AnarchistArtificer

I don't agree. I like this paragraph from the article which captures my sentiment (the last sentence in particular):

"The main rationale provided by AFGE president Everett Kelley was that his members were suffering economically from the shutdown. There’s no doubt that this hurt is very real, and I do not doubt the sincerity of Kelley’s commitment to his membership. But AFGE’s leadership could have decided to pressure Republicans rather than Democrats to end the shutdown. That was a political choice."

Union leadership made a political choice, and it's reasonable to hold them accountable for that. This isn't about blaming the unions for the choices made by scummy democrats, but rather a related but distinct beef with the union. Even if the unions choosing to pressure the Republicans instead would have had no bearing on the outcome in this particular situation, their choice doesn't bode well for future issues where the unions' support (or lack thereof) may prove pivotal.

Here, the union showed that it was willing to sacrifice the long term wellbeing of their members for alleviating the short term harms. That makes me question the effectiveness of a union at all. After all, most successful strikes involve the union helping to cohere workers into an organising force, absorbing some (but not all) of the short term harms of striking. If we can't trust them to fight for the long term wellbeing of their members, then what is the union even for?

Oddballs who dive into absurdly lengthy calculations of something trivial do it out of a bizarre, joyful compulsion, rather than necessity.

(Source: I'm one of those oddballs)

From skimming that linked page, I think that this download perhaps doesn't include recent pages? Because in the section talking about enterprise stuff, it mentions the paid API for recent articles

My impression (as someone who is not an economist) is that a lot of it is linked to not-too-distant history: the typical "go-to" strategies for deflation under the prevalent monetarist ideas (i.e. economic school of thought about influencing the economy by controlling the amount of money in circulation) weren't effective in combatting deflation in a few cases in Japan and the US in the early 1990s and early 2000s.

So perhaps it causes such panic because it exposes the weaknesses in the economic models that we see dominating modern politics. Inflation may be perceived as more manageable because it acts according to what the models say will happen, more or less, which makes it more controllable. It seems that may be less true for deflation.

Your comment fills me with a deep dread that causes me to feel like saying something to discourage you from this path. Alas, it's not your preparation that is causing that feeling, but the grim circumstances that necessitate this kind of planning.

It's difficult being on the other side of the world and completely unable to do anything than just watch as America descends deeper into fascism. However, I'm glad that I am not in the impossible position of making the decisions you're making. I'm sorry that you are.

Good luck, I hope you don't die. And I hope that people like you are able to claw back democracy from the fascists

You win by acknowledging that AI/Machine Learning research has existed long before this bubble existed, and is continuing to happen outside of that bubble. Most of what we call AI nowadays is based on neural networks (that's what Geoffrey Hinton and others got a recent nobel prize for), but that's not the only way to go about the problem, and for years now, there have been researchers pointing out problems like hallucinations and diminishing returns from increasing the amount of data you feed to a model.

An example of one such researcher is Song Chun-Zhu, who has recently moved back to China because he was finding it increasingly difficult to do research he wanted (i.e. outside of the current AI bubble) within the US. That linked article is a bit of a puff piece, in that it is a tad too mythologising of him, but I think he's a good example of what productive AI research looks like — especially because he used to work on the "big data" kind of AI, before realising its inherent limits and readjusting his approach accordingly.

He's one of the names that's on my watch list because even for people who aren't directly building on his research, he comes up a lot in research that is also burnt out on neural nets

This reminds me of an excellent episode of Dark Net Diaries, "Jeremy from Marketing". https://pca.st/episode/52252c9e-e4a8-42f6-85f5-f162ec3f6b40

"they tend to accept their situation and silently power through it instead of trying to improve it."

Your description of the more pernicious elements of "sisu" reminds me of the "stiff upper lip" idea that's prevalent in British culture.

Tangentially, I'm reminded of research that shows how people who complain more live longer. One of the reasons for this is that complaining can be a necessary part of advocating for oneself, especially in a healthcare situation.

I share your frustration with people who miss obvious solutions because they don't try to figure out how things could be improved. I like fixing stuff, and I often leap at any opportunity to tangibly improve things in life — little things, like a door that slams loudly, or a wobbly chair. Sometimes I can't fix them, but most of the time, I can spend a trivial amount of energy and improve things. I suspect this instinct of mine is linked to the fact that I'm disabled, and thus there are many things in my life that suck that I can't improve or fix, so it gives me a sense of empowerment to fix what I can. I'm always a bit baffled by people shrugging and ignoring things that have super easy solutions.

It's still fairly new research. I think the authors recently won an Ignoble prize for it

I don't have input on cameras specifically, but I have gone pretty deep into trying to understand how to maximise security and interoperability in smart home stuff, through open source control.

A starting point for the you-in-control app to use for smart devices is Home assistant. I was surprised by how easy it was to set up self hosted smart home stuff, largely because there's loads of guides that build around home assistant. So whether a particular camera works with home assistant is a good starting search filter

People didn't so much vote for Labour, as they voted for "not Conservative". Reform (Nigel Farage's party) and the Greens also made gains, but not very much due to the UK's first past the post system. Labour won via a "loveless landslide", and in the months since their victory, they seem to be determined to stand for even less than they did at the election (which already was very little)

Friends tell me that seeing Kneecap live was incredible