ineptech

How many people are watching American football on Twitch? Does that mean it's dead? You can't just pick one metric and decide that's the important one.

LoL might be technically older than SC2, but surely you would agree that SC2's heyday came a long time before LoL's, yes? My point isn't to compare them and say one is better than the other, but to say that SC2 is further along than LoL on the same curve. In other word's, LoL's future probably isn't "bigger than soccer" nor "totally dead", it's "chugging along with a small steady player base and a few hundred people playing it professionally, but not filling arenas", which is where SC2 has been for 5+ years.

edit: as for investment, I think Blizzard's "sponsorship" amounts to letting them use the logo. Certainly they're not paying for things like professional caster studios and advertising, like Riot does.

Honest answer since you seem new to this debate: there are tons of studies about IQ and race, most of them are heavily disputed, researching them is difficult because the field is so controversial, they're difficult to compare because there are so many different ways to define and measure "race" and "IQ", and the whole topic is so famously toxic and vitriolic that it tends to be a de facto banned topic on most fora, including this one.

There's a much similar way to get to the same destination as the author:

> If it can't surprise you, it's not intelligent

> If it can surprise you, it can do so negatively

Ergo, the only way to keep your AI from producing a surprising-in-a-bad-way output is to make it too dumb to surprise you at all. In practice, I feel like this means a lot of domain specific training, e.g. an airline-ticket-booking chatbot that is not a general-purpose chatbot who specializes in booking airline tickets, but rather a bespoke chatbot that can't do anything else.

LoL events get 100-200k streaming viewers because Riot pours money in to promoting them. SC2 tournaments look amateurish in comparison because they are self-sustaining, i.e. funded by the sponsors and viewers with no support from Blizzard. The question is not why SC2 doesn't get more viewers, it's why a 10+ year old game that barely even gets bugfixes can still support an industry of professional players and commentators.

It's a matter of perspective. If the Superbowl struggled to sell tickets, but more people than ever were playing football in parks, would that mean the sport is dying or thriving? I think that's what this article almost managed to figure out: esports isn't failing, esports in a big arena with cheerleaders and fireworks is failing, while esports in the form of streamers cobbling together a decent paycheck from youtube+twitch+patreon is surprisingly popular.

It seems like basic laser printers ought to be sort of commoditized by this point, shouldn't they? For my modest needs, laser printers were good enough 15 years ago. What's the printer equivalent of, like, a $12 Logitech mouse? What's the Kirkland brand jeans of printers?

Possibly too basic for you, but I was hugely impressed with https://www.nlpdemystified.org/course (found on HN a week or two back). Each chapter has a large jupyter notebook with lots of annotated sample code.

Also there's no cost, no book to buy, no email signup, it's just a guy sharing knowledge like the old days. Great course.

The purpose of a retro is to identify a process that will keep some bad thing from happening again; a process that keeps the bad thing from happening for any reason is strictly better than a process that keeps the bad thing from happening due to malice. If your infra engineers can't expose your PII on accident, they can't expose it on purpose either. To extend your analogy, it's the difference between locking your house (which protects your valuables from thieves, but not your garden hose and wheelbarrow from your drunken neighbor) vs. locking your shed as well.

I'm sure they'll make wonderful parens

> It couldn't possibly be actually doing those things. It's a large language model. How would it be provisioning a computer?

I agree that it isn't, but it's not like it's impossible, right? We know chatgpt was trained on data including a lot of html code for webapps, it certainly seems like it could be taught to parse the widgets of a UI like a sentence and traverse it well enough to handle a prompt like, "Use a search engine to find a small VPN host that accepts bitcoin, register for an account..."

edit: I mean it's not impossible to purposefully build a bot that could sign up for a web app; it is of course impossible that a language model might do it.

It's a running joke in my circle to describe the taste of any expensive wine, beer or coffee as, "strident, yet insouciant."

I had a similar thought - perhaps Elon was visited by a time traveler from the future who convinced him that the only way to stave off some impending disaster is for someone to drive Twitter into bankruptcy as quickly as possible, and he heroically offered to ruin his fortune and reputation to save humanity. That's a stupid idea, but it would elegantly explain his recent behavior...

> In the future, instead of everyone sharing the same search engine, you’ll have your completely individual, personalized Mike or Julia or Jarvis - the AI. Instead of being scared to share information with it, you will volunteer your data, knowing its incentives align with yours.

This is true IFF this software is open source and running on my own server. Hard to see how this can happen.

Same complaint about the uncloseable, unminimizable Win 11 advert that I woke up to on my Win10 box this morning. Who thinks this is a good way to push upgrades? Do they not understand how much that pisses people off?

Didn't the US intelligence services say they had clear evidence he was involved in exactly what he's confessing to, several years ago?

"Private space" is also a concept. There's such a thing as being too abstract, and specific trumps general.

This is so abstract as to be meaningless, I have no idea what you're arguing or what you think "applied" means in this context. Does the concept of "free speech" mean you ought to be able to scream the n word in a Wendy's without being asked to leave? If not, my point is that Twitter is no different; if yes, then you and I mean very different things by "free speech".

> Freedom of speech is an ideal that applies to all people and all spaces, public and private

Private spaces? Nonsense. You can't go in to a restaurant and start ranting about the Jews or whatever, and then say that they're violating the "ideal of free speech" when they kick you out. Free speech means you get to espouse an idea, not force people to hear it.

