> eternal but it seems more likely that those pirating are those that wouldn't be inclined to pay at all.
There are a lot of different reasons people pirate games, and other stuff, not all reasons apply to everyone, and some reasons on apply to a few.
I used to pirate 99% of the games I played when I was young, because my family simply didn't have money to buy me video games. Once I grew older and had more disposable income, I started buying more games on Steam. Now I have more disposable income than I know what to do with, and I'm back to pirating games, but only for the ones that don't have proper demos available. I probably spent $1000 on games I no longer play and cannot refund, because I'm over the 2 hour limit, and nowadays I pirate the game, and if I enjoy it, I buy it as a way of supporting the developer.
I'm probably not alone with this sort of process, but it's probably also not the only reason other's pirate.
people are commenting in this HN thread like piracy hasn't been thought about, deeply, by many thousands of people for ages in the games industry. i could link to numerous people writing very wise things about it - the CEO of a certain competitor to GOG and Steam comes to mind, he basically wrote the Luther thesis on games piracy - but then i'd be downvoted.
Isn't that fairly easy to estimate? If they're showing you a buy rate and a sell rate, you know the interbank rate is going to be pretty much halfway between the two. I don't think anyone's changing money and thinking the bureau isn't profiting.
Honestly, to me the problem seems more like people don’t know they don’t have to use those things. Just pulling money out of an ATM (and yes, declining the currency conversion scam there as well) is a much more efficient and cheap way to acquire the local currency.
People use these desks because they think that’s just “what it costs.”
Medical evidence costs money. What would look convincing costs sums few can pay. If you use only that medicine you basically use only Big Pharma. And they are set to produce only specific type of medicine: something you have to buy, preferably for life. A breathing technique is not like that so it will never amass that much "proof".
1. There are plenty of non-profitable non-financial things that do have scientific evidence backing them. Massage for example which can be performed by essentially anyone.
2. There needs to be some way to separate the wheat from the chaff, as it were. Otherwise we all drown beneath the waves of lying charlatans. So how do we differentiate what works? "Evidence" seems like a reasonable criterion.
Evidence is an excellent criteria, but only if you look more broadly so you're not ignoring most of the actual evidence available to you. All you really need to try something personally is decide that the likely benefit, given the limited information you have, outweighs the likely risk.
If you're sufficiently convinced it's not dangerous or difficult, the reasonable standard of evidence for some possible benefit needed to consider trying it might become correspondingly low.
Scientific studies are strong evidence of something really narrowly specific that they tested like "does X cause Y," but most decisions in life need to be made from things like direct observation, and anecdotes, because the scientific studies rarely exist to provide the full picture, even a good study on "does X cause Y" might tell you absolutely nothing about if "X causes Z" even if Z is more important than Y.
If there is something like a breathwork technique developed by a long dead soviet physician that regular people all around the world have been using for 60+ years and consistently reporting that it offered them some tangible benefits and didn't harm them, this is evidence that it might be worth a try. With the Buteyko method, most of its strongest advocates I have personally heard of are long dead from normal old age, and never had any plausible financial or personal motive to promote it.
For things like breathwork, I usually do carefully and broadly look at things like personal reports from regular people, on e.g. forums that are unlikely to have any motive to lie. If there's a strong consistent pattern of some harm or benefit, that can be quite useful evidence, even without any formal studies.
> the lack of medical evidence tells us that this is in fact not a valuable thing
Except almost none of the most valuable things I've encountered in life had any convincing medical evidence I could find beforehand.
I am an academic scientist that designs and reviews studies all day long, so I am very steeped in the practicalities and limitations of biomedical research, and as such have completely lost any illusion that biomedical research is in a state where it can guide most of my personal decisions in a useful way- maybe it will be someday. There are many things I know about as a scientist, but can't get funding to study or publish on because the funding agencies don't care about them, and/or there are practical constraints that make it impractical to study.
If all of your personal decisions are guided by peer reviewed literature in it's current state, you'll probably be sicker, and have an empty dull life compared to someone that just uses common sense, tries things, and pays attention. I say this from having seen it happen many times in the biohacking community, the people most steeped in attempting to translate research into life decisions often died young, or even got to be one of the only modern people to experience diseases of malnutrition.
For one, you have to pretty much assume there is some specific benefit you can physically quantify, and that it will apply to almost everyone in your study population, both very unlikely to be true in cases like studying breathwork.
For example, I'm a person that tends to be pretty uptight and overstressed, what you might assume in scientific terms is "sympathetic activation"- and there is a lot of breathwork research showing that almost anything that has an extended exhale can shift you into parasympathetic activation, where you calm down and relax. There is lots of research on this, and it arguably covers Buteyko, but they won't use that term in the article title, because it's more general than just Buteyko alone.
Now, I don't need some peer reviewed study to just try Buteyko for a few minutes, and immediately feel calm and relaxed, and see that I can suddenly notice the colors around me, and feel joy, when I couldn't before. If a massive peer reviewed study proved to me that this does not happen to most, or even any other people except me, why would I care about that at all? Does it mean I shouldn't do it? What if I have a problem not enough of those people have to make it show up in the statistical analysis, or my body responds in a way most of theirs do not?
There are huge limits to how meaningfully you can generalize from scientific studies about populations of other people, to yourself. Moreover, you have to choose up front what outcomes or effects you will look at in a study, and if our biological understanding can't even guess at the outcome that would have been useful to look at, the study is doomed to miss everything.
Sit down, and try it- or don't, but don't assume you can learn ahead of time if it will be worthwhile or not for you personally by looking on Google Scholar.
> Let's say I have a religion that, as part of practicing it, restricts my diet.
> If I try to make you - a non-practitioner - eat that diet, then your reply makes sense. It's a personal matter; I don't get to force it on you or anyone else.
In the UK, it's becoming increasingly difficult to find restaurants whose meat is not halal. One could argue that a religious diet is in fact being forced upon those who do not practise Islam.
> Paying with your phone is a massive improvement to convenience.
And it only gets easier when you pay with a watch - you don't even have to pull your phone out of your pocket!
My cards only come out when I'm making a large purchase that I want extra protection on (think the UK's Section 75) and these are usually purchases I know about in advance - otherwise my wallet stays at home most days.
If you're doing nothing in that 30-45 minutes other than stare at a loading screen, you're doing it wrong.
I'm not sold on the efficacy of AI and I share your reservations about having to scrutinise their output, but I see great value in being able to offload a long-running task to someone/something else and only have to check back later. In the meantime, I can be doing something else - like sitting in those planning meetings we all enjoy!
I love sitting in those planning meetings, too. /s
This is exactly right. We've adapted our workflow to kick off a task and then kick off the next one and the next. Then we review the work of each as they come through. It's just CPU pipelining for human workflow.
The process is far from perfect but the throughput is very high. The limiting factor is review. I spend most of my time doing line-by-line review of AI output and asking questions about things I'm unsure of. It's a very different job from the way I historically operated, which involved tight code -> verify loops of manually written code.
Might be worth considering a different name before you get too big. There's already pact.io, which will be the first result any time anyone searches for pact testing.
This is what we've been told since time eternal but it seems more likely that those pirating are those that wouldn't be inclined to pay at all.
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