It never stops. I’m increasingly building distinct roundups for various topics, in particular I’m splitting medical and health news out. Let’s get to the rest of it. Bad News A simple model of why everything sucks: It is all optimized almost entirely for the marginal user, who the post calls Marl. Marl hates when there are extra buttons on the screen or any bit of complexity is offered, even when he is under zero obligation to use it or care, let alone being asked to think, so everything gets dumbed down.
"Meanwhile, here in New York, we cannot even do full genetic screening and embryo selection for traits that are actually good, because ‘ethicists’ say it would be ‘eugenics.’"
I hesitate to comment on this topic because this is one of those toxic ones on the internet where the vast majority of people can't be reasonable with people they disagree wtih, but I'll see how it goes:
>Dog lovers should support such a ban most of all. Allowing actively dangerous dogs ruins it for everyone. It is not reasonable to expect me to differentiate whether your dog in particular is harmless, or set a policy that relies on that distinction. And if someone has even one bad experience with any dog, they’re likely going to be poorly disposed on all dogs for a very long time.
I'm extremely skeptical of this entire discussion. The main problem is that I think we have an _extremely_ poor understanding of the problem such that we have absolutely no idea whether or not a ban would be at all effective.
A) "breeds", especially in the bully/pit part of the dog spectrum are _extremely_ nebulous and fluid such that reporting on breeds is, in my opinion, completely untrustworthy and means that such a ban would impact a really huge number of dogs. So, when we say things like "there were 5 dog attacks this year in the UK, we have _no idea_ what the denominator of that number is. Did 5 dogs out of a few hundred attack someone? That seems really bad! Was it 5 dogs out of 10,000? Hmm, that seems less bad.
Furthermore, while I am sympathetic to the argument that some dog breeds have been bred to be more violent (breed characteristics are absolutely a real thing), I am also very skeptical of how strong this really is. Individual dog variability, even within a well defined breed, is very high, and no amount of cute clips of pointer puppies pointing gets around this fact, and in breeds that are less well defined and have lots of mixing (like most pit/bully breeds), this is even more true.
So to summarize, i think that breed bans are poorly defined, the problem is poorly understood, and the statistics are garbage.
I want to make it clear that I am not trying to make the argument that "all pit/bully dogs are actually complete sweethearts" like many defenders make online. The fact that the statistics are garbage precludes this argument just as much as it precludes the argument that they are all vicious killing machines.
If people are serious about this problem and actually want to improve it, then they need to be pushing for more information and a better understanding of what's actually going on.
Re lead: part of the issue is that not every child who is exposed to lead develops lead poisoning. Maybe that should be studied, as a way of finding out how to make people more resistant.
Re dogs: the owners of dangerous dogs are crazy. Nothing short of banning them will stop them.
Re competence: there's also a skill to showing competence and making sure you only use it when it's useful to you. So many people waste energy trying to be perfect at everything. I can do just about anything as a stay at home mother, it's wonderful. Except prescribe medications.
Dog breeding is a poor metaphor for gain-of-function research. In my experience, there are no dangerous breeds, just dangerous, incompetent and evil dog owners.
> "Tom Francis speculates that they could still fix this, if and only if they not only fully reverse the fee but they also put into the new EULA that you are allowed to keep current payment terms forever if you keep using the current version of Unity, in a way they can’t back out of later. That does sound both necessary and sufficient here."
Question: Would that actually help at all?
Way I figure it, you stand back and squint your eyes a bit, and basically what happened was in 2019 Unity was like "here is a contract which irrevocably prohibits us from doing a retroactive price increase on previously released titles", followed by the CEO stating this was the case, and then in 2023 they were like "ah but we had special incantations in the contract that made that irrevocability clause null and void, neener neener, here is your retroactive price increase."
If I'm not a trained lawyer, why would I trust in the future that *any* ToS were actually binding on Unity? Because there's language saying so explicitly? Because their CEO claims publicly that the contract is binding? We tried that one already.
"Ah yes, this contract written up by the Fey Folk seems like it's fine, and they can't lie, so I'm just gonna sign it." No! That's a terrible idea!
I’d love another round up on parent / kid issues if you are thinking in that area! One topic I’m curious if others have experienced is that off-leash dogs in parks.
