BrenBarn

4 ms·

1.
by BrenBarn 5d ago
I think that "everyone should be able to do what they want with their own property", per se, is not a good principle for society. Sometimes people should not be allowed to do what they want with their property. In particular, I
2.
by BrenBarn 5d ago
In theory this is true, but in practice I am skeptical that it's generally possible to do this with generic "business" intelligence that is not accompanied by specific understanding of and genuine care for the actual substanc
3.
by BrenBarn 5d ago
> Many people don't really run businesses efficiently. In many cases that's a good thing, depending on what we mean by efficient. Lots of people run businesses in ways that make less money than they could, and often that'
4.
by BrenBarn 5d ago
> The steelman argument is that private equity is just property rights. If I build a business I get to decide what to do with it. You're gonna need to steelman that again, because in and of itself that is also not something I see as
5.
by BrenBarn 15d ago
I'm not sure that's true. Like if they produced nothing but the worst of the slop they're currently producing, a lot of people would still be bothered by that just because of the sheer volume of such slop that can now be pro
6.
by BrenBarn 28d ago
And that's because the DMCA lets Google exploit its position. It's still a DMCA problem until the DMCA is either repealed or fixed to produce a comprehensively good situation.
7.
by BrenBarn 28d ago
It's not totally clear from the examples given, but I feel like in some cases these changes aren't a genuine effort to improve things. They're just a sort of cycle of changing things to chase fads or look busy.
8.
by BrenBarn 28d ago
The better outcome would be for everyone to slow roll everything rather than speeding up the rate of bug propagation.
9.
by BrenBarn 1mo ago
And what will be the penalty when they inevitably fail to make meaningful changes? Another fine as weak as this one? No. The penalty now should be ten or a hundred times as large as this.
10.
by BrenBarn 1mo ago
> I am not interested in blaming companies or people > The issue isn't the models becoming smarter. The issue is that the process of "testing" was careless. But that's just it. People (working at companies) made t
11.
by BrenBarn 1mo ago
I think what it does answer is "why is it reasonable for anyone to say I should not be angry?" The answer is "it isn't". Maybe some people are angry, maybe some people aren't. But I think it's wrong and
12.
by BrenBarn 1mo ago
What I want from a query language is for it to not be a language, but some kind of specification of components that can then be transmitted to the engine in a machine-readable way. The bizarre thing about SQL is that it has to be written i
13.
by BrenBarn 1mo ago
The dangerous thing about amplifying is that bad people are often more willing to amplify their activities, because they don't care about the negative effects. We are seeing this now as AI companies (and large companies of all kinds)
14.
by BrenBarn 1mo ago
> You should be doing deep introspection about how your company culture and approach to R&D produces criminal outcomes. And they should be doing that from inside a jail cell.
15.
by BrenBarn 1mo ago
Solution: break Amazon up into itty bitty pieces. A one-stop online shop for everything, automatic free shipping, automatically buying stuff you "need", many things that Amazon provides --- all of them are drugs from which we as a
16.
by BrenBarn 1mo ago
There is a great phone app called World Geography Quiz that will quiz you on flags, country shapes, capitals, and all the rest. It has a staged entry thing where you get access to more categories and regions as you play. I'm not affi
17.
by BrenBarn 1mo ago
> I feel like a lot of tech innovation and "business process innovation" over the past 15 years was just ignoring regulations that were built up over decades, only discovering the reasons for those regulations when the tide wen
18.
by BrenBarn 1mo ago
I also don't like the fatalistic mindset, but I feel like we're better off trying to retaliate against the makers and operators of the bots, rather than getting into a technological arms race against the bots themselves. That is,
19.
by BrenBarn 1mo ago
It's not a bad idea but we need a multi-pronged approach, with at least one other prong being "destroy the companies that are doing this".
20.
by BrenBarn 1mo ago
> I think that ordinary people don’t trust companies, governments, or the tech industry and always suspect that we are cooking up some new way to screw them over. It is so tragicomic to see people whose lives are built around companies c
21.
by BrenBarn 1mo ago
We're going to need more than just "legislative strength" within the framework of our existing government, because this has shown that that framework is inadequate. I don't see a path to true recovery without a Nurember
22.
by BrenBarn 1mo ago
I agree the web-of-trust model is a good idea for the future. Lobsters has something sort of like it in that you can see a tree of who invited who. I don't think it has a fully fleshed-out system for reputation flow on that basis tho
23.
by BrenBarn 1mo ago
By "candidates like this" and "these types of candidates" I assume you mean Nigel Farage.
24.
by BrenBarn 1mo ago
> There were plenty of people using the internet, but again, they were nerds or nerd-adjacent. So, maybe the LLM-ification of everything could end up being like a huge filter, where all the non-nerds no longer see the point of anything
25.
by BrenBarn 1mo ago
> The problem is that worked when the industry was mostly composed of people that were implicitly interested in this stuff, but the people that just got in it for a paycheck don't have that motivation That is a problem whenever peop
26.
by BrenBarn 1mo ago
> With AI, "bad" engineers can now amplify their "bad" engineering x10 across the organization. This is why I don't have any patience for the people who say "but AI is so powerful! we can do so much!"
27.
by BrenBarn 2mo ago
> Equipped with tools that could theoretically make me a faster, more capable builder, I felt a strong urge to maximize my use of the tools by applying them to the task of… maximizing my use of the tools. It’s reflexive in the worst way,
28.
by BrenBarn 2mo ago
I think that is one reason why it was better.
29.
by BrenBarn 2mo ago
What a load of insincere hogwash. If Zuck wanted to dilute the power of large institutions he has several billion ways to do it other than making limp gestures in the direction of open source. The problem is that even if you take him at h
30.
by BrenBarn 2mo ago
As the caption says, it's not even a real photo of Twain or Paige, it's from a movie.

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