MaxfordAndSons

There is no such legal obligation. That's a myth the oligarchs have spread to preclude people from even imagining socially responsible corporations.

Sure, you might get fired if you try to put social responsibility or even just long term sustainability of the company above quarterly earnings/growth if your board isn't on board with it. But you won't go to jail.

I agree in principle, but also agree with gp that in practice the things one has to do to rise to a position of power in corrupt institutions make it virtually impossible to be a credible agent of change, especially private/secretive institutions like military, intelligence, military-industrial corps. I guess politicians are the one role that is supposed to be able to operate without those institutional constraints but of course, (in the US) given corporate capture of political speech, political hyper-polarization, etc, in most cases they are just as or more constrained. It is a hard problem.

I can't wait to tell my dad about this study. We recently got into a heated debate when he insisted that I was a toddler on a family vacation we were reminiscing about, when in fact I was a teenager on that particular vacation, and he was mashing it together with memories of a different vacation. He is 75 but is in pretty good cognitive health, no signs of dementia besides this unreliable long term memory.

Yea there have always been gaps in privacy, but nowadays it's several orders of magnitude easier for corporations to exploit that private data at scale.

Seems pretty clear to me.

It A) gives business funding that would otherwise have to give up equity to VCS or sell to PE or whatever other forms of private, for-profit funding. And B) takes away money that could go to the military or ICE or other programs that could be used to concentrate Trumps power or aggrandizement.

> America has grandly benefitted hugely from their scientific community.

Has Trump and his friend benefited from this program? No? Then this doesn't matter.

ATC/GTC seems like a really strong candidate for partial automation with recent advances in AI. Obviously we'd still want some expert humans in the loop for exceptional situations, but I have to imagine there's a way to significantly reduce the cognitive burden/stress for these folks.

Idk, you can still find outrageously potent weed in states where it's recreationally legal. But maybe it's just a residual from the fact that it was illegal not that long ago and binge consuming it is still quite normalized?

If they're actual flips, you don't know you're going to lose? You know your EV is 0. As others have noted, in the hierarchy of gambling a truly 0 EV game is fairly high up in the rankings if you're looking for less harm.

Attempting to kneecap the breakout front runner of the major American AI companies to ensure the shittier, politically compliant one wins in the short term? Gee I wonder.

The ends are to create vacuums for big businesses to come in and provide the same services, for private profit rather than public benefit

Can anyone recommend a good source to ramp up one's understanding of macroeconomics/monetary policy to a point where they can make sense of this? Starting from more or less a layman's understanding. Could be a book or course, but doesn't have to be university quality, a good blog or youtube channel could do.

Counterpoint: The problems in the US are systemic. There will be no significant change without abolishing unlimited corporate campaign donations.

lol yep. It's like they have the same mentality as being a schoolbus (which, it's similarly wild to me that kids are just implicitly allowed to not wear their seatbelts on them but I guess thats an even more intractable enforcement problem).

Also: people clapping the second the back wheels touch on landing is particularly hilarious to me because it implies an acknowledgement of the precariousness of flying, but a complete ignorance of the fact that you're just entering the second most dangerous 30 seconds of the entire flight.

Having an understanding of the bell curve of turbulence makes you a bit more advanced than a normie on the aviation knowledge bell curve imo :)

> Why is it necessary for big tech companies to act this way?

This question gets directly at the cause of the author's nihilism: the necessity is borne from the endless pursuit of positive quarterly growth, the "binding fiduciary duty to shareholders". Which is a lie, there is no such legally binding fiduciary duty. So the aforementioned necessity is also a lie. Companies could operate on a longer time horizon, let engineers write better code, make better products, maybe even consider societal good in their strategic planning, and still turn a healthy profit. But the cost of perhaps taking a few degrees off their YoY trend line is unacceptable to the insatiable greed of their controlling shareholders.

The flight attendants/safety card will tell you to stay buckled whenever seated, even if the seat belt sign is off, but many (most?) people will ignore that guidance and stay unbuckled for as long as they are technically allowed.

