I hate to attack HN and especially any particular moderator. But I agree in the abstract that this is an unacceptable performance. When you have Larry Ellison's son appoint a political figure over a news organization and start axing things, that's Tech news-worthy.
And once any degree of censorship is involved by mainstream media the burden of open-ness goes up 10x in my opinion. At least I personally hadn't seen this article until today, and then the one I saw disappeared from the front page. I'm sorry but this story is more important than source code for photoshop 1.0 or whatever currently has the top slot.
I say this not because I think "Oh other people need to know this" I say this because I think "I need to know this" stuff and I almost didn't. I'm sure there are many well-read people on here, but for me this site is my main/only(?) news source.
Personally I'd recommend a post-mortem into this (exactly how many flags, by who?, is political news susceptible to getting falsely flagged and if so is there a way to rework that system? Perhaps let individual users disable "political news" on their own accounts? Can people "kill" a story by baiting a bunch of stupid comments on it to get its discussion number too high?)
I understand HN wasn't started as an attempt to make some free press democratized web 2.0 news. But in the current news climate where there president is personally doing shit like getting Jimmy Kimmel axed I think HN has had a greater role thrust upon it than mere startup news.
[I can't imagine it would be considered, but implicit in this frustration is a willingness to volunteer my own time to contribute toward fixing this issue as an engineer - be it gathering/analyzing the data or whatever form]
It's a bummer, but discussions about the intersections of politics and tech are especially important when many prominent figures in SV are inserting themselves directly into politics or are funding inherently political projects. It's clear, for many of them, their values are misaligned with many core democratic values and sometimes even human rights.
Musk and DOGE killed an estimated 600,000 people, mostly kids under 5, and the death hasn't abated yet. Tech workers helped him do it.
If you'd rather not be the kind of useful idiot who helps a megalomaniacal tech billionaire rack up the body count of an early 20th century despot, politics are unfortunately unavoidable.
So if you have a billion in the bank, you can collect 5% return and never touch the money. So you get $50m a year to pay enough engineers to make a browser.
That's plenty of money if they recognize they need a super lean company with 0 bloat and a few highly paid experts who focus on correctness and not bullshit features.
There are about 800 unique weekly committers to the Chromium project, so that's a start at gauging the number for that project. A little harder to find that same figure for Firefox, but Wikipedia says Mozilla Corp had about 750 employees as of 2020.
Anyway, if you have $50M, you can afford 500 people at $100k, or 250 people at $200k. So you simply declare, this is how many people it takes to make a browser, and set your goals and timetables accordingly. I feel like the goals and direction might be more important than the number of bodies you throw at it, but maybe that's naïve. But when the product is mature like Firefox (or Chrome for that matter) you do have some flexibility on the headcount.
You're significantly underestimating fully-loaded cost per person + other expenses. An engineer making a $200k salary is going to cost the company something like $300k, and there are some additional fixed overheads. And $200k is quite a bit less than your competitors are paying.
So you're looking at something more like 150 employees total of which <100 are going to be pure engineers, and that's stretching your budget and operations pretty aggressively while also fighting an uphill battle for recruiting skilled and experienced engineers. (And browser development definitely needs a core of experienced engineers with a relatively niche set of skills!)
Working at Mozilla should be more than money. $200k/year is more than enough to be happy in most of the world. You don't need to compete on rock stars that must live in San Francisco, and focus on people that are happy with a high paying job and have enough idealism to accept "only" $200k/year.
None of those figures are what the engineer makes, they're costs. And they're illustrative, not literal. You won't pay everyone at the same rate either for example, and not all will be engineers either, and I totally left both those facts out of it. Oh no! And also omitted the fact that a company whose vision and ideals people agree with can hire said people for less money, which again brings us back around to the point that the vision might be more important.
Maybe they should quit their presence in the Bay Area. The rent is insanely high. Not just of an office, also the workers. Besides, freedom of speech, liberty, DEI are each under pressure in USA. Mozilla is very much welcome here in Europe :-)
Another comment observed your cost estimates were low.
> But when the product is mature like Firefox (or Chrome for that matter) you do have some flexibility on the headcount.
Google could reduce Chrome development to maintenance and remain dominant for years. It would be much like Internet Explorer 6. Firefox falling too far behind in performance or compatibility would be fatal.
> Ladybird had fewer devs, so what were these devs at Vivaldi doing?
The Ladybird developers have not produced a browser comparable to Firefox or Vivaldi. Vivaldi have not produced a browser engine comparable to Ladybird of course.
> I don't think your argument has a lot of merit. 28 is not a magic number.
28 is a magic number was not a reasonable interpretation of my comment.
Exactly! With such an endowment they should be able to develop a browser and maybe some other stuff with a small team that’s focused on tech and not social justice.
I just want to note that this is what is sometimes called carouseling. Which is, instead of acknowledging the original accusation was not correct, which is what should be happening, this comment just proceeds right on to the next accusation.
What is happening, psychologically speaking, that is causing a mass of people to spew one confidently wrong accusation after another? They don't have an endowment (they do!). Well they're not investing it! (they are). Well they're not working on the browser! (they shipped 12 major releases with thousands of patches per release with everything from new tab grouping and stacking to improved gpu performance to security fixes)
There's nothing to acknowledge. You're asking everyone to accept the presumption embedded in the statement that a billion dollars "goes away quickly when you're a large company paying lots of money to salaries", namely that Mozilla should be a large company and should rely on a steady stream of outside money instead of seeking sustainable financial independence. But Mozilla's lack of focus and excessive spending on side projects is a major part of the complaints against Mozilla, and you aren't even trying to make a reasonable case that Mozilla needs to be spending money like that.
That isn't really the best way to think about not-for-profit schemes like Mozilla. Every organisation eventually becomes corrupted (as in fact we see with Mozilla), so creating an eternal pot of money for something is not strategically sensible.
If good people are in charge, they'll just spend everything and rely on ongoing donations. If nobody thinks it is worth donating too then it is time to close up shop. Keep a bit of a buffer for the practical issue of bad years, sure, but the idea shouldn't be to set up an endowment.
Maybe there's a 3rd option... like encrypt the footage in a way that it can't be accessed en-masse without passwords?
