foerbert

This is just a blind guess, but the difference may come when talking about impossibilities and/or extreme improbabilities. Empirically there might not be a way to distinguish between actually impossible and merely unobserved/improbable.

If an event is so unlikely that it probably has never occurred in the observable universe, how would you empirically differentiate between the two? Meanwhile I would think rationality and logic would face no such obstacle.

(Naturally rationality has it's own limitations, but that's a whole new topic.)

Despite completely disagreeing with you on the first point, I've had some of the same experience too.

Some years ago when I was going through languages frequently, I was pretty interested in it for a bit, but found it kind of hard to get into and my interest ultimately wandered.

I thought a large part of that was due to my unusually strong dislike of the syntax, and that that was why I found it unusually difficult to grok. Maybe it wasn't. Interesting.

This, alone, is not the full picture. It's trivially easy to get into utter absurdity. What if an employer decides they can only identify people by surgically grafting special ID cards to their foreheads?

There is - obviously - more at play here than simply the right of the employer to identify employees by any means they wish. There is some level of reasonableness here as well.

This moves the argument into murkier grounds, as now we have to figure out how reasonable fingerprints are in any given situation.

I don't think it's quite fair to label it content-agnostic. I mean it sort of technically is, but practically it isn't.

By pushing 'engagement' at all costs, it's essentially inevitable that all the terrible behaviors we see from 'content creators' happen. I agree that they are far from blameless, but when your entire platform is practically globally available to anybody and you only reward unsavory behavior... you're going to get unsavory behavior.

There could be many, many people behaving ethically, and most people may never even see any of them due to the way the platforms are set up.

It's technically content-agnostic in the most technical sense, but practically it's one big system designed to incentivize and surface unethical behavior.

Again, customers do not need to pay for all cost increases. Businesses are not non-profits. They take costs, and then some. The amount of "and then some" is variable. Cost increases that do not exceed "and then some" do not necessarily need to be paid by customers.

Low margin is not no margin. As long as there is a margin, this remains true for some level of cost increases.

And your example is excessively reductive. Say the $3 company can't actually retain any workers because their pay is so bad. They will not be serving any $3 coffees, so it's not a threat to the $10 coffees. Also, your example prices sure are, uh, interesting and hard not to read in to.

This has been true of many recent movements. I wish I knew what was behind it. I'm sure it can be explained by humans being humans, but part of me can't help but wonder if it isn't intentional.

I don't think this reduces down that far. That's part of it, but it's not all of it.

Even if this is true, why is it true? Why are these businesses getting so much less return per employee? Is the only solution to sacrifice wages? Is it worth sacrificing wages for everybody?

We can't just declare a thing presumably bad for smaller businesses and then say end of discussion, there's nothing else worth considering here.

Only if the company is barely hanging on as is. If they're profitable, they still have room to increase wages. There is no law out there saying a company has to make as much or more money this year than last year.

You say it like it's so easy. It's not. The reality is many (maybe even most?) articles - even ones from incredibly openly biased sources - do this. It's often difficult to make many meaningful attacks on a proposed law without mentioning what the intent is.

Unless it's one of a few already highly-covered issues with fundamentally irreconcilable subjective issues where you can pretty much recall all that context with a few words... you have to say what the heck the proponents of the law say it'll do to actually attack it.

However you don't seem to find that balanced. I don't blame you. I don't either.

The problem is the arguments made cannot be equal. They are not the same thing. Even a good faith attempt to make a completely neutral article will very often fall short. Even if the author thinks they did not, others will.

The only 'balance' you can really have is a false equivalence where nothing matters because it's all the same anyway - so why even write an article? It doesn't matter what happens.

Only if you believe those drafting that opinion actually lived through polio, smallpox, and the Spanish flu.

Otherwise, yes, it was absolutely abstract to them. Just because you're dealing with a real event or real data doesn't mean you're not dealing with it in the abstract. Humans react very differently when they're just thinking about something real hard and when they actually experience the thing directly.

What balance are you talking about? I've never been able to figure it out.

Are we talking just providing an equal number of sentences from the perspective of each major party? How do we decide which parties get included, here? Do we instead break it up by major ideologies? Again, which ones?

