Hmm, is this a new take on the "Stop Doing Math" meme?

Singular "they" is older than singular "you." And note, of course, that the pronoun "you" is conjugated as a plural, and we deal with it just fine.

I remember reading an article or blog post years ago that persuasively argued that the danger of AI is not going to be that it ends up doing things better than humans, but that it causes a lot of harm when entrusted with tasks it actually isn't good at. I think that thesis seems much more plausible now, watching people respond to clearly flawed AI systems.

The article alludes to this problem, but Amazon has basically forfeited the consumer goodwill they used to have. It used to be that their reviews were trustworthy (and relatively hard to game), and ordering products "sold by Amazon" was a guarantee that there wouldn't be counterfeits intermingled in. Plus they had a great return policy, even without physical presence in most places.

Now they don't police fake reviews, and do a bad job of the "SEO" of which reviews are actually the most helpful, they're susceptible to commingling of counterfeit goods (especially electronics and storage media), and their return policy has gotten worse.

It basically makes it so that they're no longer a good retailer for electronics, and it's worth going into a physical store to avoid doing business with them.

The Twitter deal got canceled, so the interview was posted to YouTube instead. Which, honestly, is the better service for long form video.

In my opinion, it's quite similar to Brexit: maybe you can get a majority coalition to disapprove of the status quo, but good luck getting them to actually propose a more popular alternative. Much less proposing an actual procedure for getting that alternative onto ballots.

Structurally and functionally, our political systems are not set up to run anyone other than the person who won the primary. Changing a presumptive nominee this late in the cycle is fraught with potential complications, but can be done if there's sufficient support for a specific alternative candidate. Realistically, it's Biden or it's Harris. There's no feasible way to get someone else at the top of the ticket.

It's kinda liberating to peek under the hood and confirm that society, like the internet, is mostly held together with figurative duct tape, that someone put there as a temporary fix that became semi-permanent. The concept of technical debt for software and technology projects exists everywhere, including in the backlogs of what our government agencies, court systems, and corporate organizations are doing (and what they simply haven't done yet).

But the whole thing is still pretty resilient. The individuals who make the decisions that feed into the unimaginably complex web of interdependent relationships and rules might not actually understand every detail, and mostly aren't even benevolent actors who want the best for everyone, but the system as a whole still trudges along, mostly making life better than if the system didn't exist at all. And once you learn how at least some parts of it work, you can make some changes here and there for the better, either for yourself or for the people/issues you care about or for the entirety of the system.

Sounds like most people commenting in this thread are going through some challenges right now. I'm hoping things turn around for everyone soon.

I've been having a great week.

• I got myself a working install of Linux on my laptop. I still have things I need to fix, but I've made it further than I actually expected in just 2 evenings after work.
• My kid is making great progress with learning how to swim.
• My job remains stressful but I had a few little victories that will make my September much easier than expected (or at least clear the plate a bit so that even if some things happen, they won't pile onto an existing shit sandwich).
• I just bought some really awesome tomatoes at the farmer's market, and can't wait to incorporate into sandwiches starting tomorrow (tonight I gotta go buy some fresh sourdough to really complete the entire effect of a delicious sandwich). I love tomato season!
• I made it back to the gym for the first time in a month. Lots of travel in July (mostly work, but also a family vacation in the middle) put me in hotels without room in my schedule to do any real workouts, although I guess I walked way more than I normally do while traveling (one day I hit 15,000 steps almost entirely in airports). I feel better when I'm working out regularly, so being home is helpful for resetting that part of my routine.

I'm feeling pretty great! Sending good vibes to everyone else in this thread, whether they're having good weeks or bad weeks.

Like many others, I jumped on the sourdough bandwagon in 2020, but fell off sometime during the year after that.

But a friend of mine stuck with it, and expanded into sourdough pizza doughs for NY style or Neapolitan style pizzas in his backyard pizza oven. He had a bunch of us over today, and I don't think I understood everything he was saying (he was doing 60% hydration for 00 flour, but stuff I didn't quite catch about when to knead/rest), but I can say that the pizzas he was making were delicious, and he made it seem so effortless to stretch the dough out to around 14 inch (35cm) diameter. And it was kinda infectious to see his enthusiasm for something he'd been churning away at for the last few years, explaining a bunch of things to a bunch of friends gathered around, and just having a great time on a Sunday afternoon.

