Excellent replies to everyone in this thread. You're spot on.
Just out of curiosity, is there a marketplace for private APIs? I'd love if you could elaborate on the "charge someone else for it" part.
1,944 karma · joined August 12, 2019
Just out of curiosity, is there a marketplace for private APIs? I'd love if you could elaborate on the "charge someone else for it" part.
>> You are assuming that all the abuse would still occur and none of it is encouraged by the demand for that content. I don't know why we should make that assumption.
There's near universal agreement that child abuse is wrong and should be stopped. Profiting off of child abuse is even more wrong. But how much CSAM detected on phones is going to be because the user engaged in commerce with CSAM?
I think you'll have a few different cohorts caught by this process, but almost none of them will be producers/resellers/purchasers of CSAM content.
I'd bet most of the CSAM detected will be from the occasional legal case that stems from teenagers sending explicit content to each other. Once that content is registered, any classmates who downloaded photos from group texts and backed them up to icloud without thinking about will be raided and prosecuted.
Another group will be people who had CSAM planted maliciously, because this creates an easy vector for swatting if you can get photos onto someone's device. Not to mention the adversarial network attacks that have been on HN in the last few days about this.
Also, because we can't inspect the CSAM database, it's quite likely that some percentage of what people thought was adult porn was actually underage. I see nude photos shared on forums all the time. I'm sure some people save those photos to their devices, and it's unknowable if the busty teen just an 18 year old that felt like sharing or revenge porn content from a 17 year old's CSAM case. Surely some porn addicts that have been saving every image they found attractive for years will get caught up in this.
Even the group ostensibly being targeted by this technology is unlikely to help prevent actual child abuse. For example, someone might join a porn Telegram channel, be exposed to CSAM with or without realizing that's what it is, and save it to their device. People caught in this group probably do need some kind of mental help, which the criminal system will not provide. Piracy may create some demand, but it's still pretty far removed from the abuse. Out of this group, an even smaller fraction may have actually paid for CSAM material, which is the first group where you'd find unanimous support for law enforcement action.
The people we all want to see locked up, those that actually abusing children, or those profiting/funding the abuse of children, are unlikely to be caught in this type of dragnet.
I'd imagine that when Apple turns this feature on, it will immediately catch thousands of people in the dragnet, and almost none of them will be involved in the production or sale of CSAM.
> I'm not saying Apple is definitively involved in some shady stuff, but from my perspective, it does look like NSA forced them to do some sort of file scanning backdoor and they came up with this "it's about saving the children" explanation, already successfully in use in oppressive countries.
It does seem that way because it's just so hard to draw a line from "apple scans all your images to match previously known child abuse" to "child abuse is prevented".
I think the absolute best outcome we can hope for here is that some people who purchased CSAM, essentially low-level users, will be discovered and prosecuted. Maybe that's a good thing, and perhaps it will remove thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars from the underground economy. But it hardly seems worth the cost to privacy and security if we never stop any actual child abuse.
If your propaganda campaign lines the pockets of Facebook, Google, Twitter, etc, then they are open for business. Also, if the company refuses the business by banning propaganda accounts or creating special rules for who can advertise, then they have entered the political arena.
It's not very expensive to force a meme.
Just to be clear, "false positive" in this case means an innocent person is accused of trafficking in child sexual abuse material. It's likely they will be raided.
Sure, that's bad if you're Apple, but it's a lot worse if you're the alleged predator.
In practice, I think you'd have to be insane to mix romance and work, supervisory relationship or not.
Pretty much the same reason we change jobs.
> Based on established models such as Big 5 and intrinsic values, TBI adds AI-powered Natural Language Processing to process data and help you make unbiased hiring decisions 100% of the time.
> TBI stack ranks candidates according to their performance in the assessment with regards to the competencies predetermined by the enterprise, ranging from 'essential' to 'good' and then 'critical'.
> Leverage psycholinguistics to analyze a candidate’s response and predict behavior in half the time.
