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Switching to an iPhone will put you in an even worse walled garden that respects you even less. Even simple things like setting your default navigation app in iOS are gated behind moving to the EU.

True, but the point is, once you've sucked it up and given up, you may as well get other benefits back in exchange for turning tail. And the iPhone is unfortunately THE primary platform most applications develop for.

Personally, I am willing to just ditch the Android, get an iPhone as a "contact- and banking-only" device, and drag with me some sort of small computer everywhere. I've already dragged a linux retroconsole to a large number of places and have watched videos and listened to music and even edited code through it. May as well do the obvious and call it quits on phones-for-non-phone purposes entirely if phones will be so dedicated to being shitboxes.


I also had a similar thought after these announcements. The main issue is seamless synching that syncthing provides between Linux and Android. There are alternatives like Mobius Sync etc but what I've heard is that they do app-specific sync, not like e.g., sync all my files in this folder X in Linux to a folder Y on iPhone. I'm not an iPhone user but this has always been the main hurdle for me to switch over despite the increasingly locking down of Android.

For files I use the open source Material Files, which supports SFTP servers. So I just have a little file server. For calendar, because Google doesn't reliably support background services, it's best to use a calendar app with builtin caldav sync. For carddav, I use a background sync app though (davx). Super lame that this is not built into android, not even into lineage. You'd think someone would implement native caldav/carddav sync? Maybe this is my calling haha.

I'm telling that someone who comes up with a decent file sync setup between iPhone, Android and Linux/Windows without charging a monthly fee will make some good money on one-time buy fees alone. Dropbox etc can do things like these but I'm not interested in paying monthly fees for using my own storage across devices.

For my desktop systems I do a nighly rsync to a central onsite server, which does nighly encrypted ZFS send to an offsite archive. I suppose a script could trigger on file change using Linux file watch features (exposed via CLI and C headers). What I'm not sure about is wether two way sync with rsync is possible. This could run as a simple daemonized bash script. On error the script would just retry. Rsync would have to handle conflicts, it probably has features for it. Paste this comment into a coding CLI and boom, you have your solution :). Does need rooted Android for running shell scripts on boot. But a good coding CLI can log into your phone and set everything up.

Have you tried KDEConnect?

Every day, its great. But it is more suitable for adhoc sharing, not keeping pairs of folders in sync like Syncthing does.

Banking and govt. on a cheap, locked Android. The rest (mail, calling?, SMS, web, on an unlocked Android). You'd need two SIMs, one for the banking/govt google play stuff, and one for the regular phone. My bank does support a physical reader device though. That may eliminate the main Google Play dependency. Open Android will still exists right? But it won't have the Play Store and Services. You could also download the APK on the official phone, then pull the APK off it and install that on the open phone. Won't work if the app requires play integrity, but I think there are alternatives for that. Pretty lame that this is needed, but I'm used to this crap anyway.

> Apple didn't lie about supporting a user's freedom to run anything they like, only to execute a rug pull after they successfully drove the other open options out of the marketplace.

They did execute a rugpull, and they aren't offering safety anymore.

The rug pull is ads in the app store. If I go to the app store now and search for my bank's name, the first result is a different bank. If I search for 'anki', the first 3 results are spam ad-ware tracking-cookie trash.

If I search "password store" I get 4 results before the "password store" app. I had a family member try to install one of the google-docs suite of apps, and the first result was some spamware that opened a full-screen ad, which on click resulted in a phishing site.

My family can't safely use the app store anymore because they click the first result, and the first result for most searches is now adware infested crap because of apple's "sponsored results".

What's the point of charging huge overhead on the hardware, and then an astounding 30% tax, and also a $100/year developer fee, if you then double-dip and screw over the users who want your app by selling user's clicks to the highest bidder?


Don't forget that Apple is spying on their users even more then Google does (which is gross in its own). Apple controls much more user data then Google does.

At the same time Apple keeps telling their users some fairy-tales about "privacy".

No, Apple isn't honest. Definitely not.


The question is how much of that data do they sell to data brokers.

Google also "Doesn't sell your data to data brokers"

Because they sell "insights" or "access" or "marketing" or whatever.


Sources needed.

> A disgruntled waymo contractor in the Philippines can remote drive you into a crowd of people.

They cannot. The remote drivers for Waymo offer "nudges" to the robot driver, but they cannot do full remote control.