So a bunch of us are probably gonna try our hands at the same thing, and form a bit of an amateur pizza group, texting our successes and failures to each other.

I don't think that's right.

The way we operated the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had much, much more consideration to the humanitarian toll on civilians, compared to how Israel is currently running their military operation. Even before either invasion, too, the US military knew there was going to be complex and difficult "nation building" afterward.

Take, for example, the way the US and UK troops cleared out Fallujah: leafleting and warning of the assault and specifically letting the civilian population leave before aggressive bombardment. There was controversy about whether military aged males were improperly identified as combatants, but women and children made it out.

The controversy about a cease fire in Gaza is exactly that: letting civilians avoid the places where fighting is happening. The US devoted resources to making that possible, but Israel isn't protecting those goals to the same degree or manner.

The SAG-AFTRA strike doesn't cover on-camera work for variety shows, game shows, or talk shows, which are governed by SAG-AFTRA's Network Television Code, a separate contract that remains in effect between SAG-AFTRA and the studios/networks.

Most of these shows pay residuals to actors, writers, directors, and production companies based on formulas of how many subscribers the service has. Notably, none of the services are willing to publish detailed viewership statistics, even privately to creators, so the shows have to pay the same amount regardless of whether 1 person is watching or 1 million people are watching every day.

Rather than throw good money after bad, the services would rather take the show off entirely and not have to pay any residuals going forward. Then, with the show/movie making no money going forward, they get to write down the fair value of that intellectual property, which also saves the parent company on taxes.

Exactly. There are legitimate concerns about whether law enforcement should be able to subpoena "third party" records (including video recordings) with a process less than a full blown warrant supported by probable cause, as determined by a neutral judge, or whether government should be able to compel the retention of records for a later after-the-fact search. That's a discussion worth having.

But voluntarily recording and retaining video means that the person who controls those records can choose to do what they want with it. Imagine if some homeowner had these cameras, and had their own home burglarized, and tried to turn over the video evidence of the crime, but the courts were like "whoa wait did you get a warrant for that?" It doesn't really change anything to have it be cloud hosted, or easily shared with a button, because that "share" functionality works for non-police recipients, too. Doorbell camera footage gets shared all the time on social media, sometimes because it's funny or interesting or otherwise worth viewing.

As long as no one is getting hurt I don’t really see the problem.

It'd be hard to actually meet that premise, though. People are getting hurt.

Child abuse imagery is used as both a currency within those circles to incentivize additional distribution, which means there is a demand for ongoing and new actual abuse of victims. Extending that financial/economic analogy, seeding that economy with liquidity, in a financial sense, might or might not incentivize the creation of new authentic child abuse imagery (that requires a child victim to create). That's not as clear, but what is clear is that it would reduce the transaction costs of distributing existing child abuse imagery, which is a form of re-victimizing those who have already been abused.

Child abuse imagery is also used as a grooming technique. Normalization of child sexual activity is how a lot of abusers persuade children to engage in sexual acts. Providing victimless "seed" material might still result in actual abuse happening down the line.

If the creation of AI-generated child abuse imagery begins to give actual abusers and users of real child abuse imagery cover, to where it becomes more difficult to investigate the crime or secure convictions against child rapists, then the proliferation of this technology would make it easier to victimize additional children without consequences.

I'm not sure what the latest research is on the extent to which viewing and consuming child porn would lead to harmful behavior down the line (on the one hand, maybe it's a less harmless outlet for unhealthy urges, but on the other hand, it may feed an addictive cycle that results in net additional harm to society).

I'm sure there are a lot of other considerations and social forces at play, too.

Going back to cable isn’t the answer. It’s a failed model and needs to die.

Defined narrowly enough, yes, that old model is dead.

But more broadly, as an economic matter there will always be a business model for having a basket of content, with some portion of historical content (classic movies and tv shows from decades past) on demand, some ongoing/current on-demand content (last week's episode of some scripted show), and live broadcast (sporting events happening right now). Build up enough of a catalog, charge a single price to subscribers for access to that content, and people will pay for the entire bundle. And because each subscriber is interested in a different portion of that bundle, the mass of subscribers essentially cross-subsidizes the fat tail of niche content: I don't mind paying for your niche if it means my niche gets to survive.

