> Screen Time gives you a report card. And if the grade is bad, the design makes one thing clear:
> That's a you problem.
> It measures your usage. Tracks your behavior. Gives you a weekly report card. If the numbers are too high?
> You picked it up too much.
> You spent too long.
> You failed your limit.
> Try again next week.
> Try harder.
> Screen Time is a blame shift dressed in a soft font.
> ... What if the exhaustion everybody feels isn't a moral failure but the completely rational response to being made responsible for an ecosystem of objects that never stop asking?
> Everything you buy is the beginning of a relationship you'll be maintaining until one of you dies or gets discontinued.
For adults: nothing requires you to use a smartphone. Buy that Casio watch if you want. Use those wired headphones and never pair them again (I do).
EDIT: Some things require a smartphone, not nothing.
Seems like if it were possible to implement end to end encryption where google had no way to decrypt a communication, google could avoid liability for facilitating transmission of CSAM?
Shouldn't this big liability be pushing the big tech firms to do so?
> For those who get arrested due to colorimetric testing, “over 90% of people are taking a plea deal because they can’t afford to remain in jail and wait six months for laboratory tests,” Walsh said.
This touches on a question to which I'd love to know the answer: what would happen if those charged with crimes could not waive their right to a speedy trial and plea deals were disallowed?
For the accused: those with low resources would go to trial with less time to mount a defense. Disallowing plea deals would remove the possibility of coercing lower-severity conviction pleas.
For the prosecutor: less time to mount a prosecution.
Benefits to courts and jails: much cleaner and more open dockets, jails cleared out much quicker.
Presumably this would lead to more rational charges - fewer charges and charges that were higher priority and easier to prove.
In the short term, prosecutors would have no choice but to drop a huge number of charges as they would be overwhelmed.
EDIT: here's an interesting data point where it looks like NYC passed a law that required prosecutors to have all evidence ready prior to the speedy trial date. It seems like it drove a lot of dismissals of low level stuff:
It's obviously a problem with efficiency, resources and incentives. Earlier court dates is reshuffling deck chairs on the titanic, basically after the ship sank.
Since the problem is about labs and technology, and that the state labs declared themselves too busy to do justice, the solution is to provide accountability for those decision-makers. Just to reinforce: the reporter read the label on these field drug tests police were using to charge crimes, and ascertained that they were unfit for this use; yet the state lab which should have been broadcasting this information to the police, not only failed, but refused to test the same articles for months and months, until the case was literally at trial. I know it wouldn't make good press, but this story should be "labs, labs, labs, what in the world is wrong with state labs". You can't fix it with new laws, you need better people in charge of these labs.
Private jails generally don't want this because they are paid by the government for the number of people they hold and many states need the slave labor of the incarcerated.
Cynical outcome: the system can't handle the case load and instead of scaling, it just refuses to adjudicate any dispute that doesn't involve a noble. Justice between commoners is effectively abandoned as a duty by the state, and left to vigilantism.
> it just refuses to adjudicate any dispute that doesn't involve a noble
Oh I got news for you, that already happened.
Anyone that's had their car broken into, bike stolen, or house burgled can tell you that cops won't do anything.
And if you look at serious crimes like homicide, you'll find a clearance rate of about 66%. And that's their self reported clearance rate. It's not successful prosecution. That's just the "we've looked into this enough and have decreed we think this person did it". It's a lot worse if you look at crimes like rape.
The crimes that police actually police are property crimes. Specifically for the nobles. Cops are pretty good at responding to stores being robbed or a crime against a wealthy and well connected person. Steal $1000 from a target and you'll get the book thrown at you. Steal a $1000 bike in front of the same target and cops will shrug and say there's nothing they can do about it.
Your example is flawed because Target has cameras and a security staff watching for shoplifters, and they will detain you as you walk out the door, and they will provide video and eyewitness testimony to the prosecutor. It's a slam dunk case.
