Is it more or less degrading to train your replacement when it's not even human compared to when it's some third-worlder that barely understands you?

I'm personally not inclined to trust anything (human or otherwise) trained by a person with an axe to grind or resentful of their replacement. Someone will have trained the replacement poorly out of spite. I suspect most people have heard stories of this happening when IT started getting offshored or otherwise outsourced in decades past.

For the average human being in modern society, nature is a hellish nightmare. Wild animals have no qualms with gorging on your entrails while you scream and flail helplessly as you die. The plants that will poison you will not label themselves as such and food will not deliver itself to you. Humans can absolutely live there. Our ancestors all did at some point and some groups still do to this day, but for the average person being thrown into that nature is a death sentence and one that likely involves a lot of suffering.

If your idea of nature is a quant hiking trail or a forested park where you can watch the birds those only exist because humans made them that way and keep all of the dangerous flora and fauna out. Nature is incredibly beautiful, but many deadly things are.

Earlier foldable (flip) phones were only preferable because the "candy bar" alternatives weren't as pocketable until a few generations had gone by and designs like the BlackBerry came along and added sliding keyboards that brought a lot of advantages over flip phones. Modern smartphones are slim enough to be kept in a front pocket for most men's pants even if they are wider than most devices before the advent of the smartphone. Women carry their phones in purses for the most part so they're even less concerned about device size. Anecdotally, women I know tend to have larger sized phones on average because they don't have to worry about whether it fits in a pocket or not.

Foldable smartphones seem to me like a solution in need of a problem. I can't imagine using a device that requires physically opening to use and even if it has a way to operate when closed, I'm not sure what utility unfolding it would bring. If I want or need a bigger screen I'll use a tablet, monitor, or whatever is appropriate for the task. I used to exclusively use flip phones back in the day (mostly Motorola ones) and preferred them over the Nokia bricks, but with touchscreen smartphones there's almost no benefit that I can see to the approach.

Gates should definitely be investigated and it does seem likely that he's guilty of being a dirtbag even if he didn't sleep with any underage girls or commit any other crimes. Putting that aside, the court of public option, at least at Stanford has spoken. California in general has recently been going through a similar process with Cesar Chavez who has been accused of similar crimes to what some allege Gates has committed. Chavez is dead and cannot face any kind of actual judicial process, but he's certainly recovered a similar treatment. Plenty of others have had their names removed from buildings, etc. for the crime of having opinions or beliefs that were entirely common at the time but no longer align with present day attitudes.

Personally I think trying to rewrite the past in any form is utterly stupid and that society benefits far more from painful reminders than rose-colored portrayals, but most people aren't of that belief. The cynic in me thinks it's just the university finding creative ways to get more money. Thiel may be used as hyperbole as he's ahead of the curve in terms of offending modern sensibilities, but for enough money they'd slap his name on the building. If they do rename it, given enough time any person they use will hold a belief abhorred by the future mainstream and get their name removed as well, just in time for another donation.

Anyone charging hundreds of dollars per hour for their work had better damned well be doing it. Not only should they be sanctioned by the courts, but they should face criminal fraud charges. If the courts want to put a stop to this they had better get serious now and stop handing out slaps on the wrist. Multiply the sanctions by an order of magnitude and give opposing counsel a 30% finder's fee to encourage additional vigilance and it'll quickly stop.

Or build them in parts of the world where people need to run some kind of heating for several months out of the year. If the heat can be used for something useful it's no longer waste heat. If you live far enough north (or south for the 10% of the population in the other hemisphere) than six months out of the year a BitCoin mining rig is an electric heater that helps pay for its own energy consumption.

You could do this if you had studied all of the different types of gloves that researchers had used so that the you could make a reasonable estimate of the extent to which microplastics present in their results were due to contamination from gloves worn by researchers. There are some serious difficulties with being able to do so. If the error bars are big enough due to uncertainty arising from how much of observed effect could possibly be explained by the gloves, then you take out a lot of studies. Did the researchers record what kinds of gloves were used or even have that information any more? If not, then estimating with certainty becomes difficult and anything but the strongest observed effects may be explained away by this new confounding factor.

The first thing that needs to be done is to develop some gloves without this problem. Once we have that, we can repeat past experiments to get a better idea of how extensive the problem actually is and make better determinations about which studies need to be rerun.

Some codebases have been poorly cobbled together bits of code from stack overflow long before AI became capable of replacing the human developers who were doing it. A well trained statistical model doing a better job than some batch of cowboys that couldn't pass a Turing test themselves is hardly surprising.

