BrenBarn

4 ms·

31.
by BrenBarn 2mo ago
What makes economic sense isn't necessarily the same as what is rational. All of what you said is factored into people's notion of "economic sense". My main takeaway from that is that we can induce people to do better
32.
by BrenBarn 2mo ago
> Meanwhile, only a few academics and small companies are defending us from these technologies. “The thing about cat-and-mouse games is that we know how they usually end up for the mouse,” Hartzog said. “And in this case, the cat include
33.
by BrenBarn 2mo ago
It's because people became addicted to building apps using HTML and JS instead of writing actual programs that run on the actual OS and display their UI using native OS widgets.
34.
by BrenBarn 2mo ago
As with most such things, though, what is needed are escalating penalties. If you're a Joe Schmo who files a complaint that turns out to be invalid, no penalty for you. If you're a rich jerk who files a bunch of such complaints,
35.
by BrenBarn 2mo ago
> Maybe, just maybe, that's because inventing something is actually within their grasp, whereas wholesale replacing every civil engineer and architect in the country isn't? That is like the old joke about the drunk who lost his
36.
by BrenBarn 2mo ago
> Fixing the politics is still necessary, and rather urgent. I agree. It's just wishful thinking to say that oh if we just lower the price of solar then it'll be okay. There are innumerable issues which are blocked by politic
37.
by BrenBarn 2mo ago
I don't think that's the way I'd describe it though. It's more like "our political technology is not good enough to reliably do good things instead of bad things". Working around it by lowering prices of this
38.
by BrenBarn 2mo ago
> Why shouldn't they? Because it's evil?
39.
by BrenBarn 2mo ago
It's kind of sad to me to see this because I find Gwern's website so fascinating and impressive. But I don't believe that this kind of doubling down on LLMs is a good path forward for humanity. Basically this is saying we us
40.
by BrenBarn 2mo ago
This is interesting although a couple things raised questions for me. One, I am not convinced by the arguments like "modernist architecture didn't become popular until after zoning". I do not think that people in Chicago wer
41.
by BrenBarn 2mo ago
AKA "Love of money is the root of all evil."
42.
by BrenBarn 2mo ago
That's why the burden of proof needs to shift and our thinking about responsibility needs to shift. Your liability should increase in parallel with the benefits you derive from your position. If you are getting rich from running ebay
43.
by BrenBarn 2mo ago
> A big driver of automatic updates in the late 00s and early 10s were people who never updated their OS or browser and were getting compromised left and right. I think we would be better off if people worked harder to prevent vulnerabil
44.
by BrenBarn 2mo ago
"All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone." --Pascal
45.
by BrenBarn 2mo ago
Yet another reminder that the companies providing the AI tools everyone is so gaga over are in it to make money off of you. They can and will engage in rugpulling, deception, and other shenanigans to take your money.
46.
by BrenBarn 2mo ago
I could write a really long thing here about my thoughts on video shops. Suffice it to say that there was a video shop in my town that I went to a lot as a kid, and continued to go to occasionally during college and into my late 20s. The
47.
by BrenBarn 2mo ago
> The moment external investors acquire ownership interests in FIFA competitions, football changes forever. Commercial return becomes a permanent obligation. Investor expectations become a daily pressure. If only we recognized the evil o
48.
by BrenBarn 2mo ago
The whole "human nature" argument always irritates me. We deny human nature all the time, and if we didn't our world would be far worse. Human nature has many aspects that are bad . Like, really bad! Not all of it is b
49.
by BrenBarn 2mo ago
The article doesn't mention what I think is one of the most notable AI aesthetic tropes, which is lists of bullet points where the bullets are emojis. Admittedly these mostly occur in documents (especially AI-generated repo readmes) r
50.
by BrenBarn 2mo ago
Amen to disgust with the cult of speed. A large part of what people spend their time trying to do fast doesn't really need to be done at all; most of the rest doesn't need to be done fast. One of the tragedies of our modern worl
51.
by BrenBarn 2mo ago
It's not just technical practicality that's disregarded, it's nearly everything valuable about anything that's worth doing. It's why VC is a cancer on the world.
52.
by BrenBarn 2mo ago
I think if it we want to stop killing the internet, the lack of regulation of AI/bot companies is the biggest problem right now.
53.
by BrenBarn 2mo ago
The other thing is that I find a fair number of "news" stories these days are basically one or two small details about the latest update on some ongoing situation, followed by a long summary of what happened before. So most of th
54.
by BrenBarn 2mo ago
VPN services aren't generally running out of someone's house, and I think I might be okay with saying they cannot be. I think VPNs are a legitimate service but that doesn't necessarily mean we need to let everyone run one at
55.
by BrenBarn 2mo ago
I've come to see this kind of response as sort of akin to "but what if I like driving my old clunker car that gets 15mpg and spews smog"? It's not wrong exactly, but it just amounts to saying "I became accustomed
56.
by BrenBarn 2mo ago
Whether or not the decline of literacy is a pearl-clutching myth, I don't think anything is gained by laying on a bunch of academic mumbo-jumbo about "literacies" and "problematizing" things and contextualization an
57.
by BrenBarn 2mo ago
Maybe not "all" in the sense of every word, but I think a good number were at least taking a stab at each assignment, and even more were taking a stab at most of the assignments. It's hard to know for sure without some kind
58.
by BrenBarn 3mo ago
I mean one thing is that exercise is good for your general health, so maybe there's a reluctance to tie it to specific conditions like depression.
59.
by BrenBarn 3mo ago
I have, yeah. That's kind of my point: other ORMs do this better than Django.
60.
by BrenBarn 3mo ago
> It's fine + obligation to fix, and daily fine until fixed, and higher fine if you do it again. The important proviso is that the penalties need to (on some non-geological timescale) get high enough that the offender is no longer

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