Interesting Links for 25-11-2022

[andrewducker]

1. Anyone I know fancy a plush sphinx?

(tags:toys )

2. Google is changing how it provides its services so it can track you better

(tags:viaSwampers Google web surveillance )

3. Want your car to accelerate faster? Then you'll need to pay a monthly fee

(tags:OhForFucksSake cars business )

4. DragonForce - My Heart Will Go On

(tags:music Titanic cover )

5. LessWrong/Effective Altruism as racists

(tags:racism )

6. 10 years after stalking was made illegal, victims feel abandoned by the law

(tags:UK stalking law fail OhForFucksSake )

7. Oxford scientists crack case of why ketchup splatters from near-empty bottle

(tags:food physics )

Comments

[channelpenguin]

I find that sphinx toy is ASTONISHINGLY ugly

[danieldwilliam]

I am confused by the Less Wrong thing.

[dewline]

2. Dirty pool.

3. One more reason why I won't be buying a car if I ever become able to afford one.

6. Neglect as cruelty, huh?

[bens_dad]

3. I remember hearing that in return for some software that a university had written, an engineer came and cut a link on a board in their mainframe. The machine became twice as fast.

What Mercedes and BMW are doing is "just" Software as a Service in action.
Stress testing the car for 0-60 in 5.2sec instead of 6.2sec is going to cost something; I can't really object to them charging people less not to have that extra performance.
----
My problem is a general one; I like ownership; I don't like rental, and SaaS drives right into that conflict.

Software rips up previous economic models and I don't know of any fair replacement model, never mind how we move to it.

Programmers need to eat, but I don't see how software is going to produce more food at less cost. OK, no dramatic increase in productivity beyond about the third iteration.
---
Twenty years ago car mags had classified ads for chips that would tweak the performance of your car. VW kept hiring the guys who wrote these chips, which may be how the performance of the diesel Golf improved so radically (a least until they started cheating the tests).
---
The problem I fear with these software upgrades is that people will try to hack the cars to get the performance without paying, but what else will the hacks change ? Brakes ? Steering ? Security ?

[drplokta]

It’s been common for decades to sell the same hardware at different price points, with some functionality disabled on the cheaper versions. See for example the 486SX CPU from Intel, which was just a 486DX with the floating-point unit disabled.

[hairyears]

5: One of the very best things about buying David Gerard a pint is that is so enriches my vocabulary:

...LessWrong rationalists, Effective Altruists etc as disaster chucklefucks

Lesswrong 'Rationalist' is not the same as rational and it seems that all their ponderous logic of priors and maximisation leaves them horribly vulnerable to an elegant argument that turns human beings into lesser beings, untermensch, and ashes.

I was invited-in to meet the Effective Altruists a few years ago: idealist junior civil servants and early-career professionals, lovely, lovely people that I think andrewducker knows from Cambridge...

Some of them are now becoming senior civil servants and, I think, partner-track professionals.

...And I think they all went cool, then cordially distant, from the EA fundamentalists as their agenda and their values started to show through.

Or maybe hate cults and racists and Nazis are that damn' good at infiltrating and corrupting *any* community founded on ideals but lacking some kind of anchor.

[nancylebov]

Two of the major EA charities are giving malaria nets to save lives in Africa and GiveDirectly, which is about giving money to poor people.

This strikes me as very inefficient racism.