The shoplifters who do manage to walk out undetected are of no interest to the police, as there's no basis for a case against them.
Target has security cameras on the outside and staff constantly walking around wrangling carts. That's why I picked this exact example. The evidence is pretty much the same.
At many locations, cars at grocery stores get broken into pretty frequently. Yet it's unusual for cops to ever do anything about those cases. That's not due to a lack of evidence, most grocery stores have cameras throughout the lot.
Hell, it's even less of an excuse today due to the amount of surveillance via flock cameras cities have adopted. Yet cops still don't do a thing about this sort of theft.
Cops don't do anything about theft if it does not rise to level of a felony period. Most shoplifters don't get arrested until they hit felony level either.
Reason they get arrested for felony shoplifting is big box stores gift wrap those convictions. They have watched them, tracked exact items they have stolen down to UPC with price, have all the video/spreadsheet and it's all handed to cop/prosecutor on DVD. Those cases are so easy for prosecutor because conviction rate is ~100% and any testifying required is all paid for by big box store.
On bigger note, as society, we don't know how to handle people who have antisocial behavior. I'm not talking big stuff but low-level stuff that still impacts quality of life.
Vast majority of time when shoplifters get arrested, it's because they are still at scene of the "crime". AKA, they enter big box store, facial recognition fires and off duty cop there is notified or cops are called. They show up, take the person into custody and get their gift wrap.
Person stealing the bike is long gone before cops are notified.
> On bigger note, as society, we don't know how to handle people who have antisocial behavior. I'm not talking big stuff but low-level stuff that still impacts quality of life.
Singapore has it figured out but nobody here likes to admit it. Fines are broadly ineffective and imprisonment too costly, when what most people really need is to get get smacked hard with a stick a few times.
Kids picking up carts aren't going to detain anyone. It's the detaining that makes it work. The cops just come pick them up, they have eyewitnesses and video. Easy work.
The security guards that do the actual detaining are often off-duty LEO picking up extra hours. Even Kroger here has an armed officer at the exit door. So they can legally detain you and even arrest you.
True that they don't care about the bike outside. It's not their property.
They cannot detain you. Cops can detain you, Target staff can insist you have to stay, but they cannot easily and practically bar you from leaving.
They can initiate a citizen's arrest, which would permit them to detain you But if they are wrong, and you've committed no felony, that guard is civilly and criminally liable for false imprisonment -- a pretty serious charge. Most store security are unwilling to risk their own personal necks to protect the company's interest in $20 of shampoo or whatever.
In IL, a "shopkeeper" can definitely detain someone:
> (a) Detention. Any merchant who has reasonable grounds to believe that a person has committed retail theft may detain the person, on or off the premises of a retail mercantile establishment, in a reasonable manner and for a reasonable length of time for all or any of the following purposes:
> (1) To request identification;
> (2) To verify such identification;
> (3) To make reasonable inquiry as to whether such person has in his possession unpurchased merchandise and to make reasonable investigation of the ownership of such merchandise;
> (4) To inform a peace officer of the detention of the person and surrender that person to the custody of a peace officer;
> (5) In the case of a minor, to immediately make a reasonable attempt to inform the parents, guardian or other private person interested in the welfare of that minor and, at the merchant's discretion, a peace officer, of this detention and to surrender custody of such minor to such person.
Hah, my phone was stolen and being sold on eBay. I found it because the person who bought it on eBay got my contact info and asked me to unlock the phone, I refused, he demanded a refund from the seller and gave me the seller's info, who lived about ten minutes away from me.
I found my phone. On my phone, and each and every phone I bothered to try, the IMEI failed checksumming because the last two digits had been transposed. Effect: seller looked "legit" (hah), and I couldn't find the listing by searching my actual IMEI.
What was on his page of listings? 100+ phones, most "activation locked", all "no chargers, cables, accessories.
Same with laptops. "No chargers, no cables, no accessories", many "locked".
All ridiculous prices (like $500 for a 'like new' m3 pro MBP).
