3,116 karma · joined January 25, 2022
It's your home. It's no more free or unfree, earned or unearned than anything else.
The home that I grew up in is.. hell, I'd consider it to be "mine" and my siblings more than almost anything else I have.
Had the Government at the time said - hey, look, we have two options here - we can lock down for a good few months / a year, it might get rid of the virus, it might not, but it's worth a shot; or we can just sack it off and take the hit - then I think we'd have had fairly similar compliance, and a lot more respect long term.
What happened instead was just this constant kind of psychological warfare - it's just a few weeks, actually it's just a few months, okay you can go outside again, actually go back indoors - and everything was ramped up to 11 - getting on the tube was perfectly safe if you were needed at work, but not if you wanted to see family - etc.
It felt completely schizophrenic - those of us who actually looked at the data could tell straight away that "it's just a few weeks to flatten the curve" was a bald faced lie.
For many I think that it pulled back the curtain on the kind of behavioural manipulation that goes on, and now it's difficult for a lot of people to believe that the Government is actually acting in our best interest.
I suppose you'd have to make sure it was turned off to not be broadcasting your screen to the world.
For example, wedding photography. A picture that looks like you and your husband dressed up doesn't cut it. It's the moment, capturing everyone together, the crowds, etc.
The best I can imagine is that you could have someone walking around with a basic phone (or CCTV) wide angle capturing everything in low res, and then an AI could take those images and create convincing looking upscaled versions of them with interesting perspectives and composition etc. I still think though that people will want the real deal.
Sports photography and journalism are similar.
I would love to drive for Uber when I have a bit of free time, but I'd need a licence from my local authority, and taxi insurance which is unrealistically expensive to obtain on a ride by ride basis.
I think that the main issue is that it tries to come up with a metric that works across every country which is basically pointless because a lot of them are failed states where income information isn't reliable or meaningful.
So they come up with stuff like "how high is teenage pregnancy" and "what is the male female work balance" which they define as being proxies for social mobility I assume because if you have five kids at age 20 and you're forced to stay at home then you have none.
The problem is that it just introduces a billion ways to influence the actual rankings, they are value judgements.
If you look at well functioning countries only, then you can pretty much look at how many people in the bottom decile of parental household income end up in the top decile of household income.
You still have the issue though that this only tells you how the distribution actually ends up, not how it _could_ look in a specific country if everyone actually tried their hardest to climb the social/financial ladder.
I don't think that social mobility can be measured statistically, because it depends on people actually trying. I actually think that the UK does have fairly high social mobility _but_ the vast majority of people get stuck in local maxima, and the laws are influenced by that (e.g. stuff like obsession with the mediocre outcome).
Having said that, the index you've pasted is complete bollocks. I don't know what they are measuring but it has nothing to do with what I would consider social mobility (e.g. ability to move into a different social class or perhaps earn a significantly different amount to your parents). The factors they use seem super focused on socialist policies which I don't think have anything to do with mobility.
It's not just the European Union, the UK is the same.
There is a heavy bias towards what works for the incumbents.
One of the ways in which this plays out in Britain is that almost everyone is culturally conditioned to consider themselves as being a certain "class" of person e.g. they'll never start a business, they'll never earn above a certain amount, they'll work 50 years for a company (not the same necessarily, just "a company"), if they're lucky they'll get a mortgage on a 2 bedroom house. They look down on others who want more than that, which works very well for those who have it and want to maintain that moat.
Contrast that with the US in which success is celebrated and even the poorest dream of one day "making it".
All else being equal I'd definitely prefer to work with a more attractive coworker regardless of sex.
Basically, if you take the axiom that physical appearance and genetic qualities should not matter at all, then we need to minimise its' influence.
But you could also easily make the argument that beauty is a proxy for a lot of things that we _do_ want to maximise. It makes sense to reward those that are beautiful, fertile, strong, etc.
Just not above all else. You wouldn't pick a romantic partner, or a friend, or a colleague _solely_ on those qualities, but to not incorporate them at all seems odd.
I mean, on a basic level, you have to be able to get on with your colleagues. A lot of people would find it difficult to get on with someone who's ugly, doesn't shower, has no social skills, etc, even if their code is great and their stock picks too. It's not arbitrary.
Obviously people are going to use cars to get to the Olympics. They'll park around the block and get taxis in, or they'll park near a metro station, or they'll drive from say, Vegas to LA, etc.
