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Comment Re:the controversial privacy feature (Score 1) 86

I'm all for privacy and healthy mistrust of business and government, but funnily enough that's sort of true. Scammers will very quickly try to direct the conversation to Signal or WhatsApp precisely because the E2EE stops those companies doing large-scale detection of their activity and shutting them down.

In the end TikTok is not primarily a messaging platform. The video content is public, and of that there is enough spam content (fake Musk investment videos and so on). I imagine one of their reasons to avoid E2EE for the private messaging part is to not make TikTok a one-stop shop for scammers. That, and government censorship of course.

Comment Re:blockchain tech was always doomed to fail (Score 1) 43

Agree in the main, but decentralisation is meant to solve the trust issue. Sovereign currencies are centrally controlled by a single, trusted entity, the government (yes, plenty of cynical comment fodder here). Given cryptos aim to be community currencies out of reach of the government and corporate interests, there's few other options.

There are already plenty of examples of theft/fraud from wallet brokers where that trust is given to a centralised company in the form of wallet credentials. For all crypto's many problems, decentralisation is sort of a neat solution.

Comment Re:glass half full (Score 1) 43

That was my first thought too. You would think the lack of failures is because there is a low cost to leaving a crypto running even when it is all but forgotten, but according to the article the measurement is about no longer being "actively traded". So apparently 47% are still actively traded which is surprisingly high. Perhaps it is similarly inexpensive to get bots to trade back and forth to give the illusion of activity.

Comment Re:Easy way to fight fraud (Score 1) 32

divided the portion of the subscription for royalties from each subscriber across the set of songs THEY streamed .. This is 100% technically feasible, but would tend to make many mid level successful artists

That's a great idea, it's both 'fair' and wouldn't radically change the financial distribution, but make bot tampering of the distribution ineffective. On that point, I don't think it would create more mid-level successes on the assumption that the majority of listeners stream roughly the same song count whether they like Taylor Swift or Local Indie Band.

What would change is the distribution from free accounts, whose advertising revenue is well below the regular subscription fee. Songs streamed from a free account would receive substantially less.

Comment Re:production vs consumption (Score 2) 109

I feel like I'm missing something here. Production should be in equilibrium with consumption, but they are measured by monetary value not time. Your (Rp) is a function of skill and organisation with hours applied. The time part is the easiest to change, or rather production is most quickly improved by increasing time.

But (Rc) is very easily increased and almost independent of time. I don't need 8 hours to consume 8 hours worth of production. It takes less time to buy a new $60,000 Tesla online than buy a $5,000 second-hand Toyota. I can even consume half a lifetime of production in a couple of days by buying a house.

Comment Re:A lot of training here - still impressive (Score 1) 75

What it cannot do is actually solve novel problems missing from its training set, any more than a search engine can find an match for a document that does not exist.

I'm not so sure about this. LLMs are a linguistic approach, and novel problems are described using existing words, phrases and concepts. The solution to a novel problem may be contained in the structure and patterns of the existing billions of sentences and lines of code humanity has produced, without needing formal reasoning.

Comment No Reduction in Pay (Score 1) 173

It's not valid to test well-being when keeping the same pay for less work, unless you like stating the bleeding obvious.

Were a 4-day week applied globally there would certainly not be enough productivity to do this. Some jobs would stay over 80% productive, a very small amount of high-stress jobs may even increase in output. But many would be less than 80% since the overhead tasks remain the same.

It's also invalid to test dropping pay to 80%. That would create a lot of stress on the test subjects, but were it applied globally it could be unnoticed. Major items like housing affordability would probably stay the same, keeping up with the Jones looks the same, and we wouldn't notice to mourn the slower advance in technology and living standards.

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