humanistbot

All software and copyright licenses are ideological documents. You don't see the ideology in BSD and MIT because it is your preferred ideology.

They don't want to comply with the GDPR or other EU laws.

Over a two year period in the US, there were over 600 cases where police officers and civilians with access to law enforcement databases violated internal policies and safeguards to access private data about "romantic partners, business associates, neighbors, journalists and others for reasons that have nothing to do with daily police work". This is certainly an undercount, as this is just who got caught and the department didn't cover it up. These are the cases they admitted to doing it and were charged, so the records are public.

"Among those punished: an Ohio officer who pleaded guilty to stalking an ex-girlfriend and who looked up information on her; a Michigan officer who looked up home addresses of women he found attractive; and two Miami-Dade officers who ran checks on a journalist after he aired unflattering stories about the department."

https://apnews.com/general-news-699236946e3140659fff8a2362e1...

I'm an American and the best I could answer for that is "on the baseball field." I know it is a baseball position. Many other countries play baseball too. (Looked it up, oh I remember now, but wouldn't have been able to answer on demand.)

Wikipedia tells me "baseball is considered the most popular sport in parts of Central and South America, the Caribbean, and East Asia, particularly in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. "

I don't think there is such a shibboleth with both good precision and recall. American culture is exported around the world, but also is no longer a monoculture with only 3 broadcast networks. Any shibboleth that is ubiquitous enough in the US will be exported globally. Any part of US culture that is not global probably isn't as universal in the US.

Even basic US civics (which would be known by more educated people globally) is far from universal: Only 77% of Americans can link the first amendment to freedom of speech and only 83% can name even one of the three branches of the federal government. And that's of the population of Americans who agree to take a university run political knowledge survey (https://www.annenbergpublicpolicycenter.org/political-commun...)

The Kia Soul and other Kia models can be hotwired in 30 seconds by popping off a plastic panel housing the ignition, inserting something with the dimensions of a USB A male plug, and turning it like a key. It is a huge trend on TikTok for the "Kia Boys" to steal Kias and go joyriding. My insurance company stopped insuring Kias in my area and cities and states are suing Kia over the rampant theft problem caused by bad design.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/cars/2023/01/30/kia-hyu...

The pi4 is powerful enough to drive multiple 4k displays while doing face detection from a camera.

Mostly agreed, but "sitting idle most of the time" isn't quite the right metric. The question is if it can handle the peak loads. And a pi zero can run pihole and a rain gauge.

I don't plan to upgrade my rpi4 running homeassistant, a Plex video streaming server, a tailscale VPN exit node, and a few other minor services.

Plex on the rpi4 can't keep up transcoding 4k video to 1080p, maybe the rpi5 can, but I don't personally need that. Many Plex users do need 4k transcoding though.

Also, I have tried to use the pi4 as a desktop replacement, and I just found it too slow for the modern bloated world of webapps. All the little things just added up to too much and I gave up. The pi5 might be good enough though, but with all the peripherals and pains of arm64, a used old laptop is still probably better on the price/performance ratio.

Let's get the actual numbers in this discussion:

Someone making $85,000 a year would pay an extra $170. A worker making $200,000 would see an increase of roughly $822 next year.

But who wants to listen to a computer copy of someone else's voice? No one.

I think you underestimate the cultural desire and pressure for a perfect presentation of one's self. It started out with mass marketing, where every advertisement and authorized photos of celebrities published in the last 50 years are in some way retouched, cleaned up, photoshopped. This cancer spread to social media and metastisized it with filters. Now Zoom by default smooths my patchy face. The next logical step is basically VTube but with your own face instead of an avatar. Conventionally attractive people have huge advantages, after all. If it starts to be normal, then those who don't will be disadvantaged. Maybe family calls are different, but in professional settings where you're trying to influence others, it's an advantage.

Salesforce uses the same lean product development concepts that we espouse here. They test messages and products and then make R&D investment based on real customer demand.

The crucial difference is being honest to your customers that this is your process, versus trying to hide it so that only your most savvy long-term customers know it's a mirage.

