211–220 of 223 posts
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Guilt, and shame, are both *human emotions*. "Platforms," feel nothing.
It's just a bunch of people. But you are right in a sense, that is is a large enough group that it's momentum will crush any feelings of individuals in the team.
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OK we need a bit of nuance there: I do reckon there are many niches that don’t need to cater to a general audience to begin with. Specialised conferences on InfoQ are a good example: their audience is very specific, and is best reached through aggregators like HN or /r/programming. Another example is online courses, that are not casually watched. On the other hand, some important topics are aimed at a general audienc…
1) I think that YT could make a legitimate case that its recommendation algorithm is neutral (assuming that it's not actually biased by backroom payments etc.). That is to say: it doesn't represent any point of view about anything, and simply tries to show a user "more videos related to the one you're watching". The devil, of course, is in the details of what "related" means. 2) I don't agree that not-on-YT means no…
They’d have to remove shadow banning at the very least. I’m also virtually certain that their algorithms are machine-learning based, and as such very difficult to inspect, debug, and other ML based algorithms have proven to be biased in other contexts (like facial recognition).
> I don't agree that not-on-YT means no wide audience.
I… stand corrected, I guess. Also, I’ve just discussed it with my partner, and she pointed out a marginal exodus away from YouTube, which may amplify and chip away at their dominance.
> A service that only shows/points you at videos from channels you've subscribed too is radically different from the YT of today.
It would be indeed. YouTube is significant in the way it merges 3 tools together: hosting, search, and recommendations. They could be separate. (By the way, Google itself tends to merge search and recommendations, the famous "filter bubble".)
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It's a legitimately hard problem. It's also something that they would rather not deal with and don't make any money from. Plus, it's basically unregulated and platforms mostly don't disclose any stats on how they're doing, so there's no real accountability. One way to think about it is guilt vs shame. Guilt is where you feel bad because you've violated your own standards. Shame is where you feel bad because somebody…
Guilt, and shame, are both *human emotions*. "Platforms," feel nothing.
What actually goes on is an incredibly complicated set of relationships between thousands of people. We don't have a useful specific vocabulary for that, so we have to resort to metaphor. But I believe the metaphor is a valid one, and it's grounded in the actual emotions of key people making these decisions.
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If it turns out that SARS-COV-2 escaped from a lab, that will absolutely be at the level of research (bio)chemists. The problem with individual biohacking is that there's not even oversight by colleagues. Maybe I'm overly optimistic, but I'd expect someone working near/with a biochemist who was doing crazy stuff to speak out about it. There's no real equivalent for this if the work is going on in somebody's basement…
It's hard enought to get any of that stuff to work when you have a fully-stocked lab and a raft of PhDs poking at it from all angles. Some Joe in his garage might get something interesting to happen, but it is a long, long way from there to virulence. The viruses themselves are banging away at this all the time from literally trillions of different angles; how often do they land on a winning ticket?
0% never happens. .0bar1 can happen on the next pull of the lever.
Never, ever, ever underestimate the danger of small odds and just one...more...pull.
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It's hard enought to get any of that stuff to work when you have a fully-stocked lab and a raft of PhDs poking at it from all angles. Some Joe in his garage might get something interesting to happen, but it is a long, long way from there to virulence. The viruses themselves are banging away at this all the time from literally trillions of different angles; how often do they land on a winning ticket?
What's the difference between 0% and 0.0000000000000000000000l%? 0% never happens. .0bar1 can happen on the next pull of the lever. Never, ever, ever underestimate the danger of small odds and just one...more...pull.
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I spoke with an inventor, author of many books, and semi-famous Silicon Valley millionaire— whom I respect deeply— who told me that as a teenager he toured a Wunder Bread factory and saw how they used high heat to prevent mold or something. He decided to breed a temperature tolerant mold in his home and then see if he could spread it at the factory on another tour. That’s curiosity and science, too. Fortunately, he l…
Anybody (even a teenager) could do that back then, and anybody (even a teenager) could do it today. Yet, they manifestly haven't. Evidently, it is not very easy to go from a fun experiment to global domination, gene recombination or no gene recombination. Meanwhile, ranchers are actively breeding antibiotic-resistant bacteria, everywhere, with outstanding success, and sending the resulting strains straight to your lo…
We can disagree about where to draw the line. I think it’s obvious that genetic engineering should be strongly regulated. I think that is also obvious to you.
We agree that antibiotics are overused.
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I spoke with an inventor, author of many books, and semi-famous Silicon Valley millionaire— whom I respect deeply— who told me that as a teenager he toured a Wunder Bread factory and saw how they used high heat to prevent mold or something. He decided to breed a temperature tolerant mold in his home and then see if he could spread it at the factory on another tour. That’s curiosity and science, too. Fortunately, he l…
> t’s not in societies interest to have “Joe’s homemade injectable health serum. You can trust ol’ NASA Joe” available at every roadside stand. Luckily we're already protected from misleading and dangerous medicine with existing law. You're falsely pretending he's doing something worse than he really is. If you're so confident in your belief, why not just use truth instead of exaggeration?
I guess the laws you refer to are helping, because according to the story he’s been investigated for practicing medicine without a license. But why not do everything we can, as a society, to protect ourselves from irresponsible people?
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> t’s not in societies interest to have “Joe’s homemade injectable health serum. You can trust ol’ NASA Joe” available at every roadside stand. Luckily we're already protected from misleading and dangerous medicine with existing law. You're falsely pretending he's doing something worse than he really is. If you're so confident in your belief, why not just use truth instead of exaggeration?
I am not pretending anything. I have made no representation of fact about him other than to state a principle based on a logical extrapolation of his behavior. I guess the laws you refer to are helping, because according to the story he’s been investigated for practicing medicine without a license. But why not do everything we can, as a society, to protect ourselves from irresponsible people?
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I am not pretending anything. I have made no representation of fact about him other than to state a principle based on a logical extrapolation of his behavior. I guess the laws you refer to are helping, because according to the story he’s been investigated for practicing medicine without a license. But why not do everything we can, as a society, to protect ourselves from irresponsible people?
Because it limits the freedom of those "irresponsible" people. We could ban every activity that has the slightest chance of harm but then none of us could do anything. No computer tinkering allowed - might create a virus! No chemistry allowed - might create drugs! No dogs allowed - they might bite someone.
I can see why you do that. It takes so little mental effort to participate in a discussion and still seem to say something.
I think we need reasonable regulatory limits on a lot of things, such as dumping toxic chemicals in a hole in your back yard, or abusing your children. But not everything; and not infinitely. Engineering mutants and “medicines” at home is generally too risky.
"Democratizing genetic engineering won’t suddenly unleash bioterrorism upon the world." How sure is he of that, and why? As a comparison, nuclear power has been of great utility for many countries, but I sure would not want to see it "democratized".