skybrian's recent activity

  2. Comment on Exposing the Honey influencer scam in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    Which browsers? Maybe browser vendors will block this extension from their stores? I’m not sure how much I should care about advertiser-versus-advertiser scamming or disruptions to advertising...

    Which browsers? Maybe browser vendors will block this extension from their stores?

    I’m not sure how much I should care about advertiser-versus-advertiser scamming or disruptions to advertising ecosystems.

    3 votes

  3. Comment on Bluesky's growing pains in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    Oh, I actually have that turned off and forgot about it! Oops. There's something else I'd like to see, though. There are some people who retweet things I like and others who don't. So I'd rather...

    Oh, I actually have that turned off and forgot about it! Oops.

    There's something else I'd like to see, though. There are some people who retweet things I like and others who don't. So I'd rather it be something that could be set per account that I follow, like on Mastodon.

    1 vote

  4. Comment on US Congress' age debate reignites over member living in retirement home in ~society

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    Age limits are a blunt instrument, but does seem like the most straightforward solution.

    Age limits are a blunt instrument, but does seem like the most straightforward solution.

    7 votes

  5. Comment on Bluesky's growing pains in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    Banning Singal on Bluesky doesn’t keep him from posting messages to his followers on Twitter, though, so it would be a performative action that doesn’t directly solve the problem. To actually fix...

    Banning Singal on Bluesky doesn’t keep him from posting messages to his followers on Twitter, though, so it would be a performative action that doesn’t directly solve the problem. To actually fix it, they need to moderate what Singal’s followers do on Bluesky.

    (Substitute anyone else who has accounts on multiple services - I don’t actually know what Singal or his followers did.)

    6 votes

  6. Comment on Bluesky's growing pains in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    Yes, absolutely. The UI is improving fairly quickly, though, so who knows. Also, there might be third-party workarounds.

    Yes, absolutely. The UI is improving fairly quickly, though, so who knows. Also, there might be third-party workarounds.

    1 vote

  7. Comment on o3 - wow in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    Only a guess, but I think that’s an unlikely scenario. I don’t imagine AGI will be magic in the sense of “automatically solves R&D.” There will be bottlenecks and Amdahl’s law applies. In the case...

    Only a guess, but I think that’s an unlikely scenario. I don’t imagine AGI will be magic in the sense of “automatically solves R&D.” There will be bottlenecks and Amdahl’s law applies. In the case of drugs, doing medical trials will be a bottleneck, some subproblems of improving medical trials have political aspects to them, and AGI isn’t likely to magically solve politics.

    When Amdahl’s law doesn’t apply, things might get a little weird, though?

    1 vote

  8. Comment on o3 - wow in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    Maybe NVidia is a bubble, or maybe people continue to find new usages for the de-facto standard matrix multiplication hardware, or maybe their competitors catch up enough that their lead...

    Maybe NVidia is a bubble, or maybe people continue to find new usages for the de-facto standard matrix multiplication hardware, or maybe their competitors catch up enough that their lead disappears. All sorts of scenarios and AGI is only one. It’s 6.6% of the S&P 500 and I don’t know enough to weight it any differently.

    Despite all the attempts at rigor by stock market analysts, stock prices aren’t built on rigorous evaluation. They’re built on hints and guesses, hopes and fears.

  9. Comment on Bluesky's growing pains in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    I see that as a jurisdictional hack to avoid having to pass judgement on what’s happening on the entire Internet. (And Twitter in particular.) It may prove unviable, but they’re going to try to...

    I see that as a jurisdictional hack to avoid having to pass judgement on what’s happening on the entire Internet. (And Twitter in particular.) It may prove unviable, but they’re going to try to avoid increasing the scope of what their moderators have to investigate, since they’re already scrambling to ramp up moderation.

    One thing I think this controversy shows is the limits of decentralized moderation. Users can already block Singal and any alternative moderation service can block him too. It’s not going to keep Bluesky itself from having to make a call about what to do with the official moderation service that everyone uses.

    Also, journalists sometimes limit scope too. To really cover what Singal and his allies and opponents are doing, the reporter would have to do a deeper investigation to figure out what’s true, and it seems they decided not to do that, just reporting on what they could find easily. They might not have known what to look for in Singal’s Twitter feed?

    Since it’s easy to do, they did link to an article that Singal wrote complaining that Bluesky users are sending him death threats and attempting to dox him. They posted the wrong address, so it would be a “wrong house” attack if anyone acted on it. Apparently Bluesky took a while to block posts with the address. Maybe they hadn’t done it before and had to write code in a hurry?

    Meanwhile, I’m avoiding passing judgment because I don’t really know what to believe and I’m not willing to do enough investigation myself to figure it out. I don’t want want to get into a “contempt court” discussion on Tildes where we argue about whether Singal is worthy of contempt. That would be no fun for anyone.

    I’d rather outsource that. An in-depth investigation by a neutral journalist I trust would be a real service, and this reporter declined to do that, because the article is really about Bluesky. A pity, but understandable.

    13 votes

  10. Comment on Bluesky's growing pains in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    Do you think the reporter should have done something different? I thought it covered Bluesky’s current controversies pretty even-handedly.

    Do you think the reporter should have done something different? I thought it covered Bluesky’s current controversies pretty even-handedly.

    7 votes

  11. Comment on Bluesky's growing pains in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    Deleting posts appears easy enough, but it’s kind of limited on Bluesky. Here is a feed of deleted BlueSky posts. It doesn’t keep them, but anyone else could set up a feed that does. (Worse,...

