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Having a dinky appartment that is still expensive is not worth it unless you’re young and don’t have kids and want to be around everything you care about. Or you’re rich and don’t mind paying a fortune to live in a nicer appartment in Manhattan. If I had the money I would still prefer something outside Manhattan just to be able to avoid the noise pollution, the crowds and all that Manhattan commotion.

I hear that noise pollution in Manhattan has gotten better since congestion pricing started.

Cities aren't loud; cars are loud.


Cars aren't nearly as loud as sirens and garbage trucks. Whenever I stay in a dense city those tend to keep me up at night.

> Cars aren't nearly as loud as sirens and garbage trucks

Guess what forces emergency vehicles to fire their sirens, or garbage trucks to linger.


bwahaha this is so ridiculous.

You’re really claiming that a congested street isn’t meaningfully more noisy than an uncongested one, including in terms of frequency and duration of horns and sirens?

More noisy? Of course. But even in nice places like Chelsea - at 2am when there are no cars or congestion at all - the cops/ambulances and garbage trucks have no problem being incredibly noisy.

Without cars, emergency vehicles could have their sirens at 10% of the volume. Garbage trucks and busses are slowly being replaced by electric versions which are much quieter.

Electric garbage trucks aren't much quieter. I've heard them. Most of the noise comes from the machinery and the reverse beeping, not the engines.

> Cities aren't loud; cars are loud.

EVs have entered the chat

Still, I'd always prefer less cars and more transit.


I first heard the phrase used by parent in a video [1] by youtube channel Not Just Bikes, which found EVs to be similar to ICE cars at typical speeds.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTV-wwszGw8


I find EVs noticeably quieter, but the "typical speeds" here in Copenhagen are properly lower than where you live.

At 30km/h or so, the main noise is the engine, so EVs are quieter (as the video says).


In my experience, EVs are nearly as loud as IC, as the majority of the noise at typical stroad speeds comes from the tires, not the engine.

Isn't that mostly applicable to highway speeds? Does tire noise have much of an effect at city speeds?

Yes. I live in a small city. Along a moderately busy avenue with speeds around 25 mph, it’s hard to carry a conversation. 30 feet down a side street, totally different story.

Yes, it is very noticeable at city speeds. Source: my hears every day I go out.

> the majority of the noise at typical stroad speeds comes from the tires, not the engine

It comes from honking.


The engine noises in cities are generally not a huge problem outside of trucks (or POS cars modified to make noise).

The issue that people apparently think that the horn makes the red light turn green faster or will magic away the car blocking the box.



> We’re sharing an early look into Private Processing, an optional capability that enables users to initiate a request to a confidential and secure environment and use AI for processing messages where no one — including Meta and WhatsApp — can access them.

What is this and what is this supposed to mean? I have a hard time trusting these companies with any privacy and while this wording may be technically correct they’ll likely extract all meaning from your communication, probably would even have some AI enabled surveillance service.


I don't understand the knee-jerk skepticism. This is something they are doing to gain trust and encourage users to use AI on WhatsApp.

WhatsApp did not used to be end-to-end encypted, then in 2021 it was - a step in the right direction. Similary, AI interaction in WhatsApp today is not private, which is something they are trying to improve with this effort - another step in the right direction.


What's the motive "to gain trust and encourage users to use AI on WhatsApp"? Meta aren't a charity. You have to question their motives because their motive is to extract value out of their users who don't pay for a service, and I would say that whatsapp has proven to be a harder place to extract that value than their other ventures.

btw whatsapp implemented the signal protocol around 2016.


"motive is to extract value out of their users who don't pay for a service" that is called a business.

if you find something deceitful in the business practice, that should certainly be called out and even prosecuted. I don't see why an effort to improve privacy has to get a skeptical treatment, because big business bad bla bla


Privacy was reduced from where it already stood by the introduction of an AI assistant to an E2E messaging app.

Had they not included it in the first place they would then not have to 'improve privacy' by reworking the AI.

I agree with OP and am highly sceptical of Meta's motives.


You would be correct to be skeptical when they introduced AI into conversations, which btw is opt-in.


