Assuming your question is in good faith, the answer is: when you rent something on AWS, you are paying for total cost of ownership sliced out. When you run something on your gaming rig GPU, you already paid for the machine/GPU - now you are "just" paying for electricity and depreciation. So if you have a gaming rig sitting around while you are writing a web app or whatever, let it do some science for just the cost of electricity.
I'm a little surprised you didn't mention anything about police being held accountable when responding with unreasonable force to anonymous tips. If we are going to start talking about fixing this issue, I'm not sure getting rid of blocked numbers is going to materially impact these outcomes.
Likewise, what is your recommendation on eliminating the threat of burner phones?
Technically, in the US the police doesn't have to protect you (search "no duty to protect"). And "holding them accountable" much beyond the existing threshold will ensure they won't show up at all except to collect the body.
That's only because those countries aren't, in fact, the US. The US is a pretty violent country compared to just about any other first world country. The policing methods employed elsewhere are (IMO) unlikely to work here. It'd be hilarious to send London policemen to Chicago or Detroit and have them "deescalate" things with gangs there.
Well, Detroit and Chicago gangs exist inside minority communities, i.e. not the vast majority of America, including in this particular story. SWATing is not a problem in the hood.
Most police calls that are not from a victim amount to an anonymous call. They cannot be ignored.
I hate to say, but it's a slippery slope. Right now, you can't distinguish between a legit line and a spoof, or a burner.
But a burner still has a traceable number. Perhaps burners could be placed in a "low trust" zone when dialling emergency services. Such a classification could give 1st responders the caution they need.
The underlying problem is that police should not jump to lethal force and have proper training to contain dangerous situation, not kill people who are crawling on the floor under their orders.
The problem is not distinguishing between a legit line and a spoof, it is having a police force that is not trigger happy who cowardly justify every killing with "I was scared for my life".
Police who are so easy to be "scared for life" should not be in the force, in the same way someone with pyrophobia should not be a firefighter.
> Police who are so easy to be "scared for life" should not be in the force, in the same way someone with pyrophobia should not be a firefighter.
I take your point, but at the same time, that's a very easy thing to say when it's not your life that is on the line. Unless you have first hand experience doing that kind of job, I would strongly advise a bit of restraint in being quite so judgemental.
I might be less judgmental if the police were ever willing to admit that they could have done anything differently.
IIRC, the victim in one swatting death was lying on the floor crying as two cops screamed contradictory orders at him, reached down to pull his pants up after crawling forward as instructed, and was shot dead. I might have been able to respect, at a bare minimum, a police response along the lines of "we need to review our procedures for this sort of situation." Instead the police chief gave a press conference about evil swatters and absolutely refused to accept any culpability at all.
As long as the cops keep ducking blame like a child with his hands over his ears, this shit is going to keep happening with every swatting.
First hand experience isn't needed to condemn the unnecessary murder of a completely innocent and terrified man. The police should not burst into the homes of innocent citizens and shoot them to death. Being scared is not a valid excuse.
Again, that's a different issue and separate from calling the Swat teams. The cops are told that murder has happened and a person that had "killed" his family member has zero to lose, so yeah, cops are afraid. The person that sees 20 armed cops or has a grenade thrown through his window will freak out and not act rationally. Recipe for disaster, all because someone made that call.
I am no army general or special forces specialist but one has to wonder why is throwing a grenade or any other aggressive action is the first line of action for any highly tactical large team with arguably the world's most advanced tech?
The consequences of the situation is perhaps up-to-debate but that is missing the point, the SWAT teams shouldn't be acting reactionary and out of fear, they should be, well, tactical about the situation and not burst into homes and hotels like they're in war-zone doing a Search and Destroy.
The call is the catalyst. The cops are the gullible, hyper-agressive actors that turn what should be a simple matter of communication into the 'justified' killing of an innocent.
I agree. In the video I saw the cops killed the person from it seemed like 100 yards away. He had opened the door and cops thought he was reaching for his gun. But the cops were or should have been behind a car or bulletproof thingy, no need to look for the lamest excuse to kill someone.
>I'm a little surprised you didn't mention anything about police being held accountable when responding with unreasonable force to anonymous tips
I think the logic behind this is that if the tip was correct then trying to talk it out/etc could end much worse for everyone involved. You have to remember that, to the best of the officer's knowledge, there is a live hostage in a building somewhere that needs to be saved by them
There is no "best of the officer's knowleedge", though. They have zero knowledge of the situation. They have an unsourced phone call. They know exactly that one person has made a claim on the phone and too often they don't bother looking past that and it is completely reckless.
