yiliu @ yiliu @informis.land

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2 yr. ago

Algorithms.

Do you have any evidence of that? I used to work for Amazon (as a programmer working on financial data, not delivering packages or anything), and they took review quality pretty damn seriously. They knew full well that customers losing faith in the quality of products on Amazon, it could crater their business.

If some product with 2002 reviews suddenly drops to 2 reviews, 1.5 stars average...it'll sink to the bottom of pages of results, and people will click on a different one, with better reviews. It's not like they only have a couple products to offer, and they make money on more or less all of them.

Why would this hurt Amazon? People will just see a different set of reviews. It's manufacturers if crappy knock-off products that should be shaking in their boots.

They detect when a whole bunch of reviews are posted at exactly the same time, or are posted on a fixed schedule, or use extremely similar language, or with a brand new account...

Basically they use spam-detection techniques on reviews.

They've given me too many headaches...

I.e. you did use them, but learned the hard way why you shouldn't.

Very likely OP is a student, or entry-level programmer, and is avoiding them because they were told to, and just haven't done enough refactoring & debugging or worked on large enough code bases to 'get' it yet.

Or mutable constants...

For real. Since Trump's nomination, he's lost the popular vote twice (but scraped by once thanks to the electoral college), and Republicans have lost one election after another.

So what do they do? Double down and worship the dumb motherfucker!

Not all of them, though. We just need enough of them to give up on Trump for him to lose his stranglehold on American politics.

Well, your friend wasn't totally crazy (nor was mine TBH, the trends looked bad). A few countries have more or less eliminated paper money. India was a very high-profile one, because lots of older people in India had savings stored under the mattress or whatever that were scheduled to become worthless...they had to postpone it a couple times. And a few European countries (I wanna say Finland? maybe Estonia?) have more or less got rid of physical currency.

A person might see those datapoints and extrapolate from that that it's only a matter of time before all countries would be paperless, without accounting for differences in culture. I can't see the US getting rid of paper currency...uhh...anytime soon, let's say.

Well, yes, but if it's far enough into the future it's kind of irrelevant. We can transition away from oil.

That was a key part of the argument at the time: there is no replacement! At that point, solar was much, much less efficient, wind was very much in the 'early experimental' phase, 'nuclear' was still a dirty word, electric cars were a joke, corn-based hydrogen was still a fresh and embarrassing failure, etc etc. No country at that point had ever grown their GDP without using significantly more oil & coal. The rhetoric was very much that we were stuck with gas cars forever, and everything else was a silly pipe dream.

The world has changed dramatically in the meantime--largely because oil prices started rising so dramatically.

I had some friends who were fully sold on Peak Oil for a few years. Basically: we were about to hit the point where supply of oil was going to fall below demand once and for all, and there was no viable replacement, so prices were going to skyrocket, societies would grind to a halt, wars would start over the dwindling oil resources, and we were going to be living in a post-apocalyptic wasteland within 10 years.

In ~2009, the price of oil hit a record high of nearly $200/barrel. This was at the tail end of a sharp jump, after 20 years of steadily-rising oil prices. One of my friends was pretty obsessed, and had been reading blogs and listening to podcasts, and had all kinds of facts & figures on oil production, known reserves, predicted demand, etc, and they all seemed to point to a crisis. He predicted a price of $300 or higher per barrel within a year, and that was just the beginning.

So we made a bet on where oil prices were going to be in 5 years. He said (with absolute confidence) $300+, I said somewhere under the current price of $200.

It ended up being under $100/barrel. Nobody talks about "Peak Oil" anymore.

(I won't say where I got my confidence that oil prices would stabilize and fall, because that would just invite a barrage of downvotes and angry arguments...)

who's liable when it crashes?

This is potentially the killer app of self-driving. If it gets safe enough, the company offering self-driving cars can take responsibility for insurance (so long as you use the self-driving feature).

He's far from the only one claiming self-driving cars are "just a year or two away". There was a lot of that for a while.

Jesus, how big was that bag to start with?!

He was declared dictator-for-life and was in open war with much of the senate. Not hyper-democratic. And then he was killed, so we don't know what his final goal was. Maybe he was going to set things right (in his opinion) and then hand back control to the senate, like Sulla had done a generation earlier, or maybe he would have done what Octavian did later.

Guys, this is a golden opportunity!

