twright

In “Careless People”, in the chapter on the Rohingya Genocide, a case is made for Facebook’s complicity in it. Essentially threatening and violence-inciting content got past moderation because the font that was used didn’t support Myanmar text. So there would be a report on a post but all the mod team would see was missing Unicode characters and mark the post as okay. By the time the serious violence started it was too late.

Now, I am not claiming a lack of text support caused a genocide, and I don’t think Wynn-Williams is either. Facebook was certainly culpable though, the military had direct controls over what was allowed to be posted and suppressed dissent. The issue could have been caught much earlier on and perhaps mitigated had off-shore moderation teams been able to read posts that were being flagged.

I think OP was more pointing out a supreme irony with the farmer demographic. They rely heavily on seasonal immigrant labor yet they voted for immigrants to be rounded up and forbidden to enter the US. Their sales rely on exports (e.g. soybeans) and imports (tractor parts, fertilizer) yet they voted for a complete upending of the global trade system that benefitted them. So that they are complaining about the current economic climate while simultaneously politically being fully behind it is schadenfreude for many.

I think this is a great explanation. To add to it, I believe there is something durability too. My basic Jabra wireless earbuds from 2020 are just now getting faulty (just battery stuff). In a similar time period from 2010 and 2015 I went through at least 6 pairs of wired headphones or earbuds, the jacks would fail or the wires would just stop working.

I'm a little confused about the value of scanning rare books since this story came out. I have a small collection of "rare" books and they're not really bounties of information, at least not modern information. I know novel training corpus is important but the information in rare non-fiction books is commonplace or out-dated. And the information in old rare fiction-books are originals for which reprints exist or just uninteresting stories that aren't really worth anyone's time except collectors'.

I think from the manufacturer's perspective there is some misplaced idea that automation via an app somehow makes work easier. For household chores there are so many manual steps that an app doesn't actually make the process any easier, it complicates it. You have this dependency on a phone that you're relying on whereas before it was just some simple button presses. It's like having to call your mechanic every time you wanted to start the car.

I think that's what's ringing to me about the whole piece. There is a large assumption of equity. There is this section header:

> Everyone will have free or affordable access to these tools.

"access" is doing a lot of heavy lifting, yes everyone has access to the US healthcare system. Is it affordable for everyone? Not even close, but politicians will always phrase it that way as a non-agreement to proposals of universal healthcare.

This paragraph is wild.

> As a thought experiment, imagine only one person had a superintelligent lawyer. They would have an unfair advantage in court -- even if they were wrong on the merits. That would lead to a worse society. But now imagine everyone has a superintelligent lawyer. In this case, justice would be carried out much more fairly and efficiently than it is today when there is often an imbalance in skills and resources in litigation.

This would only be true in a vacuum. Ignoring several leaps of progress where it would suddenly be allowed for an AI to represent one in court (imagine the size of the context window) and you could also call it from prison. That is not what is imbalanced about the US court system. Whoever has more money can drown someone in court filings and court fees and then drop their case financially ruining someone.

It's also funny how the interest of "AI for everyone" only extends to the national interest but I guess he's got to make sure he stays in good graces with the current administration.

Throwback to a brief moment when everyone wanted to support IFTTT. If I remember, it ran out of steam because it takes away eyeballs from the actual application (social networks in-particular). The use cases are also rather niche.

Money pit indeed! At Graycliff, the one he designed before Falling Water, there are no gutters or downspouts. The tour guide told us that Wright didn’t want them disrupting the horizontal lines of the house. The roof is cedar shake and there’s some wonderful moulding just below the roofline that gutters would normally protect. It must be astronomic to maintain it.

I think it would be hard not just because of the amount of variables you have to model for but mainly it just might not be fun--or the fun would be very niche. In "Oxygen Not Included", maybe the most Biosphere 2-like game, your colony quickly collapses if you welcome too many duplicants (people). If you do manage to balance that there are dozens of other ways for the colony to suddenly collapse but then it can be difficult to narrow down what decision(s) lead to it.