abvdasker

Accepting technological barbarism is a choice. Among engineers there should be a broad refusal to work on such systems and a blacklist for those who do.

The big companies fighting to win gen AI have forgotten how to build good products. There seems to be enormous confusion about AI applications — few seem to be willing to commit to a singular focus or application, instead trying to be everything to everyone. The tried and true way to build something big is to bootstrap a killer app that solves a real problem and then expand horizontally to other problem spaces. These companies are trying to do too much too soon (probably because they have too few financial constraints). A lack of focus.

> If someone isn't a violent threat to society, there isn't much social benefit to keeping folks locked up longer then 20-ish years.

This unfortunately widely held belief is measurably wrong and reeks of all kinds of biases. White collar criminals are one of the categories most likely to reoffend. Recidivism is much higher in white collar criminals precisely due to the leniency they often experience and the powerful financial motives associated with these types of crimes.

For violent crime 38.9% of convicts were arrested for new crime within 3 years of release. White collar crime on the other hand had a 58.8% 3-year recidivism rate.

White collar crime poses systemic risks which violent crime doesn't to the same extent. It undermines confidence in institutions by creating corruption and waste, enriching few at the expense of many. When it becomes normalized and widespread this kind of crime can destroy a country's economic and political systems.

https://medcraveonline.com/FRCIJ/FRCIJ-02-00039.pdf

Anecdotally most vice in New York City is now more or less run through the police or involves some form of NYPD protection racket. Every couple years a large prostitution or drug ring gets broken up and it's always current and former officers running them. Barely makes the headlines. I know people here who have bought drugs from police officers.

Generalizations like "the tech industry has a liberal bias" are so reductive that they aren't useful. One of the pitfalls in discussions about the overall politics of the tech industry is a lack of nuance. Another is a general inability to ask the important question "who has the power in this industry?"

Is Elon Musk liberal? What about Paul Graham, Larry Ellison or Peter Thiel?

There is an enormous difference in the politics of rank and file employees at most tech companies and the founders/executives/management. This is true of nearly every industry. If you think the biases of regular tech workers matter more than the biases of the management and leadership of these companies — or fail to make a distinction — then you will probably come to a different conclusion about the biases of the industry as a whole.

As far as I'm aware there isn't a lot of anthropological evidence to support your view that primitive societies were any more violent than we are today. You seem to have a pretty dim view of human nature that may not be reflective of any kind of scientific reality. The article itself doesn't mention any episodes of "violence and abuse" in the communes so I'm not sure why you're pointing to that as a reason for their failure.

As for the hippies, I think it's admirable that they actually made the effort to practice a different way of living, even if it was short lived. Very few people or movements are brave enough to even attempt such a radical experiment. The unfortunately common idea that the way we live now is the only way or the best way demonstrates a poverty of imagination.

Great read. Makes me nostalgic for the optimistic incoherence of the 60s counterculture, a time I never knew firsthand but heard stories about from my dad. My grandmother was part of it, growing weed on a farm outside Montpelier Vermont. The misadventures of the hippies do make you wonder if maybe another way of living is possible...

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It always strikes me as a little confused when criticism of Marxism focuses on the utility of markets and not the existence of private capital (only the latter is incompatible with socialism). A common Marxist critique of social democracy is that it allows for the accumulation of incredible wealth in the hands of a small number of people who invariably use that wealth to try and end social democracy.

The site is not running fine. Have you tried using twitter on mobile web? Go to twitter.com right now with your phone and try to play a couple videos. That's to say nothing of how bad the comment quality has become with paid accounts.

And the advertisers didn't just leave because of Musk's public comments. Musk didn't just fire engineers. He also fired the teams responsible for managing the accounts of major brands and keeping them happy (every business that sells ads employs account managers for good reason).

Twitter is absolutely doomed because Elon Musk nuked its entire business with no plan for how to make money. The company is now wildly unprofitable due to the collapse of ad revenue combined with its obligation to service the debt Elon saddled Twitter with through the acquisition. As soon as Musk gets bored of Twitter he'll sell it off to some C-tier media conglomerate for pennies on the dollar, which will conclude probably the single biggest individual financial blunder (measured by dollar-value-destruction) in the history of capitalism.

I came here to note the Times' unacknowledged lies about the Bush admin and Iraq War and was pleasantly surprised to see you beat me to it. This piece is nothing less than an interminable but polite screed from someone with an axe to grind and doesn't touch on any of the real problems at the heart of mainstream media.

