OT - 3b1b did an interesting video on the epidemic modeling [0] that shaped my thinking a bit on the lockdown and caused me to lose a few friends to argue against the prolonged lockdowns.
I believe he used the same technique deployed by major media institutions and health organizations.
Basically the interesting conclusion was unless you apply a very rigorous lockdown (CCP style) the virus ultimately spreads. All you’re doing is spreading the time. As in “flattening the curve”.
As some might recall the initial lockdown was proposed as a way to flatten the curve and allow the medical system to cope better by having a more gradual influx of patients. Which makes me think everyone promoting the initial lockdown understood its limitations and its objectives.
However, for what ever reason “control demolition” of the economy to make Trump lose the election or who knows why it turned into a long term lockdown.
I know this is a controversial topic, but it shouldn’t be. This is a clear case that the science of pandemic modeling suggested one path and for political reasons we were pushed to follow a course that caused a lot of damage, some irreversible, to the society.
Curious how many here have actually read this bill?
If you’ve read it and you still support it (as a US citizen) I’m going to be so heartbroken by today’s tech community.
This is authoritarianism in the name of protecting our children.
I understand, TikTok is projected to overtake Alphabet’s and Meta’s video ad revenue [0] and it won’t surprise me if they even lobbied for it.
I just see it as a shortsighted move by these companies not to strongly come against this bill.
With GPT-4, I'm thinking if Duolingo has fundamentally been reduced to a game.
The key network effect left is pretty much a leaderboard that fuels their daily retention. So any existing game company could potentially create another gamified learning app as part of their game pools.
The cynical me thinks this is also a pre-election (“wish selection”) PR to help promote the case for Gavin Newsom as president.
You can imagine a talking point like “under my leadership, California overtook Germany as the 4th economy in the world…”
The reality is Newsom had almost zero impact on it, his leadership should be judge by the growing homelessness issue we’ve seen in SF and rest of California and not take credit for tech economy.
Yes, solving the homeless problem is a huge and complex challenge, but the country now needs leadership that is able to solve the big challenging problem.
We’ve lost our ability to fix hard problems and we need to do that if we want to have a chance in a more competitive world.
We do know we’ve had mini ice age as a result of "Grand Solar Minimum" [1] (in addition to volcanic activities) which means reducing the solar output does reduce surface heat.
At this point we need to really focus on taking action an approaching this from many facets. As cutting of greenhouse gases alone will not work. It requires the entire globe (at least the G20) countries to invest in such endeavors.
You should be given the choice to be grandfathered into the version of TOS upon first using that service.
I think with social media where value is derived by ongoing time investment of users, the TOS changes should only be applied after mutual agreement.
When I invest hours into helping to flourish a community, I need to be assured the company holds their side of the contract and not change the terms at any arbitrary time.
I disagree with the notion that you can stop using it, if you don’t agree with the new TOS.
social media is different than let’s say visiting Politico, where I’m just a consumer and not a contributor. Politico doesn’t owe me anything.
When you start contributing and building value under an initial sets of policy and agreements that initial agreement should remain in place until mutually agreed to change it.
I understand that causes some operational headaches, but it’s just cost of running a social media company.
The same polarizing media conveniently blamed Facebook and Twitter (though to a lesser extent) for all the polarization that they have been fomenting for years.
I guess that move wasn’t as surprising for me as seeing the number of people in SV who bought into that narrative.
Corporate media should not really be thought of as real journalistic entities.
Simple example. How in the world does CNN allow Chris Cuomo to interview his own brother. The fact that no one inside CNN publicly objected to this, walked away, protested, it tells me everything I need to know about the entire organization.
I don’t remember anyone at MSNBC making a fuss about it, nor at the Washington Post (Democracy Dies in Darkness).
Anyone knows how much more efficiency is gained (due to reduced weight) once a jetliner consumes 50% of its fuel?
Curious if for flying it’ll be more practical to use electricity for some kind of direct or indirect carbon sequestration (to be carbon neutral) fuel generation and continue to fly with some type of combustion based fuel.
Yang is underestimating the network effect of the two parties.
I thought running for mayor of NY City was kind of odd. His lack of experience really showed after his initial name ID advantage faded away.
I feel like he is fighting for relevancy but it's approaching it from a wrong angle.
I do understand he is feeling betrayed a bit by the party. He was probably promised (or hinted at) some kind of a position with the Biden admin.
Then he had that disastrous loss as a mayor. I'm not sure starting a third party is really a right move for him.
He is interesting (was authentic) as a candidate, but quite honesty doesn't have a real national name ID or charisma to pull together a successful third party.
At this point, the only person who can reasonably start a third party is probably Donald Trump (not saying he is going to). My point is you need a huge national popular backing.
Yang doesn't have that. If anything he is going to destroy the possibility of having a real competitive third party in our country.
Many Americans still do not realize Trump won riding on $5 billions in free media advertising[1]
Hillary also edged Bernie in the primaries receiving over $740m over sanders $320m [2]
We also know free media is becoming more effective than political advertising [3]
Which all means if you want to blame anyone in stealing the election it’s the corporate media. Also brings up the point that we really need to reinstitute some kind of equal coverage time, otherwise all these election donation limits are meaningless when media bosses can give billions to their favorite candidates.
Frontline (PBS)in partnership with Forbidden Stories are doing a report [1] on NSO hacking the phone of Khashoggi’s fiancé and other journalist and activists around the world.
Looks like her phone was compromised by NSO based on the reporting on this video.
From the AP version (h/t @tareqak) [0], "identification of anyone engaged in foreign state-sanctioned malicious cyber activity". Key phrase, state-sanctioned.
This has less to do with tracking down cybercriminals, and more with creating a case for foreign policy agenda.
Remember it was WMD informant "Curveball" testimony to then Secretary of State Powell, that was used as one of the key pretexts to invade Iraq.
Essentially if an administration comes with an agenda to start a new war, they put the right people inside the State Department and then those guys just need to comb for anything (validated or not) to find "informants" to make the case for cyber attack. Followed by making the case in media that cyber attack is military attack and it requires military retaliation.
This will bypass the entire US intelligence system to validate the source of threat. It just needs one person to claim they were involve in cyber attack against US and it was sponsored by the government of Iraq, Iran, Venezuela, or any other country we want to go after.
I highly recommend watching this portion of the town hall with former US Congressman Dennis Kucinich talking about how non disclosure rules prevented the Congress from speaking out against US State Department spreading false information to American public [1].
Duolingo is not a language teaching platform at its core. It’s a gaming platform with language as its gaming skill.
Duolingo at some point became so focused on gamification that it just became a game (I believe they hired their lead PM from Zynga).
If you’re on free version, just look at the ads you’re getting. Vast majority of the ads are for other games.
I think you can learn a language if you use Duolingo’s streak gamification as a daily motivator but use supplemental materials to actually learn.