They can effectively mark a dot in the middle of a crowd of people on their tablet and say "Your best course of action is to drive here", and the waymo very well might decide to try and follow that suggestion, but they cannot override Waymo's brakes nor coded-in "do not hit humans" mandate, and the waymo would stop before hitting anyone.

> Only a relatively small number of these cars have been on the road, in limited conditions, and only for a small number years.

The average uber driver has driven fewer miles on the road than Waymo's software, and hasn't seen all the conditions either. Most uber drivers have cumulatively like 5-20 years driving experience in the city they're driving in.

Waymo has racked up waaaay more miles than the average single human ever gets, and unlike humans, all the Waymos benefit from improvements to the software.

> There will be failures and risks we haven't even imagined yet.

This is pointless fearmongering. Like, ketchup could cause cancer, but we have no meaningful evidence in that direction, so saying "ketchup has unknown risks we haven't imagined yet" is silly.

We know now that waymo is statistically safer than human drivers, I personally know that I haven't had a waymo driver make me feel unsafe yet, but uber drivers often did, so you know, waymo seems to have some pretty nice improvements already.

I'll wait for actual evidence of these "unimaginable risks and failures" before I evaluate them. At this point, it would have to be a pretty bad failure to change the math though.


I mean, they claim they've got 15B consumer revenue and 900M weekly active users.

If that's accurate, that means what, like 11% of the human population is using their product, and the average user pays $15?

That seems incredibly high, especially for poorer countries.

Still, I do know that if I go to a random cafe in the developed world and peep at people's screens, I'm very likely to see a ChatGPT window open, even on wildly non-technical people's screens.


> people have had their entire network compromised by bots they left running overnight

I'm curious if you have references to this happening with OpenClaw using one of the modern Opus/Sonnet 4.6 models.

Those models are a bit harder to fool, so I'm curious for specific examples of this happening so I can do a red-team on my claw. I've already tried all sorts of prompt injections against my claw (emails, github issues, telling it to browse pages I put a prompt injection in), and I haven't managed to fool it yet, so I'm curious for examples I can try to mimic, and to hopefully understand what combination of circumstances make it more risky


No maliciousness or injection required, even the newest and most resistant models can start doing weird stuff on their own, particularly when they encounter something failing that they want to work.

Just today I had Opus 4.6 in Claude Code run into a login screen while building and testing a web app via Playwright MCP. When the login popped up (in a self-contained Chromium instance) I tried to just log in myself with my local dev creds so Claude would have access, but they didn't work. When I flipped back to the terminal, it turned out Claude had run code to query superadmin users in the database, picked the first one, and changed the password to `password123` so it could log in on its own.

This was a sandboxed local dev environment, so it was not a big deal (and the only reason I was letting it run code like that without approval), but it was a good reminder to be careful with these things.


> it turned out Claude had run code to query superadmin users in the database, picked the first one, and changed the password to `password123` so it could log in on its own.

Man, every LLM quirk behavior really is a thing a monomaniacal junior dev would do...


LLMs are trained on data produced by humans after all :)

Gas cars are great until you realize you have to replace the gas. Then you'll realize the cost of owning a gas car.

Once people realize they're literally burning the expensive gas they put in their vehicle, the game is over.

Also, gas is a limited resource which after you burn never ever comes back, so it is expected to get more expensive, while all the rare earth metals in batteries can be recycled into new batteries because when you use the battery, you aren't actually burning it away into nothing. You can even recharge it.


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

> China has more than 10,000 protected areas, covering eighteen percent of the country's land

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

> As of 2022, the 42,826 protected areas covered 1,235,486 km2 (477,024 sq mi), or 13 percent of the land area of the United States.

Can you be more specific? China has areas of protected wilderness, and you can in fact go to many of them and be in nature. What's the practical difference?


Another comment said it, but that's basically land protected from most use, with some exceptions that are more akin to our national park system, right? I'm talking more about BLM lands in the west, or national forests in the east. Also, there are states with significant public lands holdings that are in the same spirit.

With our public lands, I can usually go to them anytime I want, I don't have to reserve anything. I can park my car, I can get out, and I can begin just walking into the woods or grasslands, sometimes on trail, sometimes off. I can basically camp wherever I want in many of these places. If there's a stream, I can fly fish. If it's hunting season, I can hunt. I can basically disappear into a place that feels wild for a bit.