Gave this info to the police.
They could not care less.
"Well, he probably didn't steal them himself..." (i.e. even they felt pretty sure it was all stolen).
"Isn't it still a crime to knowingly sell stolen property?"
"..."
"..."
Could not care less. They had a slam dunk case in mine alone. My phone had been stolen, a police report had been filed with them, and it had shown up in California where someone who bought it on eBay gave them the seller's info, someone who lived near me.
The police will try to discourage from reporting that at all, and if you insist you'll get the crime number and promise that nothing will ever be done.
They even refuse to send the patrol that could recover a stolen car despite the owner pinpointing it to the very specific garage based on the GPS tracking.
The police will, however, beat you and arrest if you dare ro protest against killing kids with bombs.
I really do appreciate the sentiment, and in a flippant sense I agree, but if we're being real, the potential for harm to innocents, at least in the short/near term, is far greater if society devolves into vigilante mobs; study the Cultural Revolution if you want a realistic picture of some of the failure modes here. On the other hand, a period of chaos might be beneficial in the long term; that's the accelerationist position. Worth considering, but be careful with that mode of thinking. The ends justifying the means has gotten a great many people killed for ends that never manifested.
Another thing that enables the plea bargain system is the existence of bail, which has long been criticized for being a pay-to-win scheme baking inequality into the legal system. It's also seen by other parts of the world as bizarre.
You just...don't hold people before their court date if they're unlikely to harm other people. If they can be released on bail, there's no reason they shouldn't be without the grift.
Waiving rights is weird. It’s well understood that you can’t waive your right not to be a slave, for example. Why should you be able to waive any right? The 6th amendment doesn’t say “unless the accused doesn’t want it.”
You can waive your right not to be a slave, but no one can gain the right to legally own slaves. The 13th amendment doesn't guarantee the rights of people to live free, it bans the practice of slavery. If you find someone living in slavery you don't arrest them for being a slave, you arrest the person who enslaved them. If someone asks you to do something illegal for them, you are obliged to say no; even if they are the only person directly impacted and they insist they want it, it is not in your authority to grant the request.
You can choose not to exercise any right, that's what makes it a right. Freedom of religion does not imply an obligation to practice religion, freedom of speech does not compel speech, right to bear arms does not imply an obligation to bear arms, etc. Your right to a swift and speedy trial is likewise something you can choose not to exercise. Things would be different if the law was all trials must be swift and speedy.
> Your right to a swift and speedy trial is likewise something you can choose not to exercise. Things would be different if the law was all trials must be swift and speedy.
I think there's a difference between waiving a right and not exercising a right.
If I don't own a gun, I'm not waiving my right to own a gun. Waiving my right would be something like, signing up for a registry which makes it actually illegal for me to own a gun, and I could go to prison if I buy one. I can decide not to exercise my right to life by jumping off a bridge, but I can't generally waive my right to life and make it legal for someone else to kill.
In short: you aren't required to exercise your rights, but someone else isn't allowed to violate them regardless of whether you're exercising them or not.
Well if you choose not to exercise your right to a swift and speedy trial you're not signing a registry saying you will never exercise the right in future trials. The word waive does not necessarily imply permanent relinquishment, it only implies the voluntary nature of the relinquishment.
Regardless of the word you choose to use for it, the point is that a swift and speedy trial is a right you have. There's nothing fundamentally illegal about a long trial taking place, you just can't force it upon someone. Slavery on the otherhand is explicitly forbidden. You can waive your right to freedom all day long, it doesn't make slavery any less illegal.
> In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defense.
> Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
As for permitting someone to kill you, this falls very much into the same category of explicitly forbidden. Murder is illegal, and "he was asking for it" is not a valid defense. On the other hand, something like euthanasia, so long as you're in a jurisdiction that does not consider it murder, is permitted. In neither case is your right to live or lack thereof a question.
