brownbat

We studied him too, he kicks off most of the major anthologies. Seems he's almost universally considered an overlooked founder of analytic philosophy. (There's the famous story about how Wittgenstein showed up on his doorstep to move in and study and Frege said, "no just go to Russell," he even underrated himself.)

So he is partly famous for not being famous, a paradox he would hopefully appreciate.

Counterfeit DVD box sets are pretty rampant. For example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Zwa9uKIYhM

I remember getting obviously burned DVDs run through terrible label makers back in the day. Now they're copying all the the art and packaging for box sets.

I'm both impressed at the work they put in, and also confused why they occasionally leave obvious errors like typos on the box after all that work.

A hint at what wpm I just typed at would be nice. So if I only hit 50 wpm a 50 off to the side or below the dotted line.

This is fascinating when picking a liminal wpm. Single hand words are so much harder.

I can cruise along until I hit words like "exact"

EDIT: You could make a list of bigrams as people type and average the wpm for words with that bigram, then you could weight the randomly chosen words by the difficulty of the bigrams, to really help people focus on their biggest stumbling blocks.

copyright holders do in fact declare ... and pay taxes on [IP]

Or they sell the IP to a shell company in a tax haven and lease it at an artificial price, so the balance sheet shows no profit or even a loss. It's one of the largest sources of tax evasion out there.

A system like the one midasuni proposed would actually be an interesting patch for the tax system.

Here's a similar (but different) idea from some IP law professors: https://www.uclalawreview.org/pdf/62-1-1.pdf

It's not perfect or fully fleshed out. Derivative works would raise a bunch of questions. And you couldn't use one regulatory framework for all different types of intellectual property, obviously, even though different kinds of IP can be used in this sort of tax dodge.

It's a proposal to enrich public access to orphaned works while closing a major corporate tax loophole. Saying "all this would do is benefit big business" is a surprising take here. It'd probably have some unintended consequences, any change this big would. Might be unworkable in practice. But it certainly wouldn't ONLY help big corporations. A ton of ordinary people would benefit immediately from something like this.

Maybe ransomware.

A bit speculative, but my hunch is --

IOT and some other advancements still create opportunities for new DDoS attacks, but attackers herd. And the "X as a service" support infrastructure is mostly supporting ransomware right now, likely because its safer and more lucrative. You can walk away from a ransomware target, fire and forget, so you can do it at scale. DDoS you have to pick your victims, and monitor and maintain the pressure, choose how to allocate your resources to targets while they're investigating or waiting you out.

Cloudflare might be part of the story, maybe that was enough of a headwind to stop the trolls, but for the professional criminals, I suspect this is about lucrative alternative attacks.

Ah.

https://redditfavorites.com/

Came up in a random DDG search for something.

Breezewood is mostly fine, you're on a giant empty stretch of road for hours otherwise.

If you want a truly dystopian moment, drive I-64 at the border of Kentucky and West Virginia in the middle of the night. Towering smokestacks all around you, lit up like daytime for 24 hour processing, it's like you slipped into a 70s sci fi film.

There are some pictures online, search for Catlettsburg Refinery. It's like the opposite of Breezewood. Whereas the Breezewood photos make it look worse than it actually is, none of the photos of Catlettsburg quite capture the awe and foreboding you get from staring directly into a city-scale refinery.

If a place could be a Hans Zimmer soundtrack...

This is weird to read as if it's a sudden new discovery, I had the impression wolbachia was well established as part of the toolkit.

Thorough history of mosquito control techniques and where we stand today, including some comparisons of pros / cons / applicability:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28869513/

This is a really important puzzle. In other terms, basically the efficient markets hypothesis vs, well, a week of GameStop prices.

At certain extremes, a stock price is clearly objective.

If the company is bankrupt and wiping all stock, that's objective. If the company does so well the shareholders demand an immense dividend or buyback, that's objective. Those are the fixed points where stock price is set to money in hand.

Are the swings in the market just irrational participants between those extremes?

We could imagine purely objective superintelligent AI dominating a market, investing only to those "true" values. Such AIs might determine p(bankruptcy) and p(payout), knowing those are the "true" outcomes of the prop bet, and set expected price as the ratio of those two probabilities.

But both those p()s are vanishingly small for most companies, and infinite precision will be impossible. Even if you were nearly omniscient about all current factors within a company, the slightest possible change in either probability could swing the ratio in dramatic ways.

(Add on to that the graveyard of companies that performed well, got fat, and failed to adapt... current performance is somewhat but not fully predictive of longevity.)

So basically, what if EMH is true, but stock pricing is a debate at an arbitrary level of precision, to make it close to meaningless in short time windows?

I'm not an expert so I'm sure professionals or academics would roll their eyes and offer something even more explanatory, but that's my best hunch at resolving this tension so far.

(The upshot of this theory is that it seems to validate strategies that help you zoom way out: low fees, broad diversified indexes, long time windows... those are the real value trades.)

I'm optimistic for this area of tech and research in general, but agree we need to stop benchmarking against average human crash rates.

Although anyone can be hit at any time, the distribution of human crashes is not purely random. People who drive compromised, for example, are way overrepresented in those events.

