>History repeats itself here, with the difference that instead of paying for the data, the ai crawlers simply take it for free.
This discussion was broached originally when discussing whether or not search engines and aggregators had any compensation obligation in respect of news articles. This was a hot topic in the IP and policy circles for a few years.
When the Canadian government attempted to create a mechanism to compensate content creators for the scraped content, there was widespread outrage from tech circles, despite the same community agreeing, across extensive policy discussions, that action had to be taken to prevent this universal man-in-the-middle value capture by search engines.
I've had fairly extensive discussion with the individuals involved in the academic, policy and internal industry analysis of the issue. Watching industry agree to address the issue, then aggressively spend to shape public narratives in public was eye opening.
The recent shift into "AI is obviously going to hoover up all your data and there's nothing you can do now that the theft is laundered through an LLM" is just the latest example of the same trend of short sighted capital-over-everything decision making we've become used to in jurisdictions that have dysfunctional legislatures.
It's the danger with not updating your behavior when the balance of probabilities shows that the individual/group/organization you're dealing with is acting in bad faith.
Our modern era has so many megaphones blaring into the void that it's become significantly more difficult to determine which ones are overtly lying. Accordingly, it's far more difficult to establish a consensus about who's operating in bad faith.
Again, the failure point isn't with the assumption of good faith. It's with not recognizing bad faith when it's made manifest.
You can cultivate good taste by intentionally taking in a lot of information about what's in the field, and what you like and what you don't like about it. This could be commenting on elements of film, fashion, photography, but it can also be having a sense of what you like to see stylistically in a contract, in a framework, or in corporate culture.
I recall reading an interview about a legendary developer, and the majority of the interview was not focused on his coding decisions or the structures he built, but it was about a notebook that he kept with voluminous notes about what was good and what wasn't. That notebook is a materialized version of 'taste', and it's certainly something almost anyone could put together with enough effort and time.
No, most genetic drift that ends up being reflected in wildtype populations happens during those periods, because small errors taking up a sizable percentile of the allelic distribution is easier when there are less alleles.
When it comes to neutral mutations, we can literally see constant variance creation in plenty of non-coding areas of DNA over time.
Drift occurs at a fairly consistent rate that reflects the intrinsic error rate of the particular replication machinery that a given organism uses. You can measure the statistical error rate of different ribosomal complexes.
Different planets are going to have different selection pressures. They'll have different conflicts. Different crises. Different cultures. Different reproductive preferences. Imagining that these populations will converge on the same wildtype by sheer chance is lunacy.
>Refusing to improve early, probabilistic diagnosis because today’s treatments are modest confuses sequence with outcome.
While you're right from the perspective of humanity taking the steps of gathering data then tackling the disease, most developed countries have single payer healthcare systems that require some level of cost-benefit analysis to approve covering new diagnostic systems.
Alzheimer's disease progression doesn't seem to have any notable preventative indications other than 'eat well, exercise and stay mentally active', all of which are standard recommendations.
Recall that this isn't an issue deciding between funding and non-funding. It's an issue deciding between funding Alzheimer's diagnostics, new GMP agonists, new screening options for highly preventable cancers, etc. Building out a dataset is nice but unless that's surplus money redirected from other programs it's going to come at a real flesh and blood cost.
I think the skepticism warrants more work than that. Darwin's finches are an entry-level concept to learn when learning about biochemistry and genetics. Separate planets would act to separate groups into distinct genetic populations which would then have different selection pressures put upon them. Even without selection pressure, genetic drift in both populations would result in differences compounding over time.
Humans aren't the endpoint of evolution. Something will come after us, and if we're spread out on a ton of planets, there would need to be explicit counteracting forces (genetic modification, tremendous volumes of interstellar human travel, etc.) to make sure whatever comes after us is uniform among our interstellar backyard.
America had a true famine; the dust bowl resulted in mass displacement, and the government took exceptional steps to create remediation programs to address the plight of those affected to maintain relations. The policies included measures that would be considered exceptional by today's standard, including the creation of a national organization to provide stock for relief organizations, buying out cattle herds above market value, other bailout measures for farmers, a massive work effort to create an erosion barrier and more. Most cultural histories indicate that these bailouts prevented widespread unrest in these communities.
