463 karma · joined January 1, 2011
Please name a single comparable situation in the last 20 years where the Democratic president was the one threatening a company and the company reversed course.
I don’t think so. I have hitchhikers thumb, so my thumbs do bend backwards. They don’t feel disadvantaged in terms of touching compared to my other fingers.
That’s the nature of enshittification, and a core tactic of monopolists: give your customers something for free (or below cost) until you have killed the competition, and then exploit your “customers” (victims).
> Google's search and ad monopoly do not matter
Some questions:
When Google used its search monopoly to promote Chrome in a way that no other company is capable of (a link on the Google search main page), did that have some impact, or zero impact?
When Google used its ad monopoly to give Chrome free ad placement… That is, when the Chrome team was able to ‘buy’ keywords for free that Firefox, IE, and Opera had to pay 5 cents per click for… Did that have some impact, or zero impact?
I agree that a Facebook had a powerful incentive to act this way. But they didn’t have to. The fact that they chose to reflects on their moral character.
Internal leaks let us know that Facebook has pretty advanced sentiment analysis internally. They knew that they were (are) making people miserable. They know that outrage causes engagement.
Other internal leaks let us know that Facebook was aware of how much disinformation was (is) being used on their platform to influence elections. To attack democracy.
They didn’t just look the other way, which would be reason enough to condemn them. They helped. When they saw how much money the propagandists were willing to pay, they built improved tools to better help them propagandize.
After the UK was shattered by the Brexit lies, when Facebook were called in front of parliament and congress to explain themselves over the Cambridge Analytica and related misinformation campaigns, they stalled, they lied, they played semantic word games to avoid admitting what is clearly stated in the leaked memos.
These were all choices. People should be held accountable for making awful choices.
Even if those choices result in them making a lot of money.
It sounds kind of crazy to even have to say that, doesn’t it? But that is where we are, partly because of arguments like yours from otherwise well-meaning people.
Don’t absolve them. Hold them accountable.
Zuckerberg wants to own the whole world and thinks you’re an idiot for trusting him. An egocentic sociopath who can’t imagine trusting anyone else because he knows what he will do when you give him your trust.
You’re saying that Facebook was somehow helpless to avoid changing from a “friends feed” to an ad-maximizing outrage-inducing misinformation machine because of web2.0 communication technology?
Someone invented XmlHttpRequest and Facebook was like, “well that’s the ballgame, I guess we have to suck now?”
> The charges were against search and ads.
The textbook definition of “monopolistic behavior” is “using your monopoly in one sector to extend your power in another sector”.
It’s not illegal to have a monopoly. That can happen if you are completely innocent, just because no competitors choose to compete with you.
It’s illegal to abuse the power of your monopoly.
What was the biggest browser when Chrome launched? It was Firefox. Where are they now? On death’s door.
What was the biggest commercial browser when Chrome launched? It was Opera. Where are they now? Also on death’s door.
Do you ever remember seeing ads for Chrome in any of Googles other offerings?
A better question would be, “Before 2020 or so, do you think it was possible to use Google Search without having Chrome advertised to you?”
Chrome got special treatment above and beyond anything available to anyone else. Even more than anyone else with an unlimited Google ad budget. It got special placement in the Google search interface. “Try chrome!” On the otherwise bare Google search page. You know, the one that was famously minimalistic and “ad-free”.
Google leveraged its search and ads pseudo-monopolies to help Chrome become its own pseudo+monopoly.
And now that Chrome is its own pseudo-monopoly, what is their behavior?
Well, now, you can’t install (good) ad blockers anymore. Does that benefit users, or is that abusing their browser monopoly to help Google’s other business lines?
And until approximately yesterday, they were saying they were going to disable third party cookies. That’s nice. It probably would help some users. Note that it will definitely hurt Google’s competitors.
And it’s interesting timing, isn’t it? They could have done this, to help users, at any point in the past 15 years, but they only decided to do it recently, when their search and ad businesses are a little shaky compared to where they used to be.
Google absolutely used its search and ad monopolies to build a browser monopoly. And now that they have a browser monopoly, they’re using the power of that monopoly to act in ways contrary to their users interests.
"Purple" is a mixture of red and blue.
It was a violent time.
Just one 'dataset': https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Indian_massacres_in_No...
The population reached ~300k in 1750. A murder rate of 2 per 100k times 300k people equals 6 murders. Multiply that by 50 years to get 300 murders.
Do you really believe that fewer than 300 murders occurred during this time?