Everything in archives pre-2021 is still untainted. All major social media, Q&A, code repos, and archive.org are timestamped. It taints future collection of training data, but not existing collection of training data.

If you're not interested in random and creative acts of programming, I think you're on the wrong discussion site.

This is for fun. It takes todays headlines and rewrites them. Like I could tell that the "The Mars State Fair Sees Many Galactic Party Candidates but Only One Zorgon" was a rewrite of "The Iowa State Fair Sees Many Republican Party Candidates but Only One Trump".

It retells the present in a future context. I enjoyed it.

Can you please explain why? I care about privacy and security, and this trend seems like we're going backwards. If something needs network access, web apps make sense. But I liked offline tools better when we called them "programs". Web apps to me seem like they turn the web browser into an operating system. I already have an OS.

Your reply shows that you've never had to do this yourself. It's a lot more complicated than that.

So this is some kind of attempt to make a Drake Equation [1] for AGI? That's more useful as a thought experiment than something claimed with scientific precision.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation

Generally teenage parents won't have very high income, but in the UK this wouldn't be an issue. One of the primary reasons women in my family have kids young is for the financial security. Here in the UK having kids is one of the best paths to moving out of your parents home in your 20s if you're from a working class background.

I'm in the US, where this kind of statement literally baffles my mind, because the opposite is true. In the US, having children is a financial liability and burden. Even for the poorest unemployed single mothers who do qualify for government benefits, it's a net financial loss to have a child. Our food assistance programs are pathetic and the shame of the developed world. Childcare is unaffordable even for entry-level tech workers these days. Students who have a child during high/secondary school graduate at 10% of the rate of those who don't.

I guess could someone just give a good argument against teenage pregnancy? Ideally one argument that doesn't rely on your subjective values about what a fulfilling life involves?

Any question about the role of government (especially around family planning) ultimately is a question about what it means to have a society that supports living the good life. So for millennia, we have been arguing about what the good life is. A good answer to your question must recognize that in a society, we have to come to a consensus around subjective values about what a fulfilling live involves, in order to make rational decisions about how to further those agreed-upon ends.

If you try using an 'objective' metric to avoid making decisions based on subjective values, then you're just not noticing the subjective values that are correlated with using that metric over others. The school graduation stat I cited earlier has a value built in: it assumes that all other things equal, it is a bad thing for students to not complete secondary school, because it gives the foundation to be a good member of a good society.

My interpretation is that it gives a false sense of how difficult it actually is to raise a baby.

First, they only had the students care for the simulated baby for five days, and 'childcare' was provided for free during their school day (they had to turn it off during the school day). Five days is not long enough for the novelty to wear off and the day-to-day reality to kick in.

Second, the dolls are not a good simulation of what it is actually like to care for a baby. It's a step up from a tamagotchi. Changing a diaper on a real baby is nothing like changing a diaper on one of these dolls. Real babies scream and cry much louder, and often don't stop even if you do everything right.

Their methodology/protocol paper for the study is open access: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2987778/

tl;dr: Students at schools in both the control and intervention groups took the standard required health class, which includes traditional sex ed. Students at schools in the intervention group had to opt in to the baby simulator. It wasn't a regular class and was independent of the required health class, but it did take place at the school. It was one week, 40 minutes a day to learn about the baby simulator and a few other basics. Students at schools in the intervention group only cared for the baby for 64 hours: 4 days x 16 hours. 'Free childcare' was mandated for the 8 hours they were at school, as they were turned off during the school day.

No thank you. That's not a unique benefit of the patent system, that's a minor ancillary benefit that has already been replicated elsewhere. The patent office doesn't have a patent on historical records of so-called inventions.

And the patent process is not optimized to produce documents that actually help other inventors or future historians. In fact, to the contrary, as it exists within a particular narrow legal IP regime that optimizes around legal risk. This is especially the case with software patents, where the patent office incentivizes patents that use convoluted language to make an obvious process seem like a novel invention.

