There have been past projects to do this. They didn't. Intending to improve things is not the problem, improving things without destroying the entire system is the problem.

Imagine that you're working in a regular old IT shop EXCEPT that your bosses are required to always shop projects out to third-party contractors with no skin in the game, and you effectively have somewhere north of 535 "bosses" who bungi in periodically to make you the background of a press conference. Imagine anytime you take a risk on something and it doesn't go perfectly, half of them go on Fox News to scream about you. Then imagine that you actually put in your time and get the shit done in spite of all that, and some 20yo college dropout swings by and gives you the boot.

Yeah, it is SUPER WEIRD that nothing gets done.

Some studies suggest that we're extinguishing 2% of insect biomass per year. We're extincting insects all the time because it's convenient to raze a forest to grow cattle. Even doing the research in preparation for intentionally extinction a mosquito species would probably tell us all sorts of horrors we're storing up for the future ... and we probably won't change anything.

I did hunt-and-peck for about a decade of my career. Then I realized that I was often sitting there staring at my keyboard, not at the output on my screen, so I'd have to then go back and find my cursor and probably fix some errors (again looking at the keyboard). So I sat down and taught myself to touch type. And then I could touch type. And then it wasn't a problem any longer.

Something that isn't clear in this anecdote is that for those ten years, I wasn't employed, I earned my keep doing software development independently, and I started that while I was still in college. I didn't ask someone's permission on whether to write code without touch typing, I just went and did it, and since I was paying the bills, nobody cared. Can someone make a living as a software developer without knowing how to touch-type? Sure! But if you aren't going to bother to learn a skill that is obviously useful in your field, then you'll need to have compensating skills elsewhere, which is to say that someone who can't be bothered to learn to touch-type most likely doesn't have those compensating skills to fall back on.

Like, seriously, this is a trivial thing litearally anyone can do to make themselves more employable. Who even cares about quantizing how useful it would be? For sure some people can't learn to touch type, like literally, because of neural wiring or other issues. But, unfortunately, NOBODY CARES, that's a you problem. If you're in that position, you'll need to invest time in compensating elsewhere for the fact that you can't equip the touch-typing skill. It will probably involve a lot more work than it would take the average person to learn to touch type.

People honestly have no idea how much harm it does to their career when the most basic project turns into a subquest. People gain stature not by being ABLE to do things, but by having a faster cycle time. Remove barriers rather than preserving them. Quit asking for the parameters of your accomodations and just learn your shit!

Like will they add another 32GB or so to my computer to account for the memory they are devoting to this new function which I don't want? It's embarrassing. "Speed, Security, Stability, Simplicity" indeed.

The same applies to basically anything we use the healthcare system to address. Life expectency of the population mostly doesn't increase due to heroic measures, it increases due to minor measures applied consistently over long periods of time.

When doctors don't wash their hands before surgery, most patients survive just fine with no consequences. That doesn't mean doctors shouldn't bother washing their hands.

... and now we can't tell an authentic human from something fake. This wasn't a designed outcome, but we definitely are walking past offramps with weak excuses.

Tell me how these cases differ from the primary subject of this article: https://www.thisamericanlife.o...
We need to get back to real communities, so that we can have real-person feedback loops, but we don't know how (and I surely don't know how).

So ... do they have reasons to believe it could be scaled up, or do they just hope that it could be scaled up?

Awhile back I watched a video discussing some cold-fusion type effect, and at some point they had a diagram involving stacking like a 7-orders-of-magnitude effect with an 11-orders-of-magnitude effect with another 10-ish-orders-of-magnitude effect, and I was like ... if you could get 30 orders of magnitude improvement on *anything* you could generate power from it. The amounts involved were far greater than the difference between taking a single step and leaping into orbit.