Did you read the next paragraphs? It literally describes the details. I would quote the parts that respond to your question, but I would be quoting the entire post.

> This confidential computing infrastructure, built on top of a Trusted Execution Environment (TEE), will make it possible for people to direct AI to process their requests — like summarizing unread WhatsApp threads or getting writing suggestions — in our secure and private cloud environment.


A few startups [1,2] also offer infra for private AI based on confidential computing from Nvidia and Intel/AMD.

1. https://tinfoil.sh 2. https://www.privatemode.ai


We’re into “can’t prove a negative” territory here. Yes, the scheme is explained in detail, yes it conforms to cryptographic norms, yes real people work on it and some of us know some of them..

..but how can FB prove it isn’t all a smokescreen, and requests are printed out and faxed to evil people? They can’t, of course, and some people like to demand proof of the negative as a way of implying wrongdoing in a “just asking questions” manner.


Except the software running in TEEs, including the source code, is all verifiable at runtime, via a third party not controlled by Meta. And if you disagree, claim a bug bounty and become famous for exposing Meta as frauds. Or, more likely, stick with your reddit-tier zealotry and clown posting.


I mean you are not forced to?

If a company is trying to move their business to be more privacy focused, at least we can be non-dismissive.


I don’t know about markets but he claimed to be a free speech ideologue. But then he bought twitter and proved otherwise.


I don't believe Trump bought Twitter.


Elon or Trump? Or do you see them as a team?


Me too but expect this to stop working though.


Why? Apple has a vested interest in keeping ad blocking working in Safari - it hurts Google, which is their primary competitor.


They adopted declarativeWebRequest as the exclusive option for "content blocking" years ago, which requires an actual extension update to change blocked URLs. It allows for some optimizations that look nice on benchmarks, but in reality uBO makes the web faster by getting rid of a lot of tracking requests and javascript. Nobody in the ad industry cared, because Safari's share is so small and plastering Safari users that use this basic adblocking in ads probably would've made them move elsewhere.

Chrome doing this however changes the value of working around adblockers, because they now lack the ability to rapidly respond or match with code (that's not regex) or even reading a bit of the response.


> Making 10k a month on your own is really not that hard

Does that require to have rich parents? Or rich friends that want to do business with you?


what you think 10k a month is appealing to rich people?


Odd jobs for the rich, easy work, no competition and such. I actually know some people who do that..


Yeah but the fun won’t last, you’ll get bored with this look and the idea of looks when all the space around you will be innundated with it. But no harm in having fun though…


Of course it’s terrible and that’s because it’s low effort trash with the sole purpose of making money. But AI gen doesn’t nenessarily have to be that though, it’s just the slop wave washing everything off. When humans use it to speed up their some tedilus processes but the whole project doesn’t look/feel rushed I have no problem with what tool they used.


Suicidal people are in a broken state, overcome by emotions and irrationality. When over that they’ll likely thank you for stopping them and likely to not understand themselves what the drive to kill themselves was except for remembering how cloudy they felt.


That's all valid, but I'm going to stick to my autonomy rule. People are free to make fatal mistakes.


Hey, it’s a start. Maybe other suchs fines crop up allover.


Who says the pay will remain high? I think we’re going to see either a large drop in white collar pay or massive layoffs.


I agree. The long term effect will be a devaluation of knowledge work more broadly. It's a rich irony that so many people clamor to these tools when their constant use of them is more often the thing undoing their value as knowledge workers: flexibility, creativity, ability to adapt (intellectually) to shifting circumstances and new problems.

A downstream effect will also be the devaluation of many accreditations of knowledge. If someone at a community college arrives at the same answer as someone at an Ivy League or top institution through a LLM then why even maintain the pretenses of the latter's "intellectual superiority" over the other?

Job interviews are likely going to become harder in a way that many are unprepared for and that many will not like. Where I work, all interviews are now in person and put a much bigger emphasis on problem solving, creativity, and getting a handle on someone's ability to understand a problem. Many sections do not allow the candidate to use a computer at all --- you need to know what you're talking about and respond to pointed questions. It's a performance in many ways, for better and worse, and old fashioned by modern tech standards; but we find it leads to better hires.


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