So, theoretically, the tech could get to a point with a lower than expected crash rate for humans generally, but still increase your personal crash likelihood.

Too longwinded I guess.

Absent any counterargument, I stand by the premise that app stores and extension marketplaces are teeming with junk, that curation has failed as a model.

It wasn't always like this. It doesn't have to be like this.

We just need to build something better.

Maybe the above path isn't the way. Ok, what do you think would be a better way to fix the current system?

More and more I feel like we need another new manifesto.

We need to pull people together who have a passion for making the world's computers just work and build a brand around simple extensions and apps that are TRULY FREE. As in, they don't have features removed that you can only unlock through a paid version, they don't have ads, they don't sell tracking data, source is open, and anyone can support them through optional donations, but they don't nag you for anything.

Stallman distinguished between free as in freedom and free as in beer. I don't think he went far enough.

I'm more radical because we are users first, all of us, and only by using great software are we able to be makers.

And I think about my typical experiences as a user. Often, using a piece of software that was pretty great, then suddenly out of nowhere, a popup, it was a free trial and the full version costs some exhorbitant amount. Or the software that was suddenly bought out and shut down. Or the "five star" app that is already full of spam.

Then I contrast that with those programs that just don't ask for anything. You keep expecting it, but it's just genuinely something truly free that works. They weren't optimizing revenue, they were optimizing function. That feeling of finding that perfect FOSS or community developed app, it's just sublime.

Some user had a problem they wanted to solve, once they solved it, it was just a gift to the world, implicitly asking people at most to think about paying it forward.

We should make stuff that emulates our ideal experiences, not our worst experiences. We should spread that same kind of joy we've felt. If one in a thousand pays it forward, the options spread. The oak tree doesn't waste time trying to extract revenue from every squirrel, it knows one in a thousand will bury an acorn somewhere and build the forest.

And it's especially needed now. There was a time in the early internet where there was just abundant freeware on the internet. Postcardware, donationware, people genuinely trying to make an entire open source ecosystem.

Then we got app stores. "Curated," but not for that ultimate sublime user experience. Curated for sustainable profit back to the marketplace. Curated to make the biggest revenue earners find the exact bottom line of scumminess without getting banned, and encourage them to duplicate that model, then inspire copycats flooding the entire app ecosystem.

I know the rebuttal, devs need to get paid. Sure, I'm not an absolutist; this path isn't for everyone or every project. But I've worked with some people who make many of their contributions as free as possible, and they include some incredibly talented and hardworking folks who might be a little bit crazy. The thing that unites them all is that they're passionate about making the world a better place. They are lucky to have the freedom to do it, but it's still praiseworthy that they use that freedom for everyone, when it'd be easy not to bother.

I know there are free cycles in the system out there where people code out of a desire to help. Just need to have a unifying purpose, a call to action, that's how so many of the great movements like open source originally started. Just have to have 1% of people believe in it, then so many incredible things happen.

Reminds me of the quests to recreate the secret recipe for Coca-cola.

The secret ingredient isn't orange peel, it's $4 billion a year in marketing.

That tracks with what's written in The Hacker's Diet, and I think it's largely right. If you look at how much running you need to do to burn off a daily burger it's intimidating.

The only caveat I've learned is that weightlifting can make a dent. It's one of the few things where as you improve, you can burn more calories in the same amount of time instead of fewer (partly because you're doing more work as you add weights, partly because the muscle you build is more metabolically expensive to maintain).

I also had success restructuring my life so accessing food was way more of a hassle. Kept a mostly empty fridge. Meal prepped so only whole meals were there. Don't take money unless I know I need to buy something, found a few reasonable options at local sandwich places that became routine, etc.

I'd love to see a correlational study on fridge size and obesity. In America we buy SUV fulls of food, in Europe it's much smaller frequent trips, i.e. generally higher hassle per calorie.

This and constant nagging that I'm running out of space (I'm definitely not), and (tightening?) limits on number of machines, had me migrate to Synology Drive this last week. Now I have basically unlimited space and devices.

I'm sorry to the hard working devs, I'm part of the problem I guess. But it's tough to pay for something with free alternatives that have fewer limitations and better features.

I was expecting the same thing, it got me searching to see how much clearance rates have responded to new technologies already.

It's not the relationship I expected, clearance rates are steadily dropping despite these advancements.

The following piece considers a few possible reasons why:

https://digitalcommons.newhaven.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?arti...

Some of this may be a corrective effect, DNA is more likely to exonerate and prevent false arrests than it is to identify criminals. Other situations, well, new technology doesn't guarantee that you have enough detectives to clear crimes, or that those detectives are well trained.

Then there's the whole class of violent crimes that happen on high traffic streets where DNA is not likely to be abundant or well preserved.

Yeah, it includes mechanical specifications of physical media so, say, alien archaeologists can get data off a VHS.

People are reading the title thinking it's about filesystems. It's about cataloging all human information storage methods, from phonographs to zip drives to word perfect files.

And, by implication, they're a massively higher contributor to local pollution. I was surprised to learn that most road pollution is no longer generated by tailpipes, but by the grinding of brake, tire, and road into dust through friction. Vehicle weight has an outsized effect there too.

