/ˈbɑːltəkʊteɪ/. Knows some chemistry and piping stuff. TeXmacs user.

Website: reboil.com

Mastodon: baltakatei@twit.social

  • 0 Posts
  • 192 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
Cake day: June 12th, 2023
  • baltakatei@sopuli.xyztomemes@lemmy.world•Still right
    3·
    10 days ago

    efficiency is just high functioning laziness

    Reminds me of discussions about how economists working for capitalist oligarchs, define efficiency in terms of value extracted per dollar invested without taking into amount negative externalities like environmental destruction or worker well-being. Such economists are “lazy” about those last two points which, for billionaires that hire them to get their next corporate merger approved, is a feature, not a bug.

    Your comment reminds me that every efficiency is tightly coupled to a specific goal that benefits a particular group of people that may not necessarily include myself.

    Chapter 40 of The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson

    Jevons Paradox proposes that increases in efficiency in the use of a resource lead to an overall increase in the use of that resource, not a decrease. William Stanley Jevons, writing in 1865, was referring to the history of the use of coal; once the Watt engine was introduced, which greatly increased the efficiency of coal burning as energy creation, the use of coal grew far beyond the initial reduction in the amount needed for the activity that existed before the time of the improvement.

    The rebound effect of this paradox can be mitigated only by adding other factors to the uptake of the more efficient method, such as requirements for reinvestment, taxes, and regulations. So they say in economics texts.

    The paradox is visible in the history of technological improvements of all kinds. Better car miles per gallon, more miles driven. Faster computer times, more time spent on computers. And so on ad infinitum. At this point it is naïve to expect that technological improvements alone will slow the impacts of growth and reduce the burden on the biosphere. And yet many still exhibit this naiveté.

    Associated with this lacuna in current thought, perhaps a generalization of its particular focus, is the assumption that efficiency is always good. Of course efficiency as a measure has been constructed to describe outcomes considered in advance to be good, so it’s almost a tautology, but the two can still be destranded, as they are not quite the same. Examination of the historical record, and simple exercises in reductio ad absurdum like Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal”, should make it obvious that efficiency can become a bad thing for humans. Jevons Paradox applies here too, but economics has normally not been flexible enough to take on this obvious truth, and it is very common to see writing in economics refer to efficiency as good by definition, and inefficient as simply a synonym for bad or poorly done. But the evidence shows that there is good efficiency and bad efficiency, good inefficiency and bad inefficiency. Examples of all four can easily be provided, though here we leave this as an exercise for the reader, with just these sample pointers to stimulate reflection: preventative health care saves enormous amounts in medical costs later, and is a good efficiency. Eating your extra children (this is Swift’s character’s “modest proposal”) would be a bad efficiency. Any harm to people for profit is likewise bad, no matter how efficient. Using an over-sized vehicle to get from point A to point B is a bad inefficiency, and there are many more like it; but oxbows in a river, defining a large flood plain, is a good inefficiency. On and on it goes like this; all four categories need further consideration if the analysis of the larger situation is to be helpful.

    The orienting principle that could guide all such thinking is often left out, but surely it should be included and made explicit: we should be doing everything needed to avoid a mass extinction event. This suggests a general operating principle similar to the Leopoldian land ethic, often summarized as “what’s good is what’s good for the land.”[cmt 2] In our current situation, the phrase can be usefully reworded as “what’s good is what’s good for the biosphere.” In light of that principle, many efficiencies are quickly seen to be profoundly destructive, and many inefficiencies can now be understood as unintentionally salvational. Robustness and resilience are in general inefficient; but they are robust, they are resilient. And we need that by design.

    The whole field and discipline of economics, by which we plan and justify what we do as a society, is simply riddled with absences, contradictions, logical flaws, and most important of all, false axioms and false goals. We must fix that if we can. It would require going deep and restructuring that entire field of thought. If economics is a method for optimizing various objective functions subject to constraints, then the focus of change would need to look again at those “objective functions”. Not profit, but biosphere health, should be the function solved for; and this would change many things. It means moving the inquiry from economics to political economy, but that would be the necessary step to get the economics right. Why do we do things? What do we want? What would be fair? How can we best arrange our lives together on this planet?

    Our current economics has not yet answered any of these questions. But why should it? Do you ask your calculator what to do with your life? No. You have to figure that out for yourself.

  • baltakatei@sopuli.xyztoPolitical Memes@lemmy.world•Oooo
    571·
    30 days ago

    Reminds me of the final pages of chapter 3 of the second volume of Maus (1991) in which a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust acts egregiously and unrepentantly racist to a black hitchhiker, surprising a friend who thought that the suffering would have engendered empathy for discriminated races.

    page 259 of 296

    Torture damages people, plain and simple; don’t expect victims to gain wisdom or empathy from the process. So, maybe don’t give them nukes and back the religious megalomaniacs among them who end up committing the same genocidal practices against others such as the Palestinians.

  • baltakatei@sopuli.xyztoLemmy Shitpost@lemmy.world•America
    30·
    1 month ago

    Hard mode: set time zone to UTC (or Reykjavik; it’s the same) and force yourself to add/subtract offset hours every time you want to know local time. Also, this forces you to track when exactly daylight saving time starts and stops.

    Benefit: you know when space probe stuff happens because they’re almost always timestamped UTC. Also, playing Eve Online becomes slightly easier.

  • baltakatei@sopuli.xyztoTechnology@lemmy.world•Group Pushing Age Verification Requirements for AI Turns Out to Be Sneakily Backed by OpenAIEnglish
    3·
    1 month ago

    Theoretically, it’s possible for the user to authenticate their age without either the site or service knowing the user’s identity. Quick and dirty example:

    There’s a thing called a ring signature that allows one to prove that one of a large number of people digitally signed something. Let’s say a million people all have private keys whose corresponding public keys are registered to a database after they flashed their state ID at a post office or something to prove they are ≥18 years of age. So, John Smith uses his private key plus all 1 million public keys to sign a statement that he sends to a server saying he’s ≥18. The server then takes all 1 million public keys plus the signed message John provided and verifies that his signature is among the 1 million but cannot calculate which exact public key belongs to John. The verification process requires all 1 million public keys as input; you cannot, for example, try an omit each public key one-by-one to see which causes the verification process to fail.

    Currently, there is ongoing research on how to make compact ring signatures since they can be very large the more public keys are involved.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_signature

    That said, even if you had scalable compact ring signature technology, I’d be more worried about advertiser deänonymization efforts once a user has logged in that check browser canvas size, IP address, user agent, font availability, etc. See https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/

    Also, ring signatures for age verification don’t actually verify age, just that someone proved their age at some point in the past to the owner of the public key database; just like an adult can log into YouTube on behalf of their children and let the children go to town, John could give anyone access to his private key regardless of age.