Like imagine if the US government gave a warrant to apple and said "Give us all iphone pictures from this area on this date"... they'd presumably say "We won't because we designed it so that we can't."
So assessments of safety of a chemical aren't hard science. They are statistical judgment calls (often based on things like giving a much, much higher dose to a rodent and looking for short-term effects).
And the reason that is is because there's no affordable, moral way to give 100,000 farmers [nor consumers] a small dose of a product for 20 years before declaring it safe. So the system guesses, and it guesses wrong, often erring against the side of caution in the US (it's actually quite shocking how many pesticides later get revoked after approval).
Europe takes a more "precautionary principle" approach. In those cases of ambiguity (which is most things approved and not), they err to the side of caution.
Notice how this claim here is again shifting the burden to the victims (their research doesn't meet standard X, allegedly). Absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence.
IMO the FDA should do a better job at helping the populace distinguish between these two:
1) Evidence for the null hypothesis (there are enough studies with sufficient statistical power to determine that product likely does not cause harm at a >95% CI).
2) There is no evidence that it is unsafe. (nor that it is safe).
The problem is #2 sounds a lot stronger and often better than #1 when put into English. There must be some easy to understand way to do it, IE an 'insufficient testing' vs. 'tested' label/website or something.
Because of its high toxicity, the European Union withdrew paraquat from its market in July 2007 [1]
So it's clearly poisonous to humans in high doses, I guess the argument is that perhaps the smaller doses exposed to farmers may not lead to sufficient ingestion to cause harm. The parkinsons seems like pretty clear evidence against that.
> If it simply hasn't been approved in other countries, one can't use that information to infer about its safety.
I don't know why you're trying to defend this with counterfactuals/hypotheticals instead of just googling. Feels like you're bending over backward here.
Shouldn't most chemicals be assumed unsafe until proven otherwise? How many chemicals have we produced in a lab that have no harmful effects? Even medicine is bad for you, it's just better than the disease it's meant to treat. I don't know why we'd treat something designed to kill animals as safe for humans without studies showing that it's not harmful. (Well I do know why, but I don't know why voters go along with it.)
And when we're talking about things in this realm, the general saying is "The dose makes the poison"... Water will kill you if you drink enough of it.
And we do have all sorts of studies showing that harm from these substances isn't immediately apparent (they all have safety sheets, and maximum safe exposure levels) . What we're missing, mainly because it's just incredibly hard to ethically source, is long term studies.
So the question you're really asking is "what's your tolerance to risk?". I think it's fine to have different governing bodies take different stances on that scale. What's less fine is failure to act on information because of profit motives.
Long story short - this isn't so simple. You bathe in chemicals all day every day.
I daresay that the issue is less about "chemicals" and more about "new chemicals". If a substance already exists in nature and has been in use for a long time, then it's reasonable to take the position that it is probably within harm limits. If it's a newly synthesised/extracted substance, then it should be subject to reasonable testing.
Also, if a chemical is known to be toxic, then rigorous testing should be performed before allowing it to be widely distributed and used.
> If a substance already exists in nature and has been in use for a long time, then it's reasonable to take the position that it is probably within harm limits.
Reasonable, but wrong.
Simple case: Did you know that occupational sawdust exposure is strongly associated with cancer in the paranasal sinuses and nasal cavity?
There's also some pretty compelling evidence that coronavirus's (so common cold & flu) are associated with dementia/Alzheimer's.
Alcohol increases cancer rate more than some of the "chemicals" people will complain about. So does Bacon. So does sunlight.
All of which have been floating around in Human contact for a LONG time.
Again - we do a pretty good job at filtering out the stuff that's fast acting and harmful. It's just really difficult to tease out information that requires long term monitoring and involves small/moderate increases in risk.
Think about how long it took us to figure out that lead exposure is really nasty. We used lead for thousands of years prior, and it's literally a base element.
---
As for
> Also, if a chemical is known to be toxic, then rigorous testing should be performed before allowing it to be widely distributed and used.
No one is arguing otherwise, and normally large and expensive studies are done on short term harm (extensive animal testing). But you tell me how we can reasonably and ethically do longitudinal studies on large groups of humans to determine if a new substance is going to cause small/moderate cancer rate bumps over 50+ years?
This is just genuinely a difficult problem to address, and it's not simply like we can go "wait 50 years and see"! Because usually we're trying to use these things to address existing problems. Ex - pesticides and fertilizers might still be net positives even with the cancer risk - do we avoid them and let people starve today? Or feed everyone now and have a 10% bump in cancer rates 50 years later? There's no golden ticket here.
As somebody who's looked in to this a bit, the deeper I dug the more I ultimately moved toward the conclusion (reluctantly) that indeed big corporations are the baddies. I have an instinct to steel-math both sides, but not every issue has two compelling sides to it...
One example of them clearly being the baddies is them paying people to social media astroturf to defend the roundup pesticide online [2].
You should consider dropping that instinct. If you look into how corporations have behaved historically you'd assume evil until proven innocent. Especially US corps.
This is the reason we have people mistakenly repeating the conclusion that AI consumes huge amounts of water comparable to that of entire cities.
If you make any other assumption than "I don't know what's happening here and need to learn more" you'll constantly be making these kind of errors. You don't have to have an opinion on every topic.
Edit: By the way, I also don't think we should trust big companies indiscriminately. Like, we could have a system for pesticide approval that errs on the side of caution: We only permit pesticides for which there is undisputed evidence that the chemicals do not cause problems for humans/animals/other plants etc.
"If you make any other assumption than "I don't know what's happening here and need to learn more" you'll constantly be making these kind of errors. You don't have to have an opinion on every topic."
I can do this and still start off by assuming the corporation is in the wrong. The tendency to optimize for profits at the expense of everything else, to ignore all negative externalities is inherent to all American corporations.
The main thing that people snag on is scale and frequency.
If you are super into "ACAB" (all cops are bastards) you can easily "research" this all day for weeks and find so many insane cases of police being absolute bastards. You would be so solidified in your belief that police as an institution are fundamentally a force of evil.
But you would probably never come across the boring stat that less than 1 in 500,000 police encounters ever register on the "ACAB" radar.
