The cold emails that are effective in getting the attention of my small business promise me some $25-100 gift card to Starbucks/Amazon in exchange for going through their sales demo.
Now that's pricey for them, but I'd bet the conversion rate there is a lot better than traditional click advertising.
What ScientificAmerican labels as "denial" might better be referred to as a "normal risk-management assessment". They're still hyping up the threat of Covid in the article for God's sake.
> I can agree with you on all points above, but why is it more important to keep freedom from tyranny instead of keeping our environment healthy?
Value is subjective, and anybody is entitled to prioritize the environment over any other values just as I'm free to prioritize freedom over anything else. I might just as well ask you what's the point of living in the most aesthetic prison? I don't know that there's an objectively right answer here, we're just speaking on different values.
> If climate change ruins the earth what’s the point of freedom anyway?
A lot of big science-related political disagreements in recent years stem from radically different (and in my opinion, wrong) risk-management decisions from people who (in my opinion) have almost always proven themselves to be wrong in a major way.
Based on everything I've learned in my life, I think the odds of normal human activity destroying the Earth are a very remote bet, and the odds of authoritarians who gain absolute power murdering many millions is a total guarantee.
IMO, while I don't think this would be a popular opinion on HN, I think humans face a far bigger risk from authoritarians than from climate change.
1) The real answer might depend on the time-frame you're considering. In the short run, crypto does use up a good amount of electricity, which nobody disputes. But in the long-run, crypto fortunes being dependent on electricity prices probably puts a hell of a lot of financial pressure to emphasize the most efficient possible sources of power. Crypto creates its own financial award for those who promote capital investment in the most efficient sources of power. This incentive matters in a bigger timescale.
2) Keep in mind that the climate isn't the only important variable in society. If crypto is bad for the environment, but great for freedom from government tyranny, is it not still good on balance?
3) A lot of the criticism of crypto you read might not be very genuine. A lot of criticism of crypto may come from people/corporations in the media with vested interests in the primacy of the current financial order. So make up your own mind about crypto rather than being influenced by the generic media broadcasts.
> I don't think the algorithmic nature is necessarily the problem. The monetization is.
IMO, monetization was never the real problem. Everybody online was interested in making money even back in the early 2000s: there were ads, spam, commerce, and get-rich-quick schemes and everything way back then too.
I think the main issue is that average IQs online have gone down dramatically.
In the late 90s and early 2000s, using a computer to participate in some online community took the slightest bit of intellect: you had to build or setup a computer and access the Internet, which was a bit harder back then. This filter ensured that a far greater percentage of everybody online was at least of average or higher intelligence. That's it. That's the simple explanation.
Today, every idiot out there has a phone in their pocket to mess up everything joyful. Everything good has to cater to this least common denominator: this is why everything sucks.
Consider the reason that HackerNews is a pleasant community to use: IMO it isn't because it lacks extreme monetization, it's because the average person here is smarter than what you'd see on other websites.
> how a particular group of employees are less likely to be as proficient at their work as I am due to some immutable biological trait(s) they possess
Is that what Damore actually said? That's not my recollection. I think his main point was that due to differences in biology, that women had more extraversion, openness, and neuroticism (big 5 traits) and that women were less likely to want to get into computer stuff. That's a very far cry from him saying something like "women suck at computers" and seems very dishonest to suggest.
Personally speaking, this is a blaring neon warning sign of institutional rot within Google where shrieking concerns about DEI have surpassed a focus on quality results.
Investors in Google (of which I am NOT one) should consider if this is the mark of a company on the upswing or downslide. If the focus of Google's technology is identity rather than reality, it is inevitable that they will be surpassed.
Would a company be liable to uphold its promises if a rogue human customer service agent promised something ridiculous such as 1 million dollars worth of free flights?
The Turing test of the future is going to be start a politically incorrect discussion with a suspected bot and see if it treats different groups differently.
1) You should consider yourself lucky that you (hopefully) learned the lesson that there's no such thing as a "safe career" before you got too old and were put in a shitty position where you were laid off in maybe your 50s-60s. It's harder to start over in another company as an older person in tech.
2) Organize your life accordingly knowing that you can be let go anytime. Save your cash to have a very solid emergency fund. Always keep your resume up to date. Always keep your eye open for different jobs. Have multiple income streams so you can survive losing your main job. Don't try and live above your means.
If the problem you're trying to solve is literally generating randomness, you might look into custom hardware. I think some companies have devices to measure subtle variations in the output of tiny laser beams, as one example of how pure randomness can be quickly and continuously found.
A lot of companies use recent employment as a filtering mechanism: if you have a big gap in technology employment, you might have trouble getting interviews.
I'd say to create an LLC on your own that serves as a consultancy and to put that on your resume that you're working with them to plug this gap. Register on freelance sites and take any jobs you can: even shit underpaid jobs. Make some money and get your skills a little current and use that to bypass the hiring filters.
Whenever some tech becomes trendy and people think they can make money off of it, it becomes a stupid buzzword that gets used just about everywhere unnecessarily.
Think back to the "cloud". When "cloud" became a reality, every single dopey company was using it as a buzzword term everywhere and it started feeling cringe.
Crypto hasn't yet quite reached those absolute heights, but think back a couple years ago where you started seeing "blockchain" in many dumb startups' marketing just because.
We're at the stage with AI right now where idiots are trying to shoehorn it everywhere in dopey ways just because, and it feels annoying.
I bet in a few years, after a lot of the bad companies who use AI in dumb ways die off and some new technology is the trendy new thing, I bet AI is going to start to feel a lot more technical than a stupid trend.