ACow_Adonis (u/ACow_Adonis)

ACow_Adonis commented on Training language models to be warm and empathetic makes them less reliable arxiv.org/abs/2507.21919... · Posted by u/Cynddl

allan_s · 11 days ago

A lot of companies I know have "kindness/empathy" in their value or even promote it as part of the company philosophy to the point it has already become a cliché (and so new companies explicitly avoid to put it explicitly)

I can say also a lot of DEI trainings were about being empathic to the minorities.

ACow_Adonis · 11 days ago

Well yes, but that's not actually empathy. Empathy has to be felt by an actual person. Indeed its literally the contrary/opposite case. They have to emphasise it specifically because they are reacting to the observation that they, as a giant congregate artificial profit-seeking legally-defined entity as opposed to a real one, are incapable of feeling such.

Do you also think that family values are ever present at startups that say we're like a family? It's specifically a psychological and social conditioning response to try to compensate for the things they're recognised as lacking...

ACow_Adonis commented on Australia widens teen social media ban to YouTube, scraps exemption reuters.com/legal/litigat... · Posted by u/Brajeshwar

ElCapitanMarkla · 24 days ago

I don't really understand why Youtube won't let me create a profile, on my paid family account that I'm paying $29 NZD a month for, which lets me whitelist channels.

I'm happy for my kids to have free access to certain channels on youtube, but the mind numbing shorts, and shit they find on random channels just does my head in. And it seems to be getting worse, I'm not sure if its that they are getting older and able to search for more content or if the content is just getting worse, maybe both, but I'm probably just going to cancel the sub so they at least have to put up with terrible ads if they try to access it.

ACow_Adonis · 24 days ago

Presumably for the same reason Google doesn't let you block or filter shit sites.

If you genuinely let user's preferences be taken into account, it's incredibly hard to make money from ads if the user's true preferences are not to be shown them.

The entire point of ads is to manipulate and change user preferences and behaviours.

So any preferences or customisation has to be minimal enough that their use can only partially implement user preferences. White listing is a step too far against the purpose of YouTube.

Thus Google will always be biased to not letting you implement full customisability and user control.

ACow_Adonis commented on 12ft.io Taken Down newsmediaalliance.org/tak... · Posted by u/afeuerstein

Workaccount2 · a month ago

ABP, the original uBlock Origin, saw the writing on the wall a decade ago or whenever and tried to mediate a truce between users and advertisers.

ABP would allow through ads that weren't egregious, and users could provide compensation for content they consumed.

People however either can't read or can't comprehend the writing on the wall, so instead they rioted against ABP and moved to uBlock Origin.

I know there are so many bad and greedy things that companies do. And we also talk about them a lot.

But we almost never talk about how greedy the end users are. And you cannot solve problems without understanding the full problem.

ACow_Adonis · a month ago

Except its a bit like that PERL quote.

You have a problem. You want to figure out a way to get people to pay for things like news, investigative reporting, art, community and positive externalities.

You think, I know, i'll use ads!

Now you have two problems.

ACow_Adonis commented on Intel to boost gross margins – new products must deliver 50% gross profit tomshardware.com/tech-ind... · Posted by u/walterbell

ACow_Adonis · a month ago

So i guess overnight we have a new floor for unempirical projections of future project profit :D

A lot of made up numbers now have a min(50.0) equivalent somewhere :P

ACow_Adonis commented on US economy shrank 0.5% in the first quarter, worse than earlier estimates apnews.com/article/econom... · Posted by u/Aloisius

Aloisius · 2 months ago

I'm a bit confused about the bit about the "Imports expanded 37.9%, fastest since 2020, and pushed GDP down by nearly 4.7 percentage points" bit.

Presumably when they calculated GDP previously, they hadn't seen quite as much imports, but had seen higher spending, thus they misattributed some of it to domestic products rather than imports, though I'm a bit confused as to how they underestimated imports given everything is declared. Perhaps some changes in the price index?

