LumaBop's recent activity

  1. Comment on How can England possibly be running out of water? in ~enviro

    LumaBop
    Link
    Turns out private water companies have no financial incentive to improve infrastructure, so we lose trillions of litres a water a year to leaks and build zero new reservoirs. I think the real...

    Turns out private water companies have no financial incentive to improve infrastructure, so we lose trillions of litres a water a year to leaks and build zero new reservoirs. I think the real question isn’t how can we be running out of water, but how has it taken this long?

    7 votes

  2. Comment on Germany legal case alleging adblockers violate copyright in ~tech

    LumaBop
    Link Parent
    I assume that major browsers would comply by delisting adblockers from their official extension stores. That would be enough to prevent 99% of users from accessing them. They would probably have...

    I assume that major browsers would comply by delisting adblockers from their official extension stores. That would be enough to prevent 99% of users from accessing them. They would probably have some legal means to also pursue the maintainers, or at least hosts of open source projects - GitHub would probably comply with lawful requests to take down or geo-restrict access to repositories.

    This is often the issue: in principle these laws shouldn’t be enforceable, but often due to our reliance on particular gatekeepers, it is enough if the relevant government can convince that entity to comply with their requests.

    5 votes

  3. Comment on Germany legal case alleging adblockers violate copyright in ~tech

    LumaBop
    Link
    How ridiculous. A browser must process the HTML/CSS provided in order to render it, and the way in which it does so is subject to variation, and in particular may be modified to the user’s...

    How ridiculous. A browser must process the HTML/CSS provided in order to render it, and the way in which it does so is subject to variation, and in particular may be modified to the user’s preference. Should we say that when a website tries to use a feature which is deprecated, and the browser thus ignores the relevant code, the browser is performing an illegal modification to copyrighted code? Perhaps we should say that when a compiler optimises a program, it illegally modifies the source the code?

    Of course, a court of law will never consider these things because they do not understand how technology works.

    67 votes

  4. Comment on How can we fix UK universities? in ~life

    LumaBop
    Link Parent
    Very interesting. I’ll have to give that talk a look!

    Very interesting. I’ll have to give that talk a look!

  5. Comment on How can we fix UK universities? in ~life

    LumaBop
    Link Parent
    Ah, thank you so much for articulating this - it is exactly the right point. The idea that the goal of university is to get a job afterwards is entirely at odds with the nature of these...

    I don’t think you can separate the increasingly transactional nature of higher education with its devaluation

    there fundamentally needs to be more avenues for good job prospects than just a degree

    Ah, thank you so much for articulating this - it is exactly the right point. The idea that the goal of university is to get a job afterwards is entirely at odds with the nature of these institutions, and when the students and the government believe that that is what a university education is for, the system is riveted by contradiction and bound to collapse.

    Designing trade schools and apprenticeships to appeal to those students who only care about the outcome of a job could help that type of student avoid going to university, and fixing the funding system would help universities better serve the sort of student that belongs there.

    3 votes

  6. How can we fix UK universities?

    ~life Ask
    TL;DR: I’m interested in your thoughts about this the current problems in UK higher education, and how they can be fixed. I recently read an opinion piece in the Guardian about the problems...

    TL;DR: I’m interested in your thoughts about this the current problems in UK higher education, and how they can be fixed.

    I recently read an opinion piece in the Guardian about the problems currently faced by UK universities and their students. These problems aren’t new, but they’re getting worse year by year, and Simon articulates them particularly well.

    It seems to me that there are three main criticisms of our current university system: that it is too costly for students while failing to fund the universities adequately; that degrees do not provide enough value to students; and that there are too many students attending university, especially (so-called) “low value” degrees, but increasingly also “high value” areas such as STEM.

    The main solutions being presented are replacing students loans with a “graduate tax”, shuttering low-quality institutions and degrees, and sending more students to apprenticeships or trade schools rather than universities.

    My view on this, as someone who has recently graduated university, and will be returning next year to begin studying for a PhD, is conflicted. I can definitely see that these problems are real, but I’m not convinced by the solutions being offered.

