xp84

There isn’t all that much actual first-party code in these apps, but if they made a “Hello World” but kept the same third party library deps, they’d be starting at 300MB, and once they add all the visual assets that’s another 200MB… I have a ton of apps on my phone that are absurdly large. Like Gmail is 706MB. The Gmail app for iPhone could not fit on a CD-ROM. A plain mail client. Compared to that, Facebook at 461MB is looking quite slim.

Overcast is 37MB.

I really feel this comment. The most tragic part to me is that these older type of organizations, I’d actually argue would be great for what people like me would benefit from. People are so isolated and lonely and “third places” are known to be a good thing for basically everyone. And it’s not like I couldn’t, with some effort, attend a few events and probably make a few acquaintances to get sponsored to join one. But the age chasm that’s already happened means most of the people down there are in their 60s at the youngest which makes me as a younger (than that) person feel nervous that these guys might not feel they have a lot to talk about with me (or even that I don’t belong). And with membership being so static, a new member would find themselves the only ones who hasn’t known everyone in the room for 30 years. Of note, a similar phenomenon can be seen in early Internet communities: a coupon years ago I paid to join The WELL just to see what it was like. It was interesting from an Internet Archaeology point of view, but most of the people there are older Gen Xers or boomers. Basically no millennial ever joined The WELL, because the Internet had moved on before we got online. The community has only shrunk from attrition, so everyone there has known the other members since the 90s.

Not quite sure what you mean. Is it that fare dodging is fine because the taxpayers at large already pick up most of the tab? Or that fare dodging is worse than you’d think because it makes an already quite expensive thing for the public budget, even more expensive?

I’m thinking about BART right now, which really might simply go away altogether due in part to the collapse in fare revenue that remote work triggered. BART didn’t have nearly as bad as Seattle’s fare ratio though - pre-COVID, fares and parking covered 66% of the operating costs. (Source https://www.bart.gov/sites/default/files/docs/BART%20FY23-32... ) This was apparently the best or one of the best of its peers. It was 28% last year, just due to the fare revenue basically halving.

When reading the headline I was thinking we were talking about evaluating things like whether a nurse asked the right questions of the patient from a best practices point of view (say you have <insert condition> and the best practices for that are to ask the patient about pain level and which side it's coming from and check in with them every X hours).

But evaluating tone and empathy? Great, now every nurse is gonna be wasting their time and energy making sure to recite the best canned, optimized text-adventure incantations for the KPI every time they enter the room instead of using their brains to see what the patient actually needs.

"Hello Mr. Smith our patients are our top priority at Kaiser and your nursing staff here at Kaiser Raccoon City are here to make sure you are cared for, comfortable, and safe. If you have any concerns or are feeling anxiety be sure to press the nurse button and we will be happy to assist you, we appreciate the trust you place in us and are eager to celebrate your recovery with you." < nurse now realizes Mr. Smith has been choking and losing consciousness while she was reciting that spiel >

This is an interesting point here. Due to having infinite money already, that's a possible dynamic we might see. OAI admits "Yup, obviously you got us. Let's write a check." And Apple might just respond "Nah, we are obviously going to win at trial, the legal fees don't bother us a bit, and honestly we don't really need the money, we'd rather destroy you as heavily as possible, for some combination of making an example out of all the criminals involved, plus there's a tiny chance you could threaten us someday considering you hired 'our boy' Jony Ive to build hardware."

Weird take. With as much evidence as they have (unless they're just wildly fabricating everything in their lawsuit complaint, which... really? All Apple's lawyers are just making up claims in court documents? Sounds very career-ending, why would the lawyers do that?) they would be complete idiots not to sue.

It's the Apple Watch Edition of cars.

Somehow I highly doubt anyone will leave AWS over this unless their use of AWS is way more low-complexity than the average account.

People make similar pronouncements after every us-east-1 outage makes the news, but I feel like AWS would be going out of business by now if people followed through.

It reminds me of airlines, where after a particularly grueling irregular ops experience, a few dozen people file off the plane swearing "Never again, <airline name>!" but really, we all must know deep down that the airlines are all subject to the same external inciting factors, internal profit motivations, and human imperfection, and thus all pretty equally likely to cause us a bad day or ruined trip. The effort spent to avoid one isn't really worth it.