I like the Coasean analysis. Now someone needs to build the Uber for unifying affected populations to demand rents for suffered negative externalities.

Patenting plants is one reasonable extension, and the one we've gone with.

But it wouldn't have been totally crazy if justices had decided that when you sell something that by its very nature self replicates, you cannot get too upset when it does exactly that.

Agriculture is like other goods in that it can have costly r&d we want to incentivize, so we might want to prevent copying. But it's a bit different, in that it comes preprogrammed and desperate to break all these rules.

I feel like there was a time this could have gone either way, but it was probably quite a while back.

I had a college radio show when Pandora was starting, and had shockingly responsive conversations with Tim W. about up and coming artists he should include.

It was a brief window. Now their catalogue is so full I doubt anyone could add too much value like that.

He sent me a tshirt, which was kind, but what I remember more is how he responded to recommendations. He's a musician and it was obvious he cared deeply about music. To that point of unhealthy obsession that drives some of us to work at record stores and host radio shows, and others to commit to building a transformative service that helps everyone discover new artists they might like.

You can't help but recognize it if you have it.

You might have a different opinion on the economics of it all, or wish the industry could go a different direction. But if you really talk to these people, there's no doubt they do what they do because they love music.

I tried to get a company name or mailing address out of them once, but they're pretty cagey.

They were definitely using a soundboard, they'd repeat phrases that were approximate answers to my questions.

I eventually got a Google voice number in a different area code than where I have ever lived, so it's just really easy to see them coming now.

Automatic call screening is another solution. Or the authentication protocols that are rolling out way too slowly. Or just using OTT services. We never fully fix any old communication systems we just make new ones anyway.

Our responsibility is to empower all of those watchdogs, and to listen to them...

Naturally they had to block critics like nyttypos on Twitter. Watchdogs for copyediting is obviously going too far.

Another design philosophy is that there should be one and only one exit point to a function whenever possible. Maybe that's fallen out of favor, or not important to most folks. But even if it's just a "nice-to-have," it's still a tradeoff here.

If every if block includes a return statement, you're basically writing a case switch or a series of elifs anyway. The readability of those structures is highly dependent on the language and how it expects serial conditionals to be most efficiently written.

There's something called the input hypothesis that's trending upwards in language learning. More input is basically a substitute for studying grammar, or even superior, because the brain is phenomenal at pattern matching. Bad grammar will sound "off" well before you understand the rule in your own language, same thing happens when learning new languages, given sufficient input.

It takes a leap of faith but learning grammar almost exclusively through example sentences is actually really efficient.

Krashen, Khatzumoto, Matt vs. Japan, and Antimoon are all worth reading if you want to go down this rabbit hole.

How you absorb the grammar of a language is a separate question from when you should do conversations though.

Some folks advocate conversation day one, but most pro-input folks do recommend waiting until you have a sense of how things work and can make fewer mistakes.

EDIT: One of the best articles explaining this anti-rule view: http://www.antimoon.com/how/input-gramrules.htm

Orwell and HG Wells were both really taken by Basic English at first, with Wells arguing it could help build a singular world government. Orwell later became cynical about it, focusing on its lack of any words for things like "revolution." It became an inspiration for newspeak in 1984.

(I honestly think this particular concern was a bit of a straw man of Wells' and Ogden's optimistic views, a lingua franca used in a few settings doesn't have to be a straightjacket for all contexts. But it made 1984, so maybe fine in the end.)

So I checked the source of that quote, and there is no argumentation. None.

Yeah, these quotes all seem like ad lapidem, just unsupported vague claims. I'm not even sure I agree people can be "closer" or "farther" from the past when looking at an image, it's a poetic way to look at the difference but not precise, and seems like it would evaporate if we tried to find any quantifiable measurable effects.

The roi was also high during that period.

The price of services relative to goods has also trended strongly upwards during that period due to increased trade.

Urbanization and increased cost of living in some areas could be pushing up averages in costs.

Nobody pays the sticker price. A lot of colleges are subsidized by a small slice of wealthy and/or foreign students, so to maximize differential pricing, universities raise prices, and simultaneously offer larger tuition grants for need or merit.

There are a dozen reasons. Student aid is probably one of them too, absolutely.

I just worry about someone saying 'x' is the reason for some complex social or economic changes decades in the making. The interesting question to me is how to weight all these influences.

We rebooked relatives during the pandemic and was surprised our credit didn't apply to the same class of service. If you bought a package with extra legroom and a checked bag, you end up being able to use the credit on basic economy, and repaying for the checked bag every time you book.

Just stuff like this where they continue to nickel and dime you while saying they're doing you a favor.

I've wondered about this for years, crossing off theories like you just did with powerful counterexamples.

All I see left is technophobia.

There's a deep human bias. Things we don't understand seem scarier than things we do.

People get how a dam works, the basics anyway. They understand how a car crashes or why it's bad when the pump in your chest stops beating.

They do not like radiation at all. They do not like strange chemicals. They do not like robots driving cars.

They want dangers they can understand, even if that increases the risk substantially.