rschneid

Yeah that's what a primary source is: words from a principal architect of the deal, not a vague description using emotionally-charged terms. The interviewer is a professional eBay seller, so I think lots of what's mentioned in the interview is relevant to much of the discussion in this thread.

If you were interested in learning more about the nuance of the situation you might appreciate the information therein, but you're also free to reply to anyone who provides alternate perspectives or additional information with silly labels like 'true believer' instead of addressing the content of their messages!

You're grossly straw-manning a complex situation by reducing this deal to a 'Private Equity style takeover' that 'everyone hates'...

If anyone is interested in learning more here's a great primary source interview with an ebay seller: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C1ij2nQymtA

and a retrospective here for those without as time/interest

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OyS9Q-LnhPE

I think it's good to let folks reach their own conclusions!

Your post has strong feelings and is light on facts...

It's a proof that something is possible to show one example.

In this case the claim was ASIC-resistant PoW is possible, and the proof has been the historical behavior of miners after years of RandomX. Nobody said it would be eternally or entirely resistant to optimizations...

Sounds like a good opportunity for a big indexing company to add some value by using thei-

Wait...

You may be interested to know that your sweat glands come in two distinct types: Eccrine for thermoregulation and Apocrine for the wild mess of emotions we experience.

https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/body/eccrine-glands

I think their point is that, in general, social-scale healthcare is an under-solved problem in practice and LLMs have potential to improve a significant portion these challenges by increasing accessibility to treatment. The availability of these tools will inevitably lead to more instances of reports like this (from the report the article is based on):

> This case also highlights how the use of artificial intelligence (AI) can potentially contribute to the development of preventable adverse health outcomes. Based on the timeline of this case, it appears that the patient either consulted ChatGPT 3.5 or 4.0 when considering how he might remove chloride from this diet. Unfortunately, we do not have access to his ChatGPT conversation log and we will never be able to know with certainty what exactly the output he received was, since individual responses are unique and build from previous inputs.

However I don't see this single negative instance of a vast social-scale issue as much more than fear/emotion-mongering without at least MENTIONING that LLM also have positive effects. Certainly, it doesn't seem like science to me. Unless these models are subtly leading otherwise healthy and well-adjusted users to unhealthy behavior, I don't see how this interaction with artificial intelligence is any different than the billions of confirmation-bias pitfalls that already occur daily using google and natural stupidity. From the article:

> The case also raises broader concerns about the growing role of generative AI in personal health decisions. Chatbots like ChatGPT are trained to provide fluent, human-like responses. But they do not understand context, cannot assess user intent, and are not equipped to evaluate medical risk. In this case, the bot may have listed bromide as a chemical analogue to chloride without realizing that a user might interpret that information as a dietary recommendation.

It just seems they've got an axe to grind and no technical understanding of the tool they're criticizing.

To be fair, I feel there's much to study and discuss about pernicious effects of LLMs on mental health. I just don't think this article frames these topics constructively.

The consolidate audit trail regularly has millions of errors within a day... It's far from complete data; here's their latest report card:

https://catnmsplan.com/sites/default/files/2025-04/04.01.25-...

Also, CAT is run by CATNMS, LLC which was created in response to an SEC rule 613, however it is operated by the same consortium of SROs that it purports to provide oversight on...

All these layers of responsibility diffusion and a notable absence of penalties for failing to meet rule 613 guidelines mean that rule is little more than for show.

To maybe help you alleviate a small bit of your presumably nearly overwhelming confusion I will repeat my reply to your SEC question[1], if that is indeed the 'first' one you ambiguously refer to.

> When SEC approved Enron's change in account reporting practices from historical cost to mtm, I would argue that the SEC failed it's mandate to protect investors by allowing disingenuously optimistic instrument valuations

I'm not sure what about that you think is evasive but I'd like to end the conversation here regardless.

[1][Whats] one example of something the SEC had a mandate to do that it didn’t.

The financial markets are more than the SEC but the SEC is part of the financial markets. Evidence of the SEC's imperfect lawlessness implies the greater financial markets are also, in part, lawless.

But my point wasn't even to say whether a given industry as broad as finance is 'lawless' or not, that's your sweeping strawman. I was just saying that in Finance of ALL industries, the line between lawful and illegal has been, and continues to be literally, morally and philosophically blurry...

Laws and their enforcement will always have some nonzero amount of selectivity by the localized nature of the universe but good legislation confronts these challenges proactively and tries to make prosecutorial discretion closer to the question: What should the Punishment be? Rather than: Is this behavior Punishable?

>> an implicit status quo that could be changed any time

> So is a history of enforcement!

Are you really saying that history can be changed at any time?

While there will always be jurisprudence that attempts to advance precedent, a history of consistent enforcement cannot, in fact, be changed. People will always have vulnerability to novel interpretations and surprising re-interpretations of the law, but laws which sit on the books IGNORED can easily lead to essentially undefined behavior which I have no doubt you can understand the potential pernicious nature of...

