int3

the difference is that one of them is actually justified!

well, maybe we can spend some of the money we save not subsidizing the third world on better border security

oh so that's what my elementary school classmate had

The car is following a process chosen by Mercedes' engineers (to go forward when the user presses the accelerator.) The newsfeed is likewise following a mechanistic process driven by user input (they wouldn't be showing misinformation if users weren't uploading and sharing them.)

Does the algorithm "decide" to show something, or is it operating mechanically, driven by the inputs of the user?

people can do things for more than one reason

Shouldn't all sites have some kind of bandwidth / cost limiting in place? Not to say that AI crawlers shouldn't be more careful, but there are always malicious actors on the internet, seems foolish not to have some kind of defense in place

Nope. Assume you have insurance with a one-time fee of $X. It insures against a single kind of event that happens with 60% probability, and pays out $1.6X. So the majority of people are likely to have the event happen to them. The EV of the cost to the insurer is then $1.6X * 0.6 = $0.96X, so the books are expected to balance.

Obviously I'm ignoring variance in this calculation, but you can easily adjust the numbers to give a margin of safety.

People can develop allergies during their lifetime, it's not just something that you're born with.

Sure, but the likelihood of that is low enough that insuring against that isn't worth it for most people

But my message was about the general principle of insurance being the very thing your comment was against. The situation where the vast majority of people pay some cost of which only a few need to utilise.

No, the principle of insurance is that people pay to hedge against some event that has a reasonable likelihood of happening to them at some point. Whether it's a majority or a minority paying for it is not central to the concept of insurance.

People generally don't develop allergies randomly in life. There's no insurance value here.

I think one difference is that there isn't a great alternative option in the case of commercial buildings -- if you have a job in a given building that doesn't accommodate your disability, you can't just go find a different building. But insofar as food is concerned, you could pay more for more carefully-manufactured food, or just cook for yourself

unironically. would love to have those berkeley lectures back online

whether it is smart or not depends on the likelihood of it. do you have numbers?

even if it were 10%, we shouldn't expect 90% of consumers to subsidize the other 10%

oh please, there are plenty of first world countries without as many retarded regulations

seems like crackers could just patch the app code that detects this, no?

Increased precision typically costs more economically, so I think it's a pretty good analogy... precise physical measurements require specialized equipment, precise floating-point calculations require more computational power, etc

Housing would depreciate too if we didn't have artificial scarcity policies designed to make it an investment. Saying that housing should be an investment because we've designed it to be an investment is circular reasoning.

Re #2: it's obvious that most people aren't the most objective when it comes to their offspring. That's why we should have policies that discourage overallocating resources to an unqualified child of a rich parent.

Finally, "personal property" is a construct of law. Something is yours because society has decided it's yours. If the laws change, and if you can't physically defend your property, then it's not really yours any more, is it?

Uh, none of that means housing has to be an investment. The point of a mortgage is that it helps you buy a house and pay it off over time, nothing more. We don't talk about cars being an investment just because people take out 7-year auto loans.

Moreover, passing on generational wealth shouldn't be a feature we want to make easier. You don't want a to push society in the direction where generational wealth is required to live a good life.

software does all of the above

The fact that they won't use AGPL software isn't propaganda lol. They literally won't use it. You may disagree about whether that's good or bad for the ecosystem, but it's a fact that most serous internet-based companies (and what tech co isn't these days?) won't touch it.

eh, Taiwan is a functional democracy and yet it has had parliamentary brawls too

While you're not wrong I want to point out that you generally don't get the opportunities to practice staff-like skills until you've proven you can do the 'boring' work too. The system does incentivize performative leadership, but only for a relatively short amount of time in your career, so I don't think this is a huge deal.

This is just a standard FAANG package lol. The gaming industry just pays devs poorly

The fact that there isn't a causal relationship from wealth to biological superiority is the cause of so many of our problems! Imagine if all the people who got positions via nepotism were actually good at their jobs...

It was a great experience! Thanks for your code reviews and mentorship :)

Not sure I'll have much time to work on OSS in the foreseeable future, but it would certainly be nice to work together again.

Vimium was my introduction to software engineering :) I contributed a bunch of code to it back in 2011-2012. Glad to see it still being in use!

I'm quite proud of the little test I wrote to figure out which DOM APIs could be used to detect the visibility of different kinds of elements, in order that we could display link hints correctly: https://github.com/philc/vimium/blob/master/test_harnesses/v...

Relevant paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2202.01142.pdf

I'm skeptical that most people's short-term memory is queue-like. More likely that they are better at remembering earlier stack entries, or that they are simply less neurotic when forgetting about them.

Thanks for the answers! And the push vs pull link is a great explanation indeed :)