I can't even conceive of the same thing happening in the military (been there, done that). "We got a call the enemy is in that build." "suit up, we'll go in." "how about we watch the building for a minute?" "Naw..."
At the end of the day you will always want to go home more than follow the law. Americas weapon laws put everyone postcall in a defacto civil war zone. In war zones the law, civil conventions and concepts collapse. Its your tribe vs the others. Quite frankly for this situation americas swats are remarkable civil.
Ps: the military has its own track record on fire first and then sort them out later. They blew up whole towns in Iraq for one sniper-with everyone on it. So bad example. The watch and wait often only happens in spy movies. In reality it's protect our boys preemptive at all costs. If one dies you have alot more to answer for then 40-50 locals die. Those can be labeled asymmetric after exitus. And quite frankly theire surviving relatives thirsty for revenge will cover your war crime up. One week later that sleepy town ruin is a Hotspot.
There's an audio clip of the 911 call posted on here. It wasn't an anonymous tip; the person on the phone pretended there was a situation/serious domestic dispute.
The police should have still been more accountable, but let's get the context right.
Sure, and that is a bad reason to go in guns blazing. It is even worse than if it was a hostage situation.
It is even worse if the subject capitulated and went outside. What could they do, take aim at someone and then get shot?
This is stupid trigger happy gangster style policing.
The alternate side of officers using unreasonable force from a scam anonymous call is getting officers or members of the public killed from a real anonymous call.
Police are going to be on high alert regardless, even if they think the call was a hoax
You will note that I did not say "scam" anonymous call. I said "anonymous call" which includes both real and anonymous calls. Police officers should respond with force dictated by the circumstances of their situation, trained in such analysis, and held accountable to their decisions - both as individual officers and as departments. The source of the initial investigation should have little if any impact on the level of force used in the encounter.
Spot on. I believe the crux of the issue lies in the present bias toward officer safety, leading to an almost anything goes situation if the officer claims to have felt endangered. Which is quite ridiculous because the danger is always there. It's just not an acceptable reason to blast away.
I agree completely - my point was that police can't treat anonymous calls differently than real ones, because it is literally their lives(and the lives of the potential hostages) on the line. Unreasonable force is unreasonable force, regardless of how the officer was called into the situation.
>>I'm a little surprised you didn't mention anything about police being held accountable when responding with unreasonable force to anonymous tips.
Who says they aren't? They have rules, procedures etc., but when you tell police that x person killed his wife and is about to kill his two little children bad things are likely to happen.
Plus, both sides can be held accountable at the same time. The person that made the call can be responsible for everything that happens, even for the car accident cops get into while going there. More or less like this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felony_murder_rule
I'm not sure how much better their quality control is (they are another SV startup), but I have been eating Mealsquares (http://www.mealsquares.com/) for about half of my caloric load for over a year now and couldn't be happier. I also like the fact that they are solid food rather than liquid, just as a preference. I'm sensitive to gluten, corn, and soy, so Mealsquares are a huge boon when I am in a rush or need to opt out of eating somewhere (e.g. traveling).
Me too. Good solution to getting the convenience and complete nutrition benefits you'd get from a Soylent or Soylent-like product but with the additional hedge that there may be yet unknown beneficial micronutrients in whole food ingredients that you don't get from an isolated nutrient slurry like Soylent.
For those who don't know Mealsquares, they're made from mostly whole food ingredients (Whole grain oats, eggs, milk, dark chocolate chips (chocolate, sugar, cocoa butter, milkfat), whey, orange juice, rice bran, sunflower seeds, dates, sweet potatoes, apples, vegetable glycerin, chickpeas, carrots, coconut oil, extra virgin olive oil, xanthan gum, sunflower lecithin, xylitol, iodized sea salt, potassium citrate, cinnamon, aluminum free baking powder, Vitamin C (ascorbic acid), Vitamin D3, Vitamin K2, niacinamide (B3), calcium folinate, lactase, spices).
Only downside is the price but I don't try to replace home cooked meals with them, just some of those times when I'd go grab some fast casual food instead, or times when I'm busy and don't want to have to go get food.
