• 0 Posts
  • 48 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 18th, 2023

help-circle



  • The article did mention a fundamental obstacle. It said quite clearly that we would run out of resources before we had enough computing power. I suppose you could counter that by arguing that we could discover magic, or magical technology, or a lot of new resources through space exploration.

    Of course things get more efficient. But in the past few decades they’ve gotten efficient in predictable, and mostly predicted, ways. It’s certainly possible that totally unexpected things can happen. I could win the lottery next week. Is that the standard? Are you pushing the stance that says AGI is somewhat less likely than winning the lottery or getting struck by lightning, but by golly it’s more than zero, how dare you suggest that it’s anywhere close to zero?



  • That’s true, and we should also note for further discussion that there are related major issues.

    The traditional publishing process through the major journals is entirely broken, because the journals are making a ton of money, and often the research is paid for by taxpayers, and often the researchers and reviewers don’t make much at all.

    Also, it depends on the country, but many universities are hiring fewer tenured faculty members. When people are on one year contracts, or on several year contracts, they have strong incentive to get things published before they change employer. If they have job security, they’re much more likely to do proper research before sending things off.

    Nobody wants to destroy their own reputation, but they are more likely to take a risk if it’s a make or break point in their career.





  • The potential for timing attacks has been known since the beginning of Tor. In other words, more than a decade. But that doesn’t mean you can’t defend against it. One way to defend against it is by having more nodes. Another way is to write clients that take into account the potential for timing attacks. Both of these were specifically mentioned in the article.

    Based on what was in the article and what’s in the history books, I’m not sure how to interpret your comment in a constructive way. Is there anything more specific you meant, that isn’t contradicted by what’s in the article?





  • This one is very obvious. It’s not specific to the tech world. Companies know that changing jobs is stressful, that there’s value in remaining where you are, and quite obviously many people are willing to accept smaller raises so that they don’t have to go out and apply. For most jobs in the world, you can’t work remotely, and renting a different place or selling and buying property is time consuming, stressful, and expensive. In other words, this is common sense economic reasoning.

    One side point is that if you can work mostly or entirely from home, that gets rid of some of the pressure to stay where you are, which in turn should create more mobility, which in turn should create more pay raises for employees who stay. But work from home is relatively the recent phenomenon, so old company pay scales are unlikely to properly account for it.

    Another point, that the author completely overlooks, is that some people don’t contribute as much as the author thinks they contribute. If they know that, of course they don’t want to move to a place that does contribution-based pay. They could get hired on somewhere during a probational period of some kind, and their new bosses might think they’re not good enough, and now they are out two jobs. Of course the turnover on their second job makes their resume look weaker, so they’ll have more trouble finding a decent third job.

    None of what I wrote is new information. It seems like the author of the article did that standard thing in tech circles. They decided to reinvent the wheel and write about it, and try to make it exciting when it’s not. Good for them for examining the problem, but they should be slightly embarrassed for publishing before doing basic research to see if someone had already addressed the question at hand.


  • orcrist@lemm.eetoPrivacy@lemmy.mlWhy do you care about privacy?
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    4
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    2 months ago

    It’s curious that you claim privacy and anonymity are clearly differentiable but didn’t bother to define either of them. Is your claim accurate? We have no idea, because we don’t know what you’re talking about.

    George Orwell, Philip K. Dick, and Corey Doctorow already covered the basics, and two of those authors did so decades ago. Why are you asking this question now? What is it that you want to hear that they didn’t already say? Or are you asking us whether we’ve read those authors?


  • orcrist@lemm.eetoPrivacy@lemmy.mlWhy do you care about privacy?
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    15
    arrow-down
    2
    ·
    2 months ago

    You’re the one who brought in a personal political view, and basic history realize your claim, which is why you didn’t actually cite any.

    I mean, what’s a good example of cancer culture? If some white guy says something horribly racist, and then he loses an election, he complains about cancel culture. But that’s a good thing, because we don’t want racist bastards in office. Of course he doesn’t see it that way. So he looks for some new term to describe the phenomenon, some way to make himself a victim.

    The term itself was created by right wing people who decided to deploy it against those they didn’t favor, as an excuse to justify their own bigotry, but the idea of public shaming and goes back centuries if not millennia. Quite naturally, the establishment has a strong interest in public shaming if it will keep them around longer.




  • Of course he keeps his credit card number and such private. So he cares about privacy.

    What you are talking about is related to privacy, but about others’ actions. How can companies and governments abuse us by spying on us? That is where we see interesting things. If I wanna fix my car with a $50 part but it’s off brand so I gotta pay $500 instead, that’s not cool. If McDonald’s charges me more for a Big Mac right after pay day, that’s messed up. If the grocery store charges more for a box of eggs because their ID system knows the customer is poor, that’s messed up. And this is the present and future. These examples are all about privacy, control, and equality.