23iofj's comments

I can't decide if this comment is very clever ironic satire or... not ;-)

> Politicians started using that phrase en masse about a year ago

"Existential threat" has been in wide-spread use for a really long time. The first time I heard the phrase used was probably some time in the late 90s. And that's more a function of my age than of how long the term has been used. The cliche is at least half a century old and has been used by politicians for at least decades.

For example, the phrase was commonly used in anti-proliferation and denuclearization advocacy during the last quarter of the 20th century, when nuclear weapons were characterized as an "existential threat" to humanity. This use persists today; see, for example, https://www.start.umd.edu/publication/nuclear-weapons-and-ex...

But the term isn't particularly partisan or limited to extinction-level threats. it's also been used throughout modern history by right-wing populists to refer to one group or another being an "existential threat to our way of life". See for example https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-44498438

The point is, the phrase has been used for a long time, always with the same meaning, and its use hasn't been particularly partisan as far as I can ever remember. Both sides use the phrase for various things. But they all definitely mean the same thing -- a threat to the existence of something (humanity, dominant cultural norms, the country, etc.). Not a "perceived" threat.

I'm genuinely and sincerely curious where you got the idea that "Existential threat means an implied, or perceived threat" rather than "a threat to the existence of a thing". The former has never been anywhere close to the dominant accepted meaning. Possibly you heard a politician or pundit use the term in a sarcastic way and misunderstood their sarcasm as literal? Or you heard someone use the phrase in a hyperbolic way?

Can you share one or more sources where people are using the phrase in the way you describe?

Perhaps this isn't true? It's possible that salaries for lawyers are not going down, but that salaries for law graduates are going down (because not all law grads become lawyers).

Also, I thought salaries outside the major firms have cratered? (Or maybe were never all that high to begin with but law school has become crazy expensive and the lower ranked schools are churning out more and more people? IDK.)

My local bartender has a JD and passed the bar. He bartends because it pays better.

"Existential threat" means a threat to the very existence of a thing, so a thing that is an "existential threat" is a very big actual threat. I think maybe you're confusing "Existential" with "Hypothetical"?

The year over year progress on computing power/efficiency/size is beyond impressive. Modern computer hardware is an amazing feat of engineering.

The first complete sequences of the Human Genome was completed in 2003, as part of the Human Genome Project which started in 1990. Total cost of $100,000,000. That's actually not so expensive given the payoff is literally a complete copy of our own genetic code. Today, less than 20 years later, the cost of sequencing that same genome is about $1,000.

The LHC? Super fucking cool.

We do build cool shit. Incredibly cool shit. WAY cooler than dumb ass killing machines like fission bombs and space-age fighter jets. And BTW, going from fission in theory to something actually useful for doing something other than killing people did take a couple decades (first nuke power plant turned on in 1954).

We can build all that cool shit you want, too. Flying cars? We've been able to do that for decades. You don't have a flying car because you'd almost certainly end up killing yourself or someone else and probably couldn't afford the fuel to operate it on the daily. There's a reason you can't just rent a Cessna and go out for a joy ride without any training.

The "no cool shit" thesis always uses killing machines and rich person toys as examples. I don't want stupid rich person toys that even rich people don't actually use when they get them (flying cars). I want to be able to Zoom with my parents during a pandemic.

(I doubt redirecting tax dollars would increase choice. Plus, we already have a hybrid public/private marketplace for education in our university system. That experiment is... not going too well, to the least.)

If schools explicitly acknowledged their dual purpose, then they could more cleanly separate the two functions. I think doing so would even improve the educational component.

I've volunteered in high school classrooms quite a lot. The amount of wasted time is astounding. Hours upon hours of boring nonsense that somehow actively detracts from learning. Students are so bored from sitting around all day. Also, they instinctively learn that 80% of every lecture period is filler nonsense but are quite bad at guessing which 20% they should be paying attention to.

Even in subjects that shouldn't be cut (e.g., Geometry) the lecture periods could be safely halved and probably improve educational outcomes.

Schools are great facilities for child care, BTW. Computers, gyms, fields, sports equipment, books, ...

Why not just admit that about half of the classroom time alotted to most subjects exists for fill-up-butt-in-seat-time purposes only and then openly embrace the fact that the school is an educational institution whose physical plant is also useful for leisure/childcare? Heck, university campuses already do this...

This completely misses the point, which was one of magnitude:

>> The upkeep cost for Bitcoin is, and by necessity must be, PROPORTIOANAL TO THE VALUE REPRESENTED by Bitcoin.

Also, that upkeep cost is 100.00% to protect the value of existing bitcoin.

C.f., gold:

> If you want to own some gold you need to protect it (usually with the state apparatus of violence, which has massive externalities).

I don't need continuous mining of bitcoin to protect my non-bitcoin stuff.

