Viewing profile — brainwad

Incentives are also for when a principal just doesn't care about the difference between two possible choices. But maybe other people indirectly do, and an incentive like price can …

If resources are not scarce in industrial civilisation, why do you suppose people pay for them? Why is there a spot oil market, if oil is not scarce? And the same for all other com…

Well, for one, the world changes around us in ways that necessitate innovation. But even if it didn't, if life can be better, why wouldn't you want that?

Similar regulations requiring tagging of sponsorships didn't do anything; people just got used to publicly posted content having that warning.

Train carriages, especially older ones, often have metallic windows so they are even worse than a typical plane. Even right up against the window, with the phone directly against i…

The latest and greatest internally at Google is more or less just Antigravity 2.0 with the latest Gemini models.

I don't know about Chromium specifically, but in general Google requires 2 humans to have looked at every change (normally one is the author, but not necessarily for bot-authored c…

It's called fraud because the ad host colludes with (or directly controls) the botnet to get lots of clicks on ads hosted on their sites, making them money at the expense of advert…

I would pay a premium for it. The direct flight is still better than being interrupted halfway through your "night", and then having to trudge through a huge transfer airport just …

Yes they would. That's why we get massive queues for alpine crossings during European holidays – German and Dutch tourists trying to get to the beaches in Italy.

Desktop OSes just assume the vertical subtiles (at best with an option between RGB and BGR). TVs and mobile devices don't generally support subpixel rendering at all.

Sometimes the "spirit of the law" seems to be "degrade your offerings until the European competitors who keep pestering us stop". Little consideration ever seems to be given to tel…

The argument is that the laws are so broad that the EU can always find a violation even when companies try to follow the law, and that they mostly target foreign companies. TBH I f…

That would suck, though? Showing places on a map makes so much more sense than burying them in a list of webpages.

The specific problem with Maps is that Google _can't_ deep link to other providers except by lat-lng or address, both of which throw away the actual context of the PoI in the commo…

The EU just finds a new thing to fine each time. Since the scope of US consumer internet companies is so vast, they can mine €1b fines more or less limitlessly.

It's not like they can sell the SPCX stock. It's still locked up.

If the inference gets an order of magnitude cheaper, labs can afford to subsidise an order of magnitude more usage for the same marketing cost. So that part of usage will, if not a…

Or: increasing resource efficiency may encourage even more usage, as happened with coal, oil and photovoltaics.

Not at scale. Charities only can move so much merchandise themselves, because only a small slice of the population goes to charity shops and/or accepts charitable donations. Alllls…

A bunch of those industries are unprofitable, or profitable only due to unsustainable subsidies from their local governments.

Most (all?) good novels are propaganda designed to influence your thinking. If a machine could truly provoke thoughts as well as a human author, then yeah it'd be worth reading its…

People don't usually count reading an online piece of writing as equivalent to reading a book, even if the exact same content could also be in book form. Hence if you ask speakers …

Is that understanding also cross-culturally consistent? That's a typical failure mode in comparative surveys between different countries - the meaning of the question depends on th…

What's a book, though? I suppose people would at least count a traditional e-book. Does long-form fanfic count? How about a book-length website? What about one that was originally …