    Firstly, I don’t think most people discussing these issues and offering their solutions are addressing the most fundamental problem, which is that universities have forgotten how to, or simply stopped, actually teaching. Many degrees only teach you what you need to know to pass the exams and produce acceptable coursework, which is not the point of a university degree.

    This is a very challenging issue, because obviously universities must assess their students. But the purpose of a degree, its value, lies not in the assessment, nor even in the certificate awarded upon its completion (despite what many people believe), but in how you can learn and grow to have a deeper and more rounded understanding of your degree area, and the world at large. A university degree should make you a more curious person and build your critical thinking, enabling you to think through and approach many problems intelligently. But instead universities are continuously lowering the bar necessary to pass, because failing students is too costly for them, and thus also lowering their teaching standards.

    The problem, it seems to me, is that the purpose of university is to educate, yet many who graduate university do not display the level of education, understanding and intelligence we would expect them to have achieved after investing at least three years of their life and tens of thousands of pounds in their education. This is not a crisis of too many students, but of a lack of quality in teaching. It seems to me that this has been driven by the funding model, which incentivises universities to grow their cohort size in order to receive more funding. Of course, this makes it harder to teach them all, and thus promotes the lowering of assessment standards so that students of sub-par quality - whether it be their work ethic, prior education, or simply learning at university that lacks - can graduate successfully.

    If this is our problem, then I don’t think any of the proposed solutions serve to ameliorate it. This problem is equally common to humanities as it is STEM subjects, so the issue is not in students studying in “low value” degree areas. Whilst an apprenticeship might provide better value to a student in terms of the skills they would acquire, it is addressing a different goal and need to a university education. And while a graduate tax might be fairer than our current loan system (which favour high earners who can pay the loan off faster), it would not solve the currently perverse financial incentives universities are subject to.

    The solution to this is obvious, but a hard sell. It is necessary to remove the financial incentive for universities to grow their cohort sizes. It seems to me that we must either fix, or at least cap, the funding universities receive, such that it does not grow with larger student bodies. Perhaps it should instead be linked to some performance metric, or maybe the faculty size - the more lecturers and other teaching staff the university employs, the better its funding. Of course, a complete solution to this will require a lot of thought and nuance, but I think it’s clear that the basic issue is the funding model.

    The value to be gained (as a society) from a well educated population is massive, but we are currently selling hopeful high school students up the river with underwhelming university degrees that don’t educate them properly. I believe it’s the wrong answer to say that these students should give up on their dreams of a university education. We need to fix the funding model so that universities are incentivised to provide as high quality teaching as possible, not to provide the lowest level acceptable to as many students as possible.

    12 votes

  7. Comment on Wikipedia loses challenge against UK Online Safety Act verification rules in ~tech

    LumaBop
    Link Parent
    Well, yes. People support it because they think it will make them/their children safer. A big data leak would show that OSA actually made them less safe. Then people would no longer support it.

    Well, yes. People support it because they think it will make them/their children safer. A big data leak would show that OSA actually made them less safe. Then people would no longer support it.

    1 vote

  8. Comment on Wikipedia loses challenge against UK Online Safety Act verification rules in ~tech

    LumaBop
    Link Parent
    If by some miracle we ended up with a proper privacy preserving and trustworthy government provided service for attesting age and similar personal information, then I would feel a lot less...

    If by some miracle we ended up with a proper privacy preserving and trustworthy government provided service for attesting age and similar personal information, then I would feel a lot less negative about OSA.

    It’s deeply frustrating knowing that these problems can be solved in robust, secure and private ways, but that the we choose not to do so.

    3 votes

  9. Comment on Wikipedia loses challenge against UK Online Safety Act verification rules in ~tech

    LumaBop
    Link Parent
    Specifically on OSA, it seems that for a very long time people in this country have believed that when a child accesses something they shouldn’t on the internet, it is not the fault of their...

    Specifically on OSA, it seems that for a very long time people in this country have believed that when a child accesses something they shouldn’t on the internet, it is not the fault of their parents, but rather of the internet in general, or the state for failing to regulate it. OSA is the natural conclusion of this line of reasoning.