I'm not sure I've ever encountered a more egregious example of the professional self-flattery you hear all the time from journalists. James Bennet is utterly blind to his real function within these institutions. The piece is at least useful as an unwitting illustration of journalists' ideological belief in their own nobility and importance.

Even by the absurdly high US antitrust standards of consumer harm Apple and Google's app stores qualify as anti-competitive. Major corporations like Netflix have made it impossible to sign up for the service in-app because the lost signups cost less than the app store fees. The pound of flesh Google and Apple extract is probably downright prohibitive for many smaller businesses who can't afford to take the hit on signups. Who knows how many promising startups have been smothered in the cradle because of these anti-competitive practices? This is a case of simple economic inefficiency created by monopolies and it needs to end.

I immediately canceled my subscription when I got that email. Easy decision since HBO doesn't even have any new content being released these days. Plus the idiotic rebrand to "Max" forced me to download an entirely new app and burned whatever goodwill I had towards HBO as a brand. David Zaslav is a totally incompetent moron.

Anonymity is not a band-aid, but a fundamental component of privacy. Privacy is an important right which people often take for granted and its erosion makes people less free in a multitude of ways. Even the expectation that one might be surveilled can change a person's behavior in profound ways (Foucault's panopticon has never been more relevant).

It comes down to the fact that other people may do things which we find distasteful or even offensive. You will never, ever be able to get a large group of people to conform to standards of personal behavior to the extent that this is not true, and so privacy becomes a necessity. But as long as those things aren't causing real harm then they simply aren't my business or that of the government.

In my opinion the only worthwhile discussion when it comes to privacy is what constitutes harm and whether a given harm is possible to prevent without causing even greater harm through restriction of privacy and anonymity. In many cases when it comes to safety and privacy, the cure can be worse than the disease.

I mean if you look at the astronomical levels of defense spending the US greatly resembles the USSR even in terms of the "tanks & steel". Broadly this kind of waste and stratification is characteristic of just about every fading empire.

I give her less than a year. The job description is to be the public face of Twitter's ongoing collapse.

To me what's so maddening about these attacks on Internet privacy is that they're extremely unpopular with actual voters across the political spectrum (it's just that awareness of these measures is very low). No politician would ever dare to campaign on a policy like this because nobody wants it. These persistent attempts to pass anti-privacy measures really highlight the corruption of American "democracy" given that there is zero popular mandate to do this but politicians keep trying anyway.

Not only should managers not distract their reports, I view a primary responsibility of any engineering manager as proactively shielding their reports from as many unnecessary meetings — particularly with external teams — as possible so that engineers can focus on what they're paid to do: building stuff. The best managers I've ever had spent a significant amount of their time just interfacing with product managers and designers to cut down on bullshit that distracts engineers from doing their jobs.

RIP to an absolute giant, on whose shoulders we all stand.

> The city collects $0 if there's no building no matter what the incentive was.

In reality that's not what happened. Amazon has had a very large unsubsidized office in Manhattan which predates their "HQ2" proposal and has quietly grown even larger in the years since I interviewed there. That they have significantly expanded their corporate offices in Hudson Yards without subsidy suggests that the tax breaks were unnecessary to begin with. Amazon was always going to staff up in NYC regardless of whether they got the tax break or not.

In general, subsidies of that sort for companies operating out of desirable locations like SF and NYC are unnecessary because the employer needs access to the highly educated talent pool in those cities far more than the city needs any individual employer.

Amazon very publicly decided not to build "HQ2" in Long Island City as a result of the local opposition. Amazon's significant Manhattan presence predates any of this discussion and is largely unsubsidized. It's also a little goofy to assume that the people working for Amazon in Manhattan don't live in Queens but otherwise would if the office was physically located there (especially given their proximity to the 7 train lol).

It's worth remembering that New York-based opposition to subsidies for Amazon's construction of "HQ2" in Long Island City was widely vilified and disparaged in mainstream media outlets across the political spectrum. This latest development looks like a pretty strong vindication of those who were outspoken against these tax handouts to Amazon.

I'm a Google Fi customer and experienced a very disconcerting fraud attack a year or 2 ago. I made an outbound call to the support number for my bank (I triple-checked that it was the correct number for the bank's support line). My call was routed to fraudsters impersonating my bank's support and I gave them all of my debit card information through what I initially thought was an authentication process. The 1) strange call quality, 2) that they asked for all of my card details and 3) the lack of an automated menu tipped me off and I realized pretty much immediately after the call was over that I had been scammed. I called the exact same support line a second time and got the actual customer service for my bank, at which point I promptly canceled my debit card (but not before the fraudsters performed what appeared to be a test charge of my card for $5 to a random merchant name in Connecticut).