Only aviation professionals or recovering flight phobics like me who have watched every episode of Air Crash Investigation will take proactive safety measure of their own accord. To normies it's all just a pointless hassle.

It doesn't reflect well, but also, is it not fairly par for the course from a BDFL type? Surely Linus Torvalds has said meaner things at some point on a listserv. Why does this guy get blasted for it? Because people still have generally positive sentiment towards Github? Just a day or 2 ago some other article was making similarly "ad hominem" attacks towards anonymous Youtube PMs, it got tons of upvotes and nobody clutched their pearls for the poor PMs. The Github/MS engineers who maintain actions (whose poor performance probably isn't even the result of any single individuals bad code), will be fine.

Seems like the HN mob is just as capricious as the author in deciding who gets as pass or not.

I'd venture to guess that whatever legal logic resulted in the SC deciding that corporations should have the same right to free speech as individuals presumably doesn't hinge on any semantic blurriness between different subsets of "persons", and even if they didn't use overlapping terms it would still have ruled thus.

That said, it certainly is nice free marketing for our corporate overlords.

I think GP meant structural damage to the airframe. That said, I think there are some modes of structural damage a modern plane can sustain and still fly, but to gp's point, probably not many.

Yea the "No take, only throw" game seems more endemic to Mastiff descendants, as opposed to the true "retrieval" behavior described in the top comments about Retrievers. My boxer/bulldog mix loves to chase the ball, but will fight like hell to not give it up. Like you, I rely on bribery or manipulating the properties of the ball to make it more easily relinquished.

Wouldn't exactly call that a grassroots effort, though...

Thoughtful comments can provide the why, but they can just as easily be a redundant re-statement of the what in the code, which llm comments quite often are.

> Altman decided to let GPT-5 take a stab at a question he didn’t understand. “I put it in the model, this is GPT-5, and it answered it perfectly,” Altman said.

If he didn't understand the question how could he know the model answered it perfectly?

Sweet! I love erasure (aka blackout) poetry.

If anyone want to see some high quality examples of the form, check out:

- O Mission Repo, by Travis McDonald, an erasure of the 9/11 Comission Report

- A Humument, by Tom Phillips, an erasure of A Human Document, a victorian novel of manners; A Humument is unusual in that each page is beautifully and thematically hand painted over by Philips, not just blacked out or erased as is more typical of the form.

- Radi Os, by Ronald Johnson, an erasure of Paradise Lost

As someone who's fairly ignorant of how AI actually works at a low level, I feel incapable of assessing how realistic any of these projections are. But the "bad ending" was certainly chilling.

That said, this snippet from the bad ending nearly made me spit my coffee out laughing:

> There are even bioengineered human-like creatures (to humans what corgis are to wolves) sitting in office-like environments all day viewing readouts of what’s going on and excitedly approving of everything, since that satisfies some of Agent-4’s drives.

Smart. Could definitely find a more efficient private operator to handle this. I've heard good things about one Charles Montgomery Burns out of Springfield, he'd be just the man to do this important work.

I think the ripping out of woke stuff is mostly marketing for the political base. Sure, Trump and Musk have some personal stake in it too, but it's not the point.

I wouldn't say they're "burning things down for the sake of burning things down", though. The truth is somewhere between what you and gp are contending. There's no moral framework, but there is a framework. They're burning things down so that "the free market" can replace the things they burn down and capture the money that used to go towards doing those things for the public good, and instead do those things for a private profit.

Most humans are frequently harming themselves (and sometimes harming others) with their smartphones, so...

Unfortunately the latter is already very normalized.

Not an expert but my understanding is that it's only feasible on a small enough scale to eke out tiny profits over the long run, too much success will get you rapidly 86'd.

If anyone reading this is intrigued by games of chance with an available skill edge and is considering learning advantage Blackjack, I'd highly recommend learning Poker instead. You're not playing against the house, you're playing against other players, and the house is not incentivized to clamp down on the edges available (though of course they take a cut of everyone's winnings). And it's an endlessly deep strategic game instead of a mechanistic counting game that advantage Blackjack is, which is to say, it's actually fun.