I guess that saying that they'll put on more public transport and not have actual car parks at the venues doesn't sound as shiny.
To give an analogy, a carpenter might be happy with hand tools, happy with machine tools, happy with plywood, and happy with MDF. For routine jobs they may be happy to buy pre-fabbed cabinets.
But for them to employ an apprentice (AI in this example) and outsource work to them - suddenly they are no longer really acting as a carpenter, but a kind of project manager.
edit: I agree that LLMs in their current state don't really fundamentally change the game - the point I am trying to make is that it's completely understandable that everyone has their own "stop" point. Otherwise, we'd all live in IKEA mansions.
WiFi isn't some sort of aether, it is created.
A kitchen knife isn't foolproof, you could convince someone with a sufficiently low IQ to stab themselves with it.
The law also states that crime is illegal.
I wouldn't walk around Compton late at night with a £5K camera though. Even with insurance.
Everything else is just wishful thinking. Like trying to keep a secret whilst only telling one or two friends.
Well, no, the Android model for unlocking the bootloader works well here - just make it awkward enough that a typical user can't do it without jumping through a few hoops.
My residential street in London is a 20mph limit. But it doesn't need a limit because it has speed bumps frequently enough that if you care about your suspension at all your max speed is average 15ish anyway.
Then there's the main roads leading into town which are also 20mph limits, but are double lane roads with fairly wide lanes. Some of them even have metal dividers.
It fundamentally makes no sense for the limit to be the same on both of those roads. One of them is a proper thoroughfare with a high design limit that was 30 until very recently (probably 40 or higher "back in the day"). The other is a neighbourhood that only really the residents and visitors have any business driving on.
You don't need the rubber bumps to be literally zero height, a few mm is fine, you just don't want it to be a big effort to get over with a pram/wheelchair.
Looking at it holistically though, it's probably the wrong place to optimize anyway because in practice most streets picked at random will have more obstacles in the way of wonky tiling due to subsidence or weathering of a pavement that's 50, 100, etc years old.
You seem to be stating that any loss at all no matter how small is a complete disaster without really qualifying it. Yet one could easily make the point - well, what about the customers you don't serve at all because they want to buy a rucksack and you don't sell them? That number could be far higher than the ones affected by outages.
I think this probably just depends on how big the numbers are to be honest. Yes, if 1% of people are millions of dollars, then sure, we care. Usually it's not anything close to being like that.
It's more convenient and cheaper but worse for you.
Furthermore I think that this specific misunderstanding is a huge conflict point in politics, and contributes significantly to things like the left-right divide.
The fundamental difference being that one can realise that, statistically, they have a significant risk of being in a "losing group", whilst still thinking that designing a society with such "losing groups" results in a better system overall.
The stripped back "spherical cow" form of it would be as follows: imagine a society in which you can be born as one of two people. A person requires 80 potatoes in order to survive.
One of those people is capable of farming a hundred potatoes per week, which is enough to feed one person but not two (if shared, both will die). The other of those people is capable of farming only fifty potatoes per week, which is enough to feed no-one, and if shared is still not sufficient as a total of 160 potatoes is required in order to feed both.
The optimal way to design that society then is to allow the second person to starve and the first person to live alone, even though in this thought experiment there is perhaps a 50% likelihood that you "spawn" as the person who will be put to death, because the alternative is that you die regardless.
Extrapolating from there you can have other examples - say that 99% of people are green, and 1% blue, but green people are deathly afraid of blue people to the extent that they will develop anxiety and depression if the blue people are around. The best society is clearly then one where the two groups are segregated and do not interact, even if that might suck if you're born as a blue person "cut off from the world", because otherwise it sucks regardless.
Succinctly - it basically begs the question - it assumes that equality and fairness is somehow obvious and a priori but it's really not at all.
Going back from frame 500000 to frame 499999 is in the limiting case as complex as seeking from 1 to 499999, and in most cases far better.
I think the forum thread would be better answered "you do it, I don't need this feature" which is basically the gist of it and is a completely fair answer.
To be honest I want as close to instant as possible. If the FTSE100 drops 15% then I want to be there to buy it before it pops up again.
i.e. for simplification, try to get all bills to come out on the 1st, then make sure that $20k hits the account on the 25th. For the rest of the month it can be empty.