You can't just say "I bet engineers can improve this." Engineers absolutely CAN improve on what you've done. They can make it twice as efficient or whatever. But they can't take your trivial effect and turn it into a launch vehicle (or, more precisely, if they could, they could generally just turn existing larger effects into launch vehicles or power platforms or whatever). Doing Moore's Law scaling tricks involves chaining dozens of strong effects with thousands of trivial effects to optimize things, but it's not magic.

There is a difference between asking a random person on the subway for citations and asking an acknowledged expert in the field for citations. The rando might or might not give you good citations, but the onus is really on you to verify. You can't just ask six people and pick the results which serve your case best.

You're right, that might not be perjury. But a lawyer should be held to higher standards than that.

Corporations will love this. First they evicted you from your office and put you in a cubicle. Then they packed multiple people into a single cube so that you didn't just have to wonder what that noise was, your neighbor is basically sharing your desk. Then the lowered the cube walls so they could see you better, with the side effect that anytime someone walks by it draws your eye away from what you are working on. If you were lucky you could acquire a big enough monitor or set of monitors to cover your viewport so that you could focus. This fixes that problem. Soon enough you'll be able to live continuously in the instant with no ability to focus on the longer term, and as your ability to develop relevant domain knowledge goes to zero, your replaceability goes to infinity.

My guess is that at least half the reason car manufacturers deliver super "smart" keys is so that they can force you to pay their excessive fees to get replacement or reprogramming. Having the keys actually work for the task is probably secondary or tertiary on their priority list.

Rather than speculating on things like "But where is the database of images? How would they even use it?", instead ask why they would spend real money to implement facial recognition in a vending machine? The statements in the article makes it sound like they somehow want to be responsive to whether an actual person is present, which sounds good, but couldn't possibly save more than a couple bucks a year in power usage from running fulltime, or a couple bucks in capital costs installing a "Start transaction" button. Integrating facial recognition into the UI loop can't possibly make the operation of the machine more reliable. So they're likely spending a ton of money to make a completely unclear improvement to the machine, which to me argues that there is a clear improvement to the machine, it's just that it improves things for the owner of the machine, and the owner isn't enthusiastic about sharing the shape of that improvement.

Companies don't add this kind of tech to machines for no reason, in fact their general default is to take the cheapest possible route.

There are many positive aspects of corporations - but in some sense, corporations have been abused to create entities which are gradually undermining the world on many fronts, and corporations are operated by humans. The gist of it is that by delegating authority to the employer, you can get employees to do a wide variety of things they might not be willing to do if they were held responsible for it. Furthermore, you can obfuscate many things so that no employees properly understand what the overall company is doing.

This kind of proposal assumes that the real problem is that an army of T-1000 terminators is marching on a preschool with murder in their eyes. But the real problem is things like analyzing and targeting and generating content for political campaigns and advertising and stripping the nutrition out of food to increase margins, and all of that will be indpendently loose in the system, without ongoing reference to the AI which originally created it. Even if you don't want to follow me on that line of thought, think of a virus designed by an AI - a kill switch can't prevent release of that virus, because once it exists the AI isn't needed any longer.

You're not wrong, but also ... if you took 5% of the per-capita resources from America and gave it to those other places, it would trim the American standard of living by a trivial amount and completely change the standard of living in those other places. Just because some fossil-fuel usage greatly improved living standards doesn't mean that infinitely turning that crank is worthwhile.

To be fair, though, there is nothing that says there there have to be structures down there. We just don't know. The gap could mean that there just isn't anything to find in there. Or there could be a steady stream of things to find in there. The Planck Length just indicates that any structure we do find will be larger than that, but most likely we will never be able to torture spacetime sufficiently to see anything within many orders of magnitude of the Planck Length because it would take too much energy to get there.

Worldwide apps can still be shipped to the EU, it's just that now you can build EU-only apps. If Mozilla and Google don't have enough resources to support two versions, they can just keep shipping their WebKit-wrapping browser to the EU.

In fact, I think it will be interesting to see if they try to control user choice by preventing users in the EU from installing the world version of their browsers.