AI developments have picked up the pace. That does not mean that everything else stopped to get out of the way. The world continues. Do I have the power? Emmett Shear speaking truth: Wielding power is of course potentially dangerous and it should be done with due care, but there is no virtue in refusing the call.
Not surprised that Israel is maximally confrontational, slightly surprised that it's on the high context side, more surprised that these are anticorrelated. Feels like Israel is maximally confrontational in part because people feel very comfortable with each other, and that same level of comfort allows for low legibility.
I think context here is joining the somewhat distinct concepts of legibility and directness. Legibility is higher in more international places with less shared backgrounds (like US/NL) but directness isn't necessarily (which is why Singapore is low, despite it being pretty legible in general
I'm not sure I would draw the same conclusion you do in regards to the gambling / cigarettes. Widespread cigarette availability clearly made essentially everything much, much, much worse both as to internalized and externalized harms, with benefits exceeding costs maybe at most for the tiny population of schizophrenics for whom nicotine actually was for a time a reasonably effective and available treatment. For everyone else there was stink and lung cancer. The winning move in a world where you *didn't* have cigarette smoking already widely extant ex ante would never be "legalize it and restrict advertising," it would be "keep it super illegal, execute those trying to turn it into a business and salt the earth in and around tobacco farms."
With respect to gambling, we were in that "essentially Not a Thing ex ante" stage and instead opted to throw that overwhelming advantage away because reasons.
I found Persona 3 mind-numbingly boring in the dungeons and the social links to be fairly lacking. I haven't played Reload, but I've heard that the new social links are so much higher-quality that it highlights how weak the old ones are. Just offering a dissenting opinion, In my opinion Persona 5 is the best one.
Regarding the EEOC commissioner’s tweet, note that the opinion of a single commissioner is not the opinion of the EEOC, nor is it necessarily a good indication of what will win in court, either before the EEOC or before federal courts. It’s a single tweet.
> As their scale also scales the rewards to attacks and as their responses get worse, the attacks become more frequent. That leads to more false positives, and a skepticism that any given case could be one of them. In practice, claims like Zuckerberg’s that only the biggest companies like Meta can invest the resources to do good content moderation are clearly false, because scale reliably makes content moderation worse.
Scale makes content moderation better because if you take very small group chats as an example, this is where the extreme outliers of illegal behavior happens. Take Hamas's signal chats or CSAM sharing chats. There's no content moderation at all at small scale because nobody is liable at small scale and most small scale crimes are not tracked. Also, you didn't cite any sources for your claim so it's hard to evaluate whether Zuckerberg actually said that.
Do you keep a lot of links, and then write the post in one go from them? Or do you write a bit about each link the same time you save it and then assemble and edit before publishing?
> Apple being forced to dismantle many of the safeguards of the iPhone ecosystem under orders of the EU via the DMA. Everyone is trying to force them to make all sorts of changes. They are no longer allowed to verify that apps work before letting them into the store. They are being asked if they are going to do ‘forced scrolling’ to allow competitors to be seen, order of apps shown to be shuffled, while copycat apps attempt to fool users. Apple is being forced to do things via implied threats of what happens if they don’t ‘comply’ on their own.
These notes on the DMA were fairly strange to me, having done a little bit of work on the implementation of it. I feel like the misunderstanding here is that they are definitely allowed to verify apps but only in their own platform.
And if I understand correctly, the comment about forced scrolling, which I agree is a fairly heavy-handed approach, would only apply to selecting the default apps (Store, browser, maybe more?) that would be installed on the device when the device is first started. Obviously this would not apply to the Apple App store itself.
>I have never heard an actual human argue otherwise
I have, it's not even a fringe position in Europe. FWIW I disagree with much of the european data protection legislation and cookie banners are stupid. That said, if I had to choose between the EU data protection rules and the US ones I would probably choose the EU ones. It's nice to have the ability to force people to delete things about you - I like the fact that privacy exists and think that technological progress is a net negative for privacy. Some of the things that are allowed in the US - such as taking pictures of random cars/people on roads all the time or storing databases scraped from social media should not exist as consumer products. I just wish the same rules applied in the EU to governments as they do to companies.
If I had to steelman cookie banners I'd say something like that they are good because they force companies to think
I'm going to tell you 2 dirty dark secrets about balatro
1. You can unlock everything by pressing a button on your profile
2. You can exit to the main menu after playing your hand but before it gets sent to the discard This lets you see the score you will get from the hand before you play it.
South Dakota lottery theory: Isn't that a matter of a significant portion of their economy is well paid oil/gas workers who live miserable lives? They have lots of money, but are stuck in a place where they can't use it effectively (everything is very cheap, and there's not much to do or buy). Winning the lottery would allow them to leave, as they are only there for money, and they have extra money to spend on something like that.