Anyone who ends up trying them - be aware that they taste 500% better after 30 seconds in the microwave. They can be pretty dry and dense when you don't microwave them.
That is an excellent essay and it scares the crap out of me, because I see it play out every day in both directions and it often does feel exactly like epistemic learned helplessness.
There are so many biases that affect individuals (hindsight, hyperbolic discounting, confirmation, etc) that to get correct answers, you have to look at and trust other accounts. You have to do studies, you have to trust those studies, and you have to track actual hard evidence.
But large enough systems become increasingly opaque, and it can be hard to test your web of trust empirically. This reduces huge organizations to cargo cult behavior, or worse, fundamentally unsound behavior because "it worked for me."
I don't know what to do about this besides what CFAR is trying, which is to get people better at weighing evidence and changing their damned minds. You have to constantly be asking yourself: "what would the world look like if this were true? What would the world like like if it wasn't?" It is hard work, but I think it is critical to our continued improvements as a civilization and a species.
I don't know if the right answer is to be generally more open to changing your mind.
There are far too many things to be worried about: the danger of AI, religion, the environment, other political views, the results of scientific papers in dozens of fields... epistemic learned helplessness is a defence against wasting literally all of your time taking every argument seriously.
At the end, the author notes that we should be glad for the specialists who are well-versed in certain subjects enough to actually be able to evaluate and experiment on outlandish theories and unusual study results.
Maybe we need to emphasize more specialization? Or is it working alright already?
The other solution is to not really care all that much about most things.
There's some new physics result about how black holes interact with the quantum foam? I can't build anything practical with it, so beyond "that's interesting" it doesn't really matter to me.
Some food is suddenly found to cause cancer in rats? Unless it's fairly new, the effect on humans can't be all that strong or we'd have noticed by now. Something else will probably kill me first (like whatever the medical term for "old age" is these days).
Someone's claiming that some particular aspect of modern diet causes obesity? It would have to either make you feel lethargic (lower calories out) or make you hungrier (raise calories in). Both of which are directly observable and easily correlated to the contents of recent meals, without having to argue over mechanisms and confounders and personalized gut bacteria and such.
There's a new higher estimate for the percent of scientific results that are fake or poorly done or just statistical noise? This does help for knowing how not-seriously to take everything, but beyond "that's too damn high" the exact numbers aren't all that relevant (unless you're testing a fix).
Someone wants money to research AI risk? Are they looking at how to build safe AI, or how to prevent anyone either carelessly or deliberately building unsafe AI? Only the second is worth looking into further.
>Someone's claiming that some particular aspect of modern diet causes obesity? It would have to either make you feel lethargic (lower calories out) or make you hungrier (raise calories in). Both of which are directly observable and easily correlated to the contents of recent meals, without having to argue over mechanisms and confounders and personalized gut bacteria and such.
This is extremely facile. Take trans fats scarring arteries and causing systemic inflammation, for instance.
Often it's simply dependent on when you were hired. Employers have to stay competitive but won't give you a raise if you don't express discontent. When wages trend upward new hires can often end up making more money.
Some employers, anyhow. But I think it requires a certain level of negligence or callousness. You might be able to save a little money on payroll. But I think that ignores the hidden costs in reduced goodwill, lowered trust, and higher turnover.
That's pretty much true, but in the more "responsible" startups an employee who's been around long enough would be compensated with equity (or the equivalent in benefits) to compensate for the difference.
You would be surprised about how few "responsible" startups there are. Most will never be responsible until they're under scrutiny. I've been with a few that actively derided the idea of compensating employees who were underpaid during the initial growth phases. They thought that because they'd agreed to help "build the business" that nothing more was owed in better times.
One of them got a lot of press as a successful startup and landed several new large contracts. Which is why, after a year of executive self-congratulations and bonuses, their lead developer, who had saved several failed projects singlehandedly, left for more realistic pastures. They only brought him up to just below market when he talked about leaving, had no intentions about rewarding him for past underpaid accomplishments (which were obviously investments on his part), and despite their poor compensation packages had an overly strict culture for non-executives. Management compensation was top priority, and retention was assumed - they thought people would just stay despite having better alternatives. Even if he stayed, he'd have to watch other people get screwed. He wasn't the first, and doubtless he won't be the last rat to abandon that ship. I left as well, seeing that they really didn't care about anyone who didn't have ownership and a briefcase.