Get on Right wing forums and tell them this test has been aborted, because all the clever paranoid nutjobs were onto them.

But, in fact, the test has just been rescheduled to a random time, or rather at random times for the next year or so. Until Biden's time is up and Trump is declared Supreme Emperor I guess. Because really, if you were really conspiring to send a mind control message, you wouldn't broadcast the date & time ffs.

So the only safe thing to do is to turn off their devices, all their devices, and leave them off until after the next election. That includes TVs, of course, and especially Fox News, cuz the Democrats know that Fox News viewers are more cautious and took fewer vaccines, so they'll have scheduled extra Emergency Broadcasts for them.

Fast forward a year, in which all the crazies have to go out and live on the real world and talk to real people, and we might just have a sane country back. At the very least, we'd have a year off...

Whew, okay.

food deserts

...Are a thing. They're around. But the vast majority of people in the US (much less Europe and other developed countries, with developed public transportation) have easy access to fresh food. This...just isn't a huge deal. It's a public policy tweak away from being solved.

the complete market domination of amazon

Amazon has a shitload of competitors in every sector. AliExpress, Best Buy, Walmart, Etsy, Wayfair, etc etc etc. But Amazon is solid as hell, so people stick with them. If they slip, people have endless options.

local repair shops being subsumed into corporate enterprise.

Don't care. I mean, I feel for the owners, but...you know that like 90% of everybody in the Western world worked in agriculture? Including all my great-grandparents. But then they got outcompeted by more successful farmers (including corporate operations in some cases) and ended up shutting down and selling their place. None of my grandparents worked in agriculture.

Was that a tragedy, for me or for them? Do I wish I still owned a dozen acres of land in the middle of the Canadian prairies, on which I could grow just enough to sustain myself? Lol, the fuck do you think?

Small businesses are lost to progress. This is great.

planned obsolescence

I've been buying more repairable devices. Thus the Framework laptop. And the government is putting pressure on companies to allow repairs, which is good. In the end, though, this is our fault, because we're a bunch of short-sighted assholes who are distracted by shiny things. We don't have to be.

the fact that nearly 100% of the vast variety of cereals you’re referring to are produced by like two corporations

Why on earth would I care? Again, beyond those two companies, there are a thousand up-and-comers, so if the big guys slip there will be alternatives. In the meantime? They do a really fucking good job. If the government operated like Post, I'd enjoy going to the DMV.

the fact that nearly every single piece of consumer electronics you have in your home is almost certainly made from resources extracted by actual real life human slaves.

...In countries that are resolutely authoritarian or anarchic, and non-capitalist. I hope some day China escapes it's authoritarian tendencies, and Africa manages to pull itself together. If they just establish functioning market economies, then the problem is solved.

nestle sucking up all the water from already drought stressed areas, and also more slave labor, this time with children.

Exploiting those noncapitalist countries. Shame on them. I have no problem punishing them accordingly.

millions of tons of single use plastics funneled into our oceans.

Yeah, that sucks, we should do something about that.

the fact that our access to life-saving medication is dependent on our wealth, rather than our need.

But the 'wealth' bar falls every day. People in Africa are able to access AIDS medication so successfully that I read recently it's on the path to eradication. And there just isn't a form of government where everybody gets what they need, and nobody has proposed such a government, or a path to get to it, so it's kinda fucking irrelevant, isn't it?

capitalism is currently causing massive amounts of real human suffering.

No, reality is causing massive human suffering, and capitalism is the single best tool we have to ameliorate it. Suffering is normal from any sane reading of history. But we've driven the share of people in serious poverty, on the verge of famine and starvation, from 80+% a century ago to well under 20% today. There's a lot of causes for that, but capitalism is high on the list.

East India Company commiting horrific acts of violence against the people of India

East India Company was a monopoly grant by the crown of England. They had an army. They weren't capitalist, they were colonialist. I know you can't tell a difference between Amazon shipping you a shirt you bought from them voluntarily because you wanted a shirt, and the East India Company using their military to extract taxes from the natives using fear and violence, but to me it's a pretty significant difference.

and contributed to massive famines that killed 15 million people.

Famines, again, were completely normal until relatively recently. Look up the the most fatal events in human history, and a whole lot of them are famines in China or India--most of them long before Westerners ever turned up. Saying "capitalism sucks, because there were famines that overlapped with the rise of capitalism!" is like saying "This house sucks, because while we were in the process of building it, before we had a proper roof, we got rained on! We should tear the house down again!"

