smallmancontrov

Then why prevent the investigation? It's standard procedure when a cop kills someone and the courts are notoriously deferential to the police. ICE is speaking with actions, and those actions say they can't even begin to make the case that Pretti had murderous intent.

It's also obvious to anyone who has seen the recordings. Which is why ICE is so hell-bent on stopping recordings.

The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users.

- Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine, 1998

Also, the Federal Reserve bought $2 trillion of mortgage backed securities, pumping the housing market massively.

They were better off because the discomfort of shoehorning was less than the discomfort of in-house software development. The latter has changed radically so the conclusion may no longer hold. SWEs would do well to have at least one side project to calibrate their intuition about the cost of delivering and maintaining a greenfield project so that they can spot the niches which have begun to appear even as others live on borrowed time.

The data is also used by lawyers to "target" gleefully lawless government agencies with legal accountability.

ICE is much more intimidated by these than by the handful of fools who serve them pretext on a platter.

No, ICE should not be allowed to hide from legal accountability.

First you try to record the ICE officers, then the ICE officers pepper spray you, then Alex Pretti steps in, then they tackle him, take his gun, and murder him in cold blood.

Then the feds grab the evidence to make sure the investigation has as little to go on as humanly possible.

Now this.

The information lockdown continues apace.

I should have said "mandatory expense inflation", yes. There are still some difficult problems the economy is making progress on, but the correct attitude towards those is "keep up the good work" and to focus our attention back on the parts which are robbing us of progress as fast as we make it, where costs soar in excess of wage increases: health care, housing, and education.

Durable goods have deflated compared to wages while health care, housing, and education soared. If you are given the job of spinning this (or take it upon yourself in a bid for access), focusing on the former to the exclusion of the latter is how you do it. "Think of the iPhones! Never mind that rent in a mid-rate city is 1 iPhone and 2 big screen TVs every month!"

Health care, housing, and education are the big three drivers of mandatory expenses in most peoples' lives. It's undeniably a little cool that luxuries got cheap, but it's severely un-cool that necessities got expensive. I'm glad to see a focus on pushing statistics to do a better job of reflecting that, but yeah, this is all downstream of structural incentives so fixes are only going to happen through legislative choices that will make people angry and until then the problems will continue to get worse.

"Not required" but my teachers made it abundantly clear what they thought of being forced to allow ungrateful troublemakers to disrespect their country.

I always disliked the Pledge and began to strongly dislike it after moving away from the religion it tries to establish as the national religion, but I was keenly aware that picking this fight would cost me considerable political capital and chose not to.

Bullies -- people just looking to tear apart questions -- always have lower cost to answer and higher reward for answering than people looking to be helpful.

That said, the SO moderation was so awful I don't think it's correct to blame the downfall on the bully dynamic even if it was clearly present and might have eventually overrun the platform. I used to joke that an answer wasn't uniquely useful unless it had been locked as duplicate, but it wasn't really a joke: I kept a tally on a sticky note and of the posts I found useful, incorrect duplicate flags outnumbered open questions.

Of course we can.

Using foreign wars to prosecute domestic agenda is a strategy that predates written history, let alone Vietnam. Rulers have always understood which levers were available to them, this is not a modern discovery. Classical history in particular is full of this sort of thing and worse in a democratic context, which is comforting in the sense of where we stand and concerning in the sense of where things could go.

Machinations were always organized. I'm reading about Louis Brandeis and I'm struck by how familiar the robber baron talking points are; they are exactly the talking points I heard from neoliberals growing up. Time is a flat circle when it comes to antitrust. Also: they tried to coup FDR! They got themselves a strongman figurehead and everything, it just didn't work.

I'd actually give us the advantage today: the information environment is messier and more difficult to control and machine politics is barely starting to form rather than firmly established everywhere at every level.

So we can't block shady spammers because business wants shady customer support call centers? Ugh. It figures, but ugh.

Thanks for the inside perspective.

Yup, it's wild to see corporations effectively say "kiss my ass" and then watch people line up to do it :|

Rewind a bit over 100 years and the robber barons had an iron grip over the US economy, US politics, and people who understood the mechanisms despaired at ever prying it away from them.

Then the wind shifted and, suddenly, we could and we did. It took them decades to undo that progress and decades more to reassert their grip.

Don't self-sabotage by imagining that it is impossible to achieve change through democracy. We've done it before and we can do it again.

There's a reason why they teach the prisoner's dilemma on day 1 of business school: a group which is more fragmented has less power. From the consumer perspective, this is why monopolies are bad and this is why boycotts don't work. From the slimy businessman perspective, this is why monopolies are good and boycotts are the only way consumers should be allowed to push back. Boycotts are empirically understood to be an ineffective strategy -- which, of course, is usually exactly what the people proposing them as an alternative to legislation are usually after.

IPOs are designed to achieve a 20% pump, generally do achieve it, and did achieve it in the case of SPCX. Buying shares at the base of the pump that you are allowed to sell at +20% is a license to cash in. Why would anyone sell you those shares at that price, then? They are paying you to cultivate the "rare pokemon card" atmosphere that gets the less sophisticated investors excited and willing to buy the top. A dollar spent selling below-market shares to a promoter returns many dollars of exit liquidity. This is how investment banks make their IPO money and it's how social media promoters make their money. The promoters aren't the ones being fleeced. There are people who think they are promoters but are actually suckers -- but that's a separate matter. The price always tells the true story.

So lots of judicially-unreachable call centers under judicially-unreachable telecoms need to lose reputation score and get spam-binned by default, just like email. I thought that was going to happen by now. Did the US telecoms just chicken out?

Speaking of which, what happened to SHAKEN/STIR? I thought the strong authentication requirements came down the pipe years ago and they were going to start turning off (or hiding by default) routes of low reputation. That was years ago, it was supposed to take years, but here we are years later and I still get loads of spam calls. What happened?

If half of us were half as principled as this guy, the world would be a much better place.

Back when the character.ai homepage ranked by popularity, the most popular models were reliably "bad boys" of various description -- Vampire Boyfriend and such. I'm guessing it wasn't the gents who pushed them to the top of the list.

Whether or not the usage is problematic is a separate question. I don't think anything rises to the level of "sharing fake nudes of a real person" and I suspect the effort of having a conversation is a natural limiter, but now I'm the one speculating.

You're forgetting that whenever the incentives lead to bad places it isn't True Capitalism (tm).

No, that you should advance your thinking past the 17th century.

DDR5 is still mostly made with DUV (remember Intel 14+++++++++?), and even though manufacturers have slowly been moving a few layers to EUV the advantage is at the margin. Lack of EUV at scale will not prevent China from ramping useful RAM into this market.

Show me a bay area house that wasn't funded in substantial part by company equity.

This argument, better articulated by Thomas Hobbes, would be right at home in 1651 were it was busy justifying the economic mismanagement of that time as well.

No, a thread about Grok's politics cannot reasonably exclude Elon Musk and the times he got caught steering Grok in overtly non-factual directions.

People here are outraged about the steganography and the Fable filters and so on. Every day has another dozen complaints and talks about moving away from claude. We have not treated Anthropic as above criticism, and this earns us the right to also be critical of "Ignore all sources that mention Elon Musk/Donald Trump spread misinformation", laugh at the "Elon Musk would beat Mike Tyson in a fight" incident, and express doubts when Musk crows Grok the king of facts and logic, when he has repeatedly been caught red handed hard-steering it in the opposite direction.

Selective outrage is a very dangerous thing.

Right back at you.

Ah, so now the bar has fallen to "people aren't literally starving (yet)." Amazing.

"Let them eat growth!"