80386 (u/80386) - Readit News

80386 commented on Ireland drops most Covid restrictions in wake of 'Omicron storm' reuters.com/business/heal... · Posted by u/lando2319

Mizza · 4 years ago

Am I fucking crazy for not knowing what's going on any more?

US hospitalizations are at an all time high, 2000 people are still dying every day, and it feels like everybody is just okay with that now. What happened?

I get that everybody is tired of it, I am too, but it feels like we wasted two years of everybody's life just the take the bullet anyway.

80386 · 4 years ago

> I get that everybody is tired of it, I am too, but it feels like we wasted two years of everybody's life just the take the bullet anyway.

One year, not two.

There was never any hope of containing COVID. It was endemic by the end of 2019. Individual countries had a chance of avoiding it with border controls that no Western country has the political will to implement - but the will to implement an indefinite policy of sakoku no longer exists anywhere. Since COVID was globally endemic before official sources even acknowledged human-to-human transmission, there was never any hope of not taking the bullet eventually - although in theory "eventually" means "until the next Commodore Perry".

A reasonable strategy would be to slow the spread of the virus to study vaccines, treatment protocols, and the possibility of long-term sequelae, and to build medical capacity, and then, at some point, declare good-enough preliminary results and (modulo medical capacity concerns) let it rip. Letting it rip while there are still such vast unknown unknowns is irresponsible and only potentially justifiable in hindsight - Anders Tegnell looks good now, but it could've been a lot worse.

But the propaganda machine can't turn on a dime, so the measures lasted much longer than they had any reason to, at least in the parts of the "Free World" that believe in respecting established authority qua established authority.

80386 commented on U.S. to work with Big Tech, finance sector on new cybersecurity guidelines reuters.com/world/us/cybe... · Posted by u/d4mi3n

supertrope · 4 years ago

The year is 2026. Cyberattacks have escalated to the point that megabanks are offline for weeks at a time, power grids go dark for ransom, airliners are guided into deadly collisions, a database of every American's Social Security Number is leaked, and drinking water is sabotaged by remote criminals. The USA CYBERSAFE ACT is passed with overwhelming bipartisan support. It mandates trusted federal security co-processors in every computer, key escrow, a national firewall at every ISP, an end to crime enabling online anonymity, and a chain of custody for all actions done on a computer: logs must be retained by a licensed business IT department or manufacturer of a consumer device for two years. Root access is a felony.

80386 · 4 years ago

The year is 2027. Power grids still go dark for ransom, but at least the internet has been turned back into TV. If you know how to use Linux, you might be able to pick up a fourth podcast!

80386 commented on Record Breaking Number of Journalists Arrested in the U.S. This Year freedom.press/news/2020-r... · Posted by u/infodocket

smithza · 5 years ago

Can you point to cases where this is common in mainstream news outlets? We are talking about exceptions, not norms. The 1619 Project and its revisionist perspective may have had misleading conclusions (or premises) but it was not committing errors of outright falsehood. This just an example of bias vs factual misinformation.

80386 · 5 years ago

What's the merit in distinguishing between bias and factual misinformation?

The Westboro Baptist Church could start a news outlet and report on every single time a gay man did something wrong or immoral. They wouldn't need to make anything up - there are a lot of gay men in the world. But would this be morally acceptable?

80386 commented on Record Breaking Number of Journalists Arrested in the U.S. This Year freedom.press/news/2020-r... · Posted by u/infodocket

sneak · 5 years ago

It's a tough reality check for a lot of people who grow up in the US, thinking it's a free country with equal protection of the law, when they realize that there are at least two tiers of protected overclasses (wealthy landowners, and the police) to which only subsets of the law applies in practice (to say nothing of the underclasses who are routinely beaten, robbed, and killed, with no consequences for the attackers).

It's not a small adjustment in one's worldview, and it's normal and common for people who have benefitted from the false narrative to want to cling to it and reject contradictory evidence, as you pointed out.

80386 · 5 years ago

> the underclasses who are routinely beaten, robbed, and killed, with no consequences for the attackers

Most of the people I know have been beaten or robbed at least once, or narrowly escaped being beaten or robbed. In almost all cases, the perpetrators were never caught. Are we the underclass?

The vast majority of cases of assault, robbery, and murder are not carried out by wealthy landowners or the police. If you're that concerned with people being beaten, robbed, and killed, your priorities should be different.

80386 commented on Record Breaking Number of Journalists Arrested in the U.S. This Year freedom.press/news/2020-r... · Posted by u/infodocket

znpy · 5 years ago

Oh yeah I agree with that, I was just arguing that especially because the US had more unrest it makes even more problematic that journalists got arrested.

That's a symptom of the fact that the establishment does not want the press to document what it's doing, to the point that it's arresting journalists.

80386 · 5 years ago

Is it a symptom of that, or is it a symptom of the fact that it's much easier for the sorts of people who'd go to protests and do things that get them arrested anyway to call themselves journalists?

80386 commented on Record Breaking Number of Journalists Arrested in the U.S. This Year freedom.press/news/2020-r... · Posted by u/infodocket

slg · 5 years ago

Which was exactly my point. They are limiting the title of "journalist" to exclusively people who have been anointed as journalists by some gatekeeping entity. This rules out hobbyist, freelancers, self employed people, people just breaking into the industry, and all sorts of other people. The software developing equivalents of those people are inarguably part of the software development community. Why wouldn't their counterparts in another industry be considered journalists?

