deborah @ gnomicutterance @awful.systems

You’re thinking of my brother, Zathras.

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1 yr. ago

One of the things that happened during the Great Low Interest Rates Decades is that it seems like anyone who fit a certain profile (millennial white guy with american citizenship, a computer, and at least a modicum of what passes for charm among the nerd elite) could convince both VCs and the US government that there was tons of money in disrupting the delivery of some legacy sector of society. Sometimes they were correct (eg. buying stuff without going to a retail establishment), sometimes it seems like they should have been correct and yet somehow have failed to make money anyway (Uber), mostly they were comical (Juicero). But the ones that are the most excruciating are all the places where you really, really can't frictionlessly deliver at scale, because large-scale human intervention is necessary: education, health care, customer service.

The promise of the American tech boom is massive online delivery without people. Employers hate their employees, and government is always willing to be told that doing without employees is industrial progress.

Isn’t this normal with jobs? That there is a month of tryout period?

I have never found this to be normal with jobs, no. But in the US, most employment is at-will, so you can be fired without cause at any time.

(I've encountered probation windows where benefits don't kick in for 3-6 months, and that's hideous in a country without single payer health care, but never a tryout period.)

If it makes you feel better, it costs an average of $18,865 for an uninsured American to give birth to a healthy baby, and a tenth of the country is uninsured.

I mean, it doesn't make me feel better, because I live here. But you don't, so YMMV. Or I suppose YKMV, in metric, because the US still uses imperial measurements for everything, because we're too good for real numbers. USA! USA!

It's so beautiful.

How about you remain competitive by fixing your shit? I've met a lead data scientist with access to hundreds of thousands of sensitive customer records who is allowed to keep their password in a text file on their desktop, and you're worried that customers are best served by using AI to improve security through some mechanism that you haven't even come up with yet? You sound like an asshole and I'm going to kick you in the jaw until, to the relief of everyone, a doctor will have to wire it shut, giving us ten seconds of blessed silence where we can solve actual problems.

also here for "well the opposite of left wing views is racism"

thanks for saying it aloud my friend

Here's the "what did you like least" survey entries the organizers say they classified as "edgy people":

"all the racism stuff" = "edgy people". Yup.

They do buy mosquito nets, although it's unclear that all malaria net charities do so in culturally-appropriate ways where they'll be used as intended. I believe they've stopped with the large grants to deworming charities, which is good, because the effectiveness of deworming programs is extremely controversial. Depending on where you direct your money at that parent website, it might go to EA Funds, who send a lot of money at global development but has also paid a ton of salaries for people researching LLMs and AI. Or it could go to EffectiveVentures, which might have spent your money buying a castle. For reasons.

If you support mosquito nets, you can give to the mosquito net charity directly, cut out the overhead. Doctors Without Borders / Médecins Sans Frontières does good global development work if you don't mind giving to a huge organization that by necessity has higher overhead. Avoid the Red Cross and you should be fine.

The more I look, the more I'm sure it's just bad GenAI art. I mean, look at the random Big Ben with newspaper art extending into the ether behind it, the off-center knight-in-orb, the decomposed microscope thing, the physically impossible structural shadow on the disproportionate globe that simultaneously shows from Panama east to Borneo but somehow lacks India...

Is the header image on that page an intentional joke at the expense of GenAI, or did someone seriously make that and add it to the page? Do they autogenerate their pics?

But betting? There’s being an insider and then there’s profiting, and aren’t most journalists prohibited from trading or betting on their covered areas?

is it considered acceptable journalistic ethics at Vox for a journalist who reports on EAs and prediction markets to make prediction market bets on how a journalistic outlet will follow-up a story on prediction markets and EAs? My eyebrows have just levitated so high they've collided with a starlink swarm.

Oh, but you’ve provided us with statistics! Please, though, for the peer reviewers: we need the baseline measurement. How many women do you date who don’t break up with you? And are they all in Canada?

The woman-explainer has arrived in the thread.

This is part of a whole thing where the journalist keeps presenting their framing without question. Is it “allow their neighbours to live in the second house rent free, in exchange for childcare” or is it “they have unpaid live-in nannies in a staff apartment”? Do they “give everything they can spare to charity” or are they landlords who own property they don’t live in? Is she wearing a corset and chemise from etsy because it’s practical, or because these weirdos have put on staged cosplay performances for every journalist who’s ever interviewed them, and you’re no exception?