Fair enough, I never really took those claims seriously but will concede that many still seem to be in that headspace even now.
1,231 karma · joined July 3, 2015
For general Q&A they can hallucinate, but so long as you are using it to augment your productivity and not as a driver this isn't any different than using stack overflow, or any other kind of question you might ask on the internet. It's basically a non issue too if you upload a document into its context window and stick to asking questions about that document though.
Considering how far you can go with just a few gallons of water, would be nice if there was more innovation in this space to increase accessibility in a safe way. While the bars and weights are one thing, it's ultimately the lack of a rack that makes squats troublesome imo.
My issues with the "soft" sciences, is chiefly their inability to replicate findings, and the paradoxical authority these so called scientists seem to gain despite not actually following the scientific method. It doesn't have to be this way either.
I'm not saying everything in these fields are total bunk or anything but I've been deceived by them enough by now that they have lost my trust. I'm sure there are plenty that actually do good science but I'm not capable of telling them apart from the rest unfortunately.
Even more concerning is this pretentious attitude reminiscent of what I'd expect from a religion or political movement than a field of science. Are we starting to treat universitys like cathedrals now? A scary thought.
I work in Massachusetts, but I live in New Hampshire. I pay more than double this on both Social Security fees & Massachusetts income taxes, which are non-deductible since New Hampshire has no income tax and makes up for that with higher property taxes (housing is cheaper though). Filtered to just health related services I can easily identify, in total I pay for Social Security, Medicare, and indirectly Massachusett's state healthcare (which I can only gain access to under limited conditions). Of these, only the private insurance fee directly benefits me, and I have little faith social security will actually pay out when I reach the qualifying age.
In terms of investment my HSA, and 401k are a much better dollar for dollar investment for my future finances than any government service, so I find it extremely unlikely I would ever truly benefit from public healthcare.
Despite my tone here, I'm more annoyed than upset about this. Due to the overall societal benefit, I'm not entirely against public healthcare depending on the details, I'm just under no illusion that it would be to my benefit, and I'm not much of an outlier. I'm also mostly convinced the root issue here is the inflated cost of healthcare rather than just the insurance aspect, public healthcare naively implemented would likely turn into yet another government subsidy for hospitals to devour imo.
If you want a similar feeling from a more modern game I recommend trying Prey (the new one). Terrible name that doesn't fit the title imo, but playing it felt similar to when I first played half life years ago, more than any other game I've played since then at least (except Half Life: Alyx).
Once you reach this stage, your commentary pretty much just becomes elaborate whining, which makes a poor impression of yourself and actually pushes people away from your position. At best you might get some likes on social media though, which can feel nice.
Most of the web consists of this, so if that's what you prefer, I guess it's just going with the flow.
I thought all numbers in JavaScript were basically some variation of double precision floating points, if so, why is setTimeout limited to a smaller 32bit signed integer?
If this is true, then if I pass something like "0.5", does it round the number when casting it to an integer? Or does it execute the callback after half a millisecond like you would expect it would?
In the case of firefox, it basically makes it less stable than a nightly build considering how often it crashes, and subtly breaks screen sharing in weird non-obvious ways. This experience has me guessing that Canonical probably cares more about server Ubuntu now than it does about desktop Ubuntu, which is a real shame.
While there are workarounds, I specifically endorsed Ubuntu in the first place to many people because these kinds of workarounds used to not be necessary. It's a real bummer honestly, not sure what else to recommend in this category either.
While I certainly wouldn't call myself an expert on this, having worked within the industry I've been able to make the following observations:
- Novel medical devices are often created by very small startups, who in essence exist solely to create a PoC. A larger Medical Device company then buys them to actually start walking through the regulatory hurdles which will bring them to market.
- The market it gets initially released in is rarely connected to the location it was invented (ex: Invented by European startup but released in the US is weirdly common). But if a product is successful enough then an even larger Medical device company with access to more international markets might swoop in and purchase the mid sized company.
- European regulatory agencies will oftentimes be lenient on products that have received FDA approval, but the reverse is less clear cut. So going through the FDA first can be more efficient, especially when considering the market size of the US along with the fact that you only need to support one language. In practice this pushes out the timeline for the first European release of a device.
- GDPR is actually not very different from HIPPA, perhaps not even as strict, but it is more ambiguous and that's a problem. The key difference is that, right now, everyone knows exactly how to follow HIPPA but the reverse is not true for GDPR. Some things that might be allowed by one might subtly contradict the other and there is no third party Medical Device companies can throw money at that will absorb the liability of this by saying whether or not they are GDPR compliant.
- Since Medical Device companies live & die on their study data, this data collection paradox has further pushed out timelines for when medical devices are first released in Europe.
- A European might see a cool new Medical device from a startup in their local newspaper but then never actually gain access to it for another 20 years.
So personally I'd say it largely reduces down to the regulatory environment + market size. The US can be among the strictest, but not only is getting past that worth it for market access, but by passing those strict hurdles, releasing to other international markets becomes much easier since you got the hard part over with.