In regards to the EEOC - that claim is correct, discrimination where race/sex/etc is a[n even partially] determining factor is illegal. There's a lot to unpack here in practice.
1. Even when discrimination takes place based on a protected category, it takes effort and evidence to take a case to court. Courts will never accept "it's obvious" or just the wording of a DEI program (unless very stupidly written) and the fact that a candidate wasn't hired. This is true even for minorities making claims, let alone non-minorities (more on this below).
2. Companies will come up with plausible (and likely true) reasons that any particular person was not hired for a job. You need to overcome this with enough evidence that their take is untrue and the protected category is the real reason. Legal teams at big companies are going to be really really good at this.
3. Most cases of even clear discrimination require a lot of effort and may not result in a judgement in the employee's favor for a variety of reasons, including technicalities. Spending years of your life chasing a payout is low EV and may make it more difficult to get a future job. Most people just move on, if they have other alternatives.
4. Discrimination laws were written and expanded first to protect black men, and later all women. The fact that they were written neutrally and do protect all races and both sexes doesn't change the societal understanding that white men suing is not the intended case. Everyone in the process will spend less energy helping out in such a case, unless the evidence is overwhelming.
5. DEI programs can be written in two general directions (and can easily obfuscate which direction they are written when it comes to a lawsuit). A) Nudging decisions in a direction that help find more minority applicants and are ambiguous about what you do with them, or B) Quotas or specified minority preference. Very few companies are dumb enough to admit to B up front, even if it were true. Most DEI programs emphasize A, and let their management teams implement B quietly if they want. A, depending on specifics, may be either perfectly legal (advertising in mediums intended to find black applicants as well as what you normally do) to questionably legal (guaranteeing at least one interview slot to a minority - you can see this more clearly if the same law would allow a company to guarantee a slot to a white candidate, which most people would say would be or should be illegal).
5. People tend to think that a company doing something must be legal, often in a way that they can't understand. This is especially true for very large corporations. Even this blog, which is more knowledgeable about most topics than the vast majority of people, is currently working from a point of uncertainty.
A lot of early DEI programs were written in such a way that it would be impossible or very difficult to prove discrimination, even if discrimination were true. On the surface, DEI doesn't say "hire black applicants" but instead "be inclusive of all people" which is clearly legal and doesn't implicate antidiscrimination law. Big corporations with high paid lawyers were making many of these programs, and although they were pushing boundaries, the companies would be mostly safe. Where they might not be safe, they might conclude that the positive benefits and PR outweighed the cost. They might lose an individual case if a hiring manager went too far, but the same was true and more likely in reverse. It's much more likely the same hiring manager would get in trouble for not hiring a qualified black candidate, from a senior management perspective. DEI programs at this level probably save money on discrimination claims, on net.
How I see the situation panning out - Once big players are doing it and not getting hit with problems, less careful players tag along. They miss details that are important, or hide their intentions less. They admit what is only implied. At some point a particular test case comes along that hits all the right beats and the company DEI program loses big time. This will scare companies enough that they reconsider their programs - some get cut instantly, others modified. True believers will try to stick it out, while fair-weather followers will move on to something less dangerous. It's totally true that DEI programs are ticking time bombs and could be used as evidence against a company in a Title VII race discrimination case. Well-written ones can probably be fine, if the companies want to keep them. If a lot of cases get through courts and find against companies with poorly written DEI programs, then it will be easier and easier to use the existence of a DEI program as general evidence of a discrimination claim and may destroy DEI programs.
History prior to the industrial revolution argues against that. It was highly atypical, really only known of in western places like Athens or Switzerland, and even the classical political philosophers regarded it as unstable in their experience.
Someone did make a game resembling those fake ads for mobile games:
I would put P5 well above P3 because of the difference in endings. I will not say more for fear of spoiling it for anyone who picks P3 up on your recommendation.
>Apple being forced to dismantle many of the safeguards of the iPhone ecosystem under orders of the EU via the DMA. Everyone is trying to force them to make all sorts of changes. They are no longer allowed to verify that apps work before letting them into the store. They are being asked if they are going to do ‘forced scrolling’ to allow competitors to be seen, order of apps shown to be shuffled, while copycat apps attempt to fool users. Apple is being forced to do things via implied threats of what happens if they don’t ‘comply’ on their own.
Sorry I posted this comment on the wrong thread somehow, and in the process of trying to move it here deleted the original, hence the comment twice.
Anyways I think this is clearly good, actually. Apple is abusing its (cryptographic) monopoly on force for its platform. All the usual libertarian arguments for why more freedom is good apply. The point that one can choose to leave Apple is irrelevant - just like the fact that one can choose to leave one's country doesn't give the country a free pass to infringe on freedom.