    Deleting posts appears easy enough, but it’s kind of limited on Bluesky. Here is a feed of deleted BlueSky posts. It doesn’t keep them, but anyone else could set up a feed that does.

    (Worse, they’re all digitally signed.)

    5 votes

  13. Comment on o3 - wow in ~tech

    skybrian
    (edited )
    Link Parent
    Assuming you’re right, I’m wondering who loses if they don’t live up to their valuation? They’re not public, so it seems like it would be some VC’s and companies like Microsoft who provided the...

    Assuming you’re right, I’m wondering who loses if they don’t live up to their valuation? They’re not public, so it seems like it would be some VC’s and companies like Microsoft who provided the datacenter time.

    They’re professionals and know the risks.

    3 votes

  14. Comment on Setting the record straight on Ukraine’s grain exports in ~food

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article: … …

    From the article:

    Russia’s withdrawal from the Black Sea Grain Initiative (BSGI) last July was met with international outcry. Ukraine’s allies and its food-importing trade partners feared a worst-case scenario for global food security and for Ukraine’s economy, with its farmers once again unable to export via Ukraine’s deepwater Black Sea ports. U.S. National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby stressed that “there’s no possible way, just mathematically, we’re going to get as much grain out now as we were going to be able to get out through the grain deal if it had been extended.”

    These worst-case scenarios have not played out. Global food prices, including grain prices, maintained a steady decline into 2024, in part due to increased agricultural exports from Ukraine. In mid-August 2023, following the cessation of the BSGI, Ukraine announced the Ukrainian corridor, a route passing through the territorial waters of North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s member states of Romania, Bulgaria, and Turkey, which has enabled Ukraine to resume high volume shipments of agricultural products since October 2023.

    …

    [T]he high volume of agricultural products departing Ukraine through the corridor reflect the export of grains and oilseeds whose export had been delayed due to the war, and not the production and export of a greater amount of product than pre-war.

    …

    Ukraine’s future exports are therefore expected to decline from current levels due to reduced and occupied farmed area, damaged or destroyed production facilities, and the fact that Ukraine has exported most of the stocks that were built up during the early months after the invasion.

    5 votes

  17. Comment on o3 - wow in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    It seems like startups are where there will be the most enthusiastic adopters of AI. A lot of them might be AI startups? It certainly is a lot different from cryptocurrency.

    It seems like startups are where there will be the most enthusiastic adopters of AI. A lot of them might be AI startups?

    It certainly is a lot different from cryptocurrency.

    2 votes

  18. Comment on Louisiana forbids public health workers from promoting COVID, flu and mpox shots in ~health

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    This is how some leftists look to them. Seriously. They look very intolerant.

    This is how some leftists look to them. Seriously. They look very intolerant.

    1 vote

  19. Comment on After twelve years of writing about bitcoin, here's how my thinking has changed in ~finance

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    Yeah, I think even if Bitcoin went to zero, it wouldn’t die. Some people would buy it cheap to get in early on the next round, and then hype it. Although, maybe it wouldn’t have quite the same...

    Yeah, I think even if Bitcoin went to zero, it wouldn’t die. Some people would buy it cheap to get in early on the next round, and then hype it. Although, maybe it wouldn’t have quite the same attraction compared to alternatives?

    I don’t see housing and work as much related, though they are substantially culturally determined.

    Shelter is a necessity in bad weather, but how much housing is considered necessary is culturally determined. We assume electricity, indoor plumbing, and now even Internet access are necessary, but at one time, nobody had them, and there are still people who don’t have them.

    “Work” is an abstract way of thinking about whatever you have to do to get stuff you actually need. Paid work couid sometimes be optional for hunter-gatherers or subsistence farmers, but that doesn’t mean they didn’t have to work. You can’t be either of those in a city - food comes from the outside and somehow you need to get a right to your share.

    I think that it’s true that some people work more than they need to for status reasons, though.

    Also, work is usually more of a collective necessity - even without state support, there are families and not everyone works. It’s true that you don’t need to work if someone else will support you. In modern societies, the state has partially replaced the family, along with private obligations abstracted by money and contracts. These collective obligations have gotten very complex.

    3 votes

  20. Comment on Sudan's biggest refugee camp was already struck with famine. Now it's being shelled. in ~news

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    Another way to look at it would be to treat nonintervention as the default and ask what it is that invites outside attention. In the case of Ukraine, there is US and European interest in opposing...

    Another way to look at it would be to treat nonintervention as the default and ask what it is that invites outside attention.

    In the case of Ukraine, there is US and European interest in opposing Russia, which doesn’t only threaten Ukraine, but also other allies. Attacking a neighboring country attracts interest when people are wondering who will be attacked next. Russia makes threats all the time, has a history of attacking weaker neighbors, and they have the means to back it up. (Less so due to being bogged down in Ukraine.)

    In the Middle East, the US has an interest in opposing Iran. Also, Hamas started a war that made no sense in its own terms (Hamas would obviously lose) to attract outside attention. Relying on outside attention, because there’s no other way they could possibly win.

    Nobody imagines that anyone fighting in Sudan would threaten anyone outside Sudan. There’s no enemy there to draw outside countries in. Large-scale suffering attracts some attention (from the UN) but not military attention.

    Similarly with Haiti.

    Poor countries with weak armies have a hard time threatening anyone. It’s possible with sufficient determination (as terrorists do, as Hamas did) but mostly they aren’t trying.

    5 votes