Not to mention the fact that, in a similar way a popular programming language might have more "community resources" and a larger hiring pool, the same could also be said for navigating regulatory environments. So popularity has a self-amplifying effect.
Ultimately I think changes like this should be more grassroots than top down whims of private dictionary publishers. Not to mention that all this focus on the phonetics fundamentally misunderstands that the phonetics of English spelling are closer to a mnemonic than a rule. I suspect this will become gradually more obvious as languages world wide evolve to be more keyboard friendly in the coming century.
But this all just my take on the situation.
I eventually came to realize many of my spelling "errors" were actually due to my exposure to the British spellings for many common words I would see online, like color/colour or behavior/behaviour for example. Unfortunately my teachers were a little unreasonable about this and would still deduct points when I pointed this out...
To this day I still inconsistently use all spelling variants, and curse Noah Webster for his half assed attempt at regional spelling reform. In practice my phone just auto corrects them without me noticing though.
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I will point out to anyone else bored enough to read this silly comment chain that they quoted the section from "Camera Enforcement and Racial Composition", not the section about police stops and the amount of citations that come from them. Even in the main article you can see that the tentatively "unbiased" speed cameras ticketed black people slightly more than everyone else by a negligible amount (~4%).
Ironically the entire premise of the article was that speed camera citations are unbiased so this quote is kind of, what do you even call this? Since this was taken out of context to misrepresent the implication, lets just leave it at deliberate misinformation, since I simply can't understand how someone could do this accidentally. Maybe they wanted to take advantage of the fact I said I was unlikely to reply? Who knows?
> That's not what they did; they only counted speed citations in the study.
Okay so I found the paper and read through it to see if it said something contrary to what the article written by the researchers themselves said and you seem to be incorrect. The study is very clearly just traffic stops in total, not speeding tickets. In fact it's not even that, but a complex model estimating the traffic stop distribution.
Based on the study text, I'm guessing the data they need for this is simply unavailable so this is the best they could do, which I find both surprising and unfortunate. I personally think it would be worth collecting this kind of data precisely so that more robust arguments can be made.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2402547121
While an unbiased enforcement system is naturally a good thing, I can't help but wonder what strategies the middlemen who build these systems use to get public support. Consider this, what if these systems are built in a predatory manner, positioned at locations where a speed limit change is non-obvious, or at intersections where the timing of yellow lights is reduced below the usual? If a portion of everyone on the road is getting ticketed, then of course it would appear "unbiased". While I can't speak to the nature of these cameras, a misleading studying directly advocating for more of these systems should always raise alarms unless they have good data backing them.
So in summary, not only have you misrepresented my complaint with your strawman: "well black people drive worse" argument, you yourself were dishonest about the contents of the study you clearly did not read.
I don't think I will be replying to any other posts in this thread since this overall discussion has been unproductive and frankly a waste of my time.
Excuse me? This is an extremely uncharitable interpretation of my reply.
> “Our findings show that when speed cameras are doing the ticketing, the proportion of tickets issued to Black and white drivers aligns closely with their respective share of roadway users. *With human enforcement, in contrast, police officers stop Black drivers at a rate that far outstrips their presence on the road.*”
This is precisely the text that lead to my reply, why would they compare speeding tickets from speeding cameras with traffic stops by police and not speeding tickets from police? I'm not denying there is something here, just that this is a dishonest comparison.
In fact if you had read to the end of the article you would have seen they even indirectly allude to this:
> Over half of police stops in Chicago for 2023 were license plate, registration or equipment related. Automating enforcement of such nonmoving violations would eliminate a major reason for police-driver interaction, reducing the potential for bias and escalation.
These are two very different metrics and I'd be interested to see what a proper comparison actually looks like here. As it's currently presented, this feels kind of dishonest.
Rather than comparing the citations from speed cameras with the totality of all traffic stops made by police, a more honest comparison would be the racial distributions for speeding tickets given by police vs speed cameras.
To your second point, if you classify the literal possession of the stolen items from the burglary as a suspicious coincidence, I'm not really sure what you actually consider evidence? This is pretty much the smoking gun here, we even have testimony that he sold the stolen laptop so it's not like they just magically appeared in his car without his knowledge...
I do find it strange the county prosecutors are pushing back though, but that's where it ends really.
- Installing custom addons is so obnoxiously complicated it makes me think Mozilla has it out for me sometimes. It's actually easier to sideload apps on Android than it is to "sideload" addons into Firefox mobile.
- You can either close all tabs or methodically select and close every individual tab, no in-between. Makes cleaning them up super tedious. Wish there was atleast an option to close all above or below (like close all left/right on desktop)
- Swiping left/right on a tab in the tab page will close it, closing tabs this way is slower than hitting the x button and seems to have some kind of rate limit? In practice it exists solely so I can accidentally trigger a swipe when scrolling and close an important tab I wanted (the undo pop-up only lasts a couple seconds so I only manage to undo about 2/3s the time. It seems to get dismissed if I don't perfectly select the right spot, but maybe that's just in my head).
- No way to duplicate existing tabs, this is honestly the silliest one to me, why wouldn't they let you do this? Who thought it was okay to leave this one out? Perhaps I've simply missed the option for this because I certainly can't find it anywhere. This isn't even a power user feature, it's like not being able to close the passenger window in the drivers seat of your car.
