whatgoodisaroad

There's a way of looking at this as pretty much normal. I think we have yet to really face the fact that systems of common-law are ad-hoc LLMs (in contrast to statutory-law, which is more similar to standard programming).

In particular, common-law uses an enormous "model" of case precedents that gets incrementally updated by human curators with minimal influence over it.

This is clearly much more impressive technically since it runs seamlessly on my browser, but visually and tonally it reminds me of a peaceful game called Alba that I played recently.

I'm probably referring to the wrong component, yeah, but what I'm imagining is a car with no digital intermediaries between the pedal and the power going through the wheels.

I'm optimistic about electric cars, but pessimistic when the companies producing them are the most craven financializers like this.

Sometimes I wonder if there would be a market for a "maximally analog electric car" where, for example, the accelerator pedal is a potentiometer.

Having read this, I now realize a bit in the Abicada-bra episode of the IT Crowd was a parody of this incident.

Perhaps Google hasn't found the right balance in this case, but as a general rule, less ethics === more market. This isn't unique in that way.

Bloomberg also still hasn't printed a redaction of "The Big Hack" which is extremely damning to their journalistic credibility.

On the other hand, Apple has been much much worse at privacy than Google if you are Chinese.

CSP protects against an XSS threat model, but once the attacker has control of the browser itself, defeating CSP is trivial since you can just decorate scripts with the nonce string (or equivalent).

DALL-E2 and similar are unbundlings: the best artists synergize 1) technical ability with 2) good taste. 1 is the ability to climb a hill and 2 informs the direction of "up", and both take years to develop well.

What's really interesting about this class of AIs is that they unbundle the two and you can play with them independently for the first time.

IIRC, there is a scene in the extended cut of the RotK that alludes to this part of the story.

My understanding was that this sort of stock sale blackout is typically an internal thing to avoid insider trading liability, but if you've been laid off, you would no longer be internal and therefore no longer subject to the blackout. Is that not how it's structured here?

At the same time, if that state actor happens to be China, Apple will just give the government access to your iCloud data. Not all state actors are equally within Apple's striking range.

Folks in many militaries claim pacifism, and I understand this to be not uncommon in US forces during conscription. They’d end up being medics or similar roles.

An important difference between tobacco companies and big tech is that the latter sells tools to political campaigns.

So far as I know, there was never a system where each cigarette could advertise a politician, but if there were, when world today may look different.

I would argue that both dates and datetimes dimensionally signify ranges of time with different lengths. A date being a range of ~24 hours and a time being a range of a minute/second/microsecond depending on the definition. It's rarely truly meant to signify an instantaneous point in time.

Looked at as ranges, equality can be defined as whether they overlap, and that works for most use cases but not all.

You can be proven wrong distressingly easily. Hopefully nobody does.

Is this not more of a measure of beef related farm subsidies?

To what extent is this a supply side problem? What's the counterexample high quality health website that Google should have included?

Part of the problem is surely how Google's ad model influences the success or failure of various kinds of websites, but a deeper problem seems to me how anybody qualified to share medical information freely would be acting against their own interest.

Not strictly so. An example of misaligned incentives would be an insurance salesman/CEO overstating the likelihood of death, and thus overstating the likelihood of a payout to the customer. This hypothetical would result in greater margin for the insurer.

You could make the argument that Disneyland is designed to be a loss-leader, and there's no reason for the parks to reach a price equilibrium per se. In its original formulations, the parks are one link in a much larger business model [1].

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/1957-drawing-walt-disney-bri...

Perhaps this is off topic, but it's always strange to see writing thousands of kilometers. If we're gonna use the meric system let's commit to it: either write megameters or millions of meters.

It's a very cool visualization in any case.

In the most recent episode of the Exponent [1] Ben Thompson and James Allworth make the interesting argument that it's intended to recreate the enterprise-to-consumer transition that PCs made but for VR technology. That is to say that very low price-sensitivity enterprise money will end up funding dramatic technological improvements in VR that can then be more effectively deployed to capture consumers.

[1] https://exponent.fm/episode-196-forecasting-the-metaverse/

That proof uses Euler's formula, which is the real brain melter.

Does this writer genuinely think they are the first to think of convincing people to get vaccinated? And all we needed was a little facts and logic?

A police report != a 911 call from a legal standpoint (to my non lawyer knowledge).

Thank you for this thoughtful response! I think I see what you mean how values are not necessarily universal and that imposing them across cultures can go very very wrong. You’re totally right that we don’t have to look past the last several weeks’ world news for examples.

As a “value” democracy gets tricky. What does it mean exactly? Even within the US it takes on many contradictory forms. And why does democracy matter? Is it a worthy value simply because it’s the least bad political system? That’s not very universal as a reason, and surely not a good reason to make war.

Where I suppose I diverge is that I think freedom of expression (and, inextricably, guarantees of privacy) actually are universal values that cross whatever kind of boundary. What has nationality to do with it? Call me a myopic American but its hard for me to accept the idea that freedom of speech could be a culturally specific value.

Now should we enforce values with coercion? Generally I think you and I agree that we shouldn’t. But information technology (and, to a great extent, strong cryptography) provides an enormous (peaceful) opportunity to durably promote those values at an anthropocene scale.

Maybe nobody externally taught these values in the formation of the US, but it’s maybe also worth remarking that the formation greatly benefited from an unusually free press for that time period.

Well put. Perhaps it’s cynical, I think that’s true of any corporation of Apple’s size: their only true principle is to maximize shareholder value.

The best we can do as privacy-concerned mere-mortals is to take our business where those profit incentives align with our values. Apple’s put a lot of work into advertising that their profits are aligned with values of privacy, but some signs say otherwise.

This to me is a surprising attitude. As an American whose outlook is generally framed by American values, it’s very upsetting to think of how privacy and freedoms are systematically impinged upon in so many parts of the world. If we can be upset about invasion of privacy in one country, why would those principles change at geopolitical borders?

Do you have any sources for that? I ask because the article I linked specifically states that Apple was forced to discard the entire encryption system it uses elsewhere. It’s also hard to understand why a government would insist on this sort of data custody without the benefit of plaintext access.