skybrian's recent activity

  1. Comment on Dolly Parton’s other legacy: a fortune given away, dollar by dollar in ~society

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article: [...] [...] [...] [...]

    From the article:

    Ms. Parton’s support for the fire victims was just one node in a constellation of charitable activities that distinguished her as one of pop culture’s most prolific philanthropists. With cash gifts, benefit concerts and telethons, Ms. Parton supported causes that included early childhood literacy, wildlife conservation and the development of the Covid-19 vaccine.

    She became so effective at distributing her own money that the ultrawealthy asked her to distribute theirs. In 2022, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and his future wife, Lauren Sanchez, gave Ms. Parton $100 million to distribute to causes of her choosing. And this summer, Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce gave Ms. Parton’s Imagination Library $2 million to fund the distribution of children’s books.

    [...]

    The foundation was initially focused on reducing school dropout rates in Sevier County, in part by offering $500 gifts to graduates. Cold, hard cash proved a powerful incentive; high school dropout rates plummeted to just 6 percent in the county, from 35 percent. The Dollywood Foundation, which reported $141 million in assets last year, also offers local high school graduates $15,000 scholarships.

    “She gave cash gifts to people in need long before it was popular,” Ms. Palmer said. “She trusted the people that she wanted to help.”

    [...]

    In the months after the Covid-19 virus emerged, Ms. Parton learned that Vanderbilt University in Nashville was helping with the early trials of the vaccine made by Moderna, and gave $1 million to support the effort.

    “It was a shot in the arm,” said Mark Denison, emeritus professor of pediatrics at the Vanderbilt School of Medicine. “We were starting this work but we didn’t have specific funding for it, and she recognized that this was a critical human problem that was going to impact the country and the world. It allowed us to quickly scale up and get into the lab.”

    [...]

    The next year, she made a $1 million gift to Vanderbilt to support work on infectious diseases in children, and the year after that, she created an endowment to support additional research.

    [...]

    Ms. Palmer said the question now was what will become of Ms. Parton’s remaining fortune, which is estimated to be about $500 million, according to Forbes.

    “She did so much while she’s alive, but I’m super curious what her will says,” Ms. Palmer said. “Because she had so much wealth, and she did not have children. So we may yet see more of her.”

    4 votes

  3. Comment on Russian sanctions are fueling a Canadian car theft epidemic in ~society

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article: [...] [...] [...] [...] [...] [...] [...] [...] [...] [...]

    From the article:

    While Western export bans have severed Russia from much of the auto market, they have not tempered the demand for brand-name SUVs and trucks. That has given rise to a sophisticated network of criminals that steals cars, hides them in shipping containers and sends them to Russia, often by way of the Middle East.

    [...]

    Interpol, the international police organization, received 4,798 reports that stolen Canadian vehicles had been found in Russia from February 2024 to July 2026, according to data obtained by The New York Times and confirmed by two law enforcement officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity because it is considered sensitive.

    Pickup trucks like Dodge Rams, Toyota Tundras and Ford F-150s are in particularly high demand.

    [...]

    Demand for pricey Western cars has always been high in Russia. The sanctions unintentionally incentivized sellers to find illicit ways to supply the market, driving up prices and making the cars even more of a status symbol, Mr. Aleynik said at the Chortkiv detention facility in western Ukraine.

    [...]

    Since Canada’s car theft epidemic began in 2021, officials have introduced policing overhauls and invested tens of millions in tackling the crime. Theft rates have fallen, but stolen vehicles still flow through Canadian ports.

    [...]

    Car thefts surged in Canada after Covid lockdowns were lifted in 2021. With the global supply chain in turmoil, criminals spotted an opportunity. Within a year, auto theft rates in Canada had reached historic highs and continued to climb.

    [...]

    The police recovered cars as often as they could, but thousands disappeared every year. In the hot spots of Ontario and Quebec, nearly half of the stolen cars vanished.

    [...]

    Frédéric Bonsaint, an officer at the border agency, said that every week, his team searched around a dozen containers at the Port of Montreal and discovered 20 to 30 stolen cars worth in total up to $2 million. Similar checks are carried out at other ports.

    [...]

    The Russian black market did not create Canada’s criminal gangs or smuggling networks. Those ingredients were already in place, said Mr. Aleynik, the Russian who faces car theft charges. The sanctions merely increased demand and profits.

    Key to the effort, Mr. Aleynik said, are criminal contacts in Canada who falsify customs documents and share the latest intelligence on how to evade checks.

    [...]

    Mr. Gast, the former police officer now at Équité Association, said that international buyers placed orders for specific cars. Mr. Aleynik said that happened through online marketplaces that connect black-market buyers and sellers.

    If a buyer orders, say, 15 Land Rovers, scouts will scour affluent Canadian neighborhoods and shopping malls for those vehicles.

    Stolen cars usually leave Canada through the port of Montreal, but Vancouver has seen a recent uptick in response to an east coast crackdown, officials said.

    [...]

    Smugglers often moved stolen Canadian cars to Russia via the United Arab Emirates, according to the Mounties. Officials said that they had also identified routes through Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Lithuania.

