well, except for the fact that it's still a chromium browser and google really sets the general agenda for all chromium browsers.

If I understand your comment right, you are saying that the opiod crisis shows that people do choose drugs if they can and if there was univ. healthcare, then the system would go down under the costs.

The problem with this, as I see it: A good chunk of people addicted in this opiod crisis didn't choose to get addicted. They were all too readily prescribed hard painkillers for ailments that did by no means require such a treatment (e.g. backpain of various degrees). This is fentanyl as a gateway drug, so to speak. Those people would not have been addicts otherwise. But they got hooked on the medication and when their prescriptions comes to an end, then they would seek a replacement.

That is why doctors and pharmaceutical companies are getting sued - and are losing.

Further: If psychedelic drugs are indeed this helpful with issues like smoking and depression, like recent research suggests, then controlled administration would surely be a great relief to an overwhelmed healthcare system: saving e.g. on expensive anti-depression drugs or on cancer treatments, where the cancer was caused by smoking.

(see edit below; but i leave this up; it might be interesting, also) you mean that even for smaller sequences, the UID holds, right? the assumption was that even for a single sentence, there are a lot of ways to reduce or increase information density so that you get a smoother signal. e.g.: "It is clear that we have to help them to move on.", you could contract it to "it's clear we gotta help them move on" and contract it even further in the actual speech signal ('help'em'). or you could stretch it: "it is clear to us that we definitely have to help them in some way to move on", or alike. the assumption was that such increases / decreases would even be done to 'iron out' the very local peaks and troughs, particularly in speech.

bits: yeah, that took me a while to get used to, as well. the authors used (conditional) entropy as a way to measure information density (which is a good measure in this instance imv). and bits is just per definition the unit that comes out of information theoretical entropy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_(information_theory) . btw: while technically possible, i don't think that the comparison in the summary article between 39 bits in language and a xy bit modem is a helpful comparison. bits in the context of entropy are all about occurence and expectation in a given context. bits of a modem/in CS, they represent a low level information content for which we do not check context and expectation.

edit: ah, i realise you are asking why most in our community assumed that this universal rate applied across languages, right?

i guess the intuition was that all of us humans, no matter what language we speak, use the speech signal to transmit and receive information and that all of us have the same cognitive abilities. so the rate at which we convey information should be about the same. sure, there are probably differences according to some factors (spoken vs written language, differences in knowledge between speakers, etc.). but when the only factor that differs is English vs Hausa, esp. in spontaneous spoken language, then the information rate should be about the same.

Two qualifying remarks.

1) The 'about the same' is important. Even in their data, there is still quite some variance. They found an average of 39bits, with a stdev of 5. That means that about 1/3 of the data falls outside of the range of 34-44bits.

2) Which brings me to the the uniform information density (UID) hypothesis. According to the UID, the language signal should be pretty smooth wrt how information is spread across it. For many years, the UID was thought to be pretty absolute: Even across a unit like a sentence, it was thought that information will spread pretty evenly. Now, there is an increasing amount of research that shows that esp. in spontaneous spoken language, there is a lot more variance within in the signal, with considerable peaks and troughs spread across longer sequences.

PLOS gives reasonable citation guidelines, and in this context their Rule 5 is particular relevant: https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/jo...

"I am an unswerving advocate of freedom of expression, which is guaranteed under Article 19 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), but it is not absolute. Article 20 of the same covenant says: ‘Any advocacy of national, racial or religious hatred that constitutes incitement to discrimination, hostility or violence shall be prohibited by law."[0]

As so often, different values are in tension with each other. And different societies draw the line at different places, somewhat favouring one or the other value. I hope we can agree that 8-chan, due to the lack of sensible moderation, is way past that line by all standards.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2015/apr/24/k...

Edit: to clarify, this is not meant to be a strawman. By "some", I don't mean some here or alike, but those in 8-chan , TD, etc., who have brought forward this argument in the past.

But that is the problem, actually. Simple question: Is Prof Bouman the team leader that held all this together?

In answering this, consider this is from the ERC website, which is the major funding body of the project:

> Since 2014, this six year research project is being carried out by three lead scientists and their teams; namely Professors Heino Falcke from Radboud University Nijmegen (also Chair of EHT Science Council), Michael Kramer from the Max Planck Institute for Radioastronomy, and Luciano Rezzolla from Goethe University Frankfurt. [0]

So to answer "What more should the media do?", my guess would be: at some point, mention Falcke, Kramer, and Rezzolla? And the ERC?

[0] https://erc.europa.eu/news/eu-funded-scientists-unveil-first...

in CH, search engines are state-censored for political reasons - mainly to keep in power a semi-dictatorship.

the right to be forgotten was implemented to protect individual rights. one may or may not agree with such a protection. however, the motivation was not systematic political censorship.

edit: missing word.

