenge on the internet (presumably, from a website it deems as safe). In doing so, Amazon endorses the challenge.

The product put a child’s in life in danger.

This is not very complicated.

> In the US, we lean toward less regulation than many European countries and we reap different outcomes as a result.

Yes, when laws are friendlier to wealthier people, wealthier people end up better of than poorer people, not sure why you think this is a very insightful comment.

> The US path to "Nordic levels of equality" may look much different from the Nordic one.

I am always amused to see supposedly economically literate techies making obviously false economic claims: Denmark having a smaller population would actually make it harder for them to achieve an effective welfare state, not easier, given economies of scale. This is econ 101 stuff. In the extreme end, a country with, say, 1000 people would have a much more difficult time implementing a welfare state than Denmark would. American economy is significantly more advanced than the Danish economy, so if they can pull this off, it should be much easier for the US.

Why are you okay with sectoral bargaining on the employer side but not on the employee side?

Yeah, that doesn't excuse using Vietnam as a stand-in for Vietnam war.

Also, Vietnam is a country… since when does Vietnam refer to the Vietnam War instead of Vietnam?

You might have a point if China was the only country that was able to keep their case numbers low, but dozens of countries did even better than China. Perhaps South Korea or New Zealand is to blame instead.

“When HIV/AIDS emerged in the 1980s, it was alleged, with a little Soviet help, that the virus had been developed in an American lab. Between Washington’s inaction on the epidemic and its sordid past of shady experiments, proponents said the theory couldn’t be dismissed out of hand.

After many early cases of tick-borne Lyme disease were first identified around Long Island Sound, it was deemed too much of a coincidence that the U.S. military’s Plum Island animal research lab sat on an island in the sound itself.

When SARS emerged in 2003, so did fears of the severe acute respiratory syndrome’s unnatural origin. “It’s a very unusual outbreak,” bioweapons expert Ken Alibek told the New York Times at the time. “It’s hard to say whether it’s deliberate or natural.” One Russian scientist posited that “the propagation of the atypical pneumonia may well be caused by a leak of a combat virus grown in Asian bacteriological weapons labs.”

And in recent years, efforts to eradicate Ebola have been hobbled by attacks on health care workers motivated, at least in part, by a belief that the virus is man-made.”

https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/06/15/lab-leak-theory-doesnt-...

This literally happens every goddamn time. Natural explanation is simpler.

> It’s not really about interesting for most people, it’s about is there a market for this and ultimately can I pay my mortage with this?

This is so asinine. Just because some R&D project is the most profitable thing FAANG companies can invest in doesn't mean it's actually the best allocation of resources for the people working on it.

Market fundamentalism is a brain disease.

you don't need to invoke a concept of area to justify this. you can just think of a grid of dots. since multiplication is repeated addition, each row represents one step of the repeated addition.

2x3 = 3 + 3

...

...

3x2 = 2 + 2 + 2

..

..

..

since rotation doesn't change the number of dots, we expect 2x3 and 3x2 grid of dots to contain the same number of dots, which proves that multiplication is commutative.

2 + 2 + 2 = 3 + 3 becomes much more obvious when you think of a 3x2 rectangle and rotate it by 90 degrees to a 2x3 rectangle.

They meant 3^2 = 9.