I remember a study from many years ago: people want to be better off than their immediate peers, regardless of where this puts them on an absolute scale.
The study went something like this. Which do you prefer? 1. You earn $250k but all your friends earn $500k. 2. You earn $125k, but all your friends earn $75k.
It was more refined then that, but anyway: most people picked (2).
I'm also familiar with that study, but I think it's a bit misleading because it implies the behavior is irrational by associating a fixed cost with everything. In reality, there's a perfectly rational logic that I think most people may subconsciously adapt to.
Imagine I give you a guaranteed $100k/year with the nuance that you're not allowed to earn any money beyond that, as the study implied that was your personal earnings. Where are you going to go live? In an area where most people are earning $200k or in an area where most people are earning $50k? It's the exact same question in effect, but now the phrasing makes it obvious that the choice is completely rational.
It's not about wanting to psychologically dominate your peers, but about making your money go further. If your friends are all earning twice what you do, then you're likely to struggle to afford even a decent house in a reasonable part of town. This logic breaks down at extremes of wealth, but $250k/year is nowhere near that point.
If I take a bunch of photos, those don’t have filenames (or not good ones, and not unique). They just exist. They don’t need a directory or a name.
So how are you supposed to find anything? Sure, I take photos. Most of them aren't needed after they serve their immediate purpose, but I can't be bothered to delete them, or sort or name the ones that do have a longer purpose. But at least they are organized automatically by date. For permanence, OwnCloud archives them for me automatically, from where they get sucked into my regular backups.
Why would I want to toss them all into an even less-organized pile?
[run] search queries over my higher-level objects. e.g. a “recent” directory of recent photos
How, exactly, are those search queries supposed to work? Sure, maybe date is retained in meta-info, but at best he is regaining the functionality he lost by tossing those pictures into a pile. If he is expecting actual image recognition, that could work anyway, without the pile.
It would be nice if we were a bit more in control. At least, it would be nice if we had a reliable backup of all our content. Once we have all our content, it’s then nice to search it, view it, and directly serve it or share it out to others
Sure, and that's exactly what you achieve with OwnCloud (or NextCloud, or whatever).
As for reliable backups, that's a completely different issue, which still has to be solved separately. You have got to periodically copy your data to offline storage, or you don't have real backups.
They don't mean the photos can't have names. They just observe that usually in-camera photos don't have particularly useful names like IMG_4321.JPG, same as all the other IMG_4321.JPGs that your camera has and will produce if it sees enough use.
Also that storage doesn't address a blob (or photo) by its name. But by hash / digest. You are welcome to store photo metadata with the hashes and perhaps even a good name if you care for one, in a database, on web pages, or whatever you use - if that makes it easier for you to retrieve the right photo. Probably you should.
Content object storage and retrieval (cumbersome objects) is then separate from issues of remembering what is what (small data).
Splitting storage from retrieval is a powerful abstraction. You can then build retrieval indexes based on whatever property you desire by indexing it to amortize O(N) over many queries.
Concretely, you could search by metadata (timestamp, geotag, which camera device, etc) or by content (all photos of Joe, or photos with Eiffel tower in the background, or boating at dusk...). For the latter, you just need to process your corpus with a vision language model (VLM) and generate embeddings. Btw, this is not outlandish; there are already photos apps with this such capability if you search a bit online.
I've lived in a couple of countries where there is a "vulnerable" language. I understand the emotional attachment that the native speakers have to their language.
However, in the larger picture: languages evolve. New ones develop, old ones die. Do artificial attempts to "rescue" a language really make sense?
It makes no less sense than any other work done to protect or restore something created by human beings. This comment is no more insightful than saying "cathedrals burn down, do artificial attempts to 'restore them' make sense?"
Languages evolve, but it's probably bad when language evolution is driven by bad AI slop translations made by people who have no relation to the language.
The AI slopwave is about as close to natural linguistic evolution as world war 2 was to natural selection (..aaand there we hit godwin's law, I'll see myself out)
Merz promised in 2023 to reactivate German reactors. Now, his CDU party is so beholden to the socialist SPD and the greens that he is overseeing the literal destruction of the plants.
Energy in Germany has become expensive, which is terrible for their industry. Also, they import a lot from countries burning coal. Brilliant, really brilliant...
CDU isn't "beholden" to SPD and Greens, they just know that lying about what you are going to do is much cheaper and easier than actually doing it. If CDU truly cared about nuclear power, the time to do something would've been the 16 years they were in power during which the shutdowns were planned and prepared, and undoing that would've been relatively easy, not once it was done or in final stages.
