admiralteal

admiralteal , 9 months ago to world in Poland cuts tax for first-time homebuyers and raises it for those buying multiple properties

"Multiple properties" is SIX or more?! That is so many properties. In a housing shortage, rich fucks should have to sweat to keep even a single residence unoccupied, but consequences don't start until six. It's the right direction, but that is still so bad.

Every city should just pass big ol' pied-a-terre taxes. Property taxes for a property operated as a primary residence by the owner should be a low coefficient on the millage rate. Property taxes for places with long-term tenants who call it their primary residence should get a medium coefficient on their millage rate. Properties that are not a primary residence should get a huge multiplier on property taxes. And unoccupied homes should be so expensive as to force a nearly-immediate sale.

Rent payments up to some reasonable threshold based on prevailing rates should be tax deductible, ensuring most rents show up on the city ledge.
This helps make up for the fact that renting costs more than owning in a way that targets relief to renters instead of owners without creating crazy incentive structures where rich fucks start selling their own homes to an LLC they rent it back from or other nonsense. Individuals can declare their rent payments absent any action by the landlord; totally under-the-table rent should be very rare.

All real estate transactions that aren't resulting in a property becoming a primary residence should have a HUGE sales tax.

Properties operated as a primary residence should have significant leniency on permitting for infill development -- owners living in their own property should have development-by-rights permission to do things like build an ADU. Development led by members of the community infilling in their own community should have a SUBSTANTIALLY lower bar for permitting than development by outsiders.

admiralteal , 9 months ago to news in San Francisco Fire Dept.: Person Dies After Robotaxi Blocked Ambulance

What's the "no" part of this? You don't seem to disagree with anything I said at all.

admiralteal , 9 months ago to news in San Francisco Fire Dept.: Person Dies After Robotaxi Blocked Ambulance

For what its worth, lower speeds are one of the most straightforwardly effective way to reduce congestion. Road capacity is higher at lower speeds. Errors are less likely to cause serious incidents at lower speeds. Traffic controls don't need to be so aggressive, causing you to spend less of your trip fully-stopped. For most trips, going a bit slower has a completely negligible effect on drive times, especially when you can get most of traffic to do it leading to more laminar flow.

The problem is, only road design is effective to lower speeds. You can't just ask drivers to slow down or change the posted signs, you have to re-engineer roads. People tend to just drive at whatever speed feels comfortable on the road.

admiralteal , 9 months ago to technology in Some veteran YouTube staff think Shorts might ruin YouTube

This is predicated on the belief that Google/YouTube is run in a 100% hyper-competent way. I don't buy that.

Google does things the easiest way possible to make tons of money. They make unforced errors all the damn time.

admiralteal , 9 months ago to technology in Some veteran YouTube staff think Shorts might ruin YouTube

That should mean engagement. It serves up such bad videos that I disengage.

Once in a while I'll realize I just spent 20, 30 minutes looking at a streak of pretty decent stuff. Rare enough to be remarkable. Usually after just 3 or 4 consecutive crap clips I'll close it down and get back to work.

I doubt anything disengages a user faster than low-quality content. I bet it does it even faster than the authoritarian politics and bigotry YouTube seems to inexorable serve you.

admiralteal , 9 months ago to technology in Some veteran YouTube staff think Shorts might ruin YouTube

I'm not even sure it is bad policies. I am pretty sure that they just don't have moderators.

I doubt anyone reads 99.9% of reports.

So you get bigotry and hate, you get insane and deadly DIYs, you get 12yo girls being creeped while posting random 5s clips from their lives.

Not to mention just the vast amount of extraordinarily low-quality content YouTube serves up. It's amazing how bad a lot of the videos it thinks you will like are. The algorithm makes no sense.

But hey, here's 16 different Joe Rogan clips with sigma male music in the background.

admiralteal , 9 months ago to news in San Francisco Fire Dept.: Person Dies After Robotaxi Blocked Ambulance

God I hate so much the technowizards who think all of our society problems around cars are going to be fixed by self-driving cars. My dad always does this -- any time you point out the issues with expense and congestion near him in the city downtown, he'll start talking about how any day now the self-driving cars will fix it and won't need to park and it'll be sunshine and roses.

Nope. The geometric problems of cars are not solved by fleets of vehicles that park in huge lots at the edge of town. It may mitigate issues, but it does not fix them.

Want to get rid of downtown congestion? Putting people in automated cars won't do it. Only getting rid of the cars will.

The only upside is it will make it that much easier to get rid of mandatory min parking rules which are totally unscientific and should never have been codified to law in the first place.

admiralteal , 9 months ago to technology in New phone sparks worry China has found a way around U.S. tech limits

It's absolutely bizarre that you grouped Taiwan and China together in this sentiment.

Taiwan being a silicon powerhouse is literally part of a deliberate strategy by western nations, especially the US, to combat Chinese manufacturing. They were supplied with science and technology. They have the license agreements. They're one of the cadre of nations that are currently waving protectionist flags against the "threat" of Chinese manufacturing.