A protected area like a national park is pretty much the opposite of what op is talking about.

I was curious, so I dug a bit.

Under the hood it's effectively running:

    docker run --rm -w $PWD:/workspace \
      python:3.11-slim \
      pip install -q patchpal && \
      <command>
Which cool, great, I sure love "pip install"ing every time instead of just baking a single container image with it already installed.

This isn't any sort of fancy or interesting sandboxing, this is shelling out to "docker run", and not even using docker as well as it could.

Quoting from the linked page:

> The tradeoff is ~5-10 seconds of container startup overhead

Sure, maybe it's 5-10 seconds if you use containers wrong. Unpacking a root filesystem and spinning up a clean mount namespace on linux is a few ms, and taking more than a second means something is going wrong, like "pip install"ing at runtime instead of buildtime for some reason.

I can spin up a full linux vm and run some code in quicker than 5 seconds.


> Which cool, great, I sure love "pip install"ing every time instead of just baking a single container image with it already installed.

Obviously the correct thing for such a use case would be building their own image with whatever tools are needed and then using that.

Unfortunately, then they’d probably get roasted for not maintaining the image well enough and not having proper enough automation set up to keep it recent in Docker Hub or wherever, which they’d then also have to do. On an individual level, it’s easier to just hold it wrong and do what works. Could also build the image locally once, but again, more work.

I think the ideal DX on Docker’s side would be:

  docker run some-container --pre-requisites “pip install…”
Basically support for some list of commands needing to be done, which would build an intermediate image locally and reuse it whenever the same base image and prerequisite command is used in a run command. Then you could avoid doing unnecessary init in the container itself and keep using silly little scripts without having to push reusable images and keep them up to date yourself.

You just set up CI/CD on GitHub and have it dump an image into ghcr it’s trivial. Claude excells at seeing up workflows. I don't know why anyone bothers with Dockerhub at all really.

> You just set up CI/CD on GitHub and have it dump an image into ghcr it’s trivial. Claude excells at seeing up workflows. I don't know why anyone bothers with Dockerhub at all really.

Probably because Docker Hub has great discoverability. For my own needs I use Gitea Packages and Woodpecker CI cause GitHub actions feels worse (also in comparison to GitLab CI) or maybe sometimes Nexus as a registry when I need to decouple from my Git platform or need a pull through proxy no matter the original source (I also build my own base and language runtime images but just host upstream PostgreSQL for example). I also use Claude quite heavily but the reality is that not everyone does and anything that we say should “just” be done often won’t because of a variety of reasons (limited free time also being one of those).

All of that is a bit like saying "I don't know why anyone would willingly inflict Docker upon themselves when Podman exists!" or maybe that people should just prefer FreeBSD jails or NixOS. I will say, however, that making the good stuff easier to do is always a good move.


FWIW, people making the exact mistake you describe, at scale, is the only hypothesis I ever came up with for the sheer number of downloads from PyPI that pip used to get (and many other things that you wouldn't expect production code to need at runtime, like `setuptools`, still do). You'd think that ordinary users would only ever need to get it from PyPI when they upgrade, which admittedly could happen once per pip version per virtual environment if you didn't know or care how to do it any better. But we're talking about over half a billion downloads per month. It used to be firmly on the top 20 list.

Really, the fact that any package gets that many downloads is crazy to me. (I think the main reason that boto3 ecosystem stuff tops the charts is that they apparently publish new wheels daily.) How many devices run Python? How many of those need, say, Numpy? How many of those really care about being on the latest version all the time, and can't use a cached version? (Granted, another problem here is that you can't readily tell pip "prefer a cached version if anything already cached is usable". Pip doesn't even know what's in its own cache, unless it was built locally; the cache is really only there to power a caching HTTPS proxy, so it stores artifacts keyed by a hash of the original download URL.)


That's really bad... I don't care if people (probably LLM here) do these kind of mistakes in their own personal tooling. But when you're going to distribute it as some sort of library, it becomes unacceptable.

Write public libraries for solving issues of domains you are an expert in. If your library is LLM generated, it is most likely useless and full of errors that will waste other people's time and resources.


> This isn't any sort of fancy or interesting sandboxing, this is shelling out to "docker run", and not even using docker as well as it could.

That doesn’t sound right - the LLM told them it was a fantastic idea!