I'm sure that some (few) of these NGOs do good work. However, sooner or later, they all seem to succumb to two problems: (1) excessive staff costs, and (2) a failure of incentives.
The second one is more insidious: If they solved the problem they address, they would no longer need to exist. They have no incentive to succeed. So they go around addressing individual problems, taking sad pictures, and avoid addressing systemic problems.
And if the systemic problems are insoluble? Then there is again an argument that the NGO should not exist. If the problem is truly insoluble, then likely the money could be better spent elsewhere.
I don't think #2 really applies for many/most orgs, since so many causes don't really have a hard and fast solution, but instead exist on a spectrum. Think of a group trying to end poverty or protect nature. Those problems will never be truly solved but they can go much better or worse.
The issue is that their incentive is on marketing more than problem solving. A good NGO can blend actual solutions into snappy marketing campaigns. Like its expensive time/effort wise to push for legislative change on an issue but its "cheap" to throw a few grand at a group of down trodden people and take some photos.
I spent some years working for a large NGO (Opportunity International) and living with people who work for NGOs.
NGOs must constantly raise money to fund their operations. The money that an NGO spends on fund-raising & administration is called "overhead". The percentage of annual revenue spent on overhead is the overhead percentage. Most NGOs publish this metric.
When a big donor stops contributing, the NGO must cut pay or lay off people and cut projects. I've never heard of an NGO "succumbing to excessive staff costs" like a startup running out of money. Financial mismanagement does occasionally happen and boards do replace CEOs. Board members are mostly donors, so they tend to donate more to help the NGO recover from mismanagement, instead of walking away.
NGOs pay less than other organizations, so they mostly attract workers who care about the NGO's mission. These are people with intrinsic motivation to make the NGO succeed in its mission. Financial incentives are a small part of their motivations. For example, my supervisor at Opportunity International refused several raises.
> So they go around addressing individual problems, taking sad pictures, and avoid addressing systemic problems.
Work on individual problems is valuable. For example, the Carter Center has prevented many millions of people from going blind from onchocerciasis and trachoma [0].
The Carter Center is not directly addressing the systemic problems of poverty and ineffective government health programs. That would take different expertise and different kinds of donors.
The world is extremely complicated and interconnected. The Carter Center's work preventing blindness directly supports worker productivity in many poor countries. Productivity helps economic growth and reduces poverty. And with more resources, government health programs run better.
Being effective in charity work requires humility and diligence to understand what can be done now, with the available resources. And then it requires tenacity to work in dangerous and backward places. It's an extremely hard job. People burn out. And we are all better off because of the work they do.
When we ignore the value of work on individual problems, because it doesn't address systemic problems, we practice binary thinking [1]. It's good to avoid binary thinking.
This. Rare earths aren't actually rare at all. They are everywhere. The thing is: unlike iron or copper, they don't naturally occur in high concentrations. A few percent here, a few percent there - it's refining them that is the problem.
This tends to involve lots of weird chemicals, and in the past mining operations were not particularly careful about what happened with those chemicals. Hence, the reason that the West left it to places that didn't care so much about pollution.
However, with modern technology, it is perfectly possible (if not necessary cheap) to refine without destroying the surrounding countryside. One just has to want to do it.
Crunchy on the outside, soft and chewy on the inside?
Interesting that this primary appears to be juveniles, and they primarily attack the rudder. Motivation for the Orcas is unclear, because they apparently don't do anything else. In particular, they don't attack the lifeboat with the people in it, after sinking the sailboat.
The problem is that on the packaging Burger will be written with huge letters and then vegan is metioned somewhere in a corner. I bought cheese that was not cheese :)) Imagine my disappointment.
In your example it says “with soy protein” which seems to imply that soy protein is used in conjunction with the chicken type. And the text is smaller so it makes it seem like maybe they augment a smaller portion with soy, like ethanol used in E10 benzin.
Granted, it is rather obvious in Germany as you said because those foods are most typically purchased from a section dedicated to them and not mixed with others.
But the point I’m making is that even your example image was not clear.
> In your example it says “with soy protein” which seems to imply that soy protein is used in conjunction with the chicken type. And the text is smaller so it makes it seem like maybe they augment a smaller portion with soy, like ethanol used in E10 benzin.
The study went something like this. Which do you prefer? 1. You earn $250k but all your friends earn $500k. 2. You earn $125k, but all your friends earn $75k.
It was more refined then that, but anyway: most people picked (2).
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