It'd be like putting the Dutch in the list. Except even weirder, because there is not any semblance of abnormal diplomacy/hostility between Amsterdam and Beijing.

admiralteal , 10 months ago to worldnews in Shell Silently Abandoned Its $100 Million-a-Year Plan to Offset CO2 Emissions

It also has what is called the "leakage" issue in carbon offsets -- if one group of people were going to cut down the trees, get paid, and don't, there's still a demand for the timber/land. Some different hectare of trees somewhere else will likely get cut down instead.

It really is a rare case where the neoliberal logic has it right. We expect the cost of decarbonization to grow as we have less and less CO2 being produced. The first tons of CO2 to get rid of are the easiest and cheapest ones. The very last ones, the holdouts, are going to be the most difficult and expensive. In a paradigm where as close to 100% of carbon as possible must be eliminated, then any carbon offsets only make sense if they're being sold at an equivalent price to those last tons of CO2 to be eliminated. Because otherwise, the person who thinks they're selling it is really just loaning it out -- and the payment is guaranteed to come due.

So carbon offsets should be at least as expensive as, say, direct air carbon capture. Likely more, since even air capture may struggle on those last few tons of emissions. And that's assuming no scammy accounting practices with the emissions are happening. When in reality, carbon offsets is nearly nothing but scammy practices.

admiralteal , 10 months ago to worldnews in Shell Silently Abandoned Its $100 Million-a-Year Plan to Offset CO2 Emissions

I'll eat my fucking hat if Shell's follow-up here is to invest more money instead of less, absent state consequences forcing them to behave.

They are in the business of selling virgin oil. Anything they spend towards decarbonization hurts the selling of virgin oil. They know it. The rest of this shit is just advertising and they will terminate the campaign as soon as it stops performing. They can just do more adbuys for advertorial content through the NYT if there's any backlash.

admiralteal , 10 months ago to worldnews in Shell Silently Abandoned Its $100 Million-a-Year Plan to Offset CO2 Emissions

Always happens. A commitment to achieve some climate goal in the future isn't even worth use as an buttwipe. There need to be serious consequences for failure that go above and beyond the worst-case theoretical cost of the commitment.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GRB6rSDW5i4

It's literally nothing. Only ACTUALLY decarbonizing is worth a damn.

And to be clear, offsets in ANY form don't count either. The Paris commitments are to get to ZERO carbon. The only way it makes sense for a country to sell an offset is if they sell that offset at an equivalent price to what it will cost you to get rid of your LAST ton of CO2. Since the offsets aren't nearly that expensive, we know they are load of total bullshit. They're fraudulent. Double or triply so for non-national exchanges.

Carbon removal can count, but the legit research is almost always worse bang for your buck than just fucking decarbonizing.

admiralteal , 10 months ago to technology in Duet AI for Google Meet can take notes, summarize, and even attend meetings - The Verge

The dubious usefulness of AI bots meets the almost unquestionably uselessness of most meetings.

admiralteal , 10 months ago to technology in Stephen King: My Books Were Used to Train AI

A slightly compressed JPG of an oil painting is still, at least for purposes of intellectual property rights, not distinct from the original work on canvas. Sufficiently complex and advanced statistics on a work are not substantially different from the work itself. It's just a different way of storing a meaningful representation.

These LLMs are all more or less black boxes. We really cannot conclusively say one way or another whether they are storing and using the full original work in some form or another. We do know that they can be coaxed into spitting out the original work, though, which sure implies it is in there.

And if the work of a human that needs to be fed is being used by one of these bots -- which is pretty much by definition a commercial purpose given that all the relevant bots are operated as such -- then that human should be getting paid.

admiralteal , 10 months ago to technology in Stephen King: My Books Were Used to Train AI

Yeah, and even if it WERE truly intelligent -- which these SALAMIs are almost certainly not -- it doesn't even matter.

A human and a robot are not the same. They have different needs and must be afforded different moral protections. Someone can buy a book, read it, learn from it, and incorporate things it learned from that experience into their own future work. They may transform it creatively or it may plagiarize or it may rest in some grey area in-between where it isn't 100% clear if it was novel or plagiarized. All this is also true for a LLM "AI". -- But whether or not this process is fundamentally the same or not isn't even a relevant question.

Copyright law isn't something that exists because it is a pure moral good to protect the creative output of a person from theft. It would be far more ethical to say that all the outputs of human intellect should be shared freely and widely for all people to use, unencumbered by such things. But if creativity is rewarded with only starvation, creativity will go away, so copyright exists as a compromise to try and ensure there is food in the bellies of artists. And with it, we have an understanding that there is a LOT of unclear border space where one artist may feed on the output of another to hopefully grow the pot for everyone.

The only way to fit generative bots into the philosophical framework of copyright is to demand that the generative bots keep food in the bellies of the artists. Currently, they threaten it. It's just that simple. People act like it's somehow an important question whether they "learn" the same way people do, but the question doesn't matter at all. Robots don't get the same leeway and protection afforded to humans because robots do not need to eat.

admiralteal , 10 months ago to technology in The Internet Is About to Get a Lot Worse (US focused)

There is no question that if this bill is passed, some fucker corrupt crony like Ashley Moody will use it to isolate and persecute queer, trans, or black kids by labeling content that supports them as "harmful".

A bill like this will kill kids.