…are you serious?

There would be so much data in understanding people’s light usage. For example, you could figure out how late or early people get up, number of people living in a house, how crowded the house is, how many lights are used per room, etc etc. it would be a gold mine of information.

Let’s say you’re a home automaton designer. You want to design devices to be used in the home, but in order to design such devices, you need enough of a stockpile of user data. This lightbulb data would be incredible valuable.

You can probably even analyse the data and determine things like whether someone is watching tv late at night.

From a nefarious view, how valuable would this data be to robbers and thieves?

These things are interesting for two reasons (to me).

The first is that it seems utterly unsurprising that these inconsistencies exist. These are language models. People seem to fall easily into the trap in believing them to have any kind of “programming” on logic.

The second is just how unscientific NN or ML is. This is why it’s hard to study ML as a science. The original paper referenced doesn’t really explain the issue or explain how to fix it because there’s not much you can do to explain ML(see their second paragraph in the discussion). It’s not like the derivation of a formula where you point to one component of the formula as say “this is where you go wrong”.

There was a prophetic podcast episode from the series Plain English a while back that I constantly think about.

In that episode the author describes how the internet is going through a revolution.

Basically 20 years ago, the internet was all about gaining numbers. Companies could operate at a loss if they got people signed up. Facebook, Google, YouTube, Uber, Deliveroo, etc. they were all about getting you in their mailing list or consumer list and who cares what happens then.

Now there’s an issue because that model is not profitable. In order to continue, all the internet is moving towards subscription.

In a sense, I don’t think of that as intrinsically bad. Patreon is a good example. The internet is now filled up with so much shit that people are willing to pay to filter it. So with Patreon, you pay a fee to support an artist to produce the content you want. That itself isn’t a bad idea.

Now that being said, a lot of “bad things” do emerge. The fact that you can no longer buy software like Adobe and it’s all subscription based. That’s shit. But that also inspired software alternatives like Affinity Designer.

Hmmm. If abuse happens, is the right idea to say that “I don’t need this community”?

I’m not sure how that HackerNews comment helps in the slightest. If my university has an obscure basket weaving community and people are getting abused in that community, should I just say “Eh we don’t actually need a basket weaving community”.

It’s also amusing to me that a commenter on a relatively obscure and niche website is complaining that that don’t need (or care about abuse that transpired on) a niche community from another website. And then this comment is echoed in yet another niche community.

I think people really missed my point, and thought I was somehow arguing in favour of poor working conditions.

My point was that the Lemmy response that “well why doesn’t the boss do this?” is not the right negotiation tactic.

The right negotiation tactic is, for example, to argue that it’s in the benefit of the company and society to improve working conditions. For example, you argue that by allowing remote working, you are encouraging not only a happier and more productive environment, but you are widening access and better able to recruit the top people.

There are lots of ways to argue for better conditions. The reaction of “well the boss doesn’t do it so I won’t either” is not a great tactic. If the boss does put in crazy hours, where does that leave your negotiation stance?

As much as I love these arguments, they don’t solve anything and can make things a lot worse.

A lot of companies have bosses who are putting in significant hours. They sometimes do this because they have the income and familial situation to support it. Sometimes the bosses have no families, or have nannies, or are not the main caretaker. Sometimes they just have “no life”.

Japan is a good example. Incredibly long working hours and incredibly work-centric culture at all levels.

The way to argue better working conditions isn’t to point fingers at other people and ask “well why aren’t they also having to suffer like me?”.

That’s like asking why, if you’re a programmer why you don’t just work for another company on your day off.

NBA players are professionals. They’re paid to play in the NBA season. They get plenty of tailored Xs and Os in their season and post season. They probably all need permission from their teams or stipulations on their contract that they can compete in the off season. If they get hurt, they (and their team) stand to lose millions of dollars.

For players with families and significant ones as well, they’re already away from their families for extended periods.

I’m not trying to be patronising but we do have to think of them as professionals. Not high school ballers who are grateful for any chance to touch the ball. The situation is slightly different for players who are playing for their country or for Olympic pride, etc.

I find the whole thing a strange debate. The USA Track and Field National Trials are known as some of the most competitive in the world and you might argue the competition is as competitive as an international competition. But it’s not. Nobody who wins Nationals would call themselves a World Champion.

The NBA Championship might contain the best players in the world but it is not an international competition. It is open only to American teams and to people who have work visas in America (minus one team in Canada). It’s the height of American ignorance to fall it a World Championship.

As far as I know this isn’t done in hockey. NHL players don’t call themselves World Champions.

I don’t really understand why this is controversial. It doesn’t invalidate the dominance of American basketball. It only serves to highlight how absolutely ignorant Americans are and their belief that the world centres around USA USA USA.

