timoth3y

Perhaps, but I'm not inclined to take their claims at face value.

Of course it is possible that all the managers and executives at BoA, and HSBC, Deutsche Bank, etc, etc are all innocent lambs and were completely shocked (shocked!) that they were making hundreds of millions of dollars facilitating money laundering.

That's exactly what the police investigation would, and should, determine.

Someone - an actual human person - needs to face criminal charges for these kinds of crimes.

The standard response is that it's too hard to determine exactly who is responsible since many people are involved and everyone is just doing their jobs and only sees a piece of it.

But that's not true, the police could start with whoever received bonuses for their work on the projects in question. After all, that's who the company thinks is responsible for it.

Of course that's just a starting point. Many people might have received bonuses and have had no idea what was going on. Some might have even raised concerns internally. They could share those emails and documents with the police investigators and easily clear themselves.

These corporations aren't the mafia. No one is going to spend five years in prison to protect their manager.

I have a a modest proposal. Any company wishing to use this kind of dynamic pricing should be willing to submit itself to "dynamic taxation".

Under dynamic taxation, we the public, would examine that firm's books at the end of the fiscal year and decide how much taxes they owe based on their ability to pay.

Note that companies are not natural people, they do not have a fundamental right to exist. Just like under dynamic pricing, if the shareholders and board think their dynamic taxes are too high, they are perfectly free to just dissolve the company and use their capital elsewhere.

This is not so much a problem with Musk himself, but with the massive media consolidation we've seen over the past 40 years in America.

With the recently approved mega-mergers its becoming even more consolidated and more restrictive of free speech.

An individual who makes a false insurance claim is committing a felony, but a manager who knowingly denies thousands of valid claims is rewarded with bonuses and promotions.

CEOs who who structures the company to denies as many valid claims as possible are handsomely rewarded by Wall Street for increasing margins.

Things really need to change at a core level in America.

> they are just enjoying hitting something with a stick

This is truly one of life's under-appreciated little pleasures!

I know this takes the fun out of it, and it is a fun project, but FWIW the speed of light is not an independent variable. It's woven into the fine-structure constant, the relationship between mass and energy, and how any kind of information is transmitted between objects in the universe.

This is more of a simulation of what if light was perceived as 5mph for you and kept the same for everyone else.

It is cool though.

I love my analog watches too dearly to give them up for a smart watch.

However, I just realized that analog watches also have "power users", and I am definitely not one of them.

My favorite watch (excuse me, "chronograph") has a stopwatch with lap memory, a tachymeter, support for multiple time zones, and a bunch of other features I have not thought about since the week I purchased it.

I don't really know how to use it all. I just like the watch.

This is a great move by France, but most of the rest of the world does not suffer from the telemarketing scam hell that Americans do.

I am a US citizen living overseas. I have a US cell number that is only used for 2FA for US financial institutions. No one else has that number. I get more scam calls every day on that number than I do in a year on my local number. It's crazy.

Most of the world has solved the worst of the problem by simply not allowing caller-ID spoofing and by blocking bad actors the way that ISPs block email coming from known bad IPs.

The US already has the STIR/SHAKEN authentication protocols, but the telcos seem to feel no financial or regulatory pressure to clamp down on all the sketchy intermediate carriers the scammers use to bypass them.

Maybe it's America's love of "market-based solutions" that prevents of from solving this problem the way everyone else has?

Rather then actually solve the problem via regulation, the US prefers to turn it into business opportunities to make the situation suck slightly less by letting the telcos sell subscriptions to moderately effective blocking programs and an creating an ecosystem of moderately effective apps.

It really seems like those meaningless, flashing YouTube kids videos, but for adults.

I've always found it somewhat ironic that the people who are least familiar with the actual research on the Dunning-Kruger effect tend to be the most confident in discussing it.

It's a sort of recursive Dunning-Kruger effect.

This is actually an easily solvable problem. In fact, most of the world has already solved it by not allowing caller-ID spoofing and by blocking bad actors similar to the way that ISPs block email coming from known bad IPs.

The US has the STIR/SHAKEN authentication protocols, but the telcos seem to have no financial are regulatory pressure to clamp down on all the sketchy intermediate carriers the scammers use to bypass them.

Rather then actually solve the problem, the US prefers to turn it into a business opportunity with the telcos selling subscriptions to blocking software and an entire ecosystem of moderately effective apps.

This is not specific to Silicon Valley. It's human nature.

People take the "vibe" from a work and assume the vibe is the meaning. Look at how things like Fight Club, The Punisher, and Wall Street are viewed in the general culture.

The Great Gatsby is a famous cautionary tale of the danger and pointlessness of unchecked pursuit of wealth. It's studied widely in US high schools. When the movie came out, all over the US people held "Gatsby Parties" which were 1920s themed parties focuses on ostentatious displaces of wealth.

No matter how profound and important the message, most people won't look beyond the vibe.

> frustratingly difficult to even get through the first lesson in which you are supposed to focus on your breath and minimize the wandering of your mind

Everyone experiences this. Please don't be frustrated by it.

The mind wandering is part of the practice. In fact, that instant where your mind has been wandering and you "snap out of it" is perhaps the most valuable.

That little skill carries over into real life. When someone cuts you off in traffic and you feel that flash of anger, your mind will catch itself and you'll just let it go and get on with your life.