"Have you considered using Reserved Instances? You could save up to 2 trillion dollars next month. Book a call with your AWS rep."

Interesting. And hard to square with my perception of banks as completely mercenary and ruthless. I had a decade-long personal boycott (I know, LOL) of Amex after they, because, with otherwise perfect credit, I forgot about a $30 department-store card bill and got a 30-day-late mark on my report, Amex got spooked and abruptly closed both my never-late accounts with them (which were at or close to 0 balances). This was around 2008 though, so perhaps this was a genius algorithm designed to try and detect the very first whiff of consumer defaults, so they assumed that $30 was the first domino to fall of my personal financial ruin that could lead to me charging my accounts to the max and then going bankrupt.

(I eventually admitted to myself that Amex isn't a person and thus not really capable of insulting my honor, but it took a while!)

Next question we'll find out is what if you owe the bank $1.7 trillion?

Relevant to this, I've recently noticed a trend of mass tort cases being opened up in the past couple years, and they seem to do very well. The way these seem to work is attorneys identify a company who has clearly ripped people off, and what I presume is a repeatable way to guarantee a win (thus translating to a guaranteed settlement offer). Then they advertise for eligible clients, sign those clients individually to contingency agreements, and run the playbook. A couple months ago after signing up for one of these, I received a check for about $350 (after the agreed-upon 40% attorney fee), from Ticketmaster, and I had another one related to AT&T. It took about 10 minutes more effort from me than a typical class-action settlement, because I had to e-sign those representation papers.

So really, there's a third option now, that's much easier than class action, even when class actions don't get certified.

You make a pretty fair point there. It would have been better to announce a timeline even if it's like a year. If nobody wants else to help, at least we would have forced our allies and enemies to all go on the record that they won't.

The people at risk witout the aid, though, are more comparable to a drug-addicted teenager who has criminally negligent parents than a truly-disabled grandma. Hopefully we can save a little bit of the blame for those local kleptocrats, who have been absorbing aid from all available sources and failing to properly govern since the creation of most of these countries. (Yes, I agree with you that our current iteration of government are mostly kleptocrats themselves).

child-safety hash scanning

Suddenly I'm reminded of an old baby picture in an album somewhere, of me not wearing any clothes. If the other kind of "safety" scanning[1] is done, it might be possible to get arrested for a photograph of myself.

A story came out a few months ago about a guy who had a photo of his toddler's rash-affected groin area (taken at the doctor's behest) who had some essential account (Google?) permabanned because of it.

Love this! A few similar GUI apps have been mentioned for Windows. For Mac, I've been using GrandPerspective for probably 15 years. This is one of my favorite class of programs in terms of how uniquely useful they are.

A pity we can't use something like this (and actually take action on the results) on closed systems like iOS (I've just had to factory reset my iphone to rein in a 37GB "system data" mess... even on the newly restored phone that consumes 15GB but at least that's better).

So does that mean our social/political/economic system (culture) is a failure

Post-2005 or so culture? I'd say probably... yes? Though it's far from an American thing, most of the issues I'm concerned with are worse in Europe.

The failures are:

1. Nihilism and hedonism as a substitute for moral values

- This is what signals to young people (even including many millennials) that life has no particular meaning so do whatever feels good, rather than seeing yourself as having a responsibility to raise the next generation of people, to do good things and to live good lives. Note that we're equally a failure here in a Star Trek Humanist lens or a religious moral lens.

2. Militarized gender war

- Driven by visual social media and as an immune overreaction to the real sins of past generations, men and women have normalized hating the opposite sex. For women the "Man or the bear" meme really sums it up. For men, it's exemplified by many men having zero interest in even being with women. This is mainly driven by this graph [1] - the "bottom 80%" of men in 'attractiveness,' when they realize that women judge them as a "4" or under, feel the game is unwinnable so they simply drop out. Women compete for the tiny population of "high value men," who don't value them (and won't even settle down) because they have too many options, and grow more and more frustrated.

3. Economic disorder

- In the pursuit of a virtuous cause -- allowing women to have career ambitions -- we've accidentally built a world where both parents have to work to compete with other families for scarce necessities like housing, but even having two working adults doesn't magically give most families enough resources to pay for proper childcare. Women are put in an impossible situation: Staying home to care for kids is seen as basically degrading among other women and it puts the family in a financial disadvantage, but working means both parents are stretched to find enough time to care for children, and that the children will probably suffer from the lack of your time and attention. You can't win.

