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Among my secret research ideas, this is the most dangerous and morally wrong one.

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.


Describing some of our colleagues as "becoming Fritz Haber" is a highly deep and accurate cut that I will 100% be stealing from you.


In general, technology has always decreased our liberty though


Are you serious?


It's hard to enslave your fellow man without a bigger stick


You're talking about superiority of technology, not technology itself.


It's also about variance in the number.

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.


I can relate to the attitude, but I also suspect it's a lot easier to live like this in one of the two richest countries in the world with the least stressful labor markets (going by the experience of my friends who emigrated there).


To put this into perspective, young children have an average amount of 16 colds per year (there's even a cool repo for incidence data, I suspect you could get more precise [1]). With an increasing number of parents both being in the labor market, and with childcare facilities increasingly (and rightfully IMO) refusing to take in sick kids, this means that parents need to take their own sick days to care for them.

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_...


To be fair, the median is just as little information as the mean. We live in a world where ink is cheap, they should just show a histogram.


in this case the median matters a lot more. most people either get sick for a couple days to weeks with something like the flu, or get a more serious illness/injury like a complex fracture that takes them out for months. the first type is much more common but the long leave cases push up the mean.


That's exactly right.

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...


> from one of Germany's large insurers

Is this voluntary insurance? It changes meaning to the statistic to % from those that made an insurance.


I assume you mean there might be a self-selection issue with people who are voluntarily ("privately") insured, as compared to those who have the normal state-mandated ("gesetzlich") insurance?

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.


AOK insured 27 million in 2021, couldn't find a more recent number.


Whoops, misread the digit! Thanks for catching.

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.


In Germany there’s private insurance which can only be chosen by people of higher salary and good health because the rate depends on their condition when they sign up. So this data would be biased towards sick people, people doing jobs that are more likely to make you sick, and people who are financially less well off.


In Germany you need an insurance, but you can choose which one. In Berlin at least I remember TK was the default, but you can choose others.


For clarification, “default” above doesn’t mean “In Berlin you get insured with TK by default”, and rather “Most people in Berlin will recommend choosing TK over a different state-mandated insurer”. TK was also very popular when I was back in university in Frankfurt. It might just still be the one with reasonable prices!


IIRC you can move from TK to others freely, but if you move to some options there are conditions to come back.

TK service via email, phone, etc is amazing, even if your German is not very good, as it was the case for me the first year.


Which is exactly (part of) why people call ZFS a "rampant layering violation"!


It's very simple, this is about the threat model.

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.


Sorry, this does not make any sense. E.g. vanilla GrapheneOS does not have Google Play services and no analytics from big players at all.

Even if you choose not to install Play Services/Play Store, you will still have access to many more apps than on SailfishOS - from many open source Android apps to proprietary apps that you can download without the Play Store. Plus, with the Linux terminal support in Pixels (note: not all Android phones support this, e.g. Snapdragons don't support privileged virtualization), you can also run Linux desktop apps.


I have nothing but great things to say about typst, and this is my personal favorite from this release:

"A single document can now contain multiple bibliographies"


That was nicely put.

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.


A lot of harm would be prevented if people didn't do bad shit under the assumption the next guy will do it if they don't. You're the next guy.


But they're right. The next guy will do it if you don't. And you'll be fired meaning you won't have any power any more, and the person who thinks DRM is good will be hired and become powerful in your stead. How does that help?


> You are the next guy

If you don't understand this, then you just don't understand.


Everyone can be the next guy. I can be him or the next next guy can. Do you know the prisoner's dilemma?


Yes, and I'm advocating for a specific quadrant.


You only get to choose a half. The previous guy chooses the quadrant.


I'll spell it out in case someone else truly doesn’t understand since you're just determined not to.

Pro-social actions are taken more often if you believe others will also take pro-social actions. The best way to do it is to believe you're the same as other people and that other people are good, and that you're not the patsy when you take a pro-social decision and others don't. Because you're the next guy for someone.


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