I’m not sure how many dog owners are aware of this but there is a good reason parents are scared of dogs: I’d say at least 1/20 dogs is terribly trained and 1/50 is completely batshit insane. So at a park I can’t tell from a distance which your dog is until they decide to run away from you and chase my kid like a fleeing bunny rabbit. Some people even yell “my dog is friendly” as the dog does this, which seems so weird. Like they are surprised their dog loves to chase small people and that parents take offense to this.
As to your post, the idea of people intentionally breeding crazier/meaner dogs seems completely wild to me. Dogs are already quite bizarre if you see enough of them!
I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about why metrics, broadly, are so bad and yet so popular in upper management culture, don’t have a really good single crystallizable answer but can confirm Marl is also why your pharmacy and healthcare service is bad and getting worse.
A couple interesting additional points on the Unity stuff
-People noticed you could torpedo companies you don’t like by repeatedly installing and uninstalling their games, and indeed people have -already- written scripts to do this automatically at scale.
-There’s also a lot of speculation that this is one of those things where you announce something really really absurdly bad so you can walk part of it back to what you really wanted to do and farm gratitude for not doing the actually evil thing. They do indeed seem to be trying to do something like this but this definitely, clearly going to have backfired spectacularly for obvious nobody-will-ever-seriously-use-this-engine-again reasons.
-A lot of academic programs for aspiring game designers use Unity and are having to switch away from it now. Godot seems to be the common bet now for entry-level open source game engines.
-One of the things they tried to walk back was claiming that they would only charge big publishers or eg Microsoft in the case of stuff like Game Pass, which will both double extra not fly legally but also *encourages publishers to blacklist anyone who uses Unity*.
-Because publisher deals often don’t give revenue to the developer until a certain level of sales it’s possible this could bankrupt individual studios before they’re even paid in revenue for a game they just released.
-The CEO that presided over this decision is an ex-EA guy, to basically nobody’s surprise.
-Epic just surprise laid off 16% of their workforce instead of taking advantage of the situation.
>China is not the low wage destination anymore. Taiwan is certainly not. America's issues go far beyond high wages.
The obvious trend for the US is to continue increasing its commercial relationship with mexico, which is already very strong (Mexico's imports to the US half surpassed those from China). Also, Mexico is producing massive amounts of engineers each year, more than the US or Canada.
Yesterday I was on a site that let you suggest an edit by highlighting some text in a post, and I thought it was surprisingly good design I hadn't seen anywhere else, I'd love for that to be more common. I'm sure that people would abuse it, but if you had even moderate blocking tools, it seems like it could be excellent.
Anyways, the paragraph on "Tobi Lutke meeting strategy" is duplicated.
(Also, I really enjoy and appreciate your roundups in all their varieties, I just wish there was an easy way to note typos/etc without clogging up the comment section or taking away from how much I actually value the post overall)
I genuinely had no idea all these people thinking about Rome weren't thinking about those issues in the second last link, that's all I think about when I think of Rome! (other than trying to think of emperor's names, I should maybe ANKI that to save the wasted brain cycles). The emperor who was asked to come back after retiring and responded "if only you could see these cabbages I'm growing!", Claudius surviving by acting stupid when everyone else in his family killed each other, that the Romans make a desert and call it peace... who can remember Russell Crowe among all that.
Re union strikes, whether unions are willing to work with the companies vs going full scorched earth is one of the things that comes up a lot in lky's "third world to first" as one of the things that separated the Asian economies that did well from the ones that failed.
(Other factors roughly in order of how much impact they seem to have: communism, ethnic strife, corruption, overregulation, welfare. The book is generally a recommended read, at least the parts on domestic politics, the geopolitics parts drag a bit. He's a good writer and very candid, including on the controversial stuff ).
I love the concept of lightgassing and would like to see more analysis of the social dynamics here. Some of it is probably completely unthinking duckspeak (friend says thing, therefore I say thing even stronger!). Some of it is consciously knowing that, when someone wants to frame herself as a victim, there is a social cost to breaking that frame.
Re: SMS for 2FA, this is problematic in general but I believe Google Fi is resistant to porting social engineering attacks since changes to your Fi require access to your Google Account. So if you secure your Google Account with two factor (not SMS lol) you may do significantly better than the average for dealing with web sites that refuse to support anything other than SMS 2FA.
"Meanwhile, here in New York, we cannot even do full genetic screening and embryo selection for traits that are actually good, because ‘ethicists’ say it would be ‘eugenics.’"
I've never heard of this ban. Is it true?