4. Militarized culture war

- In every Western country we have elites who identify as "left" with a set of values that sees their political "enemies" as despicable scum, and an opposite group of mostly less educated and less wealthy people that identifies as "right" that feels the same way about the left. (Amusingly the "Left" usually claims to be For The Common Man, but that's fair-ish since all the less famous billionaires are indeed card-carrying conservatives.) They've both polarized so much that it's impossible to see how we can have a government run by either faction that isn't considered evil and fascist, or even outright illegitimate, by the other side.

5. Everything to do with social media, of course, and the worst uses of AI. (Needs no explanation I assume)

So yes, Western culture has dramatically failed. I'm trying to advocate that we improve it rather than commit cultural suicide, which is the current plan we're on.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/1alibge/oc...

But if we never had, those deaths would have been happening that whole time, wouldn't they?

Unless you're saying that the aid being there in the first place was actively discouraging any self-sufficiency by the sovereign governments who are actually responsible for those areas... in which case I can see why some people (both in the West and the developing world) oppose foreign aid in the first place. Even if we passed the baton around to other countries, the band-aid will still have to be ripped off at some point.

I'm actually not anti-foreign-aid entirely, I think in addition to the humanitarian benefits which I do value, when done well it helps project soft power, giving normal people a concrete counterpoint when extremists like Islamists try to claim "America is an evil empire that hates you and wants you to die." So in that way I don't endorse eliminating USAID... I admit that mainly it was a circus trick to try to hand supporters a concrete W for the vibe of "America First" and/or "Saving Money"

What's funny is that due in part to minimum wage laws (which caused some of the inflation) the lowest quintile is arguably the one who's kept up with inflation better than the rest, meaning there has been an improvement in the wealth inequality department. But nobody talks about it. Meanwhile I've lost like 20% of my buying power to inflation in the past 3-4 years even taking the meager raises into account.

Boy, do I miss the amount of diversity and innovation we used to have in cell phones. I remember having this phone [1] which put the camera on a little rotating thing so you could use the same one for front or back facing - obviously this either saves money or means they have twice the budget for the cameras as if they had two.

Obviously these cameras themselves were potato cameras compared to modern ones, but this design was still a great innovation and unique. We rarely get many design ideas that are that different today, as everyone mainly just wants to look like an iPhone, and Apple for its part only sits around obsessing on how they can make the iPhone's form more and more featureless and pure.

https://www.mobilecollectors.net/phone/6666/lg-vx-7000

Wait, you think not giving additional aid = responsibility for whatever happens in the developing country? Does this blame go for the rest of the year, decade, or century?

Does giving aid in the first place automatically trigger this? If I gave $500 to kids cancer research every year for 5 years, and then I don't give this year, do I have blood on my hands every time a kid dies of cancer from now on? And if you didn't ever donate, you don't?

How does this work?

Trump is objectively terrible, corrupt, and feeble-minded, but the lack of self-awareness on the other side is darker. For your platform to be so bad, so out of touch, that you lose to that? And the DNC takeaway was "No, we were perfect - it's the voters who are wrong."[1] I'd rather have one terrible president than support a party that doesn't even believe democracy should exist when it disagrees with them.

[1] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/am-i-so-out-of-touch

The Amish have tons of kids and are one of the fastest growing groups you could think of. It's because of this high birth rate that they're easily able to care for their elders, even though they are IIRC legally allowed to opt out of Social Security.

Having a very inverted population pyramid, where the old vastly outnumber the working age, and the working age outnumber the children, isn't something that would be a minor inconvenience. Our economic system will collapse because it takes a lot of people creating value to pay for the needs of the elderly (remember, there isn't some big trust fund set aside for them -- it's only through the wages of the currently-working that we can pay the benefits for them, and if I'm not mistaken, public pensions in other Western countries are exactly the same in that way). And setting aside the money abstraction, which is just how we organize things, the elderly need a lot of medical care and they consume food, water, need housing to live in, and they can't contribute much to the work of making those things. So they need there to be enough younger, working people that there's a big surplus of stuff not needed to keep the young fed, clothed, and housed, and a surplus of young people to work to take care of them.

