mrwh

Cure cancer? The best we can do is promise that cancer will be cured at some undetermined date in the future if you pay trillions first. Have some deepfakes in the meantime.

Is it true in practice? No absolutely not of course not ridiculous that's not how power works. Should it be true? Yes, it should.

I still find it wild that Instagram does not share ad revenue with creators. Post something there that goes viral? You'll get nothing by default. (Of course, you could set up ad deals etc etc etc, if canny could could make money from it ultimately, but from all that traffic and all those ad dollars Instagram gets from it, you'll not get a cent.)

Going to go out on a limb here, but isn't one of the generally understood justifications for exec pay being so high is that the buck stops with them?

This exists because there is a thing to copy, and that's all I've seen so far: copy this, copy that, but now it's in rust as if that could possibly matter.

Yes and no. Why is the prevailing wage what it is, and how does bringing more supply in affect the prevailing wage? There are secondary effects.

Even a stopped clock!

It's very UK to give depth in metric and area in imperial

Indeed! Basically all of human civilization up until this point

I mean, 95% of the work if you don't factor the work to create the training data in the first place...

This is my experience too, and I'm more of an introvert who finds throwing a party both gratifying and exhausting. There are friends who reciprocate and friends who don't, and I don't judge.

And then Elizabeth had the example of Bloody Mary to avoid (not least of which: to not marry is better than to marry badly). "I have no desire to make windows into men's souls" is one of the wiser things any English monarch has ever said.

Because the executive class _is_ a class, with class solidarity. Even failure comes with a golden parachute.

Are we at the stage yet where a super-strong model that needs oodles of safety protections to stop it outright hacking you is strictly worse for day-to-day tasks than a much cheaper model that's simply not competent enough to be dangerous?

Meta is relentlessly obsessed with metrics. Want to launch something? Show the metrics. What to show impact and value? If there's not a metric for it, it doesn't exist. It's a way to say you are being as objective as possible while also being able to avoid the utterly obvious when it suits you, which is frequently.

Curious that technology will send us back to the world of Michelangelo and the Medici and so on. No more professional artists funded broadly, just pets of the rich.

In my corner of the Faang world it's been 20 years since that sort of brain teaser was asked. We switched to coding problems that require dynamic programming!

And a husband who works and his wife who doesn't, should she get a vote? The commentators here are responding exactly to the spirit of what was said, there's no confusion on what's really being implied here. Namely, the destruction of the entire basis of democracy, which is one person one vote.

Another way to express the general disgust: that proposal is saying, "we're going to take away your power, but we'll still look after you, pinky promise!"

I don't know why you're being downvoted, gross is exactly the word for it.

I tend to think the risk is the point. It's an in-group marker, getting very sick every so often for no good reason shows commitment. Which of course makes it doubly pointless as a suggestion to the general public, but the fact that it's a bad idea doesn't mean that for the in-group it's a bad idea. (I mean, it _is_ a bad idea, you understand though.)

Kinda want to push back on that. It's not like engineers are separate from operations, not really. A lot of operations is just what engineers have been socialised to do.

I used to read the New York Times on my kindle. It was great: delivered each morning, no waste paper by the afternoon, a simple subscription, etc. I was on my 4th kindle at least, which says more about the use I got out of them than their endurance. And then the service disappeared for reasons I never really understood.

It's £64K, not $64K (which is indeed about the median in the US). So, not bad.

Indeed! China is leaning heavily into AI as state policy, as the solution to its looming demographic crisis. Any advantage the US has is going to be brief. It'll be like comparing the high speed trains in China with the high speed trains in California...

Worth reading, well written.

We just finished watching a 90s Dennis Potter TV series, Lipstick on your Collar. Strange and mannered, and about in part the preparation for Suez at the end of empire, by an elderly leadership that hadn't realised that the British empire was already done (and at a time when the young were only interested in America, the new power). More stupidity than malice there. What we're getting today looks like both.

What happens when unemployment hits 25%, and youth unemployment hits 50%, in a democracy? That's the real terror here, not hacking.

Speaking for myself, an awful lot of what makes me happy are things I am forced into doing. Work makes me happy, but if I didn't have to work I'm sure I wouldn't. If I had complete freedom my life might become quite lonely and sad.

That's right. In today's carriage to San Francisco my very unscientific observation it's: three reading books, thirty on their phones, ten resting with their thoughts.

I've found some wonderful books at estate sales. A poet's annotated books of poetry, for example.

Tangential, and very anecdotal, but I've been seeing more books on the BART. While almost everyone is hunched over their phones of course, it feels like there's a growing number reading a paperback. (Oddly? it's been a while since I saw a kindle.)