sgentle

Well the point of the trial is to make a binary decision, so it has to be guilty or not guilty to a certain standard of evidence.

Think of it as "should you bring an umbrella to go outside today?" – the weather forecast has a probability, but your job is to turn that probability into a decision based on your risk tolerance. You can't bring a 30% umbrella for a 30% chance of rain.

Is it still ridiculous in the context of:

(a) AI will replace all or nearly all human intellectual labour

(b) AI will achieve superintelligence and become a (hopefully benevolent) digital god

(c) AI will be a superweapon that defines the next era of warfare

(d) AI will render art and creativity obsolete

These are real arguments I have heard. I'm sure you have too. If any of them are true, even partly, would you really be shocked to see the people of the future looking back at us as a bunch of Chamberlains?

And would they judge us less harshly just because the people who wanted to end the economy, summon Cthulhu, build a nuke and kill art simply failed to achieve their goals? Is the goal itself not odious enough to condemn?

Wild to stare down the entire history of civil disobedience, close your eyes, and say "just because you think rules are unjust, that's no reason to ignore them". Some real "all the orders were on display at your local office in Alpha Centauri" energy.

If you ever find yourself on the pointy end of an unjust system, I hope the people in a position to fight against it for you can see a little further.

Could be a useful way to force user-interaction-gated flows. A "your computer is infected, click this button in 10 seconds or it will crash" type button which, at this point, most modestly-knowledgeable users would know not to click. However, after seeing their computer actually crash when the countdown hits 0, perhaps they would be more inclined to click "allow" on whatever prompt follows when they see it again.

Of course, plenty of other uses. Disable your adblocker or we crash your computer. Watch the whole ad or we crash your computer. Click the follow button or we crash your computer.

Maybe I'm crazy, but "crash your computer" as a building block seems powerful enough to be a security issue. Is denial of service not a security thing anymore?

I think there are two opposite causes here: either an overly-aligned or completely unaligned mental model.

For developers, bug-blindness tends to be because their mental model is so close to the system's model that both have the same blind spots, and the developer can't effectively think outside the system (the classic "QA walks into a bar, orders 0 beers, orders -1 beers, orders 0.999 beers" vs "customer walks into a bar, asks where the bathroom is, bar immediately bursts into flames").

On the other hand, a common way for regular people to interact with a system is they just... don't have a model. None at all. Like, they click a thing and see what it does, and if it doesn't do what they expect they shrug and click something else. The horror of seeing a non-software person using a software system is realising that they usually cannot tell the difference between expected and unexpected behaviour, because they don't really form expectations in the first place. The computer is more genie than machine.

You can see this in the article: "Google Docs added some kind of delay such that the typing you do into the title box right after you open the doc gets overwritten". That's a developer forming a model of the system. The lay alternative is to simply learn that sometimes when you type in a box, the text appears. Other times, it doesn't. If it doesn't, you try again.

You don't need to understand the system if you abandon the assumption that the system was designed to be understood. And, in practice, the widespread plagues of shitty engineering, anti-features, and lack of respect for the user often combine to make that model the more information-theoretically optimal one.

In that sense, the very thing that makes us miserable is our perverse need to treat Google Docs as an engineered product rather than a cross between a djinn and a symbiotic fungus.

> It's not calculated, and not personal.

It doesn't have to be either of these things to be intentional. Pretty much every large system is too complex to be calculated or personal in the way we would apply those terms to a human. However, you can still describe a system as having values and goals, still analyse it in terms of its incentives and the mechanisms it evolves to achieve them in its environment.

The incentives are continued YoY growth, the environment is a saturated market, and so the mechanisms are monopolistic and anti-consumer practices. "Go to the Xfinity retail store" doesn't prove anything except that you passed an effort gate, segmenting you away from someone working two jobs with young children at home. 1% of customers costing the company $10 is the same as 100% of customers costing them 10c, with the added benefit that your segment is more likely to hurt retention than the one with no time or energy for comparison-shopping.

Did a single person design and orchestrate this state of affairs? Unlikely, but the company as a whole is more than capable of blobbing its bureaucratic way towards more efficient digestion of your funds. Never underestimate dumb optimisation processes at scale. Given enough time, such processes have turned monkeys into Shakespeare.

It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his net worth demands he not understand it.

More precisely, you need the idea and mechanisms to prevent competition, such as proprietary technology, network effects, economies of scale, and branding.

I think that's a really fun idea and I'd love to see it if you do it :)

One thought is maybe you don't need the numbers? Like for n<=2 they're redundant anyway, and maybe it's good to discourage ratios that are more complex by making them longer lexically.

eg reddish purple is just rrb, and dark blueish-grey is bwwkkkk – I kinda like how that reads

Unfortunately this is my broad experience of medical systems across multiple countries and, weirdly, it strikes me as one of the few problems that isn't caused by rent-seeking in the healthcare industry, or at least only very distantly (minus the "don't want to remortgage my house to go to emergency" element, obviously).

Medicine has a curious form of parochial paternalism: doctors, endowed with complete responsibility for your body, bodies in general, and anything that might affect a body, will confidently make claims and assumptions far outside their expertise, and completely ignore the factors outside their purview. Their role is to be the calm and reassuring face of medicine, even at the expense of a necessary humility about the complexity of the systems outside their office.

The bulk of the actual care is done by various non-doctors with a dizzying and overlapping matrix of responsibilities, all but guaranteeing that important things get dropped or missed. But all of that is meant to be fine, because the doctor is the single responsible person who will catch whatever the patchwork misses. Only they don't, because they're doctors, not social workers, not healthcare administrators; they rarely see the full picture.

This leaves only the patient, who, while suffering and with no particular expertise, has to become their own doctor, pharmacist, technician, administrator and patient advocate if they want to receive the best care.

Of course, the best care usually isn't necessary for a good outcome, and if you have an uncomplicated problem with a standard solution, chances are the medical system works just fine for you. But when you slip off the beaten path you very quickly realise that the facade has so many cracks that it's as much cracks as facade.

At some point, every man comes face to face with the lie of his potency. We're told our willingness to turn ourselves into ruthless avatars of purpose makes us powerful. Unstoppable. We can do anything if the call is great enough. Is it suspicious that the call takes the voice of more powerful men? Pay it no mind. The world is yours for the taking.

Then, one day, the tide comes in. You learn what old men know. What women know. What every victim of circumstance knows. Sometimes the world just happens to you.

A curiously frivolous way to frame the decision to get involved with a notorious sex trafficker. Nothing to do with values, integrity or culpability, just some boys missing their mommies.

Market cap and it's not even close. Turns out financialisation is the classic you-get-what-you-asked-for-not-what-you-wanted of capitalism. We told the optimiser to make number go up, and number has certainly gone up. China's number? Not as up.

I think it could have gone differently if we gave our economic system something to optimise other than itself, but then we wouldn't have centibillionaires, so... swings and roundabouts I guess?