Ahh France. I was in Paris trying to order a sandwich. I asked: "Parlez-vous anglais?" Them: "Non!" (rudely and went back to what they were doing) I then tried explain in my very butchered french I learned in elementary school: "Jambon du pain et...." And they immediately turned back with a big smile on their face: "What would you like?"

It seems the fact I knew some paltry french and I was trying was enough. A strange but nice experience.

Only it's been shown time and time again that piracy does not destroy the profit motive.

As a personal anecdote, when I used to pirate things, I still bought things in the same category, ie: I would pirate movies and I still bought movies. I would pirate games and I still bought games.

I don't think it affected how much of each thing I purchased by much, but I don't really know.

I think whether you can say it's empirically incorrect depends on if the researchers measured the right thing. Measuring: “Do you think your job is useful?” was over-simplifying, and could miss the phenomenon that Graeber was actually talking about.

Asking chatgpt, in UK in late 80s, it would be 20-25% across all computers, depending on definition of "computer". A 1/4 of households is still high. It may have been higher in your neck of the woods.

I bought this book a year ago but have not read it. It's one of those books that requires effort from the reader, which these days seems in low supply for me. :) I'll have to give it another try.

Recently I commented that: Artificial intelligence produces artificial results.

I liked the double-artificial but I wasn't happy with the meaning. Perhaps Simulacra is more accurate? I will see :)

Results are results, though. By "artificial results" do you mean those that merely appear to be results, or do you mean results achieved via nonhuman means?

If I write the exact same code as the AI, our results will be indistinguishable.

Late reply so not sure if you'll see this.

But I mean: they appear to be results. They look real, but are not. There are subtle errors hidden that the casual observer will not, or even cannot detect.

Obviously there are exceptions to this. Many exceptions. AI right now can probably write most if not all algorithms on par or better than I could. It can put together working prototypes for many ideas I've had and not had time to implement.

But the danger is in assuming that because it can do A, it can do B, because a human that does A can do B.

You might enjoy Speech Central, it decently renders any text or pdfs,epub into an audiobook that you can still read along with or speed read or whatever.

Kinda takes the effort out so you just gotta veg while reading/listening and following along

I used to report scams to facebook, but they deny my claim and say the ads are fine. Seems like fake AI videos of celebrities/politicians asking you to invest in alt-coins is A-OK in facebooks... book.

It's infuriating.

To their credit I did get this message from them today:

    We reviewed the ad you reported and found that it goes against 
    our Advertising Standards. We let the advertiser know that we 
    removed the ad, but not who reported it.

    Thank you for letting us know. Reports like yours help us to 
    improve the integrity and relevance of advertising on Facebook.

But mine was an absolutely open and shut case.

Ads on the FB & goog network (this includes phys.org btw) are NOT paper tigers, in the sense that

  they are a reliable anti-signal

(to short, not to buy, to look at rising competitors, to look into reasons why a product might be failing, to sus out the lack of foresight in their investors, to extract other high cost channels/signals that they are still using ntless

As an example of the last one, I just learnt about an ISO standard.. )

YMMV depending on how much the network knows [it doesn't know] about you ofc ;)

Well you do know YOShInOn and I frequently find an article on phys.org that we think is interesting but will substitute a link to the paper that is referenced if it is open access. I respect their selection of topics and articles and, looking at alternatives, frequently their article on the topic is really the best. But damn their ads are awful. It's a conversation I have with them and sometimes with their advertisers ("did you know the adversarial design of that site made me click on your ad by mistake and wasted your spend?")

Maybe I should draw a firmer line for some of my values but in terms of my other values ScienceX is the best popular science publisher today by far. (compare Universe Today or Scientific American.)

My wife ran into something similar to this. Microsoft changed the bucket that email attachments went into for quota purposes. She had a lot of emails with pictures attached, so was immediately above the new quota, and she stopped receiving emails.

This definitely puts a fire under one, as she had to quickly under pressure (as each day was missed emails), figure out which emails to keep/backup.

We signed her up for a new gmail immediately.

The experience was stressful. Very poor.

I don't imagine that thinking, intelligent readers would pigeon-hole a very large group of people based off of one hn comment. Somewhat ironic.

Actually, this 'very large group of people'--by definition [that they believe Evolution 'theory'] have pigeon-holed themselves as a certain type, hence their existence as a 'group'. I think the irony is that you didn't realize this.

I don't see many on one "side" with prideful ignorance. There are a few loud ones, sure. But I love to see the many ideas I've not had the time to implement come to fruition. I don't get the same satisfaction. It doesn't seem as much "mine" as if I did it all by hand. However once the tool is built, I use it to build more things. More tools.

Not having to know the lower levels means you can free your mind for things at higher levels of abstraction. It's not a void in our brain you don't fill with other things.

But I don't know. I'm new to this.

When I heard roblox was doing this, I asked both my kids if they uploaded their face data. They both had already. I didn't think to warn them.

Really annoyed a company can ask this of children without parental consent.

This raises an intriguing idea. The solutions will require children to upload their personal information, including photos. Like roblox.

Children are clearly not capable of understanding the ramifications of this decision. So, prompting children to upload such info should itself be illegal.

Nevermind that most adults do not understand the ramifications either, but we assume they are capable of consenting to anything by fiat, so let's ignore that...