    8 votes

  10. Comment on Wikipedia loses challenge against UK Online Safety Act verification rules in ~tech

    LumaBop
    Link Parent
    I totally agree with you, I just think that the implementation of age checks for OSA is so impossible and dangerous in terms of random third party companies getting access to sensitive personal...

    I totally agree with you, I just think that the implementation of age checks for OSA is so impossible and dangerous in terms of random third party companies getting access to sensitive personal information that that aspect of the law will become untenable.

    1 vote

  11. Comment on Wikipedia loses challenge against UK Online Safety Act verification rules in ~tech

    LumaBop
    Link
    OSA is clearly absurd and I expect we will see it fall eventually, but I think that will take a scandal - involving data used for user verification being leaked or stolen, or similar - for the...

    OSA is clearly absurd and I expect we will see it fall eventually, but I think that will take a scandal - involving data used for user verification being leaked or stolen, or similar - for the government to actually be forced to reckon with the utter ridiculousness of it. Until then we will just have to suffer.

    17 votes

  12. Comment on Over twenty-one days of talking with ChatGPT, an otherwise perfectly sane man became convinced he was a superhero (gifted link) in ~tech

    LumaBop
    Link Parent
    I disagree for several reasons. There are many people who, despite every benefit, clearly lack the level of independent thought necessary for a university degree. This has “fortunately” been...

    everyone could operate around a master degree’s level of intelligence

    I disagree for several reasons. There are many people who, despite every benefit, clearly lack the level of independent thought necessary for a university degree. This has “fortunately” been counterbalanced by a complete hollowing out of courses to make it possible for people who are either unwilling or unable to think or work to complete their degrees, so that universities can keep the money rolling in. Despite this, people still scrape through degrees without doing any work that could be described as intelligent, but are allowed to pass because it looks bad to fail students.

    So in the first place I disagree that most people could operate at a moderate to high level of intelligence (which is what I take you to mean when you say Master’s level) based on my own experience at university. But I also disagree that a Master’s degree is actually a high bar. Even at the actual intelligence and work ethic level required by real degrees, which is much lower, I disagree that most people could attain that. Most people simply lack the motivation necessary to actually apply themselves to challenging problems.

    This is not to say that education is not important, and that we should not strive to improve education systems for the benefit of the next generation of students. But most people currently alive are well beyond the point of having their education corrected. Worse is that the difficulty of improving the system for the next generation is probably beyond what we can now achieve, given that the structures of government and education are so filled with the sort of people who would rather stick their head in the sand and ignore these issues than actually put in the hard work to try to fix them.

    This comment has spiralled a little bit into negativity, but it really is very hard to see how we could possibly begin to fix this epidemic of poor education, when even the highest echelons of education are held captive by these sort of people. It’s still important to try, however - and it’s the duty of every intelligent person to try to educate those around them, and hopefully improve the world in even a very small way.

    13 votes

  13. Comment on Over twenty-one days of talking with ChatGPT, an otherwise perfectly sane man became convinced he was a superhero (gifted link) in ~tech

    LumaBop
    Link Parent
    Were you using ChatGPT on said Mac Mini? OpenAI is clearly accessing all data available to it (such as location, if available) to give more precise and “helpful” answers, even if it claims not to,...

    Were you using ChatGPT on said Mac Mini? OpenAI is clearly accessing all data available to it (such as location, if available) to give more precise and “helpful” answers, even if it claims not to, so it might have retrieved your device details automatically. Your hypothesis may also be correct, just wanted to mention this as well.

    Sidenote, this can be incredibly annoying, such as when I was holiday and ChatGPT insisted on giving information relevant to my current location, no matter how strong I insisted it should tell me about my home. Deeply frustrating.

    3 votes

  14. Comment on People with paranoid delusions of being hacked keep asking me for help in ~talk

    LumaBop
    Link Parent
    Comparisons to 1984 are not very apt. Yes, there is an overabundance of surveillance nowadays, which I don’t condone, but it’s an entirely different proposition. In 1984, the government is closely...

