andallthat

joined 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

I'm not sure we, as a society, are ready to trust ML models to do things that might affect lives. This is true for self-driving cars and I expect it to be even more true for medicine. In particular, we can't accept ML failures, even when they get to a point where they are statistically less likely than human errors.

I don't know if this is currently true or not, so please don't shoot me for this specific example, but IF we were to have reliable stats that everything else being equal, self-driving cars cause less accidents than humans, a machine error will always be weird and alien and harder for us to justify than a human one.

"He was drinking too much because his partner left him", "she was suffering from a health condition and had an episode while driving"... we have the illusion that we understand humans and (to an extent) that this understanding helps us predict who we can trust not to drive us to our death or not to misdiagnose some STI and have our genitals wither. But machines? Even if they were 20% more reliable than humans, how would we know which ones we can trust?

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Most things to do with Green Energy. Don't get me wrong, I think solar panels or wind turbines are great. I just think that most of the reported figures are technically correct but chosen to give a misleadingly positive impression of the gains.

Relevant smbc: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/capacity

[–] [email protected] 30 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

...especially you, Elon

[–] [email protected] 13 points 3 weeks ago

I think he means "I will give you a child, choose any of them. I don't know where to put them any longer and they don't even seem to like me."

[–] [email protected] 25 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

and Trump would just... "your beer? Haven't seen it. There's just MY two glasses of beer here. A great beer, the greatest. My uncle invented beer, Fred Budweiser Trump. Great IQ, very good genes!"

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 month ago

like sending Vance literally following her around?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago

laugh all you want, but YOU are next, former Twitter users who refused to pay for their blue badge and had the gall to move to Mastodon or others!

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 month ago (1 children)

yes, that was all completely wrong. If Trump had been the one on top of the building and had fallen down (maybe accidentally hitting a stray bullet on his way down)... now THAT would have been closer

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

I think they don't matter with outrage, because outrage explodes in ways that are hard to predict. I mean, I can see the problem with the ad now that it has been pointed out to me. After reading about it repeatedly, I now find it bad and ridiculous and what were they thinking? But at a first look, as a test audience I would have probably rated it as "meh, ok".

[–] [email protected] 87 points 2 months ago (13 children)

It is about fragility, like others said, but It is also about uniqueness, in the sense of "oh, so you think you're soo special!"

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 months ago
  • they said they are coming to get us, Ilya
  • let's hope they do, Piotr... I'm so tired of this! What do we have today, by the way? Insults, death threats or stupid memes?
[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

to be fair, he did turn orange

 

I have posted this on Reddit (askeconomics) a while back but got no good replies. Copying it here because I don't want to send traffic to Reddit.

What do you think?

I see a big push to take employees back to the office. I personally don't mind either working remote or in the office, but I think big companies tend to think rationally in terms of cost/benefit and I haven't seen a convincing explanation yet of why they are so keen to have everyone back.

If remote work was just as productive as in-person, a remote-only company could use it to be more efficient than their work-in-office competitors, so I assume there's no conclusive evidence that this is the case. But I haven't seen conclusive evidence of the contrary either, and I think employers would have good reason to trumpet any findings at least internally to their employees ("we've seen KPI so-and-so drop with everyone working from home" or "project X was severely delayed by lack of in-person coordination" wouldn't make everyone happy to return in presence, but at least it would make a good argument for a manager to explain to their team)

Instead, all I keep hearing is inspirational wish-wash like "we value the power of working together". Which is fine, but why are we valuing it more than the cost of office space?

On the side of employees, I often see arguments like "these companies made a big investment in offices and now they don't want to look stupid by leaving them empty". But all these large companies have spent billions to acquire smaller companies/products and dropped them without a second thought. I can't believe the same companies would now be so sentimentally attached to office buildings if it made any economic sense to close them.

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