6,080 karma · joined January 5, 2017
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The writing follows no thread, the article contains no more information than interleaving parts of two press releases would give you, it's a complete mess. This would not pass for a decent writing assignment at the high-school level — and yet it's published by the BBC somehow. Even the subheadings are weirdly chosen.
Was this even touched by a human?
On another note, Brian Eno has cited Morse Peckham's "Man's Rage for Chaos"[2], which seems to be more in line with what you are saying and to claim that the purpose of art is offering surprising shifts in perspective that break up the otherwise overly strong drive towards order and predictability.
1. https://arxiv.org/abs/0812.4360
2. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4552798-man-s-rage-for-c...
"NB: if puzzled by a pawn move, please check for en passant before reporting a bug"
Does anyone have some experiences with their degree programmes? Curious to hear if these are more promising...
It would be interesting to see the distribution of returns among the contained funds. I lean heavily passive personally, but at least if a not-insignificant fraction of funds outperformed the index and were dragged down by really bad returns in others, it would give some indication as to why people would even _try_ to actively pick where to put their money...
a) At the margin, a few people doing this does _nothing_ to mess with big companies' data collection & analysis. But opting out also has the same problem, obviously, so at least it's not doing worse.
b) In the absence of sandbox / selective sharing features like other commenters have mentioned, or you going so far as to _only_ keep fake contacts in your phone, using this approach requires you to also share your actual contacts with the app, thus giving away PII of unconsenting third parties. Yes, I'd rather blame the app developers for collecting this data in the first place, but I'd still prefer not to give my contacts away whenever I can reasonably withhold them.
My guess is that they want to limit functionality enough to make paid plans attractive, while still giving you the chance to try out how the sync works, but I can't help asking myself if this isn't unnecessarily confusing and going to put potential customers off as opposed to e.g. offering a 30-day trial on their paid plans.
> well - have you heard the story of statistical prediction rules in medicine?
That just crossed my mind recently with all the talk of bias in AI/ML applications (let's not say "algorithms"). Horror stories abound, and I do realize today's systems are vastly more complex & less (to use a term from this post) legible to humans trying to reason about what's going on, but somehow it seems like this aspect is omitted from many discussions today, whereas previously taking the human out of the equation was seen as a success story in some fields.
There's probably also other issues, e.g. that if you're not careful ML can overfit to things that have nothing to do with what you're looking for (e.g. all your positive example photos were taken with a different camera than the negative ones, or what have you), which aren't as big a deal with those simple rules from medicine. But I feel like I'm not really clear on the state of this discussion.
If anyone knows a good paper/article/book that deals with the tradeoff between potentially embedding some form of bias in these systems vs. the also very real biases of, you know, human decision making, but focused on contemporary ML, I'd love to read up on this.
Tantacrul's other videos on engraving software UX show some great examples of this, where improvements in UX can help without lowering the productivity plateau for experts (except of course throwing them back if you were to change what they've gotten used to from one version to the next).
One thing I've noticed: If one of my contacts signs up for the waitlist, I can give them access w/o using up one of my two invites, so it might be that they just relaxed the exclusiveness on that front to push it.
First impression is that it's nice that people talk longer, don't cut each other off as much as in other debates, etc. but it definitely sounds like mostly berlin tech entrepreneurs & VCs (and some tech-adjacent politicians/journalists/...) at this point, and the "diversity" on panels is somewhat superficial (people from mildly different backgrounds who think alike vs. people from whatever background with deeper differences in viewpoints). That being said I also randomly ended up in a room with improvised music & poetry, so there do seem to be different things going on.
I can see myself using this if the content diversifies further into different topics, e.g. I'd enjoy loose discussions about e.g. academic / more technical topics, etc. For now it sounds mostly like your run of the mill panel discussion at a big tech conf., which can be inspiring for a bit but not everyday.
That being said, I would not overly romanticize FOSS' achievements in that arena. The lack of investment beyond merely writing functional code and the lack of opinionated design shows in many FOSS products, beyond the point of it being "geared towards repeat users / experts".
A lot of it just has extremely inconsistent interfaces that not only leave visual styling trends but also basic design principles founded upon human perception by the wayside, and that costs everyone, novices and experts.
Additionally, there seems to be a bit of resurgence in productivity apps that favor more keyboard-oriented workflows, or at least also think about how people can become faster and more efficient after the initial onboarding.
Is this a bigger thing with more variety that's going on on tiktok, or is it just the one that went viral with a few variants alongside?
My account was dead for about two years or so before that. Within a minute or two of signing up with my (real) email and phone number, basically my whole friend list from back when I had an account, people I've texted on whatsapp once years ago, etc. were in friend suggestions. Downright creepy.
Unfortunately, advertising has also created an unsustainably high "standard of living", so to speak - you get so many services and applications for free these days that would realistically not exist or cost much more than you were willing to pay for them had it not been for advertising.
Personally, I don't think there's a way out of it until someone comes up with an alternative that brings the benefits of advertising without all the downsides it has, because individual consumer incentives are just not aligned. I'll gladly pay a one-time fee for some productivity app, or a small subscription for something I use almost daily. But if e.g. goodreads wanted to charge a subscription, community size would probably dwindle, and personally I'd just start keeping a spreadsheet of my books again.