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ivraatiems

8,685 karmajoined 13 years ago

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ivraatiems
·5 hours ago·discuss
The spend is on private health insurance going to for-profit middlemen. It's not mostly on the government. People love to crow about Medicare and Medicaid (safety net government-run insurance) waste but the vast majority of "waste" is the record profits put up by private companies.
ivraatiems
·8 days ago·discuss
Not quite "open to the public," but very visible from public areas and close enough for you to get a good luck. Also, some offer tours or have attached museums.

It used to be that the Davis Monthan AFB offered tours, but sadly, those have ended for security reasons.
ivraatiems
·21 days ago·discuss
Something I have never understood about the "big pharma makes fake/unnecessary/harmful vaccines" narrative is how folks who believe in it (including those in this comment section) understand these companies' incentives.

In the United States, pharma companies make money when insurance companies (and the government, but less so than in many other nations) buy their product to give to patients. In practice, very few people are paying for vaccines out of pocket.

Insurance companies in particular hate, hate, hate giving anybody money for any reason. They will not pay for something unless you beat them over the head with how well it works. And if they don't believe you, they'll do their own analyses. Better to blow a few million on a study than spend a few billion on unnecessary treatments. (This is the same reason that there's a car-insurance funded highway safety institute crash-testing cars.)

And yet, every year, they insist on making the flu and COVID vaccines free and pushing it on as many people as possible! I guarantee you if you call your insurance company and ask if they think you should get a flu or COVID vaccine, or any vaccine, really, they'll say, yes please.

Why would they do that if these vaccines were going to cost them money by a) being useless or b) being harmful? There is simply no incentive!

The reason everybody wants you to get the damn shot is that the shots work, and the downside risks of them are smaller and cheaper than the downside risks of the things they prevent. Capitalism would make it very difficult to repeatedly sell vaccines that don't work, or hurt you; you might get away with it once, but after that, the reward's just not there.

I don't know how one responds to that, if one distrusts vaccines, other than to suggest a much larger and more complex evil conspiracy than is plausible to most people.
ivraatiems
·24 days ago·discuss
I really like this breakdown of what one has to do. For my little laptop-selling side business, I have the install-and-setup process pretty heavily streamlined, and it still takes time to do things like get all the relevant driver updates installed and test the machine to ensure it's fit for sale. Probably around an hour or two per machine, but with a lot more downtime than this process involves.

I would generally advise against buying an HP in this day and age, though.
ivraatiems
·29 days ago·discuss
In fairness, I think this might be a case where the pure id represented by this administration happens to align with the correct and logical choice. You could be right, but for this instance, the outcome is the same.
ivraatiems
·29 days ago·discuss
I completely agree with you. I think the problem is that Anthropic believes their own BS, and thinks it IS a Doomsday device which only THEY can control. I think that's what's produced this outcome.
ivraatiems
·29 days ago·discuss
> So if you take these risks seriously, which the median commentor on HN obviously doesn't, what is the right thing to do?

Easy. You oppose it. You dedicate all your resources to stopping not just OpenAI, but anybody trying to make these technologies.

With all those billions of dollars, you could get a lot done.

Anthropic doesn't do this, which exposes the fundamental hypocrisy in their stated philosophies.
ivraatiems
·29 days ago·discuss
> A CEO's blog post is not an official company statement or any sort of binding agreement.

Uh, then what is it? We should not take the words of the leader of the company published on the company's website to be the official stance of the company??
ivraatiems
·29 days ago·discuss
Maybe this will be simpler for Anthropic to understand if they take their own high-minded philosophical nonsense and ego out of it and consider it the way a neutral party would.

Suppose a company calls themselves The Doomsday Device Company. They make and sell excellent-quality doomsday devices. They regularly go online to proclaim that their doomsday devices are the best and most powerful, and also that doomsday devices are dangerous and should be regulated.

The Doomsday Device Company then says they have the world's best doomsday device. (They don't, but they claim they do.)

The US Government hates the Doosmday Device Company for various political reasons, but also has a vested interest in there not being a massive proliferation of doomsday devices.

The Doosmday Device company spends a great deal of time and money telling everyone: "Our doomsday device is the most doomy of all time!" (though it probably isn't) and "Everyone can use it!" (for a lot of money)

It is completely logical, then, for the US Government to say: No, everyone cannot use your doomsday device, because doomsday is bad. (While also meaning: Only we should be able to use it, and you shouldn't be able to tell us how.)

If you do not want to be in the business of having your doomsday devices shut down by the government, well, it would help if you didn't so loudly and aggressively proclaim how doomy they are. It doesn't matter how trustworthy you claim to be, given that your business is making evil doosmday devices. You still won't be trusted!
ivraatiems
·last month·discuss
I think the key is that they also can't let Anthropic employees who are foreign nationals use it (e. g. overseas remote employees, people on H1-B visas or green cards, etc.)

