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For sure, but also I don't want "Joe's Discount Basement Insulin" to be on the market. I do think we should allow imports of medicines from some places in the world as long as they meet a verifiable safety standard.

This is great news. Honestly, I hope to see more nationalization of widely used services (or whatever the equivalent word for nationalization is at state or municipal levels.)

Municipal broadband, power, roads, schools, post, housing, and healthcare? It's long overdue, and with an appropriate amount of funding has been shown to be effective at controlling costs and delivering moderately good quality in most cases.

A lot of things get so warped by profit motive. And there are places I want a profit motive, but insulin (and healthcare generally) isn't one.

Walmart needs to either earn a profit or use the item as a loss leader to earn a profit elsewhere. A government can provide services without expecting them to be profitable. (See: roads, licensing, schools, transit, etc.)

There's no reason California couldn't say, "If you need insulin, and you live in California, it's available for free." Assuming that's what the taxpayers want.

"All these safety regulations slow down the free market! Anyone should be able to make and sell insulin! If it's poisonous, people just won't buy that!"

Thanks. That's the opposite (the government is protecting corporate interests too much) of what the usual "It's the feds fault" usually implies.

[Citation very much needed]

I assume this is a joke about autistic folks disliking change?

You should understand that your definition is out of date, but I'll respond:

If somebody has coping strategies that effectively mask their autism (in the early childhood/developmental stage specifically), they DO NOT HAVE autism

The DSM V diagnoses autism much more broadly -- https://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/autism/hcp-dsm.html -- and it's very plausible that a child might not be identified. (For example, my parents were drunkards, I was not assessed as a child.) A child might also learn that they are punished for some behaviors such as stimming, and learn not to do it publicly, but still engage in that behavior privately.

Autism diagnoses only require that person needs 'support', and explicitly calls out that symptoms may be masked by coping strategies.

How SPECIFICALLY are these additional people getting diagnosed?

Psychologists and psychiatrists usually start with a series of screening questions, followed by several in person discussions sessions where they probe into both your own self perceptions and the perceptions of others.

There is a 2018 paper that specifically identifies camoflauging traits and a screener that can be used to help identify adults (and others) who have built systems to survive in the world. It's called the CAT-Q. See the paper: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10803-018-3792-6

Is there special training diagnosticians get to unveil the secret masked signs of autism?

Yes. Typically a psych degree (doctorate) with an emphasis on ASD, but sometimes masters level mental health professionals working in concert with an MD.

What are these scientific advances I've heard vaguely cited for the rise in autism diagnosis over the years?

Well, see the 2018 paper I linked above. If it would be helpful, there are many other papers from 2000 onward that specifically address everything from repetitive behaviors to social isolation to meltdowns, etc. Mostly, we've improved our screening processes, which means we've got better, more accurate criteria.

Why is it even possible for a diagnostic criteria that hasn't changed to result in dramatically different diagnostic rates over time, doesn't that prove the diagnostic process is fundamentally unreliable and thus fundamentally scientifically invalid?

The DSM criteria have changed between DSM 4 and DSM 5, in 2013. The DSM used to separate Autism and Aspergers as categorically different, but they've removed the Asperger's category and adjusted the criteria for a diagnosis.

It's also important to remember that science is never stable. The point of science is to revise over time our criteria. The point is to evaluate what new information we have.

And observed rates have risen, from about 1% to about 2% over the past decade, which you've correctly identified, but you would expect that because screenings have improved, diagnosticians have evolved, and we've put more emphasis on testing people.

That's not a huge number of people, and it's fairly reasonable to assume that as we've developed the science, we're catching people who previously would have been missed by less accurate tests.

It could also be that whatever causes autism is also happening more. There's a whole lot of factors, but no, that doesn't mean the science is bad it just means we haven't answered all the questions we have yet.

The fundamental cause of the rise of Autism is that both schools and parents both financially benefit from a child being labelled as "Autistic"

That's a pretty conspiratorial claim for an increase in diagnoses that can adequately be explained by "we're better at testing for it now."

It's driven by parents and schools looking for money, money is the dynamo driving this, autistics are rainmakers.

This is likewise a conspiratorial claim. Can you provide evidence of this? Because "I've seen it" is at best anecdotal, and runs counter to the prevailing idea that being labelled as autistic by the medical community can deny you agency in academic, medical, and social contexts.

Science has improved, yes. We've discovered there are many people who are able to produce a set of coping strategies that effectively mask their autism.

This is what science does -- we continuously challenge what we know and change our definitions when we learn. The people who are experiencing diagnosis with autism and ADHD today will seem totally different than the diagnoses 50 years from now.

