If future generations of researchers will wonder why IRB reviews became mandatory for computer science, studies like this will be the answer.

Seriously, some people don't seem to realize the point at which they are becoming Fritz Haber.

Expert software engineers will still accidentally burn $500 or $5000 on tasks that don't work, or are not efficient. Amateurs will accidentally spend $100 to get something great.

So part of the change is a change in the risk structure of using frontier models. Before, you'd burn your quota; now, you can burn uncapped (less-capped) money.

But the numbers are still the same (it's about rates not counts), just that we can expect the 40% figure to be more accurate than with 2M.

It's difficult to do a back of the napkin calculation, but you can easily see how 16 colds x 3 days / 2 parents leads to 24 excess sick days for parents per kid (discounting for some overlap when multiple kids are sick) over the first few years.

[1] https://github.com/robert-koch-institut/GrippeWeb_Daten_des_...

This data is from AOK which is one of the state-mandated insurers. It insures around 2M people, and my gut feeling is that they are not terribly unrepresentative of the workforce as a whole.

But of course the point is, everyone with a tiny bit of true data could tell much more precise stories, and the journalists (as usual) didn't care or didn't think it would fly with readers.

This article [1] mentions 40% of sick days being from people with long-term (> 6 weeks) illnesses. That's data from one of Germany's large insurers. While I don't know the proportion of those with long-term illnesses, if we assume it's at most 10%, then the average for people with "normal" short-term illnesses is at most 12 days. So much lower.

[1] https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/sind-die-deutschen-wirklich-h...

If you are worried about big players profiling you (hard to avoid, high likelihood of happening, low likelihood of damage), then you want Sailfish.

If you are worried about apps profiling you (easy to avoid, high likelihood of happening, moderate likelihood of damage), you want Android or iOS.

Graphene and Sailfish sit on different points on that spectrum, just like OpenBSD and Linux do.

"A single document can now contain multiple bibliographies"

I think you can learn about it most by reading clever, capable people from big tech corporations. Their framing often involves tradeoffs against a slow but inevitable societal pressure that is helped by compromising on freedom.

So I don't believe they are ignorant of all your points; it's rather that they don't see a realistic way how tech, corporations, and perhaps even ordinary people can go forward (being better, or richer, or more sophisticated or whatever) without making that compromise. It's as if they saw the forking paths of the future, and none will end up without technical restraints, regardless of whether they do it or whether things just get worse and someone else then does them.

[1] https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/developmental-psycholog...

But in practical terms, while there are some very obvious gaps and biases, I think the German media system is still pretty good in a lot of ways and everybody does have a lot of freedom.

I'd even go so far as to say - the typical accusations of censorship are mostly from right-wing actors who are not censored, but who demand more views and make a spectacle out of claiming to be censored.

The historic precedent is that Germany's first Chancellor wanted to establish a state-funded and state-directed TV station. This was explicitly shut down by the constitutional court.

As a result, a system was established to (1) ensure funding is not decided upon by state institutions but instead by an independent body of experts (KEF). (2) control over the meta-level content decisions is exercised by a body (essentially like a parliament) of representatives from societal groups (e.g. including politicians, doctors, churches etc etc.)

Now the "gross intervention in the media" is a very recent American idea - up until pretty recently the US did have the fairness doctrine, it has licensing and so on, all of these are gross interventions in media. And so are libel laws etc. So the German insight that underpins its media regulation is: You cannot have functional mass media without enabling them through some form of state action, you can only try to be light-handed and implement checks and balances.

- The world has very diverse ideas about how media regulation works. Germany has a strong public service broadcast tradition that is constitutionally anchored. You may not like it, but that's the cultural and legal tradition and changing it is not easily done. Please respect that especially coming from a country with a more liberal tradition (and perhaps a less functional media system, e.g. in the US).

- The source is a fringe right-wing outlet that most Germans would consider a bit suspicious (not necessarily factually wrong, but tasteless and a bit hysteric perhaps?)

- Public service broadcasting in Germany is not influenced by the state (note this says state, not politics or politicians) by design.

- Prioritizing public service broadcasters is a pretty logical conclusion from a certain tradition of media regulation and has precedent, e.g. in must carry rules for cable, EPGs etc.

So sure, debatable whether this is sensible, but it's at least neither surprising nor evidently nonsensical.

Source: Was a tiny bit of an expert on this for a short while.

Some downsides are: No unique constraints with indexes (can accidentally shoot yourself in the foot with double ingestion), writing is a bit cumbersome if you already have parquet files.

The true reason is, as the recent norwegian report quipped: We love our tech, but it betrays us - that's an abusive relationship.

Consent prompts are a band-aid for users being exploited: They are not fixing the root but covering it with legal painkillers.

But the only true remedy is actually feeling in control of and empowered by your device - a vision that Apple once at least promised, but now has less and less legitimacy of heralding.