Broken link on "Russia can deanonymize telegram accounts"
Not surprised that Israel is maximally confrontational, slightly surprised that it's on the high context side, more surprised that these are anticorrelated. Feels like Israel is maximally confrontational in part because people feel very comfortable with each other, and that same level of comfort allows for low legibility.
I think context here is joining the somewhat distinct concepts of legibility and directness. Legibility is higher in more international places with less shared backgrounds (like US/NL) but directness isn't necessarily (which is why Singapore is low, despite it being pretty legible in general
I'm not sure I would draw the same conclusion you do in regards to the gambling / cigarettes. Widespread cigarette availability clearly made essentially everything much, much, much worse both as to internalized and externalized harms, with benefits exceeding costs maybe at most for the tiny population of schizophrenics for whom nicotine actually was for a time a reasonably effective and available treatment. For everyone else there was stink and lung cancer. The winning move in a world where you *didn't* have cigarette smoking already widely extant ex ante would never be "legalize it and restrict advertising," it would be "keep it super illegal, execute those trying to turn it into a business and salt the earth in and around tobacco farms."
With respect to gambling, we were in that "essentially Not a Thing ex ante" stage and instead opted to throw that overwhelming advantage away because reasons.
I found Persona 3 mind-numbingly boring in the dungeons and the social links to be fairly lacking. I haven't played Reload, but I've heard that the new social links are so much higher-quality that it highlights how weak the old ones are. Just offering a dissenting opinion, In my opinion Persona 5 is the best one.
Regarding the EEOC commissioner’s tweet, note that the opinion of a single commissioner is not the opinion of the EEOC, nor is it necessarily a good indication of what will win in court, either before the EEOC or before federal courts. It’s a single tweet.
Regarding in-play parlays - check out the golf story here, which did pay out if placed at the appropriate time: https://newsletter.goldenpants.com/p/bet-wish-made
> As their scale also scales the rewards to attacks and as their responses get worse, the attacks become more frequent. That leads to more false positives, and a skepticism that any given case could be one of them. In practice, claims like Zuckerberg’s that only the biggest companies like Meta can invest the resources to do good content moderation are clearly false, because scale reliably makes content moderation worse.
Scale makes content moderation better because if you take very small group chats as an example, this is where the extreme outliers of illegal behavior happens. Take Hamas's signal chats or CSAM sharing chats. There's no content moderation at all at small scale because nobody is liable at small scale and most small scale crimes are not tracked. Also, you didn't cite any sources for your claim so it's hard to evaluate whether Zuckerberg actually said that.
Do you keep a lot of links, and then write the post in one go from them? Or do you write a bit about each link the same time you save it and then assemble and edit before publishing?
> Apple being forced to dismantle many of the safeguards of the iPhone ecosystem under orders of the EU via the DMA. Everyone is trying to force them to make all sorts of changes. They are no longer allowed to verify that apps work before letting them into the store. They are being asked if they are going to do ‘forced scrolling’ to allow competitors to be seen, order of apps shown to be shuffled, while copycat apps attempt to fool users. Apple is being forced to do things via implied threats of what happens if they don’t ‘comply’ on their own.
These notes on the DMA were fairly strange to me, having done a little bit of work on the implementation of it. I feel like the misunderstanding here is that they are definitely allowed to verify apps but only in their own platform.
And if I understand correctly, the comment about forced scrolling, which I agree is a fairly heavy-handed approach, would only apply to selecting the default apps (Store, browser, maybe more?) that would be installed on the device when the device is first started. Obviously this would not apply to the Apple App store itself.
>I have never heard an actual human argue otherwise
I have, it's not even a fringe position in Europe. FWIW I disagree with much of the european data protection legislation and cookie banners are stupid. That said, if I had to choose between the EU data protection rules and the US ones I would probably choose the EU ones. It's nice to have the ability to force people to delete things about you - I like the fact that privacy exists and think that technological progress is a net negative for privacy. Some of the things that are allowed in the US - such as taking pictures of random cars/people on roads all the time or storing databases scraped from social media should not exist as consumer products. I just wish the same rules applied in the EU to governments as they do to companies.
If I had to steelman cookie banners I'd say something like that they are good because they force companies to think
I'm going to tell you 2 dirty dark secrets about balatro
1. You can unlock everything by pressing a button on your profile
2. You can exit to the main menu after playing your hand but before it gets sent to the discard This lets you see the score you will get from the hand before you play it.
South Dakota lottery theory: Isn't that a matter of a significant portion of their economy is well paid oil/gas workers who live miserable lives? They have lots of money, but are stuck in a place where they can't use it effectively (everything is very cheap, and there's not much to do or buy). Winning the lottery would allow them to leave, as they are only there for money, and they have extra money to spend on something like that.
In regards to the EEOC - that claim is correct, discrimination where race/sex/etc is a[n even partially] determining factor is illegal. There's a lot to unpack here in practice.