You cannot hold on to one, old definition for something like autism (or any other non-neurotypical behavior) and expect it to remain the definition, unchanging.

Welcome to being a senior dev. Your job is teaching, coaching, and developing others. Because the better and faster you do so, the better and faster the team will be at achieving your visions. You have the opportunity to set the direction for many engineers and build things bigger than you yourself can build alone, AND the people who will one day be able to help you do that.

Teaching is an investment (and is, imo, super rewarding). Think about where your team will be in one year if you spend the time now to level up everyone.

Let me tell you about the Luddites. People hear "Luddites" and think "Anti-Technology, backwards mentality! Closed Minded!"

No.

The Luddites were highly trained, technical workers who had built careers around being loom operators. They worked in the factories for a decent wage, and earned the factory owners a tidy profit.

New auto-looms were invented, and the Luddites were like, "This is great! Our highly trained staff can increase our production! We'll get paid more, the factory owner will earn more, it's a win-win!"

Except the factory owners said, "LOL. No, you are all fired, we're going to hire bargain labor and hold 100% of the profit. Get bent."

So the Luddites, who wanted to use the looms and increase the well being of all were turned out. And the factory owners extracted as much from the workers as possible.

The Luddites then decided, "Fuck it, let's burn these looms." and they went around and smashed up a bunch of them.

When I see AI tools being developed, I think, "Wow, an auto-editor. An auto-script-writer. An auto-matte painter." Surely the studios will want to use these tools to raise the efficiency of their highly trained staff and split the profits with them, right? No... of course not. The writing is on the wall already -- the studios are going to fire their highly trained staff, lean on technology, and try to maximize the profit to the studio at the expense of the people who work there.

We're setting ourselves up for a neo-Luddite moment where people get angry enough to start doing industrial sabotage, imo. Maybe I'm wrong, but it seems so short-sighted to just turn out all the people who wrote code, drew art, edited scripts, composed music, etc.

(Maybe it's a good time to consider collective bargaining and/or unionization, if your job is likely to go the way of a Luddite's job in the future?)

Have you seen cops? Cops know one thing -- doing violence. They are already terrible at handling folks with mental health needs, folks who aren't neurotypical, folks from other countries or cultures... I don't want them anywhere near kids.

I mean, no, right? Obviously no? Is this even a question? I can think of many significant countercultures across all sorts of political spectrums?

Discord is not a "chat app". That's a pretty narrow view on how it is both used and vended. It's a communications app, at a minimum, and people use it for audio, video, chat, events, and a bunch of other stuff that may require hardware acceleration.

Yep. Housing is the big one. And transit.

Trains can't cover long distances? Surely that's a typo -- trains can cover incredible distances...

And they can change routes within their network. So yes, there's some cost to get train stations and tracks built, but afterwards they can visit anywhere within the network and carry a whole lot more than airships.

Fair point on the oceans thing though.

WotC licenses some of their content using the Open Gaming License. It ostensibly covers both the rules* of D&D as well as key elements of the setting -- particular monsters, characters, place names, spells, etc.

That license has allowed products and content creators to build on top of a shared platform -- using and reprinting portions of D&D's content to build their own worlds, stories, systems, etc. Note: not everything D&D publishes is covered by the OGL, just a set of core items they call the SRD -- Systems Reference Document.

WotC/Hasbro leaked that they were working on OGL 1.1 which had a bunch of ambiguous (and many argued harmful) language that required creators to do things like license their content back to WotC, pay fees to license content, control what and what was not appropriate to build on top of OGL, etc.

The OGL 1.1 was met with huge community backlash, and wotc has been fumbling for some time to figure out the next steps. It looks like they are taking those steps now.

* Aside, it's not clear that the rules of D&D are even something that can be licensed in this way, as game mechanics are not protected the same way as copyrightable characters are.

When you don't spend the time and money on preventative care as a society, you end up spending much, much more on emergency care. I feel like this has been quantitatively demonstrated again and again, but it's somehow still a political football.

People are saying 'ventilate'. Makes sense. I've got a resin printer in a large room with a crossbreeze, but I'd like to put in some more forced ventilation. Is there a quick thing I can buy that's got a small hood, inline fan, and waste vent? Or do I need to cobble something together myself out of flexible tubing?

Is a portable hepa filter sufficient? I don't even know what to look for.

I'm not an expert, but my understanding is that the normal levels of inhibitions and reading social cues aren't present in many stalking cases. There is a belief that if they are just persistent enough, their target will see their attempts as affection and fall head over heals for them.

