This ignores that physical things can happen in many different ways, most of which are decided by those who have the money. The choices of the rich aren't preordained, so there's no reason to absolve them of the responsibility for their decisions.
The most obvious recent example is the right to receive lifesaving medical treatment. It's no coincidence that between 2019 and 2023, there was "a 33% increase in maternal mortality rates in Texas, compared with a decrease of 7.5% nationally during the same time," and the "rate of sepsis shot up more than 50% for women hospitalized when they lost their pregnancies in the second trimester."[0]
If you have a non-viable pregnancy, but there's still a heartbeat, Texas will try to force you to carry to term anyways. In the best case this causes you immense emotional suffering, in the worst case it means that doctors will often hold back lifesaving medical care until your life is in imminent danger - but waiting this long causes your chance of injury/death to rise sharply. Unfortunately Texas also doesn't want you to receive this lifesaving medical care out of state, so anyone helping you is liable to be sued for $10,000[1].
No matter what your position is regarding the intent of the law, we can hopefully all agree that the changes in maternal mortality are horrible, and that nobody should be forced to risk death just so they can see their non-viable pregnancy die before their eyes[2].
Though I mostly use pnpm these days, yarn still has a feature that I frequently miss: the project-local cache[0]. Basically, every dependency archive fetched from a registry is stored in your repo in .yarn/cache, so unless you're adding/updating dependencies a `yarn install` will work fully offline.
I'm sure there are drawbacks to this method regarding repo size etc., but it just feels good knowing that my repo contains everything needed to install and run any version of my project.
I should add: this is enabled by adding `enableGlobalCache: false` to .yarnrc.yml, though I think it was the default for a bit when Yarn 2 first released.
As someone stumbling across this thread: the idea that, in regards to bias, a real person might actually consider these two events in any way comparable is honestly leaving me stunned. I can't find the right words to describe how sickening it is to see Nazism being treated as just as banally acceptable as any other political direction.
You're misreading. Nazism isn't being treated as acceptable, neither is wokeism. Both companies have apologized for these incidents, and have addressed the problems.
I haven't equated them, I've used them as examples of opposite extremes.
I think Nazism is extreme right, and wokeism is extreme left. It's both out of balance. And Google and xAI both acknowledged that, and addressed the problems.
Nazi is the terminology you chose for referring to past Grok issues. Woke is the terminology I used to refer to past Gemini issues.
Regardless of the terminology, I think we should look at the issues themselves, and not mindlessly apply a certain ideaology upon a company for certain past issues.
In short: maybe xAI aren't the nazi's you seem to think they are, and maybe this woke movement that you seem to adore isn't as innocent as they make themselves out to be.
Don't forgot the cost of worse products. If you're an honest company trying to build the best product, and your competitors choose to milk their customers instead, they can still win more market share by spending more on advertising.
Of course it's possible for customers to find out about these practices by doing research - too bad the marketing industry manages to sabotage every halfway reliable indicator after a few years.
I had a boss like this when I worked at a call center, he would swing a golf club around (he was short and I think he wanted to feel like he had a weapon, he never hit any balls in the place) and he would go out of his way to offer overtime to the poorest and most hard off people and wanted to see how much OT he could get one person to work.
It was his little game to manipulate people that couldn't help but say yes into a situation that left them no time to live a life.
The stats were much worse for such people, and those stats had a direct impact on his pay, but if there was a sadistic option he always took it.
Same guy had a "water drinking contest" so he could watch all his employees throw up for a day off.
I disagree with multiple of your responses, but I'd like to push back on this point in particular:
> Yes - and you just ordered DoorDash, which delivered food made by exploited workers and delivered by exploited workers. In fact, almost every convenience you enjoy is the result of some level of exploitation. That doesn't mean it's morally right, but if your outrage is pointed at GenAI (one of the technologies that can potentially level the playing field and remove some amount of exploitation) at the exclusion of these other things, you are simply rage farming.
You could have made the same point without the baseless accusation of bigotry. But even if it's true, it would still be the "You think we should improve society, yet you live in it" meme in action. Exploitation is not a binary state (some workers are exploited worse than others), and if the author believes that AI will broadly lead to much more/worse exploitation, watering down their actual point would only make their stance less likely to be heard.
And if they mentioned DoorDash workers, would you actually be satisfied? Or would you be looking for the next group of exploited workers that aren't included?
Nuance would make the points stronger, not weaker. If you complain about something while assuming everyone should agree with you without question, you are not contributing to the conversation, but merely whining.
Sure, but including more groups of exploited workers wouldn't have made the author's point more nuanced. And ironically, throwing around baseless accusations (like "you just ordered DoorDash" and "if you actually cared about the environment") will only serve to make the conversation less nuanced.
While that's most likely true, it rests on the assumption that consumer hardware stays affordable enough, and isn't locked down to disallow running "untrusted" models. I would have never believed that these assumptions could ever turn out false, but the recent developments have shown that even if unlikely, it's not impossible.
Mind sharing a video of what you're talking about? I've heard this response many times since the inauguration, but I've never seen an actual video showing a comparable gesture.
All the results I've seen indicate that solar panels will keep producing electricity long after those 30 years, just at a reduced rate (but seemingly still >50%).
I'm not sure what kind of answer you expect here. Your initial objection further up was:
> By the time the "free" electricity has paid for the installation, you'll need to replace it.
Since you won't need to replace it, I'd say that this whole thing couldn't work out better: the panels are literally just generating electricity for free! And that's not even taking into account that 30yo panels generate more than "only half the power" (the study I linked measured ~80%).
Imagine someone offered to give you their 30 year old panels and install them on your property for free. Unless every eligible surface is already taken up by more efficient solar panels, who would say no?
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