    The Canada-to-Russia pipeline was visible because Moscow remains an active participant in — and sometimes abuser of — Interpol’s information-sharing programs. When the Russian authorities investigate a possible stolen car, they run it through Interpol’s database. With each hit, the database automatically updates to say that a stolen car was found in Russia.

    [...]

    Why would the Russian authorities return stolen cars to Western countries? One explanation is that Russian law prohibits the registration of vehicles listed in Interpol’s database. Returning them is one way to prevent unusable stolen cars from piling up. Western officials say that Moscow is broadly cooperative when it comes to crimes like auto theft.

    That could change. Last month, Russia took steps to allow the registration of cars stolen from “unfriendly countries,” including Canada. A proposal by the Russian Interior Ministry would protect those cars from seizure. European officials have warned that this could fuel a rise in transnational car thefts.

    2 votes

  5. Comment on Stop Killing The Internet: No digital ID and no age verification in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    It's true that discussing new ideas is a prerequisite for implementing them, but there's a long and winding road at best from a discussion on an obscure forum and a large policy change. I think we...

    It's true that discussing new ideas is a prerequisite for implementing them, but there's a long and winding road at best from a discussion on an obscure forum and a large policy change. I think we can assume that whatever we discuss here probably won't be implemented, even if it somehow went viral?

    (That includes my "this should have been an http header" idea. I posted it because I'd like to see it more widely discussed, but I'm not optimistic that it will get anywhere.)

    Not mattering is freeing in a way. A butterfly shouldn't worry that flapping its wings might cause a hurricane even if it's technically possible.

    We can still discuss politics, but it's for us, not for the unlikely and unpredictable effects of our conversations on people who aren't even here.

    2 votes

  6. Comment on Technology is over in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link
    I wonder how today’s young people will look back on the AI bubble that we’re living through? Are there subcultures with the sort of techno-enthusiasm we had during the early days of the Internet?

    I wonder how today’s young people will look back on the AI bubble that we’re living through? Are there subcultures with the sort of techno-enthusiasm we had during the early days of the Internet?

    4 votes

  7. Comment on ‘This is crazy. This is insane’: Bill Gates has changed his mind about AI and jobs in ~comp

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    Yeah, fair enough. I think it's fairly inevitable that we're going to talk about articles like this one, in part because of who wrote it.

    Yeah, fair enough. I think it's fairly inevitable that we're going to talk about articles like this one, in part because of who wrote it.

    8 votes

  8. Comment on What are we in a golden age of? in ~talk

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    There's plenty of subtly wrong code in enterprise apps. I don't think it's all that different? The obvious bugs tend to get fixed. You and past-you does happens with time, but short-term exercises...

    There's plenty of subtly wrong code in enterprise apps. I don't think it's all that different?

    The obvious bugs tend to get fixed.

    You and past-you does happens with time, but short-term exercises in school don't have much time for that. Working with AI will get you to large scale faster.

    1 vote

  9. Comment on ‘This is crazy. This is insane’: Bill Gates has changed his mind about AI and jobs in ~comp

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    I think posting an article to his own website is fine. Anyone can do that. I skimmed it and I didn't think he was saying anything new. Other people have made similar predictions, but nobody really...

    I think posting an article to his own website is fine. Anyone can do that.

    I skimmed it and I didn't think he was saying anything new. Other people have made similar predictions, but nobody really knows. I didn't see any evidence that I thought was interesting, so I didn't reshare.

    But apparently someone else thought it was worth writing a "celebrity has an opinion" story, and someone shared it here, so here we are.

    8 votes

  10. Comment on What are we in a golden age of? in ~talk

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    I imagine a world where everyone is going to have their own custom software running on Linux, but it will be in a VM and they might not even know what they're running. Unless you ask the AI how it...

    I imagine a world where everyone is going to have their own custom software running on Linux, but it will be in a VM and they might not even know what they're running.

    Unless you ask the AI how it works, and then you can go as deep as you want.

  11. Comment on What are we in a golden age of? in ~talk

    skybrian
    (edited )
    Link Parent
    Yes, there are things that are best learned by doing it yourself. For example, when you're learning math, you have to do the exercises. I think that's true of programming, too. However, there are...

    Yes, there are things that are best learned by doing it yourself. For example, when you're learning math, you have to do the exercises. I think that's true of programming, too.

    However, there are other things that students might learn more easily learn by working with AI. For example, you might learn from the struggle of working on a large-scale program where you didn't write it all yourself. Many concepts from software engineering don't really sink in until you're working at a larger scale than is likely to happen when you're writing a program that you can keep in your head.

    There are many different exercises we can learn from. If the software has bugs, that's part of the challenge. If the answers aren't always right, we learn to be skeptical and test things. In the real world, when we look for answers, we do sometimes get bad advice. The AI is going to let us down sometimes, but I still think it's more good than bad.

    2 votes

  12. Comment on Stop Killing The Internet: No digital ID and no age verification in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    For the most part society has decided that children should have age-appropriate experiences. That’s why children are in schools designed just for them, for example. Parents buy them...

    For the most part society has decided that children should have age-appropriate experiences. That’s why children are in schools designed just for them, for example. Parents buy them age-appropriate books and toys.

