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Futurebot | 1 year ago | on: Accountability sinks

What the article describes seems like a parallel concept (and an important one.) I wouldn't call them Accountability Sinks, though, as they seem more like Accountability Avoiders. Here are things we might think of as sinks in the real world:

- "Sin Eaters"

- Corporations, especially companies that are spun off and take on all the debt of the original company

- Voluntary stool pigeons (in criminal organizations, etc.)

- Certain religious martyrs

Futurebot | 2 years ago | on: OpenAI's misalignment and Microsoft's gain

"The biggest loss of all, though, is a necessary one: the myth that anything but a for-profit corporation is the right way to organize a company."

Alternatively, we could have these companies turned into research organizations run by the government and funded by taxes they way most research (e.g. pharmaceuticals) should be. There's more than one way to get good research done, and having it public removes many strange incentives and conflicts of interest.

Futurebot | 3 years ago | on: ChatGPT can now call Wolfram Alpha

The next grail here would be the automatic use of more trustworthy systems like WA when using ChatGPT in general. If one were to ask it to write an essay on a subject, that it'd infer which pieces need fact-checking based on confidence intervals of snippets of discernable and differentiable data, then run a query against said trustworthy system.

With this improvement, it would at least never get dates or measurements wrong.

I don't think we can ever solve the problem of needing real editors and fact checkers as ultimate sources of truth for ChatGPT's output, especially when it's for something critical, but for many tasks, this would be a major improvement.

Futurebot | 4 years ago | on: It's hard to say who's winning the streaming wars, but customers are losing

Licensing, copyright takedowns, and partnership agreements make things that appear seemingly simple in fact quite complicated. That, and supporting a myriad of devices (plus different versions of those devices with different capabilities, plus all the different store integrations and their quirks) make for a very complicated set of organizational requirements.

There's no good answer here in markets this complicated

Futurebot | 4 years ago | on: Unreliability at Scale

Another in a long line of unexpected causes for system errors, the classic being the cosmic ray:

"When your computer crashes or phone freezes, don't be so quick to blame the manufacturer. Cosmic rays -- or rather the electrically charged particles they generate -- may be your real foe.

While harmless to living organisms, a small number of these particles have enough energy to interfere with the operation of the microelectronic circuitry in our personal devices. It's called a single-event upset or SEU.

During an SEU, particles alter an individual bit of data stored in a chip's memory. Consequences can be as trivial as altering a single pixel in a photograph or as serious as bringing down a passenger jet."

https://www.computerworld.com/article/3171677/computer-crash...

Those of us who do high-level development generally treat these underlying systems as infallible, but as we continue to scale - and more money and lives are on the line - we'll need to get used to the idea of not only not trusting the underlying hardware as the article states, but may have to get to the point where we have "ECC at the system level." We already have this in various distributed systems tech, but this tends to be application-specific. The next step would be to incorporate it directly into datastores generally.

This also suggests that heterogeneous hardware architectures can have an advantage in situations where data integrity is critical, even with the increased administration, hardware, and ops costs. Finally, it also highlights the importance of data audits and reconciliations for even non-suspect data on a regular basis, preferably with the aforementioned heterogeneous setup.

Futurebot | 5 years ago | on: Tillis Releases Text of Bipartisan Legislation to Fight Illegal Streaming

We're an oligarchy, that's why:

'that rich people and organizations representing business interests have a powerful grip on U.S. government policy. After examining differences in public opinion across income groups on a wide variety of issues, the political scientists Martin Gilens, of Princeton, and Benjamin Page, of Northwestern, found that the preferences of rich people had a much bigger impact on subsequent policy decisions than the views of middle-income and poor Americans. Indeed, the opinions of lower-income groups, and the interest groups that represent them, appear to have little or no independent impact on policy.

“Our analyses suggest that majorities of the American public actually have little influence over the policies our government adopts,” Gilens and Page write:

Americans do enjoy many features central to democratic governance, such as regular elections, freedom of speech and association, and a widespread (if still contested) franchise. But we believe that if policymaking is dominated by powerful business organizations and a small number of affluent Americans, then America’s claims to being a democratic society are seriously threatened.

In their conclusion, Gilens and Page go even further, asserting that “In the United States, our findings indicate, the majority does not rule—at least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes. When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites and/or with organized interests, they generally lose. Moreover … even when fairly large majorities of Americans favor policy change, they generally do not get it.”'

Futurebot | 7 years ago | on: Kickstarter Senior Staffers Are Pushing Back Against Colleagues' Union Efforts

New York City’s unionized workers are mostly minorities, for example:

https://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/04/nyregion/new-york-citys-u...

"White men account for less than one-fourth of the city’s union members, according to the study, written by Ruth Milkman, a sociology professor at the CUNY Graduate Center, and a colleague, Stephanie Luce. Fully 60 percent of all union members in the city identify themselves as either black or Latino; women who do not identify themselves as black or Latino make up an additional 17 percent of the city’s union members."

Futurebot | 7 years ago | on: What We Learned from a Year of Americans ‘Risking It’ Without Insurance

The real arguments only rarely get stated by politicians, and it's the reason we don't get other universal services, either. It's ideological. The economic efficiency, competency, or access arguments (government can't do anything right, it's wasteful, etc.) while they do get used (and are certainly believed to various degrees) aren't the core (cultural) reasons. They are a belief that:

- society should be dog eat dog, red and tooth and claw, and that the weak and sick should merely die. Not only is that not bad, it's desirable, as the weak and sick bring down the rest and having them disappear strengthens the society / species

- the world should be every-man-for-himself, that you should be on your own, and never expect anyone to help you outside of blood relatives, or if you're lucky, charity.

