One good thing is that unlike AI, Wikipedia at least allows you to see how an article grew. Yes, for the most part you only see pseudonyms in the edit history, but they represent individual editors with discernible interests and biases, whereas an AI-based 'pedia is a black box.
You can argue with Wikipedians; with an AI-'pedia, not so much.
Hasidic teaching stories are charming. Here is one:
When Rabbi Zusha was on his deathbed, his students found him in great distress. They tried to comfort him by telling him that he was almost as wise as Moses, so he was sure to be judged positively in Heaven. He replied, "When I pass from this world and appear before the Heavenly Tribunal, they won't ask me, 'Zusha, why weren't you as wise as Moses?' They will ask me, 'Zusha, why weren't you Zusha?'"
Mm. Google Maps will sometimes confidently suggest roads which without that recommendation would have seemed quite unsuitable. So people put their instincts aside and think Google must know better ... only to regret it later.
It would be helpful if Google could add a few qualifiers like "Note that this is a very steep and mostly single-lane unpaved road" or "This road leads through an unsafe neighbourhood", followed by "An alternative route would be ..."
Ha... It's not that they can't do it now, it's just Google fear the uproar the woke brigade will inevitable make about how dare Google classify poor black neighborhoods as unsafe. But yeah I agree with you, that feature would be damn helpful, especially for someone like my wife driving home at night.
I think it is unrelated. Regardless of how dangerous is an area, there are still people who libe there and have to go there or through there for various reasons.
It is not like life stops when places have an higher crime rate. Peoole still conduct business, have family outings and whatnot.
Besides the feeling of safety is totally subjective and some white neighborhoods you might consider safe as a white person might be unsafe to people of colors going there because they will be viewed under the bias of systemic racism and might be seen as a threat to people.
Absolutely. Same with the favelas – locals are safer than strangers.
Incidentally, the UK government website contains specific warnings about using GPS navigation in Brazil:
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The security situation in many favelas is unpredictable. Visiting a favela can be dangerous. Avoid all favelas, including favela tours marketed to tourists and any accommodation, restaurants or bars advertised as being within a favela.
You should:
– make sure the suggested route does not take you into a favela if you’re using GPS navigation
– avoid entering unpaved, cobbled or narrow streets which may lead into a favela - tourists have been shot after accidentally entering favelas
If you’re unsure about a location, check with your hotel or the local authorities.
Aye, you put your finger on something there. Reminds me of how common it is for menial jobs to be outsourced to immigrants or seasonal labour. Fruit picking in the UK to Eastern Europeans, agricultural work in Israel to Thais, etc.
Someone has to empty the bins. I guess like anything emptying bins is a job you can enjoy more or less, depending on your inner attitude to doing it, and your ability to "make the best of it" (by having a laugh with mates on the job etc.) but surely it's hard to be creative in it.
There are millions of jobs like that that have to be done by someone – unless everyone, including those who enjoy that self-fulfilment in their work, somehow were to chip in and do their bit.
Ironically emptying the bins and picking fruits might be more directly meaningful for people then building the new generation ad platform/social media/saas tool.
Picking fruit would have been incredibly meaningful if you had spent the year doing the variety of agricultural activities leading up to it. There’s a reason so many cultures had harvest festivals. But now rather than a whole area getting together to literally pick the fruits of their year-long labour and celebrate we’ve optimised the process by just bringing in some seasonal workers.
I think GP means that picking fruit has a direct, meaningful impact on consumers--fresh food--whereas the positive impact of the next saas thing is indirect and often dubious.
But yeah, harvesting as a community sounds more meaningful to workers than mass fruit production does.
Haha, yeah. I have a side story about working in construction with my dad. He was a home builder and was helping to build out a line of new apartments. It was very straightforward work -- he did the tile in the kitchen and bathrooms. I was his helper. He was excellent at it. All the buzzwords inclusive of efficiency and quality. It was fulfilling work to me and I had a sense of pride working alongside my dad. I made $10/hour, $80 a day.
Now I work in FinTech. The fulfillment is different, sometimes it's good. But I reflect on this time often. I own a small home now and my dad comes around to help me fix or remodel stuff. I'm handier now because of those experiences -- I think I do find a little more fulfillment when working with my hands. I also find myself in my garden more often which brings a little more joy than my day job. Perhaps it's just balance.
Those traditions and rituals are alive and well in small communities. Modern agriculture is based on the need to feed millions and millions of people. That’s why it is the way it is.
Some of my friends from Poland went to Western/Northern Europe to pick tomatoes, salad, cherries etc. None of them ever spoke about meaning of the job, only that it was long, hard, uncomfortable hours in sun, rain etc. and that it paid good money.
