Note that the linked article answers your FOSS question.
This isn’t recent. This has been an ongoing thing for at least 20 years (if not longer; that’s just the earliest I remember having this convo). Yes, it cleans the wound by killing things but it also fucks up the healthy tissue around the wound (see other comments for a more scientific explanation). Having some in a medical kit is useful for other activities such as diluting with water for an ear rinse, diluting with water for various mouth stuff (rinse not swallow), and some skin treatments (again, diluting first).
Adding extrinsic rewards for tasks like this can often introduce dark patterns eg maxing reviews to max rewards. It’s not as simple as “just pay someone to read papers.” As much as I detest academic publishers, it’s also not as simple as just throwing everything into open access (which we should do no matter what) and then having folks do it for the good of the community. There will have to be some experimentation with a balance of intrinsic and extrinsic rewards.
In the US I directly pay for the funding for papers through tuition and taxes. I shouldn’t have to fucking pay a parasitic publisher on top of that just to access that shit. In math at least I don’t mind paying a little here and there for an MAA or AMS journal though.
It looks like someone else linked one of these studies in a different comment while I was writing my own. I don’t feel as crazy now. I don’t care one way or another; I just want to make sure I can respond correctly! I wonder if the emphasis on fluoridated water is itself linked to industry capture?
I want someone who knows about these things to respond to this 2012 metastudy that ties naturally fluoridated groundwater to neurological problems. I have used this the past decade to say “well the science is unclear;” I found it back then (2013 at the latest) when I was trying to disprove a crank and really questioned my shit. There was a(n unrelated?) follow up later that questioned the benefits. Since this is very far from my area of expertise, I’m not championing these; I just want to understand why they’re wrong or at least don’t matter in the discourse.
(Edit: for the educated, there could be a million ways these are wrong. Authors are idiots, study isn’t reproducible, industry capture, conclusions not backed up by data, whatever. I just don’t have the requisite knowledge to say these are wrong and therefore fluoridated water is both safe and useful)
Update: great newer studies in responses! You can have a rational convo starting with these two that moves to newer stuff.
You started with a straw man tho?
Since we’ve turned this into a gish gallop
We both agree that capitalism is bad, you provide no evidence aside from ad hominem to contradict the most superficial analysis of your midjourney, and you have swallowed way too much genAI propaganda (coincidentally called out many times and left unanswered) without applying any of your development critical thinking skills. You want to burn energy on dumb shit to support billionaires while saying billionaires are bad, I think that’s stupid and enjoy poking fun at any engineer stupid enough to miss the forest for the trees.
Oh my goodness simpler words would be nice since we’re struggling with “non sequitur” and “strawman” and “basic connections to underlying language.”
I appreciate your summary! Here’s mine:
It is crucial to recognize that disagreements generally arise from individuals approaching the problem from different perspectives. I presented my perspective and you went after some straw men. Are there personal insecurities that hinder the expression of contrary opinions here?
The path to comprehending the complete picture involves engaging in dialogue to grasp the trade-offs considered by each person. This only works if everyone is actually engaging in dialogue, though.
Thanks! Your 4D chess was my inspiration. Either you have no understanding of the tools you use, the content they generate, and the billionaire propaganda you’ve swallowed while ignoring every single piece of technical knowledge you have in theory or this whole this was a masterclass we all can learn from. Immediately responding to criticism with strawmen, linking the current tech con to the last tech con, losing track of your personas, all fantastic work!
Should I quote your comments about the same? I love this discussion because the original non sequitur you made seems to apply to these responses! It’s great feedback. I also liked the “tilting at windmills” joke; how clever to ironically misuse a quote from around the same time as the ironic mislabeling of the artist!
Thanks! It’s always better to try to make the world a better place than it is to peddle billionaire vaporware while mislabeling the most basic concepts of art. I’m so glad we agree this prompt engineer is a witless dishcloth.
Zero energy wasted calling out dumb shit. It’s never a bad idea to rip into AI slip, especially in the context of things we can spend less energy on. Browbeating was incredibly influential in the dismantling of NFTs, which you correctly pointed out is just as bad a citizen as genAI turds.
Absolutely! Hyped-up vaporware like genAI and blockchain speculation should be nuked from orbit. Glad we agree this all garbage.
Shit, why not start with all the wasted energy generating the slop first? You’re solving the wrong problem.
I don’t normally get mad at genAI art. This one makes me mad. A huge part of Bosch is the tiny detail. There’s scholarly debate about how we interpret the detail; it’s incredibly wrong to say something is in the style of Hieronymus Bosch without clever little details. This AI garbage just has a bunch of repeated lens flares, age marks, and blobs. Also in the style of Bosch implies something we can interpret, be it a dark take on office work or capitalists teaching us lessons. I don’t know what the fuck we can take away from this.
This is more “someone with the title ‘prompt engineer’ spent three minutes hunt-and-pecking the name ‘Hieronymus Bosch’ into midjourney and grabbed the first image that was sort of muted earth tones” than “remotely in the vicinity of the style of Hieronymus Bosch.”
It’s very misleading to say “paying for software is stupid” and not consider the total cost of ownership. TCO includes things like infrastructure and maintenance. As an exec, I am constantly faced with two choices: free software that might do what I want or paid software that sort of does what I want. At face value, you would immediately tell me to get the free stuff. That’s where you miss TCO.
(Read the last paragraph if you think the business lens is bullshit)
Every FOSS solution I run requires me to deploy and maintain it. I only have so many hours in the day so at some threshold I have to hire more and more people to deploy and maintain. Integrating? That’s on me too because I’m using free software so now I need a resource to glue things together. My “free” option actually costs a portion of my engineering resources. I’m also on the hook for failures. Running my own ERP? I need to have support staff on-call to handle outages.
Every paid solution I run costs can require some of those things. Let’s ignore paid licenses and just focus on things I can completely outsource. This means I’m no longer on the hook for deployment and maintenance, so if I can show the cost of the paid software is less than my TCO, it’s a better deal. If I have a good relationship with the vendor, I might be able to delegate my integration needs to their product pipeline. I might be able to purchase a support contract that’s cheaper than running my own.
At some point every company will outgrow certain software. It’s a constant reevaluation of the costs of paid vs TCO of free and when I need to spend resources making it do something it doesn’t. A managed telemetry stack like Sumo or New Relic allows me to scale quickly but cheaply until I have the revenue to build an in-house team to instrument fucking everything.
The exact same logic applies to my time. I could run free everything. That comes with a higher TCO (usually). I say this as someone who has rebuilt dot files repos on the dot every three years and been running Linux since you could get it in a book at B Dalton at the indoor shopping mall so my tolerance for personal TCO is very high. However, I don’t change my own oil. It’s free! I could do it myself! I don’t want to. I buy certain things, like software, in my personal life because the TCO of FOSS is higher than I want to pay. I have outgrown Windows and Mac so I have some level required cost in Linux. I pay for some things like storage and routing solutions even though I could build and deploy and maintain all of that myself. Sometimes I just want my shit to work and not have to do it myself.
That explanation runs counter to my experience with VC-funded companies, marketing budgets, and running in the red in general. Trying to hit as much of the total addressable market as possible means burning money. Notice how I expanded and included discounts? You don’t even get a 5% off code. Framework is making a profit so they can lose margin on a low percentage (if they’re not making a profit then there’s no reason to not throw away more to get closer to TAM anyway).
Board games run in the thousands for some of the bigger ticket items. I’m not sure you understand either market. I regularly crowdfund packages that are more than at least 25% of the Framework prices I’m skimming now.