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neffy

1,708 karma · joined September 13, 2015

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neffy··on What happened to the Snowden archive
Historically, one of the biggest issues that the Gestapo (and I would imagine any other such organisation) had to deal with was all the false neighbour and similar complaints from the "curtain twitchers" getting in the way of the actual surveillance and persecution work.
neffy··on Rethinking legal education in the AI era
Because if you can just use AI, Law becomes accessible to both the rich and the poor.
neffy··on Astrophysicists Puzzle over Webb’s New Universe
Some of the Hubble results were also raising questions. At the same time, I read one of the papers on the galaxy stuff, and what struck me was they were identifying galaxy shapes by counting the pixels each galaxy had, so there are definitely some question marks over how they do some of this.
neffy··on Who Wins and Who Loses in Prediction Markets? Evidence from Polymarket
Although the stock market isn´t in itself, it benefits from the second order effects of continuous money supply expansion, and long term processes progressively concentrating money into the financial system.
neffy··on Anthropic takes $5B from Amazon and pledges $100B in cloud spending in return
It is a similar kind of lending loop to that which went on during the late 1990's leading up to the 2000 crash. A lends to B lends to C lends to A.

There is a famous quote from the polish economist Kalecki, that "economics is the science of mistaking a stock for a flow". Essentially this form of lending continues while everybody can make interest payments, and blows up horribly as soon as somebody can´t - as I have no doubt all those concerned are fully aware.

neffy··on Who is Satoshi Nakamoto? My quest to unmask Bitcoin's creator
Time? He´s busy starting a company, taking the time to drag out decade old emails and digging out the meta data for a journalist who is borderline stalking (assuming he even has them somewhere). I wouldn´t give that the time of day either.
neffy··on I'm Kenyan. I don't write like ChatGPT, ChatGPT writes like me
There are a lot of very distinctive versions of English floating around after the British Empire, Indian newspapers are particularly delightful that way - but there is as the author says, an inherited common educational system dating back to the colonial period, which has probably created a fairly common "educated dialect" abroad, just as it has between all the local accents and dialects back in the motherland.
neffy··on I know we're in an AI bubble because nobody wants me
If they optimize though - and this is coming at some point - local AI becomes possible, and their entire business case as a cloud monopoly evaporates. I think they know they're in a race between centralized control, and widespread use and control, and that is what is really driving this.
neffy··on F5 says hackers stole undisclosed BIG-IP flaws, source code
Well honestly, this security person thinks its a terrible idea - but needless to say the people selling those systems disagree - and for non-technical management, it ticks the compliance box and they get back to their jobs.
neffy··on Matrices can be your friends (2002)
And since the economist's main skill at math is fitting a very short ruler to a very large curve... i wouldn't put them ahead of lawyers...
neffy··on The murky economics of the data-centre investment boom
Feedback loops. Always with the feedback loops.
neffy··on It's just a virus, the E.R. told him – days later, he was dead
It´s not just the legal system. A lot of US Doctors are typically paid on a piece rate basis, and the medical records systems are extremely fragmented, so there is an incentive to order repeat tests (as you get passed around from specialist to specialist), and no incentive to put the systems in to make that unnecessary.
neffy··on Hackers strike Harrods in latest UK cyberattack
There is a fair bit of grooming going on out there on the private discord channels and similar.
neffy··on The story of DOGE, as told by federal workers
No, it does make sense. Most of the purported growth in government spending is just using raw figures, and not correcting for either inflation or monetary expansion. It is a convenient mistake.
neffy··on An attacker’s blunder gave us a look into their operations
It´s also a lot of assumptions. This probably is an attacker - or wannabe at least. But you could be a student or researcher working on a cyber security course looking and for some projects your search flow would look a lot like this.
neffy··on Where's the shovelware? Why AI coding claims don't add up
No, it´s really not - it's exactly what they are. Multi-dimensional pattern matching machines, using massive databases put together from resources like stack overflow, Clegg's (every cheaters go to for assignment answers, massive copyright theft etc.). If that wasn´t the case, there wouldn't be jobs right now writing answers to feed into the databases.

