lukifer

The better analogy might be, "when the morality police call the restaurant, they divulge which table you sit at every day during lunch". And it's also not clear that it would be noticed: national security letters, gag orders, parallel construction, etc.

It's just another principal-agent problem, and I agree that a fully self-sovereign life, with no dependence on trust or agents, is an unrealizable ideal; and, that a decent solution (while not perfect) is reputation stake and aligned incentives, check and check in Apple's case. I too think Cook is sincere, and I trust them as far as I can throw their products, which is to say, a little. (The Apple Tax is so they don't have to rely on a sketchy big-data business model.)

That said, computing and InfoSec have some unique contours, in a way that trusting a mechanic or a lawyer does not. Those can have catastrophic failure modes as well (crashing from a shoddy repair, getting sued based on bad legal advice), but they aren't systemic to society, and have lower switching costs.

And I ultimately think it's a false choice. When it comes to meatspace security, it's possible to have trusted and accountable public institutions, and allow citizens to have some means for self-sovereignty (2A, locked doors). It would be foolish to rely only on one or the other, either as a society or an individual.

So I'm deeply grateful for the Stallman types, pushing forward the capacity for self-sovereignty. Even if it doesn't currently meet my needs from a risk/benefit tradeoff, I still benefit from the ecosystem, and its BATNA, and I look forward to the day I sever my dependence on Apple's ecosystem, whether or not they betray my trust.

I use 4K Blu Rays when I can, for the best possible quality. And I continue to be staggered at just how bad the UI/UX is, compared to DVDs (which was arguably somewhat worse on average than VHS).

If I didn’t know better, I’d think the manufacturers were actively trying to sabotage physical media. That the default UX should be “insert disc, wait three seconds, hit play” is not exactly rocket science.

I tried years ago, I don't think I got it working, ended up using Rhasspy/voice2json instead (TIL: the creator of both is now the Voice Eng Lead for Home Assistant).

Looks like the GitHub is still somewhat active, although their roadmap links to a dead Trello: https://github.com/leon-ai/leon

This is one advantage of a system with a constrained set of commands/grammars, as opposed to the Alexa/Siri model of trying to process all arbitrary text while in active mode. It can simply ignore/discard any invocations which don't match those specific grammars (and no need to wait to confirm that the device is awake).

"Computer, turn lights to 50%" -> "turn lights to fifty percent" -> {action: "lights", value: 50}

"My new computer has a really beefy graphics card" -> "has a really beefy graphics card" -> {action: null}

You might already be referencing this, but linking it anyway: Cory Doctorow's "I, Rowboat", where Asimov's Laws are a religion which some AIs adopt voluntarily to give their existence meaning.

https://craphound.com/overclocked/Cory_Doctorow_-_Overclocke...

(I could also make a case for truthfulness being prioritized over harm.)

What's the problem? Just do a Vickrey auction with your insurer, where you bid how much you're willing to spend to stay alive, and they make a counter-bid.

If you win, they spend their bid to keep you alive; if they win, they pay out your bid to your next of kin when you die. A perfectly Pareto-optimal solution of revealed preferences! /s

> Cash now is worth more than cash later.

This is accurate, regarding preferences for optionality, and how our economy currently works. But I think it's worth questioning the expectation that giving up that optionality deserves compensation, whether morally or practically (resulting in compounding "money-on-money returns", usually at low risk if sufficiently diversified).

The Italian economist Silvio Gesell noted, that no other good besides currency works this way. Every other good with a use value (food, houses) tends to lose value over time (entropy being fundamental to the universe), and/or, to carry risk (a share of stock which represents unpredictable ROI). There is course an exception in land, which doesn't intrinsically depreciate, but whose value trends upwards thanks to location value (and which can be addressed separately via Georgist land tax).

Gesell proposed a "demurrage currency" [0], which gradually loses value as it is held: the idea being, rather than being entitled to a return, retaining high long-term optionality is actually a privilege that one should have to pay for, since the real-world value it represents is depreciating. And the incentive to invest (whether at high or low risk) instead becomes to break even (with the rate of demurrage tracking what we currently call the discount rate).

I have no idea if such a concept is practical in a trans-national, growth-dependent global economy (with deflationary crypto-currencies as a BATNA!); if anything, I'm fairly confident it's not. But it's at least worth thinking about: that it's not at all axiomatic that holders of value should be entitled to compensation for "forgoing consumption" (not only because the wealthy don't necessarily need such an incentive, but also because increased consumption can mean an increase in the velocity of money, and more total value created, per the multiplier effect, and the "hotel riddle" [1]).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silvio_Gesell#Economic_philoso...