This is almost always where people run aground. Stats are almost always obfuscated for things that people develop a moral conviction around. Imagine trying to acknowledge the stat there are effectively zero transgender people perving on others in public bathrooms.
ACAB is not about the proportion of bad encounters to good encounters. It is about the police system as a whole that defends and provides cover for the bad ones.
If you have a system where 1 actor is bad, and the other 500,000 actors are good but also protect the 1, then you have a system with 500,001 bad actors.
Suppose you have a system where 1 actor is bad, and 500000 actors are “good except that they protect that one guy”, and then the one guy dies of a freak heart attack,
and then all but one of the 500000 are replaced with “good actors” except that they defend the guy who remains from the 500000.
You're reducing it down too far. Policing has a problem policing itself -- it's very well documented.
People take it too far in both directions, but it's safe to say that there's more than one bad actors and the system demonstrably tolerates and defends them right up to the point where they are forced not to.
Right, there’s clearly a problem, and I think even a systemic problem. I just don’t think it follows that literally every officer is therefore culpable. I think I would say that probably almost every police union leader is culpable.
The good cops, such as they are, get run out if they try to challenge the institutional problems in police forces. This radically restricts how good a cop can be while still being a cop.
Can good cops speak up about bad cops and keep their job, or do they have to remain silent? How many bad things can you see in your workplace without quitting or whistleblowing while still being a decent person? Can they opt out of illegal but defacto ticket quotas and still have a career? Does writing a few extra tickets so you can stay in the force long enough to maybe change it make you part of the problem?
Many people look at the problems in policing and say that anyone working inside that system simply must have compromised themselves to stay in.
And who votes for those union leaders? The cops. They vote for corrupt people to protect their own corruption. It's a corrupt system from top to bottom.
Well, who votes for politicians? The public. Are all members of the public therefore culpable?
Voting isn’t a means by which every voter’s preferences are amalgamated into a coherent set of preferences.
Voting is better than the available alternatives, but one person voting for something better doesn’t make the outcome of the vote be that better thing.
You might have a point if we actually had an anti-police-corruption movement led by police officers - but we don't. The people who are supposed to be protecting us and enforcing the laws are really just bullies who like to abuse people, or they'd do something about it. They keep voting for union leaders who will cover up their crimes.
I explicitly stated that it was "more than one" and in no way intimated that it was all cops.
One of the simplest things we could do as a country to help mitigate this is to end the War on Drugs. It was never about protecting people, and was always about enabling oppression of "others".
The other simple thing to do is to stop using cops for "welfare checks" and mental health crises -- those situations are uniformly better handled by social workers. This has tragically been put under the category of "defund the police", but the idea itself is sound. The "defund" slogan is so bad it's almost like it was created to sabotage the effort.
As much as I understand ACAB due to their systemic corruption and acting as a gang to provide their friends and family with more “justice” than others, I disagree with ending the war on drugs.
While it would be nice to think we can live in a world where everyone can be healed from mental problems (including drug addiction), I don’t think it’s possible to come back from the hardest of drugs (on a population level). The only thing you are inviting is chaos into your neighborhood.
I understand your concerns about this (living outside Portland OR) but would counter that there's plenty of chaos with the current system.
I lost my brother to heroin decades ago and the laws on the books did nothing to prevent it, and a better system could have helped prevent it.
It would have to be done "holistically" (coordinated with the legal system, policing, health care, etc) but it's technically viable. The only thing stopping us from doing it is, um, us.
Even if it wasn't truly legal, it could be vastly overhauled if it actually was about doing what it pretends to be about: protecting us from the dangers of drugs.
The fact that 6 people replied to my comment in order to "correct me" on something that is less deadly than hunting accidents, is the most evidence I can offer for my point.
In the signal of things that are damaging society, negatively impacting individuals, police-brutality-self-investigation-no-harm-found is so far down in the noise floor, it should be about as worrying as people who live on busy street intersections not trimming back their hedges for safe driving visibility.
But somehow, here are 6 people deep in random HN comments telling me all about the importance of trimming hedges. Err, reforming police.
Near as I can tell that's more than a decades worth of hunting fatalities in the US.
IHEA published a report of 79 fatal hunting-related accidents in 2001. Twenty-nine fatalities resulted from hunters’ failures to identify targets; 11 resulted from hunters’ inability to see victims; 10 resulted from hunters firing while swinging on game (the hunter follows a moving target with their firearm).
( Not a great source, it has some obvious errors but largely meshes with other sources, I admit I've not found a good comprehensive report on the overall state of US hunting acidents, I did look at a several good state summaries )
>If you have a system where 1 actor is bad, and the other 500,000 actors are good but also protect the 1, then you have a system with 500,001 bad actors.
This line of thinking will either be totally unable to ever build a large organization, or else will pathologically explain-away wrong-doing due to black and white thinking.
This sort of thing is unfortunately very common in many large bureaucracies, especially across the government. A notable (and likely controversial) case in point is teachers who (sexually or physically) abuse students, and are kept on the payrolls, often in ‘rubber-rooms’. Are public schools worth having?
I guess the equivalent here is the teachers and the teachers unions covering up that abuse, moving the abuses around to other schools, and lobbying for special protection for those abusers even after they are caught and convicted.
Its not perfect as an analogy since police are the state's sanctioned violence and teachers are not, nor are teachers in charge of preventing rape generally, but it kind of works since kids generally do have to go to school of some kind.
I expect in the above hypothetical the person you're asking would agree that yes, all teachers are part of the rape problem. The logic is the same and it hinges on the idea that allowing and intentionally enabling <very bad abuse if power> instead of fighting to expose and stop it makes you part of that problem even if you aren't directly doing the bad thing. Doubly so if your job is to expose and stop that abuse in every group except your own.
Teachers in many jurisdictions (I don’t know about every jurisdiction) are required (and paid) to take training in spotting signs of sexual or physical abuse, and are (at least often) legally required to report it. In that sense, they are ‘in charge of’ preventing sexual abuse.
I don't think many teachers think that abusing students is part of their job, but there are LOTS of cops who think that abusing their power to kill / maim / steal from / rape citizens is JUST fine.