And that´s actually quite useful - given that most of this material is paywalled or blocked from search engines. It´s less useful when you look at code examples that mix different versions of python, and have comments referring to figures on the previous page. I´m afraid it becomes very obvious when you look under the hood at the training sets themselves, just how this is all being achieved.

neffy··on Tipping point in Gulf Stream may be reached as early as mid-century
Ok, but this happens pretty regularly on a planetary scale (at least every 110,000 years or so) - why hasn´t it been so disastrous before - say at the end of the last interglacial?
neffy··on Electromechanical reshaping, an alternative to laser eye surgery
When I looked into it last year, it´s still an under-acknowledged issue. The impression I formed was that it was a bit of a crapshoot - along with some bad practitioners, there didn´t seem to be much information on when and why it would or would not occur.
neffy··on I tried to replace myself with ChatGPT in my English class
I do the same in my classes, and it´s common practice in many courses my dept which may help, as the students know what is expected of them. I don´t think it's wasting time. It motivates the students to know that they have to present in front of their peers, helps the shy ones get practice, and yes the quality varies, but it´s a very good way to share information within the class about different projects, even with a not so good presentation.
neffy··on John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025
This is exactly it. Biology is making massive use of hacked real time local network communication in ways we haven´t begun to explore.
neffy··on How are cyber criminals rolling in 2025?
Sure. Corporations commit ransomware attacks all the time.
neffy··on In Jail Without a Lawyer: How a Texas Town Fails Poor Defendants
But I don´t want to "consume" more than Americans. I want to eat healthy food in reasonable quantities and maintain a sensible weight.

I don´t want to own a car and drive 2 hours to work every day, and consume more car ownership - I want to cycle or walk, and stay fit and enjoy the sun.

You see the mistake you're making?

I lived in the US for 6 years, and could have stayed. It was an easy decision to go back to Europe.

neffy··on In Jail Without a Lawyer: How a Texas Town Fails Poor Defendants
We're really not. Just the health care issues, which can be directly seen in the life expectancy figures, make us materially richer, never mind anything else.

And I much prefer not needing to exercise my rights to self-defence in the first place, than to have to worry about carrying a gun around all the time, and whether or not a child might get accidentally get access to it. See also gun shooting figures.

neffy··on The Demoralization is just Beginning
Not actually the case. The gold standard linked the expansion of the money supply to the price of gold, not the actual supply. So as the money supply expanded, every time gold was bought or sold through direct bank transfer, the price was influenced by the expanding deposit supply, not by the asset gold supply, and slowly increased, creating a nice little feedback loop. If you look at the figures for the gold standard period in the 19th-20th century, otherwise known as the British Monetary Orthodoxy, you will see a slow and steady expansion in the deposit supply in all countries using it. Trouble was, the expansion was a different rates in different countries, and so by the 1910´s the differences were tearing the invisible financial fabric apart. The rest as they say is history.

Banking systems being somewhat unstable and prone to credit crises is actually an entirely different problem, and unrelated to how the expansion is being regulated.

neffy··on The Demoralization is just Beginning
If that, as @acatton says. It is certainly not happening all the time. There are laws around libel and slander, which are more aimed at civility than anything else, but its rare that they make it to actual court. In Britain at least there is a long held tradition, and some rightly infamous accompanying libel cases, where 1 farthing/penny/pound damages (inflation has had some effect I guess) were awarded in an ok, you win but the moral case was with the defendant signal. One of the more recent:

https://www.lawgazette.co.uk/law/judge-right-to-award-lying-...

neffy··on China turns members of its diaspora into spies
There are two as it happens - the other one is Eastern Russia - ethnically asian, although not Han. Notice how Putin is always present for the pacific exercises, even when one might think he had better ways to spend his time on the western front.
neffy··on Engineers do not get to make startup mistakes when they build ledgers
Double entry book keeping implements an error correction and detection algorithm.
neffy··on Engineers do not get to make startup mistakes when they build ledgers
The Basel Capital rules dominate at the moment. If that ever gets rolled back... buy gold immediately.
neffy··on Engineers do not get to make startup mistakes when they build ledgers
That´s not correct unfortunately, although it has been widely taught in economics text books, and you can blame Keynes for that. Keynes used that example to try and explain the process to parliament, and also to argue that the system didn't expand the deposit money supply over time. Ironically even the data (in the Macmillan report) he supplied contradicted him. It´s confusing as well, because the fundamental rules have changed over time.

Banks can lend up to an allowed multiple of their cash or equivalent reserves (gold standard regulation), and in the Basel era are also regulated on the ratio of their capital reserves to their loans. This acts to stop hyperflationary expansion, but there is a feedback loop between new deposits and new capital so the system does still expand slowly over time. This may be beneficial.

In engineering terms, Banks statistically multiplex asset cash with liability deposits, using the asset cash to solve FLP consensus issues that arise when deposits are transferred between banks. It´s actually quite an elegant system.

neffy··on What made Dostoevsky's work immortal
There was no shortage of casual mass murder before the 20th century, not infrequently perpetrated by religious orders. The Mongol invasions in the 13th century, An Lushan rebellion in China in 750, Albigensian Crusade in the 12th century... it´s a long list I´m afraid - we are not a tame species.
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