I don't have any tolerance for people who put everyone else at risk. Take their license, take their cars, send them to prison if they try driving again.
This habit of latching onto one word specifically to ignore what everyone knows is obnoxious, pedantic, and most of the time not even technically correct. It's just stupid quibbling over how words in English can be used to mean different things. And just so you know, the model doesn't "learn" anything, you're just adjusting weights until you get a desired result.
More broadly, the meaning and usage of specific words are important for these products because they shape how people perceive their utility.
If a thing isn’t “correct” because it has no sense of understanding, and therefore is only “correct” due to projection by the user, then that’s a super important distinction.
This dismissive, snarky one-liner only works if people already overwhelmingly agree with you. Most people are tired of companies adding more and more surveillance "features" and grew up in a time that set a higher bar for how much privacy they're willing to give away. A user taking a note? Sure. The OS recording everything you do 24/7 to send through an AI? Maybe we need new legislation to address your behavior.
Nearly every post that uses exclamation marks like this is off-putting. Fake enthusiasm is creepy. There is no way you are enthusiastic about people having no inner voice.
Of course there is. Maybe they are one of those people. I know multiple people who say they have no inner voice the way I experience it and I don’t get it, but yes they are enthusiastic about saying that they can still think perfectly well!
You came up with an extreme example that virtually never happens as a counterpoint to something that is ubiquitous in modern life. This behavior is why people don't like this forum.
>To add insult to injury, means testing[2] often costs more than the cost of fraud in social benefit programs! Not to mention, the biggest fraudsters with Medicaid are providers not recipients.
Intuitively, I'd expect fraud to go up (at least to some degree) as means testing goes down like a differential equation. The depressing part of this is that it doesn't matter what is actually true, or what either of us are convinced is true, as the system will do its own thing.
"Eliminate means testing" doesn't mean that you stop verifying if someone qualifies for the program, it means that you stop imposing conditions on qualifying for the program, i.e. turn it into a tax credit that everybody gets unconditionally, and adjust rates to compensate.
In principle you can do this without affecting the budget at all -- if there is a benefit that phases out at, say, 20% up to $30,000 in income, this is equivalent to paying the benefit unconditionally and increasing the marginal tax rate by 20% in the same income range. All it does is eliminate the application paperwork.
In practice the problem is that there are multiple overlapping programs like this, so the poor aren't paying a 20% marginal rate (on top of any formal taxes), it's more like 60-80% and in some cases it even exceeds 100%. This is a poverty trap. But to get out of it while balancing the budget you'd have to use a lower total phase out rate, requiring higher marginal rates on people who make more money. These people -- as much upper middle-class doctors and computer programmers as Jeff Bezos -- then object to this, and so here we are.
Of course, another way to do it would be to cut some other government spending and use the money for this.
It's overvalued but still useful for the average person to have an easy way to think about if they're about to run 1000 operations or 1000^3 operations on something.
There's also the issue when private companies just do what the government expects of them, or even pressures them to do. There was a brief controversy (canonized by CBS news) when the current administration ordered social media sites like twitter, youtube, and and facebook to remove posts that they thought were false or painted them in a bad light. What is the point of placing restrictions on government if they can just have a private company do it?
I'm also tired of seeing people say "It's a private company, they can do what they want." I don't know why the average person is so enthusiastic about the idea of getting taken for a ride by huge corporations.
> What is the point of placing restrictions on government if they can just have a private company do it?
"Perception is reality".
- Lee Atwater (GOP Consultant)
> I'm also tired of seeing people say "It's a private company, they can do what they want."
A lot of people (many of them smart) don't realize that there is a distinction between the first amendment and the general principle of free speech, which precedes the first amendment.
They realize it, they just don't want it to exist, and have a vested interest in muddying the waters of discourse such that most people remain unaware of it, or mistrust it in principle. For a few years they've been actively campaigning to have protections like Section 230 repealed and have all social media platforms (with some arbitrary number of accounts) be taken over and regulated as utilities by the government.
I disagree: I think people genuinely do believe their own opinions, and politicians are also human....thus delusional, and corrupt, necessarily. But they ain't stupid (or at least their PR folks aren't): a well done (mis)representation of reality is well known to be more than adequate to fool most people most of the time, and misrepresenting reality is at the core of "successful" (depending on your perspective, I'm talking electoral and financial success) politics.
When someone says "It's a private company, they can do what they want" in defense of a company doing something, it's probably because in that case they like what the company is doing, and they're probably not being "taken for a ride" by them.
> I'm also tired of seeing people say "It's a private company, they can do what they want." I don't know why the average person is so enthusiastic about the idea of getting taken for a ride by huge corporations.
It's especially humorous when you see those same people claiming that talking out the other side of their mouth about the danger of fascists.
I'm glad this covers the "canonization cycle" that's popular among news sites right now. The path to getting something declared as truth on wikipedia is to convince an unqualified journalist to uncritically repeat your claims, and now you can point to that as an official source. Often it goes even deeper if you try to track down a source on wikipedia and it's a reputable news site citing another, citing another, citing another, all the way down to the original source being some cooking blog. This means that unqualified bloggers and the tech company who host the infrastructure are the final arbiters of truth.
What would you propose as an alternative to the current accepted sources system? In my mind there sadly isn't much of a choice. It means that Wikipedia is not so useful for charged political articles, and the number of articles achieving that status has continued to increase, but it also means it is generally good for technical and scientific articles as well as the more niche history articles that are more often written by subject experts than political wariors.
Wikipedia should admit that "verifiability" matters because truth matters, and that they can't get away from making judgments on what's true. in particular, making judgments about which sources are truthy, as they do, is a judgment on what's true.
If something true and important can't be written on Wikipedia, that is actually a problem. If something false can be written on Wikipedia because a truthy source has said it, that's a huge problem.
Wikipedia should also acknowledge that a source can be trustworthy in some areas and not in others, and that e.g. someone posting evidence of their own statements is more trustworthy than a third party saying what they said.
In short, it's not hard imagining better policies. It's maybe hard to imagine getting them implemented in the most socially gamed institution on the internet.
> What would you propose as an alternative to the current accepted sources system?
I propose journalists should do their own research like the old days, and directly talk to the people in question, then form their own conclusions and report that, instead of just regurgitating third-hand blogspam.
Perhaps I misread GP. I thought he took issue with the accepted sources system although he didn't say that explictly. I agree with you and GP that the so called trusted sources should be better.
Some news articles about kiwifarms might get a few minor details wrong. I've seen one mix up the timeline of the site's founding. But they describe the site's content accurately. The wikipedia article for kiwifarms seems fair to me.