I'm not one who insists on some unsustainable growth or even any growth at all. A 0 growth rate would be fine. But the nihilism in the West (coupled with too many economic incentives to not have kids) that has killed off our birthrate is going to make the decline in living standards that's been seen between the boomers and our generation (you know, all those think pieces about the "Death of the American Dream") look like a joke. And economic collapse doesn't mean we just shift to living like the Amish. It looks more like Haiti.

Nevertheless, I have very little faith in states somehow blocking big mergers. Can you cite an example where this has happened? We've had basically every airline, several supermarket chains, and every major media company go through 1-2 rounds of megamergers. Which, specifically, have been successfully blocked by states?

Better than the Barbra Streisand solution of screaming about the thing you don't want people to see, drawing a tremendous amount of attention to it and giving the bully tremendous satisfaction.

This 'bully' is nearly always going to be an untraceable online ghost. Raging against them and declaring yourself violated doesn't teach them a lesson, it only increases the blast radius of their mischief and makes people see themselves as helpless victims.

Also, I wish all bullies were so weak and impotent that all they can do is generate fictional, obviously-fake images. Imagine if Putin was trying to conquer a country by making mean pictures of Zelenskyy. Would be a pretty good world.

Sure, I'd answer with an example of it done well. When "Instant Messaging" was a huge deal circa 2000, if you got a message from a new person on most platforms, you'd get a chat invitation. You could accept and allow them, or dismiss them and never hear from them again. (Of course this had a vulnerability if you could generate new accounts too easily, so spam activity varied depending on how easy it was to have bots sign up).

Phone calls and SMS should be like that, which, they almost could be today just with the phone OS keeping track of who you've previously "accepted."[1]

Except.

The identifiers (phone numbers) are nearly infinite, and nearly free, so the scammers just use a "new to you" number every time they call you, allowing each one to generate a new 'invitation.'

And of course to make it worse, the "numbers" are actually truly free since they can spoof any number they want all day long and to this day, most of those calls will go through and not even show a big red flag.

That last part is entirely reprehensible that our carriers haven't solved it by now, but apparently they don't want to.

[1] and also there's that sticky problem that some arbitrary company like say, a health insurance company or the state government, has 1000 departments who might call you, and they couldn't give you a full list if they wanted to.

1. Bank apps are terrible, slow, and poorly organized, because banks. They suck at software. Venmo and Cashapp are good at software.

2. (Insert healthy amount of distrust of anything the banks all want, because there's zero chance it's in consumers' best interest)

3. We don't control anything, Zelle does. I have 5 bank accounts (multiple banks). I have one cell phone number, and of COURSE Zelle, like the banks that run it, insists on using cell phone numbers as basically their primary key and only identifier. When someone pays me by putting in my number, where will the money go? F--k if I know!

It'll still exist though no matter what. The best we can do is to educate everyone not to put any stock in random imagery, and to be kind to those who might feel embarrassed by it. Pretending it's a massive violation just hands power to literally any asshole who wants to hurt someone, because it's so easy to do. And the more people pearl-clutch about it, the more power it hands them.

clearly have trouble using and allocating the limited resources we have now

But population is project to continue rising until 2084 anyway, which means I don't need to think about this problem at all for the remainder of my life.

Your first point sounds like you are probably the kind of responsible person who is pretty concerned about climate, emissions, wealth inequality, etc. Which implies that you consider it a duty to not just do whatever is convenient in the now, but to act in a sustainable way that doesn't screw future generations.

Then you drop that second bomb, which implies maybe you don't give a crap if today's teenagers will inhabit a horrific world with twice as many old people as society can afford to support. You'll be gone after all, so you "don't need to think about it." If you are that callous to the plight of generations that come after you, I guess you have more in common than you think with those people who are supposedly doing such a bad job with the "resources we have now."

I see you're among the group I was referring to which feels that the entire human race dying out or descending into stone-age collapse is a W as long as 'carbon number go down.'

It's not the best the universe has to offer; people have just been raised by horrifying engagement-maximizing-algorithms, and as a result don't understand how to relate to other human beings.

Both young men and young women have adopted insane expectations of what a partner should be, and real humans cannot satisfy those expectations.

My generation (~40-year-olds) took a glancing blow from it, since at least our formative understanding of the world predates the warping influence of modern social media. But gen Z took a direct hit from it, and it's only getting worse.