bertil

As someone who doesn’t live in the US, it was hilariously impossible: you had to call on the phone a number in New York, which never picked up, so you had to pay hours of internal call, or send a fax, something I hadn’t done in two decades…

Thankfully, I had a bank that used technology from this century, including a disposable credit card number. I stopped paying and that lead them to them calling me.

I have a very low opinion of the current US administration, which might be a blindspot when they do something both horrible and not caveman-like in its sophistication. I’m genuinely surprised they would look into differential privacy (again: this sounds judgmental, but I’m just trying to confess my prejudice).

I’m more surprised that they were able to look into it and come to the conclusion that they should get rid of it… What could be the logic here?

The urge to put capitalized, repetitive, borderline abusive instructions should be studied. I haven't read many academic papers looking at the frustrations around repetitive patterns.

the AI says things like “Interesting!”

My experience of those utterance is that it’s purely phatic mimicry: they lack genuine intuitive surprise, it’s just marking a very odd shift in direction. The problem isn’t the lack of path, is that the rhetorical follow-up to those leaps are usually relevant results, so they stream-of-token ends up rapidly over-playing its own conviction. That’s why it’s necessary (and often ineffective) to tell them to validate their findings thoroughly: too much of their training is “That’s odd” followed by “Eureka!” and not “Nevermind…”

My impression is that the quality of the conversation is unexpectedly better: more self-critical, the suggestions are always critical, the default choices constantly best. I might not have as many harnesses as most people here, so I suspect it’s less obvious but I would expect this to make it far more valuable for people who haven’t invested as much.

After a few basic operations (retrospective look at the flow of recent reviews, product discussions) I would expect this to act like a senior member of the team, while 4.6 was good, but far more likely to be a foot-gun.

People were still writing code by hand three months ago…

What do you mean by that? Promise some investment? Commit to something?

I do that everywhere, but it seems to fail for LinkedIn: they don’t redirect the link if it’s not in the same tab.

You are assuming I didn’t know before this news came out.

It sounds like a great opportunity to ask if people have used Apple Maps in Lebanon before.

Yeah, that’s the default option for detailed databases like that. Large deletion are either technical issues (and that should affect a lot more than one country) or deliberate edits.

Satellite source would require detailed editing, and there’s very little chance those are fully automated. The entire Middle-East is being blocked, but only Lebanon is being affected.

It could be that they have a provider in Lebanon that was bombed but I’ve never heard of a cartographer with local dependencies like that.

You can very easily verify the claim by following the link. Other than three major cities, there are no agglomeration listed in Lebanon. Other countries have detailed maps.

Seems strange to me but I get dragged in all the same.

Maybe it‘s a you thing?

Is it not factual that trains have brake pads which wear down and cause carcenogenic micro dust?

Not a point I have contested, but yet another suggestion without any sense of scale, and so far you have refused to address that aspect of five or six replies on the topic. Maybe that’s why you are inviting so much hostility?

Trump is too cheap to have paid for those ads.

I’m not saying that Vance is not doing that—God knows that man’s ethics has no floor.

I’m doubtful he paid for ads to make his disdain better known. So I suspect someone else is trying to make that happen beyond what Vance can with his speeches.

Some big moneyed interests are trying to split Europe and the US.

The current US administration is definitely not helping, but every ad I see on the Reddit main feed is a blatant attack on the relation, from brand new subreddits, pointing at magazines I’ve never heard about before. I’ve been reporting them, but it keeps coming, from constantly different sources, different names, subreddits, but always the same vague but incredible incredibly provocative titles

I suspect that some social-media-addled senior US officials are being fed the same crap because their reactions to non-existent European reaction are not grounded in reality.

Do you know what a "useful idiot" is, in the Soviet manipulation tradecraft?

Someone who repeats, jokingly or not, an argument that was placed somewhere deniable. One lab, looking at a small study, published a correction saying their estimates were wrong because they didn’t realize how their gloves accounted for it. Do you know who knew about that? Every intern in every lab ever. This was a minor correction that should never has reached anyone except the 10 readers of their original report.

But, strangely, that story got a wide coverage in the press: the usual “science” publication, the trade press, even widespread media. Why? Because it was presented as a “They are making things up about micro-plastics” piece, and those can go really far. And that kind of coverage doesn’t happen by accident.

So no, I don’t think you did that deliberately. But I know you read about it recently; I know you didn’t check what that original story was that triggered the coverage; I know you found that quaint—and I have no reason to think you deliberately tried to spread misinformation. But, you did. Because the people who want to sow doubt know what they are doing.

I wish the millions of people killed by delaying safety legislation for decades knew that pretending to make jokes (what became known as the "stochastic asshole" approach) was also a common tactic taught by those PR firms, to make critics sound like sour-puss.