You're probabably already doing things right.

A good article about a genuinely great and important book. One quibble.

> Lukashenka knew that arresting children for eating ice cream would make him a laughingstock abroad. Zuckerberg knows that threatening Wynn-Williams for standing in wooden silence on a stage makes him look like history's most guillotineable billionaire.

I don't think they think that. People this powerful who choose to surround themselves with fawning sycophants are undoubtably being told daily that the whole world is understanding and routing for them in their "perfectly reasonable response to these vicious attacks."

FWIW, I've just published this interview with David Ha an hour ago.

We talk in detail about Fugu and why these kind of routing models are likely to win out over the big frontier models.

He makes some very good arguments for them.

https://www.disruptingjapan.com/the-future-of-ai-looks-very-...

Said experts do not seem to have included this core analysis in the report.

Since housing starts are more likely in areas seeing rapid housing price appreciation, and construction employs many illegal workers, you could make just as strong of a case that increased housing costs drive unauthorized migration rather than the other way around.

That's why it's so hard, and so important, to disentangle correlation and causation.

The research is impressive in its granularity.

However, they seem to simply assert causality. It would seem far more likely that people (illegal or not) move to areas experiencing economic booms that, among other things, is push up home prices.

Palantir is clearly a mind-boggling on-the-nose, but terrible name to those familiar with the book.

The Palantiri consistently provided their users technically accurate intelligence that lead to disastrous strategic decisions.

Denethor committed suicide out of despair, after a palantir showed him the black fleet approaching, but he did not know that it was actually Aragorn who had captured the fleet and was coming with reinforcements.

We don't know specifically how the palantir deceived Saruman, but it's pretty clear it was one of the key factors in his corruption and downfall.

And even Sauron himself was misled in this way! The palantir showed him, correctly, that a hobbit and Aragorn were at Helm's Deep, and he concluded that Aragorn had the ring. So he prematurely moved his armies out of Mordor and left the plains and Mt Doom unguarded, which permitted the destruction of the ring.

I honestly can't think of a worse name for a company that provides intel for strategic decision making.

> "if the product is free, you are the product"

This is not true. You are the product whether you are paying or not.

If the company thinks they can make money by selling your data/attention/access, they will do so. Paying them does not stop them from monetizing you.

These new paid tiers will be slowly enshitified just like most modern paid plans.

> There’s a fallacy that gets used a whole lot to justify things like this ...

FWIW, this is the Fallacy of Composition

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacy_of_composition

The Luddites (or at least their successors) won, and we are lucky that they did.

I recently published an article about the Luddites. If you look at their actual demands, they were not anti-tech. They were labor activists. Life got much, much worse for most people in the industrial revolution until the laws they advocated were finally implemented.

https://www.disruptingjapan.com/the-real-luddites-would-have...

If you look at what their actual demands, the pattern is clear. They lobbied for support for unemployed, the right to vote, improved safely and labor conditions across all industries, and enforcing the labor laws that were already on the books. Banning machines was not part of their demands.

The Luddites were part of a larger labor movement that spanned multiple industries.

I think that is the core truth of the matter. Technology itself does not make life better.

I recently published an article about the Luddites. If you look at their actual demands, they were not anti-tech. They were labor activists. Life got much, much worse for most people in the industrial revolution until the laws they advocated were finally implemented.

https://www.disruptingjapan.com/the-real-luddites-would-have...

This will be just another minor cost of doing business unless they are treated like human drivers in at least two other ways.

1) If theses companies get enough points on their license, their license is revoked. Not just for that vehicle, but for all of their vehicles. (The number of points would need to be adjusted for number of miles driven.)

2) Senior executives could be held criminally liable for vehicular manslaughter the way a normal drivers are. A death doesn't mean someone is going to prison, but their would be a police investigation. If an exec decided to ship a product with a known bug that lead to someone's death it should be treated with the same seriousness as a drunk driver killing someone.

I used to be a professional musician, and I can't work if there is any music playing the the background. It drove my ex-wife nuts because she could not stand the silence. We ended up playing background sounds from coffee shops, which worked for both of us.

But recently there is one big exception!

I can listen to AI-generated instrumental jazz or blues in the background, and it does not distract me after the first few seconds. I think it's because the music doesn't go anywhere. It's just kind of noodling.

As a musician, I feel kind of bad listening to AI music, but it is amazing in this use case.

talk is cheap, so what is he doing today to make that happen? Is he supporting NGOs or politicians focused on making this happen, or is he just musing that it would be nice? (I honestly don't know, but I've only seen the non-committal musing.)

There is this ongoing flack in our "billionaire-said-a-thing" news where billionaires imply that their tech will result in huge benefits that will be delivered by someone else once they amass their fortunes.

Musk is the most obvious. He publicly proclaims his mission to create technology that ensures we all live better, healthier lives, while routinely violating labor, safety, and environmental laws and insisting his employees work 60-hour weeks with minimal vacation in order to give him a shot at becoming the world’s first trillionaire.

I wish the press would push back once in a while.

If you look at their actual demands its clear the the Luddites were not actually opposed to the new technology, but the new business practices.

It's an interesting parallel to AI today, where criticism of the business practices of AI firms tends to be written of as fear of new technology by people who will be "left behind".