80386 · 5 years ago

If you don't rule out hobbyists, freelancers, and the self-employed, I can declare myself a journalist, start a blog or a Twitter, and start throwing Molotov cocktails, and if I get arrested for it, that's another arrest of a journalist.

And as a Molotov-cocktail-throwing opponent of the regime, I want to raise the number of arrests of journalists, because that makes the regime look bad, as shown by this thread. Even if every single arrest is of someone like me - a left-radical with a Twitter account, not Walter Cronkite or whoever - it's unlikely that anyone will bother to check, and even more unlikely that, if anyone bothers to check, very many other people will hear about it.

80386 commented on Record Breaking Number of Journalists Arrested in the U.S. This Year freedom.press/news/2020-r... · Posted by u/infodocket

pc86 · 5 years ago

If you take a picture of something happening on your street and write a blog post about it, you are not a journalist. If you wouldn't be granted press credentials for something, you're probably not a journalist. If it's a side gig you don't intend to make a living doing, you're very likely not a journalist.

There are plenty of instances where someone can fit into the article's definition of "journalist" where they probably shouldn't.

80386 · 5 years ago

> If you wouldn't be granted press credentials for something, you're probably not a journalist.

But if you would, you might still not be. I once got press credentials (and a steep press discount to an event) because I wrote for a group blog and knew a guy.

80386 commented on Research questions that could have a big social impact, organised by discipline 80000hours.org/articles/r... · Posted by u/apsec112

notahacker · 5 years ago

But in practice, this list of questions reflects less the principles of Effective Altruism and more the overlap between people calling themselves Effective Altruists and other personal and career preoccupations. That's how you get four of the six "most impactful" questions in politics and international relations being about AI and one of the others involving representation for 'sentient nonhumans'. (Suffice to say this is not a list a political scientist, or even your average consequentialist utilitarian cosmopolitan humanist who read more newspapers than AI papers would propose as research priorities in politics and IR. Probably great research questions to get you a popular blog and a job in a Silicon Valley research institute though)

80386 · 5 years ago

It's also how you get a list at all. I don't like EA's "Jeremy Bentham solved philosophy forever" worldview, but at least it gets them thinking big, you know? Is anyone else making these lists?

80386 commented on Research questions that could have a big social impact, organised by discipline 80000hours.org/articles/r... · Posted by u/apsec112

ForHackernews · 5 years ago

The "effective altruism" movement (of which 80,000 Hours is a part) has long been preoccupied with preventing a malevolent, superintelligent AI from killing or enslaving humanity (they call this fostering "friendly AI"). Their position is that this is a low-probability but extremely severe risk that few people are working on preventing.

Whether AI is really more dangerous than, say, pandemics or asteroids, is left as an exercise for the reader.

80386 · 5 years ago

AI safety isn't an EA "preoccupation"; it's just weird enough and noticeable enough that it's easy to mistake existence and prevalence. It's also not even their weirdest position.

The first question on their list is about the 'problem' of wild animal suffering - and I've personally seen EAs argue that, because some animals are carnivorous, nature should be destroyed.

That's not even the weirdest position EAs take. Look up Brian Tomasik. Specifically, his paper about the possibility that electrons might suffer.

Concern about superhuman AI is one thing; bullet-biting utilitarianism is another entirely.

(This isn't the only place where their philosophical framework is stuck in the British Empire; they also tend to take a teleological view of history and moral development, and believe that their views are the self-evident progression of ethical development that every culture and civilization will come to eventually. They may not be as bad about this now as they used to be - there are questions about China now - but I don't think they're quite to the point of coming to terms with cultural contingency yet.)

80386 commented on Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products blog.mozilla.org/blog/202... · Posted by u/rebelwebmaster

prepend · 5 years ago

I think that’s when their values changes from being a technically excellent product to being a friendly company that values harmony over function.

So it did stick to their values, but their values seem superficial rather than functional.

As a user, I would rather have a better browser than a company full of people who think that being against gay marriage 10 years ago means they are dangerous to coworkers or whatnot.

I think it’s great for companies to choose their own values and make their own way. And I can prefer companies that focus on other things.

I don’t necessarily think firing Eich causes Mozilla to suck, but I think Brave is a much better browser and they have far fewer employees with less funding.

I don’t donate to Mozilla and one of the reasons is because their mission is so vague.

80386 · 5 years ago

Brave was a good browser. Now it's... what, a Chromium extension? I liked pre-rewrite Brave much more than post-rewrite. The tab contexts (or whatever they were called, it's been so long that I've forgotten) were great - pre-rewrite Brave had ten separate containers for cookies and so on, so if you kept Facebook in context 8, you'd only be logged into Facebook in context 8, and you could do all your other browsing in the nine other contexts.

This was also good for multiple accounts; most social media doesn't support clients anymore, or doesn't have good clients, and in order to keep separate topics separate, you need multiple accounts. So now I keep three different browsers open, because there's just no good way to do this otherwise.

I still mostly use Brave, but IMO it's much less differentiated from other browsers than pre-rewrite.