100%, I was thinking this exact same thing. I couldn't help but ponder the irony that during the pandemic, the vast majority of "essential workers", i.e. people we really need to fulfill the foundational layer of the economy, were usually the lowest paid: garbage men, farm labor, construction labor, grocery store workers, delivery drivers, etc. The famous "Pyramid of Capitalist System", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramid_of_Capitalist_System, had never felt more spot on to me.
Meanwhile, I'm relatively very highly paid, and while I really like my job because I get to work with interesting technology and I think my coworkers are fantastic, the only reason my job exists at all is because of the extreme insanity of the US healthcare system. Literally everyone would be better off if there wasn't a reason for my job to exist in the first place.
We make sure that all important jobs are easy to do so that they can reliably get done. Hard unreliable jobs can thus never be as important as the easy ones, they are still important but never as important because we don't want to rely on unreliable work.
You can see that in software orgs as well, the easiest tasks are also the most important, like ensuring the site continues to run and handling breaking changes in dependencies, those tasks has to be done or your entire product is gone. But the highest paid engineers probably don't work on those things, instead they might look at adding more features or drafting new architecture, those tasks aren't as important but they are much harder to do so are better paid in general and you require higher skilled workers.
So in general the lower paid the more important their work is, because higher skilled tasks are harder and less reliably done so we try to not rely on them getting done. Think famous painter vs low paid icon designer, which work is more important? Goes for most things.
Thanks very much. I've heard this phrased different ways before and I understand it, but "We make sure that all important jobs are easy to do so that they can reliably get done" is probably the clearest and most succinct way I've heard this put.
I worked as a garbage man to pay for the start of my software ventures. It was the best combination thinkable of sitting in a room on a chair behind a computer, being in the software clouds, typing away, and being outside, working out, having fun and getting enough sunlight.
These both completely different things balanced each other out perfectly.
It's hard to say what exactly caused his persecution. He did upload a few pictures of human rights activists to Wikimedia Commons, almost a decade prior.
One way driverless cars might help is that they reduce the amount of land that has to be given over to carparks, especially in the US.
Where towns in Europe would build a multi-story carpark to serve a shopping mall, municipalities in North America may simply cover acres upon acres of land around a mall with asphalt (take the Edmonton Mall in Alberta, Canada, or the Fairlane Town Center in Dearborn, MI), in the process creating an almost lifeless zone.
You wouldn't need that much space for parked cars if everyone arrived in a driverless Uber.
(Apparently, US parking lots cover an area of around 25,000 square miles, about twice the size of Switzerland:)
The US could also generally stop mandating such a ridiculous amount of parking. Parking minimums are scarcely different than soothsaying, “oh great book of zoning rules, tell us how much parking this bowling alley needs”. And the book is just made up, based on everyone else’s book which was ultimately based on a guess from 60 years ago.
There is a small development on previously industrial land near me with a Best Buy and a Kohls, facing each other with some parking in the middle. Half surface lot, half there story parking garage. On a busy day, maybe 60% of the surface lot will be full. The garage is useless, but required for X amount of retail square footage. A monumental waste of money and resources.
We don’t need self driving cars, we need to pull our heads out of our asses and change the absurd, baseless rules we build our environment around.
Seems like it'd be so easy to solve with all the data we have now. Just pay some youngsters to count cars and empty stalls for awhile and record what type of businesses are nearby and then give it to an analyst.
Autonomous buses. Or mini buses which apparently exist in LA already. Similar to Uber but the only option is to share with other riders. You won't get there quite as quick but it'll still be convenient and we won't need as many.
> Where towns in Europe would build a multi-story carpark to serve a shopping mall, municipalities in North America may simply cover acres upon acres of land
Couldn't you solve this issue without self driving cars by just building multi-story carparks like Europe?
Or using the same space to build shopping streets with multiple stores and some onstreet parking? That way it's a bit more social and scenic as well.
Multistory parking lots are more expensive, and ultimately unnecessary if you don't need parking in the first place.
First, determine how much you can eliminate car related infrastructure and implement infrastructure that are more efficient and are actually necessary.
Dollars that don't have to be spent on expensive and unnecessary infrastructure can be spent on making spaces more livable or increasing amenities.
I definitely agree, I live in the Netherlands and love the infrastructure philosophy here.
I just thought that in America the car dependecy was partly cultural and partly due to zoning laws which push the broader philisophical shifts beyond the control of individual design companies and contractors. The solutions I put forward above were meant to be read within that context.
Horrible title, sorry. The gist is: The Wikipedia Library provides free access to research materials to anyone who has made more than 500 Wikipedia edits and has an account more than 6 months old.
You can argue with Wikipedians; with an AI-'pedia, not so much.
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