> The company produces and sells watches with the technology.
Technology that’s been around since the 30’s and has been put in many other devices including other fitness devices. Putting something in watch form is hardly innovation.
They may be selling products but that doesn’t mean they’re not patent trolls. This is clear patent troll behaviour even if other parts of the business is honest.
The way I use the term, a company which engages in patent trolling is a patent troll. That seems natural to me, but I apologise if that’s unorthodox use.
I think using the ITC as the forum of choice for patent disputes qualifies. I can’t see why the courts can’t handle this. The federal agency that makes sure the windshield wiper fluid I put in my car is legit isn’t really set up for evaluating complex intellectual property disputes on medical devices.
Okay, but that's not the framing of the argument I'm responding to in this thread. The title of the article and the people I'm responding to are framing the percentage growth as the problem.
I don't think you build up a "Beer Debt" that grows as it depletes like sleep and hunger. Cute wrong example but there's really nothing all that malevolent or irresponsible about the suggestion. Maybe keep it to the weekend (like don't start till Friday/Sat night) and obviously you need the set it up so you don't have to be places or hold meaningful convos although Im not going to rule them totally out
I have extensive experience with it. I would disagree that there’s nothing irresponsible.
I don’t recommend anyone try skipping a night just to see. Blood pressure, heart rate, and glucose levels can easily go to shit and exacerbate underlying any conditions. FWIW it would take me 1-2 weeks after shifting to a polyphasic before seeing any benefits (which makes sense, respective to jet lag). I can easily skip a single night (without stimulants, etc) and run off adrenaline the next day, but the day after sleeping again I’m useless state of sleep-lag-wtf.
Mediocre analogy: something like polyphasic sleep with extremely disciplined sleep-hygiene is like using a stack of high-interest credit cards for the rewards/benefits, but if you make a mistake then there’s a high cost and it’s not really tenable forever. Skipping a night of sleep outright is basically a pay-day loan.
"It was concluded that sleep deprivation has a greater impact on driving performance than a BrAC of 22 μg/100mls of breath, as measured by driving simulation. Coffee is not an effective countermeasure for sleep deprived driving and drivers’ ability to judge this impairment is suggested to be limited."
Can I ask how heavily everyone desire I pre-caveat the main lede here in order to get the discussion centered more on the idea itself and competing views on the extent to which folk's have found some usecase or success with it? Like, obviously if you're a pilot who needs to be able to thread needles and sew while you're able to still control the plane should maybe wait till they're relieved of duty for the weekend or some amount of time allowing the latitude to try this thing out but I feel like there's an amount of obtuseness and ridgidity on display here.
Edit: also, Polyphasic is insane so anyone making a false equivalence here can simply stop. I'm referring to an occasional all-nighter for the joint purposes of resetting ones mental slate and also helping prime oneself for a better quality and faster easing-into the next sleep
> in order to get the discussion centered more on the idea itself and competing views on the extent to which folk's have found some usecase or success with it?
So you only want "competing" views if they line up with your views?
The study was about driving, something many/most of us do on a regular basis. It shows that:
1. Sleep deprivation while driving is comparable to being intoxicated while driving.
2. Those who are sleep deprived are not reliably able to recognize their impairment.
If you think it's "obtuse" to bring this up, then I don't know what you're trying to do here. Those are extremely important pieces of information to bring up.
Would it actually be that much less costly to give you 20-25 vs 75, though? My uninformed assumption was that it was largely artificial once you get to a low enough speed.
Well, if there's not a cost difference, why do they keep trying to double my pricing when the base tier goes up?
My sense is there is some cost savings at these lower tiers, but more importantly it would prevent ISPs from jacking prices up while using higher speeds as the rationale ("Look, we just tripled your speed, and it only costs double!"). ISPs would be less likely to double prices without any service improvement. But since many people don't care about the service improvement, it's an illusory benefit for them.
In my area, a competitor just finished installing fiber to my neighborhood, and is offering symmetrical gigabit speeds for less (nearly half the price) than I was paying for 500/20 Mbps to the incumbent cable company before.
The cable company now needs to both increase speeds _and_ lower prices to even keep their existing customers. This is a good place to be, as a customer.
I've had many instances where ISPs increased my speeds without increasing prices.
If pricing stayed even close to fixed my gigabit internet would cost well over $10,000mo, considering back in the day I was paying SBC for less than a meg for more than I'm paying for a gigabit today. And that's before adjusting for inflation, those 90s dollars are worth way more than 2023 dollars.
Agreed, I suspect the cost is in providing the larger amount of bandwidth to the block or neighborhood (better cabling, cable modems, etc.) Once in place, the individual subscriber usage probably all costs the same for Comcast.