You can take a look at the global hunger index; countries with less food security are certainly less stable than those that aren't, but by no means are countries like India and Pakistan undergoing constant revolution. By contrast, countries with comparatively solid food security like Egypt underwent revolution that toppled the government sparked by changes in the (comparatively affordable) price of food. Hunger itself doesn't tell the story. It's how society perceives it.
The zeitgeist matters more than whether or not everyone in society can eat, and you can change the zeitgeist with propaganda.
>When you're truly hungry, nothing is beyond reproach.
When you're truly hungry, you can't plan a revolution. Anti-government efforts are generally spearheaded by groups that are fed, connected, and have the incentive to incite rebellion. It's more Navalny and less Oliver Twist. This means that both pro and anti-government groups will be engaged in a similar recruitment effort. The two groups will have competing accounts of why the hunger is occurring, complete with different evidence regarding the magnitude of the issue, the source of the issue, etc. Hunger doesn't short circuit that process, and propaganda doesn't lose it's force because it's a more persuasive and simpler motivator than, say, discontent over tax burden shifting or some other policy point.
It's worse than that; within a few generations our linguistic and biological systems will begin to diverge under conditions with little cross-pollination and different selective pressures. We will become aliens in the sci-fi sense very rapidly if we attempt to create a foundation-like diaspora of settlements.
>I disagree. You can escape a disease, even during a global pandemic. And not every person that got COVID was on a ventilator or even felt that bad.
Propaganda works.
The knowledge worker class often believes their training will afford them some level of protection against it. Even then, with those warding effects, they're still susceptible. Consider further that most people in society are significantly less educated or trained in epistemological functions than they are - a large portion of society is defenseless against a liar with a megaphone.
Propaganda won't contest that starvation is occurring. It will claim that the reason for the starvation is a specific foe, internal or external e.g. It's China's fault we're starving or the immigrants have caused this food security crisis and once they're gone we'll have enough food for our own people, etc. They'll workshop and see which ones poll well, then run with the talking point that seems to perform best.
Since the government harnessing that discontent has no real desire to fix that problem, all they need to do is maintain the perception that they're the solution, while not addressing the problem itself.
I feel like this was more accurate a long time ago when the first rounds of YCombinator hopefuls were all piling in here and nerding out. The vibe, tone, and content has dramatically shifted towards the finance and ambition side of tech over the years.
>Everyone here wants to look like the next Steve Jobs in front of YC, no one wants to look like Steve Wozniak.
I think it's interesting that this wasn't the vibe that was here around the time of the first few YC cohorts. Everyone posting here was chatting as if they wanted to embody the Richard Stallman/Wozniak prototypical hackerman. I think once YC grew and this became a place to network with successful industry insiders rather than tech savvy ultra-geeks doing it for the love of the game that the tone changed hard.
There were a lot of pre-internet 2.0 groups that were phenomenal in terms of competence density.
The first point I worry a bit less about but it does have moments when it's suboptimal - for certain specific discussions there's often a need for a more durable thread-space to continue discussion. Some of the heartbleed and cloudflare discussions, wherein there were ongoing developments day by day needed to be cut up into many threads and people discussing had to refer back to now dead-threads from earlier days.
As someone with a hard science background doing law, I agree with the second point. I agree and notice it fairly consistently where discussion moves into my areas of expertise. I feel like there's a lot of Bayesian overconfidence that bleeds into off-competence discussions on here. I think this fairly normal, where high-competence people are put into areas where they can't identify their own knowledge gaps.
I think Nobel disease is more of an apt moniker than the Dunning-Kruger effect to describe what happens here. People who are highly competent in some areas probably learn to have lower Bayesian uncertainty, so they speak in more confident terms and sanity check their own conclusions less.
This is only true to a point. Evaluating incremental cost benefits on the basis of the delta of energy loss along specific lines ignores the state change that occurs when main trunk elements of the grid become lossless and energy generation and storage solutions can be deployed in a near-location agnostic manner.