That would probably make it very difficult to maintain and develop if there's even a small number of such employees, and I suspect Anthropic, who pays large sums of money for what they perceive as the best talent wherever they can find it, has quite a few.
ivraatiems
·last month·discuss
When you spend a lot of time telling people how dangerous your products are, people who have the power to keep dangerous products off the market might listen.

Especially if those people aren't presently very bright, and are already mad at you for not helping them achieve their unrelated authoritarian goals.

I do not think this is somehow a 3D chess move by Anthropic. They are not masterminds, even if they'd really like to be. People who actually interact with their products know that Fable and Mythos are incremental improvements, not doomsday devices. I think this is a punitive move by an administration that loves being punitive, which they have unknowingly bolstered with their own dumb rhetoric.
ivraatiems
·last month·discuss
Whether or not Anthropic is right about what AI can accomplish, whether these performance gains are real or not, their moral stance here is absolutely hideous to me.

"We must blast forwards into making this dangerous thing because if we don't, someone else surely will," is a coward's argument.

If you believe it is dangerous, you should be dedicating yourself to STOPPING others from making it, not making it first! There's a reason disarmament has been so important in nuclear politics! It's not because people think nukes are a great idea!

In fact, that kind of thinking is exactly what keeps nukes dangerous!

If they themselves buy what they're selling, they should shut the whole thing down. Fortunately, I don't think they do, and neither do I, yet.
ivraatiems
·last month·discuss
I'm writing this from a Macbook Neo. It's goddam fantastic. The best product Apple has put out in years. There simply is not a Windows laptop out there that can compete on speed, price, and build quality all at the same time. The low amount of RAM is simply not noticeable for everyday tasks. The display is fantastic. It feels really solid and great to hold and use.

macOS is far and away the worst thing about it. It's never exactly been a customizable or flexible OS, but Tahoe is also loaded with bugs, has tons of unconfigurable settings (or buries useful things in "accessibility" layers), and is still missing basic features (still no NTFS write support out of the box? really?) for anybody who is not an entry-level user.

But that said, for about $500, I truly don't think anything better exists. One of the best bang-for-buck new electronics I've ever bought.
ivraatiems
·last month·discuss
The message they're trying to send is not "we think you're stupid" so much as "we know you hate this, let us make it easier."

The problem is that they don't offer a way for you to say "no, thank you, I'll write my own emails", because they are dumping so much money into this thing and if people don't want to use it they can't justify feeding the token machine.

You can turn a lot of this stuff off by having a Google Cloud account and using their "business-class" product, which gives you the power to turn off these features (most of them, anyway) for your "employees". I'm already doing that because I use Google for a bunch of stuff, but if I wasn't, I might switch away from Gmail as well.
ivraatiems
·last month·discuss
Why does saying "humans have intrinsic value" put an obligation on a person to entirely fix society's problems? It's a really walrus-y "so you critique society yet participate in it, huh, curious" way to engage with the question. "Oh, if you think humans are so great, why haven't you helped every human?" just dodges the point the original article is making.

I think insinuating that OP is engaging in empty platitudes because they expressed a hopeful philosophical position rather than a cynical one is reading their work in bad faith.
ivraatiems
·last month·discuss
Do you consider dogs to have more, less, or the same amount of consciousness as humans?
ivraatiems
·last month·discuss
Is it your contention that the vast majority of people only value others in terms of their economic value?
ivraatiems
·2 months ago·discuss
I think Dropbox is great, but I got about 10GB of storage via affiliate links ten years ago and I've never upgraded or paid a cent since. I'm sure I'm a huge loss for them.

And even despite enjoying their service, if Google Drive produced a Windows integration that actually worked well, I'd leave for it in a minute.

I'd never use OneDrive, but that's more out of spite at Microsoft shoving it at me than because it is bad in any way I know of clearly.
ivraatiems
·2 months ago·discuss
It's fair to say that EV owners need to pay their share of road taxes. I don't think even most EV owners would necessarily disapprove of that in principle; I am one and I don't at all.

I do think that this bill is clearly structured to disincentivize EV purchases at a time when transitioning to EVs is an extremely good ideas for both the public and the climate.

There are a ton of other ways to go about this that would be less punitive: A one-time fee at purchase. A tax on public charging. A tax on charger purchase for home use, or on electricity at homes which have chargers installed.

I think the goal here is to get people not to buy EVs.

Also - and maybe this is a shortcoming of the reporting in the article, not the legislation - I have questions. How is this going to be collected? Is the IRS going to ask if you own an EV and then assess a tax? Are states going to do it? Who's going to pay for the process of figuring out who owns which EVs and how much to tax them? Is there a grandfather period for existing EVs or are we taxing all EVs going forward? Are we taxing them retroactively, too?

(By the way, the "Albert Gore" quoted in the article, despite their similar names and political interests, appears to be no relation to the former Vice President of the United States. That's a fun coincidence.)
ivraatiems
·2 months ago·discuss
"We should tax EVs because I think they are ugly" is a take I genuinely would never have imagined I'd hear.