The disagreement is about whether Twitter is a public or private space. It seems to me to be pretty obviously private, and AFAICT the people who argue that it's public don't have much justification beyond "I want it to be, because I or someone I like got kicked out."

This kind of sentiment always shows up in this kind of thread; I think a lot of people don't really grok that being far enough to one side causes an unbiased forum to appear biased against you. If you hate X enough, Reddit and Twitter are going to seem pro-X, regardless of what X is.

(And, separately, almost no one who argues about anything being "communist" is using the same definition of that word as the person they're arguing with, but that's a different problem entirely)

$1K was the high end, most of 'em cost less than that new.

Treating this press release like a story problem in 5th grade math, there's something off:

> Last year approximately 1,600 catalytic converters were reportedly stolen in California each month, and California accounts for 37% of all catalytic converter theft claims nationwide.

> The black-market price for catalytic converters can be above $1,000 each, depending on the type of vehicle and what state it is from.

> Defendants ... operated DG Auto... DG Auto sold the precious metal powders it processed from California and elsewhere to a metal refinery for over $545 million.

How did they make $545M in a racket whose upper limit on annual profit is a tenth of that? Perhaps that figure represents DG Auto's gross revenue, only a portion of which comes from recycling converters?

I don't really understand SAFe, but from the outside looking in, it seems like the answer to "How close can we get to agile while still employing an army of Project Managers?" Which is to say, not very.

What I object to, at least, is that GA could ignore incognito mode users, but doesn't. Yes, other ad networks might still get incognito users' data, but they're not the biggest spy company on Earth, Google is. It's misleading that they collect data on both ends of the HTTP call, and have a feature called "Incognito mode" that only affects one end.

I don't see the difference between that and, say, Coke selling a product called "Diet Coke" that just has regular coke in it. A disclaimer reading "Warning: this is just regular coke," might make it legal but it's still messed up, and I wouldn't blame someone for trying their luck in the courts over it.

It might help to start by getting rid of the ranks and other military trappings.

You can't give them credit for solving a problem they created. If Nvidia made me log in to Facebook to use my graphics card, I wouldn't cheer when they gave me the option to make an Nvidia account instead.

I mean, fair, but does it follow that someone who dislikes utilitarianism or feels it's disprovable must consequently dislike EA? Because that seems to be the thesis of this essay.

I guess it comes down to this: when people argue with utilitarianism, in my experience it's specifically the part about treating strangers and friends equally, i.e. the idea that it might be better to save two drowning strangers than to save one drowning friend. I don't think EA relies on that or is based on it; you can have a value system that says it's better to save your drowning friend than to save ten or a hundred drowning strangers, and still find EA valuable.

That's the thing, I think you can. If everyone who donates to animal shelters felt as confident about it as you described, I don't think anyone would have a problem with EA. Certainly, no one is complaining about the idea of, between two charities who do the same thing, giving to the one who does it more effectively.

But there's a lot of complaining about the idea of comparing two different kinds of altruism. And the whole point of EA, I think, is that the fact that it's uncomfortable leads people not to do it at all, and prodding them to think about it feels like an attack.

Religious devotion? No offense, but that sounds like more straw. I think there's an awful lot of people who read about EA, visit some charity ranking websites, rethink their giving, and then don't go on to start a blog.

I don't think EA is utilitarian. Or at least, not in any way that requires objective moral realism. EA doesn't say, "moral goodness is quantifiable and I can prove on graph paper that one life saved from malaria is equivalent to 137 meals delivered to hungry people." It says, "I don't know what goodness is or how to measure it, but I need some way to decide where to donate, so..."

In other words, EA demands that you actually think about where your money goes and whether that's the best place for it, rather than just donating to whichever charity has the most emotionally moving imagery and music in its TV commercials. Once you do that, it naturally follows that almost any system you use will give the same answer: "Sheesh, I should probably donate less to the animal shelter." And I think 99% of the hate EA gets is rooted from the fact that people like donating to their local animal shelter, but can't really justify it.

Is EA predicated on moral realism? That seems like a straw man. I don't see any contradiction between abandoning realism (i.e. admitting that there is no objective way to measure goodness or other moral qualities) and EA.

We probably just define EA differently. When I'm elected dictator, it'll be illegal to write an essay like this without supplying your working definition of the thing you're against.

> PS. Please do not say anything about “anyone can start his own instance”. No, average Twitter/Facebook consumer can’t start his own instance.

This isn't a law of the universe, it's just software people haven't written yet. Installing new client-side apps was hard, until it wasn't. "Anyone can start their own instance" will be easy once someone writes the software to make it so. (Presumably a cloud provider like AWS, since that's who stands to profit from lots of people wanting to run server-side apps)

1) You responded as if I said, "the only purpose of monetary policy is to stimulate the economy as much as possible even if it introduces instability." Please don't do that.

2) You gotta read the thing I was replying to, and interpret my comment as a response to it, not as a standalone assertion. I think it's pretty obvious that I meant monetary policy resulting in inflation, as that's what they were complaining about, not all possible monetary policies in the abstract.

The person I was replying to was saying that inflation is bad because it dilutes the value of savings, which is therefore sorta kinda like a tax. I'm saying, that's a terrible model; a better one is that monetary policy uses inflation to stimulate investment in order to grow the economy, and doesn't care if that dilutes your savings, because it wants you to invest those savings.

If you disagree, say so, but argue with the whole thing, not with a sentence fragment taken out of context.