So this company has layered AI on top of pseudoscience and is selling it as an automated hiring tool. I guess the hiring decisions are 100% unbiased if the results are indistinguishable from noise? Or maybe your hiring decisions are "unbiased" if you launder them through this software to produce a team that looks like your existing team?
Either way, this Talview company is doing some really evil stuff.
I recognize that you're being sincere, and I don't mean to offend, but why would you tie meaning in your life to your labor?
Work time is labor time for me, and any amount of it is actively detracting from me being able to pursue the things that I do think have meaning.
The more time work takes, the less time I have for things that are meaningful, practically by definition.
Tying any sense of meaning or purpose to employment would seem to put the worker in an emotionally precarious position without any obvious benefit.
When I stop requiring additional funds, I'll stop going to work.
What am I missing?
Bored at work is a problem? And in a cubicle? You have the internet in your pocket and bluetooth headphones in your ears, no work to do, you're getting paid, and people are complaining about this?
I seriously hope this article is part of some shadowy PR campaign to make people work harder or justify austerity or something. It's hard to believe this is BBC.
People work for money. Money can be exchanged for goods and services. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A81DYZh6KaQ
> What happens more often, she says, is that people will just show up at their desks and spend time shopping online, cyberloafing, chatting with colleagues or planning other activities. She says that these people aren’t lazy, but are using these behaviours as “coping mechanisms”.
Shopping online, talking to friends, and planning other activities are all things everyone needs to do. They're not coping mechanisms, this is just people getting all their stuff done at work so they have more time to do things important to them.
> Harju describes boreout as “kind of a signature syndrome” of the pandemic; our ennui fueled by too much time in Zoom meetings, surrounded by the same four walls.
Does Harju understand that the organization has made the decision to pay people to attend them?
How anyone can see a job as anything other than a way to sell time for money is beyond me.
Being bored at work would be wonderful. Being bored remote is even better. If I could just get the paycheck and benefits and have absolutely 0 obligations to the company, that would be optimal.
I think intuition is what I'm lacking here. It's unclear to me just how dangerous the situation is likely to be.
Before this discussion, my understanding was that only attestations are available, and that the company wouldn't become insolvent because the company would incur huge losses if that happened.
That's still my understanding, though now I know the difference be attestation and audits, that a complexity boundary exists due to audit resources, and that auditors don't even look for fraud (you'd think they would without knowing how this works). Thank you for the color around it, it helps me understand how people in this business think about finance.
However, I'm still of the (apparently wrong?) opinion that Gemini/Circle/Binance/Paxos at least, are staking their real businesses, with things like executive pay and employee payroll and all that, on these products. "We lost the money and our stablecoin is now worthless" should sink any of these companies.
I think we're in agreement that failure to maintain peg would sink these companies, but my conclusion was that it's very unlikely. You and numair seem to conclude that it's more than just likely, it's almost inevitable.
This tells me that my intuition is probably wrong, but it's still difficult for me to understand why a company like Gemini would decide to risk insolvency.
And even if they did release a full audit, if it can't detect fraud, then why would you trust it? I know it's better than just attestations, but I'm not sure how great the risk of fraud is relative to the risk of other routes to insolvency.
To use GUSD as an example, this is the document in question: https://assets.ctfassets.net/jg6lo9a2ukvr/4HRkKKmHejTvQ32jfv...
It is not a full audit of the entire history of the movement of the funds.
I agree that having a full trace of every penny publicly available would increase trust in GUSD.
I suspect that if you're an exchange partner with Gemini, you could ask for more visibility into how the funds are actually being allocated when they're not being summoned for attestation.
Keep in mind that the risk here is insolvency, and the firms best suited to evaluate that risk are also the ones holding large amount of GUSD.
I don't know if regulation would be helpful here or not. I think exchanges considering holding GUSD should accept the risk of possible insolvency, and adjust their business to account for that risk, perhaps by buying insurance.
