Legit question: what's going to happen when bitcoin is no longer produced? Like, there's a finite amount of bitcoin that will ever be mined, and after that, why would anyone keep running their mining operations? How do transactions get verified after that?
Doesn't the entire viability of bitcoin as a currency depend on miners mining?
> developers who work for big companies will get jealous and they will reject you. If you're very good, you need to pretend to be mediocre and above all; compliant.
To add to what another poster said, it's not jealousy.
Big companies move slow because generally, to get big, they had to be successful (to some extent) and changing too much all at once is a risk that the bureaucracy isn't always comfortable with.
One of my old managers (I work in "enterprise") used to say things like "the efficiencies that this solution will bring the company..." which was just a euphemism for more folks getting laid-off (happened all the time, and glassdoor was full of warnings about this) or more jobs being shipped to our offshore units or even down-sizing in our offshore units.
I think it's reasonable, at least in the US, where healthcare & retirement & welfare is so tightly coupled with employment, for folks in big companies to be wary of innovation. They might want their job to be easier, sure, but too easy and they could be out of a job (for example, if the workload that previously took 5 people can now be managed by 2 or 3).
1) What would you expect be implemented to reduce/eradicate doom scrolling?
2) What would making the algorithm public do for us? I'm not an ML engineer, but presumably their algorithm isn't just an algebraic equation where x is how toxic the post is and y is how inflammatory it is and y is the number of kids who will think harder about suicide because of the post.
Maybe I'm just super naive and that _is_ how Facebook made their algorithm, but my understanding is that the algorithm is a little more of a black-box and is a little abstract. How is a lay-person supposed to evaluate something like that?
> Philip Morris doesn't make money every drag someone takes, that's exactly my point. It's different.
I see. You're right that it was an imperfect comparison.
Philip Morris makes _more_ money by addicting its users.
Facebook makes _more_ money by addicting its users.
I think social media being bad for you is a nebulous concept. I would argue that, since I stopped using Facebook and Reddit (and only use HN on work-breaks), I've been able to maintain my environment and thereby my well-being on an order that I was not previously able to.
Eating a peanut M&M isn't _bad_ for me, but if they were addicting, it would be a lot harder to consume a non-harmful number of them.
Stab wounds aren't inherently lethal, but enough of them will be.
> engagement with social media doesn't directly create value for Facebook.
Yes it absolutely does. They get value by showing ads. If you're staring at facebook for 4 hours a day, that's a lot more ads than if you log in for 2 minutes and then log back out.
The cigarette comparison is being used a lot, so it's more like if Philip Morris was paid for every drag someone takes. Getting folks hooked, smoking a pack a day or more, is going to generate more revenue than not getting folks hooked. If cigarettes weren't addictive, would P.M. make billions of dollars every year?
> I personally ran analysis like this to detect high and unexpected latency on people with cheaper cell phones (disproportionately minorities in the US). The results of my analysis led to changes that reduced this disparity
Something tells me that "the poors" not having access to the problematic content/software isn't the the ethical dilemma that's being discussed.
That's like saying "I ran the analysis that determined that powder cocaine being expensive was causing a disparity in access, so I helped invent crack cocaine so that even minorities could experience cocaine addiction".
I think you're overlooking the role that rapport plays in this. If you don't have a rapport (it's a new relationship, for example), one doesn't have that to rely on (this describes a significant portion of online interactions, like this one!).
If one has a solid rapport with someone, and that person says something that one find upsetting, one's much less likely to attribute that behavior to malice, because rapport is just social context.
> Apparently people who are concerned with this are “not willing to accept the effort of empathy”?
I think a more accurate thing to say is that those who are harmed and cannot contextualize it to be reasonable are not willing to enable that harmful behavior by the person that has harmed them. Empathy is just the act of "putting yourself in someone else's shoes to gain respect for their perspective". I can empathize with an asshole and decide that their behavior needs to be called out _despite_ OR _because of_ the context I have for that person (e.g. I might be more likely to call out inappropriate behavior in those with power than in those without power, with whom I might work more closely to come to an understanding privately, as there's really no use kicking someone when they're down).
The political divide is because the institutions of power are winning.
It will be and always has been the goal of those with power to deflect attacks directed at them, usually to other groups who are attacking them. For all of his faults, Biden has been extremely good at convincing the lefties that "well, we'd be back to normal now if those damn Republicans would just get vaccinated", effectively turning the normal folks on the left against the normal folks on the right instead of where the anger should be directed: toward the institutions that let millions of folks go homeless, financially and medically insecure, etc. in the face of the pandemic.
The Republicans in power are, I think, a little better at playing this game: they whip their base into a furor over the group in power but only in such a way as they (those already with power) still come out on top. The people are angry at the right group, but for the wrong reasons (and really just to further the agenda of the _worst_ people).
Wow, glad someone else caught that. I read that comment a few times because it seemed almost exactly the opposite in intent of the general intent of the PR (as explained by the twitter thread).
In my experience, when someone "fucks up", I can reflect on my rapport with that person to determine whether or not it was intentional. Either way, I can say something to them about it.
It is a sign of maturity to say "oh, I'm sorry. I didn't think that my words could be perceived in that way. My intent was.."
If your intent is harmful, that's great, because I can help you with #2 by not interacting with you in the future. However, if your intent was reasonable, then no harm done. I walk away having set a healthy boundary for our relationship and you got to keep me around and strengthen our rapport.
> I've taken #2 in almost all cases, because I'm definitely going to screw up because I'm human.
This makes it sound like you're not willing to accept the effort of empathy.
That article is really interesting and something that, as an academic scientist, is pretty obvious. In theory, we have peer-review to keep ourselves honest, but as the article points out (maybe unintentionally), bad science gets through that process (really, as long as the "data" look believable enough and the "experiments" are methodologically sound and the interpretation of the "data" is also reasonable, it's reasonably undetectable to peer-reviewers).
There are a lot of problems with the way science happens, and a lot of bad data is never found out, because it can be hard to show, definitively, that it was fabricated or manipulated without someone from the lab in question speaking up about it (which probably doesn't happen enough).
At a certain point, though, there's too much information & data, good or otherwise, for any one person to parse. That's sort of why we have journalists: to acquire first-hand accounts and deliver them to a broader audience. The problem really arises when journalists significantly editorialize or disregard conflicting information. The Wakefield paper is a great example of that. Some journalists' cum pundits' gross negligence with regard to the retraction of that paper constitutes misinformation, but has shown to be very difficult to discredit because those actors abuse what we've all agreed is the role of the journalist: to give us valid accounts of actual events.
The study discussed in the article you cited even used a real, but heavily criticized (unknown to the participants) scientific study in their experiment. I think the question is "what is the amount of effort that it is reasonable to expect a lay-person to put into the in/validation of information presented to them?" with the caveat that trust is generally earned over time, but once earned, can be abused (and I use the word abuse very purposefully here, because it is a violation of one's relationship in a harmful manner). Should one be expected to more rigorously critique the statement of a trusted peer because of the potential for abuse?