semanticjudo

That the outrage doesn't seem to extend to the other companies clearing the other 242,700 acres in Finland

[edit] Request for source on illegality of the clearing (article states Google claims it was legal - I don't see where it says anyone is refuting that)

If it was done illegally, it shouldn’t have been done. But I wanted some numbers to put this in perspective.

Forest loss in Finland has averaged about 243,000 hectares per year in recent years through 2025

Finland has 20.3 million to 26.3 million hectares of forestry and forest land depending on the classification used.

The United States has a gross forest loss of about 3 million acres per year, which is largely offset by 2.6 million acres of non-forest-to-forest conversion.

Brazil cleared 985,000 hectares of forest last year.

India approved the diversion of 26,858 hectares of forest last year.

There are a lot of entities clearing lots of forest every day. Interesting that this one makes news.

I recently bought a new car for the first time in 16 years. I had all the same concerns - my Acura MDX solved them all. It’s not perfect (has opaque shade for panoramic roof) but the number of physical buttons (dozens) is glorious. And the door handles are great.

The author has implied a false dichotomy: positioning the article as “it does 10x or it does nothing” (my paraphrasing) is disingenuous and hyperbolic. My experience is that on several tasks professional devs, including myself, can get to an answer much faster than pre-LLM. For example, I’ve never had to use SQL frequently enough to become an expert. Prior to LLMs, creating queries beyond the basic would take an hour of Googling and keyboard head banging (or find an expert to help who is invariably doing their own job). Now, the same thing takes 6 minutes. Arguably 10x faster for this task. But since I don’t do this often nor have 40 other examples like this, I’d never claim it makes me 10x more productive. But I DO run into 5 or 6 of this and similar examples a week and several others of smaller magnitude. And that has a meaningful impact on my productivity. I could go on to describe in what ways I can see this productivity improvement but the primary point is that it is not all or nothing. An LLM might make me 20% more productive across my week and that is still a big deal when compared with just not having it.

I try to capture this sentiment all the time in conversations here in America - we are privileged simply to say, “I feel unsafe” and have it taken seriously when vast swaths of the world would simply reply, “you and everyone else, why are you stating the obvious”

The western world’s calibration on what it means to feel unsafe is so far out of whack that it’s often hard to take seriously.

I’ve led the software development at a design agency to build project and client collaboration tools in a web app over the last seven years. The company founders never set out to intentionally run a design agency with custom built software in house and from the outside looking in, building “project management” from scratch would sound like a terrible idea. Yet we’ve been profitable in every year and grown +30% more than half those years and were acquired last year with decent equity payouts. The acquiring company (300m+ rev / year) is now expanding the engineering team to build SW for their adjacent market.

Myself, my boss (former CEO) and current CEO strongly believe in the power and potential of in house engineering, in particular for spaces that “sound on paper” like solved problems. The efficiency and productivity gains from building exactly what you need is hard to quantify but has been proven in our business as indispensable and, we believe, a significant competitive advantage.

Of course, as others have mentioned, you need the right person to make this happen in your business. I would look for someone with proven startup and product development experience that you could ultimately see managing a small team. None of this is cheap but the ROI long term is likely justified given the issues you’ve outlined.

yes, when the odds of winning are in my favor...

But I assume you know that so you must be asking, "Is there a situation where somebody can accurately understand the expected outcomes of any particular bet where the odds are against them winning and still come to the conclusion that taking the bet is rational?"

And one answer comes immediately to mind although I'm sure there are several: when I'm willing to lose for the entertainment value of having the chance to win and knowing that short term variance means I may in fact win.

There always has been and always will be a “tax” on those who cannot or will not apply math to their financial decisions. Of course the degree to which we provide opportunities to collect this tax is a societal decision and we’ve almost certainly increased the opportunities for tax collectors in the last ten to fifteen years quite dramatically. And of course, de facto the under educated folks, who also are likely to be poor, will tend to be taxed at a disproportionate rate. Yet another wealth transfer. I wonder what societal attitudes led us down this road?

> Its been proven time and again that these meaningless level rewards are pointless in studies and often even distort/bias the data (people treat it like a board game).

Do you have one or two references for this I could take a look at?

I'm as wary of bias and mistakes in research as "the next person" but if they are measuring brain activity it gets more interesting. To establish that there isn't some validity to this experiment then one would have to show that the brain's reward center can respond while receiving a reward while playing a game but not respond when receiving a reward in a different "non-game" context.

If such research exists or it's been established as fact that this is true, that would seem like a glaring omission from this study. I'd be interested to see that.

Secondarily, you avoided addressing the race question entirely :) I'll assume it is safe to say there is some bias there as well then.

Did you bother reading it?

“Historically, many studies have involved the easiest people to recruit, who tend to be people who come from advantaged environments. If we don’t make efforts to recruit diverse pools of participants, we almost always end up with children and adults who come from high-income, high-education environments,” Gabrieli says. “Until recently, we did not realize that principles of brain development vary in relation to the environment in which one grows up, and there was very little evidence about the influence of SES.”

Without this very type of study one could mistakenly do exactly what you’re accusing them of doing. I also didn’t see race mentioned. I’d assume the opposite of your presumption i.e. that this finding would stand regardless of race.

Read widely, absorb judiciously, adopt frugally

There is one measure of a government that has never failed: are people trying to get in or are people trying to get out?

California's government - federal electives, state and many local have been making decisions and putting in place policies that we are now seeing the consequences of.

The pandemic didn't create the problem - it poured gas on the fire. The elected officials of the last 30-40 years created the problem. The housing shortage is 100% a government created problem. The homeless "problem" is 100% a government created problem.

We don't have to solve these problems - we can continue on as we are which is likely because it is the path of least resistance (accountability is hard for people and governments). But let's be honest about why things are the way they are.

you weren't supposed to notice the similarity to, "standing around outside during your lunch hour".

Sounds like a legitimately good application for block chain - both parties can have access to the immutable transaction history. Similar to how Walmart applied block chain to inventory delivery disputes.