I had no idea this kind of attack was possible and I don't know how it works or whether it was related to the T-Mobile breach. Had the hackers attempted an account takeover using the information they collected from me they could conceivably have stolen all of my savings.

I think you're overestimating the extent to which anyone on the left or right approves of this kind of censorship. This is one bad decision by probably 2 or 3 people in a publishing company. The overwhelming consensus online seems to be that this is bad, and I can't seem to find anyone of any political persuasion who thinks otherwise.

This is interesting, but doesn't address a crucial question: yes, spices seem to give practical antimicrobial benefits in food preparation, but why do we enjoy spiced food more? Did it start out as something practical until we evolved a taste for more flavorful food due to its advantages (co-evolution)? Or do we like spiced food just because we're used to it (enviornmental)?

"Won't somebody please think of the children"-style legislation over public safety online is always used as a trojan horse for surveillance and censorship. This has been done so many times at this point that I just default to assuming these measures are created for sinister reasons. I haven't been wrong once yet.

I also hate the gym and this sounds almost exactly like what I do. For the last 3 months I've been alternating between running through my neighborhood (2 miles for ~20 minutes) and weightlifting at home (~30 minutes) a total of 5-6 times per week. Running you can do pretty much anywhere and any time of the year with the right outfit as long as there isn't snow/ice on the ground. For the weightlifting I bought a pair of adjustable weight dumbbells [1] and just follow along with a YouTube workout at home (there are tons of them).

So far this has worked great for me. I've gone from 213 -> 192 pounds and built a little bit of muscle, though not a ton because I've been eating at a moderate caloric deficit. Diet is a huge component depending on what your goals are and I had to learn to love salad. Once I get down to 180 pounds I'll probably switch things up and start eating more and lifting more frequently in order to bulk up.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01J8S38LW?tag=verywellfit-onsite-...

Ruby was probably my "first love" as a programming language for the reasons you described, but nowadays I prefer statically typed compiled languages. Ruby is still my preferred scripting language, though I've seen the way large projects can start to suffer from high maintenance overhead when it comes to dynamic languages like Ruby.

Pieces this stupid make me viscerally angry. I disagree with many of the core points, but it's the particularly dumb way those arguments are presented that really gets me. This reads like it was written by some 70-year old retired executive who has no idea what a semiconductor is.

The level of arrogance and stupidity required to witness the (still ongoing) catastrophe in global supply chains from the COVID-19 pandemic and not reassess any of one's opinions on globalization is simply staggering. It's either criminally negligent or deceitful not to even mention COVID-19 in a discussion of globalization in 2023.

> The death of [the hope for a democratic China]—combined with the migration of a million manufacturing jobs to Chinese factories—caused America to fall out of love with globalisation.

Ok, so the author is acknowledging that globalization cost the US a lot of manufacturing jobs (though there's an obvious downplaying of that loss here). Great!

> Reindustrialisation will raise prices, hurting the poor most.

Now the author is arguing the other side of the exact same point! What about the manufacturing jobs the author just said were lost to globalization? Does the author have brain damage?

> Democrats and Republicans alike worry that the loss of America’s lead in advanced chipmaking to Taiwan will undermine its ability to develop artificial intelligence—on which, they predict, armies of the future will rely to plan strategy and guide missiles.

This totally misunderstands the nature of the conflict. TSMC is the biggest fab of the most sophisticated microprocessors in the world, processors which we all rely on every second of every day. The entire global economy needs these chips to function and US companies need the best chips to put in their products so they can be competitive. For simple economic reasons and complicated historical reasons China really wants to reintegrate Taiwan into the PRC. The US can't tolerate that because it would put China in direct control of the world's biggest supply of advanced semiconductors. It has nothing to do with artificial intelligence and everything to do with control of economic resources.

> America must also woo emerging powers. By 2050 India and Indonesia will be the world’s third- and fourth-largest economies, projects Goldman Sachs, a bank.

Minor quibble, but why include this appositive? Does anybody who reads The Economist not know that Goldman Sachs is a bank?

If you think Saudi Arabia doesn't rely on modern slave labor I would urge you to learn more about their treatment of immigrants.

And there is simply no comparing the status of women in China or Russia to Saudi Arabia.

Combine that with Saudi Arabia's barbaric public beheadings and you're talking about a modern dystopia that many in the US would rather ignore out of convenience. Another common response is to distract from their crimes by hyping up other bogeymen in more direct competition with the US.