Your right to life is very much a question when the state kills you. For example, George Floyd's assailants were convicted of violating his civil rights, in addition to the murderer being convicted of murder. And Floyd declaring that he waived his civil rights wouldn't have changed that.
I think we should allow people to declare that they will accept a non-speedy trial. But we should allow people to assert their rights at any time even if they have previously declared they will not. It should not be possible to waive your rights in a way that's binding upon you in the future. The combination of these things would mean that effectively the state has to prosecute you within whatever window is defined as "speedy" because otherwise you could wait until that window expires, then say "whups, changed my mind, you violated my right to a speedy trial, I'm going home now."
Obviously this isn't how things actually work. But how things work and how they should work are often pretty distant, especially when it comes to the justice system. I also have major problems with things like plea bargaining and binding arbitration which are other staples of the American system.
The speed which enables the most fair outcome overall is subject to interpretation. More time to prepare your case is probably good, but the longer the process drags out, the greater portion of your finite life you've lost to the process. Weighing these two factors, with all the other various factors, can't be done objectively for a generalized case that can apply to all real cases, hence giving the accused some amount of say over the matter.
Plea deals were illegal for the majority of America's history.
You could help fix this problem by removing the 'trial' tax. Currently you receive a much lower sentence if you take the plea. If a punishment is truly fair based on the crime the sentence should be required by law to be the same in both cases.
And are still illegal/unused in the vast majority of the rest of the world.
And in most of those jurisdictions where it is a possibility, its use is massively less (less than 1% per capita) and also far more regulated, and subject to review. In the US a judge ostensibly has the power of veto over a plea deal, though in practice this is nearly never exercised unless the miscarriage of justice (in either direction) is so egregious that it can't easily be ignored.
These themes have been going around and around for a while.
One thing I've seen asserted:
> What he demonstrated is that Claude can, with detailed supervision, produce a technically rigorous physics paper. What he actually demonstrated, if you read carefully, is that the supervision is the physics. Claude produced a complete first draft in three days... The equations seemed right... Then Schwartz read it, and it was wrong... It faked results. It invented coefficients...
The argument that AI output isn't good enough is somewhat in opposition to the idea that we need to worry about folks losing or never gaining skills/knowledge.
There are ways around this:
"It's only evident to experts and there won't be experts if students don't learn"
But at the end of the day, in the long run, the ideas and results that last are the ones that work. By work, I mean ones that strictly improve outcomes (all outputs are the same with at least one better). This is because, with respect to technological progress, humans are pretty well modeled as just a slightly better than random search for optimal decisioning where we tend to not go backwards permanently.
All that to say that, at times, AI is one of the many things that we've come up with that is wrong. At times, it's right. If it helps on aggregate, we'll probably adopt it permanently, until we find something strictly better.
AI is extremely good at producing well formatted bullshit. You need to be constantly on guard against stuff that sounds and looks right but ultimately is just noise. You can also waste a ton of time on this. Especially OpenAI's offering shows poorly in this respect: it will keep circling back to its own comfort zone to show off some piece of code or some concept that it knows a lot about whilst avoiding the actual question. It's really good at jumping to the wrong conclusions (and making it sound like some kind of profound insight). But the few times that it is on the money make up for all of that noise. Even so, I could do without the wasted time and endless back and forths correcting the same stuff over and over again, it is extremely tedious.
Complexifiers for teaching: K12 cash comp in major population centers (CPS, SFUSD, Philly, MSP, &c) is sharply higher than that median, and, more importantly, teachers get a huge amount of non-cash comp. Can't say enough how valuable a defined-benefit pension is. All-in comp for a lot of rank-and-file K12 teachers in major metros is competitive with software development (in those regions; obviously excluding SFUSD).
I think people can reasonably go back and forth about whether they should be more compensated, but I don't think there's a reasonable conversation to have about teaching not being a well-compensated career path. I know this surprises a lot of people.
I assume the CTU came up a lot at the dinner table, haha.
Shrug clearly teachers are paid more than the median wage. There isn't much to argue there.