However, I do need the "state apparatus of violence" to protect my non-gold stuff, including things like my house and my body, and oh yeah, my fucking mining rig!

If all gold disappeared tomorrow, would anything about the "state apparatus of violence" change? No, of course not. That is absurd.

It can be that

    COUNT(failure -> failure) > COUNT(success -> failure)

Think about generating a dataset using the process you outline and then performing a statistical test for correlation on the resulting dataset.

Think about the percentages in step 2 and 3. If those get small enough, then there could be a statistically significant (failure, failure) correlation in your generated dataset and also not a statistically significant (success, success) correlation in your generated dataset.

The 90% number [0] explains how those percentages get small enough that (success, success) is not picked up by a significance test but (failure, failure) is.

You don't have to take my word for it, though. You can actually implement this process, run your favorite test for correlation, and verify that as those success probabilities get small you have the above effect.

What you've proven above is that

    COUNT(failure -> failure) > COUNT(success -> failure)

Again, the most fundamental reason that can happen is because failure rates are over 50% [0].

--

[0] I mentioned in my first comment you can get this result even with a 50% failure rate. How? Companies and founders aren't 1:1, founders drop out of the data generation process, etc. You can play with that to create similar effects even in extreme cases like failure rates dropping to 50% but it'd be a bit contrived.

This is the most glaring wrong assumption that causes your and GP's confusion.

90+% of startups fail.

Note: "failure predicts failure but success does not predict success" could still be true even if business failure rates were >= 50%! But the fact that failure rates are higher than 50% is the first and simplest mistake in this line of reasoning.

This is a deflection. I'm responding to a comment that stated:

>> as they state on their website, they scored #1 for best at that by Consumer Reports compared to the stock offerings

CR is irresponsible for issuing ranked scores while saying in the fine print that these scores aren't actually recommendations.

That they didn't foresee comma.ai using their recommendation in marketing only makes them that much more irresponsible.

Toyota was found legally responsible for its unintended acceleration bug from the mid 2000s when "the driver should pay attention 100% of the time" wasn't even something you would think to say because there were exactly zero driver assist features.

The real point is that Google isn't selling their system to consumers.

Exactly.

The Consumer Reports test wasn't a comprehensive safety analysis; it was a superficial "how will this feel to a consumer based upon a few drives" analysis. We are talking about a consumer reviews magazine... no regulator or jury is going to give a shit what a Microwave/Refrigerator review website said after performing 37 "tests".

In other words, the other products are "worse" because those are production-quality products for which automakers with substantial assets to forfeit are willing to accept a degree of real liability.

I'm sure if you compared comma.ai to GM's equivalent "alpha quality software" -- aka Cruise's L5 prototype -- the latter would come out way on top. But GM isn't stupid enough to ship alpha quality self-driving software, even as an aftermarket add-on.

Including comma.ai in this comparison was a huge oversight on the part of Consumer Reports. They should be comparing comma.ai to competitors' "alpha" products, which are all L5 prototypes.

When you write software that can kill people, you don't get to roll your eyes at questions like "who is responsible when someone dies?".

These sorts of questions ARE engineering questions, and answering these questions with thought and care is important! Why? Because if the answer is "this is alpha quality and we might be liable" then you wait to deploy the feature. Which is why comma.ai is "ahead" of its competitors -- because they aren't doing real engineering. Thinking about the real-world context into which your system is being deployed is the thing that separates real engineering from R&D/hacking.

What you're describing is not engineering; it's R&D. Even comma.ai admits this. And, look, R&D is perfectly okay! Everyone else is also doing R&D on real roads! E.g., all of the major auto manufacturers are putting cars on real roads with full L5 (and safety driver backups where appropriate). In fact, the major auto manufacturers are all WAY ahead of comma.ai when it comes to R&D-quality systems! Compare Cruise or Argo or Uber ATG or Waymo to comma.ai.

But it's a terrible idea to ship R&D to paying customers when lives are on the line. If comma.ai wants to drive their system with their own safety drivers, that's fine.

This isn't even (just) a normative or ethical statement. It's simply a statement of fact, at least in the USA. For some reason Software never became a "real" engineering discipline. But automotive

Every self-driving product that deploys to consumers is going to end up in court eventually. It's inevitable.

Imagine trying to defend comma.ai to a lay jury... the prosecution won't even have to try.

Read through the Consumer Reports PDF [1]. It's abundantly clear that they have no idea how to properly evaluate adaptive cruise systems.

What this report tells you is exactly what you would expect from a Consumer Reports publication: the generic impression that a typical consumer will have after a few hours of use. This sort of superficial analysis is completely unrelated to anything approaching a real safety analysis.

[1] https://data.consumerreports.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/...

35 million miles is statistically meaningless.

This reads like an oxymoron to anyone who's not a property owner, which is about half the country -- all of whom are in the bottom 90% referred to in the headline.