Police killed about 1200 people last year, with 118 happening during a wellness check, 116 during a traffic stop, and an additional 213 for unspecified non-violent offenses.
Only 10 officers were charged with a crime from these cases. What do the 'rubber-room' stats look like?
The statistics for sexual abuse in educational settings are not quite as clear as those for police-involved homicides (and I am not a subject-matter-expert), but the numbers which do exist are quite alarming.
If someone had this experience I’d encourage them to look into how police departments across the US consistently fight against any accountability for the cops who perpetuate those relatively few awful encounters. “Most interactions are harmless therefore the negativity is overblown and cops are trustworthy” is one takeaway if you stop your research at the right point. “if you have a bad experience with a cop the entire department will turn against you; they are not to be trusted” is a more accurate takeaway.
If we apply your logic, would you say it's fair to go around and say "all teachers are bastards", when referring to teacher unions that make it hard to fire incompetent teachers? Or maybe "all doctors are bastards" when referencing how the american medical association (the trade association for doctors) makes it hard for more doctors to be admitted?
Sure, but one key difference is that if either of those groups steps outside the law, you can recourse to the law to check them.
Since police are part of the law, when they don't hold their own accountable, there's no recourse. And that's a real problem. This is before one even starts unpacking the knapsack of how much law is designed to protect the police from consequences of performing their duties (leading to the unfortunate example "They can blow the side off your house if they have reason to believe it will help them catch a suspect and the recompense is that your insurance might cover that damage.")
>Since police are part of the law, when they don't hold their own accountable, there's no recourse. And that's a real problem.
I don't see how this is a relevant factor for the two cases I mentioned. Sure, it's bad that are part of the justice system, and therefore you can't use the justice system to correct their misbehavior, but you're not going to involve the justice system for incompetent teachers, or not enough doctors being admitted. For all intents and purposes the dynamic is the same.
I am not at all joking when I make the claim that police committing sex crimes is a problem that is frequently swept under the rug by both police internal affairs and the judicial system.
you are definitely going to start involving the justice system if teachers and doctors start physically abusing people, illegally detaining them and killing them!
>But you would probably never come across the boring stat that less than 1 in 500,000 police encounters ever register on the "ACAB" radar.
This is hardly a revelation. There are levels of bastardy in between "angelic philosopher-saint and paladin of justice" and "demonic hellspawn stomping babies for resisting arrest". The cop who just hands out false tickets to meet quota is just as ACAB as the one who finally loses his temper and shoots someone without true cause, but one gets to hide it better. Intuitively, I suspect that the cumulative actions of the low-level ACAB behaviors add more misery and injustice to the world than all the wrongful deaths and incarceration combined.
pedantic, but "ACAB" doesn't necessarily mean every (or most) cops do horrible things all the time (that's the strawman version).
one, more nuanced, sentiment is something more like "all cops are bastards as long as bad cops are protected."
another sentiment is "modern police institutions are directly descended from slavecatchers and strikebreakers; thus, all of policing is rooted in bastard behavior, therefore: all cops are bastards".
there are plenty of other ways to interpret the phrase. "acab" is shorthand for a lot of legitimate grievances.
> modern police institutions are directly descended from slavecatchers and strikebreakers;
That's not (entirely) true, though? Every modern police department has its roots in London Metropolitan Police Force which had nothing to do with salve catching can't say much about strikebreakers, but I know specifically LMPF went on multiple strikes themselves. It had also nothing to do with solving crimes, that's just a bonus.
My favorite slogan is “Slogans are always bad.” . It can be interpreted in a lot of different ways that make a lot of sense, and that’s why I repeat it often, without clarifying what I mean by it.
That is a lot of words to make a claim that nobody would accept if they used it for other issues. If somebody said that all blacks are criminals and used your exact argument, nobody would buy it.
You picked a terrible example as a counterpoint, because ACAB is about police protecting bad police (or generally, authorities defending each other as a gang themselves).
Which is seen in every group of authorities around the country. They literally give out get out of jail free cards for cops’ friends and family in many parts of the country, that is systemic, and has nothing to do with frequency of cops committing crimes.
And when a cop tries to do something about it, this is the sort of thing that happens. This guy seems like he's trying to do the right thing, but the system is designed so he can't:
> Bianchi claims his superiors retaliated against him for his stance against the “corrupt” cards after he was warned by an official with the Police Benevolent Association, New York City’s largest police union, that he would not be protected by his union if he wrote tickets for people with cards. And if he continued, he’d be reassigned... The lawsuit cites several instances where his NYPD colleagues complained about his ticket-writing, including on Facebook...
> Bianchi’s service as a traffic cop ended last summer when he wrote a ticket to a friend of the NYPD’s highest-ranking uniformed officer, Chief Jeffrey Maddrey, the lawsuit states.
> Schoolcraft amassed a set of tapes which demonstrated corruption and abuse within New York City's 81st Police Precinct. The tapes include conversations related to the issues of arrest quotas and investigations. [...] Schoolcraft was harassed, particularly in 2009, after he began to voice his concerns within the precinct. He was told he needed to increase arrest numbers and received a bad evaluation.
His fellow officers had him involuntarily committed to a psychiatric ward. They told the hospital that his claims were a sign of paranoid delusions. He was eventually vindicated, but his career was destroyed.
It's been a long time since I heard this, but I believe there is recording here [0] of his colleagues forcing themselves into his apartment to have him committed.
> I can do this and still start off by assuming the corporation is in the wrong
You really can't. You can start off with a prior that it's more likely the corporation is wrong than not. But if you're assuming your conclusion, you're going to find evidence for what you're looking for. (You see the same thing happen with folks who start off by assuming the government is in the wrong.)
When you go shopping and see two items for sale that seem nearly identical, do you buy the cheaper one?
If you have long term savings do you want it to earn interest?
The desire to optimize for profit exists at all levels among all participants in the economy. Everyone does it. We are the system and the system is us.
Regulations are usually the only way to fix these things because there are game theoretic effects in play. If your company spends more to clean up and others don’t, you lose… because people buy cheaper products and invest in firms with higher profit margins. The only way out we’ve found is to simultaneously compel everyone. But that doesn’t remove the incentive.