There are many sources online that agree, so I won’t bother to link them, that the population of New England was ~100k in 1700 and ~300k in 1750.
The claim that that actual rate of murder in all of New England was 2-6 per year is not believable.
Yes, but Honey was also stealing from them. Most youtubers make a significant portion of their income via affiliate links.
So, consider the following scenario. I made up these numbers, I don't know if these are accurate:
Honey pays a youtuber $1k for a single ad spot. Due to that ad, many of the youtuber's audience installs the Honey extension. Afterwards, the youtuber's affiliate link income goes down by $2k/month, because all of those affiliate referrals are being stolen by Honey.
Also, Honey never disclosed that they were doing this.
So, of course, you can understand why the youtubers would have grievance. Pretty much nobody would ever agree to give up $2k/month of income forever to get $1k right now. (And it's probably not right now, it's probably more like 90 days when they settle their payables).
The link mentions "a feature that triggers on the Golden Gate Bridge".
As a test case, I just drew this terrible doodle of the Golden Gate Bridge in MS paint: https://imgur.com/a/1TJ68JU
I saved the file as "a.png", opened the chatgpt website, started a new chat, uploaded the file, and entered, "what is this?"
It had a couple of paragraphs saying it looked like a suspension bridge. I said "which bridge". It had some more saying it was probably the GGB, based on two particular pieces of evidence, which it explained.
> The model recognizes nothing, and groups nothing
Then how do you explain the interaction I had with chatgpt just now? It sure looks to me like it recognized the GGB from my doodle.
Recognizing concepts, grouping and manipulating similar concepts together, is what “abstraction” is. It's the fundamental essence of both "building a world model" and "thinking".
> Nothing in the link you provided is even close to "neurons, model of the world, thinking" etc.
I really have no idea how to address your argument. It’s like you’re saying,
“Nothing you have provided is even close to a model of the world or thinking. Instead, the LLM is merely building a very basic model of the world and performing very basic reasoning”.
That is a pretty big leap.
There are plenty of ways, plenty of “unviable financial beliefs”, that can lead one to unwisely fritter away their resources without being exploited by a scammer.
You are basically asserting that most people who get scammed are otherwise Rational Agents who would invest their capital wisely, if not for the scammers deceiving them.
I would argue that, on the contrary, this set of people is very small.
Think of how many stories there are of people pursuing “investments”, or just directing their resources, into flat-out bullshit.
To pick some examples off the top of my head:
How much time, money, thought, effort (e.g. capital) has been wasted by people pursuing the Flat Earth theory? I would guess that there aren’t very many scammers involved in the Flat Earth movement. Most of the people involved are crackpot true believers.
As opposed to, say, homeopathy. Which certainly has a not-insignificant number of exploiters/scammers, people who know that it is bullshit but gladly exploit the uneducated.
Both of these movements involve a significant number of “uneducated” people spending their resources on a fantasy.
But, most of the resources poured into the Flat Earth movement are pure waste, with very little benefit whatsoever to the “Body Economic”. There are not very many “trickle down” benefits from the resources being spent.
When the “uneducated” people give their resources to a scammer, it is usually ending up in the hands of someone who is at least somewhat economically rational. And those resources will be spent in more rational ways.
Even if the scammer buys a bunch of gold chains and sports cars that they don’t really use, those resources are “participating” in the economy in a way that the wasted investments that don’t involve a scammer are not.
I’m not on the scammers’ side. I’m not saying they are good people. But it is not clear that “they are the economic inefficiency”.
There is a whole (potential) downstream genealogical tree branching off from each individual
Certainly, any person who reproduces has done “better” at the game than someone who has not reproduced at all. But that is still not quite enough.
If a parent reproduces, but none of their children themselves reproduce, then the parent has not actually succeeded in the game.
A gambling addict who can’t hold onto any money absolutely affects their downstream tree.
Counterpoint from “The Zen of Python”:
> There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it.
But there are several names that used to be considered male but are now female, like Leslie and Marion. I don’t think I’ve ever met a man name Marion, but you still occasionally run into a Leslie.
It would be interesting to start using Leslie for this little logic puzzle and see how that affects people’s answers.
> ”Open Source" was created to be corporate-friendly as it was predated by Free software, which is rigidly committed to users freedom.
Rigidly committed to a certain interpretation of users freedom. And that interpretation happens to involve removing a number of freedoms “for your own good”.
