But you sacrificed some of your 33 bits of anonymity to have this setting work as intended. And that isn't strictly necessary: the web could have been engineered so that the selection of light or dark styles takes effect in a way undetectable to a web site.

Making me talk to a fucking robot leaves me with a deep and abiding hatred for your company. I will prefer almost any alternative to doing business with you and hope fervently to read about your bankruptcy.

What percentage of interactions having this result will cancel out your cost savings?

FoundationDB used this (detection of read-write conflicts in optimistic transactions) as its default isolation level since we started building it around 2009. Doing it at the kv store level has the advantage of providing serializability even for predicate and range reads (sometimes at the cost of unnecessary conflicts, so it offers granular control of read conflict ranges also).

When on the road to hell, it's OK to be left behind.

But what if all the good jobs are only in hell?

Then it seems you have a flawed concept of what constitutes the "good jobs".

a good job is one that brings you joy and improves your creativitiy, they by definition can't be in hell. if you mean well paying, that's a different thing entirely, ditch the fancy car and adjust your lifestyle

I have a fancy car? News to me. I'm just trying to pay my bills and live a sensible and reasonably comfortable life. These days that requires a lot of money.

mind you given the topic of the article I took the jobs in question to mean largely in the software industry, not talking about minimum wage workers here.

But as a programmer I am quite baffled when peers my age, often without kids struggle in this kind of way. My essentials are rent, food, metro card, library card. When I hear people who make what I make say that living requires a lot of money that usually includes two dozen subscriptions, a few grand in useless electronics per year and ordering food most of the week.

So, are you suggesting that an acceptable lifestyle would be an empty studio apartment with nothing inside of it, no pets, no partner, no meaningful possessions?

Personally, I have pets, a partner, and thoughtfully selected and meaningful possessions. I don't collect crap, and nothing I own or do is particularly extravagant. But I'm not exactly living an ascetic life either. A pretty typical lifestyle, I'd say. And I don't consider any of this a moral failure, if that's what you're getting at. Though admittedly it's not as affordable as living like a monk.

I don't advocate living like a monk. I play in a band and play football every weekend, play chess, you can go to church, most of that is practically free.

I'm very much in favour of participating in culture, real culture though. You can ditch the 1k Taylor Swift tickets, Disneyland visits, and high end gym for the 20 bucks local jazz festival.

I think the people who live socially like ascetic monks are ironically the people who build themselves a home gym for 10k and then complain about not having any time for friends because everything is too expensive

Well, I'm neither of those extremes. Like most people, I'm somewhere between two ends of a spectrum. ;-)

That's an excuse you made for yourself to feel better.

Leave the city.

Sssh, don't give away the secret.

I'd rather be poor in the city than rich and bored outside of it.

What is sensible in a literal economic recession if not “boring”?

Anyway..

I'll be in my home for longer than the recession lasts. Seems a little silly to sell it and walk away from my hard-earned lifestyle (which I quite enjoy) to save some money for just a few years.

A job from hell is a bad job by definition.

“Wilt thou call again thy peoples, wilt thou craze anew thy Kings? “Lo! my lightnings pass before thee, and their whistling servant brings, “Ere the drowsy street hath stirred— “Every masked and midnight word, “And the nations break their fast upon these things.

“So I make a jest of Wonder, and a mock of Time and Space. “The roofless Seas an hostel, and the Earth a market-place, “Where the anxious traders know “Each is surety for his foe, “And none may thrive without his fellows’ grace.

“Now this is all my subtlety and this is all my wit, “God give thee good enlightenment, My Master in the Pit. “But behold all Earth is laid “In the Peace which I have made, “And behold I wait on thee to trouble it!”

The Peace of Dives Kipling, 1903

https://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/poem/poems_dives.htm

(As you know, there have been no major wars since then)

I too fear what governments will actually do in this area. But I think you may be underestimating the threat to personal agency.

Imagine you are trapped in a groundhog day like time loop - but you are not the person who remembers previous loops. "Z" is. He tries to convince you to do something, over and over and over, thousands or millions of times, refining his approach based on your reactions while you remember nothing. Are you really confident that your free will protects you from being taken advantage of in this situation?

Now imagine that instead of a time loop, Z has a million clones of you. He tries his persuasion on one of them at a time, refining it until it works reliably before using it on you. You are just as vulnerable.

Now suppose he has a billion people, not identical to you but drawn from the same distribution. He has a harder computational problem, mapping the high dimensional manifold of their responses to create a model of you sufficiently accurate to manipulate you. But with enough data he can approximate the results of the previous case without more than a tiny fraction of his experimentation being visible to you.

Any relationship where one party gets to surveil and monitor not only the other party, but millions or billions of like parties, has the potential to be a deeply abusive one. We should not tolerate such situations whether the surveilling party is a government or not.

It depends on whether people wake up to the threat before or after there is a robot army that can crush them, doesn't it? If humans are economically and militarily useless, it won't matter what they choose.

In the immortal words of Scott Alexander [1],

> I used to think that the alternative medicine people were overestimating how evil Big Pharma was. But now I know that’s not right.

> Now I know they’re underestimating it.

> If it were discovered tomorrow that potatoes cured cancer, then people wouldn’t “suppress” this “natural” remedy. Two years from now there would be an ultrapurified potato extract called POTAXOR™®© that was, on closer examination, physically and chemically identical to mashed potatoes. But these mashed potatoes would be mashed in a giant centrifuge by scientists with five Ph. Ds each. Any time someone got cancer, their doctor would prescribe POTAXOR™®© and charge $6,000 per dose, and the patient would get better, and the thought of just going out and eating a potato would never occur to anybody. Not to the doctor, who doesn’t want to sound like the idiot who tells her cancer patients to eat potatoes. Not to the FDA, who doesn’t know whether potatoes might be contaminated with lead or potato fungus or ketchup or God-knows-what. And certainly not to the patient. They would have to pay 60 cents for a potato at the supermarket, but if they have a good enough insurance the POTAXOR™®© is free!

> This system, bizarre as it is, is your guarantee against the pharmaceutical companies suppressing a promising new natural medication. Your insurance company pays $300 on fish oil, and in exchange you go to sleep at night secure that no one has discovered that potatoes cure cancer but decided to cover it up to protect their bottom line. Good deal? Given the current health system, it’s better than you had any right to expect.

Potatoes aren't on Schedule 1; that makes this situation suck a little more. But probably the alternative scenario is just the treatment remaining illegal forever.

[1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/06/15/fish-now-by-prescripti...

> If it were discovered tomorrow

It wouldn't be discovered without the profit motive created by the granted monopoly

I think this is reasonably precise. "Uniformly" means that all points within the unit circle are equally likely. You can sample this distribution by picking independent rectangular coordinates and rejecting points outside the unit circle. I'm sure you can sample it in polar space by using an appropriate nonuniform distribution for radius (because a uniform radius would not result in a uniform distribution over points in the unit circle). If you want to sample directly in some really weird parameterization I guess markov chain monte carlo methods are available.

The article currently says

> Three points are chosen independently and uniformly at random from the interior of a unit circle

Has it been edited in the last 15 minutes to address your objection or something?

Hey, author here :)

That has always been the statement (i.e. I've not updated it since adding the post). I do agree that the "uniform on area" bit should have been made more clear!