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Joined 3 years ago
Cake day: October 21st, 2023
  • sorter_plainview@lemmy.todaytoChapotraphouse@hexbear.net•We have Apple, the NBA and Sydney Sweeney. What do they have?English
    16·
    10 days ago

    Seems like you are interested in the mighty American stuffs…

    Nothing important here

    Free Expression is a daily newsletter on American life, politics and culture from the Opinion pages of The Wall Street Journal. Sign up and start reading Free Expression today.

    President Trump’s visit to China has prompted Americans to reflect, as we periodically do, on the state of our superpower. Some say the future is Chinese. Don’t worry. It isn’t.

    The U.S. is rich, powerful and attractive. We are perhaps the richest, most powerful and most attractive country that’s ever been. Had we been blessed with only one of those attributes, we’d still be a formidable player on the global stage. In the event, we’re 3-for-3. We are crushing it.

    Run down the list. Almost all the world’s top companies are American. The reason is simple: Ours is an open economy governed by the rule of law. Anyone can start a company and grow it. You don’t need an uncle in the Politburo.

    The U.S. has Nvidia. We have Apple, Microsoft, Google, Meta and Tesla. We have the big, healthy and transparent financial institutions. We have Walmart. Our ability to project both hard and soft power is unrivaled. We have the NBA. We have the Northrop B-2 Spirit. We have Sydney Sweeney.

    When you look at it that way, it’s laughable to say we are in a competition for the future with China. What do they have? What have they done? TikTok. That’s pretty much it.

    Name a Chinese movie star with global box-office appeal. Name a top Chinese athlete playing in an elite sports league. Name a Chinese musician who could pack stadiums around the world like Taylor Swift or Beyoncé. Name a Chinese writer or thinker whose ideas have infiltrated the intellectual discourse. Name a clothing brand or style originating in China that has conquered the world. Name a Chinese product that you can’t live without.

    You got nothing. Be honest.

    Now name a recent military engagement that the Chinese have fought and won. Their soldiers are untested. Their pilots have no combat experience. Their navy plays sharks and minnows with Filipino fishing boats. Their supply chains run on the principles of corruption and inefficiency that are the communist hallmark.

    There is precedent for our fear of Chinese power. In the 1970s conventional wisdom held that the Soviet Union commanded a lethal modern military machine. They had the firepower and manpower to overwhelm us in a direct confrontation. Then Soviet tanks rolled into Afghanistan and the world saw how limp the threat was. The Russians hadn’t built a war machine. They’d centrally planned a paper tiger.

    No one should want war between the U.S. and China. But if it comes to that, I know which side I’d rather be on. The team that took Fallujah—twice. The team that neutralized Fordo, Natanz and Isfahan. The team that snatched Maduro.

    Americans have a reputation as yokels and navel-gazers. That’s not reality. We are actually quite cosmopolitan. We can be open-minded and self-critical. We read our own reviews—even the bad ones. We know what people think of us. Most of it is motivated by envy.

    The reality is, the world is with us. If they could, they would be us. Nobody wants to be China.

    No one in Albania or Botswana dreams of living in a low-income, censorship-and-surveillance state. They want to live in a modern, prosperous society with free and fair elections. People risk everything to come here, to build new and hopeful lives in the unsexy parts of our country—midsize cities, inner-ring suburbs, rundown areas.

    Everywhere you go in the U.S. you find immigrants from around the world, raising families, building businesses, investing in their futures. That is a vote of confidence, a revealed preference. It doesn’t happen in China.

    Tune out the partisan noise and the communist propaganda. China’s per-capita GDP is in the neighborhood of Mexico’s. Its economy is dominated by state-owned enterprises—phony businesses, in other words. They don’t engage in real competition in open markets. They don’t report real numbers. Everything is a mirage intended to give the illusion of strength.

    You can’t steal your way to greatness. And you can’t bluff your way to hegemony.

    Communism is a self-defeating ideology—impoverished, weak and ugly. So don’t worry too much about the future. It’s got America written all over it.

    Mr. Hennessey is editor of Free Expression.

  • sorter_plainview@lemmy.todaytoSlop.@hexbear.net•aaahhh ahhh aaaaaaahhhhhh AAAAAAAAAHHHHH!!!!!!!11111
    39·
    1 month ago

    For those who are curious.

    My husband and I are both over 50 and work full time. For the past seven years, we’ve employed a woman, slightly younger than we are, to clean our house. She also cares for our pets when we travel. When Covid hit, we kept paying her for a full year without asking her to come in, and over time we’ve raised her pay voluntarily. Each Christmas, we give her a generous bonus.

    Every few years, she goes through periods of mental health difficulty. During those stretches, she stops working and disappears from contact, leaving us unsure whether or when she’ll return. We check in with her by text but do not press her or complain. Eventually she comes back and resumes a regular schedule.

    Over the past year, though, the quality of her work has declined sharply. She spends less time at our house, does less overall and often leaves the job unsatisfactorily done. We suspect some of this may reflect physical problems, and she does not have health insurance. Still, we know she depends on this income, and we have hesitated to raise the issue with her. We can afford to pay her every other week, but we are not wealthy. Her help makes possible other parts of our lives that matter to us.