As with all toy models being applied to the real world, there are important factors to model in that aren't immediately obvious.
There are plenty of Kleptocrats that aren't concerned with the world being free and fair; they're just happy to sit atop the pile, regardless of what the pile is.
>The IRS would have come down on him with a hammer already
Part of my work is in financial investigations. The finances of large, multi-entity organizations are expensive to create, difficult to parse, and require extensive periods of time of trained, expensive staff to understand.
Assuming that 'things would have been caught' flies in the face of the fact that they almost never are. Accounting rules change frequently, software systems for logging information is changed, and records are lost. Emails have to be read in tandem with entries to understand the intentions.
Even in cases where we have confessions that someone has embezzled money, we often need to spend multiple weeks tracking down records to isolate when/where/how it occurred.
Even during audits, requests for records can be baked. 'Random' samples of given entries can just exclude the questionable ones.
I've appeared in front of federal tax courts in my practice, the game isn't fair - don't base your reasoning on the idea that it must be.
>"How is Thiel investing in his own company not considered a prohibited investment?"
It should be, but the IRS doesn't catch every cheat, and as with most other white collar crime, the responsibility can be laundered through a number of accountants and other professional staff, resulting in fines rather than jail time.
So a lot of rich people make a lot of questionable calls regarding how their assets are categorized and if they get caught out they generally just pay what they're supposed to have paid, or sometimes slightly less (some countries have legislation prohibition tax authorities from accepting settlement offer at under-assessed amounts, but there are ways around that too). If they're particularly risk-averse and ballsy, they'll ask for an advance ruling certificate or another pre-emptive ruling on their filings to confirm they're correct beforehand. You can bake those too, if needed.
There are many legal traditions in the world, and most of them (both by number, volume of territory, amount of people governed, etc) take the opposite approach.
Only a very narrow English line of black letter law that ascribes to the black letter above all else... and even in that system a completely twinned system of courts allowed for ethical adjustments to law through the courts of equity.
Most continental systems of law and currently standard constitutional constructions provide very clear, very codified release valves for situations in which the written law is bullshit. Which is often.
The concern was the depression in prices was cratering local high-quality smelting capacity.
However, the DOD issued a memo (penned by Mattis iirc) indicating that there was no supply related concerns. The lack of aluminum used to justify the tariffs was in fact just the result of the LME's anti-market-tampering rules creating an incentive for metals traders to stockpile the material in private stores rather than in LME warehouses.
There was a nice article about this yesterday, but I don't have the link.
Observing certainly influences the election if the non-observed state of the election would involve voter intimidation, ballot box stuffing, or any other corrupt practice.
Hence we can distinguish between interventions aimed at subverting the democratic process and interventions based upon reinforcing them.
Whether or not Soros' interventions are enabling democracy or subverting them is a separate debate. My statement is just to show that the premise that 'any' interference is anti-democratic is demonstrably false.
>You are technically right that if someone from outside tries to influence the result of some election that would be meddling with the democratic process
No, he isn't. If someone from the outside is influencing the system to preserve key characteristics it has, they aren't subverting the process.
No one thinks foreign election observers sent to oversee contested elections are the heralds of the end of democracy; quite the opposite.
This discussion was broached originally when discussing whether or not search engines and aggregators had any compensation obligation in respect of news articles. This was a hot topic in the IP and policy circles for a few years.
When the Canadian government attempted to create a mechanism to compensate content creators for the scraped content, there was widespread outrage from tech circles, despite the same community agreeing, across extensive policy discussions, that action had to be taken to prevent this universal man-in-the-middle value capture by search engines.
I've had fairly extensive discussion with the individuals involved in the academic, policy and internal industry analysis of the issue. Watching industry agree to address the issue, then aggressively spend to shape public narratives in public was eye opening.
The recent shift into "AI is obviously going to hoover up all your data and there's nothing you can do now that the theft is laundered through an LLM" is just the latest example of the same trend of short sighted capital-over-everything decision making we've become used to in jurisdictions that have dysfunctional legislatures.