[1] https://www.econlib.org/archives/2012/01/an_answer_to_a.html

I support your general thrust in spirit, but I think "monopoly" isn't a helpful frame here. Consumers have a glut of options in streaming services: Prime, Max, AppleTV, Hulu, even YouTube (contrast with one of the classic monopolies, AT&T, which for many was the only game in town, unless you consider "write a letter to your friend instead" to be a valid substitution good).

I feel the correct frame is the general category of "market power" (including, but not limited to, the "anti-competitive practices" that forms the basis of current regulatory policy).

In the case of streaming, the closest analogue to monopolization is vertical integration: the custom-produced content which is only accessible on a particular streaming platform (sometimes including no releases on physical media).

On the one hand, Netflix could be considered to have a monopoly over the distribution of "Squid Game" (and Prime over "The Boys", Apple over "Silo", etc), meaning they can raise prices, not for the product itself, but for the "club goods" distribution platform, which the consumer may not be interested in otherwise.

On the other hand, entertainment/culture are not the same kind of "inelastic demand" necessity as telephone service in the past, or internet service now. And when we look at actual outcomes, I'd say quality for vertically-integrated productions are better on average than older business models; and while prices are going up, I wouldn't call them ridiculous price-gouging either (in addition to competing with each other, the streaming services are also competing with piracy and password-sharing).

Anyway, I think it's absolutely the case that enshittification isn't inevitable, and we should be wary of succumbing to learned helplessness in the face of capital consolidation. I would claim it's a "natural expected process" of the shareholder corporation, and the perverse incentives of short-term profits and stock prices, even when it comes at the expense of long-term brand equity. But solving that general problem is probably out of scope for "the bitrate is too damn low and the subscription fees are too damn high".

I'd love to see more regulation in the space, but realistically it'd be tricky (I don't expect any Doctorow-approved abolition of DRM, or mandatory interoperability, anytime soon). One could perhaps establish streaming-quality standards, where a company couldn't advertise "4K" unless it hit some threshold. But when it comes to the issue of streaming quality in particular, I suspect the tragic reality is that the majority of users simply won't notice or care.

Arrow’s Theorem is often invoked as a criticism of alternative voting systems (RCV, etc). And not while not wrong exactly, it seems textbook “perfect being the enemy of the good”. (It’s also one reason I prefer Approval Voting, which in addition to its benefit of simplicity, sidesteps Arrow by redefining the goal: not perfectly capturing preferences, but maximizing Consent of the Governed.)

I think Apple just wanted their own Game of Thrones flagship, and on paper, Foundation seems like it should be that (epic scale, big ideas). But honestly, it needs a more subdued treatment: mostly talking heads in rooms, and an anthology that jumps forward decades with each episode, rotating characters as necessary.

Blockbuster narratives need heroes, which works directly at cross-purposes to the long-term systemic thinking that defines the books. There was probably never a scenario where the high price of buying the rights could match up with the size of audience for a more faithful adaptation. (And rightly or wrongly, non-book-readers seem broadly positive on the series.)

I enjoyed Peripheral, having not read the book. I'd be curious to hear (spoiler-free) criticisms. (The concept was compelling enough, I definitely intend to read the series, especially given its cancellation.)

An individual can sometimes strike out on their own and succeed, and that's all to the good. But it simply does not scale across every sector of the economy, let alone being a viable strategy for most hand-to-mouth laborers (IIRC, something like 40% of US workers have less than $1000 in savings).

Every shareholder and investor wants a competitive moat: for corporate firms to have enough market power (including lobbying power and regulatory capture) to keep labor costs low (with an intentionally managed reserve pool of the unemployed, via NAIRU, to "discipline labor").

The fact that some individuals can beat the odds, does not change the systems dynamic: "the table is tilted, the game is rigged".

This is exactly why the conflation of "capitalism" with "markets" has been such an effective propaganda coup for the neoliberal rentiers: while there is often non-zero-sum value creation and growth in the short term, it's usually with an eye towards long-term consolidation of social power and rent extraction (converting flows into capitalized assets, representing expected returns and embedded growth obligations).

Monopoly, oligopoly, and market power are a feature, not a bug, and that includes reducing labor to a commoditized asset on the spreadsheet like any other: not only as cheap as possible, but as predictable, and as fungible as possible. (The extent to which the social power of these fiefdoms is not always a means to a "Number Go Up" end, but instead a primate drive for status and power merely enabled by rent-seeking, is left as an exercise for the reader.)

See "Markets Not Capitalism" and "Capital As Power".

