wobbly_bush

BRICS and OPEC are two very different things. Except one country in BRICS, the remaining ones are oil importers. They would gladly get rid of that dependency for national security reasons alone.

> How often have you read a headline, and then not clicked on the link?

Somewhat related - I have clicked a lot more on Axios articles which I know are 2-5 minute reads, compared to other long form articles where the author wanted to write a novella. Infact I look forward to reading Axios articles which I know are well written, compared to others which are of varying quality, so less inclination to click.

Same thing doesn't happen to say lawyers? Or any of the other white collar jobs?

I'm genuinely curious how does that data help. What would the prompts be like? "Help me design an addictive UX"? How do comments like birthday wishes or people posting their beach pictures and people replying with how good they look add any kind of value to the ML model training? Those conversations would be in larger quantity than any that discuss anything meaningful.

Whatsapp chats are encrypted, how can they be used to train the models? Also what kind of training can be done on Instagram data, is there anything of value there?

In Parliamentary system this is somewhat equivalent to "hung parliament" and usually results in re-elections. Governments must prove minimum support to pass legislations before they can claim to be "in charge"

Don't bank apps require logging even explicitly even if the phone is unlocked?

Can you elaborate on why you chose Macy's over others?

I used to own a pixel phone and loved it. What made me move was the data collection, and to some extent lack of security updates on older models. Feature wise, I still like Android over iOS.

Aren't Insta images heavily edited?

> hoping that turning cars will see you and not mow you down. Pretty sure this is what is going to kill me

I saw an accident in front of my eyes where this played out - a turning car mowed an elderly couple crossing slowly with the help of walking sticks. It was not pretty.

> Maybe you come back saying "it's somewhere in this eldritch spaghetti, and when I stared into it the abyss starting back at me sent chills up my spine and the pictures on my walls wept blood, please don't send me back there" and it's clear it's not worth pursuing any further and we drop it.

I wish I could give my status updates like this.

> For larger groups and families I have used other services where I can communicate directly with the owner

Which are those services and how do they differ from Airbnb?

Two points - legally, caste based discrimination is illegal. From a cultural aspect - cultural changes are much slower in non-western countries. For example, compare how quickly the culture around marijuana & same sex marriage changed in US, and the laws kept up. But similar change probably takes 10x longer in "older" cultures. As an analogy, the left wing party of India which is supposed to be liberal, opposed legalizing same-sex marriage[1]. This attitude extends to all issues of reform in the entire political class.

[1] https://www.opindia.com/2021/09/377-decriminalisation-congre...

> Why don't people just change their names to the caste they want to be

For an over-simplified explanation, substitute caste with race/nationality and rephrase the question in a setting you might be more familiar with. For example "if people face racism/discrimination due to their nationality, why don't they just do X", where X is to obfuscate their race/nationality. It might work sometime, it might not work most of the times and the real answer is complicated and depends on the details. If you consider everyone in India to be culturally homogeneous, then it's just a matter of saying someone isn't caste X but Y. But if you consider every caste/subcaste to be distinct culturally and linguistically (almost like they are their own countries), it's not trivial to replace surname X with Y as other factors give you away.

> Is there a reason that such a backwards obviously oppressive system persists to this day in 2023?

Similar mental analogy helps understand a tad bit better - why do oppressive practices like racism/discrimination based on nationality exist today? At that, exist in some of the more developed countries. FYI - caste based discrimination is illegal in India, kinda similar to how racism is illegal but that alone isn't sufficient to remove it from the culture.

Isn't the opposite also true?

Add to that if you have food restrictions, the $40 meal might not even taste worth it but you have to order for some reason (like not being able to cook on that day, etc.)

There is LitRPG genre in which tension is not as key an ingredient. Also, there can be consumers of the writeup who don't particularly "buy" a book - so the writeup doesn't have to follow a typical book structure.

If they don't involve you at all, perhaps you can convert it into a LitRPG novel - something like CivCEO [1]

[1] https://www.amazon.com/CivCEO-Lit-Accidental-Champion-Book-e...

> If I make a trip to (for example) Target, it feels nothing like Target of 20 years ago.

I'm curious how did Target feel like 20 years ago?

> because they seem to come from a place of... very high expectations

You can see housing prices for whatever areas people are talking about and how much the monthly mortgage comes out to be to get baseline on cost of living.

> Propaganda, though? Misinfo campaigns, astroturfing, where you hide behind sockpuppets and shell companies anyway?

Why just limit there? The chatbot companies can introduce ads where the answers are influenced by whichever company that buys the ads. Looking for information on nutrition? Some fast food company might "insert an ad" subtly changing the text to favor whatever the company wants.

That assumes the chatbot creators don't introduce explicit bias of their own. What if they start doing that? For example a search for nutritional information about some foods might be influenced by fast-food companies buying "ads" to insert their own messaging.

This brings an interesting question - will the various chatbot products bias towards the owning companies lobbying efforts (parroting their lobbying points)?

> When I've been reading on a computer all day for work, do I have the patience and energy to read a long book at home? Or would I rather watch a movie and relax.

Or somewhere inbetween - audiobooks. They are written with higher quality than most other text forms, and the narration lowers effort to consume them.

Are just the landing pages that are intentionally kept simple or even the real site behind logins? A bad site typically also reflects low confidence in technological abilities, is that not the case here?

> 2) Lobby to get TikTok banned

This happened in India, though it is not clear if it was Meta who lobbied or combination of other factors.

Question - what are your thoughts on giving an old laptop instead of iPad? Probably 5-year olds are too young for laptops, but in general there could be more a child could do for safe entertainment on a laptop than iPad/smartphone (theoretically atleast - with equivalent restrictions on accessing social media etc.).

If more Android phones provided longer support, it would be a reason for a lot of people to move back to Android from iOS.

Interestingly, one of the actual AIs from DEI teams is to ask for referrals from existing diverse candidates.