Yeah I'm aware. Learning about how American capitalism functions is what set me on the path of being an anticapitalist. Reforms and regulations will never be effective here in solving this issue. The system itself is poisonous.
Destruction of the system and building a new fairer one. Similar to how feudalism gave way to capitalism, things can improve. What details are you wanting to know exactly?
An egalitarian society where the means of production are owned (or mostly owned) by the working class. A blend of that and small private industry with heavy regulation would be nice. I like how the Kurds in Rojava are trying to build things but it's impossible to know how successful their ideas could be while they're dodging bullets from Syria and Turkey. The Zapatista movement is another way of doing things I'd consider.
I have a bias towards not dying, and so far that has steered me away from activities that increase my likelihood of it. Bias is not intrinsically negative (that's prejudice), it just means a preference towards.
I see some lifted pickup truck, I know where to focus my attention to better perceive a potential outsize source of accidents.
If I know where a hidden driveway is, I know where to focus my attention to better perceive any cars emerging. My knowledge of the driveway biases me towards looking towards it, where another driver without that knowledge would not.
Biased perceptions of things as dangerous will absolutely make us observe them more closely in order to better perceive danger.
You're still (perhaps inadvertently) equating 'bias' with 'prejudice', but experience biases our perceptions in positive ways, like clocking a hot stovetop.
You think I think there isn't a difference between bias and prejudice, while I think you think there isn't a difference between prejudice and knowledge.
What I really care about is guilty-until-proven-innocent masquerading as civilized, or false-until-proven-true masquerading as scientific. The starting position should be I don't know. I may have seen cases that look like this, I might know where to look first, but I don't know what I'll find. Until I do, not before.
> I think you think there isn't a difference between prejudice and knowledge
I'm having trouble following this. Of course there's a difference between prejudice and knowledge.
Being aware that studies show pickup trucks are statistically more dangerous than other classes of vehicles (SUVs included, which is nuts!), and thus wanting to avoid them, is knowledge.
Thinking that pickup truck drivers are wannabe macho chuds, and thus wanting to avoid them, is prejudice.
From the outside, you have no clue whether avoidant behavior stems from knowledge-based-bias, or prejudice. I'm not sure how you came to the conclusion I'd conflated the two.
> What I really care about is guilty-until-proven-innocent masquerading as civilized
What?
> or false-until-proven-true masquerading as scientific
I have no clue what this has to do with our discussion.
> The starting position should be I don't know. I may have seen cases that look like this, I might know where to look first, but I don't know what I'll find. Until I do, not before.
Ah, I see where you're going. You're wrong.
If you truly believe that you don't use lived experience to make prefactual assessments throughout life, you haven't thought about it enough:
When you walk up to a new computer, you don't assume that you have no idea how the mouse will work, just because this is a new mouse you haven't individually encountered before. You assume (and act on the assumption) that it will work the same as other mice. You don't swab it just in case it's a bomb, or covered in poison.
You just act on your expectations of how it will behave -UNTIL- you see evidence to the contrary.
The problem is you're trying to (as I said) equate bias with prejudice. The comment from pepperghost93 was about the belief in corporations' willingness to do bad things.
You and Permit1 clearly assumed they were merely prejudiced against corporations, and not basing their wariness of corporate malfeasance on factual data showing corporations being willing to, in fact, do immoral and illegal things.
tl;dr Ironically, you, in the process of decrying bias, used your own biased perception of prefactual judgements to assume they were coming from a place of prejudice rather than knowledge.
I'm sure our viewpoints are more similar than it seems, and we eventually would find a fairly spacious middle-ground, but I'd prefer not to continue: thanks for the conversation.
That bias is well earned. Maybe one day corporations will do enough good things in the world to undo the evil they've perpetuated. I'm not holding my breath.
>people mistakenly repeating the conclusion that AI consumes huge amounts of water comparable to that of entire cities
Does it not?
"We estimate that 1 MWh of energy consumption by a data center requires 7.1 m3 of water." If Microsoft, Amazon and Google are assumed to have ~8000 MW of data centers in the US, that is 1.4M m3 per day. The city of Philadelphia supplies 850K m3 per day.
Why do we need to assume so many things, when we can peg it to reality.
Worldwide, Google's data centers averaged 3.7GW in 2024. Globally, they use 8.135e9 gallons of water in the year, which is 30.8e6m³ per year, which is 84e3m³ per day. Double that to meet the assumed 8GW data center capacity, 168e3m³/day. QED: the estimate 1.4e6m³/day is high by a factor of 10x. Or, in other words, the entire information industry consumes the same amount of water as one very small city.
I believe this is why Google states their water consumption as equivalent to 51 golf courses. It gives a useful benchmark for comparison. But any way you look at it the water consumption of the information sector is basically nothing.
Even the golf course trade association only claims 10% grey water use.
Also, you're going to be shocked, data centers can cool with grey water as well. The now-cancelled Project Blue data center near Tucson was going to build and operate a wastewater pipeline and treatment plant and give it to the city, but the shouting NIMBYs prevailed anyway. The developer now intends to use air-to-air cooling, which costs more energy.
Yeah, but that is for everything. YouTube, Amazon itself, AWS, Azure, GCP, ... not just AI stuff. I mean, it is still a lot of water, but the numbers are not that easy to calculate IMHO
Resource consumption of AI is unclear on two axes:
1) As other commenters have noted: raw numbers. In general, people are taking the resource consumption of new datacenters and attributing 100% of that to "because AI," when the reality is generally that while AI is increasing spend on new infrastructure, data companies are always spending on new infrastructure because of everything they do.
2) Comparative cost. In general, image synthesis takes between 80 and 300 times fewer resources (mostly electricity) per image than human creation does. It turns out a modern digital artist letting their CPU idle and screen on while they muse is soaking significant resources that an AI is using to just synthesize. Granted, this is also not an apples-to-apples comparison because the average AI flow generates dozens of draft images to find the one that is used, but the net resource effect might be less energy spent in total per produced image (on a skew of "more spent by computers" and "less by people").
I agree, but that's what people are implicitly doing every time they toss out one of those "The machine drinks a glass of water every time it" statistics. We are to assume a human doesn't.