The technological and cultural changes have deemphasized the importance of cable's live delivery mechanism of 100+ "channels" each with programming on a specific schedule, but the core business model still will be there: subscribe to content and you can get some combination of live channels and a catalog of on-demand content.

The content owners, through either carriage fees with the cable/IPTV providers, or through the streaming services, or everything in between, are trying to jack up the price to see what the market will bear for those bundles. They might miscalculate to the point where the subscriber count drops so much that their overall revenue decreases even with a higher revenue per subscriber (and I actually think this is about to happen). And then instead of a market equilibrium where almost everyone pays a little bit to where there's a huge bundle of content available, the little niche interests just can't get a subscriber base and aren't made available, even if the content is already made.

That might be, but the tug back and forth at least gives the ISPs pause before going full bore into engineering (or contracting for) non-neutral arrangements. Why invest the time, money, and effort into something that is only sometimes legal?

The US has basically all 4 major healthcare insurance systems in a single country.

The Beveridge model, used in the UK for its National Health Service, is essentially socialized medicine where the government literally owns the hospitals/clinics and employs the doctors and other professionals who work within that system. It exists in the U.S., too, in the Veterans Health Administration system, and the military's own hospitals, plus a few smaller systems like the Indian Health Service.

The Bismarck model, common in much of continental Europe, is essentially an "all payer" system where private insurance can still exist, but where all the insurers are paying the providers the same prices for services. Providers are private, but the highly regulated price structure means that private providers can't just demand their own prices (lest they get cut out of the insurance system entirely). Insurers can be private, too, but all plans must offer specific features, in a way that ends up pushing the pricing and coverage to be fairly uniform throughout the system. This exists in the U.S. in the employer-provided health insurance system, or the "Obamacare" ACA exchanges, where most states regulate what insurance coverage there can be, what prices they can charge, and then all the providers and insurers negotiate prices that end up looking pretty similar. Realistically, someone who gets Aetna through their employer doesn't have all that different of an experience from Blue Cross Blue Shield or Cigna or United.

The Medicare model, or single payer model, basically puts everyone on one public insurance plan and has that insurance system negotiate prices with providers as a monopsony. Doctors and other providers don't have much room to just opt out of the system, because in a society where everyone has insurance for no or low out of pocket expenses, doctors won't be able to charge significant out of pocket expenses for normal services. It's what Canada has, and what the United States has for everyone over the age of 65, as well as everyone under the age of 18, and most people below the poverty line.

The chaotic market-driven model, where patients and providers essentially shop around and negotiate one-off pricing for services, is basically what remains for anyone not covered by the three models above. It might be how markets work for most other stuff in the western world, but among developed nations only the U.S. uses it in a significant way for health care markets.

Single payer, or Medicare for All, is at least something that one can envision for the United States, but I think it's far more likely we end up with something like the German/Swiss model, which probably would be the easiest transition among the 3 major universal health care models. One disadvantage is that it doesn't really look like what we see in other English-speaking countries (Canada's single payer, UK's socialized medicine), so there aren't as many people explicitly calling on the U.S. to adopt models already implemented in other countries.

In the U.S., buying is a mistake if you don't think you're going to stay for more than 5 years. The up-front transaction costs of a purchase, and then a sale when you move, needs to be amortized over a long enough time period to be worth it.

A typical $500,000 home is going to see something like $520,000 paid by the buyer for $480,000 in the seller's pocket. That $40,000 is an expense that can only be justified if you're staying there for more than 5 years ($8,000 per year). Maintenance, taxes, and insurance on that $500k home will also be continuous, and will vary heavily based on age/condition of the property and the jurisdiction/location. On the upside, maybe the property will appreciate, but historically that has basically only happened about as fast as inflation for specific properties.

Renting is generally better if you want the flexibility. If you're single and childless, but anticipate maybe getting married and having children later, do you buy the place that works for a single person today, or do you buy the place that might work for raising kids 10 years in the future? Contrary to this piece's argument, it's precisely the young people who are least equipped to predict the medium term future, and renting can buy time so that when they do buy, they buy the right place for them at that future stage of life, with full knowledge of their household income, expenses, and household size. Plus city, neighborhood, etc. Nobody wants to commute an hour per day because of a decision they made 10 years ago.

