Technologically practical? Certainly. Kick renewables and electrification into high gear. Treat it like the emergency that it is.
Politically practical? Not a chance. It was already a major struggle a decade ago when the political climate was much more favorable to addressing the problem. Now, even the countries that want to do something about it are going to be more concerned about more immediate threats like being invaded.
Our best hope is that green technology quickly gets to the point where it so heavily outcompetes CO2-emitting technology that the latter disappears on its own. But this will take longer than it should.
A civil engineer might work on a major bridge that costs a billion dollars to build. An automotive engineer might work on a car that has a cumulative billions of dollars in production costs. An aeronautical engineer might work on a plane with a $100 million price tag.
The engineer’s job there is to save money. Spend a week slimming down part of that bridge and you’ve substantially reduced costs, great! Figure out how to combine three different car parts into one and you’ve saved a couple of dollars on every car you make, well worth it.
Software doesn’t have construction costs. The “engineer” (I have the word in my job title but I hesitate to call us that) builds the whole thing. The operating costs are often cheap. Costs like slow rendering are paid by the customer, not the builder.
In that environment, it’s often not a positive ROI to spend a week making your product more efficient. If the major cost is the “engineers” then your focus is on saving them time. If you can save a week of their time at the cost of making your customers wait 50ms longer for every action, that is where you see your positive ROI.
When software contributes to the cost of a product, you tend to see better software work. Your headphones aren’t running bloated React frameworks because adding more memory and CPU is expensive. But with user-facing software, the people who pay the programmers are usually not the people who pay for the hardware or are impacted by performance.
I think the argument you present here makes an MBA kind of sense, but with the benefits of hindsigh, we know exactly what sort of costs this encurred.
People hated the redesign, and stuck with the old reddit UI as much as possible. The company lost a ton of benevolence. Alternative frontends sprung up overnight, which used the API.
Management was probably faced with the dilemma that if new features were only developed for the new UI, a significant chunk of the userbase would not get to use them.
This was probably one of the major factors on the decision from Reddit to kill the API, which created a ton of negative sentiment, some of it probably lingers to this day.
I'm sure a lot of people were either driven away entirely or significantly reduced the amount and quality they posted. While numerically small in number, we know that most of the quality content comes from very few people.
Reddit might have more users now than any time before in history, but I'd argue user satisfaction and engagement is lower than the days before, and the quality of the content and discussion to be had means most people don't bother.
A major difference is that it’s coming straight from the company. If you get bad advice on a forum, well, the forum just facilitated that interaction, your real beef is with the jackass you talked to. With ChatGPT, the jackass is owned and operated by the company itself.
A large number of extremely smart people are being paid ungodly amounts of money to enhance the addictiveness of AI output. I'm not optimistic about them failing.
Not really? It’s incredibly easy to run an A/B test targeting hundreds of thousands of users to test hypothesis and refine your eventual feature. All these eventually add up. And honestly, the upper management is pretty smart too.
We never bet against extremely smart people on HN. Extremely smart people not actively shaping the world would be a true travesty to revolt against, not simply post angry comment-content into the void.
Who says we're falling for it? I expect it, as in I believe that's how it should be. I know that offerings can change and that there are paid services that include ads. I know what I'm getting if I sign up for a paid plan with ads. I also think anyone who offers such a thing should be publicly flogged.
Locks raise the cost of bad behavior, which makes it less likely. They can still be quite meaningful to someone who breaks those promises, if that person doesn't have the tools or time to defeat the lock, or is just plain lazy.
I live in a pretty low-crime area. From time to time, residents complain about things being stolen from their cars. Every single time that I've seen, the cars have been unlocked. A thief certainly could smash a window to steal from a locked car, but the thieves around here seem to be opportunistic and won't go that far.
And a larger lock pick tool does pretty much zero in the case you listed as that is not opportunistic. Those are pretty much the open up and steal when they see an unlocked car kind of people.
It does nothing for the type of criminals that work in groups and steal tires of 50 cars at once, or whatever soup de jour of automobile parts they want at that moment.
My point is, locks do more than just keep honest people honest, and they are meaningful to some people who are up to no good.
I wasn't addressing picks at all. My opinion there is that it's the lock maker and lock owner's responsibility to resist picking, and the rest of us have no obligation to keep it more difficult by not making tools.
Internal bleeding? Where do you get this nonsense? I keep seeing completely imaginary "facts" parroted about this case and I really want to know where they come from.
So you think there no other way in the world that ice agent would have a bruise? Is there any proof the bruise was from this incident? Did he have any bruises before from any other ice activity?
They are grabbing people day in and day out.
Again, think.
This was the same incident where the administration said they guy was fighting for his life after being struck by the car however:
“Eventually, the agent who shot the motorist approaches the vehicle. Seconds later, he turns back around and tells his colleagues to call 911. Agents blocked several bystanders who attempt to provide medical care, including one who identifies himself as a physician. At the same time, several agents, including the agent who opened fire, get in their vehicles and drive off, apparently altering the active crime scene.”
Honest-to-God truthfully, reading Moldbug is what made me realize the speciousness of pure rightism and ushered my journey from a rightist-axiomatic "Libertarian" / ancap to a centrist-qualitative libertarian-without-labels that sees left and right thinking as both necessary parts of a complete whole. But YMMV, apparently!
In general I think whenever you find a "red pill", you also end up confronted with a whole slew of new easy answers. Whether you end up buying into them or not really comes down to who you are as a person.
I will never ever understand the construct of right / left / red / blue / lib / conservative without having to take a really dumb view of the world and its human inhabitants.
The problem is that left/right are highly appealing because they claim to have the world figured out. The strongest manifestation being the authoritarians (of either ilk) that think they just need to implement their chosen top-down policies and every problem will end up being solved by construction.
Politically practical? Not a chance. It was already a major struggle a decade ago when the political climate was much more favorable to addressing the problem. Now, even the countries that want to do something about it are going to be more concerned about more immediate threats like being invaded.
Our best hope is that green technology quickly gets to the point where it so heavily outcompetes CO2-emitting technology that the latter disappears on its own. But this will take longer than it should.
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