snugghash's comments

Seems like a rare backpedal by Apple, which I'm happy with. Also happy with them doing more for right-to-repair. It's very unbecoming of a 2T company to punish suppliers for leaking a chip.

Still, seems like the internal Apple culture still has a long way to go on addressing its customer base specifically for Mac - 2021 and I still can't get focus-follows-mouse-without-raise to work on MacOS, even if I'm willing to pay for it. For now, I'm just way more productive (and energy efficient) on KDE.

I'd like to modify that to be even more long-term - progress is where they know everything about you and can assist in everyone's best interest.

The individual is not necessarily the limit of happiness. IMO it's a very limited view on things, to consider individual as the epitome of affect.

Why exactly? Information is good - if you were a single organism you'd want as much information at your disposal as possible. Indeed that's why we wear fitness trackers, we don't think our legs have privacy rights.

The problem is indeed consequences, most privacy warriors assume mishandling of data, i.e. bad consequences.

In a world with more data we wouldn't have any preventable disease. Like at all.

You mistake the way western governments are structured with "governance of a society". The CCP is far more than the traditional there branches of the western democratic government.

Societies self-govern and create structures. Some of those structures are companies, some are government. Sometimes the government regulates companies, and sometimes companies regulate the government.

Edit: even in the US for example, ONLY the judiciary is concerned with defending individual liberties. If that's all that's necessary then we wouldn't need elections, just a military and that's that.

You seem to heavily discount the amount of work it takes to become post-scarcity - most societies in the world fail to achieve this, even for simple things like cell phones in 2021.

I'm not in the field. For anyone else curious about relationship to things like TLA+ (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TLA%2B) - the discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15583377 was great.

Thank you for the thoughtful expansion. I completely agree with you on the level you're thinking about this, and I also agree that our tech level in collaboration is basically amplified mob rule, same as 100 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29051178 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29051412

But zooming out, I think a society/government's job is preventing destruction and growing. That may not be in a way that's dangerous to other governments, but high relative growth can make other governments irrelevant. I'm claiming that the value from unabashed large scale data surveillance that CCP gathers is very large, and that might be a significant enough factor moving forward that privacy-first countries might simply not be able to keep up with it, and become irrelevant.

From this viewpoint, if the EU is doing this, we have no large diverse conglomerate that can serve as an experimental control any more. We can't even tell if privacy "is a good thing", for the final metric of growth. Not US, not EU, not India. Africa is still not in the same league.

Every single one of them have basically succumbed to privacy vs. security false dichotomy (https://signal.org/blog/private-contact-discovery/). Every single one thinks the way forward (at least for now) is mass surveillance.

Maybe they think the gain from not having public crime is big enough to justify the cost. In which case CCP was "right" - convergent evolution means something (for now).

Yes, but prioritization is everywhere - maybe the EU finds that their ideals and principles were an instance of the XY problem, and privacy doesn't matter at all.

I'm not saying they're right, I'm saying they're "right". I'm redefining "right" as "long term success".

It's like everyone uses mobile phones now and the luddites who don't are simply irrelevant. Maybe the anti-tech folks are actually right in terms of harm it causes, but because of the other party's success, there's they're not relevant. The right-ness is not relevant for this case.

Similar to how you might do pagans-vs-christians. Maybe we as a society will evolve to support and encourage pagans and diversity and stop encouraging supremacist religions like Christianity, BUT - they've "won" against all the pagan religions in the middle east and europe. With Islam, against everything all the way up to central asia and SEA, down into Africa. Maybe the holdouts like the Hindus in India will ultimately build better and more resilient societies (they haven't been converted yet, unlike many others) but so far, nothing.

The question requires time and more data to resolve - but the tentative resolution is that people don't care about privacy. So societies don't care either.

That said, I'm a huge privacy/crypto nerd - I even think privacy-vs-security is a false dichotomy. THEY don't. Apple doesn't. Most VCs and Google thing privacy and valuable insights from data are dichotomies and mutually exclusive too, but they're mathematically provably wrong. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_encryption

My metric here is "grabby success" or growth. I alluded to this in my comment but essentially, if you have a society, civilization, entity, species, w.e., it's almost guaranteed to be different in some way to other such entities.

And because effective resources are generally limited, these differences will lead to relative difference in market share, like maybe how many people one entity can sustain.

