What does this have to do with bookmarks?

That's fair enough though. If you buy a stolen car you don't get your money back when the police take it back. Sandisk are hardly going to guarantee something they didn't make - that makes absolutely no sense.

Whatsapp is shit though. If you use it on more than one device you can see how often messages have incorrect sent/delivered/read status, appear out of order or simply don't show up at all.

"But then, I have said the same thing about Amazon and others, that people should simply stop buying from them, but since that is so simple to do, it won't take place."

People don't not do things because they're simple - they don't do them because they don't have a problem with them. I like Amazon - the prices are good, they don't fuck me around if there's a problem and the whole process from ordering to delivery causes no problems.

Likewise, if you don't like reddit or think they should be tolerating people scraping data or accessing APIs for free forever, don't go to reddit. But I couldn't give a fuck about all that - I just want to follow a few subreddits from time to time. This protest was obviously going to fail because reddit would have lost money if they did, and no normal person is going to be remotely interested in APIs or third party apps etc.

How many more times am I going to read a "universe older than previously believed" story?

Generally by around junior year of undergrad as a physics major, you realize "holy shit, it's just progressively improving models all the way down - and none of these models get to a 'real' understanding of what's going on underneath the hood".

That's the reality. We don't know what quantum measurement or wave function collapse 'is', where the boundary between classical behavior and quantum behavior sits, why general relativity works well but we can't seem to get it to play nice with quantum mechanics - and the proposals to do so don't really yield a satisfying sense of understanding either.

Anyway, I find it very surprising that these would be revelations to any physicist. The thousandth time you write the "approximately equal to" operator as an undergrad or drop all the higher order terms from a diff-eq it is self-evident what level of understanding you can get from physics.

Yes, because you are a legitimate contractor, with contracting/pricing power who negotiates with clients. Gig workers are really not independent contractors, they are cheap employees.

I recently went to a restaurant (outdoor dining of course) where they told me they have renamed their "Black Manhattan" cocktail to a "Dark Manhattan" out of sensitivity to recent times, so this is only one step removed from reality.

Kind of like mask-wearing. The government was running around telling us it didn't work, while desperately trying to make sure hospital workers had enough masks. Meanwhile, Asian countries where mask wearing is considered good public hygiene when ill or during an outbreak all adopted it en masse and mitigated their COVID-19 epidemics much faster. This has all deservedly cost the US government, our anti-science President, the CDC and other agencies vast amounts of credibility.

As another poster implied, the President is so bad at his job of reassuring the nation and communicating complex information in a convincing but straightforward and believable manner that he would be much better off shutting the fuck up and saying "I am going to let the experts address this". What some of these Trump supporters call "Trump derangement syndrome" is just rational, well educated people reacting to an imbecile in the office who couldn't reason or explain his way out of a paper bag. Trump has some good advisors around, and some of them are surely feeding him good information from time to time, so he isn't always wrong (though he frequently is), but he ALWAYS sounds like a moron when he opens up his mouth.

It seems likely to me that HCQ is somewhat effective against SARS-CoV-2. I had what I believe was COVID-19 in early March (no tests available, fuck you California and your horrible lack of preparedness, so until I can get an antibody test I won't know for sure) and I megadosed on zinc lozenges and used benedryl and Albuterol to manage reactive airway inflammation and shortness of breath. I came through it fine, but it was scary and unlike any virus I have had in the past. I would gladly have added HCQ into the mix, but my doctor seemed to think I was doing fine and it wasn't so widely discussed then. I am a scientist, but recognize that in many scientific fields we have to make timely educated decisions based on less than perfect evidence.

China has a massive, truly massive, local government apparatus as part of the CCP control mechanisms. The United States has nothing at all comparable. How could cities and towns deliver groceries to all of their citizens? Our military and reserves could help in a few locales with a massive-scale call-up, but could not do this nationwide. The US economy and government is organized completely differently.

What we should have done is put better restrictions and public/private cooperation mechanisms in place immediately to reduce panic-buying and hoarding, ensure sufficient supply to go around, regulate safe delivery service operation, etc.

As you can see from other threads here, Amazon gets a list of 501c3s from the IRS and filters out bad actors from a list managed by the SPLC. If the government views it as a legitimate not-for-profit and the SPLC doesn't classify it as a hate group or other socially undesireable org, then Amazon is trying not to be in the business of curating which nonprofits are good or bad, given that there are apparently around a million on this list.

Maybe there is another category of organizations that support unscientific treatment of medical conditions? I just think that would result in blacklisting tons of charities that people want to support because a lot of people believe in woo nonsense. If Narconon is breaking the law and hurting people (beyond just fleecing then out of money for woo BS), then the government should be going after them, revoking their 501c3 status, pursuing the individuals involved, etc.

Amazon processes donations through smile.amazon.com to random PTA groups, to major charities and everything in between. I don't know much about Narconon, it may be shitty and Scientology associated, but if people opt in to supporting it on smile.amazon.com that is their business.

I personally use smile to support a charity in New York that develops schools and employment opportunities in a developing country in Europe. If that's not your cup of tea, that's cool, Amazon making that available on smile isn't an endorsement of the particular charity.

I hate Scientology personally, but Amazon processing donations to a vaguely Scientology-affiliated charity is no worse than lots of other causes or charities that I don't support or agree with and is not some sort of secret endorsement by Amazon of Scientology.

Beautiful form? It's an expensive low powered computer in the form of a rectangle made of plastic, metal and glass. I've put a case/cover on every phone I've ever owned so they don't break when I drop them.

All supervised machine learning systems require labeled training data. All production speech recognition systems are included in this class. There is literally no way to do this without human annotators. All companies building speech recognition systems, by definition, will be transcribing sampled data. Anybody who is surprised by this does not understand what machine learning is and thinks it is some kind of magic. It is not. Nothing Google, Amazon, Apple or Microsoft is doing here is wrong, surprising or undisclosed. Stop panicking about it - if you don't like it, don't use speech recognition systems.

I dunno, if you use an Android phone with Google maps, by default, you can probably retrieve detailed info about your location and movements unless you've turned that feature off. I happened to have it on for several years, which turned out to be lucky if unintentional, as I used it to successfully defend myself in a legal matter. I could show times and places on a series of maps Google had tracking my phone checking in that were incompatible with the crazy claims of somebody accusing me of some totally irrational and false things. Creepy location tracking, true, but I was damn glad I had the info when I needed it.