Even if we attempt to go no ideology and just raw facts, the facts you choose to report are a result of interpretation. You could easily construct an entirely factual article that contains no subjective opinions and still be majorly and intentionally deceptive. So not mentioning any perspectives is also not balanced.

What balance is everybody talking about? How is it defined? How we determine what is and is not balanced?

I suspect they are just referring to the basic social fabric, so to speak. If everybody has a variety of mostly trustworthy sources that act as implicit or explicit verifiers of each other, then everybody has a fairly robust ability to gather information about the world - including the trustworthiness of the various parts of their 'net'.

This sort of thing seems to have, however, somewhat broken down in recently years. At a minimum I think most people would say these networks are at least smaller and more insular than they were in the past.

If it's all in good faith, this might not be so terrible. If the aforementioned trusted CEOs faithfully and accurately are able to point out media they believe is trustworthy and keep an eye on those outlets, it could potentially work as a way to kick start the rejuvenation of these networks.

Now, this relies on these CEOs being both trusted and trustworthy. That is a fairly substantial assumption in my opinion.

But if it's all in good faith it's possible to read this as not Orwellian at all, but rather more informing a section of the community that there is something they can do for the community, and then asking them to do it.

I don't get why this is downvoted. There is a huge difference between, say, a court order or other force-backed request and a requirement in a bidding process.

It doesn't absolve the NSA of any guilt here either, but this is not a helpless Juniper giving in due to full weight and power of the government.

Often? The Army Corps of Engineers had a budget of less than $8B in 2021. The Army Corps of Engineers has three main missions, one of which is the civil side of things. I'm not sure how it breaks down budget-wise though.

But saying money spent on the military often flows into local infrastructure seems laughable.

It is good, thanks!

Well, throw me in the bucket of people who've been lost by that decision. Sounds potentially interesting, but I'm by no means invested enough already to go through the whole account creation thing just to try it.

Is there anybody except Wallmart who will say it's a good thing when the only store in an entire town is Wallmart itself?

Why are we trying to hold Apple to standards that we know are bad, but just happen to exist in the real world anyway?

What does the price of a cone in relation to the price of a burger have to do with a cone being a loss leader or not? The price of a burger has absolutely nothing to do with their costs on the cone.

If the cone is profitable to sell, then it's not a loss leader and they have every incentive to sell as many of them as they can.

I'm not sure Netflix would agree that a low monthly subscription is not enough to fund TV and movie development, but regardless...

Fairly recently I saw a very interesting proposal for this. The basic idea was to base it off of how artist commissions work, and combine that with crowdfunding. A creator can decide how much they need to make a thing - including both costs and how much profit they need to find it worth doing - can use crowdfunding to get the payment upfront. Then once they make the thing, it gets freely released.

This works out for everybody. The creator has already obtained the amount of profit they desired. The people who paid to have to created have gotten it. The people who didn't pay can enjoy it if they wish. And overall everybody who "engaged" with the content now has a better idea of how trustworthy the creator is. The people who did not pay this time may have gained enough confidence to pay for the creators next project.

Obviously, there are many realities to face here. The degree of departure from the current model is rather large. It's not something you can just flip the switch on tomorrow and expect everything to just magically work out with no pain. But I think it's an interesting idea, and one that meshes better with the realities of the digital medium than the current status quo.

I don't buy this line of reasoning.

It doesn't explain the vast majority of ads. Most ads you've seen are for products you - and everybody else - knows about already. They aren't informing anybody of anything.

We also don't see this behavior in advertising strategy. It's not an irregular campaign trying to reach unique individuals. Instead, you tend to see the same ad over, and over, and over in a short period of time. Companies are often extremely transparent about this kind of behavior.

This is not anything like the behavior you would find if ads were at all attempting to merely inform people about a product.

Yup. I find it amazing the quoted myth lives on. It doesn't even make sense.

How many problems do most people have that can be solved with an existing product they are unaware of? The numbers can't be very high.

How do you explain well-known brands advertising the same product for decades on end? Surely Coke and Pepsi aren't suddenly enlightening many people to the existence of their drinks.

How about ads that get shown to the known-same individual time and time again after mere minutes? (See Hulu, at least back in the day, not sure what it's like now.)

The whole line about ads being mere consumer education is ridiculous and doesn't even stand up to a cursory thought.

