3
points
zugi
Joined 925 karma
- I suspect the data from 50 or 150 years ago would be similarly distorted. "Old person dies of old person disease" does not make the news.
Also the idea that homicide rates were much higher a century ago is colored by media and entertainment. The graph on the second page of https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/instance/1435670/pdf/p... (PDF) shows homicide rates in the 1970s exceeding that of the prohibition era, which itself was a huge spike over pre-prohibition rates.
- I disconnected my Roomba from the network right after programming its schedule. It still works great, following the same schedule for 7 years.
I recently bought a cheap Chinese roomba clone. It comes with a remote control so you don't need to connect it to the internet. I do have to press a button to start it but it works great.
If you care about your privacy, choose products appropriately and/or take 5 minutes to protect yourself. Most people don't seem to care, which is their choice.
- It's almost impossible to navigate parking garages if two such trucks park opposite each other. Or if one parks on an end that people need to navigate around.
People spend insane amounts of money buying these monstrosities too. It seems as a society we've normalized spending a year's salary on a vehicle, or rather getting a 7-year loan and making crazy monthly payments. I don't understand it. My then normal-sized, now smallish, 13-year old car, that I paid off 11 years ago, still runs great and I can park it easily.
- > Who cares, insurance probably covers some or all of it
Exactly, this is why vision "insurance" is basically a scam, supported only by US tax laws that enable employers to offer vision "insurance" tax-free, while people buying their own eyeglasses have to pay with after-tax dollars.
Except where insanely inflated, glasses cost at most tens of dollars. Certainly not the kind of thing one needs insurance to cover.
- > Microsoft killed the email account of an ICC prosecutor, at the request of Trump
These are legally-binding sanctions, issued under the same authority as those levied against Putin and Russia for the invasion of Ukraine:
* ICC: https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/02/impo...
* Russia: https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/08/addr...
The ICC sanctions are politically unpopular in Europe, whereas the Russia sanctions are popular in Europe. But the email account was not closed simply "at the request of Trump." Companies face serious consequences if they do business with sanctioned persons or entities - that's what makes sanctions work.
- My company avoids most of the "cloud" hype. We've found it more cost effective to self-host our internal services, plus it gives us more control over our configurations and data. We don't need 24/7 guaranteed up-time; we have occasional hiccups and resolve them in minutes or hours.
But communications within and outside of the company is so vital, that email is the one thing we outsource to the cloud.
- Absolutely agree, constant surveillance is something we have too much of already.
My thought when posting was, if the schools already have surveillance cameras that human security guards are watching, adding an AI to alert them to items of interest alone wasn't bad. But maybe you've changed my mind. The AI pays more invasive attention to every stream. Whereas a guard may be watching 16 feeds at once and barely be paying attention, and no one may ever even view the feed unless a crime occurs and they go looking for evidence.
Regardless this setup was way worse! The article said the AI:
> ... scans existing surveillance footage and alerts police in real time when it detects what it believes to be a weapon.
Wow, the system was designed with no human in the loop - it automatically summons armed police!
- Exactly. In a saner world, we could use fallible AI to call attention to possible concerns that a human could then analyze and make an appropriate judgment call on.
But alas, we don't live in that world. We live in a world where there will be firings, civil, and even criminal liability for those who make wrong judgments. If the AI says "possible gun", the human running things who alerts a SWAT team faces all upside and no downside.
Hmm, maybe this generation's version of "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" will become "nobody ever got fired for doing what the AI told them to do." Maybe humanity is doomed after all.
- > Could this just be a pressure tactic on SpaceX?
Yes! I'm disappointed I had to scroll down so far to see this. The CNN headline isn't even accurate. The actual NASA statement is:
> "I’m going to open up the contract. I’m going to let other space companies compete with SpaceX."
SpaceX is behind schedule, but still years ahead of its competitors. No one is even in the same ballpark on the main metric that ultimately matters: dollars per kilogram to orbit. The main effect of this NASA statement, or of NASA sending a few dollars to SpaceX's competitors, is to give SpaceX a kick in the pants.
- There seem to be massive differences between the two. Per the article, the Swiss system:
> People can use it to identify themselves to authorities and businesses... Use of the e-ID is voluntary
Whereas in the UK, Starmer proudly proclaimed that the "right to work" in the UK would require this ditigal ID, which is a rather creative use of the word "right".
- This is the quote that bugged me the most too, as it's an obvious attempt at pure emotional manipulation. Working from home as a federal employee was always a limited time privilege, not some sort of fundamental right.
And it sounds like she actually did find a place to drop off her child: "Her explaining to her manager the way her child cried and begged Mommy to stay home broke me." Yeah, most employed adults have to leave their children somewhere when they go to work.
- The Senate still requires 60 votes to close debate and pass legislation, with rare weird exceptions like reconciliation. The 1990s had more bipartisanship, so Clinton skillfully got enough Republicans to support some of his moves.