Yeah, but how do you find the person making the threats?

Polymarket accounts are more-or-less just a crypto address.

Whatsapp accounts are somewhat easier to link to a real identity, but still not hard to at least obscure a bit.

The arm of the law struggles to reach across borders, and on the internet, it's quite plausible all those involved are in different jurisdictions.


Polymarket runs on Polygon, which, like most blockchains, has public history. If the user wasn't very careful about how they got their money into the system, it traces back to a public cryptocurrency exchange with KYC records.

Ok but if you're using it to kill people you're probably going to be pretty careful about how you got your money into the system.

You'd be very surprised. It's more likely to be a collection of internet trolls than to be organized crime

...so then trace the transfer to each identity? How does knowing the first person in the chain help identify the 2nd and 3rd, etc? What if there are 50 identities and the coin has a dozen origins?

That's the part about the user being careful how they got their money into the system.

You're also assuming Ethereum-clone chains work the same way as Bitcoin. They do not. An Ethereum wallet has a single long-term identity.


Well, that's why it's called an investigation.

That's the BS reply that always comes when (in particular) bitcoin is associated with crime: that it is traceable. Well, it hardly is. And for the average policeman/woman, even less so. And when the owner has taken some care, as you admit, practically impossible even for experts.

It's not BS though? That's what companies like Chainalysis professionally. This was covered in graphic detail as to how they caught a pedo ring in Andy Greenberg's book Tracers In The Dark.

Isn't it like claiming that breaking and entering is pointless, as you can always trace the perp through finger prints, unless they happen to wear gloves? Except in this case, most of the criminals operate from outside your jurisdiction as well.

In this case the threats all seemed to be delivered in Hebrew, so it's plausible that those involved resided in Israel.

Yes, it seems likely.

I assume the author would have noted in his blog post if the Hebrew used in making the threats came across as non-native or non-fluent.

Machine translation is really good these days, but I still think there are some "tells" for a truly vernacular and local command of a language.


Because translation is so very hard?

Yes, for colloquial speech to be plausible to a native speaker.

I assume the strange English translations of some of the Hebrew messages are because the messages were badly translated to Hebrew. It certainly sounds like the kind of result you'd get out of Google Translate.

Polymarket has KYC for US users now. Can you get around it with a VPN though? I think so.

>Yeah, but how do you find the person making the threats?

Subpoena Meta for all of the IPs of the account. Subpoena the ISPs for data who was using the IP. Bring in the likely people who were sending the message for questioning.


And when the people sending the messages turn out to be in a different country?

Maybe they are all in North Korea and beyond any extradition. But police broadly defined don’t even try very hard when it comes to certain crimes.

Then work with local law enforcement.

Polymarket's founder is Shayne Coplan, 27-year old "youngest self-made billionaire" (why do all billionaires seem devoid of ethics?)

A sane system would just throw him in jail until his illegal betting market implements KYC.


Polymarket is banned in most first world countries (including the US). It's not particularly tough to get around with a VPN, but they do enough that they have plausible deniability. I'm sure if the US wanted to they could go after them and prove that they're still letting US customer sign up, but it's not the open and shut case you're making it out to be.

Polymarket US is starting to roll out in the US and other countries where Polymarket cannot operate, but that's a separate company and they do abide by KYC laws similar to Kalshi.


Same with Kalshi's founders. As if becoming rich, off gambling and speculation, is supposed to inspire some kind of admiration.

The lunacy of the mysticism of money.


When power is concentrated to the government, the corruption is concentrated with it. Incarceration and the end of privacy don't restore the victims. A consumer protection bureau could bring a civil suit against Polymarket to pay the journalist.

> When power is concentrated to the government, the corruption is concentrated with it.

This is a hackneyed neoliberal fundamentalist myth.

If power is concentrated anywhere, it should only ever be in government - where it's answerable to the public electorally.

Governments become corrupt when they are weak, and turn to serving private interests rather than the public they represent.

Corruption in general is far more prolific and fruitful where government is weak (the neoliberal ideal) - which is one of the reasons corrupt private actors look to weaken government - for instance by undermining public trust in it or lobbying for its parasitization by private entities. Or by stuffing their acolytes minds with foolish neoliberal fundamentalist myths.


Interesting tangent. This is the first I've heard the term "neoliberal" but it feels like it's being used as a perjorative term for libertarians?