That's assuming that they're actually deleted as opposed to merely being flagged as deleted so that they aren't displayed anymore. Even if they did actually remove them from their database, your comments still exist on backup tape somewhere.

What were their alternatives? They weren't doing anything about the problem so had nothing else to point to. Their lawyers can't outright lie and claim Facebook did things to try and stop them problem when it didn't, so this was the one excuse that was presented. It's no different than a murder trial where it's clear that the defendant is guilty, but the defense presents an absurd theory that no one buys because they have to have some alternative explanation. If Facebook had done more then their lawyers would have had more to work with. It's not the attorneys' fault that their client was that fucking stupid.

There's a difference between Facebook who didn't do a good job at policing their platform and Epstein who committed the acts himself. Consider that the bits were transmitted by some ISP, but that you would think it's absurd to punish them just like it would be stupid to try to put Chevy on trial because some bank robbers used a Camaro as a getaway vehicle. If you tried to charge the ISP they'd also argue that some illegal activity is inevitable. It's impossible to prevent all crime, but the law is that Facebook has some responsibility to ensure that they're not allowing it to knowingly occur on their platform.

Even if Facebook were making actual efforts to prevent this from occurring, some would still inevitably slip through because some criminals are smart enough to work around whatever efforts are made to prevent the crime. The problem here is that Facebook wasn't doing nearly enough as they were legally required to do.

Of course the stock market isn't a perfect reflection of the actual economy. If it were, Soviet style central planning would actually be possible. It's just a (usually good) estimate of it by a large number of people. Just like guesses about how many marbles a jar contains, the individual ones may be wrong in one direction or another, but the aggregate average will turn out to be fairly close to the actual amount.

The GameStop situation wasn't a good example of a Ponzi scheme. That was an entirely separate fiasco where some greedy investors got caught in a position that created infinite liability on their end where they had more short positions than there existed shares of stock. They were obligated to purchase shares at a future date regardless of price until their shorts were covered. If the price had collapsed, they would have been able to buy the shares for less than they previously sold them. However, the flip side of this was that if the market collectively drove the price up, those investors were royally fucked and they wound up losing badly. That's entirely different than a Ponzi scheme.

GameStop's price fluctuations were the result of specific circumstances that don't typically occur naturally and are unlikely to again because no investment firm would ever allow their traders to do something like that again. It will probably be a case study in textbooks for decades to come to make sure no one does something that stupid ever again. If anything it shows that the model works because it allows bad behavior to be appropriately punished which ensures others will be less likely to repeat it in the future. More generally any investor behavior that deviates too far from the underlying reality will be similarly "punished" by other investors. Those who are less able to accurately value the economy will lose out to those who are and be replaced.

They should be done away with. The ability for unelected bureaucrats to create and enforce law is unconstitutional. We elect legislators for that purpose and they shouldn't be able to rely on unelected bureaucracies to do their job either because the effect has been that they all throw their hands up as though they can do nothing while allowing these unelected bureaucrats who do not have to ever face the voters to act as they please.

If these agencies have recommendations they can make them to Congress like everyone else and it can go through the same process as every other law.

I think his point was that a person talented enough to have built this could have built something better. I'm sure you would also agree that it would be better if the average Colombian could sell cocaine to people as opposed to being exploited by a cartel, but at the end of the day the world would be better off if no one were involved in the drug trade at all. Of course there are some that don't consider illegal narcotics to be any more or less immoral than online pornography and that both are awful or that there's nothing wrong with either.

For anyone who believes that pornography in and of itself is exploitative, then at best OnlyFans is just a cleaner version of hell, or possibly even worse if it entices more people to participate who might have otherwise stayed away. I'm sure more people would try cocaine (and possibly destroy their own life through addiction) if it were sold by well-dressed young men in a clean and tidy store who would have never bought it if it meant dealing with a shady looking character in a back alley in a bad part of town.

All that aside, my condolences to his family. Having lost relatives to cancer myself, it's not something that's easy to go through. Whether you agree that this man was immoral or not, he still had people who were close to him and loved him and I hope that can find peace after his passing.

It would cut down on it, but you'd be a fool to think that a $5 monthly fee makes it unprofitable to operate bots on a website. Unless whatever marketing or other crap they're shilling isn't worth even $60 a year then they'll go away. Unless they can detect the bots, a paywall doesn't do much and probably kills traffic as bad or worse than ID requirements.

There aren't any good solutions to this problem, just the choice of alternatives that are awful in their own different ways.