I think the craigslist thing is a reference to a tweet from one of those statue trad accounts using the same phrasing to describe a cathedral, which was widely mocked. See variants: https://twitter.com/search?q=%22We%20can%E2%80%99t%2C%20we%20don%E2%80%99t%20know%20how%20to%20do%20it%22&src=typed_query&f=top
I hesitate to comment on this topic because this is one of those toxic ones on the internet where the vast majority of people can't be reasonable with people they disagree wtih, but I'll see how it goes:
>Dog lovers should support such a ban most of all. Allowing actively dangerous dogs ruins it for everyone. It is not reasonable to expect me to differentiate whether your dog in particular is harmless, or set a policy that relies on that distinction. And if someone has even one bad experience with any dog, they’re likely going to be poorly disposed on all dogs for a very long time.
I'm extremely skeptical of this entire discussion. The main problem is that I think we have an _extremely_ poor understanding of the problem such that we have absolutely no idea whether or not a ban would be at all effective.
A) "breeds", especially in the bully/pit part of the dog spectrum are _extremely_ nebulous and fluid such that reporting on breeds is, in my opinion, completely untrustworthy and means that such a ban would impact a really huge number of dogs. So, when we say things like "there were 5 dog attacks this year in the UK, we have _no idea_ what the denominator of that number is. Did 5 dogs out of a few hundred attack someone? That seems really bad! Was it 5 dogs out of 10,000? Hmm, that seems less bad.
Furthermore, while I am sympathetic to the argument that some dog breeds have been bred to be more violent (breed characteristics are absolutely a real thing), I am also very skeptical of how strong this really is. Individual dog variability, even within a well defined breed, is very high, and no amount of cute clips of pointer puppies pointing gets around this fact, and in breeds that are less well defined and have lots of mixing (like most pit/bully breeds), this is even more true.
So to summarize, i think that breed bans are poorly defined, the problem is poorly understood, and the statistics are garbage.
I want to make it clear that I am not trying to make the argument that "all pit/bully dogs are actually complete sweethearts" like many defenders make online. The fact that the statistics are garbage precludes this argument just as much as it precludes the argument that they are all vicious killing machines.
If people are serious about this problem and actually want to improve it, then they need to be pushing for more information and a better understanding of what's actually going on.
So much to comment on
Re lead: part of the issue is that not every child who is exposed to lead develops lead poisoning. Maybe that should be studied, as a way of finding out how to make people more resistant.
Re dogs: the owners of dangerous dogs are crazy. Nothing short of banning them will stop them.
Re competence: there's also a skill to showing competence and making sure you only use it when it's useful to you. So many people waste energy trying to be perfect at everything. I can do just about anything as a stay at home mother, it's wonderful. Except prescribe medications.
Dog breeding is a poor metaphor for gain-of-function research. In my experience, there are no dangerous breeds, just dangerous, incompetent and evil dog owners.
> "Tom Francis speculates that they could still fix this, if and only if they not only fully reverse the fee but they also put into the new EULA that you are allowed to keep current payment terms forever if you keep using the current version of Unity, in a way they can’t back out of later. That does sound both necessary and sufficient here."
Question: Would that actually help at all?
Way I figure it, you stand back and squint your eyes a bit, and basically what happened was in 2019 Unity was like "here is a contract which irrevocably prohibits us from doing a retroactive price increase on previously released titles", followed by the CEO stating this was the case, and then in 2023 they were like "ah but we had special incantations in the contract that made that irrevocability clause null and void, neener neener, here is your retroactive price increase."
If I'm not a trained lawyer, why would I trust in the future that *any* ToS were actually binding on Unity? Because there's language saying so explicitly? Because their CEO claims publicly that the contract is binding? We tried that one already.
"Ah yes, this contract written up by the Fey Folk seems like it's fine, and they can't lie, so I'm just gonna sign it." No! That's a terrible idea!
I’d love another round up on parent / kid issues if you are thinking in that area! One topic I’m curious if others have experienced is that off-leash dogs in parks.
I’m not sure how many dog owners are aware of this but there is a good reason parents are scared of dogs: I’d say at least 1/20 dogs is terribly trained and 1/50 is completely batshit insane. So at a park I can’t tell from a distance which your dog is until they decide to run away from you and chase my kid like a fleeing bunny rabbit. Some people even yell “my dog is friendly” as the dog does this, which seems so weird. Like they are surprised their dog loves to chase small people and that parents take offense to this.
