Silicon Valley is infamous at this point for running loss leaders to lock people into their ecosystem with the expectation of being able to milk people dry later. The fact that the services are "worth the money" doesn't mean it's economically in China's interests to allow for easy access to them.
An IP based economy just on its face seems like such a laughable house of cards. So your economy is based on government enforced imaginary rights to ideas? The proliferation of tax havens should be a sign that the system is bullshit - it exposes how little is actually keeping the profits of IP endeavors within a nation.
There is incredibly little respect for the society owning the means of production in a tangible real sense, instead we have economies that run on intangibles, where the intangibles allow 600lb gorillas like Oracle to engage in much rent seeking while simultaneously avoiding paying dues to the precise body that granted them their imaginary rights. The entire status quo feels like something some rich tycoons dreamed up to sell to the public the merits of systematically weakening their negotiating position on the promise that one day a Bernie Sanders type would descend from the heavens and deliver universal basic income fueled by the efficiency of private industry through nothing but incorruptability and force of personality.
China seems to be successful in part because they have no qualms with flexing dictatorial power to increase the leverage of the state itself. This may be less economically efficient but it means they actually get to harvest the fruits of any efficiency. Intellectual property law? They just ignore it and don't get punished, since punishing them would be anti-trade.
Yes, the IP economy rests on a bunch of fragile international treaties the US has with its partner states. The government provides the court system that enforces IP claims, but the costs of litigation are mostly carried by rights holders. So when you are sued for patent infringement, the court's costs are fairly minimal and paid by both sides -- but the court's power is just an externality of state power.
This article was eye rollingly heavy on moralizing ultimately to only eventually hit on the point that what the algorithms are measuring is the odds somebody will be convicted and not the odds somebody does illegal things. Appearance is known to dramatically affect your chances at trial.
I remember reading about a similar result in software that judged job applicants. The system was trained on resumes of past applicants and the hired/not-hired outcome. Unfortunately, instead of providing a neutral guide, it just learned the biases of the humans who had made past hiring decisions. Of course, the designers of the system had excluded demographic information, but the system found proxies like extra-curricular activities that correlated with race, gender or social class.
I know exactly what he's talking about as somebody who ran a win7 and Linux VM on a 4gb MBA. I had to be incredibly choosy about what I kept open at any given time or my system would keel over. It enforced discipline that I just didn't have normally which helped keep me organized.
Yup they're already under 99.9% reliability for the year. Never mind WhatsApp this makes them a questionable replacement for SMS. Not only "was" it a disaster for signal the disaster isn't over.
Reliability is more important than privacy for messaging most of the time. Some major balls are being dropped here.
> Reliability is more important than privacy for messaging most of the time. Some major balls are being dropped here.
Obviously, The Signal team should have done a better job of coordinating the mass user migration with the WhatsApp team at Facebook. Such a failure. /s
I don't get why some people see the need to bitch about Signal at every opportunity. The criticisms are usually unfair (like this one), missing the point, or a self-centered whine that Signal didn't decide to focus on catering to the whiner.
I have made one complaint about signal in my entire life after the outage hit 9 hours. They did fail. It's just an inconvenient truth thus the character assassination and apologism.
Go back to WhatsApp. Signal is crashing because it appearantly went up 5x in userbase. I can't guarantee any other service would cope with such a rapid expansion of their userbase other than WhatsApp.
For me what made me give in was realising how useful the features would be in regards to ADHD, allowing for a new input modality that just straight up reduces the friction it takes for me to set a reminder.
It's routine that I will just leave an item and forget where it is several times a day that I take it almost for granted up until it causes me to be late going out the door. Now I can yell "Find my phone" (or wallet, keys, etc) and my phone is there. Yes I could go to my computer, go to the find my phone page, but there's just more friction and these issues happen to me all the time. The more things I link up to voice control, the more options I have in regards to accomplish a task, and sometimes voice is the most efficient means of going about it.
I can get entertainment like a podcast or music without a single screen being involved, which given that I inherently have low impulse control, is a nice separation of things. Or I can again, find my stuff without looking at any screens. Voice input can act as a lesser evil to screens.
Saying to just use FOSS and air gaps, because of how immature such solutions are, is effectively saying you shouldn't use these systems at all. The benefits of using the systems that exist today makes it so that the average person, like yourself, judge me less because I appear more punctual and less forgetful and more productive and better rested and so on. Being human, you are likely to disrespect me for being late and disorganized no matter what my excuse is, whereas you'll only disrespect me for using voice assistants if you know I'm using them, so it's a winning tradeoff. Just like how some will judge me for taking medication but only if they know I'm using it.
I don't read his post as pointing the finger at all Republicans. I see it more targeted at people like Cruz who refused to even Certify Biden for President. I doubt he's saying Pence who was notably outspoken in his support of certifying Biden and had violent threats against him as a result is who he's talking about just because he's a Republican.