"If power is concentrated anywhere..." The libertarian ideal is that it is not concentrated anywhere, because power corrupts. Maybe neoliberals want power concentrated in some entity that isn't government, and that's what you are arguing against? I guess I better do a little research on this new (to me at least) word


> If the penalty for a crime is a fine, then that law only exists for the lower class.

A lawsuit would just be the "cost of doing business" for Polymarket. Until there is no skin in the game, there will be no change or accountability.

If CISOs can be held criminally liable for data breaches, the rest of C-suite can be held criminally liable for their own decisions as well.

In this case, the guy knowingly operates a betting market that illegally does not require KYC.


On the other hand, what often happens with high level corruption cases in my country is that people go to jail for a few years, but none or next to none of the money is ever recovered. So quite a few crooked politicians and business man just accept prison as nothing more than an unpleasant bump on the way to getting extremely rich, and roll with it. So you actually need a combination of both money and personal fault for really fixing some of this.

>In this case, the guy knowingly operates a betting market that illegally does not require KYC.

It's not illegal where he is. You can't go around arresting people in other countries just because they don't follow your country's law.


Yes, I think they should implement KYC pretty darn quick, and perhaps there’s more they can do. But he didn’t make the death threats.

And what do you think KYC would help with? The threats were made on WhatsApp, not Polymarket.

It would make more sense to campaign for better background checks on WhatsApp. A case can be made that a chat system with discoverable identities should have better safeguards. If the incentive to make a threat is financial gain rather than a pure desire to kill, restricting the means in which a threat can even be made (or identifying the participants) would help silence the noise and give actionable insights to law enforcment.

I’m generally opposed to KYC and similar measures, but if a platform is already collecting massive amounts of user data, it should at least use that data to help protect the people who become vulnerable because of it.


Polymarket is a set of blockchain smart contracts. It's banned in most countries but you can still use it by interacting with the blockchain directly.

WhatsApp would be more direct, but if they're uncooperative then knowing who is betting might provide some clues.

That might help in some cases, but even if there are 10,000 people with bets of >$X on an outcome, that won't be much help determining which one is making anonymous death threats.

There is a fundamental architectural problem here with no easy band-aid fix, and the companies involved are desperate to deny it because their founders have personal fortunes riding on it.


> why do all billionaires seem devoid of ethics?

why do all NBA players seem so tall?


A sane system doesn't "throw" human beings in jail for flippant and arbitrary reasons. Sociopaths exploit this, to be sure.

The reasons are neither flippant or arbitrary.

What is the law being broken?

"Lack of regulation clarity on your part does not constitute a crime on mine". Why is that not a valid defence?


> What is the law being broken?

“In most jurisdictions, death threats are a serious type of criminal offence” [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_threat#Legality


Polymarket's founder did not threaten anyone.

yea just throw the CEO of microsoft in jail too because illegal transactions are set via Xbox live.

Betting markets are legally required to have KYC. If you or I operated a casino illegally we would ABSOLUTELY be thrown in jail.

Do you seriously think fraudulent Xbox live transactions are on the same level of the heinous insider trading going on in betting markets?

Or do you just think C-suite should be legally immune from accountability overall?

Polymarket's decentralized and anonymous nature was an intentional choice by its creator precisely because it enables illegal, anonymous transactions.


How is the ceo responsible for operating under the current legal framework which allows his platform not to require KYC? Unless they are breaking the law, why should anyone arrest him?

It's the responsibility of the lawmakers to make them illegal or force them to do kyc.

If you fantasize about China or Russia way of doing things you should move there.


He is breaking the law, and was under DOJ investigation for it until he bribed the president's son to call them off.

If he's breaking the law and there is proof to that, then he will and should be arrested.

From where has it entered your mind that they don't do KYC?

Anybody can send anonymous threats, that has nothing to do with any betting company, unless they are sent through that platform.


Trivial to make a polymarket account without KYC

And what is the relevance to the death threats mentioned in the article?

unironically yes, I think with the huge payday they get for being responsible for Microsoft they should also carry an equivalent responsibility when they cause social harms. Billionaires have gotten way too comfortable.

I hate them too, but arresting them for something that they simply cannot prevent due to technical limitations, since they cannot scan in realtime all the conversations happening on their platform, is Russian-style government action, not rule of law.