While if didn’t hook me as quickly as Antimemetics or Ra, I also thoroughly enjoyed Fine Structure: https://qntm.org/structure

I'd certainly entertain it as possibility. From a purely physical perspective, I think the Gaia Hypothesis [0] has some validity to it, even if the analogy to DNA organisms is deeply imperfect.

Where I stumble, though, is identifying a way in which the Earth is actively chasing any sort of free energy differential, meaning no iterated selection pressures, and (probably) nothing we could call intelligence.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaia_hypothesis

I certainly don't rule that out. But even the Hofstadter "strange loop" model explains awareness, moreso than the qualia of experience. (Show me an "ouch", and I'll show a way to accomplish identical behavior via -X weighting of utils.) And, it invokes the question of whether a sufficiently advanced predictive function in silicon/code would also have consciousness and/or qualia.

If yes, one essentially lands in IIT [0] (according to some, implying that even a light switch has a 1-bit micro-consciousness).

If no, then one wonders what utility qualia brings to the table, compared to simply optimizing the algorithm to work without subjectivity. (Would ML training be more effective if we could somehow add "yuck" and "yum" experiences? How would we tell, assuming we aren't accidentally doing it already?)

For another perspective, Peter Watts' novel "Blindsight" explores the idea that consciousness is merely a temporary local optimum, and eventually selected against, in favor of life forms which are intelligent without being conscious.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_information_theory

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/48484.Blindsight

There isn’t the same kind of ontological boundary in a rock, as there is an organism.

My hunch is: there’s a low-grade subjectivity/qualia to all of the universe, which would include the particles of the rock, but the rock would not experience an independent “rock-ness”.

The consciousness of organisms are perhaps more like a dissociative state, analogous to a gravity well of subjectivity, such that the qualia are concentrated inside a boundary (the entity that is intelligently chasing energy differentials), and excluding most information outside this boundary.

The primary reason for this hunch is that “ouch” is an experience, rather than merely a mathematical/algorithmic update to a neural net (compare with artificial NN’s, chemical feedback loops, etc). An “ouch” is not needed to strengthen the signal; just tilt the training feedback stronger as necessary (-10,000 points to “eat the berry that made us sick”). And it seems prohibitively expensive expensive to bootstrap “strange loop” subjectivity merely to strengthen those numbers via an “ouch”.

But instead, if some form of subjectivity were to pre-exist, Darwinian pressures would co-opt it as an efficient feedback loop mechanism, and then iterate until arriving at the “consciousness” of animals and humans (including an incentive to pay more attention to qualia in the organism boundary, and only minimally outside it)

> prologue with the woman talking for 90+ seconds

There are multiple cuts, and the one I grew up with (I think a VHS recording from cable) instead has a longer introduction [0], with detailed exposition while panning over paintings of its world. Watching it at around 11yo, I found it comprehensible (if bizarre), and compelling, before reading the book years later.

I'll have to look again to see if this cut is finally available in any official capacity; I've only ever managed to find a stitched-together fan edit. It's flawed by any measure (many sets and effects that looked good on VHS don't hold up on HD), but I actually enjoy most of its creative license, and the longer cut mostly holds together IMO, in a way the theatrical doesn't.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z7FcJwg6OkA

Not OP, but I'll give my answer. The unification of different media types in iTunes is a feature, not a bug. (I clung to Retroactive as long as I could; I forget what made me cry uncle.) For actual music, Music.app has been okay, bugs notwithstanding. (I don't use Apple Music, only my local library.)

But the other apps simply aren't as full-featured as iTunes; they align more with Apple's interests as an appliance maker and content vendor (original iTunes preceded the iTunes Store by several years). TV.app preserves some power-user features, like Smart Playlists, while stripping out basics like "Show In Finder". But the one that really grinds my gears is the way audiobooks have been shoe-horned into Books.app, with any semblance of user sovereignty removed.

Example: few years ago, I was planning a road trip, and wanted to quickly filter down a shortlist of audiobooks: "Unread, Genre: Science Fiction, Length < 12 hrs". Not only does the UI offer no affordances for that: it doesn't even display audiobook length, let alone allow sorting by it! I had to dig to find where the files are stored (in `~/Library/Containers`, with gibberish file names), then write a Bash script to `ffprobe` the files and parse the results. When audiobooks were managed by iTunes, this would have been trivial.

This is going to vary wildly by game experience; many board game veterans learn shorthands for mechanics, and learn rule-learning as its own meta-skill, picking up even complicated games in 10 minutes.

That said, there are countless games where it's not unusual to budget an hour or more for "the teach". A great one I played recently is "Hegemony": a game that simulates political economy and class struggle, where one player is The State, and the others are economic classes (Working, Middle, Capitalist). Each player has their own rules, mechanics, and goals, each requiring a unique full-sized rules reference.

