roflc0ptic

Fair point, though I think “did I accurately summarize a conversation” is much harder to check/get away with vs “did I piss off the person on the other end”

I’m inclined to believe that call center employees don’t have a lot of incentive to do a good job/care, so a lossy AI could quite plausibly be higher quality than a human

Pretty sure this is out of date now

The claim here is that the tech innovation is occurring in the US. It adds value globally, but most of the profits from that value are being realized in the US b/c the innovation is by US companies.

There’s no natural law that says technical innovation must occur in NA, but due to contingent historical conditions, it is occurring here. Thus, the gains are being realized in the US stock market b/c it’s the one capitalizing the winners.

I work with a bunch of functional programmers. We went through most of “category theory for programmers.” We had support from a math PhD.

Broad consensus was it was a waste of time. Functional programming has taken the useful bits, and some of the less useful bits. The rest is arcanum, and as useful to programming as astronomy

Yeah the subject of my sentence was unclear. I was responding to the comment about IO in particular.

(Tries to fight the urge to explain, fails) it’s a construct to sequence async interactions, one after the other, without blocking. It’s very similar to c# or python’s await

The simple answer here is that the boards actions stood to incinerate millions of dollars of wealth for most of these employees, and they were up in arms.

They’re all acting out the intended incentives of giving people stake in a company: please don’t destroy it.

https://web.archive.org/web/20231112101006/https://www.nytim...

Kudos to Krystal for trying this out. As I've been working on a globally distributed team lately, I've been reflecting that while I only get 4-6 good hours of programming in a day, the value of everyone working the same 8 hours is really about being able to coordinate.

Support's a different beast, though.

I shared this understanding. I'd be curious to hear where GP's understanding differs.

yeah, definitely. "Drugs are bad, actually" is decidedly an over simplification. For the record my drugs of choice are SSRIs, caffeine, and mushrooms.

Full agree with everything you're saying here. The less oversimplified realization I had: In the pros/cons of "Should drugs be fully legalized?" I was counting only the negative aspects of making drugs illegal, not the negative aspects of legalization. I expect others make this error too, so "drugs are bad, actually" is intended as a pithy corrective, less a broad ethical directive.

The specific causes of this realization: the accruing evidence of the downsides of THC, and the easy access of teenagers to extremely potent weed. The ditch weed I bought from Curtis behind The Globe coffee shop in high school simply had less potential for harm.

we should probably come up with better terminology that correctly reflects addiction potential and intrinsic and extrinsic damage

Full agree. Really there are complex policy trade offs here. I don't pretend to know optimal solutions, and agree that arriving at optimal solutions is unlikely via an extremely polarized discourse.

I used to share a similar position until I realized: drugs are bad, actually, and there should be substantial friction in making them available to people.

Disincentivizing drug consumption is a good thing. The war on drugs obviously leads to some absurdities - e.g. drug cartels, unnecessary incarceration - and I much prefer the Portuguese model.

But making fentanyl in particular available in the grocery store would be bad; some substantial number of people would die who wouldn't have died otherwise. Some substantial number of people who would never have tried fentanyl would give it a try.

Some sensible balance needs to be struck between a free society and preventing people from e.g. leaving live landmines in their parking lots. Doing things which inevitably kill people/mess up their lives without active violence is still bad, and should be heavily discouraged.

well, that's pretty damning. I got irritated and stopped reading, shame on me.

That makes sense - I certainly see how “I’m doing this for your own good” opens up a bit of moral hazard.

Fashioning himself as a cultural preservationist rather than an opportunistic pilferer, Latchford knowingly purchased looted statues and stones from ancient sites of worship

Honestly, I think buying and selling looted artifacts from the Khmer Rouge regime seems at least morally neutral.

Year Zero (Khmer: ឆ្នាំសូន្យ, Chhnăm Sony [cʰnam soːn]) is an idea put into practice by Pol Pot in Democratic Kampuchea that all culture and traditions within a society must be completely destroyed or discarded and that a new revolutionary culture must replace it starting from scratch

The article really doesn't give a good explanation of why Latchford's actions are bad in context.

It’s remarkable how much sympathetic pain the phrase “stepping on a Lego at night” causes

Therapists aren't supposed to use you for steady income. From a good therapist's perspective, if their clients continue to need therapy, they're failing.

I believe you! I just don't understand what you meant, then.

"right" and "wrong" are normative statements: quite literally they're statements about how things should be. IMO it's a reasonable read of your comment

That’s a perspective I haven’t heard; I’ve generally heard the opposite. Would love to hear more about that - any reading recommendations?

their decisions have huge penalty for incorrectly saying "yes" but zero penalty for incorrectly saying "no".

The FDA acting out this incentive scheme _is_ the problem.

The issue is the opportunity cost: "I default to no, because while that may cost millions of lives, I don't incur responsibility for their deaths."

The incentives should change to "I am responsible to take informed risks to maximize the wellbeing of the population." There is a literal death toll from their inaction, and it doesn't get counted in the equation. It's possible to design a system that takes that into account; that's what's being argued for.

Not in the face of such overwhelming evidence; it’s literally their job to make sure things are effective. It turns out medical studies are weaker evidence than anyone would like, but here there was quite compelling evidence that it was useless!

No. There was a drug released that targeted that pathway, but the approval in and of itself was a scandal - I spoke with a pharmacist last night who said people at her hospital were disgusted by the FDA’s decision. It was removed from the market two weeks later. There was basically no evidence of efficacy.

Idk man my public elementary school gifted peers all went on to be pretty successful - head dramaturge at a Broadway playhouse, doctors, poker champion, etc. I manage software developers at a dev shop with a bunch of ivy and prestigious euro university grads.

Some people are smarter than other people, and being smart gives you myriad advantages in navigating the world. This seems pretty uncontroversial.

Take a long tube with an osmotic filter on it. Put it in the sea with one end out. Pressure is going to fill the tube up, no, just like a snorkel? Probably back up to sea level, possibly minus whatever force reduction caused by the filter? Boom, water filtration with no expenditure of energy.

It may be wrong but it really isn't "obviously delusional."

the math checks out

Do you think I would disagree?

Why should being born Asian so drastically negatively affect your ability to get into an elite college? It’s discrimination.

They did the same thing with Jews - they introduced standardized testing, found that too many Jews were making it into Harvard, and then added other requirements so they could reject them.

For some of us who want a not-systemically-racist society, this seems like a travesty

I like the humility