uniqueuid

Among my secret research ideas, this is the most dangerous and morally wrong one.

If future generations of researchers will wonder why IRB reviews became mandatory for computer science, studies like this will be the answer.

Seriously, some people don't seem to realize the point at which they are becoming Fritz Haber.

It's also about variance in the number.

Expert software engineers will still accidentally burn $500 or $5000 on tasks that don't work, or are not efficient. Amateurs will accidentally spend $100 to get something great.

So part of the change is a change in the risk structure of using frontier models. Before, you'd burn your quota; now, you can burn uncapped (less-capped) money.

I can relate to the attitude, but I also suspect it's a lot easier to live like this in one of the two richest countries in the world with the least stressful labor markets (going by the experience of my friends who emigrated there).

Whoops, misread the digit! Thanks for catching.

But the numbers are still the same (it's about rates not counts), just that we can expect the 40% figure to be more accurate than with 2M.

I assume you mean there might be a self-selection issue with people who are voluntarily ("privately") insured, as compared to those who have the normal state-mandated ("gesetzlich") insurance?

This data is from AOK which is one of the state-mandated insurers. It insures around 2M people, and my gut feeling is that they are not terribly unrepresentative of the workforce as a whole.

But of course the point is, everyone with a tiny bit of true data could tell much more precise stories, and the journalists (as usual) didn't care or didn't think it would fly with readers.

To be fair, the median is just as little information as the mean. We live in a world where ink is cheap, they should just show a histogram.

Which is exactly (part of) why people call ZFS a "rampant layering violation"!

It's very simple, this is about the threat model.

If you are worried about big players profiling you (hard to avoid, high likelihood of happening, low likelihood of damage), then you want Sailfish.

If you are worried about apps profiling you (easy to avoid, high likelihood of happening, moderate likelihood of damage), you want Android or iOS.

Graphene and Sailfish sit on different points on that spectrum, just like OpenBSD and Linux do.

I have nothing but great things to say about typst, and this is my personal favorite from this release:

"A single document can now contain multiple bibliographies"

That was nicely put.

I think you can learn about it most by reading clever, capable people from big tech corporations. Their framing often involves tradeoffs against a slow but inevitable societal pressure that is helped by compromising on freedom.

So I don't believe they are ignorant of all your points; it's rather that they don't see a realistic way how tech, corporations, and perhaps even ordinary people can go forward (being better, or richer, or more sophisticated or whatever) without making that compromise. It's as if they saw the forking paths of the future, and none will end up without technical restraints, regardless of whether they do it or whether things just get worse and someone else then does them.

The causal loop you mentioned makes social science hard, but I’d argue that falsification and hypothesis-driven research can still work. Otherwise all the behavioral targeting Meta and Google and co are doing would not work.

Thanks, that's a great point. I know a huge amount of the literature exactly in this area, and I'm honestly still pretty skeptical of the theoretical idea of the diversity principle. Mostly because there doesn't seem to be a good consensus what actually is a good amount of diversity.

But in practical terms, while there are some very obvious gaps and biases, I think the German media system is still pretty good in a lot of ways and everybody does have a lot of freedom.

I'd even go so far as to say - the typical accusations of censorship are mostly from right-wing actors who are not censored, but who demand more views and make a spectacle out of claiming to be censored.