Teens will learn to bypass all this within the week. Then, whatever the new way of doing social media will be, it could easily reach consensus within the year.
Even if it achieves only a small reduction in usage (say 10%), i would expect that should have a measurable effect on happiness if the hypothesis of [social media causes unhappiness] is true. If no increase in happiness is observed, i think we could say that social media does not cause unhappiness.
Not so sure. The government has placed a A$50M incentive per violation discovered, I heard. That sounds like a powerful incentive on the companies to outsmart the kids.
If a kid uses a pseudonymous account and fraudulently bypasses an age verification system, I have a hard time believing that the company would be fined $50M.
I would guess that this massive fine is more for situations like if a company can be shown to have wilfully allowed a violation or else has been grossly negligent. (But I have not read the law!)
Realistically, at a certain point the training would likely involve interaction with reality (by sensors and actuators), rather than relying on secondhand knowledge available in textual form.
Yes and reality is the hard part. Moravec’s Paradox [1] continues to ring true. A billion years of evolution went into our training to be able to cope with the complexity of reality. Our language is a blink of an eye compared to that.
Reality cannot be perceived. A crisp shadow is all you can hope for.
The problem for me is the point of the economy in the limit where robots are better, faster and cheaper than any human at any job. If the robots don’t decide we’re worth keeping around we might end up worse than horses.
Look I think that is the whole difficulty. In reality, doing the wrong thing results in pain, and the right thing in relief/pleasure. A living thing will learn from that.
But machines can experience neither pain nor pleasure.
It's pretty easy to imagine a world in which, for example, UBI is available, but it's contingent on sterilization.
Aside from being more compassionate than the Terminator movies, it might simply be the cheapest way to handle humans in a world where we've become a liability.
This argument has always confused me. Yes, it's true that a digital copy of a video can be duplicated endlessly in a way a physical item cannot. But... so?
It's an item available for purchase at a price. If you take it without paying that price then the seller is out money they would otherwise have received. If everyone pirated Netflix's output then they would have to shut down, just the same as a grocery store would if everyone stole their produce. The only reason that doesn't happen is because piracy is a minority activity.
Seriously how old are some of the people responding? An entire generation already went through this.
Bootleg DVDs, pirated files were common place. I could literally go out whenever and spend change on a VCD. Or a friend would have a copy of whatever movie on their HD. I’d go to anime screenings where people would bring their RAID arrays full of fan subbed anime. Music was pirated all over the place. Digital players just made music piracy more common. Everyone used BitTorrent. Everyone. People got sued. ISPs used to send out letters saying “we think you’re torrenting. Please stop or we’ll cancel your service”.
You know what didn’t happen? The entertainment industry didn’t collapse. You know why? Because none of these people were never going to spend money on entertainment. You know what I did if I couldn’t afford to see a movie or get a new CD in college? Something else.
When Netflix started streaming, they fixed all this. We all stopped BitTorrenting because Netflix was easier. They know how to fix it and they fixed it for a while. Sell us convenience. But I’m not paying and managing 5 subscriptions.
By acquiring a duplicate of the original, you're no longer depriving someone of property in the way you would be with theft. If you steal an apple, that's one less apple that the store has to sell to someone who is willing to pay for an apple, and the store will still owe the orchard the cost of the apple you took. In contrast, pirating a movie doesn't remove any physical copies from shelves.
The problem comes down to what you believe the cost of piracy actually is, and who bears that cost, which gets complicated in the case of digital goods and subscription models. If the argument is that piracy lowers demand in general, then you'd have to account for the effect of libraries, the secondhand market, and competition from other media.
The practical evidence that pirates are outnumbered by paying customers suggests that on the balance, the system is capable of supporting some freeloaders without collapsing. To extend the apple analogy, it would be similar to people coming to the orchard after the harvest and gleaning the leftover apples instead of buying them from the store. Can you argue this diminishes apple sales? of course. Is it theft? yes, and the orchard owners have their right to insist it's a crime and all apples must be paid for, but if the apples were going to rot anyways the harm is minimal. Would it completely destroy the apple market and leave all apple growers destitute? I don't think so.
Personally, I can pay for media, so I believe it's ethical that I do. If someone in my position chooses not to pay, there's a pretty solid argument that the media company is out money they could have had otherwise.
However, not everyone who pirates something was ever going to buy it in the first place. A huge portion of the world lives in sufficiently deep poverty that the option was either: have the thing for free or not have it at all. These folks don't represent lost sales.
Luckily though, "price" is not the same thing as "cost". If they watch for free, it doesn't cost us anything.
Just out of curiosity, how certain are you that "piracy is a minority activity"?
Intuitively I feel like it's something like the light bulb.
For a while, bulbs had to meet efficiency standards. These standards were configured such that they didn't technically exclude incandescent bulbs, however, for an incandescent bulb to comply, it would have to be driven hard and thus comparatively short-lived.
(for context, incandescent bulbs last something like 4x as long if you let them be 10% dimmer)
I have 3x 100watt lightbulbs in a single fixture that have been running strong for years. The secret? I keep them dimmed by ~20%. Longevity wasn’t the intent, though, I just like them dimmer and warmer. A pleasant side effect nonetheless.
I like this kind of thinking. I wonder though if you're paying as much attention to see who's "struggling with output" on Tues, Thurs, and Fri?
As in, are you skeptical of WFH and looking for downsides, or does your particular team just work better with more time in the office? I only ask because it's foreign to me; offices completely destroy my focus and I don't know how anyone does it.
In this case, it's not about whether it fits on my physical hardware or not. It's about what seems like an arbitrary restriction designed to start pushing users to their cloud offering.
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