The big upfront cost is trenching. The rest is potatoes. If you think the "big heroes" of an ISP are the router wizards, oh boy. It's the permit people. A ransomware gang has nothing on the uppity council of a town of 4000 people.
People often confuse society as a whole with individual choices.
An individual can independently choose to brush, floss, engage in less risky behaviors, have a good diet, maintain a health weight, etc. It's not hard.
But when talking about society as a whole, that breaks down. Society is going to have a percentage of people who don't brush and floss. Who aren't managing their diet and weight. Who are taking risks beyond what you find acceptable.
When talking about society as a whole, it's a dead end to just say, "well people should just be better". It doesn't work that way, and it certainly doesn't fix anything. Society will always have people who have a lot of sex. Making it safer is better. Society will always have people who have teeth issues. Not having them die or be in massive pain is better. Society will always have people who can't maintain a healthy weight. Making it easier is better.
Of course, what you're saying is obvious. I'm just asking questions to get people to think about the ramifications of technology. Society is the sum of all the individual choices people make, which are influenced and amplified by technology, either for good or bad.
> An individual can independently choose to brush, floss, engage in less risky behaviors, have a good diet, maintain a health weight, etc. It's not hard.
Maybe I'm one of that percentage, but I wouldn't describe these things as not hard.
But the problem GP highlights is that of a ratchet - those changes start as choices, but then become requirements. Key example:
>> A person can choose to move to a new country, halfway around the world, and still have their parents be
>> able to see and converse with the grandchildren every night.
> Why did this person choose to move physically away from their tribe? To slave away at a job they don't care about? Would they have chosen to move away if the tech to communicate long distance didn't exist?
That's the ratchet in action. Progress in transportation at first enabled people to pursue new opportunities, new living arrangements. But as more and more people did that, everyone started relying on others being able to travel long distances fast. It became a social expectation, and a professional expectation, and that's how in a few decades, we went from cars being generally-available, to car culture, urban sprawl, hour+-long commutes, and constant gridlock. Problems we can't extricate ourselves from now.
The same mechanism is at play with every new invention. Even the humble clock is something you need to have, because you need to sync with people in time to minute precision, because everyone else has a clock and expects this too. Same with phones and bank accounts. Smartphones, Internet, credit/debit cards are just finishing this process too - arguably this is held back by the governments, who need to service everyone, including the elderly, but wait a few more decades for those elderly to die, and we'll see governments closing physical offices and removing in-person processes to cut costs, at which point smartphones (or their future equivalents) and Internet will become necessities.
Another, more controversial example: all the efforts to make women equally able to pursue careers and have equal pay - they started as clearly beneficial, offering choice to people who did not have it before. But couple decades down the line, the market adjusted to the workforce effectively doubling, and now single-income households are increasingly impossible. And so, at first, women could choose to work, but today, they have to. There is no choice anymore. This becomes a huge problem when children are in the mix, as in an average family, neither parent can become a stay-at-home one. Instead, children get sent to daycares and kindergartens, which of course cost money, further locking both parents into their jobs, and because child care facilities are group spaces, kids constantly get sick, creating huge logistics hassle for parents...
This is not to criticize women's right movements here - only to point out that the choice won was temporary, and the society/economy forcing a two-income model creates a whole set of other problems we're still figuring out how to deal with. Hopefully one of these days we'll figure out how to have equality while supporting either of the partners to be the stay-at-home one.
That's a big part of where the market ate the sudden surplus when two-income household became a widespread thing. That's what markets do: if people, on average, have X$ more disposable income, the prices of everything will adjust until X = 0.
The "on average" in the sentence above is key - those whose surplus of money was less than X end up worse off.
But who bears the cost of this betterment? I certainly don't want to be responsible for paying a cost for someone else's bad choice, esp. if the bad choice gave them an advantage or "profit".
That's why all individual choices should have individual consequences, and only under some circumstances where there's a prisoner's dilemma should there be a method/regulation to enforce cooperation.
> I certainly don't want to be responsible for paying a cost for someone else's bad choice
Then, in some cases, you'd prefer them dead/permanently disabled/permanently in pain/etc. Which, I guess is a position to have, but not one I'd like to take. It sounds like I'm exaggerating here but I'm not.
Remember, the theory in the posts above is that technology makes people more likely to take more risky behaviors. And I'm arguing that there will always be a significant percentage of the population that engages in risky behaviors (for whatever your definition of risky is), and we should have technology to help.
> esp. if the bad choice gave them an advantage or "profit".
Not everything is black and white. We are allowed to pick and choose here and limit this from happening. Most examples we've been talking about involve an individual having to use some communal system, like a healthcare system. That isn't an "advantage" or "profit" that the individual is abusing.
Did you pay for the roads you drive on or your freedom others died for? Do you pay for insurance? It’s kinda hard not to indirectly pay for others bad choices.
