In Europe, more and more public transportation is free, or at least very heavily subsidized
The costs are covered by local taxes, to curb on individual vehicle use and reduce congestion. After some hiccups, some cities manage good economies of scale where everybody, including the environment, wins.
As for housing and food, while there the incentive structure is more fragile, at least, we have homeless shelters that are free, and once again, everybody wins: the costs are very low, and cities are far safer and cleaner.
If transportation, housing, and food were paid for by giving private corporations and they demanded to incade our privacy as payment then i would be against that too actually
It is not entirely true that no one cares about quality. I'd like to stay optimistic and believe that those who are demanding on the quality of their production will acquire sufficient market differentiation to prevail.
After all, this has been Apple strategy since the 80's, and, even though there were some up's and down's, overall it's a success.
> It is not entirely true that no one cares about quality. I'd like to stay optimistic and believe that those who are demanding on the quality of their production will acquire sufficient market differentiation to prevail.
Maybe, but it probably requires a very strong and opinionated leader to pull off. The conventional wisdom in American business leadership seems to be to pursue the lowest level of quality you can get away with, and focus on cutting costs. And you'll have to fight that every second.
I don't think that's true at the individual-contributor level (pursing quality is very motivating), but they people who move up are the ones who sound "smart" by aping conventional wisdom.
> After all, this has been Apple strategy since the 80's, and, even though there were some up's and down's, overall it's a success.
I might give you that "since the late 90s," but there have been significant periods where that wasn't true (e.g. the early mid-90s Mac OS was buggy and had poor foundations).
I disagree. Giving fake info adds noise to the mechanism, makes it useless. Ultimately I'm inclined to believe that privacy through noise generation is a solution.
If I ever find some idle time, I'd like to make an agent that surfs the web under my identity and several fake ones, but randomly according to several fake personality traits I program. Then, after some testing and analysis of the generated patterns of crawl, release it as freeware to allow anyone to participate in the obfuscation of individuals' behaviors.
> You might want to take a look at differential privacy
Differential privacy is just a bait to make surveillance more socially acceptable and to have arguments to silence critics ("no need to worry about the dangers - we have differential privacy"). :-(
It may often times be trickier than that - content often mixed of course. My 10 y/o hit me with a request yesterday to play Among Us where the age verification system wanted my full name, address, email, AND the last 4 digits of my SSN. I refused.
The bad actor still gets ROI, eg 'paid', for another bit of user data.
Making the overall system less useful is good. However, not allowing a company to profit, and giving fake info still allows for that, is paramount. EG, even with fake info, many metrics on a phone are still gamed and profitable.
That's why they're collected, after all. For profit.
> I disagree. Giving fake info adds noise to the mechanism, makes it useless.
There's no such thing as useless info. Companies will sell it, buy it, and act on it regardless of how true it is. Nobody cares if the data is accurate. Nobody is checking to see if it is. Filling your dossier with false information about yourself won't stop companies from using that data. It can still cost you a job. It can still be used as justification to increase what companies charge you. It can still influence which policies they apply to you or what services they offer/deny you. It can still get you arrested or investigated by police. It can still get you targeted by scammers or extremists.
Any and all of the data you give them will eventually be used against you somehow, no matter how false or misleading it is. Stuffing your dossier with more data does nothing but hand them more ammo to hit you with.
My way of phrasing this: I need to activate my personal transformers on my inner embeddings space to really figure what is it that I truly want to
write.
I'm more and more convinced top execs are most likely to be advantageously replaced by LLM.
They navigate such complex decision spaces, full of compromises, tensions, political knots, that ultimately their important decisions are just made on gut feelings.
Replace the CEO with an LLM whose system prompt is carefully crafted and vetted by the board of directors, with some adequate digital twin of the company to project it's move, I'm sure it should maximize the interest of the shareholders much better.
Next up: apply the same recipe to government executive power. Couldn't be much worse than orange man.
Even Knuth, in TAOP, acknowledges that using O(n) asymptotic behavior as a measure of performance is just a heuristic and not an absolute.
Cache-awareness and structure discovery are 2 important tools of the engineer to optimize practical problems.
If we wanted a reliable measure of the difficulty of a problem instance, it should rely on a function of O(K(n)) where K is the kolmogorov complexity of the input.
Fun fact: in the 90's, the reference gauge for aircraft safety was 1 accidental fatality per 100 million hours of passenger flight. Which is amazingly safe, far better than car and on a par with train.
Now, facing the growth of air travel, it was decided to raise this bar to 1 per billion hour. Not as an end by itself - this comes at very high cost and had a significant impact on travel prices. But because, with the growth of air travel, this would have implied one major accident per fortnight on average. And because those accident are more spectacular and relayed by media, civil aviation authorities feared this might raise angst and deter the public from air travel.
So, safety was enhanced, but mostly for marketing reasons.
which for 2019 describes "0.5 accidents per million departures" and "40 fatalities per trillion revenue passenger kilometers". Considering that many or most passengers fly close to 800-1000 km/h, we're still quite a bit above above 1 fatality per 100 million passenger hours.
Would a factor of 10 be enough? Suppose we go from one major accident per fortnight to one per five months (10 fortnights). Is that higher than what we have seen in the past thirty years?
My numbers come from conversations I recall with René Amalberti, a notable specialist in the area, having advised, among others, Airbus. The conversations were around 1993-96, when I was doing my PhD, and thus may be a bit blurry by now. Also, it is perfectly possible the reference values and measurement units have evolved since then.
Still your projection shows that both reference indicators and actual values are in the ballpark of the estimates I cited.
My (and Amalberti's) main point is that safety assessment is not just about minimizing the raw number of accidents, but involves tradeoffs between various concerns, including psychological perception and revenue. Otherwise, the safest airline would be the one that does not fly anyone.
The problem I see with decentralized protocols is that node owners can easily be spotted, and then crushed under legal constraints that will make them more insecure than a strong multinational who's there just for profit and can balance legal fight for a relative privacy with it's own interest in protecting its customers.
Don't you think that it makes them obvious high-value targets? I mean, that's not even like this profusely pragmatic take has no precedent in the real world: the Snowden revelations showed that all major tech companies were in bed with the NSA to spy extrajudicially on everyone. It's a leap of optimism to think they would "fight legally for its own interest in protecting its customers".
Then, compare that to the low-scale/low-value/hobbyist/residential service providers. How high do you think the chances are for a malicious state-actor to "corrupt" many service operators without it widely being known and publicly dealt with? There's also a deniability dimension to this: XMPP uses OMEMO as a zero-knowledge encryption scheme: whatever the users are doing is none of the operator's business, and the choice of encryption scheme and implementation is purely a client-side affair, so now you are no longer dealing with "reluctant" operators, but potentially millions of end-users using strong encryption. And that is assuming the server is operating in the open, but nothing prevents service operators from offering it over tor (with very little impact on the end-user-side), further raising the bar for the malicious state actor.
The costs are covered by local taxes, to curb on individual vehicle use and reduce congestion. After some hiccups, some cities manage good economies of scale where everybody, including the environment, wins.
As for housing and food, while there the incentive structure is more fragile, at least, we have homeless shelters that are free, and once again, everybody wins: the costs are very low, and cities are far safer and cleaner.
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