Let me get this right. You made up a league only open to American teams and Americans or foreigners with work visas in America. And then you call yourselves the World Champions? Does that sound weird?

I didn’t communicate myself so well. I’m imagining a situation where the knot needs to be under pressure to bind the two pieces together. I’m not experienced with bowlines but it doesn’t allow me to do tighten by cinching (does that make sense?)

I kind of both enjoy and detest that site. A lot of the time I just want to know the best general knot for a general situation—not a million knots I’ll never use where I have to click and read about each one.

Like for instance, if I need a loop at the end of a cord, a bowline is a good knot.

What about if I need a knot that allows me to take a rope around a pole? Like a hitch.

It would be nice to have a single website just giving the top 5 knots you need to cover 90% of the situations.

Check out his podcast with Podcast P. I’m not sure how the book compares but you gain a lot of respect for his career.

A lot of language is subtle.

On this case, the use of the word “obviously” is a backhanded compliment. It’s like seeing someone come last in a race and say “well they obviously tried”. I

I don’t really think if this (the subtlety of language) as a bad thing. If you want to improve as a writer you have to begin dissecting words and meaning and underlying context. It’s part of emotional and social intelligence.

When taking to people, it’s not as easy as “everything is the opposite”. If that were true, then it would be easy since everything is the opposite. Learning the subtlety of language is a skill—you might argue in every way as important as learning to code or learning maths or learning how to walk.

This subtlety of language governs how you treat others, how you write letters, how you give talks, how you parent, etc.

Honestly some of it is a skill, right? Since having kids and being around more children you quickly learn how to feign enthusiasm and excitement.

Also as you grow up you just learn how to pick your battles. Sometimes the gaps between people are so wide.

Science and logic and rational thinking is, in some sense, a religion. Either you drank the kool aid or you didn’t. It’s hard to convert people to it after they hit the work stage.

The first question to ask yourself is: “why do I need to say anything at all?”. If you don’t like the book or think it’s garbage, you don’t need to say anything. It’s not your job to educate your boss on what’s good or bad. So keep your yap shut.

The second issue is how to feign interest or how to steer the conversation. I would treat something like this the same way I treat a conversation about religion, race, or gender, that might disagree with amongst colleagues or people I don’t know.

As others have said, you can turn questions around and ask them. “It’s not my type of book but did you enjoy it? What part did you like?”

The key to it is to leave your ego behind. If a child comes up to me and says they liked some trite novel, I wouldn’t disparage them. I’d feign interest and ask them to talk about it.

The fact that you talk about “redline the shit out of it” makes me think it’s your ego that’s the problem. You think it’s your job to correct your boss and tell them why they don’t understand good writing. That’s an ego thing.

I don’t know anything about small US towns but these stories always remind me of stories from Jack Reacher involving small town corruption. Pretty incredible.

Unfortunately here in the UK there has been systematic defunding of things like libraries.

This wasn’t what I read but this looks excellent.

https://archive.org/details/jonah-edwards-presentation

Another super interesting story is about Marion Stokes, who recorded around 71000 cassettes worth of television media from 1975 to 2000s. She houses them in 9 apartments. I need to watch the documentary about her. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marion_Stokes

I remember I started reading about about this when I wondered what kind of media is “safe” for storage. It sounds like a simple question but it’s not. Digital media, unlike print media, is so easy to lose.

I love how so many comments and replies ascribe some form of ‘guilt’ to this, as if HP employees would feel shame. This doesn’t really mean anything to a company that size.

One of the great things about moving to the UK is that, despite all its problems, consumer protection Europe is so much better than in the US.

Sorry, I think you misunderstand that I’m talking about a large scale problem rather than a personal problem. Of course people can individually download videos to preserve.

Imagine losing YouTube’s videos next week. You would have effectively lost nearly two decades worth of media chronicling human and technological development (more if you take into account that YouTube has repositories of older media).

Someone described it like the Library Alexandria. In terms of density of information, I think the comparison is apt.

A good comparison that might be too old for some readers. Back in the 80s and 90s, the early internet was populated via usenet discussions. Google eventually bought this data and merged it into Google Groups. However Google Groups was disbanded. This meant that some archives can no longer be accessed because to do so requires some active component no longer in service. We have effectively lost gigantic chunks of early 90s internet history. A lot of this history was quite important in many facets of life.

There is already something like this via the Wayback Machine (who indeed do copies of video media but more typically VHS and other things) and things like the Russian Library genesis, which is kept in torrent format.

The problem really is that storage for video media is insane compared to storage of document or even photo data.

If people here haven’t read into it, it’s incredibly interesting to look into the way the Internet Archive works. In particular you have to begin to concern yourselves with how long it takes for HDs, SSDs, and other media to degrade in time.