Though other articles talk about the expected GDP next quarter being higher because they don't expect a surge of imports to continue, which makes no sense to me unless one assumes spending remains the same with or without imports.

ACow_Adonis · 2 months ago

See this article: Why do econ journalists keep making this basic mistake.

https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/why-do-econ-journalists-keep-m...

Source: am economist, and the writer of the blog is 100% correct.

Reporting and commentary on GDP and economics stats is just generally bad.

ACow_Adonis commented on Research suggests Big Bang may have taken place inside a black hole port.ac.uk/news-events-an... · Posted by u/zaik

kibwen · 2 months ago

Why not? If you can't observe it, test it, and reproduce it, then it lies outside the realm of science and in the realm of belief. Until someone figures out a way to experimentally verify the big bang hypothesis (or any other explanation for the origin of the universe or what came "before"), it's entirely fair to attribute it to whatever you feel like, be it a god or anything else. There is no law of the universe that guarantees that science is capable of answering all questions.

ACow_Adonis · 2 months ago

Well, I think surely the entirely fair thing to do is to just admit we don't know rather than make any attribution or imply any possession of an answer to those questions?

ACow_Adonis commented on Airline demand between Canada and United States collapses, down 70%+ onemileatatime.com/news/a... · Posted by u/amichail

ACow_Adonis · 5 months ago

Your countrymen literally voted in Trump, and they did it with broad support across many parts of the country. You can argue that a significant proportion didn't, which is true, but while democrats and the like show increasing distaste which can be explained along general partisan lines, on the other side is a significant number of Trump supporters who show themselves strongly supportive of and behind his general policies and proclamations. To pretend otherwise or call that fearmongering is to deny all reality.

ACow_Adonis commented on Ask HN: Why are banks charging so many fees for accounts and cards? · Posted by u/Lopsii

BenjiWiebe · 7 months ago

Well, somehow not every bank/credit card needs to charge fees to make money.

I have two bank accounts and 5 credit cards - no fees. And I'm not a rich SV programmer either. If I was, I'd probably get one of those fancy cards that does have fees.

ACow_Adonis · 7 months ago

Yes, this is product differentiation, features, demand elasticity, network/ecosystem lock-in, loyalty tax etc.

Just as software and internet also has a mixture of free to use, once off, subscription, usage metering and fixed cost revenue, so too does banking and credit services vary their fee revenue structure and sources for its various financial services and products.

It's very hard to make universal statements to how these are structured, but about the only thing I think I can say is that if you aren't paying fees, the commercial entity must be aiming to make revenue off of you being a customer in some way. Some savvy customers can get services with a net positive value for free, but the business at large scale is going to try to extract what value it can.

It's hard to give a universal statement on price structuring, but generally fees can help squeeze revenue out of sticky customers, customers who need your services, customers who do not provide enough net capital or volume-based revenue to cover your costs.

You can also use fees to explicitly target or select for particular users. For instance, in some money and credit markets or markets which offer various costly rewards you can sometimes split your customer base into good revenue sources and costly freeloaders. A fee structure can even help signal or self-select these costly customers out of a product or identify them for your other product lines.

ACow_Adonis commented on Ask HN: Why are banks charging so many fees for accounts and cards? · Posted by u/Lopsii

ACow_Adonis · 7 months ago

I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around someone someone in business not understanding charging fees.

You charge fees to get money.

Banks are there to make profits.

You say that banks don't make much money off of it, but maybe your idea of "much money" and mine are different.

In my country, it is reported that bank fees make up approximately 5% of bank revenue, and I'm reasonably sure we have less fees than others. I don't know what business or country you're in, but there's a pretty good guess your country takes in more money in fees, and earning a marginal 5% on anything is not chump change.

May I humbly suggest that your premise is wrong. They ARE significant sources of revenue and profit and banks charge them because they are in the business of generating profits.