Unless we're talking about very very young children, I have an extremely hard time with this. I had none of that as a child, and I assume neither did most adults here. Because I had none of that, I'm a software engineer making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. In no world would I be where I am today with those limitations.
- What am I going to do with my child's browsing history except snoop? Are we still worried about porn in 2023?
- What applications are they going to install that I'd want to override that couldn't be solved by not giving them a credit card number?
- What are they going to watch on Youtube that can't be solved by simply limiting device time?
- Shock sites? Surely every one of us experienced that at some point in our childhood, and I haven't thought about them in years. And are they even in vogue these days?
- Stories like strangers trying to meet up with children seem on par with poisoned halloween candy. It happens incredibly infrequently, often ends up being a known family member anyway, and people forever fear it as if it's actually something to fear in their daily lives.
I think communication, education, and limiting screen time at certain ages is the only healthy thing to do. Giving children (yes, even young children) some privacy is important. Your suggestions I believe fall into the "helicopter parent" territory.
This might be a surprise to some, but the highly paid engineers who invented the internet did not have access to the internet when they were children. Correlation is not causation, and in this case I can't even imagine the causal link in your claim.
Also until extremely recently, almost no one saw adult material unless they found a magazine of utterly tame (by today's standards) printed nudity.
See my other comment below for a more detailed answer but: no, my claim is not that I needed porn to become the engineer I am today. But the level of restrictions proposed by the top level comment in this thread would have, and it seems blocking porn is a driving factor in those decisions.
Social media addiction, etc. can be helped by restricting time without restricting access.
What would you reply to the person here[1] who wishes they had restricted access instead of restricted time, because restricted time hindered them learning to code?
I thought I felt the same as you, but I have nieces and nephews who have a variety of "no screen time" to "screen is default" aged between 2 and 10. The online world is very different now to what it was when I explored it.
When I was 15, YouTube was music videos, shitty flash animations, and people doing bargain basement myth busters. Now it's content farms, conspiracy theories, cleverly crafted dopamine hits.
Similarly, online multiplayer games when I was 10-15 were warcraft 3, neverwinter nights and diablo 2. Compare those games to Roblox, Fortnite and co - it's just not the same (and I say this as someone who now works in this space).
I don't have a good answer, but the landscape has changed so wildly in the last decade that I thin it's incredibly naive to think that it's safe to allow unrestricted unmonitored access to devices.
I guess that the percentage of people who approve of their preteen children watching porn is still a rather small minority. In fact globally I'd bet the majority of adults don't even approve of themselves watching porn.
More broadly speaking, assuming we're roughly of the same generation, I'm not sure our parents' borderline neglectful approach to children (latchkey, ads at 10 PM to remind them we exist, not being let in the house during the day) is one that's worthy of emulation.
These restrictions just don't make sense to me. I was a pretty reserved child, so I can't imagine getting over all the hurdles needed to grow as a person and foster my love for programming/tech:
- Asking for permission to read all the random Perl forums or IRC chats I stumbled upon just wouldn't be a thing I would have done.
- My parents probably wouldn't have understood what it all was and denied my request. Early on I probably wouldn't have even been able to explain why I needed that access.
- Remember installing linux for the first time? Sorry, not going to happen because the stalkerware doesn't work on linux.
- You want access to a website called "hacker news"?? No way! (HN wasn't really a thing I think back in my childhood but you get the idea).
-----
Second, I was a latchkey kid. Having two working parents is neglectful? What would have been the alternative?
And my point with the porn is that it's not worth locking everything down for fear that your child is going to see some boobs. It's not worth it, and it seems that it's the driving force or a lot of these restrictions.
Please focus on the core message of my post rather than three words.
If you're so concerned with Internet pornography that you want to lock down your child's digital life and know every single thing they say and do, then so be it. We probably won't change each other's minds.
Why should an ISP know more about a child’s Internet activity than the parents?
For what it’s worth my personal philosophy would be trust, but verify. That necessarily entails some way to verify.
Furthermore, in many jurisdictions parents are civilly or even potentially criminally liable for their childrens’ activities. If you’re in one of those jurisdictions you have a duty to prevent your child from breaking the relevant laws or other rules.
> Why should an ISP know more about a child’s Internet activity than the parents?
They shouldn't. Fight the ISPs.
> For what it’s worth my personal philosophy would be trust, but verify. That necessarily entails some way to verify.
Again, trust what? Do all roads lead to porn?
> Furthermore, in many jurisdictions parents are civilly or even potentially criminally liable for their childrens’ activities. If you’re in one of those jurisdictions you have a duty to prevent your child from breaking the relevant laws or other rules.
Really grasping at straws here. What laws are you worried your child will break that would reasonably reach the level you're worried about?