Fuck this is exhausting.

It's true that capitalism isn't perfect, and even more to the point, it doesn't exist in a perfect world: people trade for goods on open markets, and at the same time there are enslaved people in Africa. People pool their resources to fund enterprises that offer goods & services for sale, and even as they do so, the American government works to achieve policy objectives which I don't personally agree with. Giving people the freedom to buy, sell, work, and invest as they please has fantastically increased the wellbeing of those people & countries who participated, but it hasn't solved literally every problem in the world (especially in places that have very specifically not participated).

So you want to rise up and shut down the markets and ban enterprise. In it's place you have nothing. You have no working system to replace it. Nobody has proposed anything that could take it's place in anything but the vaguest, most loose terms possible. "What if everything was like...better, man?" Fucking useless. Anyway, even if you did have a goal, you have no politically viable means to reach it. Historically, the best anybody has come up with was, "hey, how about we just kill a bunch of people who are better off than we are, then sit around and talk about how much better things could be?" Then somebody with charisma gathers enough followers to seize power, and things get really fucked up.

Until you have an amazing vision and a bulletproof plan to achieve it, you're just whining. And I haven't seen anything even beginning to approach a half-baked vision. I am profoundly unimpressed. At the same time I think you (and others like you) suffer from a profound lack of perspective on where we are and how impressive it is that we got here.

Sure, it's supposed to be major things.

There was a point where Europeans were massacring and torturing each other over religious differences, for centuries. Protestants and Catholics considered each other literal heretics, and mortal enemies.

Then they developed this idea of tolerance, and decided that your religious beliefs were your own business. And that worked amazingly well! We can all just get on getting on. This was a huge deal, protestants tolerating catholics and vice versa was every bit as hard as trans people tolerating transphobic people. But it worked, and eventually the differences faded into irrelevance.

And it turned out that the same attitude was great for progress in general: who you love and who you sleep with is your business, and after a decade or two: you know, we've all got pretty used to the idea of people being gay. They wanna get married? Sure, I don't see why not. Tolerance was the basis of most progress in the past few centuries.

And now Gen-Z (or probably just terminally-online people, but as a ratio that's more of Gen-Z than any earlier group) wants to flip the table. Tolerating 'intolerance' is practically a crime! Intolerance, BTW, is when you don't have the correct set of opinions. People who don't have the right opinions are monsters, and must be harassed, deplatformed, fired, etc. The wrong opinions are violence.

I've seen reactions to 'bad' opinions that I would call hysterical.

You guys literally couldn't be leaning into Gen-Z stereotypes any harder.

"Some guy says Gen-Z doesn't have the ability to respectfully disagree."

"Man FUCK that guy, I bet he's an intolerant/racist/sexist/homophobic/transphobic piece of shit, and that's why he can't get along with us, because it's definitely not our problem!"

"Uhh, it sorta feels like you're demonstrating that you really don't have the ability to disagree."

__ __ __ __ __ "Lol just cuz I reported a guy who said a thing that hurt my feelings, does that mean we can't be friends?! Lol jk fuck you too buddy!"

No, sure, you're totally right, you guys are a real delight to have in conversations and debates.

me: looks at cereal aisle at the local grocery store

No...I think i've got plenty of choices, thanks. In which areas do you feel like your freedom to chose is badly impinged-upon?

Do you want a list of tech companies that have been allowed to fail? It's a very long list.

I'm typing this on NixOS on a Framework laptop. Very happy with both. Both were products of (gasp) capitalism!

I'm sitting in a 20-year-old La-Z-Boy chair. Not the most beautiful, but it sure is comfortable, and it's in good condition for it's age.

Sipping on a nice red wine. Don't remember the company--it was a random pick, one of thousands of choices. Anyway, it's great, I'm enjoying it. Snacking on some corn nuts from Trader Joes.

That's just a few companies whose products I appreciate, and am interacting with right this instant.

Google annoys me sometimes. I'm kinda de-googling, and it's harder than it ought to be. Still: totally doable. Microsoft was a huge PITA back in the 90s and 00s, but these days they don't affect me at all. It didn't fail, but it changed in major ways, and more to the point it became irrelevant in important ways.

Overall, when I compare the system I'm living in with the alternatives that we've tried in the past...well, it's very much a no-brainer.