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InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)JJ
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  • On the one hand, most of those incidents cited were in the face of a regime that also didn't want to care. Just hard to ignore circumstances if 3.5% of your people are out on the streets and likely most of the people off the streets agree with them.

    On the other hand, they base this on very few instances, so it's hardly a statistical slam dunk, it's vaguely supportive of some concepts, but anyone taking note of specific numbers is really overextending the research beyond what it can possibly say.

  • I think it's not "3.5% of people want an outcome" but "protests of significant magnitude to have 3.5% actively on the streets pushing" correlate with a very very large population that agrees, but not enough to be out on the streets.

    So even if 40 million people want single payer, there are not 12 million in the streets.

    But again, this is based on a scant handful of "movements", so it's pretty useless on specifics. Most I can see as a takeaway is perhaps that a violent movement may be too high stakes for people and a largely non-violent movement can attract more people and more people usually matter more than more violence.

  • Based on the article "no non-violent movement that has involved more than 3.5% of a population has ever failed" has the caveat of "we only look at 3 of them, and those 3 worked".

    So their overall sample size is small, and the 3.5% sample size is just 3. Further, those 3 had no idea someone in the vague future would retroactively measure their participation to declare it a rock solid threshold.

    I think the broader takeaway is that number of people seems to matter more than degree of violence, and violence seems to alienate people that might have otherwise participated.

  • can’t even do video playback on VLC.

    I remember back in the day when I downloaded the first divx file my K6-400 couldn't smoothly play... I had been so used to thinking of that as a powerhouse coming from my Pentium 60, which was the first one I ran Linux on.

  • Way way too much stock is placed in that study.

    For one, their total sample size was only 323 events, only 3 of which met the "3.5%" level. So the statement that change is inevitable based on only 3 instances is really crazy.

    Further, none of those three instances had participants thinking that 3.5% was some sort of goal, it was a correlation. So now you have a lot of protestors treating 3.5% as a goal rather than some organic emergent property of the broader movement. Even if there was something inevitable about having a 3.5% participation rate when no one is aware of that metric, simply knowing of the metric can change a lot.

  • The cited scenarios were rarely democratic in nature.

    Of course, in all the scenarios cited, there was no one telling them "get to 3.5% and things will happen", so with everyone saying "if we get to 3.5%, things will happen", that could itself break the "rule", as a sort of self-denying prophecy.

  • Further, it happens to hit the magical "3.5%" number everyone was throwing around.

    Maybe it's correct and others will vouch for it, analysize, but an estimate that's significantly higher than an already decently high number that bridges the apparent gap to the 3.5% number almost exactly seems too conveniently on point, like someone wanted to stretch the numbers as little as possible while still hitting the designated number.

  • My understanding is that the train system and automotive sector are kind of opposite.

    For automotive, the government does the roads and private industry does the vehicles.

    Conversely, the rails are largely private industry excluding Amtrak, and Amtrak is mostly responsible for the trains with their government granted monopoly on passenger rail.

    It's part of what really limits passenger rail, the companies that own the rail mostly want to rail from places like ports, and negligible value for rail between population centers. Also Amtrak has to suck it up if a rail is busy (wasnt supposed to be the case, but cargo operators were allowed to make trains too long to fit on bypass spurs so they can't get out of the way like they were legally required to).

  • One thing left unclear is how the determination is made about emergency versus non emergency.

    If it's a separate number, ok, seems clear cut enough.

    If it's human always answers and if it's some bullshit they just click a button to punt to AI instead of just hanging up, ok.

    If they are saying the AI answers and does the triage and hands off immediately to a human when "emergency detected", then I could see how that promise could fail.

  • To be fair, that article was overall pretty plainly stating that the protests were overwhelmingly more well attended. Yes they had one line that raised the possibility of weather as a factor, but I think anyone but Trump could see the facts as presented in the story telling the real story.

    Also went out of their way to characterize the protests as peaceful and the only politicians under violent threat were Democrats, despite the magnitude of protests.

  • Being able to just cut off access to the application means a customer has little choice.

    For a competitor to pass them, they first have to catch up. To catch up, the customer needs to be able to extract the data from the application to give competition a chance. If they get closer to catching up, they tend to be bought out. Lot of speedbumps to discourage competition. Also, to get funding those competitors have to pretty much promise investors they will also do "as a service".

    For assets versus expense, I see a pendulum, largely based on how appreciation/depreciation pans out versus acquisition cost and loan interest rates, as well as uncertain start up versus steady business. I'm not sure software is giving enough choice in the matter the let that swing.

  • While "any" is a bit much, I do anticipate a rather dramatic decline.

    One is that there are a large chunk of programming jobs that I do think LLM can displace. Think of those dumb unimaginative mobile games that bleed out a few dollars a week from folks. I think LLM has a good chance at cranking those out. If you've seen companies that have utterly trivial yet somehow subtly unique internal applications, LLMs can probably crank out a lot of those to. There's a lot of stupid trivial stuff that has been done a million times before that still gets done by people.

    Another is that a lot of software teams have overhired anyway. Business folk think more developers mean better results, so they want to hire up to success, as long as their funding permits. This isn't how programming really works, but explanations that fewer people can do more than more people in some cases can't crack through how counter-intuitive that is. AI offers a rationalization for a lot of those folks to finally arrive at the efficient conclusion.

    Finally, the software industry has significantly converted transactional purchases to subscription. With perpetual license, you needed to provide some value to drive that customer who bought from you 5 years ago a reason to upgrade. Now with subscription models, you just have to coast and keep the lights on for those customers. Often with effective lock-in of the customers data to make it extra hard or impossible for them to jump to a competitor, even if competitors could reverse-engineer your proprietary formats, the customer might not even be able to download their actual data files. So a company that acheived "good enough" with subscription might severely curtail investment because it makes no difference to their bottom line if they are delivering awesome new capability or just same old same old. Anticipate a log of stagnation as they shuffle around things like design language to give a feeling of progress while things just kinda plateau out.

  • I think AI is a component of the decline.

    For decades, companies have operated under the misunderstanding that more software developers equals more success, despite countless works explaining that's not how it works. As a result many of these companies have employed an order of magnitude more than they probably should have and got worse results than they would have. However the fact they got subpar results with 10x a good number just convinced them that they didn't hire enough. Smaller team produce better results made zero sense.

    So now the AI companies come along and give a plausible rationalization to decrease team size. Even if the LLM hypothetically does zero to provide direct value, the reduced teams start yielding better results, because of mitigating the problems of "make sure everyone is utilized, make sure these cheap unqualified offshored programmers are giving you value, communicate and plan, reach consensus along a set up people who might all have viable approaches, but devolved into arguments over which way to go".

    AI gives then a rationalization to do what they should have done from the onset.

  • Significant presence in the Arctic circle which may become more valuable with some climate change and/or closer relationship with Russia.

    At least that's what I'd guess. Similar story with Canada, more land to have a better chance to respond to climate change.

  • I find that a credible thought, though one would imagine an answer to say that they try to have plans for any concevaiable scenario, no matter how unlikely, and have done so for years.

    One would imagine if he was good at this politics thing, he would have found an answer to distance such plans from the current contentious situation.

    And upon reading, he said precisely that...