1. Even when discrimination takes place based on a protected category, it takes effort and evidence to take a case to court. Courts will never accept "it's obvious" or just the wording of a DEI program (unless very stupidly written) and the fact that a candidate wasn't hired. This is true even for minorities making claims, let alone non-minorities (more on this below).
2. Companies will come up with plausible (and likely true) reasons that any particular person was not hired for a job. You need to overcome this with enough evidence that their take is untrue and the protected category is the real reason. Legal teams at big companies are going to be really really good at this.
3. Most cases of even clear discrimination require a lot of effort and may not result in a judgement in the employee's favor for a variety of reasons, including technicalities. Spending years of your life chasing a payout is low EV and may make it more difficult to get a future job. Most people just move on, if they have other alternatives.
4. Discrimination laws were written and expanded first to protect black men, and later all women. The fact that they were written neutrally and do protect all races and both sexes doesn't change the societal understanding that white men suing is not the intended case. Everyone in the process will spend less energy helping out in such a case, unless the evidence is overwhelming.
5. DEI programs can be written in two general directions (and can easily obfuscate which direction they are written when it comes to a lawsuit). A) Nudging decisions in a direction that help find more minority applicants and are ambiguous about what you do with them, or B) Quotas or specified minority preference. Very few companies are dumb enough to admit to B up front, even if it were true. Most DEI programs emphasize A, and let their management teams implement B quietly if they want. A, depending on specifics, may be either perfectly legal (advertising in mediums intended to find black applicants as well as what you normally do) to questionably legal (guaranteeing at least one interview slot to a minority - you can see this more clearly if the same law would allow a company to guarantee a slot to a white candidate, which most people would say would be or should be illegal).
5. People tend to think that a company doing something must be legal, often in a way that they can't understand. This is especially true for very large corporations. Even this blog, which is more knowledgeable about most topics than the vast majority of people, is currently working from a point of uncertainty.
A lot of early DEI programs were written in such a way that it would be impossible or very difficult to prove discrimination, even if discrimination were true. On the surface, DEI doesn't say "hire black applicants" but instead "be inclusive of all people" which is clearly legal and doesn't implicate antidiscrimination law. Big corporations with high paid lawyers were making many of these programs, and although they were pushing boundaries, the companies would be mostly safe. Where they might not be safe, they might conclude that the positive benefits and PR outweighed the cost. They might lose an individual case if a hiring manager went too far, but the same was true and more likely in reverse. It's much more likely the same hiring manager would get in trouble for not hiring a qualified black candidate, from a senior management perspective. DEI programs at this level probably save money on discrimination claims, on net.
How I see the situation panning out - Once big players are doing it and not getting hit with problems, less careful players tag along. They miss details that are important, or hide their intentions less. They admit what is only implied. At some point a particular test case comes along that hits all the right beats and the company DEI program loses big time. This will scare companies enough that they reconsider their programs - some get cut instantly, others modified. True believers will try to stick it out, while fair-weather followers will move on to something less dangerous. It's totally true that DEI programs are ticking time bombs and could be used as evidence against a company in a Title VII race discrimination case. Well-written ones can probably be fine, if the companies want to keep them. If a lot of cases get through courts and find against companies with poorly written DEI programs, then it will be easier and easier to use the existence of a DEI program as general evidence of a discrimination claim and may destroy DEI programs.
> I consider this highly effective altruism.
So you disagree with Bryan Caplan's argument that news is worse than silence.
https://www.betonit.ai/p/how-good-and-honest-is-the-media
> Democracy is an inevitable aspiration
History prior to the industrial revolution argues against that. It was highly atypical, really only known of in western places like Athens or Switzerland, and even the classical political philosophers regarded it as unstable in their experience.
Someone did make a game resembling those fake ads for mobile games:
https://www.avclub.com/new-collection-lets-you-play-fake-facebook-ad-games-1850683932
I would put P5 well above P3 because of the difference in endings. I will not say more for fear of spoiling it for anyone who picks P3 up on your recommendation.
>Apple being forced to dismantle many of the safeguards of the iPhone ecosystem under orders of the EU via the DMA. Everyone is trying to force them to make all sorts of changes. They are no longer allowed to verify that apps work before letting them into the store. They are being asked if they are going to do ‘forced scrolling’ to allow competitors to be seen, order of apps shown to be shuffled, while copycat apps attempt to fool users. Apple is being forced to do things via implied threats of what happens if they don’t ‘comply’ on their own.
Sorry I posted this comment on the wrong thread somehow, and in the process of trying to move it here deleted the original, hence the comment twice.
Anyways I think this is clearly good, actually. Apple is abusing its (cryptographic) monopoly on force for its platform. All the usual libertarian arguments for why more freedom is good apply. The point that one can choose to leave Apple is irrelevant - just like the fact that one can choose to leave one's country doesn't give the country a free pass to infringe on freedom.