Modeling wage/salary is pretty straightforward for the majority of jobs (weighted by number of people working the job). There really aren't too many surprises.
Monopoly/Oligopoly union power, licensing, labor supply, regulatory/compliance restrictions/barriers, and product/service output value are pretty much most of it?
Hell if I know. This thread is based on a claim that people go into nursing and teaching out of altruism, and not for compensation. I'm pretty sure that's not true. Both are well-compensated, safe paths to a comfortable lifestyle and, especially for teaching, to a secure retirement.
No teacher is going to tell you they're not altruistic, and that they're in it for the money. They see themselves as doing good, and I agree that they are. But that's not what drives entrance into those fields.
Nah, that argument isn't going to get us anywhere: big school districts actually have incentive plans to get teachers masters degrees. New teachers don't need them, the district will reimburse some amount of tuition, and set you up with tuition discounts at partner universities. Once you have the masters, you get a significant pay bump. The masters situation with K12 education is a benefit more than it is a cost.
> ...the employees of Random House don’t need to be paid as much as the employees at Palantir, because Random House is perceived (by its employees) as fundamentally good, something that serves humanity, while Palantir designs software that the government uses to find targets for drone strikes. Jobs at Random House are much harder to get than jobs at Palantir, even though jobs at Random House are paid much more poorly.
An interesting take, particularly the assertion that "jobs at Random House are much harder to get than jobs at Palantir." I'd be absolutely 100% shocked if that were true.
Generally, the more a job pays, the harder it is to get hired. These are generally correlated with job-obtaining-difficulty:
> the more a job pays, the harder it is to get hired
That's not axiomatically true, like, at all.
The odds of being hired vary according to the supply of qualified applicants vs available positions. Tech companies with large profit margins will be able to offer higher wages than businesses with lower margins - and do so because they're competing with other tech companies, and (for the most part) not companies in other sectors - so assuming pay is a differentiator across domains can't be assumed. Over the long term, pay differential within a sector will motivate more people to become qualified for jobs within it, but at any particular moment cross-sector compensation isn't really relevant to the question.
This isn't to say the original assertion is true, as they don't offer any evidence, but it wouldn't be shocking to find out that a publishing company has more qualified applicants per job posting than any particular tech company.
And yet I don't know any software engineers in my personal circle who would be willing to work for palantir, and so they must have a fairly hard time finding people willing, thus it can't be as difficult as places where this is not the case (in the same industry).
If you go to the last (2356th!) page, you will see eight posts from 2023 and 2024, mostly few months apart. (But even none of those are good)
Then in 2025 @nawazdhandala starts going wild with 22 articles on January 6th. And from that point on it's basically just all him and it keeps accelerating.
The unfortunate situation is that self-driving vehicles need to be fantastically superior to human drivers to secure the public trust.
Self-driving vehicles that are much better than human drivers aren't enough.
It's similar to making alternative software targeting an entrenched incumbent. The disruptor needs to add value that overcomes the friction of switching at a minimum and then more to make it worthwhile.
> Young people are consuming news less frequently than older people...
> Young people are also less interested in news...
Haven't the youth always consumed less news and been less interested? The question is if the current youth consume less and are less interested compared to when the current old people were young, no?
> That's a you problem.
> It measures your usage. Tracks your behavior. Gives you a weekly report card. If the numbers are too high?
> You picked it up too much.
> You spent too long.
> You failed your limit.
> Try again next week.
> Try harder.
> Screen Time is a blame shift dressed in a soft font.
> ... What if the exhaustion everybody feels isn't a moral failure but the completely rational response to being made responsible for an ecosystem of objects that never stop asking?
> Everything you buy is the beginning of a relationship you'll be maintaining until one of you dies or gets discontinued.
For adults: nothing requires you to use a smartphone. Buy that Casio watch if you want. Use those wired headphones and never pair them again (I do).
EDIT: Some things require a smartphone, not nothing.
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