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Is it weird to be pro free market but to be against this kind of pricing?

I can’t seem to square the positions.


Free market depends on relatively equal knowledge. If there is significant knowledge disparity it's no longer free.

Internet initially helped consumers with knowledge. Now that balance has shifted to more and more corporations knowing more.

If we enshrine into law significant privacy expectations, that can restore the knowledge balance.


Depends on what you mean by "free market". If you think "free market" means market participants should just be free to do whatever they want then yeah, it's weird. But if you think "free market" means that products and prices should be determined by supply/demand and a competitive race to the bottom between market participants, then it's not weird at all.

I mean if you're a laissez-faire capitalist, you can't have it both ways.

But if you believe in anti-trust, regulation, and competition as external checks (typically enacted through governments) on capitalism's power - then you can indeed square the two positions.


It’s weird I have basically a free private tutor in any subject and I use it a lot.

Yet nothing has actually changed.


Can you expand on that?

I'll use 1NN as the interpolation strategy instead since I think it illustrates the same point and saves a few characters.

Recap: 1NN says that given a query Q you choose any pair (X,Y) from your learned "model" (a finite set of (X,Y) pairs) M minimizing |Q-X|. Your output is Y.

The following kind of argument works for linear interpolation too (you can even view 1NN as 1-point interpolation), but it's ever so slightly messier since definitions vary a fair bit, you potentially need to talk about the existence of >1 discrete "nearest" or "enclosing" set of neighbors, and proving that you can get away with fewer points than 1NN or have lower error than 1NN is itself also messier.

Pick your favorite compact-domain, continuous function embedded in some Euclidean space. For any target error you'd like to hit, the uniform continuity of that function guarantees that if your samples cover the domain well enough (no point in the domain is greater than some fixed distance, needing smaller distances for lower errors, from some point in your model) then the maximum error from a 1NN strategy is bounded by the associated error given by uniform continuity (which, again, you can make as small as you'd like by increasing the sampling resolution). The compact domain means you can physically achieve those error bounds with finite sample sizes.

For a simple example, imagine fitting more and more, smaller and smaller, line segments to y=x^2 on [-1,1].


My main skepticism (Shark lover here btw!)

Is that sharks are an ancient species and they’ve survived way warmer oceans even relatively recently.

For example the Medieval Warm Period Sargasso Sea surface temperatures were 1°C warmer than 400 years ago, and Pacific Ocean water temperatures were 0.65°C warmer than the decades before.


Sharks are an ancient division of life, roughly 440 million years old, which has survived far warmer oceans.

There are ~500 living species of shark and likely tens of thousands extinct in their lineage.

We are perpetrating a mass extinction event that incorporates not just temperatures, but ocean acidification and trophic cascade for fisheries. In mass extinctions, enough things about the ecosystem change that specialists often go extinct. Great White Sharks are a specialist species in their extreme size; Most size specialists are in a precarious local maxima that disappears too quickly to adapt if conditions change drastically.


The warmer ocean thing seems to be blanketing over the real issue: we are overfishing.

Which is really heartening to me, because decreasing the temperature of the ocean seems daunting, but not dragging giant nets through the ocean nonstop seems pretty straightforward.


Were there any periods in which the rate of change in warming was the same or greater?

Younger Dryas, definitely. It very likely abruptly stopped progress in human agriculture, before allowing it to abruptly restart again. Makes the Medieval warm period and little ice age look like a joke. Two massive shifts that punctuate the timeline of early human prehistory.

> The Younger Dryas (YD, Greenland Stadial GS-1) was a period in Earth's geologic history that occurred circa 12,900 to 11,700 years Before Present (BP). It is primarily known for the sudden or "abrupt" cooling in the Northern Hemisphere, when the North Atlantic Ocean cooled and annual air temperatures decreased by ~3 °C (5 °F) over North America, 2–6 °C (4–11 °F) in Europe and up to 10 °C (18 °F) in Greenland, in a few decades

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas


I think there’s debate on the current numbers but I’ve heard sea surface temperatures are currently about 0.5°C above the 1981-2010 average.

During the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, the rate of change of CO2 concentration was 1/4 what we're at today

During mass extinction events.


> Is that sharks are an ancient species

For a shark lover, you should know that shark is not a species, but a taxonomy group.

From there, everything else you assume is incorrect (ie: some species of sharks have definitely gone extinct)


I presume it was due to the temperature gradient being extremely low, so they could gradually adapt to the change over hundreds of years. We're pulling the handbrake in geological terms.

https://xkcd.com/1732

(that chart was made in 2016, given that we were at +1.5C last year we're outdone even the most pessimistic scenario presented on that graph by quite a bit, the line is now almost horizontal)


How are you in any way qualified to know that what you said is correct, besides that being a wild guess?

https://climate.copernicus.eu/copernicus-2024-first-year-exc...

Reading a thermometer is not really an advanced skill.


Except you have no idea what the capability of sharks are to adapt to different ocean temperatures. As sharks swim across various parts of the ocean or at various depths in a single day, the temperatures change far quicker than ocean temperatures over the last 100 years. The idea that you could guess that sharks can't adapt to a wide range of temperatures is nothing but a wild guess on your part because it agrees with your biased belief that sharks are in danger due to climate change.