    We have never detailed what the job includes, so drawing up a task list now would feel awkward. Any conversation about her performance would be uncomfortable, especially because she used to do the job extremely well. Still, the present arrangement is not sustainable, and we do not know how to proceed. What are our ethical options? — Name Withheld

    From the Ethicist:

    People who work regularly in other people’s homes can come to seem less like employees than friends or even dependents. And the truth is that, in a wide range of relationships, there isn’t a bright line between the transactional and the personal. But that lack of clarity often serves neither party well in circumstances like these. It can make it harder to speak plainly about expectations, on either side, when things change. At the moment you’re dissatisfied, and your cleaner may be at risk of losing her job without ever being told why or having a chance to address the problem.

    You don’t owe her tenure; you do owe her a direct, respectful conversation. Tell her what you’ve noticed. Talk about what you think the job requires, what schedule and standards you expect, and see if there are accommodations that would make the arrangement workable for both of you. The question is whether the job can still be done in a way that meets your needs and acknowledges hers. If, after that conversation, it becomes clear that the work can’t be done at the level you need, you should give her reasonable notice and let her make other plans.

  • sorter_plainview@lemmy.todaytoFuck Cars@lemmy.world•Overtaking and going fast in urban areas is not only dangerous, but also useless: a mathematical demonstrationEnglish
    71·
    1 month ago

    My mental model is slightly different. I think of average speed of the car between source and destination. Every segment of the road will have an average speed at a given time, which may vary depending on the time of the day. This average speed is dictated by numerous factors, including traffic lights, number of slow vehicles on the road, speed limits, etc. You cannot really go significantly higher than this average speed, even if you try as aggressively as possible.

    There are exception, especially in Asian roads. If you are a large vehicle, who doesn’t care about the law and limits, and they do very aggressive driving, then they go at a larger average speed. I have some completely asshole private bus services in my country.

  • sorter_plainview@lemmy.todaytoComic Strips@lemmy.world•There is another.
    62·
    1 month ago

    The sudden rapid re-release of all that sequestered carbon is as natural as the process that formed it 378M years ago.

    Let me highlight. You are telling industrial revolution, and the emmision of green house gases is as natural as, some other process happened in the nature? And humans continued doing it even after knowing the consequences of it, even when there were much better alternatives abundantly available?

    I’m struggling to see the “natural” part of it.

  • sorter_plainview@lemmy.todaytoNews@lemmy.world•Kids groups say they didn’t know OpenAI was behind their child safety coalition
    32·
    2 months ago

    I’m extremely conflicted about this.

    On one hand I believe, ads industry is behind the age verification laws, and governments and law enforcement agencies are taking this as an opportunity to increase surveillance on citizen.

    On the other hand, there are genuine risk in not regulating tech products used by kids. Especially AI chats. But I’m not convinced age verification is the solution.

    When the IT proliferated in 90s and 2000s, tech companies played the standard game of arguing that the laws present at that time were inadequate for regulating them, and this resulated in the surveillance nightmare we are currently in. The former Commissioner of Federal Trade Commission of USA, Lina Khan, in an interview with Jon Stewart, pointed this out, and drew parallels on how AI comapnies are using the same playbook now.

    This is a classic trick played by capitalism, where they push for “unregulated” free market. This usually results in severe harm on kids and marginalized groups in the society, because oppressor get more power and accountability is non existent. But at the same time, every attempt to bring in regulations usually results in increased surveillance by data brokers and governments, which helps these groups to either make money or get into power.

    All these power hungry maniacs, and money making machines, don’t care about a common person. People are commodities for them. A resource to make money or get into power. Unless things start to have a people first approach, ironically which is what democracy claims to do, this is going to be bad for a common person like you and me. We suffer, they gain. We get oppressed, and they get more power to oppress.

  • sorter_plainview@lemmy.todaytoProgramming@programming.dev•“Good Taste” Is Just Experience
    81·
    2 months ago

    The tooling around AI should be to improve the quality of the programmer. Not to write the code for the programmer.

    For example if you ask an agent how to scale things well, and best practices in architecture, it will have a lot of resources on it. But that does not mean the code it will produce when you ask it to write a programme will consider and include the best practices it gave you in a separate question. That is the ‘intelligence’ part that LLMs cannot have. If you ask a it to do a certain way it will create it. Context tries to address this by prompting the user to give more, but that is not persistent.

    This is exactly why senior devs finding LLMs works for them, because they know ‘how’ to do it, and they explicitly state it. But at the same time junior devs feel they think the code written by LLM is the ‘best’ way so solve a problem and superior in quality, even if it is not, because they don’t know any better.

    Tooling should be able to help the developers improve their knowledge and skill on ‘how’ to do it. Instead it always focus on writing the code. I want to add that I’m not talking about algorithms. But every aspect of coding, in which the programmer needs to know ‘how’ to do it.

  • sorter_plainview@lemmy.todaytoChapotraphouse@hexbear.net•UN General Assembly Resolution on wether slavery was bad. Guess who abstained and who was againstEnglish
    32·
    2 months ago

    Also note that almost all of the Europian countries abstained from voting. I think we are seeing the effects of colonialism.

    The resolution talks about ‘reparatory justice’ which I think these colonialists, and countries benefitted from slave trade are afraid of. I feel they see it as, if they agree to it they will have to take actions now and in future, and have to pay or compensate for the injustice.

    The justification given by US is utter bullshit. Wealth of western countries mainly came from extracting resources, both human and material, from Asian and African countries. Claiming otherwise is just ignoring the past and neglecting the injustice.