AI water usage is pretty bad on a local scale where a large water consumer(Data centers) start sucking up more water than the local table can bear at the expense of the people living there.
Even if the general takes seen on water use is wrong, it's correct in that these companies don't have the best in mind for the average person. It's correct that these companies will push limits and avoid accountability. It's correct that they're generally a liability creating a massive bubble and speculation based on an immature tech designed to automate as many careers away as possible without a proposed solution to the newly unemployed besides "deliver fast food" or "die".
Despite legally treating corporations as people, there's no consistently enforced mechanism that can punish them like people. Monsanto can't be sent to jail for murder. Their C-Levels will never see a cell the way the average person can have the book thrown at them for comparably minor crimes.
Because companies cannot be held accountable legally and effectively, it's important to assume the worst, to generate the public blowback to hold them accountable via lost business.
>Even if the general takes seen on water use is wrong, it's correct in that these companies don't have the best in mind for the average person.
That just sounds more like cope than anything else. eg. "AI companies sucking up all the water might not be a real issue, but I still think they're evil for other reasons".
Buddy no one can buy RAM right now because Ole sammy bought up the useless wafers for datacenters they can't power for 10 years.
They don't have your best interest at heart. They're going to willingly nuke the economy before admitting their chatbots aren't the god machine they've been preaching about.
Nonsense, if we view proving as providing evidence for, then absolutely we can prove a negative. We have our priors, we accumulate evidence, we generate a posterior. At some point we are sufficiently convinced. Don't get hung up on the narrow mathematical definition of prove (c.f. the exception[al case] that proves [tests] the rule), and we're just dandy.
I like to think that what the “can’t prove a negative” phrase originated from was someone grasping at the difference between Pi_1 and Sigma_1 statements . For a Pi_1 statement, one needs only a single counterexample to refute it, but to verify it by considering individual cases, one has to consider all of them and show that they all work (which, if there are infinitely many, it is impossible to handle them all individually, and if there are just a lot, it may still be infeasible) . Conversely, for a Sigma_1 statement, a single example is sufficient to verify the claim, but refuting it by checking individual cases would require checking every case.
And when a chemical goes off patent protection and you have a new patented chemical ready to go, it's advantageous to suddenly dis the now public domain entity.
It's a rational default position to say, "I'll default to distrusting large corporate scientific literature that tells me neurotoxins on my food aren't a problem."
As with any rule of thumb, that one will sometimes land you on the wrong side of history, but my guess is that it will more often than not guide you well if you don't have the time to dive deeper into a subject.
I'm not saying all corporations are evil. I'm not saying all corporate science is bad or bunk. But, corporations have a poor track record with this sort of thing, and it's the kind of thing that could obviously have large, negative societal consequences if we get it wrong. This is the category of problem for which the science needs to be clear and overwhelming in favor of a thing before we should allow it.
There are shades of gray here. But you are absolutely not required to extend benefit of the doubt to entities that have not earned it. That's a recipe for disaster.
Personally, I find myself to be incredibly biased against corporations over people. I've met a lot of people in my life, they seem mostly nice if a bit stupid. Well intentioned. Selfish.
Are corporations mostly well intentioned? Well, consider that some people tried to put "good intentions" into corporations bylaws and has been viciously resisted.
Corporations will happily take everything you have if you accidentally give it to them. Actual human beings aren't like that.
This is unworkable in practice; nothing will ever be completely safe. Instead, we need a public regulatory body that makes reasonable risk/reward tradeoffs when approving necessary chemicals. However, this system breaks down completely when you allow for lobbying and a revolving door between the public and private sectors.
Ai does us a crap-ton of water.
Most data centers use closed loop liquid cooling with heat exchangers to water cooling. (At least all the big ones like Google and Amazon do)
I’m curious what evidence you think you’ve seen to the contrary. from my side, I used to build data centers and my friends are still in the industry. As of a month ago I’ve had discussions with Google engineers who build data centers regarding their carful navigation of water rights, testing of waste water etc.
The Dalles data centers use a large fraction of the water supply of The Dalles because the data centers are extremely large and the town of The Dalles is of negligible size. It is also true that the paper mill of Valliant, Oklahoma uses 50 million gallons of water per day and that the town of Valliant, Oklahoma, population 819, uses less than 1% of that amount, so the paper mill can be said to be using > 99% of the local water supply but this is also a meaningless comparison.
So we'll move the datacenters from the tiny town to just outside of a giant city which will probably move that percentage down to only a few percent if even that. Problem solved!
You're looking at the wrong metrics to compare here if we're trying to just gauge how efficient a datacenter is or is not. This metric could be useful if the datacenters are attached to the municipal water system and thus begin to be a massive load compared to what was originally planned/built, but in terms of understanding the total water use compared to other industrial users its kind of a meaningless statistic.
I’ve been unclear on this. What datacenter out there is using an open loop cooling system that does not return the water after cooling for other uses?
It seems extremely inefficient to have to filter river water over and over then to dump it into the ground so deep it doesn’t go back to getting into an aquifer.
As is always the case when discussing systems, the answer changes depending on where you draw the system boundary. In some cases you would expect water to fall as rain in the same watershed where it was drawn. This is the case for example of water "used by" California rice fields that are irrigated by flood. In other cases, you can expect the water to disappear into a distant system. This would be the case for water drawn from fossil aquifers.
No, that's incorrect. Others have provided citations demonstrating that the big tech AI facilities use more water than cities with populations of 100,000 people.
A city is not defined by its size. It is defined by its legal incorporation as a city. There are big cities, and there are small cities, and most cities are on the smaller side.
Corporations should be assumed to act in line with their interests, which is the bottom line. "Morality" isn't the lens that you need to try to view them through to understand their intentions and actions. But yes, their motivations pretty much always lay outside of any moral good due to the nature of them.
> the bear isn't evil but it will still maul you on sight
The bear still has unified agency. Corporations do not. (No group of people do.) More than the wind, less than a bear. And I think their flaws are probably shared by all large human organisations.
Isn't unified agency the point of forming an organization? The organization generally elects leaders to direct the actions of the organization for some common purpose, e.g. through policies and direct decisions, and they can (or should) be held accountable for those actions.
