Just this guy, you know?
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Oh please. The anti-TikTok hysteria has been going on much longer than the Israeli invasion of Gaza, and the narrative has largely been about national security concerns, particularly as they relate to election misinformation.
Agree or not with the anti-China rhetoric about TikTok, but at least argue about the facts and not inane conspiracy theories.
My favourite was this bit:
Poilievre said many Canadians already have access to drug coverage through workplace plans that may offer better benefits than those the NDP-backed Liberal plan eventually could offer.
A 2022 Conference Board of Canada report found that about 24.6 million Canadians are already enrolled in private drug plans.
Disappointed in the CBC here. What they should’ve said is that over 15 million people are not enrolled in a private drug plan, as most people won’t do the math and 24.6M people seems like a big number.
Moreover, many of the people most in need of drugs–the elderly, disabled, and those dealing with chronic health conditions–are far less likely to be employed and have access to coverage.
Didn’t actually read the whole piece did ya? Just stopped at the first paragraph and then reacted?
It’s fine, at this point I’m sure you’ll go find something else to pick apart to protect your ego, meanwhile allowing the point to escape you entirely.
I just hope if/when you get scammed, the people around you are less of a dick about it.
It can happen to anyone:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/05/cyber-dunning-kruger/
Cory Doctorow didn’t just fall off the back of a turnip truck. If it can happen to him, odds are it can happen to you.
when taxes have increased dramatically since then too
No they haven’t:
In 1961, families paid 33.5% of their income on taxes, but by 1969 they were paying 39% and in 1974 they paid 43.4% of their income. So, if you compare the 2009 effective family tax rate to 1961, you will find a 25% increase, but you will only report a 7% increase since 1969 and an actual decrease since 1974.
(Note this analysis is circa 2010, but things haven’t changed substantially since then aside from the post COVID inflation spike that’s still subsiding).
But enjoy the alternate reality brought to you by your “friends” at the Fraser Institute™️.
Lol as if the Canadian Construction Association wants infill. Their members are responsible for the municipal lobbying that leads to sprawl in the first place, and I all but guarantee you their infrastructure cost estimates are assuming traditional suburban residential growth
So sure, this person may have a point in that supportive infrastructure is not being adequately accounted for. But I don’t believe for a second that they’re interested in what’s actually best for Canadians.
The most obvious problem with their comment is the dismissive, holier-than-thou tone.
They could have made their point by suggesting non-disposable alternatives: finding a local viewing party with shared equipment, preferring reusable glasses, or safe alternative ways of viewing like pinhole cameras or projection techniques.
But no. It’s much easier to sneer on an anonymous forum while stoking that sense of superiority instead of actually offering something constructive.
Oh fuck off with the mindless cynicism.
The amount of plastic used in those glasses, which is only in the lenses as the rest is card paper, is a fraction of what’s in typical disposable consumer goods. I guarantee you’ve already thrown out more plastic in the last week than is in a whole ten pack of those glasses.
Meanwhile, events like this are a great way to remind people of the natural world we live in and how miniscule our experience of it is relative to the enormity of even just our solar system.
All excellent points, and you’re right, I really meant “simple”, not “easy”.
My comment was really intended to highlight the narrowing of the solution space regarding housing. When houses became products and investments, we collectively decided the government had no place in building them aside from indirect nudges: zoning, various forms of incentives, etc.
Maybe it’s time we accept that the free market has simply failed and we need to look beyond neoliberal orthodoxy for solutions.
That’s not an easy shift! Not at all. But IMO it’s a necessary one.
As an aside, it’s not like this is new. “It’s a Wonderful Life” highlighted this exact problem. Their only mistake is they assumed a benevolent capitalist (George) would come along and fix the problem. But that ain’t how the real world works.
This isn’t an easy solution. It took us 40 years to get into this mess, and it’s going to take a good while to get out of it.
No, there’s a very easy solution: the government should build housing the same way they build roads and bridges.
Housing is societal infrastructure. Leaving that entirely to the private sector never made any damn sense.
The QAnon Anonymous podcast, which critically explores conspiracy movements in general, is worth checking out if you want a deeper dive into Didulo and the broader conspiracy movements she’s connected with. They have a couple of episodes dedicated to her particularly, but also cover things like the sovereign citizen conspiracy theory that she trafficks in.
Take it to an electronics recycling center. Seriously.
If you already have a homelab, you plan to replace it, you don’t want to repair it, and you don’t have an obvious use case for another machine (it’s just another computer; you either have the need for another computer or you don’t), then holding onto it is just hoarding.
So laziness. Got it.
(They could easily move to an ipc mechanism that doesn’t require binding a port on a network interface but that’d require time and effort and why bother when the goal is to ship something fast and cheap while the AI hype is strong)
Sounds like a fun way to directly mess with their model though.
There are more beginners then there are experts, so in the absence of research a beginner UI is a safer bet.
If you’re in the business of creating high quality UX, and you’re building a UI without even the most basic research–understanding your target user–you’ve already failed.