    Comparisons to 1984 are not very apt. Yes, there is an overabundance of surveillance nowadays, which I don’t condone, but it’s an entirely different proposition. In 1984, the government is closely and personally monitoring its citizens in order to control their lives almost entirely. In real life, data is collected by many different organisations and processed en-masse for the (relatively benign) purpose of advertising. Surveillance is less about control than it is convenience.

    You have to be delusional to believe that anyone cares enough about you, personally, that they would have an actual human look at the data that is collected about you. There really just isn’t any reason to do so.

    All this is not to say that real world surveillance doesn’t have a darker side - the recent news about the scale of the IDFs mass surveillance of Palestinian phone calls, for example, is alarming. But that’s no reason for the average person living in a free democracy to be concerned about the sort of personal surveillance the people discussed in this post are worried about.

    3 votes

  15. Comment on Recommendations for a obscure newer games in ~games

    LumaBop
    Link
    Gunpoint is a 2D stealth puzzle game where you play as a private investigator who likes to jump out of high windows. A Short Hike is a game about taking a short walk to the top of a nearby hill -...

    Gunpoint is a 2D stealth puzzle game where you play as a private investigator who likes to jump out of high windows.

    A Short Hike is a game about taking a short walk to the top of a nearby hill - but really it’s about having a fun time exploring a cute island, interacting with charming characters and playing fun mini-challenges.

    Jusant is a climbing game about uncovering the history of a lost civilisation.

    Outer Wilds is a space exploration game where you need to solve the mystery behind a solar system stuck in a timeloop.

    Gunpoint and A Short Hike are very short games (maybe 2 hours or so) and I recommend them especially strongly. For such a low time investment they are incredibly enjoyable.

    3 votes

  16. Comment on Google search flaw allows articles to vanish through "clever" third party censorship tactics in ~tech

    LumaBop
    Link
    If I’m reading this correctly, it sounds like the bug is caused by a misplaced String.toLower() or similar? Is there any other technical information on this bug, since the article is quite brief.

    If I’m reading this correctly, it sounds like the bug is caused by a misplaced String.toLower() or similar? Is there any other technical information on this bug, since the article is quite brief.

    4 votes

  17. Comment on Sleep discipline in ~life

    LumaBop
    Link Parent
    Fascinating - how do you modify this for lucid dreaming?

    Fascinating - how do you modify this for lucid dreaming?

    2 votes

  18. Comment on Brazilian comedian sentenced to eight years over discriminatory jokes in ~society

    LumaBop
    Link Parent
    I agree with a number of your points, but I think it’s wrong to insist we can only have a completely relative notion of what counts as discrimination. It is normal to have an agreed upon...

    I agree with a number of your points, but I think it’s wrong to insist we can only have a completely relative notion of what counts as discrimination.

    It is normal to have an agreed upon definition of these things in your society. That agreement comes through a democratic process, where elected representatives write laws, and the final decision on whether the laws apply or have been violated is given by a judge and a jury of peers.

    That way we can define discrimination in a way that is more than just one person’s individual opinion, and which reflects society at large.

    I believe in freedom of speech, but I also believe that personal and societal freedoms must be balanced. Hateful and violent speech cannot be protected above the lives of those who are hurt by it.

    2 votes

  19. Comment on Brazilian comedian sentenced to eight years over discriminatory jokes in ~society

    LumaBop
    Link Parent
    Are you referring to Palestine Action? That has nothing to do with free speech, although I agree that it a government overreach.

    Are you referring to Palestine Action? That has nothing to do with free speech, although I agree that it a government overreach.

  20. Comment on Brazilian comedian sentenced to eight years over discriminatory jokes in ~society

    LumaBop
    Link
    From reading this and a couple other sources: good. Sounds like he deserves it, and I hope his appeal is unsuccessful. Perhaps people in the US find this shocking, but in most places we don’t...

    From reading this and a couple other sources: good. Sounds like he deserves it, and I hope his appeal is unsuccessful.

    Perhaps people in the US find this shocking, but in most places we don’t actually tolerate racism/homophobia etc. Crucially, it seems that his intent was discriminatory. This was not satire, which might make it justifiable.

    11 votes