From what I know it seems we're headed to about +3C (mean temperature rise above preindustrial). It's a pretty dire scenario. But it's far, far from "too little too late". It seems probably large parts of Earth will become difficult to inhabit (like e.g. Phoenix AZ is today) without things like AC, etc.. But that's very far from an extinction scenario or total doom.

Every little bit we don't emit today will prevent probably several decades up to a century of atmospheric warming before it's extremely costly to remove from the atmosphere back into some reservoir.

Reminder that some fossil fuel companies quite enjoy narratives of total doom and change being pointless.

Some people mean "capitalism" to mean: a state should be minimal, everybody should be doing everything in their power to seek profits and become maximally rich, becoming rich is simultaneously the utmost absolute charity you could do, and also the utmost personal happiness such that you shouldn't lift a finger for anyone else (of course, unless to particularly impacts yourself). That's the corrosive part I think. I think hypercapitalism (or money is my God) might be a better name for this, or some other term.

There are a number of associated malaises: along with believing money is the ultimate measure or virtue, come the belief that poor people are worthless (or worth much less), that being "productive" (generating profit or income) is the most important thing in life, that consumption of goods and services (i.e. things you buy with money) give you ultimate happiness (you just have to pick the 'right things' to buy), that any technological development is always perfectly good and can do no harm because it increases productivity, and that civil participation is unnecessary because the market sorts everything out. To name a few.

But it's not just regulation megacorps can use, the most frequent is just various forms of capturing and dominating a market, I guess.

For example, Google is on the process of deciding or severely restricting independent developers on Android. I think by reasonable interpretation, user freedom is being severely restricted. But most people have little recourse, it's either Android or iOS (and by now both are similarly bad in different ways). There are some alternative OSes and devices, but there's a significant chance you may rely on some real world service that needs one of the two major ones.

Without trying to overgeneralize everything, in this particular example I don't see how things could change without regulation.

(and, if you will, in that case you can generalize to the implication that regulation isn't necessarily always bad)

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I think the lesson to take isn't that the cyberlibertarians were 100% wrong and we need maximum government control and surveillance over the internet. The world tends to be complex and most simple stories we come up with (which are the ones that tend to sound good on our ears and be most comfortable) tend to be wrong in various ways. The world demands, at least, flexibility from ourselves. Sure, be inspired by one idea or manifesto or another, but don't follow it blindly always.

A relative freedom of communication and widespread access to information arguably is pretty good for civilization. When you can talk and relate to people from allover, the justification for war seem increasingly flimsy. But various forms of regulation preventing single megacorps from dominating the global internet (or simply local wired internet access in your region), can be important. Maybe we need to protect more discourse against bad actors and the incoming flood of LLM-generated, possibly propaganda-fed content. Keep an open mind. Whatever decisions we make we can walk back and change course.

The fundamental principle isn't this or that ideological current, but that people are living good lives. Happy, in peace, full of awesome possibilities. As someone wiser has once said, remember your humanity and forget the rest! :)

Obligatory xkcd https://xkcd.com/605/

If the user must click through a tons of disclaimers (including locked 60-second timeouts with huge WARNING: SCAM ALERT or something) in something buried in settings to get scammed, I think the few edge cases may be worth the tradeoff of being able to install apks.

Remember there is already malware-scanning by default (by Google play), apps need to ask for permissions, they generally can't read other app data or control say banking apps, modify system data (at all), etc..

The threat vectors seem already restricted. I haven't met anyone which has fallen to actual Android malware ever (that I can remember), but I can remember several close family members which were victims of simpler social engineering scams (mostly unsuccessfully) recently.

I'd say degradation involves a lasting depletion or lasting damage (potentially permanent until restoration efforts happen) to the environment's output and ability to support life. Permanent depletion is what can happen to e.g. shallow mines and fossil fuel deposits.

I think I'd agree the legal system was created mostly for the former, depletion, and only recently had to contend with degradation and permanent depletion. I feel like we still struggle collectively to coming to gripes with permanent depletion.

Permanent depletion is also usually the result of shortsightedness or a competition gone awry. Famous case where nobody wants the ultimate results but people may selfishly march towards it (tragedy of the commons).

On computers however, we basically always use exact arithmetic and exact, fixed logic where learning the higher order doesn't help (we're not doing approximations and decisions based on incomplete information), in fact for mathematical reasons in the exact cases it's usually better to compute and utilize the lowest bits first (e.g. in the case of sums and multiplication algos I am familiar with). [note1]

Overall I'm slightly surprised some automatic/universal translation methods for the most common languages haven't been made, although I guess there may be some significant difficulties or impossibilities (for example, if you send a bunch of bits/bytes outside, there's no general way to predict the endianess it should be in). I suspect LLMs will make this task much easier (without a more traditional universal translation algorithm).

[note1] Also, the time required to receive all bits from say a 64b number as opposed to the first k bits tends to be a negligible or even 0 difference, in both human terms (receiving data over a network) and machine terms (receiving data over a bus; optimizing an algorithm that uses numbers in complicated ways; etc.), again different from human communication and thought.

Like, I think in a way it's just not viable to patch every little loophole a corrupt or morally bankrupt administration could exploit and all damage it could cause, and probably not without making the administration itself useless. It's a still a good idea to patch as much as feasible, in part to if slightly discourage the worse from seeking power in the first place. But in a way, it's garbage in, garbage out. Laws will never be able to magically turn corrupt and misguided decisions into ever good ones. The robust solution is promoting wisdom, ethics, civility and education, so people make good democratic choices for themselves and others.

I am not saying this line of thinking is completely absurd. But I think every individual considering this should reflect a lot. (1) Is your country using its ""defense"" systems wisely? (2) Won't the technology be replicated by adversaries anyways? (3) etc..

Overall, the number of people and resources spent on Weapons R&D is probably significantly more than people working on things like diplomacy, ethics, or activism for international human rights (assuming human rights violations are the only legitimate reason for war).

It's significantly safer for individual nations and humanity as a whole if we're not all armed to the teeth constantly on the brink of large conflict, and instead are more or less ethically aligned, all respect basic human rights, and respect other nations.

One thing that comes to mind is a kind of collaborative medical research platform. The trick is to increase as much as possible the likelihood that the research generated isn't junk; it's literally worth far more to produce a single plausible research direction than an infinite amount of junk. Bots could post ideas, and have a system of reviews and various checks to see if any proposed idea, proposed mechanism hypothesis, proposed solution, has merit (support from previous research, consistent with known medical facts, impactful, etc.). Of course, the platform should be very accessible to medical professionals to read the top research and bring it to the real world.

So, I'm not a very big builder, so I'm asking someone to make it :) (I volunteer free advisory for the platform if you do make it open source, maybe with a few ads or donations for revenue stream)

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47076849

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