It is more correct to say that the GPL was created to be anti-corporate, as it was predated by both the MIT and BSD licenses, which are more free, both for users and corporations, which the FSF finds intolerable.
It doesn’t necessarily prove that they did.
Although the article presents pretty convincing evidence that they did. (Ceramic formation on the clay trays that matches the temperature and composition of focaccia residue).
So unless they are just making up data for their paper (which is something that definitely happens), it sounds legit to me.
So, especially in the northern cities, maybe the lettuce:nails ratio held true.
That makes it feel like a trick question, though. I wonder what the situation looked like for hardy vegetables like potatoes, onions, corn, squash.
This feels like it can’t be correct.
Nails were expensive and difficult to obtain in the American colonies, so that abandoned houses were sometimes deliberately burned down to allow recovery of used nails from the ashes. This became such a problem in Virginia that a law was created to stop people from burning their houses when they moved. [0]
And nails were a significant expense in Thoreau’s cabin in _Walden_, c.a. 1850s
Maybe lettuce was a lot more expensive back then than I realize, though. I assume that produce is close to “free”, since you can grow it yourself.
This device has never been built, never been purchasable, and it is ALWAYS brought up whenever IV wants to talk about how cool they are.
And I say this as someone who loosely knows and was friends with a few people that worked there. They brought up this same invention when they were talking about their work. They eventually soured on the company, once they saw the actual sausage being made.
IV is a patent troll, shaking down people doing the real work of developing products.
They trot out this invention, and a handful of others, to appear like they are a public benefit. Never mind that most of these inventions don't really exist, have never been manufactured.
They hide the extent of their holdings, they hide the byzantine network of shell companies they use to mask their holdings, and they spend a significant amount of their money lobbying (bribing).
Why do they need to hide all of this?
Look at their front page, prominently featuring the "Autoscope", for fighting malaria. Fighting malaria sounds great, they're the good guys, right? Now do a bit of web searching to try to find out what the Autoscope is and where it's being used. It's vaporware press release articles going back 8 years.
Look at their "spinouts" page, and try to find any real substance at all on these companies. It is all gossamer, marketing speak with nothing behind it when you actually go looking for it.
Meanwhile, they hold a portfolio of more than 40,000 patents, and they siphon off billions from the real economy. Part of their "licensing agreement" is that you can't talk badly about them after they shake you down, or else the price goes up.
They are rent-seeking parasites.
Presumably they could spend a little bit of that to deliver some more education, couldn’t they?
That is too strong a statement to just toss out there like that. And I don’t even think it’s true.
I think children probably feel pain more intensely than adults. But there are many more dimensions to suffering than pain. And many of those dimensions are beyond the ken of children.
Children will not know the suffering that comes from realizing that you have ruined a relationship that you value, and it was entirely your fault.
They will not know the kind of suffering that’s behind Imposter Syndrome after getting into MIT.
Or the suffering that comes from realizing that your heroin addiction will never be as good as the first time you shot up. Or that same heroin addict knowing that they are betraying their family, stealing their mother’s jewelry to pawn, and doing it anyway.
Or the suffering of a once-great athlete coming to terms with the fact that they are washed up and that life is over now.
Or the suffering behind their favorite band splitting up.
Or the suffering behind winning Silver at the Olympics.
Or the agony of childbirth.
Perhaps most importantly, one of the greatest sorrows of all: losing your own child.
Et cetera
The SGL would be much, much harder than the JWST would be, and the JWST was already stretching our capabilities.
The SGL needs to be 650AU away from us. Voyager 1 and 2 are currently 165AU and 120AU away.
The JWST is 0.01 AU from us.
And you can only look in one direction after the probe finally gets into position. Once you're 650AU away, it's not really feasible to move "sideways" far enough to look at something else.
Our most powerful telescopes can see "back in time", by looking at stuff far enough away that it took nearly the entire age of the universe for the light to reach us.
I would guess that we can use this natural compound lens to "see farther" with our current telescopes than we might otherwise be able to see.
Our current best telescope, the JWST, can almost see to the very beginning of when it was possible to see, somewhere between 300k and 200M years after the big bang [0].
Somewhere in this time period, the universe cooled enough for normal matter to form.
The JWST still cannot see the actual 'edge' of when this occurred.
Maybe with this natural compound lens, we can see all the way to the edge.
And if we could see where the edge actually is, then maybe we can refine the estimate to a tighter range than [300k,200M], which would give us a better estimate of the expansion rate of the earlier universe.
[0] https://www.universetoday.com/168872/webb-observations-shed-...