It's certainly another frontier of exploitation, but we have yet to see any signals of significant demand. Well, maybe Roblox is sort of that signal. But meta's vision seems pretty disconnected from any signal that people want to interact this way.
Besides, haven't we already been through this with second life?
I remember she did a talk at the Long Now Foundation a while back. My take away - which could be completely wrong - was that they saw the potential to read and write memories.
Spot on. I come from the Midwest, and the romantic notion of hunting/small time ag was definitely established a long time ago when game numbers and variety were astonishingly high compared to the modern era. Even then, we hunted most of that game to near extinction - sometimes intentionally so.
Last I checked deer numbers are has high as anytime in the past, maybe even more. There are less predators (they can eat humans so we don't want them around) and deer have figured out how to live around humans just fine. Deer numbers were way down in say 1960 (as you say they were hunted to near extinction) but with stronger hunting and environmental laws they have come back.
Of course hunter/gather lifestyles never supported large concentrations of humans like ag did.
Deer are an outlier. Most other game species (like buffalo, elk, bear, beaver, various birds and fish) have seen significantly reduced number and fitness relative to pre-1900 levels. “Game” in my previous comment was referring broadly to any animals hunted for food or other sustenance (e.g. pelts, oil, etc).
Right, most of what you list either hasn't figured out how to live with humans, or is a predator that will kill humans, so humans kill them (illegally!) or otherwise chase them out to protect their children.
“ I don't doubt this mans death will be celebrated but only the terminally online weirdos are publicly saying so.”
I don’t know. I live in Minneapolis where this company is headquartered, and even the tone around my admittedly corporate circle is something akin to “you make your bed, you sleep in it”. He was apparently a nice and well-liked guy, but I’m not seeing a well spring of sympathy.
I wont' shed any tears for this guy, mostly because 1) I don't care and 2) I don't know him, but we could apply the “you make your bed, you sleep in it” reasoning to many, many industries (including ours).
I agree, but that assessment is open to interpretation. Build software for self driving cars that displaces a workforce? Automate a segment of the economy that makes a workforce obsolete? Build actuary software that helps analysts decline claims based on health conditions? Write some computer vision algorithms to be used in surveillance software?
You guys are kinda overreacting. No one is gonna track down and kill dozens of engineers, i really don't think it would even be possible to do hundreds or thousands of hits like that without being caught or stopped. This is about the people that _make the projects_. The person who _decided to obsolete an entire workforce_ is infinitely more culpable than a level one engineer who made an API. I mean just look, this guys the literal CEO, i think if we see anything more it'll be other top executives. For better or for worse you're almost certainly safe just working on a team.
But also, why would you want to participate in the active ruining of people's lives. If you realize your work is doing that you have a choice, bear responsibility for the suffering of thousands of people upon your soul and face the consequences, or leave. It's not like we're felons fighting to get hired at wendys. Jobs exist, we have 401k's and stock plans and get paid insaaaane amounts of money. Simply be responsible with your financial savings so that you can be responsible with your work. None of this applies if your financially troubled. But financially troubled people aren't the ones building the abstracted death camps and job eating machinery.
Aside from workforce automation I would hesitate to work on any of those problems. I also recognize that workforce automation has significant impact on the people whose work is automated away and I would prefer we as society took better care of people, but I feel like that is a different class of harmful than the other examples.
Yeah its tough. One that doesn't get though about as much is libraries/frameworks or generic technology that can be plugged into these projects. If one of these firms had to reinvent a message broker or event streaming framework or front-end/UI library everytime they built something it'd not be profitable.
I agree. We all carry responsibility for the outcomes of our actions, choices and associations. It is possible to work in our industry for companies with positive social impact and minimal negative externalities. If you do not, perhaps you should consider a change.
Given the costs and benefits involved, under what circumstances would you not simply run all of your drinking water through a Brita filter? They are inexpensive, solve problems aside from lead, and solve lead problems that emerged after your test (like what happened in Flint).
Brita filters solve lead problems? Carbon alone doesn't do it, Brita filters are basically just for taste and large particulate matter.*
Brita filters don't typically remove bacteria, viruses, or anything truly worrisome from water. If your water is unsafe to drink before a Brita jug, it's unsafe after too.
If you want to remove lead, a little brita filter jug won't do it. You need reverse osmosis, or maybe a fancy super-large, regularly renewed, incredibly expensive filter.
It would be nice if you updated your original remark. I rarely see such a combination of total confidence and complete incorrectness, and you're giving advice on a health matter.
> It would be nice if you updated your original remark. I rarely see such a combination of total confidence and complete incorrectness, and you're giving advice on a health matter.
You said "Brita filter". Not "Brita Elite filter", which is a different brand and not what is included in most "Brita" brand filter jugs. Despite you only saying "Brita filter", not all Brita-brand filters are the same.
It would be nice if you updated your original remark to say Brita Elite. :)
I rarely see such a combination of total smugness and incorrectness, and you're making us all stupider for it.
And I rarely see such a rush to judge someone so harshly over something so relatively innocuous. Setting aside the fact that it's OK for someone to be wrong and for us to correct them in a constructive manner, I'm not even sure that that user being wrong is so dangerous to one's health, as the end of your comment implies.
Now, if the user had said something to the effect of, "Bleach and ammonia are perfectly fine to mix together, I am not aware of any documentation that suggests otherwise," then, yes, that is a tremendously dangerous thing to tell someone and reasonable people should absolutely call them out for spreading FUD. But what happened here is different.
The user simply said, "Hey, I don't know that these kinds of filters can actually work to remove lead". That's it. Anybody reading this, who is concerned that there may be lead in their water, isn't at any greater risk of consuming it now than they were prior to reading the user's statement.
Despite the risk implied by the existence of this water quality mapping, Minneapolis and Saint Paul have some of the highest metropolitan tap water quality in the nation. The concern about lead pipes is local to the individual property, so it’s wise to test (and understand the age of your infrastructure) but the Brita would be a cost without a benefit in my case. The water is clean, and I’ve personally assured that through lab testing.
At least in St Paul they are actively replacing lead service lines in whole neighborhoods at a time. The line replacement itself is free although there may be some costs and logistical hurdles to the homeowner to prepare the house and get the existing line inspected.
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