And yes, if you definite “beginner” to be someone with expert training and experience, then yes an expert UI would be better for that “beginner”. What a strange way to define “beginner” though.
If I’m building a product that’s targeting software developers, a “beginner” has a very different definition than if I’m targeting grade school children, and the UX considerations will be vastly different.
This is, like, first principles of product development stuff, here.
Unless you’ve actually done the user research, you have no idea if a “beginner friendly UX is a safer bet” . It’s just a guess. Sometimes it’s a good guess. Sometimes it’s not. The correct answer is always “it depends”.
Hell, whether or not a form full of fields is or isn’t “beginner” friendly is even debatable given the world “beginner” is context-specific. Without knowing who that user is, their background, their training, and the work context, you have no way of knowing for sure. You just have a bunch of assumptions you’re making.
As for the rest, human data entry that cannot be automated is incredibly common, regardless of your personal feelings about it. If you’ve walked into a government office, healthcare setting, legal setting, etc, and had someone ask you a bunch of questions, you might be surprised to hear that the odds are very good that human was punching your answers into a computer.
That third screenshot, assuming good keyboard navigation, would likely be a godsend for anyone actually using it every day for regular data entry (well, okay, not without fixes–e.g. the SSN and telephone number split apart as separate text boxes is terrible).
This same mindset is what led Tesla to replace all their driver friendly indicators and controls with a giant shiny touchscreen that is an unmitigated disaster for actual usability.
Hah I… think we’re on the same side?
The original comment was justifying unregulated and unmitigated research into AI on the premise that it’s so dangerous that we can’t allow adversaries to have the tech unless we have it too.
My claim is AI is not so existentially risky that holding back its development in our part of the world will somehow put us at risk if an adversarial nation charges ahead.
So no, it’s not harmless, but it’s also not “shit this is basically like nukes” harmful either. It’s just the usual, shitty SV kind of harmful: it will eliminate jobs, increase wealth inequality, destroy the livelihoods of artists, and make the internet a generally worse place to be. And it’s more important for us to mitigate those harms, now, than to worry about some future nation state threat that I don’t believe actually exists.
(It’ll also have lots of positive impact as well, but that’s not what we’re talking about here)
You don’t need AI for any of that. Determined state actors have been fabricating information and propagandizing the public, mechanical Turk style, for a long long time now. When you can recruit thousands of people as cheap labour to make shit up online, you don’t need an LLM.
So no, I don’t believe AI represents a new or unique risk at the hands of state actors, and therefore no, I’m not so worried about these technologies landing in the hands of adversaries that I think we should abandon our values or beliefs Just In Case. We’ve had enough of that already, thank you very much.
And that’s ignoring the fact that an adversarial state actor having access to advanced LLMs isn’t somehow negated or offset by us having them, too. There’s no MAD for generative AI.
Really? I’m supposed to believe AI is somehow more existentially risky than, say, chemical or biological weapons, or human cloning and genetic engineering (all of which are banned or heavily regulated in developed nations)? Please.
I understand the AI hype artists have done a masterful job convincing everyone that their tech is so insanely powerful (and thus incredibly valuable to prospective investors) that it’ll wipe out humanity, but let’s try to be realistic.
But you know, let’s take your premise as a given. Even despite that risk, I refuse to let an unknowable hypothetical be used to hold our better natures hostage. The examples are countless of governments and corporations using vague threats as a way to get us to accept bad deals at the barrel of a virtual gun. Sorry, I will not play along.
You know what?
I’m fine with that hypothetical risk.
“The bad guys will do it anyway so we need to do it, too” is the worst kind of fatalism. That kind of logic can be used to justify any number of heinous acts, and I refuse to live in a world where the worst of us are allowed to drag down the rest of us.
For the record, I deleted the comment you replied to because I realized I was wrong in that both Tesla and the quoted manual, above, urge the removal of tree sap and so forth immediately, something I hadn’t caught in my first reading.
Having recognized that I realized I hadn’t considered the more fundamental point that I called out in my other comment (that the fact that the Cybertruck finish requires the same treatment as a regular car is in fact an indictment of the quality of the Cybertruck’s exterior, not a justification for it), hence the new reply.
Yes, but you see the difference is my car is expected to rust because it’s not made of supposedly stainless steel.
So I fully expect to have to protect my car’s finish. That’s why it’s painted. The Cybertruck doesn’t even have a clear coat. One would naturally thus expect that, unlike my regular non-stainless steel car, the Cybertruck wouldn’t in fact rust.
Please try to keep your criticisms of Musk fair and unbiased. Otherwise, you risk weakening your point.
Thank you for your unsolicited advice. I’m sure next time I’ll keep it in mind while having meaningless arguments with anonymous internet strangers.
It’s all about tone. The original comment was incredibly combative and hyperbolic (“I utterly loathe Mass Effect. I consider it one of the worst pieces of science-fiction ever created.”) so much so that it would easily be mistaken for flamebait given the thread was likely to attract fans of the series.
It certainly didn’t strike me as the start of an open-minded conversation.
But in hindsight I should’ve just downvoted and moved on rather than commenting as I did, so that’s on me.