I think it's very reasonable to accept that you're mostly betting on Gemini (or whoever) being an honest broker, and the attestation reports give some reason to believe that they can produce the dollars on demand. The attestation reports do show that they're able to come up with that available balance, even if only for a minute, which does add credibility.
If you're concerned about the solvency of the institutions offering these products, that's fine, but I think everyone (including Tether) is incentivized to do everything possible to never become insolvent.
Aligned interests do count for something.
As I understand it, exchanges wire Tether large amounts of USD, and then Tether mints and equal amount of USDT and sends it back to exchanges.
These offerings are pretty transparent. If you choose to use a stablecoin that's not backed by on-chain collateral, you're accepting the attestations are true and putting trust in the reputation of the companies.
Personally, I'd rather be able to verify the collateral on-chain, which is why I think fully collateral-backed on-chain stablecoins like DAI make a lot of sense.
Contagions are all over the credit markets. The whole thing is a house of cards and always has been.
We have all kinds of regulations for just how much collateral a bank must have, for example, but 2008 still happened.
I'd rather have firms fail if they make bad decisions.
Risk-taking is incentivized when banks can say "oh no, we followed all the rules but somehow still went insolvent, must be someone else's fault... definitely not ours for not researching our investments... so how about a giant free loan?"
If there's a bank account, it's possible the entity managing that account could become insolvent or that someone could run off with the funds.
If your collateral is locked in a smart contract that's properly secured, it's possible to create a situation where it's technically impossible for anyone unauthorized to lose the collateral, either by embezzlement or by losing it with poor managmeent.
I'm honestly not sure whether it's more likely that DAI has a contract bug or USDT/USDC/GUSD/BUSD/TUSD/etc becomes insolvent due to some external factors.
If we had a global credit crisis and banking institutions were failing, I'd feel a lot more comfortable holding DAI than one of the stablecoins that relies on the traditional system.
I'd guess most of the centrally managed ones make their money investing the deposited USD to earn a safe rate of return as profit.
The defi ones that take colleteral, like DAI, make money by charging a borrow rate on the DAI that's minted and another fee if your account is liquidated.
If this happens, we need to let it fail. I'd be furious to see the fed bail out USDT to make sure the crypto market stays "stable".
> That is, Tether loses its peg, $X dollars go missing, and firms start to fail like dominos, even outside the crypto sphere.
If firms fall because they bet too hard on USDT, they deserve to fall. Tether has not offered sufficient evidence that they are fully backed, so that risk needs to be accounted for by the firms that use USDT.
> Tether is far from that level but theres nothing stopping its growth.
Hopefully what's stopping that growth are better stablecoins with alternative risk profiles that are more favorable to investors.
> The solution isnt to ban tether, but rather launch central bank stablecoins. Put the official USD as a ERC20 token.
That's still just trading one set of risks for another, which is fine. Having multiple stablecoin options is good.
If USDT is worth $1 because everyone agrees it is, everything works fine. It's been that way for a long time and will likely continue.
If there's a run on the bank because people believe it's not worth $1, everyone tries to sell their USDT, then it is no longer worth a dollar. That's the risk of holding USDT. Everyone who takes 5 minutes to research it understands that USDT is kind of shady but has a long record of maintaining peg anyway.
This is true of every partially-backed stablecoin, of which there are many.
We have a recent example of one failing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27539368
In that case, IRON was only 75% backed, and now the price is $0.75.
There are other products, like DAI, which keeps reserves of ETH equal to 150% of the value of DAI. Occasionally liquidity becomes thin and DAI loses peg by a few cents, but it quickly returns as liquidations happen and the ETH is sold off to return DAI to peg. Synthetix does something similar with sUSD.
Gemini has GUSD, Coinbase has USDC, Binance has BUSD, all of which claim to be fully backed by USD and have audits to bolster that claim.
