andrewducker | Interesting Links for 25-01-2023

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Interesting Links for 25-01-2023

1. CNET's AI journalist is an error-prone plagiarist: (tags:journalism ai plagiarism )
2. LA's Grand Experiment in UBI (turns out giving money to people in poverty is really helpful): (tags:GuaranteedIncome poverty USA )
3. The Netflix co-CEO says Netflix has "never canceled a successful show": (tags:netflix business tv viaSwampers )
4. Why South Africa is siding with Russia: (tags:Russia southafrica )
5. Wagner loses up to 80% of prison recruits amid reports of Putin rift: (tags:Russia Ukraine war prison )
6. Ukraine announces purge of top officials over corruption and bribery allegations: (tags:corruption Ukraine )
7. NVidia will make it look like you're staring directly at the camera. That won't feel creepy at all!: (tags:nvidia eyes )
8. "Macroeconomic Changes Have Made It Impossible for Me to Want to Pay You": (tags:satire business employment unemployment redundancy )
9. The UK is awful for investing in itself. And it's even worse in the North: (tags:uk investment OhForFucksSake )

On no topic in particular - is there good news anywhere?

Because I need distraction. I'd like hope that life for ordinary people (either side and most definitely down from my own comfortable but not at all secure-feeling life) could have hope. Security. Dignity. But I've seen not much in my life to contradict my view that the vasty majority must spend our existence doing whatever the absolute ultra elite want doing, for the benefit of said ultra elite. Who are where they are overwhelmingly because their ancestors were. And those ancestors were who they were because they were rich and / or very very nasty and effectively violent. Which still seems to be true....

Almost all of us only get to live because we have/produce value for the benefit of those who already have and/or control almost everything. Except those who have it even worse, being very directly enslaved or controlled by violence - they have to do what their direct "owners" want.

Sure - Germany has agreed to hand over tanks after all, an aviation startup has demonstrated a hydrogen-powered plane that can carry 19 people up to 500 miles, the River Mersey has gone from "biologically dead" to being in a great state, and the Netherlands has been trialling a new way of preventing pollution from reaching the sea.

That's from three minutes looking at https://www.goodnewsnetwork.org/ and https://www.positive.news/

There's a bunch of bad news at the moment, but there's still lots of nice things going on.

:-) thank you!

I revisit this song occasionally. Also, I learned just recently of the solarpunk genre of fiction (and they have a magazine already!), which seems to be growing because so many of us need reminders of reasons to hope. :)

Also, the city of Ottawa just announced that they're about to swap in 300 new electric buses for our public transit fleet, with help from federal government financing (EG: Infrastructure Canada grant money and Canada Infrastructure Bank loan)! I'm watching Ottawa City Council discuss this by way of YouTube as I type this paragraph!

The further evidence from Los Angeles - added to that from Canada's CERB and extended (un)employment insurance modifications during the first two years of the COVID-19 Pandemic makes it clearer that UBI will be good for the populations of multiple countries, once it's instituted properly.

I wish I could hope for UBI as genuinely "U". But I remain convinced that human nature (and wrong assumptions about lazy people) will ensure it doesn't happen.

I'm pretty sure I could set myself up to survive on €1000/month. My pension if I ever get there would be more - but I suspect it UBI ever happens, then state pensions will cease to exist and people will just get UBI instead (though since Germany gives you a pension kinda based on what you earned over time, up to a not-dreadfully-generous limit maybe it wouldn't)

There's a Canada Pension Plan, which for people with lots of short-term jobs won't amount to a lot, even with Old Age Security and other supplements added in these days. I think it's kept that way to encourage the Registered Retirement Savings Plan and Tax-Free Savings Account business...again, for those who could afford to pile money into those devices to begin with. Because "kinda based on what you earned over time" doesn't cut it for people who haven't been able to earn a lot to begin with. UBI as a successor to CPP - if properly structured (and I have no patience for people who think that "unemployed = chronically lazy", either) - would be far more helpful.

Not saying that RRSPs should be ended. If one can top up like that, go ahead. Just don't starve me to keep their idea of what a just universe looks like in force.

Agreed.

My worry is that the market will develop products - housing, food, etc. - priced for the UBI and once they have taken over remove any quality, leaving the UBI only being enough to buy crap.

That doesn't seem to have happened with the existence of welfare generally. Competition still seems to work.

We have currently housing, food, and other products priced for minimum wage earners, with quality barely meeting the limits set by legislation to be classified as habitable or edible. So agreed, the market will continue to provide crap to the non-wealthy. The only difference will be that people will have a better likelihood of receiving sufficient crap.

#1: "error-prone plagiarist" seems like exactly what you'd expect if you make a giant pattern-matching system and train it on lots of other people's work! The news is surely not that it's terrible, it's that the people deploying it for some reason expected anything else.

Yes: if you want unattributed bullshit, it's great. Otherwise, it's exactly what you'd expect given how these things work and its training set.

Yup!

I played with Markov-chain text processors back in the 90s, and it's really clear that the latest lot are just better versions of that kind of thing. There's no intelligence or understanding, it's just "What's a believable sentence?"

Thanks for the South Africa link. I was wondering about that. Not sure if the article covers the whole story, but it provides at least some context.

Yeah, I can't speak for its accuracy - it was just in the top 3 articles I read about it when I got curious myself.

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Interesting Links for 25-01-2023

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