A1kmm's recent activity

  1. Comment on The rise of elevated stupidity - America’s hot-take economy has created a kind of smart that is indistinguishable from stupid in ~life

    A1kmm
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    Unfortunately - and I think this is the point of the article - people can be very adept at copying trusted ways of presenting information while still being disingenuous. It is possible to copy the...

    Unfortunately - and I think this is the point of the article - people can be very adept at copying trusted ways of presenting information while still being disingenuous. It is possible to copy the style (including bibliographic references) without actually improving the quality of the material.

    There are many ways of doing this: reference another work but inaccurately portray what the document you are referencing says. Cherry-pick examples from literature that paint a picture contrary to the general trend. Cite widely discredited information but don't mention that it is discredited. Reference other false news / misleading material from one of the many other people in your bubble - perhaps even from your own network. Start a new think tank or 'peer reviewed' scientific journal where reviewers are pre-screened to be people who support your viewpoint, with policies that reject any opposing views (see: Journal of Creation), and everyone can start citing that.

    So I'd say the presence of a bibliography is not a reliable metric - and verifying the citations would require recursively verifying the graph of referenced documents, which eventually becomes an impossible task.

    9 votes
  2. Comment on 3D-printed guns are getting more capable and accessible in ~tech

    A1kmm
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    Maybe the most effective way governments could limit the effectiveness of sharing of this type of design through decentralised technologies would be to spam millions of credible but non working...

    Maybe the most effective way governments could limit the effectiveness of sharing of this type of design through decentralised technologies would be to spam millions of credible but non working designs and instructions, and likewise spam recommendations of the non-working designs, so it is impossible to find the working designs without having real world networks back to the creator. When combined with attacking and infiltrating those real world networks, this could effectively maintain gun control in countries that want to do so.

  3. Comment on Subway bread does not meet tax exempt legal definition of bread, Irish court rules in ~food

    A1kmm
    Link Parent
    I think that it probably depends where you live. Bread in most parts of the world has just enough sugar to feed the yeast to make it rise. Products such as 'banana bread' do have more sugar...

    I think that it probably depends where you live. Bread in most parts of the world has just enough sugar to feed the yeast to make it rise. Products such as 'banana bread' do have more sugar everywhere in the world, but banana bread is considered a form of cake.

    In North America, on the other hand, the standard is to add significantly more sugar (possibly in the form of a corn syrup). To the palates of most non-Americans, American sandwich bread is more like cake in terms of the sweetness.

    So it is unsurprising that an American company rolling out products similar to what they sell in their country of origin to other parts of the world would encounter differences in how their product is locally categorised.

    It is probably also a good example of where localisation of products to local norms would have been better practice than blind copying when entering a new market (similarly, for example, that same chain also rolls out imperial units in naming their products to countries where those units are not in current use or well understood).

    4 votes
  4. Comment on Devs of accessibility extension start group to lobby Google on extension devs rights after being removed from Chrome in ~tech

    A1kmm
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    I think it is an interesting idea for those who are building on a platform to form a union-type body to collectively negotiate with the creators of the platform in an attempt to balance the...

    I think it is an interesting idea for those who are building on a platform to form a union-type body to collectively negotiate with the creators of the platform in an attempt to balance the imbalance of power between a big platform creator and each individual application developer.

    I think it will definitely be interesting to watch to see if this type of organisation is effective at achieving its goals.

    6 votes
  5. Comment on Reddit starts an Ethereum scalability competition in order to launch Community Points (monetization of karma) site-wide in ~tech

    A1kmm
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    I really don't understand the value of a blockchain solution that is only meaningful in the context of a centralised website. If you don't trust Reddit in this, using this wouldn't make sense,...

    I really don't understand the value of a blockchain solution that is only meaningful in the context of a centralised website. If you don't trust Reddit in this, using this wouldn't make sense, because Reddit still has significant control over the scheme. If everyone using it trusts Reddit, then there are much more efficient and privacy conscious schemes possible that would rely on Reddit as a trusted central party.

    4 votes