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Cake day: August 2nd, 2023

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  • This is all true if you take a tiny portion of what AI is and does (like generative AI) and try to extrapolate that to all of AI.

    AI is a vast field. There are a huge number of NP-hard problems that AI is really really good at.

    If you can reasonably define your problem in terms of some metric and your problem space has a lot of interdependencies, there’s a good chance AI is the best and possibly only (realistic) way to address it.

    Generative AI has gotten all the hype because it looks cool. It’s seen as a big investment because it’s really expensive. A lot of the practical AI is for things like automated calibration. It’s objectively useful and not that expensive to train.






  • It’s hard to draw meaningful conclusions form a single 4 year period. There have been several instances of corruption (and significant externalized costs) in private firms that went on for much longer than 4 years.

    I agree that there is a lot of corruption in government but there’s a long gap between that and no accountability. We see various forms of government accountability on a regular basis; politicians lose elections, they get recalled, and they sometimes even get incarcerated. We also have multiple systems designed to allow any citizen to influence government.

    None of these systems and safeguards are anywhere close to perfect but it must be better than organizations that don’t even have these systems in the first place.


  • What makes governments any more susceptible to corruption than a private organization?

    I’m not actually talking about governments having absolute control. That’s a pretty extreme scenario to jump to from from the question of if it’s better for a private company or a government to control search.

    Right now we think Google is misusing that data. We can’t even get information on it without a leak. The government has a flawed FOIA system but Google has nothing of the sort. The only way we’re protected from corruption at Google (and historically speaking several other large private organization) is when the government steps in and stops them.

    Governments often handle corruption poorly but I can rattle of many cases where governments managed to reduce corruption on their own (ie without requiring a revolution). In many cases the source of that corruption was large private organizations.





  • They do it to make you spend more time browsing. Shoppers typically get the same stuff every time they get groceries. Over time people learn the layout of their local store and develop efficient patterns to move through it and get everything they want. When the store shuffles everything around they force shoppers to wander around the store and to look at all the shelves carefully for the stuff they actually want. Some percentage of them end up finding new things to buy and spend more money.


  • I have to applaud David Nolan on some next level marketing for this one.

    He invented the predecessor of that chart as a way to promote libertarianism. It’s very clever in how subtly it introduces a loaded question.

    The phrasing asks the viewer to consider if they want more or less political freedom and if they want more or less economic freedom. Obviously, most people want more freedom. Therefore Libertarianism is the best form of government. QED!

    But that makes two big assumptions that are almost certainly incorrect:

    1. It assumes that choice of government is entirely, or at least predominantly, determined by your views on economic and social regulations. Questions of military, legal process, environmental policy, etc are all either irrelevant or can be entirely described within the economic and social regulation factors. That doesn’t even pass the sniff test. If two people agree that they want social and economic freedom, do we really believe that they necessarily have identical political beliefs? No, because we know that in real life they’ll define those freedoms differently.
    2. It assumes that complex topics such as economics and social regulation can be entirely described on a single axis of “more vs less". If you look at the disagreements that people actually have, it’s almost always about the types of regulations, not on the degree of regulation.

    It’s a little frustrating that unabashed marketing is so frequently trotted out as though it were an established fact.


  • nednobbins@lemm.eetoMemes@lemmy.mlPlease don’t nuke me
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    1 year ago

    Primarily because it’s really difficult to move countries. Even when an other country is “better”, by whatever metric you may choose, the high switching cost makes the move worse for individuals unless staying in a country is really really bad. That threshold is typically when subsistence in the country of origin becomes untenable, often due to war or famine.


  • Didn’t know it had a name.
    That once stopped me from registering a video game title.

    I was feeling silly so I figured I’d go for a nonsensical contrast. “Evil Grape” got rejected. After several failed attempts it eventually dawned on me that some dumb algorithm thought it was a reference to sexual violence.

    It kind of annoyed me but I just picked an other fruit. It wasn’t until later that I considered that “Evil Banana” was probably more sexually evocative but it was too late by then.

    So if you’re ever playing a video game and shoot (or get shot by) “Evil Banana”, know that, if it weren’t for the Scunthorpe Problem, it could have been “Evil Grape,” but either way, it wasn’t intended as a sexual reference at all.





  • This isn’t about own vs rent, it’s about house vs apartment.

    Open flames are dangerous and smoke is annoying to neighbors. Condos and coops typically won’t let you grill. Some of them have designated grilling areas and those often have restrictions on how you can use them. Even many apartments with fireproof balconies won’t allow them because not all the neighbors want a balcony full of smoke.

    Every house I’ve ever rented, allowed grilling. Even the cheapest one, a row-house in Baltimore, let you grill in the back “yard”.


  • It’s functionally close enough to a conglomerate though.

    I’m not exactly sure what ‘“free market” cultist’ is or if you’re accusing me of being one. Modern economists don’t normally align themselves with simplistic ideologies like “free market”, “communist” or “capitalist”. They’re aware of the historical and modern usage of these terms but they tend to focus on areas that are far to specific for those terms to even make sense. You won’t find a lot of economists that argue for complete Laissez-faire capitalism any more than you’ll find real economists arguing in favor of classical Marxism.

    There is general agreement that conglomeration benefits management more than shareholders. There’s general agreement that they are more likely to arise under some economic conditions and that those conditions usually aren’t associated with socially optimal economic policies.