As to your post, the idea of people intentionally breeding crazier/meaner dogs seems completely wild to me. Dogs are already quite bizarre if you see enough of them!
I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about why metrics, broadly, are so bad and yet so popular in upper management culture, don’t have a really good single crystallizable answer but can confirm Marl is also why your pharmacy and healthcare service is bad and getting worse.
A couple interesting additional points on the Unity stuff
-People noticed you could torpedo companies you don’t like by repeatedly installing and uninstalling their games, and indeed people have -already- written scripts to do this automatically at scale.
-There’s also a lot of speculation that this is one of those things where you announce something really really absurdly bad so you can walk part of it back to what you really wanted to do and farm gratitude for not doing the actually evil thing. They do indeed seem to be trying to do something like this but this definitely, clearly going to have backfired spectacularly for obvious nobody-will-ever-seriously-use-this-engine-again reasons.
-A lot of academic programs for aspiring game designers use Unity and are having to switch away from it now. Godot seems to be the common bet now for entry-level open source game engines.
-One of the things they tried to walk back was claiming that they would only charge big publishers or eg Microsoft in the case of stuff like Game Pass, which will both double extra not fly legally but also *encourages publishers to blacklist anyone who uses Unity*.
-Because publisher deals often don’t give revenue to the developer until a certain level of sales it’s possible this could bankrupt individual studios before they’re even paid in revenue for a game they just released.
-The CEO that presided over this decision is an ex-EA guy, to basically nobody’s surprise.
-Epic just surprise laid off 16% of their workforce instead of taking advantage of the situation.
FYI it was actually the governor of New Mexico, not Arizona.
>China is not the low wage destination anymore. Taiwan is certainly not. America's issues go far beyond high wages.
The obvious trend for the US is to continue increasing its commercial relationship with mexico, which is already very strong (Mexico's imports to the US half surpassed those from China). Also, Mexico is producing massive amounts of engineers each year, more than the US or Canada.
More on North America's manufacturing: https://youtu.be/rIpPwfMLE-Q?si=N6T62WK4g89zDf4L
Reason to be doubtful of the Chinese mango massacre:
https://twitter.com/friendly_gecko/status/1703386667741302890
> This is the same account that tweeted that semen extraction factory fetish video that tricked Jordan Peterson, so I'm skeptical.
Yesterday I was on a site that let you suggest an edit by highlighting some text in a post, and I thought it was surprisingly good design I hadn't seen anywhere else, I'd love for that to be more common. I'm sure that people would abuse it, but if you had even moderate blocking tools, it seems like it could be excellent.
Anyways, the paragraph on "Tobi Lutke meeting strategy" is duplicated.
(Also, I really enjoy and appreciate your roundups in all their varieties, I just wish there was an easy way to note typos/etc without clogging up the comment section or taking away from how much I actually value the post overall)
DALY = Disability Adjusted Life Year not daily.
I genuinely had no idea all these people thinking about Rome weren't thinking about those issues in the second last link, that's all I think about when I think of Rome! (other than trying to think of emperor's names, I should maybe ANKI that to save the wasted brain cycles). The emperor who was asked to come back after retiring and responded "if only you could see these cabbages I'm growing!", Claudius surviving by acting stupid when everyone else in his family killed each other, that the Romans make a desert and call it peace... who can remember Russell Crowe among all that.
Re union strikes, whether unions are willing to work with the companies vs going full scorched earth is one of the things that comes up a lot in lky's "third world to first" as one of the things that separated the Asian economies that did well from the ones that failed.
(Other factors roughly in order of how much impact they seem to have: communism, ethnic strife, corruption, overregulation, welfare. The book is generally a recommended read, at least the parts on domestic politics, the geopolitics parts drag a bit. He's a good writer and very candid, including on the controversial stuff ).
I love the concept of lightgassing and would like to see more analysis of the social dynamics here. Some of it is probably completely unthinking duckspeak (friend says thing, therefore I say thing even stronger!). Some of it is consciously knowing that, when someone wants to frame herself as a victim, there is a social cost to breaking that frame.
Also Diana Fleischman: https://www.piratewires.com/p/women-online-spaces-relationship-advice
Re: SMS for 2FA, this is problematic in general but I believe Google Fi is resistant to porting social engineering attacks since changes to your Fi require access to your Google Account. So if you secure your Google Account with two factor (not SMS lol) you may do significantly better than the average for dealing with web sites that refuse to support anything other than SMS 2FA.