non_aligned

18 ms·

31.
by non_aligned 1y ago
I'm not here to defend the US, but here's one way to look at it: the death toll of alcohol abuse is much higher, so how can one conceivably defend a society that allows its consumption? Almost everywhere in the West, the answer
32.
by non_aligned 1y ago
I think there are two factors that helped Google. First, the search engine landscape back then was absolutely abysmal. I'm sure someone will chime in saying that it's abysmal today as well, but the reality is that 99%+ of consumer
33.
by non_aligned 1y ago
The difference is that you can, quite successfully, keep "cheating" with an LLM while at a job. And people do, not just in lower-importance roles, but at law offices, etc. I work in tech and I see this more and more every day. By
34.
by non_aligned 1y ago
TikTok is the most prominent one, for a number of reasons, but other platforms that pioneered or copied the format also reached considerable prominence. Instagram Reels, Snapchat Stories, etc. And tellingly, when YouTube wanted to compete,
35.
by non_aligned 1y ago
I honestly don't think this shows in the data. As a software engineer, I really want to believe it, but I think we're prone to confusing well-being with productivity. We feel better about the work, but if you try to quantify it in
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by non_aligned 1y ago
> What was unique about YouTube is YouTube did not have to pay for content. People made acceptable quality content and uploaded it to YouTube for free. They still do. The vast majority of YT content is not monetized by creators, often no
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by non_aligned 1y ago
Yeah, there's this whole YouTube genre of fairly unassuming farms showing off millions of dollars in the latest and greatest John Deere equipment and coming up with rationalizations about how it's going to pay for itself very soon
38.
by non_aligned 1y ago
I've seen this from both sides, and I think there's about the same amount of bad-faith arguments on both sides. Now, line workers have less power here than the execs, so I'm inclined to side with the former group, but... the
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by non_aligned 1y ago
The simplest way to answer this is to ask "whose dream?". We have billions of data points conclusively showing that users don't care about nerd fantasies. No one cares if it's decentralized or not, if it's open sour
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by non_aligned 1y ago
> But doing so would not only increase the costs dramatically (by a multiple) it would give money to many parents who didn’t need it for child care. And while no-strings-attached payouts appeal to rational geeks, they usually lead to pub
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by non_aligned 1y ago
> I'm amazed that the article doesn't discuss the end of ZIRP. I'm not sure this particular phenomenon can be explained this way. For example, antiques auctions are doing quite well, with prices rising quite briskly year a
42.
by non_aligned 1y ago
Collecting big-ticket art is a weird hobby in that it's very passive. For most collectibles, you're supposed to go to garage sales, scout eBay, walk around with a metal detector, or even dumpster-dive. And if you find something un
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by non_aligned 1y ago
The limit of a process at infinity is not necessarily subject to the same constraints as the outcome you're seeing after a finite number of steps. The assumption you're making here is intuitive, but it bites students in the butt e
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by non_aligned 1y ago
I really want to believe, but if I had a penny for every time that analog, optical, ternary, clockless, or other radically non-standard computing paradigms were supposed to revolutionize the industry... I'd have a nice pile of pennies.
45.
by non_aligned 1y ago
> most people are boring Nah. Unless your benchmark is "interesting to every person on the planet", in which case, sure. But then, I'd say that following celebrity and politician gossip is far less productive than followin
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by non_aligned 1y ago
20+ years isn't exactly "recently" in internet time. And while early 2000s might be pushing it, in the 1990s, it was most certainly normal for people to put their home phone numbers in Usenet signatures. The internet was init
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by non_aligned 1y ago
> Writing unit tests where needed makes you more productive in the long run. Debatable? It has positive effects for organizations and for the society, but from a selfish point of view, you gain relatively little from writing tests. In yo
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by non_aligned 1y ago
This is fantastic, although the statement about the intended audience cracked me up a bit: "intended for a general audience including ... anyone interested in a concise intro/overview of QM. Prerequisites: linear algebra, calculus
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by non_aligned 1y ago
I think that the culture of a given forum plays a huge role. There are some places where commenting is meaningful because you're a part of some closely-knit, stable community, and you can actually make a dent - actually influence peopl
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by non_aligned 1y ago
This is not a fine, it's a settlement to recompense authors. More broadly, I think that's a goofy argument. The books were "freely available" too. Just because something is out there, doesn't necessarily mean you ca
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by non_aligned 1y ago
I'm gonna say one thing. If you agree that something was unfairly taken from book authors, then the same thing was taken from people publishing on the web, and on a larger scale. Book authors may see some settlement checks down the lin
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by non_aligned 1y ago
You're joking, but that's actually a good pitch. There was a significant legal issue hanging over their heads, with some risk of a potentially business-ending judgment down the line. This makes it go away, which makes the company
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by non_aligned 1y ago
Or, were there any statues of Lenin on the way... but I think it also shows your age. A person born in 2000 is already 25 years old.
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by non_aligned 1y ago
And the data for the two decades before that should be tossed out because of the global housing crisis, the sovereign debt crisis, and all the reverberations from that. And the data for the two decades before that obviously needs to be to