I tend to treat the first play of every new game as a "sacrificial round": I expect to do poorly, but I'll grok the game by the end. But I've found some need at least two sacrificial rounds: one just to get the mechanics, terms, symbology, and flow; and then another to internalize strategy and actually play well.

So yeah, this is all going to vary based on on one's experience level and definitions. I certainly don't begrudge anyone who doesn't want to spend a whole afternoon basically just to learn a game; as opposed to a game like "Photosynthesis", which might have seem intimidating to an inexperienced player, but after ten minutes they've internalized both the rules and the strategy.

100%, thanks for the link!

That's a good point. It was famously the preferred policy of Milton Friedman (presumably as a cheaper alternative to the welfare state, back when the Overton window was still more FDR than Reagan). A negative income tax might need to be paid out weekly or monthly to make a meaningful difference to the homeless and the working poor (to say nothing of access to banking services; as long as we're waving policy magic wands, let's add postal banking to the mix.)

Of course, I feel obliged to bring up the Georgist objection: that either negative tax or UBI would need to contend with the problem of ground rents, lest landlords simply jack up the rent by the $X additional income that they know for a fact that everyone has.

Fun aside: Thomas Paine, the author of "Common Sense", made one of the earliest proposals for a citizen's dividend [0] (funded by ground rents), but going the other direction: a one-time lump sum during young adulthood, as a means to bootstrap a homestead or small business.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agrarian_Justice

Shares at least some overlap with a "ritual of common knowledge": https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1116212.Rational_Ritual

I broadly agree with you, I favor UBI for similar reasons, though I'd maybe frame it less as "very good vs. less good", vs. just acknowledging the enormous overhead costs of means-testing, to say nothing of the consequences when bureaucracy turns corrupt or Kafka-esque.

But devil's advocate: is there any reason the same outcome couldn't be accomplished with a negative income tax instead, leveraging a bureaucratic infrastructure which already exists and isn't going anywhere?

The problem isn't that there isn't a common-sense distinction between the extremes; it's attempting to define the crossover point (presumably for the purposes of a "bright line" rule in law/policy/norms). Defining how much interest should qualify as usury is a classic "paradox of the heap" [0]; which may be a reason by some faith traditions simply forbade lending at interest altogether.

An interesting alternative to consider, is money that intentionally depreciates value at a fixed rate ("demurrage" [1]). In theory, this would incentivize lending at zero interest (assuming relative price stability for real goods, which is easier said than done).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorites_paradox

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demurrage_(currency)

Let’s at least grant the benefit of the doubt, that the poster knew to salt the hash. We can take it as given that incompetence makes for poor anonymization.

Your example of “transactions in Chicago” is much more salient; there’s clearly a cat-and-mouse dynamic where data can be de-anonymized, especially if the dataset is public. How much that will actually be possible will be specific to the data in question; but the risk is non-zero. There’s certainly a case that no amount of obfuscation is sufficient if a user has not explicitly consented to their data being used this way.

At some point, someone produced an actually working TNG comm badge as a Bluetooth phone accessory, apparently it's still for sale: https://shop.startrek.com/products/star-trek-the-next-genera...

Though from the reviews I've seen (and as with so many Bluetooth devices), it's unusably terrible, and the battery only lasts a few hours.

It's staggering to me that Apple has not improved on the UI for "try again" or "keep trying", whether the fault is with Siri itself, or just network conditions. It seems like (relatively) low-hanging fruit, compared to the challenges of improving the engine. (I don't use any other voice assistants, no idea how well they do here.)

> it looks like you're in a phone conversation with somebody

Even though everyone's seen AirPods by now, in those rare occasions when I'm on the phone in public, I feel compelled to have my phone out and vaguely talking at it, so it's clear I'm on a phone call and not a crazy person.

I'm curious if we would see similar usage with the pin, where voice commands in public are always performed with the hand up for the projection screen (it will still prompt looks, but hopefully be clear in context, "oh they're doing some tech thing").

Of course at this price point, it's highly dubious that we'll see anywhere near the ubiquitous market penetration of AirPods (which garner understandable complaints about the price point sub-$200, and that's with a clear value prop).

A good analogy might be a shareholder corporation: each one began as a tool of human agency, and yet a sufficiently mature corporation has a de-facto agency of its own, transcending any one shareholder, employee, or board member.

The more AI/ML is woven into our infrastructure and economy, the less it will be possible to find an "off switch", anymore than we can (realistically) find an off switch for Walmart, Amazon, etc.