AdamHede's comments

Anecdotally, a notorious real estate developer named Blackstone where I lived got into a lot of heat, and afterwards rebranded to a local-language version of "DearCity". Now everyone seems to have forgotten their ruthless practices. To be fair, they went from a hilarious villain-like name to an almost cartoonishly cute one. But jokes on the public, because it works. They're largely off the hook in the publics eye now

I am a part of a small but passionate group in Denmark, who advocates for giving everyone an account in the national bank at birth.

This account would be able to attach a featureless debit card (using our national standard payment system "DanKort"), and have the same interest rate as the national Bank (so for now, slightly negative).

Employees of the national bank is already able to get accounts like this. So there is precedence.

This is obviously not a particular attractive not sophisticated "product", but it is awfully hard to hurt yourself with, and will have all the functionality that allows you to function in a modern society.

Make banking a choice, and force the banks to make sufficiently attractive products to convince me to participate willingly.

A less synical conclusion would be that the longterm viability of a AI-centric company like Google benefits a lot of reasonable development in the early stages. If Google can avoid ethical hiccups it might provoke less regulation and provoke it later.

All else equal, being a reasonable and ethical company IS good business. Problems arise with ethics and business collide.

This is pretty important. The way the guys does this is very close to how you could also fool a human by hanging up real stop signs in the wrong places, and "stupidity" people would start to respect them.

The only difference here is that a mere 500 ms flash elicites a response, where a human wouldn't notice. on balance, a 500 ms response time does seem like a feature more than a bug compared to a human.

I especially buy into your third concern.

Where I live, if the introduction of a UBI was followed by a drastic reduction (or complete elimination) of the means-tested system we know today, hunger would potentially become a problem for people blowing their money early in the month (or getting robbed?).

This tells me the utopian ideas of replacing the entire complex system with a simple UBI isn't feasible. You'll end up in dreadful ethical choices and moral hazard. This is indeed already happening, but the bureaucracy of it makes abuse less attractive.

Maybe off-topic, but the article says they used a modified machine learning algorithm to nap bat calls to activities and from that developed a translator.

With the improvements to machine translation without parallelism data and voices-to-voice translation, how stupid is the idea that we might someday be able to take enough bat calls and human speech, and create a true translation system? obviously assumes the bats got something vaguely resembling a language we can translate from.

I've starten writing a series of articles on getting started with data science form an organisational perspective, in my own native language (Danish).

I don't think we need to declare "One truth", in order to remove the worst layer of misinformation. It's a false dichotomy.

What is the effectivness of (homemade) masks? Disbuted, so here information should be free Should you inject disinfectives into you bloodstream to cure Covid-19? No. This is misinformation, is easily identified.

If there is doubt, it should be allowed. There will obviously always be a grey area, but for the time being, a lot of good can be done, without any harm.

In Denmark we've had a public payment card for a couple of decades now (Dankort). It's a no thrills, dump, payment card, but it is universally accepted, has no fees and virtually impossible to get into financial trouble with.

I have to admit, I welcome apple pay with a lot of sceptisism. In my perspective, a lot of innovation in payment over the recent years has been towards better ways of extracting value from basic transactions, or selling confusing products to financially illiterate consumer. With the exception of contactless and mobile payments, which our public solution has picked up as quickly as the commercial vendors.

They also look at road section with abnormally high levels of accidents and are actually willing to chance road layout to more intuitive.

It is a legitimate reason to change the curvature or build a bridge or additional exit in Norway "because it's difficult to drive in".

It's really quite incredible, and combine that with safer cars, and you can really start to eat into traffic fatalities.

I often find it hard to tell if authoritarian governments are strengthened or weakened by internet... The mass shutdowns tells me it's the latter.

I think you are more right than most people here want to admit. Sure, surveillance is bad, and so is censorship, and we should fight it, and not let short-term moral panics like drug wars and terrorism forfeit our fundamental rights.

But let's realize how impossibly hard information is to contain and control. With maybe the exception of China, let's imagine sitting in the Iranian or Saudi secret service. You might have vast funds at your disposal, but you also have a rapidly increasing sophistication in your populations technological awereness. Every day, New VPN technologies spring up and things like sudden critical mass of mesh networking threatens to turn everything upside down. You whack new exist points, but you also know, fundamentally, hundreds of thousands of you people have unrestricted access, and you best weapon is a frustrating shutdown, whenever things truly get out of hand.

A lot of people are speculating in the comments on all sorts of causal factors making this connection spurious.

Thank for digging up the article!

The guessing can continue, but the authors and the data in their small study says it pretty clearly: It's the income, guys!

I'm not going to dispute that this is wrong (the ICO determined so), and that Google should be punished for breaking the law.

That being said, I would also respect someone who said that it is nice to see Google aid in medical research and see some of the best minds of ML allowed to access high quality data to develop these solutions.

This was not a Google ad network integrating medical records in order to target the sale of medicin... It was a medical research project.

I'm going to get fired up once someone gets hurt. I know someone is going to call slippery slope, but until someone can prove harm (beyond the broken trust and principle of data sharing), I'm going to save my pitch fork for bigger problems.

If you don't think fruity flavors target kids as at least collateral damage, will you tell me this is classical marketing aimed at your (adult) age group? https://s3-prod.adage.com/s3fs-public/styles/width_1024/publ...

Also, no nicotine product is (safe). There is no safe amount. In my opinion, we should just work towards a smoke-free future.

The analog to alcohol is a bit of a whataboutism. Just because alcohol is bad, doesn't justify smoking.

You could easily add high quality motion blur in 60 FPS if that was the desired look.

More FPS is really no different that increased resolution. There is nothing sacred about 24, 480 or 1080.

It's all conditioning ;)

Kids really shouldn't be smoking e-cigs either. E-cigs are only better than cigarettes because "cigarettes are so legendarily bad for you".

I can accept them as cessation devices, but all their value in this realm should be weighted against the new users they introduce, chief among them: Kids.

This is only true in a very theoretical sense. Going 180 km/h will 9/10 be more dangerous than going 120 km/h. Reaktion time, brake time, requirements to equipment, everything is tougher at higher speeds.

people calling it a sensible strategy or solid 'risk assessment' really surprises me.

You are to a large degree in charge of your risk. Proper, fullblown, 100% fabcricated accussations seems exceedingly rare. I've never seen any stats and the anecdotes I hear are often 3rd or 4rd degree.

Be a decent human being and you are probably still more likely to get struck by lightning or die in a car crash.

Meanwhile, the cost of walling yourself off from 50% of your colleagues (or as a manager, to avoid 50% of the workforce) seems like a very high cost to your career.

While that on principal is true, as an average citizen, digging into whether or not Netflix actually did something illegal is logistically impossible (not to mention requires skill very few outside of private industry-tax-optimization has).

Looking at a successful company like Netflix, boasting massive profits and growing fast while paying no taxes is a reasonable proxy for something not being right.

Either Netflix is doing something wrong (and the public needs to take action) or the system is broken (and the public needs to take action).

In either case, anger and discussion is in its place