[–] 20 points 10 months ago

"Sounds like my friends and I can show up at your door in fake ICE outfits and make your gargle on our balls. And if you refuse, we'll beat your ass, and you won't do anything about it."

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  • [–] 8 points 10 months ago (1 child)

    I actually think this level of control over notifications is a GOOD thing. Trash apps will mix spam and useful notifications without a way to filter out the spam ones. Nextdoor is garbage for a lot of reasons, but granular notifications controls are not one of them. Arguably, defaulting all of them to "On" is scummy, but if they didn't, most users would probably never know they existed in the first place without UX handholding.

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  • [–] 7 points 10 months ago

    You get more stuff, more status, etc. Or alternatively, penalized, threatened, etc. Whatever it takes to motivate people to do the job. Even if paper money isn't a thing in communist societies (which it still is), money's just a symbol for debt. You're going to get something, somehow, for a job people greatly desire to be done without enough doers and they'll become "indebted" to you disproportionately for doing it.

    In Soviet society for instance, you might be provided a nice apartment in central Moscow if you were doing something "important". This assignment would be via your government-controlled employer and their agreements with some other government bureau that officially managed the buildings to dole them out to select people.

    So, same deal as anywhere else, just a different mechanism. Higher ration, bigger dacha, jump to the front of the line to get a car, etc.

    Compensation is usually not much about how dangerous a job is, though. It's more about how many people are willing to do it for any number of reasons. Some people are just not very risk-adverse, and figure they're going to be fine at a job that is more dangerous. And they'll be compensated at a normal level as long as there are enough such people to fill the need.

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  • [–] 3 points 10 months ago (1 child)

    I think AI backlash is intersecting anti-intellectualism; LLMs often use somewhat formal language, and if your writing style is too close to the style bots use because of their training set, you're now caught in the crossfire by LLM haters. Sucks, and might have a chilling effect on real discourse as AI slop propagates.

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  • [–] 0 points 10 months ago (5 children)

    Can only try to help unwilling people for so long that you have to consider that this kind of assistance is not limitless and has to be prioritized for people who are interested and willing to at least try to support themselves. Fill up shelters to use them, but when you're at capacity based on what the local government and its policies by extension of the voterbase's willingness to contribute financially can support, you have to make hard decisions.

    Will these people end up on the street? Probably. If this feels unreasonable, support candidates pushing to increase/reallocate funding for the program, or volunteer your own time and money to contribute.

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  • [–] 6 points 10 months ago (1 child)

    Cache-like storage, private user-specific data, blobby or otherwise schemaless data. Stuff like that. But IMO it's a matter of time until you find a need to operate against this data relationally, and then you regret using document storage. I've made this mistake twice now and do not intend to make it again. I now consider document storage architecture to be a performance optimization with significant tradeoffs, and not a choice to be made by default for nearly any scenario.

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  • [–] 41 points 10 months ago (4 children)

    I don't like tokens or cards. I like open play, just pay like $20 for all day access. I'm fortunate to have places like that around. The pay to play model penalizes you for being bad at or new to an arcade title or pinball machine, which mega blows and discourages people from trying out random games they might lose quickly at.

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    This is a rant.

    I used to be really optimistic and interested in scientific news. But I started noticing a pattern, and I can't get it out of my head. Nearly every experiment or study in the news seems to end inconclusively...like, every study says more study is needed despite whatever it is they got money to study. Why can't good experiments be designed and conducted that actually answer a meaningful question without weasel words and hand waving? Or in other words, if the study cannot make a meaningful conclusion that leads to insight and action instead of just data, design a better study.

    Here's a more specific example. I was reading about studies related to life on Mars. All of the experiments were designed to conclude with results that could not actually answer whether life exists on Mars. They would instead conclude that there's maybe water somewhere, or there are maybe biochemical signatures, or there are signs of an ancient ocean somewhere. But here's the thing: it doesn't matter if there are hints here or there that maybe some data could be speculatively interpreted as signs of life. Design a rover with a microscope that zooms into some damn rocks. Any other findings from any other study are a waste of time and money, because despite how much evidence that chemical XYZ exists and cannot possibly have come from non-life, no meaningful conclusion can be drawn other than "We gathered data, here's what the data we gathered looks like. It suggests something. We need more studies to gather more data that will suggest more studies to gather more data. Thanks, bye."

    I feel that the abundance of "meta-analyses" as a modern practice really underscores how little value most studies individually bring to the table. If most studies are so independently worthless that the scientific field finds they have to glue together lots of them to make a conclusion, it's a sign that the field is wasting tons of time and resources that should be better spent on answering the hard questions for real by designing rigorous experiments and analyses with results that are not speculative.

    I'll give another example. There are studies showing vitamin XYZ can help maybe prevent disease ABC. Well, does it or does it not, and exactly why, and how much is needed? What's the point at the end of the study if you still don't know? Why should a journal publish your paper if you can't claim anything as a result of your work? And yet, of course, they do. And I know the answer is so they can get more funding. But I doubt the group who originally funded it wanted the outcome to be "we didn't answer the question and need to study more".

    It feels like Nobel prizes are handed out to the rare few who actually design a study or experiment that conclusively answers a meaningful question because it's big enough to actually do that. But shouldn't this kind of science be the norm, not the exception? Like, can we have more groups collaborating to do big motivating and meaningful things like imaging a black hole as their goal? Why are these kinds of collaborations so rare?

    Ok, rant over. Carry on.

     

    I had a thought the other day in relation to how impossible it is for a large country to make everyone happy with broad policies. There are big differences in opinions, values, economics, and cultures across a population. What one city, county, province, etc prefers for policy seems to be universally be overridden by "higher level" governance levels going to the top if they so choose. Are there any countries where lower level, more specific jurisdictions get to set policy overrides instead of vice versa? Like, a place where nationwide laws are defaults, but smaller hierarchies can pass laws to supercede the higher defaults?

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