2) In addition to this, they stand on the shoulder of giants and profit from a long tradition of researchers and even companies making their data and tools available. but "open"AI chose to go down a different path.

3) which makes me wonder what they are trying to add to the discussion? the discussion about the dangers of AI is fully ongoing. by not releasing background info also means that openAI is not contributing to how dangerous AI can be approached. openAI might or might not have a model that is closer to some worrisome threshold. but we don't know for sure. so imv, what openAI primarily brought to the discussion are some vague fears against technological progress -- which doesn't help anyone.

OP knew that she had something valuable. But she also thought of it as a free good (libre, not gratis). As I interpret it this is because she knew that her work builds on the work of others.

At Google, they probably knew about the intellectual background of OP's innovation, too. And yet, they tried to patent it. So much about their intellectual honesty.

Chances to die of a car crash/ any kind of vehicle crash is about 1 in 100 according to here [0].

I can't find something similar straight away for injuries, but car accidents are ubiquitous and 2m people are injured every year (vs 30k fatalities) [1; cached]. So something above >20% seems plausible.

[0]: https://www.iii.org/fact-statistic/facts-statistics-mortalit... [1]: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:dnqo-l...

for the same money, you get other laptops that are really nice with a cost/return ratio that is a lot better.

sure, apple products are good products. but the premium is getting absurdly high

I was interviewing for Amazon a while back and my experience was mostly positive.

I had applied myself and they got in touch via email a few weeks later. After a brief email exchange, I got invited for a phone interview. All very straight forward - the interviewer was really friendly and professional. At the end of the interview, he also gave me some pointers about what he thinks is important in interviews.

A week later or so, I got an invitation for on-site interviews. I think it was 5 interviews in total. The hiring manager and his team were all really nice. (Interesting site note: I did mention some interesting and for the interview relevant HN article at some point and the interviewer told me that I should not believe everything that is said on HN haha.) I think the "bad cop" role was given to the two off-site interviewers. They asked some tough questions, one of which was something along the line of "Tell me about a time when you were right about something but could not convince others/management." Of course, I had experienced such situations in the past, but I struggled to give a clear narrative. I didn't want to look like someone who doesn't care; nor like someone who doesn't get their point across, nor like a push-over. In the end, I left it at something like "I still think I was right, but for other, non-content-related reasons, management went for a different decision." They didn't seem happy about my answer. The last interview was a bit weird and I probably asked a stupid question that put the interviewer off.

I think that was my inner obstructionist. I was living in Belgium at the time and I really love BE (but didn't like my job there). The Amazon job looked better, but I didn't really feel like moving to the UK, where the job was located. Also, the team indicated that they are doing more than 9-5. Here, too, my inner obstructionist was telling me 'meh'.

You can see where this is going: I didn't get the offer. Still, I thought the process was pretty decent and fair in my case. Of course, this is also just a personal experience, but I thought I'd share a nicer one.

Poulson's view seems to align with Brin's view from 2010. I wonder what Brin would have to say about the issue today, because the facts in China have not changed much since 2010, certainly not to the better.

I had that feeling again when I first used Nano. A friend of mine and me, we got the wallets and kept sending Nanos back and forth, just because. 2s per transaction, no fees. It blew our minds.

Not to shill Nano. It might well be the case that Nano won't be occupying this space of near-instant and feeless transactions. But _something_ definitely will, and it will happen rather soon.

it took the belgian embassy about four months to decide on the application. however, to be able to apply, you have to make all your travel arrangements. they didn't anticipate the process to take this long, had to first move, and then cancel their arrangements altogether. in the end, the application got rejected, but the official reasons were cryptic. my friend's interpretation was that the embassy was concerned that his parents might not return to india. they had the option to appeal, which can take 6 to 12 months. chances of appealing successfully are low and so are the chances of getting a visa in a renewed application. in the process, they lost about €3000, which is a lot of money in rupees.

instead of appealing, the parents booked a vacation in the netherlands. the visa application went through in less than a month. they got a schengen visa, meaning that they could also visit belgium. and this is how his parents visited him in the end.

his conclusion was that belgian bureaucracy is out of hand and that the EU has interesting loopholes.

what they also like to do is to adjust events in hindsight such that it suits their story. the case I have in mind concerns the NRW state police, but that, too, seems to be common strategy. in this case, which is very recent, a protester was arrested and police claimed, in their official report, that the protester physically assaulted the officer and resisted arrest. the protester disputed this, but without evidence would not have stood a chance in court. moreover, the protester was badly injured during the whole ordeal. now a video turns up and what do you see?: no physical assault, no resistance [1](also in german). in such cases, i am glad that we live in the age of mobile phones, where anyone can take recordings.

[0] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posteo [1] http://www.sueddeutsche.de/politik/wuppertal-fall-von-polize...