There's good news and bad news. Unfortunately they're the same news. Given the rapid dissolution of any sort of publicly verifiable 'news' outlet, and the abject commercialization of media, plus the doublespeak of politicians and businesses, the PR industry, self-censorship in response to cancel-culture and other divisive popular behavioral trends, and the replication crisis in science - it's not just you. It's everyone.
>Given the rapid dissolution of any sort of publicly verifiable 'news' outlet
When was the news ever publicly verifiable? If Walter Kronkiue said that the North Vietnamese shot at our naval vessels twice on two different days you had no way of even accessing alternative viewpoints and that the 2nd day was questionable, you just had to trust him.
Today with all the contrarians and competing alternate sources it's arguably better because if there's some smoking gun that something is BS it almost certainly will get talked about. It might be bullshit on both sides but at least it's there to look at if you want.
And how would you be able to publicly verify the competing alternate sources and the smoking gun? It's no different than the situation with old media, except there's more noise and disinformation, and everything is easier to fake.
Unless you personally are physically there with whatever necessary field expertise exists to run experiments or interrogate witnesses, you wind up having to trust somebody either way.
I mean the fact that the effect of all of this "alternative" media has been the complete dissolution of any kind of objective reality in favor of conspiracy theories and pseudoscience, rather than holding power to account, should demonstrate that it isn't better.
Being able to see the evidince presented by the alternatives, the degree to which they're grasping at straws, the scope of their criticism, etc. you can get a handle on the general degree of legitimacy of the original reporting.
When some source says something and backs it up with numbers and everyone on the other side attacks the conclusion but not the numbers that says something about the numbers.
I think you're making the mistake of assuming the world works like an internet forum. You aren't going to be able to judge reality on the basis of rhetorical tricks or logical contradiction. Your implicit assumption that if "everyone on the other side attacks the conclusion but not the numbers" the numbers must be correct first assumes only two sides, and second doesn't actually say anything about "the numbers," only your perception of one side over the other.
Everyone who's been taken in by conspiracy theory and misinformation already thinks this way and it's why they'll believe the world is flat and the sky is held up by Nephilim and anyone who says otherwise is just attacking them and obviously not taking the "evidence" into account. The end result of this kind of thinking just winds up reinforcing your biases because in essence it's just vibes.
Aussie with ~20 years in Asia, periodic trips to Cabramatta and California (lived there awhile). I'm a massive fan of the Laos versions which have huge amounts of fresh greenery. The biggest problem with foreign derivatives is generally they skimp on the greenery, use packet stock or use non-fresh noodles. None of these are acceptable. There's some tomato-in-soupified beef ones with differently shaped rice noodles in Xishuangbanna (sipsongpanna) near the Chinese border with Laos, they're excellent also. The Cantonese origin myth seems bogus: I've never had Cantonese food that celebrated subtlety like a pho, nor would I expect to find it. Lived in Guangdong a few years and visited at least 10 cities + HK + Macao so my opinion is somewhat informed.
Cirrus was bought by China in 2011. Around 2022 I knew the US head manufacturing engineer as they were based near our R&D facility in China. They fired the US team after that.
The reservations expressed here are fair and Peter hasn't exactly distinguished himself as a holistic empathy-espousing human.
However, extra-institutional process is already a fixture in corporate law, for example arbitration. I'm dealing with a small US state-level jurisdiction at the moment and they can't even get their own rules published online (link is 'legacy.blah...' and times out) which makes placing trust in prosecution for flagrant violations impossible. I would go for arbitration through an official body but their timelines are worse and damage limits don't cover process.
As a second example, it is also a fixture in housing market law in some jurisdictions. I rented out a house here in Australia and had bad tenants who destroyed things, stole things, grew weed and stole electricity from the grid, leaving me with various damages. After a protracted 'tribunal' (local jurisdiction non-court proceeding with reduced powers and damage scope), I got nothing despite a massive weight of undisputable evidence basically because they couldn't be bothered evaluating it and there was no effective oversight.
The honest truth is I've had better, more balanced and effective judgements from Chinese courts. This shocked me.
That is to say: there is clearly a place for faster and fairer resolutions, even if just for small claims. I can see strong support for the approach in these cases. We do need appeals to humans, and we do need a limit. But it would prospectively be useful in these cases, especially if the system is designed to avoid corruption and to run isolated from the internet. You could even have a plurality of non-profits producing best-effort judges and voting. Disparate versions could be regression tested with anomalous decisions flagged for human review. That way it would be very hard to game because targeted attacks could be readily identified.
It's hard to think of a future in which humans are the most efficient means of governance. Carefully designed AI can free us of corruption, sloth, and procedural bullshit. As long as we have good oversight and transparency, from my experience as a business person across a range of jurisdictions and matters, it's hard to consider it worse than current solutions. So-called democratic representation is bullshit, and politicians know it: "Mamdani for prez!" He'll be sold out before entry - same as the others, just with a cleaner nose and cuter back-story.
If anyone wants to build an alternative to Judge Thiel, I'm in.
You're kidding yourself if you think governance by AI is somehow not magically governance by the worst kind of humans. If anything the humans can say I donno,the AI did it! When they cause the system to generate the outcome they wanted.
Tech isn't magic, you still have the same messy people problems.
Having suffered repeatedly at differing implementations of people-based systems across a range of jurisdictions, I remain an optimist for a tech solution. If the system is correctly designed, it can finally reduce the people problems.
Yes, it would be easy to screw up. Yes, it's not going to fix everything because surrounding process will no doubt be human-influenced. However: no, that doesn't mean it's impossible to get value from. Especially given the shitty state of present-era systems.
"Correctly" according to who? People with different interests have very different ideas about what "correct" is.
> Yes, it's not going to fix everything because surrounding process will no doubt be human-influenced.
Well, the core process will be more human-influenced, with even less doubt.
Besides efficiency, it doesn't matter who will be executing the process, actually a skewed process is better to be executed by slow and fallible humans than by a tireless machine that doesn't make mistakes while acting against you.
> no, that doesn't mean it's impossible to get value from.
Again, some will definitely get a lot of value from it but a lot more will only provide it.
All systems are human systems. There isn't a single technological solution in the history of humanity that hasn't been co-opted for some grubby human purpose almost immediately after being deployed. AI is just better at hiding who's running it.
Me too. We'd write and discuss them at school, then run home and try them out. QBasic, and batch file viruses. Ages 10 and 11. Fast forward 35 years and kids play minecraft, programming is dying, and modular desktop computers themselves are seemingly becoming a rarity between surveillance mobile phones and surveillance TVs. Disposable vape pens have more processing power and screen resolution than our household PCs back then, which cost thousands of dollars.
First when you get to your material you face either a shelf of related books or bound journals covering a range of related topics.
Unfortunately many novel library buildings are transitioning to electronic stacks which fetch specific resources quickly and are well suited to large collections but deny the experience of browsing.
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