Before they built the platform this danger did not exist. There is no law of nature that says massive social media platforms that are too large to moderate effectively need to exist.

If they have built a thing they can't maintain that isn't bully for them and we should feel sorry that their best efforts aren't working well enough - it's proof that that thing (or at least the way they built that thing) isn't feasible.


If you can't do a thing safely and without harm, perhaps you should not be doing the thing? It blows my mind the number of tech people who just say "it's too hard to do it safely and without harm so we'll just do it anyway and externalize the damage to other people." Lazy, greedy, amoral douche bags.

Cars? Airplanes? Motorcycles? Child birth? Life itself? Nothing could be done 100% safely and 100% without harm. Obsession with safety is what helps governments become totalitarian even in traditionally-democratic countries. Obsession with safety is the reason terrorists win.

Edit: Personally I think betting on war is immoral and should be condemned by all sane people, but saying that everything needs 100% safety and 100% no harm is very naive.


The items you've listed are all quite safe and palatable in their harm when contrasted with the benefits they bring. I'm not seeing the same picture when looking at polymarket - I don't see the great gain we're accomplishing as a society in exchange for an addicting platform that breeds organized crime. Some inventions are just plain dangerous and a bad idea.

>(why do all billionaires seem devoid of ethics?)

The type of person at the top of a hierarchical system is always a direct reflection of its play rules. In late-stage internet capitalism you win by being the most unhinged and un-emphatic. Today's young adults grew up on twitter, 4chan, video game gambling and with influencers telling them that the only thing that matters is material wealth and status. This culture has moved more and more into the mainstream in the last decade.


> late-stage internet capitalism

This isn't a thing.

Capitalism is just capitalism.


Pretty sure every single economist would disagree with you

Happen to have any links?

Please dont sealion. You can start simple and work from there to make your case. It's not compelling to declare facts.

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


I’m not sure what that wiki article has to do with a criticism of the oblique “late stage” capitalism term. Particularly when the only reference is a link to the relevant late stage capitalism article which mentions the term isn’t all that clear cut or even used with any degree of consistency, which is why I’m asking for proof that “every single” economist agrees.

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


You said

> Capitalism is just capitalism.

If you want to just debate the validity of the specific term “late stage capitalism” then sure go ahead, but that’s not all you did in your prior comment. Capitalism comes in many forms and variations.

That being said, late stage capitalism is such a common term now that to say “it isn’t a thing“ feels more like something you feel should be the case than anything else. The fact that everyone in this conversation is able to understand the phrase without anyone needing to explain it is pretty indicative of that.


I don't know. Certainly the underlying mechanisms of capitalism remain the same, but it does not hurt to clarify the context that it exists within. The world is very different today, than say the 1960's, but the "rules" were the same. Capitalism has been accelerated a lot by the rise of information technology, specifically the internet, and today it is a whole different beast with unique "opportunities" and consequences.

I think the differentiating feature is that capitalism used to be tethered to producing things that were useful. The current model of wealth acquisition, so called "late-stage" seems to have shifted more towards rent seeking and extraction.

The only things that's true now is that there's more laxity around consolidation of power in big business. The core tenets of capitalism haven't changed in thousands of years.

Capitalism only exists for like 500 years. In some places of the world it did not fully develop until the 20th century. It is very young.

Are you confusing capitalism with class society in general? Yes, class society exists since the neolithic revolution. Those economic systems had barely anything in common with capitalism though. Even medieval feudalism is very different.

And yes, late stage capitalism is a term. It was coined by Lenin in his book about Imperialism. You might not agree with the term but that doesn't mean it is not real.

I think it is very obvious that 20th and 21st century monopoly capitalism is qualitatively different to 18th and 19th century free market capitalism.


The current financial system, which is integral to the current form of capitalism, only existed since 2008.

I would be reluctant to say that capitalism, as we have had after the industrial revolution, has existed in the same form for thousands of years. That just seems silly.

What seems silly about it? Labour is certainly more efficient but the principles and the outcomes remain largely the same.

I think you are right in that the primary mechanisms remain the same, or at least similar, but that was not my point anyways. The surrounding adjectives describe more the context of which capitalism exists within.

The effects and consequences of capitalism under feudalism or the age of slavery is, for example, fundamentally different from capitalism under a freer modern democracy. A slave or serf did not have the opportunities of capitalism, which changes how the system behaves and its effects.

