Either way it’s going to organized crime. At least the crypto scammers are unlikely to influence the election!

Do you have a source for this?

It’s really simple: Microsoft is a business solutions company. Microsoft helps your boss spy on you at work. Your boss is their customer, not you.

Apple is a consumer products company. You are their customer. They market their products on privacy and security. Betraying that marketing message by spying on users is shooting themselves in the foot, so they’re incentivized not to do that.

Neither company is trustworthy. Economic incentives are the trustworthy concept here. Barring screwups, we can trust both companies to do what is profitable to them. Microsoft profits by spying on users, Apple does not (not right now anyway).

I mean the Gimp in particular. My point is that if we could suddenly wish the Gimp into non-existence (a counterfactual) then we could get a do-over. But because the Gimp actually exists it occupies a niche that could go to something better. Instead of banding together to create a better tool, people just grumble a bit and then use the Gimp (or hand over their wallet to Adobe).

I think my biggest issue with the Gimp is that it simply exists. If it didn’t exist there’d be a huge hole in the free software space and people would get together to build software to fill it. But of course there’s no guarantee that would actually produce something better.

Maybe the real problem with the Gimp is that it’s built to scratch an itch for its own developers who are used to its bizarre UIs and workflows. For all the people I’ve seen complaining about the Gimp over the years, none have stepped up to create an alternative. I think this is likely due to the intersection between visual arts people and software engineers being extremely small (and likely most working for Adobe already).

I think you’re still going to alienate teachers with that kind of shuffling. People form relationships with their colleagues. This is especially the case at universities where your coworker may be one of a handful of people on the planet who actually understands your research.

But also I think you may overrate the impact of teaching skill on student outcomes. Universities barely teach their students at all. Apart from lectures, they assign course work and conduct examinations. By far the majority of learning in university takes place alone, when the student engages with the course work. It’s often the case that students will pass a course with a decent grade having never attended a single lecture.

The truth of the matter is that most of the value of a highly selective university is the selectivity. There’s nothing that makes a teacher look brilliant more than having brilliant students. The top schools like Harvard could honestly eliminate lectures entirely, just keeping coursework and examinations, and their students would still be the most sought after.

Yesterday was my convocation day. So yes!

You could hire a hundred times as many grad students into the tenure track but that still wouldn’t stop people from competing to study with the best ones.

The brutal, national, standardized exam is what you get when you eliminate all the other barriers to going to university. It means every single student is in competition with one another to get accepted.

Shuffling staff around between schools just sounds like a great way to drive all the best researchers to the private sector while driving all the best teachers out of the profession entirely. Forcing people to move around to different cities for their job means you are selecting heavily for a particular “nomadic” type of person without any attachments to the local community. Sounds absolutely awful to foist that on educational institutions who really ought to be in the business of fostering community.

Everything these AIs output is a hallucination. Imagine if you were locked in a sensory deprivation tank, completely cut off from the outside world, and only had your brain fed the text of all books and internet sites. You would hallucinate everything about them too. You would have no idea what was real and what wasn’t because you’d lack any epistemic tools for confirming your knowledge.

That’s the biggest reason why AIs will always be bullshitters as long as their disembodied software programs running on a server. At best they can be a brain in a vat which is a pure hallucination machine.

Meta’s not behaving in the slightest. Their entire business model is illegal under the GDPR. They will continue maliciously complying for as long as they can. Just like Apple. Fight tooth and nail for as long as it takes.

Apple’s going to fight all of this tooth and nail, country by country, to the end of time. Anything less and they risk a shareholder lawsuit.

This is billions and billions of dollars we’re talking about, not chump change.

“Don’t blame me, I voted for Kodos!”

WhatsApp is owned by Meta.

I agree with him on right to repair and other rights issues but I can’t stand the guy. He’s incredibly abrasive and annoying. I’m interested in people who have interesting things to say. Long, angry rants about stuff I already agree with are just a waste of my time.

You can subscribe but you can’t comment without an account. I know YouTube has a terrible reputation for the low quality of comments but that’s exclusively a large channel problem. Small, niche channels actually have decent discussions.

I’m really surprised at how bad of an experience people are having! I have a bunch of channels I follow and people I interact with. Some big channels but most small. I love channels with only a few hundred to a few thousand viewers. The creators post their videos and then I talk to them through the comments. We have some really interesting conversations.

Lots of other channels I follow I don’t interact with but still really enjoy. A lot of hobby channels are amazing! I generally avoid the news and politics stuff, though I still occasionally watch Ukraine videos or Trump trial stuff. I get sick of those after one video though!

The issue is that you don’t want to give some random untrusted process root access. You, the user, have root access as long as you’re capable of running processes as root, but that doesn’t mean you should.

There could be tons of apps on the iOS App Store or Google Play Store that are completely benign under the existing security model but do nefarious things when run as root. No one knows that for sure because they aren’t tested under root by Apple or Google.

The problem with root is that it’s giving the process the keys to the Ferrari. That’s long since been decided to be a bad security model. Far better to have the process request permission to access particular resources and you grant them on a case by case basis.

These guys would get expelled from kindergarten for antisocial behaviour!

Gitlab is open source. You can download it and host it yourself. A decentralized developer community is resilient against this sort of attack for the very reason GitHub is so vulnerable: size.

Git was always designed with decentralized development and collaboration in mind. Its creator, Linus Torvalds, prefers not to bother with servers like GitHub at all. Git can even be used entirely over email (Linus’s preference)!