There was also the point about lack of granularity and follow-through.
The government has the power to ruin your whole life, so it's reasonable that they have high standards of evidence to ruin your life. But if they can't secure a conviction they do nothing, they'll let you open another NGO and apply for another government grant as if nothing happened.
A business has the power to inconvenience you by refusing to do business with you. That's less ruinuous than what the government does so it's OK that their standards of evidence are lower.
But perhaps there should be something that the government can do in between nothing at all and ruining your life. Otherwise the same frauds will happen again and again.
I agree, but you've already mentioned the issues with the government having a punishment system that isn't based on the courts. We all know how great the secret no-fly list is.
My bicicle got stolen a long time ago and I never recovered it. The perpetrator was never caught.
From this we can conclude many things. Maybe the thief was very crafty. Maybe the local police are incompetent. Maybe everyone is trying their best and the job of going after bike thieves is very hard.
But you cannot ever convince me that an appropriate conclussion could be "your bicicle didn't actually get stolen". I saw it. I can't identify the thief, there will never be a conviction, but don't tell me it didn't happen.
A conviction in a court of law is very important to be able to confidently say "so-and-so has committed fraud". But requiring a criminal conviction just to be able to say that fraud has happened is lunacy.
Yes, but we're not talking about whether or not bike thefts happen, or medicare frauds, we're talking about what actions we're going to take in the future.
I too have had a bike stolen and it was an incredibly awful experience, but I'm not going to vote for a law requiring us to execute people accused of bike theft.
This is what is so incredibly frustrating about these types of conversations because so frequently you have one side proposing fact based strategies developed via reaearch and experiments and historical analysis and so forth, but that makes them quite complicated to explain in 30 seconds on tv, and on the other side you have some asshole going "all these problems are caused by <subgroup> and if you give me power I'll be cruel to them and everything will be better".
The latter's simplicity seems to be highly appealing and attempting to argue against it using facts and logic requires A) the listeners to actually respect facts and logic and B) and lot more effort to research/cite/develop the facts and logic.
So again, it sounds like fraud happened. This is bad. Some people were imprisoned because of it. Now what?
I keep asking this basic question because that's whats actually missing from the article.
Is there a specific person who should be in prison but isn't? Is there a law that could be passed to make fraud harder? What, specifically should be done?
Near the end of the book Winston finds out that he was watched much more thoroughly than he thought. They read his private diary and carefully put the same mote of dust on top of the cover so that Winston wouldn't notice it had been opened.
Sounds very hard actually. If you asked me to spend a significant fraction of Bill Gates' money I wouldn't even know how to begin.
How would you do it? Do you have a way to earn his trust, a service to offer him that he values a lot, a way to steal from him, or anything like that?
Melania apparently managed to do it with true love and kindness. Are you capable of sincerely loving Bill Gates for a period of several years, or fake it in a perfectly convincing way for several years?
I don't think it's that hard. MacKenzie Scott Bezos managed to give away nearly half (not accounting for appreciation) of the wealth she obtained from her divorce in a few short years.
She got them from the divorce. She didn’t have to convince anyone to pry them loose.
Notably, she played a huge part in how Amazon was structured due to her influence on Bezos.
I do find it very interesting though the apparently common pattern here of ‘woman gives away massive fortune she got from x to make the world better/rehabilitate her image’ or something.
Meanwhile, the men all seem to go on hooker binges. See Bezos, and now Gates (vs Epstein files).
No one, including the people getting screwed at the end, are actually innocent, but some definitely are more guilty than others eh?
You won't see it because it's mostly personal software for personal computers.
I've got a medical doctor handwriting decipherer, a board game simulator that takes a PDF of the rulebooks as input and an accounting/budgeting software that can interface with my bank via email because my bank doesn't have an API.
None of that is of any use to you. If you happen to need a similar software, it will be easier for you to ask your own AI to make a custom one for you rather than adapt the ones I had my AI make for me.
Under the circumstances, I would feel bad shipping anything. My users would be legitimately better off just vibe coding their own versions.
I disagree. There is a tier of people who can't vibe code what you've vibe coded, but also might not trust your app (especially the bank one). There is still a real gap here to be filled by professional work or fakers.
Professionals are doing what I am doing, only inside companies. They make custom software that solves ultra-specific problems of that one company.
I don't quite understand the obsession with shipping fancy enterprise b2b saas solutions. That was the correct paradigm for back when developing custom code was expensive. Now it is cheap.
Why pay for Salesforce when you only use 1% of Salesforce's features? Just vibe code the 1% of features that you actually need, plus some custom parts to handle some cursed bespoke business logic that would be a pain in the ass to do in Salesforce anyway.
Supposedly Richard Stallman's secretaries knew how to code their own Emacs macros.
I don't expect any LLM to empower people as much as Emacs can, but they will definitely empower more people in total, just because LLMs are easier to use than Emacs.
> > Pardoning a different drug dealer can be a way to show Maduro that they were serious about the offer, that they really would have gone easy on him.
Maduro is not a drug dealer and even if it was not directing all the limited resources of its government to stop the drug trade we are talking about allocation of resources which should have happened in order to put Americans Interests first whereas Venezuela has so many other serious problems.
Also even if all that was true we are talking about cocaine, the party (and somewhat productivity) drug.
The fentanyl is produced 10,000 miles away from Venezuela, in CHYNA which used to be a great talking point in 2016 but of course nothing ended up happening
It's possible to imagine all kinds of fantastical explanations but usually the simplest one is the correct one: Trump is receiving bags of money for the pardon. Also bolstered by his past (and ongoing) behaviour of openly and shamelessly enriching himself at every opportunity.
What if you fail for whatever reason and don't finish college? Then you spent a bunch of time and money for essentially no benefit.
College will always be worth it for people who are smart and driven and hard working. But a lot of people who are not like that are nevertheless encouraged to go to college because that's what everyone does.
The change in attitude towards college by the new generation is probably a reaction to the excesses of the previous one, when even mediocre students were encouraged to take a risk they were not prepared to even evaluate, let alone take.
I sometimes share interesting AI conversations with my friends using the "share" button on the AI websites. Often the back-and-forth is more interesting than the final output anyway.
I think some people turn AI conversations into blog posts that they pass off as their own because of SEO considerations. If Twitter didn't discourage people sharing links, perhaps we would see a lot more tweet threads that start with https://chatgpt.com/share/... and https://claude.ai/share/... instead of people trying to pass off AI generated content as their own.
The problem is that the current generation of tools "looks like something" even with minimal effort. This makes people lazy. Actually put in the effort and see what you get, with or without AI assist.
I think in that sentence the fog isn't really that important, it's just an excuse to tell you about the surroundings.
The speaker is probably standing near city limits. There is some sort of dock or shipyard down the river, there is some green nature stuff up the river. The river might come up later as a reference for other locations.
The government has the power to ruin your whole life, so it's reasonable that they have high standards of evidence to ruin your life. But if they can't secure a conviction they do nothing, they'll let you open another NGO and apply for another government grant as if nothing happened.
A business has the power to inconvenience you by refusing to do business with you. That's less ruinuous than what the government does so it's OK that their standards of evidence are lower.
But perhaps there should be something that the government can do in between nothing at all and ruining your life. Otherwise the same frauds will happen again and again.
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