- The process for making new tabs is confusing, it will have an option to "jump back in" to the last tab you had opened but sometimes it will also replace that tab entirely and I can't understand why. Wish it was just a normal new tab page instead of whatever this is.
- Scrolling always seems fucked up on a bunch of sites, it sort of forces you to move the address bar to the top to make things work but the interface is so over-designed for your thumbs this ends up always being terrible.
- The interface just objectively sucks on tablets because of the over-designed for thumbs thing, Chrome reverts to standard tabs like you see on desktop, wish Firefox did the same, or at least something similar. Looks ridiculous.
Good Parts:
- I liked the way bookmarks/pinning works, use that all the time
- I love that I can use uBlock Origin, frankly this is the main reason I'm even using this thing
- I like the general idea of a page that shows all my tabs as little window boxes, just wish it was executed better.
- Reader mode is awesome, I barely use on desktop but it's critical on mobile. This is indirectly because the scrolling is fucked up on most sites because of the bar thing though so maybe this one only half counts. It would also be nice if they put the slightest bit of extra effort into the customization options for the reader page. This is literally just updating some values in a style-sheet after all... I would do it myself if addons weren't so painful
- It actually plays media when I change the app focus unlike the user hostile Chrome does, in practice this still doesn't actually work very reliably but I appreciate the effort
- I can install it from F-Droid
- I like that really old tabs get smushed into a menu that makes it easy to delete them. It's sort of niche and makes me wonder why they would implement this before any of the other more obvious features for managing tabs, but I digress, better than nothing.
I don't think it's about getting the absolute perfect shot of the moon, but capturing an absolutely perfect shot of the moon in this moment, at this place; that kinda vibe. This holds even more true for distant celestial objects that you can clearly see in your telescope but look like a blur with your otherwise untuned camera.
It ultimately depends on the "how" though, like if Mozilla were to act selfishly, they could get aggressive with the trademark and kill the brand recognition of a fork, possibly even requiring interface changes. Alternatively on the other end of the spectrum, if they simply passed Firefox in it's entirety to the community, it could possibly end up in a Thunderbird situation where it experiences a revival without a fork being necessary.
Absent Googles funding, I think the best case scenario would be it's top leadership leaving as the budget stops being capable of sustaining the salaries critical for "supporting their families" and Mozilla gradually transitions into the non-profit it was always meant to be, soliciting donations exclusively for browser development. All while free from any concerns about pissing of Google and losing their main source of funding.
Presumably a proper non profit would be more incentivized to stick to the projects ideals so they can brag about it in their fundraising activities (with perhaps a little too much of that money going into administrator pockets on the down low). Meanwhile Google's funding creates a status quo where it's pretty much fine with anything so long as Firefox continues to exist as a scarecrow to anti-trust suits. It effectively muscles out all the potential well meaning donors which could have helped steer things in a more positive direction, and acts like a sword of damocles floating over Mozilla's head, engorging the organization in addictive cash they don't deserve, and implicitly discouraging them from ever stepping on Google's toes lest the money hose gets turned off.
These days I'd call Firefox "good enough" from a privacy & open source perspective. It checks the boxes, and while I'm actually pretty open to the UI changes they have made over the years, I've gotten the sense that top Mozilla leadership don't really care about Firefox anymore, even distancing themself from it in certain respects. These days Firefox doesn't really seem to be going anywhere, it does the bare minimum by implementing web standards but all efforts to distinguish it from Chrome seem to be gradually extinguished. I wouldn't even be surprised at this point if they eventually turned off Mv2 support in a few years from now, despite all promises to the contrary, citing complexity or perhaps even "security" like Google's been doing as the reason.
If in the "worst" case Mozilla shutters down or abandons Firefox development after losing their money hose, perhaps the mindshare of the community they have been hoarding away all these years will coalesce around a healthier fork with an organization structure closer to the Linux foundation, maybe then Firefox would actually have a future again.
One can only dream.
While it might present a save menu similar to the real game, that doesn't mean the menu itself actually functions. With LLMs, they are ultimately only able to remember what's been pre-trained into their model + whatever is discussed within their context window.
A hypothetical LLM based online bot/shill sent out into social media would likely be including the entire discussion within their context window for each post generated though, otherwise it wouldnt really be possible for it to maintain a coherent conversation.
If anything I'd go so far to say that LLMs are innately more vulnerable to persuasion than humans are, they are technically just a complex text completion algorithm at the end of the day after all. Even with the strictest system prompt, the best they can do when cornered is bend the knee, devolve into a pattern of verbatim repeating themselves or just start spewing a bunch of gibberish in the worst case.
In reality stubborn thickheaded folks who refuse to compromise are pretty much the norm across social media in my experience, so even if LLMs really are capable of what you're suggesting here I don't believe there would actually be much of a difference to the status quo.
I have faith they will continue to do what's in their best interests and if their best interests happen to align with mine, then I will support that. Just like how I don't bother killing the spider in my basement because it helps clean up the other bugs.