Maybe this is taking it too far, but anyway: corporations don't have any agency. They are not persons. The organization and constellation of interests of corporations may be such that:
1. immoral people (such as psychopaths) will be disproportionately at the helm of large corporations
2. regular people will make immoral decisions, because to do otherwise would be against their own interests or because the consequences / moral impact are hidden from their awareness
There is no way to act in life that isn't in some sense moral or political, because it also impacts others and you are always responsible for your what you do (or don't do). And corporations are just a bunch of people doing stuff together. To maintain otherwise is in itself a (im)moral act, intentionally or not, see point 2 above.
It's not that cynical when you consider that corporations exist precisely to shield owners and leadership from legal (and to a lesser extent) monetary responsibility.
Evil confers an individual advantage. Pro-social behavior confers a group advantage. That's why sociopaths continue to walk along us. Society can tolerate a few of them, but only up to a point.
Evolution works on the level of the reproducing organism, i.e. the individual.
Google group selection if you'd like to go down a deep rabbit hole but the upshot is, if pro-social behavior did not confer and individual advantage, the individuals who lose the trait would outcompete their conspecifics and the pro-social trait would not be fixed in the population.
This is why you usually see additional stabilizing mechanism(s) to suppress free-loading, in addition to the pro-social traits themselves, even in very simple examples of pro-social traits such as bacteria collaboratively creating biofilms.
The genes coding for the biofilms are usually coded on transmissible plasmids, making it possible for one individual to re-infect another that has lost it.
You might consider the justice system, police etc. as analogous to that.
So yes, in the case where you're part of a functioning society and free-loading on the pro-social behavior of others, that is temporarily beneficial to you - until the stabilizing mechanisms kick in.
I'm not saying in practice you can never get away with anything, of course you can. But on average you can't, we wouldn't be a social species otherwise.
In your Durkheimian analogy, sociopaths are cancer and while the body usually handles one off rogue cells, it often fails when tumors and eventually metastasis develop.
That can happen, sure, but the cancer's strategy is not a winning one - it dies along with the host.
Again, I'm not arguing for some naive Panglossian view. Things can get pretty bad transiently.
I just take exception at the cynical view that evil is somehow intrinsically more powerful than good.
"Survival of the fittest" is often misunderstood that way too, as survival of the strong and selfish, when, on the contrary, evolution is full of examples of cooperation being stable over long timescales.
Evil simply has more options available than good. Sure, those options, like all options, have pros and cons. Cancer, like sociopathy, can have a pretty good run even if it ends ultimately in demise.
I very much want to push back against any bias towards a just world. Bad people often live their whole lives without any consequence (think prostate cancer) while good people struggle (think my cuticles, which deserve much more than I usually give).
The cynical view suffers from availability bias - it's easy for us to think of someone who sticks out through bad behavior, but somehow gets away with it, precisely because it is not normal. (1)
But if you look at long timescales, it's pretty obvious that cooperation is the more powerful strategy.
We used to live in tribes of hunter gatherers, in constant danger from a hostile environment. Now, we're part of a global technological superorganism that provides for us.
If free-loading was a dominant strategy, this would never have developed.
(1) From the evolutionary biology point of view this can be explained by rate dependent selection- meaning the strategy is strong as long as only a small fraction of a population employ it. Durkheim would probably say you need these people to establish what the norms of a society are.
You can certainly accept a bias against corporations but you still should never assume every accusation is correct. Otherwise you'd be inclined to believe bullshit theories like Moderna wants our kids to have autism.
If the corporate veil, a legislative invention, were abolished or significantly weakened companies would stop acting evil pretty quickly. So yeah, this tracks.
You're right. That's why I never took the Covid vaccine and I convinced everyone I know to avoid it as well. You cannot trust big pharma after all the evil things they've done.
Companies are not evil, they are profit driven, and they make profit by responding to demand. If people demand evil, they will make evil, if people demand good, they will make good. I think it is too easy to blame them when ultimately, we are the one who support them.
In the case of farming, we want cheap food, and the way to make cheap food is intensive farming, with pesticides and synthetic fertilizers. So, companies make pesticides, farmers use them, and we eat the cheap food. Because we recognize that some checks need to be put in place, we elect governments to regulate all that, and or vote goes to whoever makes the best balance between cheap food, taxes and subsidies, and general health and precautions. This is crucial because cheap food is a matter of survival to some.
So in the end, there are no "baddies", just a system that's not perfect. Also keep in mind that big corporation are made of a lot of people, you may be one of them. I am. Does it make us evil? Maybe a little, but I don't think any more than average, as middle-class, I even tend to think we define the average.
> If people demand evil, they will make evil, if people demand good, they will make good.
This is so naive.
People do not ask corporations to be evil and they certainly don't demand it. People ask for good value and convenience and corporations respond by doing by amorally pursuing that.
However, when you ask consumers if they want value and convenience at the cost of *evil*, they almost always say no.
Corporations have a demonstrated and well-documented history of actively hiding their evil actions because they know consumers are not aligned with them at all.
If consumers "demand" evil, as you say, then corporations wouldn't try to hide it.
Even when eggs are clearly labeled "caged" and "free range", many people will buy the "caged" eggs despite the clear implications in terms of animal welfare.
Also, while I consider organic food to be mostly (but not completely) a scam, most people don't buy organic. Which can be interpreted as "if it is cheaper with pesticides than without, I will go for pesticides".
In cars, emission control devices have to me made mandatory and almost no one would pay for them. And even with that, people sometimes break the law to remove them (ex: catalytic converter). It is common for all environmental laws.
Of course, if you talk to people face to face, most will tell you that they don't want value and convenience at the cost of evil, but in private, if can turn a blind eye, they will.
And most of these company evil practices are often not very well hidden. Sometimes, they are genuinely criminal, highly secret operations, but they are often not, as criminal lawsuits are costly, and secrets like that don't last long in big companies. But if it is legal and it brings value convenience to people, people usually don't want to look too much, even when some NGOs try to bring awareness.