Whereas these days any Democrat supporting any Republican action is likely to get primaried at the next election, and vice versa.
- Indeed the article is less an article and more a random collection of gripes and quotes. The third paragraph betrays that they're not really doing any analysis...
> The government would likely end 2025 with about 300,000 fewer employees... The total figure amounted to one in eight workers... In recent weeks, hundreds of the employees DOGE pushed out have reportedly been offered reinstatement.
"Hundreds" coming back is portrayed as if it offsets the 300,000 gone. They continue:
> The true scope of DOGE’s attack on the federal government remains unknown. While there is no reason to think it achieved meaningful cost savings or operational efficiencies...
and then go on to complain about an immigrant database, which has nothing to do with the reduction in the federal workforce. Simple quick math would suggest $60 billion or so a year in savings from the workforce reduction. Of course the larger savings is in the whole programs that were eliminated, not just the salaries and benefits savings.
DOGE saving $2 trillion / year is indeed impossible. That kind of savings would require a national conversation about what federal roles we no longer need. But DOGE likely achieved hundreds of billions a year in savings. USAID alone had a $50 billion budget that was mostly eliminated, though a few billion just moved over to State.
- Exactly. We all love a fun epistemological debate about truth and objectivity. But the whole field of journalism, first in academia and then in practice, used such philosophical questions to then intentionally abandoned the goals of objectivity. Today searching for objective journalism yields only articles about how it's a myth and there never was such a thing.
Sure, we all understand that biases exist and perfect objectivity can never be achieved. But today schools and newsrooms teach journalism as advocacy for causes and effecting change, and no longer even aim for objectivity.
Are we really surprised or disappointed that people finally figured out that they're being preached to, not informed, by most modern "journalism?"
- "Monopoly" used to mean a single company controlling a market. Now folks are now hollering "monopoly" about five different companies competing and collectively capturing 90% of a market?
Plus the market is artificially defined to be small. It excluded companies that do their own delivery (pizza places and others), home food delivery that isn't from restaurants, and the old option of just driving yourself to a restaurant.
There's thriving competition in the industry of getting people food, and lots of options that didn't even exist a decade ago. Crazy that it's being spun as the exact opposite.
- Did the rise of fire, the wheel, the printing press, manufacturing, and microprocessors also give rise to futures without economic rights? I can download a dozen LLMs today and run them on my own machine. AI may well do the opposite, and democratize information and intelligence in currently unimaginable ways. It's far too early to say.
- Asian countries and cultures generally have stronger and more rigid notions of family than western nations. Newly married couples in Japan are officially members of one family or the other - not both - and being a member of the family includes obligations to care for the graves of the family ancestors. When a family has no sons, the eldest daughter may need to marry a non-eldest son willing to join the daughter's family and take on their last name. Otherwise, the family will die out, and there will be no one to care for the ancestors' graves. Per the article, it seems in about 5% of marriages, the man takes the woman's name.
- Misleading voters is what democracy is all about!
But more seriously, society has dealt with misinformation and disinformation for millenia and collectively decided that freedom of speech and the press were key factors in keeping democracy, and were a more vital concern than the threat of misinformation. To me, government deciding what is or isn't misinformation is a step away from democracy and towards tyranny. But I do understand that reasonable people can disagree about where to draw the fine lines of freedom of speech.
- > The public might well question why so much time is spent on this, while burglaries routinely go unsolved.
I'd offer yet another explanation: laziness.
For burglaries, you have to get out of your chair, go out into the community, interview witnesses, search for evidence, and maybe wander into dangerous areas to find and arrest potentially violent suspects.
For internet thought crimes, you can sit in the comfort of your own chair, getting paid to surf the internet, and declare enough posts "offensive" to look productive. When you do show up to arrest someone, they're highly unlikely to be violent. It's a lot easier and safer than investigating burglaries.
- That seems about right. Hacker News was once a more reasonable alternative to reddit, but these days sometimes it's reasonable, and sometimes it displays the same hive-mind reactions, depending on the thread.
The app is absolutely gamified, but I've never paid them a dollar, waste about 1.5 minutes a day ignoring ads, and in exchange for nothing I get moderately useful foreign language learning. The gamification keeps me at it, where past study approaches eventually petered out.
The use of AI in this and other tools is inevitable. The CEO certainly oversold it in his initial announcement, but the weird reaction of people stopping using the app because Due Lingo is going "AI first" seems inconsistent. Are people going to stop using Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, and Nvidia because they're all-in on AI too?
Even if they don't love him, a vast majority would prefer him over the Ayatollahs.
EDIT: Found the poll, last taken in 2024: https://gamaan.org/2025/08/20/analytical-report-on-iranians-... . The Shah is preferred by just 31%, but no one else even gets double-digits.