- that everything must be "earned," discounting the ideas that it's society itself and all of its trappings (trade rules, police, roads, availability of skilled workers trained with public money, etc.) that's allow said money to be earned in the first place. If you don't earn it you don't deserve it, regardless of what that means for you.

- that government should simply not be in the business of providing services, period. It should exist only as a nightwatchman state that protects from "force and fraud" when it applies to domestic policies (empire building and maintenance + policies to further theocracy and political chauvinism are a big divide over spending on the right)

- taxation is theft. If one "earns" money, one should be able to keep basically all of it (minus force+fraud taxes, though ancaps don't even want that one.)

Now, mind you, this doesn't actually reflect the will of people in the US (recent poll links: https://twitter.com/GunnelsWarren/status/1078510910317174785), but large parts of the right-wing establishment (many of which inhabit the Democratic party, not just the Republican one.) This includes large donors, corporations, and powerful think tanks.

One thing that has to be understood about the US, is that since its very founding, it has largely opposed redistribution (the General Welfare clause notwithstanding.) People should remember Madison:

"Landholders ought to have a share in the government, to support these invaluable interests, and to balance and check the other. They ought to be so constituted as to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority."

Futurebot | 8 years ago | on: The health care toll today’s work culture exacts on employees

"Market forces are also intensified by intensifying assessment, a development especially visible on the labour market. Even within a contract period, an employee will be subject to continuous assessment. The use of specialised software in call centres has provided some extreme examples: the time employees spend at the toilet is measured in seconds: this information is used to pressure the employee to spend less time away from the terminal. Firms with contracts are also increasingly subject to continuous assessment procedures, made possible by information technology. For instance, courier services use tracking software and GPS technology, to allow customers to locate their packages in transit. This is a typical example of the new hyper-provision of business information, in neoliberal economies."

From "Neoliberalism: origins, theory, definition"

http://web.inter.nl.net/users/Paul.Treanor/neoliberalism.htm...

Futurebot | 8 years ago | on: Recycling Chaos in U.S. As China Bans 'Foreign Waste'

This is probably a very good move. At some point, the clever marketing behind "Keep America Beautiful" will lose its believability, and people will demand what the creators behind KAB have been trying to avoid: corporate responsibility for creating less wasteful products. What we have now, in the form of the recycling industry and its associated regulations, are an outsourcing of that responsibility to individual citizens, cities, and states.

Regulations in this area need to shift from recycling to sustainability.

"KAB downplayed industry's role in despoiling the earth, while relentlessly hammering home the message of each person's responsibility for the destruction of nature, one wrapper at a time. ....KAB was a pioneer in sowing confusion about the environmental impact of mass production and consumption."

Then in the 80s the industry faced another challenge; the landfill crises that led to recycling. Heather Rogers writes:

"All this eco-friendly activity put business and manufacturers on the defensive. With landfill space shrinking, new incinerators ruled out, water dumping long ago outlawed and the public becoming more environmentally aware by the hour, the solutions to the garbage disposal problem were narrowing. Looking forward, manufacturers must have perceived their range of options as truly horrifying: bans on certain materials and industrial processes; production controls; minimum standards for product durability."

"In essence, Keep America Beautiful managed to shift the entire debate about America’s garbage problem. No longer was the focus on regulating production—for instance, requiring can and bottle makers to use refillable containers, which are vastly less profitable. Instead, the “litterbug” became the real villain, and KAB supported fines and jail time for people who carelessly tossed out their trash, despite the fact that, clearly, “littering” is a relatively tiny part of the garbage problem in this country (not to mention the resource damage and pollution that comes with manufacturing ever more junk in the first place). Environmental groups that worked with KAB early on didn’t realize what was happening until years later."

https://www.treehugger.com/sustainable-product-design/recycl...

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2006/05/origins-anti-lit...

Futurebot | 8 years ago | on: Ask HN: Why are billionaires not giving more money away?

It's important to realize that even if they're not giving enough, they do give more in times of great inequality. Unfortunately, that's not, and will never, be able to do the job that politics and real redistribution is designed to do:

"In developing this position Walker sits squarely within the traditions of American liberalism, with its belief that promoting equality of opportunity within the current economic and political system is the best response to its failings. Everyone should have the same chance to be privileged, you might say, so that they can use their privilege to attack privilege more efficiently.

There’s some logic to this line of reasoning, but it rests on two questionable assumptions.

The first is that generating more philanthropy is effective as a route to reducing inequality. If it isn’t, then the intellectual scaffolding supporting Walker’s arguments collapses, because the problems of capitalism can never be addressed regardless of how many new philanthropists it creates. At the macro level however, societies that are most dependent on philanthropy like the USA are also the most unequal and vice versa—it’s the social democracies of Scandinavia that have the highest levels of equality and wellbeing, where the foundation sector is very small.

Tax-funded, redistributive government; people-funded, independent civil society action; and dynamic but well-regulated businesses are far more important. It was the same story in America under the New Deal and the Great Society, which kept economic inequality at much lower levels before the new gilded age began around the turn of the Millennium. In fact in the US, philanthropy has increased in line with inequality over the last 50 years, so the more you have of one, the more you have of the other. Statistically speaking, philanthropy is a symptom of inequality and not a cure."

The Privilege of being Privileged: https://www.opendemocracy.net/transformation/michael-edwards...

Futurebot | 8 years ago | on: Terminal and shell performance

I've had no problems with latency, but I'd like to add something not in the original article as a latency-adjacent consideration: stability. Stability is an incredibly important attribute, since the output rate of a dead terminal is zero.

I switched to iTerm2 recently after repeated Terminal.app slowdowns and crashes, and have no issues doing the exact same things I did in the previous application. Good work.

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