In other words, let's assume a future where there are no more copies of Zelda to play. If you had to choose between getting to preserve the patent on the Zelda loading screen and an actual recording of it, I'll take the recording every time. Or in a future where much of the knowledge of computer science and programming was lost, I'd rather have an archive of a set of textbooks, Stack Overflow, and Github than the entirety of the patent office's software patent documents.

Arlington is to DC as Oakland is to SF: they're not interchangeable, but they've become substitutable for many in the region.

1) I am a niche small business - how do I let people know that I exist? 2) I run a website and would like to monetize it - how can I get paid for the content that I produce?

You don't have a right to violate my privacy in exchange for this.

As someone whose first language was BASIC, which led me down a path that eventually culminated in a CS Ph.D, I have also not been a fan of that quote.

It implies that Dijkstra was a terrible educator who could only truly teach blank minds. For all his imagination and creativity on theoretical CS and math, he was very rigid in other ways. Imagine a history professor saying that students who have been exposed to various myths and ideologies are mentally mutilated beyond hope, or a literature professor saying that students who have been exposed to pop culture retellings of the classics are mentally mutilated beyond hope.

Remember that Dijkstra looked down on anyone who wrote using word processors, because he thought any academic should be able to work out their argument in their head and just write it down. Eventually he came to even reject the mechanical typewriter.

What's the best open source software stack that can turn a bunch of internet-connected devices (like Pis) with audio devices into a single home audio device available via Chromecast / Miracast / DLNA?

From sentence one of the post, it clearly states that they are VC funders who are doing this for a round of startups they just funded, and they're looking for others to be a part of it.

Won’t see that in todays media. That’s the generation I grew up in.

Oh come off it. Sex still sells. Sexualized ads are still around, and they're always controversial. They were controversial in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, and they're controversial today. If there was one thing Tipper Gore and Laura Bush agreed on during the 1990s, it was that media was too sexual and violent.

This reads like the author has just taken their first intro to political philosophy class.

If King Arthur actually existed in the 5th-7th century (the tales are from the 9th-12th century) you wouldn't be able to understand him at all. You probably wouldn't even be able to understand the Old English of the 12th century tales either.

Hola has a much longer history, to 5th-7th century, per https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/hola

Spanish: This is related to greetings in Germanic cognates such as Dutch hola, Old High German holā, emphatic imperative of Old High German holōn (“to fetch, used especially in hailing a ferryman”)

Dutch: From Late Middle Dutch hola (“wait up!, hold on!, calm down!”), which also had the dialectal form holla; compare Middle Low German hola!, holda! (interjection), Middle High German holā! (interjection), of obscure origin. Possibly from the imperative of Middle Dutch halen, *holen (“to fetch”) (> dialectal holen), or possibly from Old French holà (“hey!”), from ho (“hold!, halt!, stop!”) + là (“there”).

The moment I read the headline, I was expecting to find a bunch of low-effort comments that don't engage with the article, which actually speaks directly to this issue. Congrats.

Yes, all psychics can be seen as committing a kind of fraud, but most stay in their unfalsifiable lane. This psychic used the mail to advertise health services. They didn't just claim to predict the future or sending good energy into the universe, which you can still legally charge for. They claimed to be able to cure diseases in exchange for a fee, which is fraud, and they did it over the mail. But then they rebutted that they were basically selling the placebo effect, which is kind of real... it makes for a much more interesting case than your comment makes it seem.

You cite LTL / J&J like they got away with it. It's currently being litigated in multiple courts, it could go either way: https://money.usnews.com/investing/news/articles/2023-06-27/...

If AI can replicate linguistic patterns in a way that is undetectable for both humans and models, then it seems even easier for a ML model to emulate a natural typing style, rhythm, and cadence in a way that is undetectable for both humans and models.

But you know who has more real-world data on typing style? Google, Microsoft, Meta, and everyone else who runs SaaS docs, emails, or messaging. I imagine a lot of students write their essays on Google Docs, Word, or the like, and submit them as attachments or copy-paste into a textbox.