From there, it might lead to differences in how productive each person and the entity itself is, which leads to a spread of that productivity to other entities. The US has generally enjoyed the crown here for at least a hundred years - even now, cutting edge research is still in the US. The US "culture" is essentially internet culture and it will rub off on everyone who uses most US services (even innocuous ones like Google).

In sum, I'm equating long-term relative growth rate to societal/governance success. China isn't a great comparison to the US, but it's a very good comparison to, say, India (with caveats).

Over the next 50 years, I think it's a decent comparison to the US/EU as well, as the populations are now more similar (with immigration).

Seems like the CCP was "right" all along.

All of our governments are simply playing catch-up at this point. Unless the western-influenced can prove their superiority with growth and progress, I think everyone here has to acknowledge they have a better overall governance model (elections are a small but significant part of this)

Our tooling for communicating ideas and finding good ones is equivalent to mob rule, same as a hundred years ago, just amplified. More at my older comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29051178

> Pop onto stormfront and try convince a handful of posters there and see how far you get.

I've actually done this - it's far easier than you make it seem. I haven't really started collecting metrics on success, but that's kinda what we're missing - messengers who construct a pyramid of truthy statements and go back up the chain to whoever convinced THEM to a particular viewpoint when they find resistance to change from the opposite side. We're missing tech that incentivizes such behavior.

Of course this requires that everyone has a set for themselves a threshold for when they would change their mind about a topic - which I find is far more prevalent among US conservatives (at least online, as they behave to me), than when you try to establish the same among US liberals. Of course, ignoring the obvious field that doesn't have a threshold by design - supremacist religion.

My working theory is that supremacist religionists who converted out of it simply replaced it with liberal ideas (and were being supremacist about those), while there are both religionists and non-religionists among the conservatives.

You're missing an important point here, that Eric Weinstein brings up a lot. The goal of science is finding truth, but the mechanism of how it happens right now is very tied to the "goal" of each study. Goal-less data collection is apparently impossible to certify and "be acknowledged".

>no societal value beyond reinforcing or justifying an established hegemony or excusing discrimination Researchers might have hypotheses they want to test, and any hypothesis that's not "good" is not explored. Because 1. real identities and careers are affected 2. collected data isn't good enough for journals

That's better as "the effects of my pretend actions are very real" than anything more subtle

The core problem here is that our technology for discourse is basically twitter and "voting with likes". The algorithms are optimized for attention and likes, so the mob wins - not the best argument.

IF we fixed THAT problem (with new technology, an early one is https://www.kialo.com/tour, but it's not good enough), we can have what you want.

Right now, we're effectively the same tech level as the 1900s (perhaps in a more dangerous way) w.r.t finding truth or the "right" arguments

I think it's a fairly well-understood causal inference problem to figure out how much effort (money) needs to be spent on other people for GDP growth from that one person to offset the money spent on them by society.

We just need someone to step up and collect the data.

I just noticed that my jaw dropped for the first time in recent memory. Wow. Slow clap. UK, US, China... just wow

tbh, probably exactly how the current uni works, with vacuum energy and virtual photons communicating things in QED.

Somethings probably randomly fail, but because entropy and time is randomly selected we find ourselves in the successful ones.

What? The core aspect of FB/Twitter/etc. is twofold

1. No guaranteed-attention obligation from your circle, so you're free to share more things

2. Algorithms for YOUR attention so you see what you want to see in the order of importance. If you have very little time, you only see the most important things.

Email, Slack etc. are not even in the same category, it's like comparing a postcard to a newspaper headline

You do realize there's an edit button? It's next to the timestamp etc., the comment metadata

I think you're forgetting an important stakeholder here: humanity. We as a unit need to do things in an efficient way so we can save our limited resources for other, more important things.

Developers and their time matters more for the above since they're a smaller, minority population whose services are disproportionately necessary as opposed to users (who are more replaceable).

From purely a self-centered user's point of view, it doesn't matter, and might even be a negative since they don't get Apple's high-touch review. But it's not like Apple cares all that much about the opinions or user experience of the user either. One positive I can think of is more diversity and availability, there are just many more PWAs available. Another is time saved - if a user can start using your PWA in a couple seconds instead of painfully installing the app over a minute, then over a billion users you've saved very significant time.

I would even argue this sort of time saving might cause "natural" selection.

I think it's pretty daft to not consider an investment (by all of humanity, which I get is hard) which can improve efficiency by a lot, for all of time until we direct BMI.

At some point in the sliding scale it becomes worthwhile to care about and implement