Renting is almost always better for people under the age of 30, and the financial calculators basically prove it.

The API is much more limited for kernel mode, because Microsoft doesn't want to make it easy to crash the kernel. So it's not just a matter of taking old DOS code and making Windows run it in an old compatibility layer, but actually requires translating the whole thing into a much more limited set of commands to properly draw the graphics and respond to user input.

It's impressive like being able to play the French horn without using the valves, or painting beautiful pictures using only a mechanical typewriter. It's being able to do something that is trivially easy with normal tools, but with such a limited toolset that the accomplishment itself is impressive.

I’m a little surprised she’s toeing the line for the SAG strike, but not WGA.

What she's doing doesn't actually violate any of the contracts. Any covered work remains struck: no WGA writing for her show, no SAG-AFTRA members promoting struck work. So in a sense, she's not violating any legally enforceable line on either contract.

Choosing to produce and air the show without WGA work is shitty. It's crossing a picket line, and it's breaking solidarity. But it isn't a breach of contract, so she's following the strict letter of the law.

Rage isn't sustainable. Enthusiasm is down across the board, and the question will be whether enthusiasm among left-leaning voters has wanted waned to the same degree as among Trump's base.

I actually just canceled my preorder for the AMD Framework. I decided I didn't need a new device if I could stretch out the life of this laptop for as long as it stays alive. My next new machine will probably be Framework, but that might not be for years.

Personally, I don't think the reporting requirements are all that burdensome (especially for an organization that receives less than $50k on donations per year). Most of the requirements are just good governance/administration, that it seems like they're doing anyway (the monthly Beehaw post outlining costs/receipts).

A formal board of directors or trustees that meets once a month? I'm pretty sure they already have regular meetings. Minutes? Yeah, someone just needs to send out an email summarizing who attended and what was decided or voted on in that meeting.

Annual filings? Seems like a straightforward transfer of the information they're already putting in the monthly posts to fill out the IRS's PDFs.

As for employment stuff, they simply don't need to have employees. If it's all volunteer officers and board members, with a few contracted vendors here and there, they just need a bank account (which can be free for nonprofits).

It'll cost a little bit more in overhead, not least of which is a donation payment processor, but I don't see it as being more administratively burdensome than what they're already doing.

It's the meme format:

"Men will literally (something) but not go to therapy"

People who use it don't necessarily endorse the original view, but are making fun of it.

Ad-riddled blogspam, probably written by some AI.

There's literally nothing in this post that isn't better covered by a more reputable site.

Your scenario 1 is the actual danger. It's not that AI will outsmart us and kill us. It's that AI will trick us into trusting them with more responsibility than the AI can responsibly handle, to disastrous results.

It could be small scale, low stakes stuff, like an AI designing a menu that humans blindly cook. Or it could be higher stakes stuff that actually does things like affect election results, crashes financial markets, causes a military to target the wrong house, etc. The danger has always been that humans will act on the information provided by a malfunctioning AI, not that AI and technology will be a closed loop with no humans involved.

Bundling things together is good when it reduces friction for the consumer, but bad when it reduces choice for the consumer. Every decision about bundling needs to be understood from that perspective, and evaluated on a case by case basis against that tradeoff.

That loss of choice is especially anti-consumer when a provider leverages a dominant market position in one product to push their own inferior version of a totally different product. For example, right now there's a competition for consumer cloud storage. But none of the providers are actually competing on cloud storage features or pricing. All of them are competing based on bundling with the other totally unrelated products provided by that competitor:

• Apple pushes iCloud by giving it first party advantage on all Apple devices, with system and OS integration that the other cloud providers aren't allowed to match.
• Google pushes Google Drive by using that storage space as part of the quota for Gmail, Google Photos, and Google Workspace.
• Microsoft pushes OneDrive as an add-on to its dominant position in Microsoft Office and Exchange, and gives it first party integration into Windows.
• Adobe pushes Adobe Cloud as an add-on to its dominant position in its suite of apps
• Amazon gives cloud storage to people who subscribe to, like, 2-day shipping and a TV streaming service and discounts at Whole Foods, in what is probably the most absurd bundle of them all.