You really don’t like factual replies, do you?

Im sure bikes and trains are too. … for tyres and brakes

You are welcome to edit your comment to clarify.

Classic case of PR leveraging a real, anecdotic observation on one single result, but completely flipping it to pretend it’s a systematic result, to saw doubt on all scientific findings around microplastic. The same companies behind this last story have done the same thing to slow down regulation to limit the impact of smoking, alcohol, processed foods, oil refinery, global warming, lead pipes…

Not as long as there are powerful car lobbies and the main source of microplastic will remain car tires.

Instead, you have articles like this trying to tell people to look away from that main source of problem, and blame, say, indoors or food preparation, and skip details like how the homes with the most microplastic in them are… close to the highway.

The amount of damage to tires is proportional to the fourth power of the weight per axel. That means that for the same journey, a bike sheds (3000 kg / 80 kg)ˆ4 so about 20 million times less. Assuming that the rubber is the same—and not that it has proprietary chemistry that may or may not contain carcinogens. Eight orders of magnitude of difference feels relevant.

Almost every train I know use metal wheels. We can look at the few that don’t, but something tells me people who raise that argument don’t want to look at alternative wheel composition, but rather hope to seed doubt and, in private, lobby replace one metro with thousands of cars, and I’m not sure that’s a good idea.

So, please, don’t come in here with that bullshit.

The silence from that from media that make a lot of money selling ads for cars is becoming quite suspicious.

Precisely.

I was focusing on a theoretical dynamic analysis of competition (Would a monopoly make having a competitor easier or harder?) but you are right: practically, there are many players, and they are diverse enough in their values and interest to allow collusion.

We could be wrong: each of those could give birth to as many Basilisks (not sure I have a better name for those conscious, invisible, omni-present, self-serving monsters that so many people imagine will emerge) that coordinate and maintain collusion somehow, but classic economics (complementarity, competition, etc.) points at disruption and lowering costs.

We are all fans for Simon’s work, and his test is, strangely enough, quite good.

It could be, formally, if they have a monopoly.

However, I’m tempted to compare to GitHub: if I join a new company, I will ask to be included to their GitHub account without hesitation. I couldn’t possibly imagine they wouldn’t have one. What makes the cost of that subscription reasonable is not just GitHub’s fear a crowd with pitchforks showing to their office, by also the fact that a possible answer to my non-question might be “Oh, we actually use GitLab.”

If Anthropic is as good as they say, it seems fairly doable to use the service to build something comparable: poach a few disgruntled employees, leverage the promise to undercut a many-trillion-dollar company to be a many-billion dollar company to get investors excited.

I’m sure the founders of Anthropic will have more money than they could possibly spend in ten lifetimes, but I can’t imagine there wouldn’t be some competition. Maybe this time it’s different, but I can’t see how.

Why do those essays read like the watch that they look at every hour somehow became illegal in the last decade?

You can buy one. People still make clothes, pencils, cutlery, automatic watches, furniture — more than they ever did at any point in the past. Automation, electrification, motorization has allowed considerable wealth that has made making all those terminal products that much cheaper, reliable, and easy to do the little maintenance that they do need.

Regretting that there is an alternative to a Casio F-91W is missing that there are more of those made today than in the 90s. Billions more people can afford it now than they ever could, because, among other things, the farmer who collected the latex to make the bracelet can check, on their Android phone, the weather, or whether the bug they found on one of their tree might wipe out their plantation; the driver who delivered a shipment of those watches to the harbor can call the factory admin to fix a paperwork issue.

Like the author, I have some nostalgia about that exact watch: my dad still wears it every day, like he did throughout the 70s, after his dad gave it to him as a present for going to work abroad (in a humid country where a mechanical watch would not have been reasonable to bring). I don’t know how much my grand-father paid for it, but it couldn’t have been cheap given how my dad talks about it.

The parallel stories put both of our family in a minority who were privileged then and are privileged today. We could afford that watch then, when it was the pinnacle of technology, and we can afford the latest iPhone now because we are privileged. $21 is a lot for a lot of people; a second-hand Android can cost five times more. That’s also a lot for people who need more than the time and a beeping alarm to work, pay their taxes, keep their paperwork handy, etc.

Those need more updates because they can do a lot, which means bad people are trying to hack into those, and about their power. Incredibly smart and generous security researchers have been able to find ways they could do that, fix those and share that with us. That’s as much a burden as pulling the ribbon around a birthday present.

You might need to turn laws into formal proofs, and the existence of judges makes me think that’s not as likely as you would like. A commenting system would though—trained on countries’s precedents, jurisprudence and traditions might.