I think "caged" is not "evil" in a lot of people's minds. This is NOT society saying "we will look the other way", it's society saying, "that's not evil"
Also, organic doesn't mean, "without pesticides" it means a lot MORE than that. For example, I have no problem buying genetically modified produce. If there was an option for "pesticide free, but not organic because of GMO" I would probably buy that.
Anyways, my point really being, you can't extrapolate that people are looking the other way because of price. All your examples are more of examples of society not being morally aligned to what you are considering evil.
> Even when eggs are clearly labeled "caged" and "free range", many people will buy the "caged" eggs despite the clear implications in terms of animal welfare.
Are many egg cartons actually labeled as "caged" around you? Where I am its either advertised as cage-free or its unlabeled. Its not like the options are "tiny torture chambers": $2.99, "unclean hellscape": $3.99, "rainbows and sunshine": $4.99. Its also hard to tell what these things mean, because "cage-free" can still be a pretty terrible existence for the birds as well.
But I do agree though, if there's a seemingly similar product with a much cheaper price tag a ton of people (myself included) will often reach for the cheaper product.
This is assuming that every consumers knows what evil goes into their consumption. They don't, and not by choice, but because nobody will tell them. Ever. In fact, everyone will spend billions to make sure they don't know.
The problem with simplistic free market dynamics views is that they rely on consumer choice. Consumer choice relies on consumer consent and free information flow.
As soon as EITHER of those two are chilled, even just a tiny bit, the free market dynamics thinking falls down like a house of cards. Now the situation is orders of magnitude more complex, and we actually have to think about what's going on, inatead of appealing to a model so bare-bones it's practically impossible to see in real life.
This only really applies in a world of complete information. Pesticide side effects were an enormous externality, which only the company was aware of. And they obviously worked hard to keep that information out of the public consciousness. Perhaps there could be nuance to producing the pesticide, weighing food prices against health impacts, but that’s no justification for lying about what it does.
Yes but the fact it's primarily a Chinese export makes the profit as the cause narrative much less convincing. The US FDA is ignoring evidence to protect a Chinese supplier?
> Yes but the fact it's primarily a Chinese export makes the profit as the cause narrative much less convincing. The US FDA is ignoring evidence to protect a Chinese supplier?
Who said it was done to protect the pesticide's manufacturer? It protects the industry as a whole: the agro-industry aims for low costs, and that means using cheap pesticides to increase crop yield, even it it ends up harming farmers in the process.
There are refineries within a stone's throw from my house. One of them sits on the highest point in our water table and the vacuum it creates has been destroying our famously soft water by creating underground fault lines which pollute the aquifer with leeched hard minerals.
I used to be a proponent of the industrial agriculture, because technological progress of all kinds (genetics, chemicals, mechanisation) are the reason why food is now abundant.
But the massive disinformation campaigns and targeted harassment of researchers, as well as the outright corruption of science is where they lost me. Surely you wouldn't do things like that if you had clear consciousness.
> One example of them clearly being the baddies is them paying people to social media astroturf to defend the roundup pesticide online [2].
It certainly looks bad but I'm not sure the logic really follows.
It's just modern PR. Companies used to just do that by having good relationships with journalist but now social media has taken a lot of that role away. It's a fairly natural transition for companies to make and I'd be surprised if you couldn't find a lot of major corporations that don't do something similar.
And, also, it doesn't necessarily follow that they are either willingly lying or that their products are unsafe.
I don't get it -- software performs at human levels for translation. Do you (and should you) need permissions to do a translation of a show for the audience?
> Do you (and should you) need permissions to do a translation of a show for the audience?
Should you? Obviously subjective opinion. Do you? Yes, a translation is derivative work under copyright and requires permission from the copyright owner.
Leaving aside whether AI translation is up to human level, particularly in a visual medium where important context isn't present anywhere in the text, that was about dub voice acting, not translation.
And leaving aside any ethical debates, the rightsholders may object to their content being presented this poorly just so the distributor can save a buck:
The humans who do anime/manga translation and dub voices were already paid a pittance for their work, so trying to replace them with AI is really scraping the enshittification barrel.
Do you own the rights to the show? If not, you're creating and profiting from an unauthorized copy of copyrighted material.
Language translation is editorial work, and you may make editorial decisions the rights owner disagrees with, misrepresenting their product without permission.
I dunno seems like a nothingburger to me. There are plenty of real things to worry about these days... somebody dubbing something so I can watch it isn't an issue for me. Presumably the viewers could just turn off the dubbing if they wanted?
I don't think punishments should be decided relative to social media anecdotes. If there's some area of the country where local police routinely show up in assemblies or other gatherings and arrest people for driving past school busses, I support reforming their laws; in my local jurisdiction it's a traffic violation and police don't do that.
Not OP, but how about not being allowed to lose more than 1% of your net worth (or salary?) gambling in a year? (The gambling platforms would be required to monitor your losses)
I'd pass a law that you can only lose in a year .1% of your current retirement savings (at which point you're cut off from gambling for the year). It may sound crazy to spend even a 10th of a % of your retirement on gambling, but that means if you have 1mm saved you can gamble $1k a year.
And once any degree of censorship is involved by mainstream media the burden of open-ness goes up 10x in my opinion. At least I personally hadn't seen this article until today, and then the one I saw disappeared from the front page. I'm sorry but this story is more important than source code for photoshop 1.0 or whatever currently has the top slot.
I say this not because I think "Oh other people need to know this" I say this because I think "I need to know this" stuff and I almost didn't. I'm sure there are many well-read people on here, but for me this site is my main/only(?) news source.
Personally I'd recommend a post-mortem into this (exactly how many flags, by who?, is political news susceptible to getting falsely flagged and if so is there a way to rework that system? Perhaps let individual users disable "political news" on their own accounts? Can people "kill" a story by baiting a bunch of stupid comments on it to get its discussion number too high?)
I understand HN wasn't started as an attempt to make some free press democratized web 2.0 news. But in the current news climate where there president is personally doing shit like getting Jimmy Kimmel axed I think HN has had a greater role thrust upon it than mere startup news.
[I can't imagine it would be considered, but implicit in this frustration is a willingness to volunteer my own time to contribute toward fixing this issue as an engineer - be it gathering/analyzing the data or whatever form]
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