And you see it everywhere. YouTube tries to protect its inferior Music service by bundling it with ad-free videos, Samsung put the inferior Bixby assistant on its phones, Google uses its dominance in browser, search, and maps to protect its advertising business, Apple gives its credit card preferential treatment in its payment app, etc.

So when a service protects its own affiliated service through unfair/preferential treatment, it harms the consumer by making the entire bundle less useful than a bunch of independent services, each competing to be the best at that one specific thing.

I'm pretty protective of my online privacy so I have a tendency to make alts rather than allow disparate interests to be correlated to the same user (I'd rather have 3 accounts than a single account that show that I'm a person with my hobby with my career living in my city), so I've scattered my lemmy alts all across the lemmyverse (less beholden to instance downtime or an admin trying to correlate users).

There’s a complete dearth of content for niche communities like individual games or special interest hobbies, because the userbase is simply too small to support a healthy special interest community.

At this point, lemmy doesn't even have much in the way of communities on some mainstream topics: sports, lifestyle/advice, food, cars, fashion, television, film, music, local issues in major population centers, etc. I mean, back in the 2000's, these were topics that were mainstream enough that they were able to publish printed magazines or even newspapers for newsstands, but we can't even get a critical mass of commenters for many of these topics on lemmy.

Yes, linux/FOSS and video games and tech are relatively niche interests that do have robust discussion here on lemmy, but that's mainly a function of who tended to adopt use of the platform. Is lemmy going to be like Hacker News or Slashdot in that it never makes the jump to the mainstream?

That's not what that sentence means.

People respond to prices by changing their purchase behavior. If prices go up for some things, people tend to buy less of those things, and if prices go down for some things, then people tend to buy more of those things.

Across the entire basket of stuff that people buy (measured by a weighted percentage of how people were spending their budgets the previous year), people tend to move away from the stuff that got more expensive and towards the stuff that got less expensive, so that the current household budget shifts less than the inflation measure does. It's called the substitution effect, and the CPI intentionally pretends it doesn't happen - so that the numbers can be more meaningful as a measure of price changes, at the cost of understating how households actually experience inflation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substitution_bias

Each subreddit had its own atmosphere and culture and environment. I would expect the same to happen here, only with an opportunity for different instances to also foster their own dynamics, in addition to each community within each instance.

We’re too small to have niche thriving communities

The same was largely true of reddit when I joined (in about 2008 or 2009). There were a lot of technology/science/engineering/programming people in the mix, so there was good content for that, but most of what it was just kinda grew out of some ideas that had come from other forums (lolcats style content, advice animals memes) and from internal inside trends organically bubbling up within the community (the concepts of the AMA, TIL, ELI5, AITA, narwhal fandom, grumpy cat, reddit switcheroo), and then weird turns of phrases the people started repeating elsewhere like a cargo cult (the overuse of the word "obligatory," accidentally a whole word, ಠ_ಠ, playing with movie titles by adding or removing or switching letters). We saw the rise and fall of some content creators and power users, the rise and fall of communities (/r/fffffffuuuuuuuuuuuu, inglip, space dicks, all sorts of communities that eventually got banned).

Trends don't stop trending. Any community, large or small, ends up developing its own cultural touchstones and a shared history. Eventually we'll see things turn from innovative to an inside joke to overdone within different lemmy communities, too.

@penguincoder@beehaw.org is a pretty active dev for Beehaw, has been very open about his views that the lemmy software is built on very shaky foundations, including the programming language and architecture choices underpinning the whole thing, making moderation unnecessarily difficult and making it hard to comply with legal requirements of hosting such a service, and providing severe limits to scale. It might make more sense to build up a new forum from the ground up, compatible with ActivityPub, than to try to fork Lemmy, or persuade Lemmy's existing maintainers to start accepting big patches.

That's the fundamental tension here.

The right to control your own posts, after posting, imposes an obligation on everyone who archives your posts to delete when you want them deleted.

For most of the internet, the balance is simply that a person who creates something doesn't get to control it after it gets distributed to the world. Search engines, archive tools, even individual users can easily save a copy, maybe host that copy for further distribution, maybe even remix and edit it (see every meme format that relies on modification of some original phrase, image, etc.).