But sharks have been around for 400 million years, longer than trees have existed. The amount of change they have endured is far greater than that, and sharks are likely the most adept at climate change.


How are you in any way qualified to know that what you said is correct, besides that being a wild guess?

How are you qualified to know anything that you haven't personally witnessed, besides all of your "knowledge" being a wild guess?

How come the sharks don’t migrate toward colder water?

> Several large tuna species and sharks, known as “mesothermic” species for the way their bodies run hot, require more fuel to maintain their temperature and are thus confronting a “double jeopardy” of warming oceans and declining food, mainly from overfishing. As water temperatures climb, these species will be forced to relocate to cooler waters.

They are moving to cooler waters but the cooler waters won't have the food supplies they need. So it's either stay where the food is and overheat or go to cooler water and starve.


Whites do dive deep as they age, and feed on giant squid and elephant seals that dive deep as well.

Is there a way to listen to say the top ten AI songs?

Will this change their AI strategy (or lack of)

Like blowing hundred billion dollars for undifferentiated technology?

Do.you.think.he’ll.fix.the.usability.issues?

I tell my kids, there’s a God out there for everyone.

The last question God might be for you If you’re super rational and are really into technology.

Belief in God is like a supermarket. Once you decide to enter you’re probably going to find something that works for you.


The funny thing is this, let's say that an entity is outside of time, an entity that maps 1:1 in every practical way to the theists God.

Putting aside the bidirectional issues of non-interaction, what if mankind, or the universes collection of agents (if there are others and we interact with them) at some future point manages to create a supercomputer or entity in a substrate that exists outside of our time in the causal sense.

As long as we don't apocalypse ourselves or self destruct or get distracted from self preservation and miss the asteroid that ends us - we end up bringing this thing in our imagination to reality, just like all the other stuff we imagined and subsequently made.

Maybe God is real we just haven't made it yet.

This is all imagination of course, a fun thought about possibilities, humans tend to make the things they imagine and desire if it's actually possible.


How does this fit with those of us who found one, then later on decided it was silly and gave up the whole idea?

Good question. Perhaps you found the wrong one?

I mean there’s such a wide selection you can even believe in simulations these days.

Or if that’s still too much there’s always the Pascal’s wager God. Still better than nothing.


I find Pascal's wager is of the same nature as Aquinas' Five Ways to prove God, or accelerationists about the inevitability of a Singularity: believing that your own rational argument can be the basis to prove a fact about reality merely because it feels internally consistent.

Needless to say, I don’t find them at all convincing. This 'nothing' is much better than catching unconvincing unneeded supernatural entities.


The Wager doesn't attempt to prove God, it merely states that you might as well worship, because the cost is small and the potential payoff is huge.

It falls apart because, based on what's actually known, there's no reason to think worshipping might be the thing that condemns you to hell, and not doing so gets you into heaven, rather than the other way around.


Not to mention that "the cost is small" is in the eye of the beholder. I've known people who spend a significant part of their week on religious activities, and that's a huge opportunity cost.

Granted, if your belief is based on Pascal's Wager, and is only to hedge your bets, presumably you wouldn't spend much time on religion. But that also raises the question of whether that style of "belief" would be good enough for whatever god might exist.

Granted^2, spending half of your life devoted to a religion could be deemed a small cost when weighed against the eternity afterward. But then you have to think about the idea that you'll have wasted half of your one and only life if the afterlife turns out not to be real.

At any rate, Pascal seems to have failed to consider that there are thousands of religions to choose from, and that a hypothetical god(s) might punish you for choosing to believe in the wrong one. And might even prefer that you believe in nothing, rather than the wrong one!


That’s the fun thing about the Wager. If the reward is infinite then any finite cost is worth it for any finite probability of obtaining it.

Pascal did actually consider other religions. He just concluded that they were definitely wrong. In his view, either (his brand of) Christianity was correct, or god doesn’t exist.


Yes, my point is that those three arguments may be compelling but they assume that reality is correlated to the shape of their thoughts. What they have in common is that they all miss the insight that you need to actually test your assumptions to improve your certainties, and that's not feasible for theoretical all powerful entities that can bend reality.

Why bother, though? What does trying to believe in this ill-defined entity do for me?

Does iPhone do this? Kind of scary to be accidentally sending your home address anywhere you upload a photo.


You can choose whether you want to share the location or not when selecting photos in iOS. You'll see at the bottom a label that says "Location is included", and you can click the three dots to remove location:

https://imgur.com/a/lm0stDE

Not sure if there's a way to do that by default, I've never checked.


I feel like that's the optimal implementation - best of both worlds

Wish android copied them for once lol


I know which one works better for us. Which works better for grandma?

(Of course, Google's move shouldn't have been altruistic, it would have been pragmatic as mentioned elsewhere.)

If I got paid a nickel every time someone talked about protecting children online and I reinvested it into technology accessibility for seniors, it'd be fully funded! :)


Interesting. How does it work for texting?


I just checked in iMessage. When you add an attachment and select photos, you get the same picker that the rest of the OS uses, it's just in a collapsed state. If you swipe up, it'll expand to fill the screen and that same "Location is included" label and configuration menu is available.


Wow you’re right. I’ve never thought to look there.


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