Fundamentally, I believe we need to do more for people like this. Safety nets and mental health and, if needed, in patient care. Would this have happened if the person had access to excellent therapy, medication, and support? Maybe, maybe not, but I would like to think that it would happen a whole lot less.

I object specifically to this:

Saying "there's no way to avoid the bias" is just an excuse to get away with being biased

And specifically to the implied idea that there is an unbiased target that is achievable.

If you set this expectation up front, and explain the premise, this rules. If you simply present problems to students without this caveat, you are being needlessly cruel.

It seems like the author found a good approach.

Banning this is the right move for the wrong reasons, imo. TikTok (and Youtube shorts) are both terribly addictive and we should make sure we understand their impacts on developing (and developed) minds before just opening the floodgates to them.

The goal is to be as unbiased as possible given that limited amount of effort.

So you are therefore biased. You have a finite set of resources, and you are choosing to allocate them in a particular way. That is bias.

You could equally choose to allocate those resources away from the majority, which would also be bias. Any time a human is making an editorial decision about how to allocate resources, you are introducing bias.

The approach you describe has the problem that it's asking majority people about the experiences of minority folks -- for instance, if you ask a statistically significant sample of the population about what it is like to be a trans man, you are going to either a) have to spend a TON of effort to interview a trans masc population, or b) going to be asking a bunch of people who have no idea what it is like.

And it gets worse. For instance, trans men have a totally different experience in rural vs coastal America vs Europe vs Africa. To get an AI who can speak confidently on what it is like to be trans male in those places will require even more interviews.

An that's before we get into set intersection territory. Take a simple example of being gay or straight, Black or white. Each of them is separately a unique experience. But being gay and white in America is very different from being gay and Black in America -- the two identities create 4 different intersections.

Now, you could say, "My AI simply will not speak about the experience of gay Black men, and the challenges/perspectives from that community", but then you've introduced a bias.

You could say, "Well, we'll go out and interview people from every set then, make sure we're covering everyone!" But where then do you stop sampling? Each additional modifier adds exponential complexity -- gay Black men from New Orleans will have a different experience from gay Black men from Lagos.

You cannot describe a procedure that collects a representative sample without introducing bias. What does representative mean? Who decides what it means? Who gets to set the parameters of over vs under sampling?

Let's say that white nationalism is a tiny fraction of ideas online. Significantly less than 0.1%. Now, you randomly sample the internet and do not collect this idea into your training set. Do you adjust your approach to make sure it's represented (because as reprehensible as it is, it is the reality of online discourse in some places?)

I genuinely believe that it's all going to be biased -- there are no unbiased news or media outlets -- and the sooner you recognize everything is biased, the sooner you can move on to building the tools to recognize and understand that bias.

Asking "why can't we strive to build an unbiased outlet" is to me like asking "why can't we build a ladder to the moon". It's an interesting question, but ultimately should lead you to "Well, why do you want that, and your approach is impossible but the outcome you want might not be."

I was asserting that the parent comment was misremembering, misquoting, or mistaken. There are no claims that "Matrix multiplication is racist". There are claims regarding multiplication tables.

So the parent probably meant "Multiplication tables are racist!". Which, again, is a reduction/strawman.

The pattern is the point. I don't think people are going to catch on because it's fun for them to ride the wave. If the man on the tv tells me M&Ms are not sexy anymore and that's bad, I have a week of outrage over it before he tells me gas stoves are good.

Those outside of that loop see it as obvious, but when you are in it, it's real hard to get to the surface.

So it should be allowed to implicitly trained to favor one political view over another?

There's no way to avoid the bias, whether it's because you chose a different training set, reinforced different pathways, or put blocks in place on certain topics.

I'd rather the authors be explicit in where they are putting their fingers on the scales rather than just relying on "Guess we got lucky".

I believe the general claim is that multiplication tables, and more specifically, the manner in which they are taught could disadvantage particular communities.

Culturally, not every community handles rote memorization the same. There's been a desire to change the way multiplication is taught, and a strong pushback from a certain set that say, "Well, I learned multiplication tables, what's wrong with them?"

Most (good) math curriculum in elementary age now teaches many different techniques for performing the same operation. Sums, for instance, are taught in the traditional way (add the ones column, then carryover to the tens column, etc.) but they are also taught in other ways, e.g. (borrow to get to the nearest tens, add the tens together, return what you borrowed).

Kids then have a variety of approaches, must still show their work, but can use the technique that makes the most intuitive sense to them.

Like many things that get demonized online, or reduce to the absurd, there's a really interesting and systemic change happening if you take the time to understand the reasoning.