The answer here is even in the article title. Microplastics. Nobody is talking about chunks of plastic you can see, or feel, directly.

I can understand your hesitancy, but I think in practice I strongly disagree.

A big part of why I like Ada so much is the fact it lets me hold such a strong mental model of the program. I can specify quite a bit about how it should all work, and the compiler holds me to it.

Most or all of that sort of information is tied up in the .ads file. If I want to refer to the model, I can check the .ads file, even if my project doesn't compile yet. Everything I need to know is there, from the very first line of code.

Most importantly, if I'm working in the .ads file, I'm changing the model. Changes here are Important. If I unknowingly make a change here, I've lost my understanding of the model. I really don't want that to be possible.

Meanwhile the .adb is more the implementation. If I'm changing the .adb, I'm just altering the details, but the overall model stays the same. Maybe what I'm doing in the .adb tells me I really do need to change the .ads because the model has a problem, but that doesn't mean I should just go make the easiest little change to the model that makes the .adb work.

Frankly, I think that extra little bit of friction in having two files that need to be in sync makes it easier to write better programs. Something as huge as changing the model should have something that helps cue me in that I'm doing something Big.

"begin" and "end" are probably the most arguable, but in the context of everything else being a real-word keyword I think they make sense.

Ada was not my first language, and I was a little dubious about the keywords at first, but I quickly changed my mind. Now I wish every language did it (obviously, not literally every). It's really nice for a couple reasons.

One is just googling. You pretty much have a built-in shared lexicon, so there's no trying to remember the right name for the problematic symbol, or figuring out the best way to describe it.

There's also no trying to remember what symbol does the thing you want, which is really nice even when just coming back to a language feature you haven't used recently enough to be fresh on.

I have no idea how much these things would matter in a more structured environment. I pick up words way faster than symbols and my memory isn't so great, so I think it would have helped me even there. But I don't know how universal that is.

Though given the number of times I had to help the actual CS majors with basic syntax stuff, even after the 101 course... I can't help but suspect it would be useful.

I suppose so, but this sort of problem has been pretty well documented as actually being a thing. I was also referring more to techie-type arenas, I don't know that I've seen much about this so specifically recently in major media outlets.

Even if it was... it seems pretty clear this is the exact type of problem you'd expect to see a Tesla have. If you're at the point where you're doubting it simply because other people might know it's a problem... eventually you kind of lose the ability to function here, as the mere knowledge of doubt makes you doubt the doubt, and when does that end?

Hell, we've all heard lots recently about the media being so bad...

I'm not sure how you read that as them asking for a literal algorithm (never mind a perfect one). They're talking to the courts, and they literally used the phrase "analytical framework." They're clearly asking for defined standards - who has the right to make such requests, what evidence do they need to provide, what actions can the court take in response, and how certain do they need to be in order to do so, etc. All basic ways the court does things, they're just asking for a set standard rather upfront rather than letting an organic hodgepodge form and then eventually congeal.

I'm not sure why you're finding this particularly doubt-wowrthy. Tesla autopilot doesn't have the most amazingly clean history - particularly when it comes to this exact sort of situation. It does not handle stationary obstacles in a lane very well. It's even been a somewhat popular topic recently.

If you're willing and able to make everything from scratch, nothing.

But if you're not, or can't... well. Simple lack of availability will be a major hurdle.

Part of the problem is that the actual impact of vulnerabilities in the program is often divorced from it's actual purpose. A simple TODO list that allows RCE is one example. It also has a wide variety of impact based on the user - is it just installed on a random personal computer? Or is it on a hospital server?

I don't know that it's particularly possible for a developer to truly understand all the possible impacts of an error in their program.

I'm not sure what the best way to handle that uncertainty is. Assuming all failures are critical would do the job, but certainly isn't free. However doing something like is suggested here - somehow requiring safer languages - might be a decent middle ground. The cost of using languages more built-in safety features is often not very high. Actually often such languages claim that those features make them cheaper to use.

Maybe it be a little more accurate to say not that you hate gravity but having something under your feet in that case, but I think the point was clear enough.

Gravity is the thing that causes the consequences of stepping off the overpass. It's those consequences we find unacceptable. The same more or less goes with masks, etc. You can not wear them or follow the other rules, but natural forces ensure that doing so causes harm to others.