howrar

howrar , 4 days ago to Technology in UK Woman Mistaken As Shoplifter By Facewatch, Now She's Banned From All Stores With Facial Recognition Tech

I'd be surprised if being born with a specific face configuration isn't protected in the same way that race and gender are.

howrar , 7 days ago to Technology in Male birth control breakthrough safely switches off fit sperm for a while

Somehow, we manage to accept organ transplants despite it hurting one healthy person a little to help an unhealthy person a lot. What's stopping us from treating birth control the same way?

howrar , 12 days ago to Fuck Cars in Cycling isn't legitimate transportation...apparently

I don't think car access should ever be completely removed. The way it's done in most pedestrian/bike areas around here is that trucks (delivery and trash pick up) are all done within a small window of time. Outside of that, no cars are allowed besides the one or two security vehicles that move at walking speed if they even move at all.

howrar , 22 days ago to linuxmemes in you don't need more 4GB of RAM

You might benefit from installing earlyoom. It'll kill some of your processes before the system freezes from running out of memory.

howrar , 1 month ago to Technology in ChatGPT provides false information about people, and OpenAI can’t correct it

It is made by scientists. And we don't know how to make the model determine whether or not it knows something. So far, we only have tools that tell us that something probably wasn't in the training set (e.g. using variance across models in a mixture of experts setup), but that doesn't tell us anything about how correct it is.

howrar , 1 month ago to Technology in Tesla’s Autopilot and Full Self-Driving linked to hundreds of crashes, dozens of deaths

I've heard Elon Musk (or was it Karpathy?) talking about how camera should be sufficient for all scenarios because humans can do it on vision alone, but that's poor reasoning IMO. Cars are not humans, so there's no reason to confine them to the same limitations. If we want them to be safer and more capable than human drivers, one way to do that is by providing them with more information.

howrar , 1 month ago to Technology in Google fires 28 employees after protest over Israel cloud contract

Oh, I see. You're clarifying why jonne thought this was the case, not arguing for why they're correct.

howrar , 1 month ago to Technology in Google fires 28 employees after protest over Israel cloud contract

The article is about Google. Why does it matter that it's missing from the Alphabet handbook?

howrar , 1 month ago to solarpunk memes in Strange, isn't it?

Specialized vs general labour?

My point is, if we care about what we call this, then just pick something and move on to solving the real problem.

howrar , 1 month ago to solarpunk memes in Strange, isn't it?

"skill" is a gradient, so the label "unskilled" is in itself meaningless.

You know what else is a gradient? Size. Does that make terms like "big" and "small" meaningless? Just about everything in this universe exists on a spectrum.

howrar , 1 month ago to solarpunk memes in Strange, isn't it?

Maybe specialized vs general labour?

howrar , 1 month ago to solarpunk memes in Strange, isn't it?

Everything requires skills, yes. Some skills take longer to acquire. It's the difference between taking a random adult on the street and teaching them to perform a job within a week versus a year or more. Whether or not you're self taught doesn't change the fact that it didn't take you a week to learn to code and it's not something that's part of a standard curriculum most adults would've gone through.

If you don't think "unskilled" reflects this distinction properly, suggestions for alternatives are welcome. But I still think this is a distraction from the main problem.

howrar , 1 month ago to solarpunk memes in Strange, isn't it?

I see what you mean with certain jobs being perceived negatively. Maybe the messaging should be about the value of "unskilled" labour/labourers rather than saying that there's no such thing as "unskilled" labour? To me, the latter implies that there's nothing distinguishing "skilled" and "unskilled" labour. The only people who would understand what you're really trying to say are those who are part of your circle spreading the "message", and thus it only serves the purpose of saying "I'm on team X! Anyone else?"

howrar , 1 month ago to solarpunk memes in Strange, isn't it?

They also exist because there's important differences to the jobs. For example, in how you hire. If you're looking for "unskilled" workers, you can cast a wide net with the job ad and hit mostly the relevant audience. You can go up to anyone looking for a job and offer them said job. If you need a bigger pool of people to hire from, you can make changes that have almost immediate impact (e.g. increasing benefits, working conditions, marketing). For "skilled" labour, there's fewer people in the pool to hire from, so you want to go directly to where they're being trained (e.g. job fairs at universities or trade schools), and if you need to increase the pool you can hire from, that has delayed effects since you need to wait for people to go through their training.

I was not aware of the negative connotation though, so I'll keep that in mind. I don't think changing the word itself is going to do anything about that though. Connotation will follow unless you change people's attitudes towards these jobs. I don't know how you would do that though. Any ideas?

howrar , 1 month ago to solarpunk memes in Strange, isn't it?

You can criticize the way we name things, but the fact remains that the distinction between "skilled" and "unskilled" labour is a useful one and will continue to exist regardless of what you decide to call it. I feel like this comment is just a distraction from the real problem you intend to draw attention to, which I'm guessing is low wages.