Here's a whole list of them, each offering various models of trust, decentralization, audits, etc: https://www.coingecko.com/en/categories/usd-stablecoin
If USDT implodes, it could cause a liquidity crisis, but it will lead to investors demanding more proof of funds before using a stablecoin, and long-term strengthen the crypto economy. If USDT fails and creates a liquidity crisis that tanks the rest of the crypto market, I'll be shopping for bargains.
You're blaming corporations and the wealthy for what is fundamentally a problem with the government and the electorate, and in effect giving up the game and accepting they are actually in charge.
The main complaints I see are that minimum wage hasn't kept up with a living wage, that health insurance is too expensive, and that education is too expensive. But what I think people actually want is a safety net for the basics: health care, shelter, food, education, etc. The narrative of being "pushed around" implies that somehow those basics must come from giant companies. They shouldn't because it's exactly what gives them the leverage to push people around.
The people can elect a government which provides these basics for everyone. Then we can find out the fair value of an Amazon warehouse worker, when the worker is showing up for their own economic improvement instead of to simply not die in poverty. Amazon can continue to act in their best interest, but they'll be forced to pay higher wages by workers who don't need the job for basic survival.
It is possible to organize these types of changes with massive grassroots efforts.
> the way Uber bought that proposition
That proposition was about classifying drivers as employees vs contractors.
They ran an aggressive ad campaign, but they didn't engage in any illegal practices to buy that law. They played by the rules.
But why does this classification even matter? It's because employees are required to have employer-offered health insurance plans.
In other words, the real problem is that your employment and health care are linked. If we had national health care, nobody would care if they were a contractor or employee. In our reality though, it was worth $200MM to Uber to fight the measure, and they're acting legally and rationally for their bottom line, because that's the framework our government has created for them.
If you look up the history, there was a salary cap for workers to prevent inflation during WW2. But health insurance was a new product and employers offered that as an incentive instead of higher salary, because companies will always find a way to compete. When the salary caps went away, employers were already offering health coverage for years, and it became normalized throughout the system that health care is provided through an employer.
Why a wage cap that set all this into motion? “We shall be compelled to stop workers from moving from one war job to another as a matter of personal preference; to stop employers from stealing labor from each other” -- FDR (https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/fireside-chat-4)
FDR may have have had good intentions for the war effort, but that salary cap set the model for all of these non-salary "benefits" that we have today.
> I don't like it when wealthy people take out huge low, or no interest, loans in order to not pay taxes, or set up 501c3's with less than 1% of the sacred money going back to the country that provided a relatively safe, fair enviornment to let their entrepreneurial ideas flourish.
I see this as the same class of error. Also, it's going to be impossible to prevent people holding Bitcoin from borrowing against it, for example. We can't look at these problems as trying to close loopholes, especially when it's technically impossible to enforce them.
Maybe we should re-think if taxing investments even makes sense at all. There are probably more enforceable ways to pay for our collective needs besides income and investment taxes.
Every time we enact taxes or benefits that are supposed to be "targeted", we cause a lot of collateral damage. We need broad solutions that work for everyone, like universal health care, universal basic income, changes to what we tax, and how we manage our currency.
I believe the goal should be to enable a type of capitalism where everything is operating with more efficiency and nobody is getting hurt or homeless in the process.
> I hope we never lose that angst.
I hope we do. Some day we will achieve a system where workers have a true safety net and are free to bargain with their employers without risking their lives. Then the angst should be pretty much gone.
A lot of people on this board have experience with prescription stimulants. How would you say the experience of "doing meth" differs from taking amphetamine orally? Was a typical experience for you "smoke meth, study or write code all night"?
I like prescription stimulants, but it's hard for me to imagine anyone wanting to take overdose-levels of stimulants for fun, so I'm probably missing something. If I take too much (~40mg), I feel pretty terrible, physically and mentally. I can't imagine how 500mg/day could produce any desirable effects.
If the supply chain for meth wasn't so poor, I'd probably try it once to see what all the hype is about.