    There is still exposure to the adult world, though. The question is how much.

    6 votes

  13. Comment on Stop Killing The Internet: No digital ID and no age verification in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    Many businesses wouldn’t have anything for kids and that’s okay. There are many nonprofit websites. Running a website isn’t that expensive and there are many people who do it. Also, parents buying...

    Many businesses wouldn’t have anything for kids and that’s okay. There are many nonprofit websites. Running a website isn’t that expensive and there are many people who do it. Also, parents buying things for their kids is a thing and I’d expect child-locked devices to have a way to do that.

    If there are parents who don’t care what their kids do on the Internet, that’s on them. There’s only so much we can do to control what people do in their own home. But the idea is that society should support the parents who do care by making it easier for them to manage their kids’ devices, and that should be enough to change the culture so that kids don’t have routine access to the adult Internet.

    6 votes

  14. Comment on Stop Killing The Internet: No digital ID and no age verification in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link
    As I've written before, this could have been an HTTP header. Basically we should have two Internets, one for children and one for adults. This is like the difference between a children's library...

    As I've written before, this could have been an HTTP header.

    Basically we should have two Internets, one for children and one for adults. This is like the difference between a children's library and the main library. It's not that adults never go into the children's library or children are never allowed in the main library, but they have a different intended audience, and children should be supervised in the main library.

    So, it makes sense to have child-locked devices that send an HTTP header indicating that they're child-locked, and cooperating websites send different content. For example, there should be no advertising and you can't buy anything on the children's Internet, and websites for adults don't let you set up an account or log in if the HTTP header is present.

    It's up to parents to give their kids child-locked devices if they're going to let them browse the Internet by themselves, and vendors shouldn't sell unrestricted devices to kids.

    Also, child-locked devices stlll need extra filtering because it's not like every website is going to cooperate. But the more legit websites will, and there can be laws coercing them into cooperating if needed.

    If you do that, no identity-checking is needed. And there's no particular age when kids are allowed in the adult library. It's up to their parents and teachers.

    37 votes

  15. Comment on What programming/technical projects have you been working on? in ~comp

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    It seems like using web apps instead of native apps might help a lot with this?

    It seems like using web apps instead of native apps might help a lot with this?

  16. Comment on Meta agrees to heavy restrictions on teen users in major lawsuit settlement in ~tech

    skybrian
    (edited )
    Link Parent
    "Directly responsible" is doing a lot of work there. Websites don't kill people. Someone else had to be motivated to do it. Websites can motivate people to do terrible things under the right...

    "Directly responsible" is doing a lot of work there. Websites don't kill people. Someone else had to be motivated to do it.

    Websites can motivate people to do terrible things under the right circumstances, but it's not direct. Often, what Facebook is responsible for is failing to stop people from using their systems to plan terrible things, or failing to stop them from indulging their own worst impulses. But the people have agency too.

    9 votes

  17. Comment on What are we in a golden age of? in ~talk

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    I think it depends on how you go about it. With the right attitude you can learn from mistakes, too. Your own mistakes, other people’s mistakes, and the AI’s mistakes. You try stuff, it breaks,...

    I think it depends on how you go about it. With the right attitude you can learn from mistakes, too. Your own mistakes, other people’s mistakes, and the AI’s mistakes. You try stuff, it breaks, and you figure out why. Or these days, ask the AI why it broke, and then see if its explanation makes sense.

    4 votes

  18. Comment on What is the oldest file you still have? in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link
    Do scanned photos and documents count? If they do, the scans that my wife and I have from going through our parents' stuff are the oldest. That's what I see when I scroll all the way back in...

    Do scanned photos and documents count? If they do, the scans that my wife and I have from going through our parents' stuff are the oldest. That's what I see when I scroll all the way back in Google Photos.

    Although, technically I've taken photos of much older things at museums. I didn't try to file them under their original dates, though :-)

    Actual files: perhaps some of the floppy disks from the Commodore 64 at my Mom's house are still readable? I won't know if I still have them unless I take them to a service to be scanned.

  19. Comment on What are we in a golden age of? in ~talk

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    My guess is that it's going to get cheaper, but current prices aren't bad. I'm using Luna with a $20/month ChatGPT subscription (also used for asking questions). It's not free, but it's not that...

    My guess is that it's going to get cheaper, but current prices aren't bad. I'm using Luna with a $20/month ChatGPT subscription (also used for asking questions). It's not free, but it's not that expensive as hobbies go.

    At today's RAM prices, I'd put off buying an expensive machine for local inference.

    2 votes

  20. Comment on What are we in a golden age of? in ~talk

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    This reminds me of how I randomly saw one of Hiromi's concert videos on YouTube a few years ago. Then I searched for all her other videos and made a playlist, started listening to her albums on...

    This reminds me of how I randomly saw one of Hiromi's concert videos on YouTube a few years ago. Then I searched for all her other videos and made a playlist, started listening to her albums on Spotify, went to see her in concert, and recently bought a book of sheet music from a store in Japan and started learning to play one of her songs.

    Seems like I should listen to other jazz musicians more.

    1 vote