@thisismissem @RomanceReviews I’m not familiar with how Mastodon handles moderation, so this may be a stupid question:

Is there value in posts being reported more than once? Is it just a binary ‘this has been reported’ signal or do moderators prioritise things that are reported by multiple people? For example, I can imagine a malicious person going and just reporting a hundred posts that they don’t like, but if a dozen people report a post then it’s more likely to be spam (assuming the dozen reports are not from sockpuppets). If something is already reported, is it useful to have a single click to say ‘I agree with the report’? And the ability to learn accounts that tend to agree with the instance moderators’ views that can be a quick-to-review list?

Ugh. I hate the bit of being ill where I feel completely fine unless I do, say, or think anything.

When I was a PhD student, I attended a talk by the late Robin Milner where he said two things that have stuck with me.

The first, I repeat quite often. He argued that credit for an invention did not belong to the first person to invent something but to the first person to explain it well enough that no one needed to invent it again. His first historical example was Leibniz publishing calculus and then Newton claiming he invented it first: it didn’t matter if he did or not, he failed to explain it to anyone and so the fact that Leibniz needed to independently invent it was Newton’s failure.

The second thing, which is a lot more relevant now than at the time, was that AI should stand for Augmented Intelligence not Artificial Intelligence if you want to build things that are actually useful. Striving to replace human intelligence is not a useful pursuit because there is an abundant supply of humans and you can improve the supply of intelligent humans by removing food poverty, improving access to education, and eliminating other barriers that prevent vast numbers of intelligent humans from being able to devote time to using their intelligence. The valuable tools are ones that do things humans are bad at. Pocket calculators changed the world because being able to add ten-digit numbers together orders of magnitude faster allowed humans to use their intelligence for things that were not the tedious, repetitive, tasks (and get higher accuracy for those tasks). If you want to change the world, build tools that allow humans to do more by offloading things humans are bad at and allowing them to spend more time on things humans are good at.

A Student’s Guide to Not Writing with ChatGPT . Perfect, no notes.

On behalf of the United Kingdom, I would like to welcome the United States of America into the select club of countries that have voted to impose economic sanctions on themselves.

@ryanc I saw an advert on LinkedIn a while ago for some product that claimed to be better than JIRA. I assumed it was terrible because anything that sets the bar that low is not going to win any usability awards.

So many alpha males, so few people working on QA to get them ready for beta.

@MrBerard @0xabad1dea Department of Energy. They have a Fortran program that they are not allowed to modify without re-validating the simulation. They cannot re-validate it unless the test-ban treaty is repealed, and so it's a big pile of Fortran 77. They will pay unbounded amounts of money to companies that can make Fortran 77 run faster because they can't touch the source code (I assume this is still true, it's been quite a while).

@0xabad1dea In a past life, I worked on a compiler that the DoE used. I never had to handle their bug reports and was quite glad. The flow was:

Them: It doesn't work.

Us: In what way?

Them: That's classified. The wrong number comes out of the program.

Us: What program?

Them: That's classified.

Us: Can you send us a reduced test case?

Six months pass while the reduced test case is declassified, which involves review that it does not leak anything about the Super Secret Program that it's based on.

The reduced test case does not trigger the bug. Apparently the original did, but en route to being declassified the parts that triggered the bug were removed.

To put a billionaire in perspective, it's more interesting to think about the income than the capital. You can get a 5% annual return from some fairly low-risk investments (and you can further reduce risk by spreading your money across a load of these). You can often get higher, but 5% is a fairly good baseline.

If you start with $1bn and do nothing clever, you can get an income of $50 M per year by doing nothing. Even with the kind of 95% tax rate that we had for the highest income levels when The Beatles sang about it, that leaves you with $2.5M/year in income.

That's enough to buy a nice house every year, with no mortgage. It's a disposable income of almost $7K. It's enough to take a first-class transatlantic flight every day.

And that's just one billion.

Even with a 95% tax rate on investment income and a conservative investment strategy, someone with a billion dollars would have a daily disposable income that's more than the monthly income of anyone in the bottom 99% of earners, without having to work.

Now try these calculations again with real tax rates and Musk or Bezos' wealth.