>> I'm not sure our parents' borderline neglectful approach to children (latchkey, ads at 10 PM to remind them we exist, not being let in the house during the day) is one that's worthy of emulation
Latchkey is a little after I grew up, mid Gen X, I think the premise is that these kids with working parents would run home alone and lock themselves inside in terror because some kid somewhere got abducted and it made the news. I don't know what statistics there are around it, but that's my memory of the phrase latchkey. I don't remember locking the door when I was a kid, we didn't live in a great neighborhood.
But I was a beneficiary of the borderline neglectful approach to children, and I'm certainly glad I grew up that way. I got kicked out of a bar for the first time when I was 10 or 11, and when I was 14, I would go to hardcore punk shows a hundred miles from home and my mom had no idea where I was. "I'm sleeping over at Joe's house tonight". Maybe "Joe" existed, maybe he didn't, but either way, I am at a show learning how to stage dive.
So it's weird reading how closely people watch their kids these days, and I'm not criticizing, people raise their kids how they raise their kids, none of my business. But I am reminded of one friend whose house I stayed at a couple times, he actually had two parents, if you can believe that, and they monitored everything he did, asked him questions about everything, listened to his answers, and he had to ask for permission for everything. On one hand I could tell he was lucky he had parents who cared about him and wanted the best for him, but I also remember feeling so, so sorry for him.
> Because I had none of that, I'm a software engineer making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. In no world would I be where I am today with those limitations.
You've commented plenty throughout your replies. But this bit uses very concrete, casual language. I'm not sure how you could possibly know such a thing and therefore write the statement you wrote. So much of your success as a hundreds-of-thousands-of-dollars engineer is luck, timing, and other things that are not so clear in nature.
I mostly agree with you, or at least I think you're providing important pushback that needs to be considered. Porn is largely a weird religious boogeyman, and scary stranger kidnapping stories seem to be a form of lucrative fear porn to attract conspiracy minded types. My access to the internet as a teen fueled my curiosity and computer technology exploration in a way that was crucial for where I've ended up today. I actually installed a keylogger to get the internet password that my parents guarded, and I've never regretted it. Blanket luddite rules for kids seem to me to be lazy at best.
That being said, here are some of the things I worry about:
- The internet is no longer a niche playground for nerds, and much of it has become a mainstream entertainment megahub, very highly cultivated for your bland engagement. When I was growing up, I had to constantly fiddle with and troubleshot several layers of software in order to explore, interact with friends online, and play games. It was almost like a barrier to entry. These days, I'm not entirely sure I would have fiddled with anything and might have just skipped to the gaming & media consumption part. After all, it just works now, and the media is more engaging than ever. There seem to be fewer incentives for learning and creativity.
- I'm more concerned about bad behavior modeling than I am about the moral panic nonsense. I want to make sure that whatever personalities my kids are having a social/parasocial relationship with aren't encouraging trollish and abusive behavior.
- I'm also concerned about misinformation. Most people generally are very bad at gauging the trustworthiness of information online. Ironically even the people who cry the most about how media distorts your worldview tend to have that exact problem. I want to teach my kids critical thinking and how to evaluate information based on several important criteria. This will have to be an involved process, and I want to be able to contextualize heavy sources of misinformation while they're being exposed to it.
None of these problems are well addressed with a luddite approach, but they do need careful attention.
You are missing a very obvious piece of the puzzle here: assets seized by the government during bankruptcy get used to offset liabilities of the bankrupt company. This doesn't need to be explicitly said; it wouldn't make sense for it to work any other way.
> There’s only no harm in more data if you handle false positives perfectly. Surely, this is never the case, so there’s always some harm in more data.
That's not the correct way to think about it. The correct way to think about it is whether or not there's more harm with more data than the status quo.
Most medical professionals seem to think there's more harm than the status quo, but that doesn't change the fact that you're thinking about it wrong.
The reason is pretty simple. As companies get larger, the culture dies.
Those who joined big-tech early-ish in their career likely see the state of the company at the time as way better than what they're used to. Then it gets worse.
It doesn't really matter where you enter in the history of the company, the culture is almost always going to be the best as you know it when you join and get worse over time. Very rarely does the opposite happen.
On the contrary, higher CEO pay is a symptom of enshitification because it means ownership has dispersed enough and/or the majority owners have checked out enough that there's no strong hand slapping the CEO around when he proposes utter BS for his pay package. I did my undergrad econ final thesis on this subject almost 20 years ago now, it was quite interesting. Over 500k of total compensation a year correlated very heavily with a whole host of policies that indicate CEO board capture (Don't ask me what they were at this point, it's lost to the sands of time) and likely enshitification progression as well since the guys providing the capital have checked out and the CEO's interest is in increasing his comp, not in making sure the capital is well compensated.
The company produces and sells watches with the technology. It's not a patent troll.