The author proposes that it may reflect the incredible stability we've enjoyed in recent decades, which rewards more conservative "life planning":
> Our super-safe environments may fundamentally shift our psychology. When you’re born into a land of milk and honey, it makes sense to adopt what ecologists refer to as a “slow life history strategy”—instead of driving drunk and having unprotected sex, you go to Pilates and worry about your 401(k). People who are playing life on slow mode care a lot more about whether their lives end, and they care a lot more about whether their lives get ruined. Everything’s gotta last: your joints, your skin, and most importantly, your reputation. That makes it way less enticing to screw around, lest you screw up the rest of your time on Earth.
That article plays very loose with what is or was "weird" or "deviance". It ignores things in which new generation is different from ours and somehow manages to ma frame things that were normal (alcohol drinking) as deviance.
The question is why is "0 results" correct. hyrix's answer is so that you have a simple equation for plural, my response is that if "0 result" was correct we would have an even simpler equation.
Journalists don't just publish whatever comes into their mailbox--at least, good journalists understand the potential that they are being manipulated. We should be wondering to what extent these journalists vetted the source of the clip. It's not that journalists need to publish an identity, but they ought to serve as a filter as much as they do as a megaphone. Without a credible story about how the sender got ahold of the clip and its provenance, why would they even believe that it's real? With so little context, how could a responsible journalist publish this kind of character assassination without any more research than one phone call to the purported speaker?
Perhaps if there were a pattern of behavior behind the clip, supported by other testimony from the speaker's colleagues or previous incidents--not that it's the responsibility of journalists to conduct a trial in the court of public opinion, presenting the strongest arguments from each side--but, lacking any actual effort at all to establish the credibility of the source, this is just lazy, click-counting, ragebait--not journalism.
Partly, it's also on the laziness and gullibility of the general public--but these are well-established features of the audience that should be no surprise to a trained journalist. To publish such clips without any real work to validate them is basic negligence.
For a small/solo team, which is the audience under consideration, they probably want to spend their time on their core product and not reimplementing oauth.
AM radio travels farther for the same energy consumption, as a feature of the lower frequencies used. That means they can provide emergency information to a much larger area for a given power supply. AM radio also doesn't rely on huge towers since the waves can bounce off the ionosphere and travel as ground waves.
AM radio receivers are also very simple to make--check out the crystal radio!
The really disturbing part of this whole issue is the way that online platforms perform a form of torture arbitrage between buyers in wealthy countries that have stricter animal cruelty laws and suppliers in countries that lack them. The platforms are fully aware at this point, but seem to rely on the grey areas of free speech and multinationalism. In my opinion, it calls for some kind of third party independent review system since the platforms remain complicit and have an obvious conflict of interest in giving up ad revenue and highly engaged users.
I think this is about awareness, not ad revenue. I don't think any brand thinks torture porn videos are good for their image.
I think automated content moderation filters just aren't set up to detect animal abuse (the article gives an example with Gepini, where the AI doesn't quite seem to detect the depicted abuse). So removing videos needs manual reports, and that doesn't scale.
> Captivity: The monkey is likely being kept in captivity, as evidenced by the harness and the lack of natural surroundings.
> Animal Abuse: The image raises concerns about animal welfare. The monkey's tethering and the apparent lack of suitable living conditions could indicate potential abuse.
> Exotic Pet Trade: The monkey might be part of the illegal exotic pet trade. Many countries have strict regulations against keeping wild animals as pets, especially primates.
The article claims that it means the AI detected the abuse perfectly, but I don't think it did. It points out things that could be signs of abuse (I'm guessing the prompt primed Gemini to look for them), but signs of abuse alone wouldn't be enough to delete a video, especially if the clip was part of, say, a documentary.
The AI missed two things: that the monkey's leash wasn't just a restraint but a form of deliberate torture, and that the purpose of the video is to make a display of the abuse (as opposed to the abuse being an incidental result of bad living conditions). Those are the things you'd really want to flag for deletion, and I think a current tech AI is unlikely to find them without some deliberate prompt engineering.
I do think we're moving towards platforms taking more and more responsibility for this kind of shit, and they should. But it's naive to assume there's some product manager at google somewhere who is aware of the millions of animal abuse videos on the platform and went "oh no we should preserve them, they bring in ad revenue". That shit is niche.
Optimistically, this rule could create tighter feedback loops due to increased community engagement with planners so that databases get updated more quickly and speed limits are perhaps dialed in to match real conditions--the mismatched limits that you mention might have been established with expectation of a neighborhood buildout that never happened, or may be an oversight in low population areas--or they may be there for good reasons.
As it stands, speed limits are not usually enforced and are basically ignored by drivers, so (optimistically) this may encourage communities to make them more realistic limits, as opposed to suggestions.
The way to reduce speeds is not to make the road more dangerous but rather to signal the expected speed correctly. The article a sibling commenter linked makes this point:
> [...] The premise is simple: drivers will make occasional mistakes—veer a bit out of their lane, fail to brake hard enough, etc.—-and if the street is wide, with high visibility in all directions, and free of immediate obstacles such as trees and fences, those mistakes won’t be catastrophic. The problem: this street feels too forgiving to a driver. Too safe and comfortable. So drivers speed up. The engineers didn’t account for this aspect of human psychology.
Drivers behave as expected when they can't see around obstacles, the lane feels tight, and there are curves and other features that reduce visibility. These roads aren't inherently more dangerous, they just give drivers less margin for taking excessive risks.
Just the other day we were thinking about how recent generations have gotten more conservative: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45734620
The author proposes that it may reflect the incredible stability we've enjoyed in recent decades, which rewards more conservative "life planning":
> Our super-safe environments may fundamentally shift our psychology. When you’re born into a land of milk and honey, it makes sense to adopt what ecologists refer to as a “slow life history strategy”—instead of driving drunk and having unprotected sex, you go to Pilates and worry about your 401(k). People who are playing life on slow mode care a lot more about whether their lives end, and they care a lot more about whether their lives get ruined. Everything’s gotta last: your joints, your skin, and most importantly, your reputation. That makes it way less enticing to screw around, lest you screw up the rest of your time on Earth.