msandford

Joined 14 years ago

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Comment · 3 hours ago
They also mentioned that this is the first example of the unknown phenomena that caused the creep. This technology has been in use quite successfully for more than 100 years.
Comment · 2 days ago
It's amazing what you manage to not find when you try really hard to not find it.

Reminds me of a scene from the movie "Thank you for smoking" where Big Tobacco's lead scientist has managed to find no link between smoking and cancer for 30 years. It's a miracle!

Comment · 6 days ago
Well traditional publishers are responsible for the content of what shows up in their medium. Nobody would argue that the NYT shouldn't be responsible for what op-eds they publish.

New media outlets/websites do have a carve-out in the law to not be responsible for what people post there, presumably because "they (the platform) don't really have control over what people post" which is largely true.

But it's only largely true as long as new media outlet/platform isn't doing editorial work ala deciding which op-eds to show everyone and which ones to bury. But, their algorithms are de-facto editorial policy.

When you only saw updates from your friends or friends-of-friends or whatever there was no editorial policy because THEY didn't decide what you saw, YOU did. YOU were in charge of what you saw by who you associated with. The algorithm was a 1:1 correlation between your friends and what you saw.

That is no longer the case. My Facebook feed is at least 70% not updates from my friends but rather random crap that FB decides to show me. That's much closer to NYT deciding which articles/op-eds to put into the paper than it is running some kind of "people post what they want and find what they want" thing like the forums of the old days were.

Will a new law get written? I don't know. Will the tech companies allow you algorithmic choice to try and avoid getting regulated? I don't know. But there's a lot of latent discontent around how corrosive social media is by constantly stoking outrage/anger/whatever. I don't think it would necessarily be good if they got regulated but to me it's absolutely believable that it could happen.

Comment · 6 days ago
At a certain point the big social media companies are going to have to publish their algorithms and/or let you choose your own re: friends updates, friends of friends, things your friends or friends of friends liked, etc. Make your algorithm too opaque and you run the risk of outrage engagement showing up as "the platform pushed this" whatwver that happens to be.
Comment · 10 days ago
Comment · 17 days ago
A lot of it isn't about these people in particular. It's about what's happening in their countries. Like it or not Trump is more of a symptom of what's going on in the US than the cause. I know that sounds weird but the inflation that's been eating away at a middle class lifestyle for decades is most of what's getting people so riled up, and the unwillingness to reckon with that by "normal" politicians is what got Trump elected.
Comment · 17 days ago
If you're prepared for a bit of a rabbit hole you can look at https://www.shadowstats.com/ which was allegedly the result of airline econometrics predictive model stopping working and that spurred someone to figure out what was going on.

The idea that the government would cook the books in their favor isn't outside the realm of possibility. The idea that it's been happening for 40+ years is worrying.

Comment · 23 days ago
Yeah I'm not arguing that this is an eco paradise and that we should all copy the model. I don't love subsidies either but I far prefer little ones like this to big ones where several big companies benefit and we're all paying for their profits.
Comment · 23 days ago
I've seen a couple of videos and I think you've missed some information, at least if we're talking about the same thing. The train is specific for a bunch of flag stop people along it, small locomotive and only a few cars. It might not be as sustainable as walking to the store but it's probably on par with driving an SUV to Costco weekly, especially when a lot of stuff at Costco is trucked not rail.
Comment · 25 days ago
100M active time series is good information, but what's the data rate for each time series it can handle? One update per minute or 10 per second? There's a factor of 600 difference there. Neither is obviously insanely the wrong update rate.
Comment · 25 days ago
You don't even have to ban fishing entirely, just reduce the fishing to a point where fish populations increase. It might mean that fishing has to be at half the level it is now which still isn't great for the people impacted but you don't have to go 100% outright ban.
Comment · 1 month ago
That's a great idea, thanks for sharing!
Comment · 1 month ago
This is the same problem as the "AI drives the car until it can't" situation. Feel free to doze off so long as you can wake up and instantly have world class racecar "save the situation" reflexes. Hope isn't a strategy but that's what all of this feels like.
Comment · 1 month ago
My feeling about all the corruption talk is that everyone is at different points on the "oh yeah now I see it" curve. I've noticed that I'm really annoyed at people who are just now getting it as I've been seeing it for 20+ years. Because people who are further behind didn't see it before they have no idea how bad previous corruption was and only see the new corruption as a unique evil, unmatched by anything that ever happened in a million billion years. Which then makes for very tiresome arguments about how bad it used to be back in the day. They actually argue that it used to be fine, but NOW it's bad.

Anyhow kind of a rant but it's an insight I had as to why nobody can agree on anything despite lots of folks probably being honest/good faith actors.

Comment · 2 months ago
You know that the usage has gone up something around 1000x since AI right?

Nobody outside of actual engineering or engineering adjacent like construction used load bearing up until about 6-12mo ago. Now it's everywhere.

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