Even private, end to end encrypted conversations are often logged by the other end. You can send me a message and I might screenshot it.

A lot of us active on the Internet in the 90's, participating in a lot of discussion around philosophical ideas like "information wants to be free" and "intellectual property is theft" and things like copyleft licenses (GPL), creative commons licensing, etc., wanted that to be the default vision for content created on the internet: freely distributed, never forgotten. Of course, that runs into tension with privacy rights (including the right to be forgotten), and possibly some appropriation concerns (independent artists not getting proper credit and attribution as something gets monetized). It's not that simple anymore, and the defaults need to be chosen with conscious decisionmaking, while anyone who chooses to go outside of those defaults should be able to do that in a way knowledgeable of what tradeoffs they're making.

free association includes the freedom to not associate.

Reminds me of the Simpsons episode where the aliens campaign for the US presidency, and can't figure out why "abortions for all" and "abortions for none" are both unpopular opinions.

In other words, it's about freedom of choice, not mandatory association.

I also speak post college level English. And I can recognize dumb ideas written in English. Mises was a hack.

Weird. I'd say the correlation is much stronger that people who try to tear down others for fitness accomplishments tend to be more likely to be "deeply unhappy."

If anything, poor health is a more reliable indicator of unhappiness.

to my knowledge, Bluetooth doesn't work with airplane mode

The radio regulations were amended about 10 years ago to allow both Bluetooth and Wifi frequencies to be used on airplanes in flight. And so cell phone manufacturers have shifted what airplane mode actually means, even to the point of some phones not even turning off Wi-Fi when airplane mode is turned on. And regardless of defaults, both wireless protocols can be activated and deactivated independently of airplane mode on most phones now.

an airplane full of 100 people all on Bluetooth might create some noise issues that would hurt the performance

I don't think so. Bluetooth is such a low bandwidth use that it can handle many simultaneous users. It's supposed to be a low power transmission method, in which it bursts a signal only a tiny percentage of the time, so the odds of a collision for any given signal are low, plus the protocol is designed to be robust where it handles a decent amount of interference before encountering degraded performance.

You absolutely could build this with a “traditional” centralized service that eg. the GOBERMENT (or whoever trusted stakeholder) runs and operates, but then you have a single bottleneck that’s entirely dependent on a single stakeholder, and you still need to implement eg. audit trails for state mutations, access control, etc. etc.

So before anyone comes forward and claims that their innovative solution will improve on the status quo, I generally expect them to be able to describe the status quo. And here, you haven't done so.

In the U.S., county recorders allow for anyone to record to the centralized ledger (and this is literally paper technology that long predates computers), and the transactions themselves are validated when necessary to resolve a dispute: one can only sell what they already own, and if they sell something they no longer own it. The law allows for certain types of involuntary transactions: foreclosures, execution, inheritance (where the owner can voluntarily prescribe some rules but doesn't get to control the timing of when those rules get executed, and the failure to affirmatively write stuff into a will means that the inheritance falls back to defaults), divorce, partition, adverse possession, reverter, and then a bunch of special rules that apply to governments like tax foreclosures or eminent domain. And no matter what the actual papers say, ownership of land still must be enforced by a sheriff.

Which portions of this status quo should be decentralized? Or centralized? What would the benefit be?

In my opinion, real estate is the worst candidate for decentralizing the ledger.

That's true of everyone who worked for Trump and came into the government as a Trump appointee or staffer, but I would argue Milley is in a different boat. Milley was appointed Army Chief by Obama, and never engaged with the political side of things. He did have some eyebrow-raising proximity to crazy Trump things, but even then was viewed as the least crazy person in the room.

If the equity is worth $19 billion, and the debt is worth $13 billion, that's a drop of $44 billion to $32 billion. Still hilarious, although not as dramatic.

Google has run a fiber ISP for a little over 10 years now. It was one of the first U.S. ISPs to offer gigabit speeds to residential customers, and has provided steady competitive pressure to other providers to provide faster speeds in those markets, as well.

Google also operates a mobile service called Google Fi as an MVNO. They handle the billing, but lease the capacity the way other MVNOs do.