The term "capitalism" becomes kind of meaningless, because it just describes a broad set of mechanisms. In the case of the question in this thread it is much more descriptive to include the context of which it exists within.


> (why do all billionaires seem devoid of ethics?)

Because no ethical person would accumulate a billion dollars. An ethical person would share the wealth they're creating with those around them instead of hording that wealth.

What can you do with 100 million that you couldn't do with 10?


Just as a note - I feel like there's a lack of understanding of how difficult it is to get a billion dollars. It isn't something you can just trip into and I think the concentration of that much wealth really goes against something in most people's approach to the world where generosity increases as you gain more wealth. To capture that much wealth as a business owner you have to be extremely stingy with compensation to those who accompanied you along that path which is not how most people tend to operate - more often people share that wealth and make sure those around them also benefit from the work even if the structure of corporations may technically entitle the owner to 100% of the upside.

Having assets worth X dollars is not the same thing as having X dollars. It means investors are willing to trade you X dollars for the assets.

Those investors don't want to give /you/ money, they want to give the billionaire money.


KYC is nothing sane. in what world does anything give you or anyone else the right to decide to probe people up their rear end just because they want to do business? people like you are extremely dangerous.

loads of banks all over the world now demands to know what you plan to spend the money on just to withdraw a bit cash. Some will even deny you saying "well.. you shouldnt buy a new car anyway". all the KYC shit. how about just no?


> in what world does anything give you or anyone else the right to decide to probe people up their rear end

A world in which these people bet on heinous things while insider trading/influencing those very things.

Privacy in gambling or insider trading is not a constitutional right.


Insider trading itself is only a crime when someone's betraying their fiduciary juty to an organisation, e.g. their employeer. There's nothing morally or legally wrong with using one's private information to make informed bets on other things, and economically speaking it produces better market prices/predictions because they reflect more information.

>A sane system would just throw him in jail.

<facepalm>

A capricious system that interprets based on whim, politics and influence is a large part of how we got here.

People like this and their less than moral path in which they further their endeavors succeed specifically because of this environment.

Polymarket is basically a platform to monetize petty stuff while also being able to monetize bad stuff. There is soooo much pressure to monetize bad stuff that once you poke a hole it's an uncontrolled leak. Polymarket recognized this, used it to scale, and then wisely used that money to get the legitimization and buy in that they needed to make the system (capriciously) say "this is fine for now you can keep going".

They basically pulled a "actually Mr. Banker, I owe you so much money that it's your problem" but for insider information. The other metaphor you could use if people with a steady supply of prescription opioids don't turn to street drugs.


There's probably a useful middle ground between tossing people in jail and rewarding with great wealth, power, and influence those people whose main drive appears to be accumulation of said things without regard for their fellow citizens.

It is not capricious to hold C-suite legally accountable for their choices. Lots of corporate scandals would simply not have happened if decisionmakers had skin in the game.

If CISOs can have personal liability for data breaches, CEOs can have personal liability for intentionally creating an illegal platform.

Instead we reward these people with billions for degrading the fabric of society.


> If CISOs can have personal liability for data breaches

Where’s this, now?


In the US it’s a legal battle currently being fought. CISOs have been charged by the SEC and other agencies, with varied success. Some cases have been deemed over-reach, some have not. And other were a case of a CISO doing ostensibly illegal things in their capacity (in some cases paying ransom demands have been interpreted as such, especially when disguised as other things).

We need either a “corporate death penalty” of sorts, more personal liability for c-suite execs, or some combo of the two. Too many people fail upwards to trust the system to sort out the “bad ones.”


Fair. I should probably say “we need to actually use the corporate death penalty.”

Yes, but you are very much right: the fact that it exists but that hardly anybody knows about it is what is the problem. There are many companies that over the years should have been dissolved because of incredible crimes and yet they all keep getting away with it.

Besides that I'm all for strict personal liability for the execs and the investors of the companies they invest in. That's of course the exact opposite of the way it works right now but that actually institutionalized externalization, one of the key issues with why the world is the mess that it is.

Corporations are fine, limited liability corporations are not, I'm becoming more and more convinced that they are in fact the root of all evil because they allow the erection of financial 'diodes' that allow you to partition your stash from your liabilities and the two should always be linked. They are a very effective mechanism to allow people to screw over society and claim it's all perfectly legal.