It's really not that uncommon. Being at the top of a company requires only one of three things: luck, lies ("charisma") or capital. Quite a lot of new business owners get mislead by their own kool-aid. They start believing that their vague "vision" is the most important thing and treat the people who do the real work as replaceable cogs. They give no thought to training costs or productivity and have high turnover rates. Merely treating the staff better could have a huge and positive financial impact. They'd probably know about these management issues if they didn't defensively fire people who voiced dissent. But a fool and his competent staff are soon parted.
I agree with the overall sentiment of your comment. However, I think psychologists would disagree with the idea that charisma -> dishonesty, and I think holding such a viewpoint is damaging to long-term success.
A quick google search fails to bring up the original suit text, but from what I recall it was pretty scathing. I hope that cash infusion is at the root of this announcement and AMD can get back in the game.
Unfortunately with antitrust lawsuits, they usually happen too late to stop the damage from being done, as we're seeing in this case and as we've seen with Microsoft and IE.
The way this could be solved without "abusing" antitrust power too much is by looking for "anticompetitive behavior" before companies actually get 90%+ market share in a market. At that point it's obviously too late, and with heavy lobbying-influenced politicians and institutions today, the punishment is unlikely to fit the crime, too, and the monopolists will only get a slap on the wrist and get to keep their monopoly (which makes the crime all worth it).
Example of anticompetitive behavior: Microsoft not allowing other browsers to be installed on the Windows mobile platform. It doesn't matter Windows mobile only has 3% market share. Why wait until they get 90% market share (again) to do anything about that awful and anticompetitive policy?
Same goes with Apple which doesn't allow other companies to compete with its "core apps". Why would you ever let something like that happen? It should be quashed from moment zero. Not to mention Apple already has a very strong position in the mobile market (especially in the US), but that should be beside the point.
What I always wonder is, what is market dominance worth?
Intel has $50B/year in revenue, net income of $10B/year. So they paid about one month's profit as a penalty for strategies that helped them dominate the market for years.
Which makes me wonder if anti-competitive practices start to look, even in spite of possible litigation, financially prudent.
“I’d like this to be something that is like coffee — a commodity something that’s available everywhere. Maybe a utility like water and power. Something that is ubiquitous and easy to consume,” he said. “I’d like to see it in grocery and convenience stores soon.” ( http://techcrunch.com/2013/08/01/soylent-1m-preorders/ )
You have to keep in mind this is an early adopter, hot-off-the-manufacturing-line, hey-look-this-might-work version. Give it time to grow, mature, and let economies of scale kick in.
One of my favorite things about Soylent is that it provides a "reasonable" but consistent baseline for doing these sorts of tests. Until Soylent there wasn't a non-medical meal replacement that at least theoretically tried to be everything you need. Once Soylent has been battle tested for awhile, we can start doing actual experiments with controlled variables around diets. If we can get that far without throwing the baby out with the bathwater, we will potentially upend how we do nutritional testing.
> Until Soylent there wasn't a non-medical meal replacement that at least theoretically tried to be everything you need
As far as I understand it that's because the knowledge to make such a thing does not exist and everyone in the field is confident trying to make such a product would fail. They are waiting for the pure research folks to learn more about human nutrition (either a bit more or a hell of a lot more depending on who you ask).
Ensure/Jevity/etc would certainly market their products for non-medical purposes if they could. But they are only used as last resort options during medical interventions precisely because of the results they've seen during those medical interventions.
A bunch of volunteers self experimenting is an interesting way to get around this (the ethics of this level of experimentation on human subjects that is). While the data will be too uncontrolled and biased to judge any positive effects you will probably get some very interesting data when someone gets sick (as long as they at least keep a detailed enough log of their diet).
Considering the ingredient list now includes snake oil like Ginseng and Ginkgo Biloba I don't trust the makers enough to include myself in those tests but I am interested in how it turns out.
That's crazy talk. Plenty of other controlled diets, for which there are decades or centuries of experience, would be better 'baselines' for experiments than novel, radical Soylent.
Actual controlled experiments in diet are not currently blocked waiting for "a non-medical meal replacement that at least theoretically trie[s] to be everything you need".
In 10 years "eating the Soylent" might have a colloquial meaning very close to "drinking the Kool-Aid".