I’ve always felt LLC’s should more narrowly limit people’s liability more or less. It’s basically a shield currently. I also think it should be reserved for sole proprietorships or otherwise very small companies, and very specific kinds of companies at that. For instance, if I am drumming up funding for a movie I should not be personally held liable if it loses money (otherwise indie film would be completely snuffed out lol)

>A sane system would just throw him in jail until his illegal betting market implements KYC.

There's nothing sane about KYC, it's a fundamental assault on the right to financial privacy. And the people with power can always bypass it; only the little people suffer.


I think it's important to look at the context of the discussion around this comment. Someone has received credible death threats - clearly the current situation is one where the little people are already suffering.

> Someone has received credible death threats

2 points - 1) “credible” is carrying a lot of water in that statement, and 2) your implication is that any activity which could eventually or conceivably involve a lunatic making a death threat is not compatible with any level of privacy.

The second is incredibly disturbing - people have made death threats over E2E encrypted chat channels, therefore we must remove any privacy built in to such a model?


I'll just dodge 1 for the moment since we're discussing an article about those threats. For the second point - I'm not saying that death threats should invalidate privacy concerns I just wanted to stress that the little people are already seeing quite a few downsides so it's important to view this issue with more nuance than a Facebook-like scenario when the privacy only comes at the cost of ad-revenue.

Putting aside this is sort of a knee-jerk reaction, if this was actually implemented you’d just see the role of the CEO change to basically be a highly-paid fall-guy. People in those positions today would vacate them for quieter roles behind the scenes, and corporations would put greater effort forth to hide their decision making processes. I don’t think it would be a better system.

>you’d just see the role of the CEO change to basically be a highly-paid fall-guy.

That seems to be assuming a world where CEOs actually face meaningful consequences and that feels like a good start.


"Meaningful consequences" in this case means "throwing a CEO in jail until they de-anonymize their platform," which sounds ripe for abuse to me.

In this specific case, perhaps. In most it means "throwing a CEO in prison or fining them extensively for crimes they have committed".

In what instance is a CEO not liable for their own crimes? At least in the US, they are still criminally liable for anything they do. If anything is at issue here, I think it's whether it can be proven a crime was committed and who can be proven guilty of it. I think often civil penalties end up being the answer because they're just easier to make stick (AIUI the burden of proof is lower in those cases).

Sure, and we can deal with that problem when it comes to it. For now, there are people at these companies that are clearly responsible and can be held accountable.

Why would anyone sign up to be the fall guy? Perhaps because the payoff is worth the the punishment. So make the punishment algorithmically outweigh the payoff, for example by seizing everything they were paid to be the fall guy plus jail time. Doesn't seem like a hard problem to solve if politicians were actually interested in holding CEOs and corporations accountable, the problem is the politicians themselves are bought and paid for.

This already happens with professional athletes, so we have a model to look at. Look, I don't disagree that all people should be held accountable for their actions, but sometimes the solutions people fire off half-cocked (throw a CEO in jail until they de-anonymize their platform, for example) are not going to be used in such a naive way.

I believe we should do away with limited liability as a concept. Companies would get lot less investments and lot more scrutiny if every stock holder was criminally held liable as a class for any crimes they commit. Lot of people would simply choose not to invest in such ventures or only select those where they can have sufficient oversight.

AFAIK limited liability is more about financial liability, not criminal. People are still responsible for actual crimes they commit, we just may need to classify more things as crimes.

I think discouraging investment is the opposite of what leads to a prosperous society. We'll just have a bunch of rich landlord sitting on piles of cash, afraid to give it to anyone because the risk of any jail time at all is probably too high for most.

And that doesn't even account for non-institutional investors. Can you imagine putting people in jail because of the meme stock they bought on Robin Hood?


I’m fine running straight down the list of corporate officers and senior managers and jailing them too until the behavior stops.

Why wouldn't capitalization, commas, etc do well?

These are text completion engines.

Punctuation and capitalization is found in polite discussion and textbooks, and so you'd expect those tokens to ever so slightly push the model in that direction.

Lack of capitalization pushes towards text messages and irc perhaps.

We cannot reason about these things in the same way we can reason about using search engines, these things are truly ridiculous black boxes.


> Lack of capitalization pushes towards text messages and irc perhaps.

Might very well be the case, I wonder if there's some actual research on this by people that have some access to the the internals of these black boxes.


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