You've got it backwards mate, a lack of enforcement isn't an agreement or resolution or much of anything reliable or solid or sound. This vacuum of enforcement actually ENABLES selective enforcement because a lack of enforcement isn't an official stance but technically at odds with the written law: It's an implicit status quo that could be changed any time and when it does, you could become retroactively liable for behavior that was acceptable under the prior status quo. That is precisely the conditions of selective enforcement: the choice of the enforcer. Under these inconsistent regulatory modalities you may insidiously lose valuable rights like: No Bill of Attainder or ex post facto Law shall be passed.

The SEC has a three-part mission: to protect investors; maintain fair, orderly, and efficient markets; and facilitate capital formation.

These mandates are, of course, subjective and vague enough to be interpreted a variety of ways whether you view 'investors' as institutions, households, individuals, etc... What you define as 'fair/orderly/efficient', and what meaningful 'capital formation' really is.

When SEC approved Enron's change in account reporting practices from historical cost to mtm, I would argue that the SEC failed it's mandate to protect investors by allowing disingenuously optimistic instrument valuations. You could argue that eventually the SEC fulfilled its mandate by recovering much of the misappropriate funds, but it's hard to say they didn't also facilitate the disorder in approving these instruments given how that story concludes with a corporate collapse and flurry of regulation...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarbanes%E2%80%93Oxley_Act

Pretending to be subject to a law however in practice never prosecuting opens the door to inconsistent (aka selective) enforcement. How is this not the worst of both worlds? What a weird gotcha....

Well official disclosure in finance is very similar to assigning value, since many of the instruments that actually trade are derivative or abstract representations of actual assets with 'real' value.

My only point is that the notion of 'legal' can get very fuzzy when you're talking about an industry with so many private/self-interested entities that rival or exceed intellectual/manpower of the agencies responsible for regulation.

If you want to learn more about the SEC's role or dereliction of duty in the Enron case you could start here: https://www.investopedia.com/updates/enron-scandal-summary/#...

Google could lead you to more evidence, if you wish to explore the hypothesis further...

I humbly submit to you hypothesis that the lawlessness of finance is so pervasive that it has effectively become legalized through intellectual and regulatory capture. If you're interested in supporting evidence for this idea, check out how Enron sought and acquired SEC 'approval' for their ponzi instruments....

Exactly, these diffuse international entities are merely responding to structures of incentives which are ultimately the government’s responsibility to create and enforce.

Contrary to the quote in the article, proper investment in response and mitigation has, so far, been proven to ~not~ be mandatory for making incredible amounts of cash, which is the primary objective of these behemoths.

Now that externalized costs are starting to personally affect members of government and enforcement, I hope we’ll see some meaningful regulation around accounts on private-but-essential digital platforms resembling a general bill of rights rather than letting private companies get away with nearly anything by default, as is the current state. However merely asking these pseudo-nation-states masquerading as companies to behave differently and expecting to be taken seriously is good for a laugh!

Hello, first of all you have my sympathies and I share your opinion that the 'tech' job market is seeming less appealing to new graduates for a variety of objective/measurable reasons you've mentioned. I also think your self-described lack of interest is sufficient cause to seek other careers and the previous justifications may be worth not focusing on too much... The world has more interconnected opportunity now than ever before and even if you don't do full-stack web development ever again I am sure your computer skills are valuable in very many domains.

I finished college 8 years ago and have been coding since. I still code, but I have just begun tutoring/teaching Adult Education classes for a Service-worker Union (Search for SEIU + <your_locale>) and have found the work to be fulfilling, flexible (fully remote), and pay surprisingly well (over $50/hr entry). In my limited experience there is great demand from this somewhat hidden (but growing!) demographic of multi-year-industry-specific professionals seeking to upgrade their career flexibility through education. Digital literacy is a subject us programmers take largely for granted that has nearly constant over-subscribed classes in my branch, and one of the first questions I was asked by a much-adored veteran teacher when observing their science/math TEAS prep class was 'How's your Google-fu?' I felt right at home...

Part of the reason I got into CS was because I had a diverse range of interests and somehow computers seemed to power the foundations for interacting with and connecting the vast majority of them. If you've got similar motivations I think you'll enjoy the wide range of challenges that teaching adults offers. Fwiw, I think most folks in the world face professionally uncertain times ahead but at least we can understand enough to try and make the most of the inevitable instead of squandering precious energy...

I hope my perspective offers you some assistance, and I thank you for sharing. I know a lot of people (both your age and older) have similar feelings.

PS English Literacy classes in my branch are also heavily oversubscribed, and with bilingualism you might be a marvelously effective teacher in that meaningful domain as well.

>effectively banned

In my opinion, these governments haven't implemented 'effective' bans (though maybe chilling, as you say) but primarily created awkward new grey markets for the personal data that these policies rely on for theatrics. Remember when China 'banned' youth IDs from playing online games past 10PM? I think a bunch of grandparents became gamers around the same time...

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-023-01669-8

This is a wonderful lead and gives me hope at recovering this lost curiosity... I will continue to refine my searches, you have my thanks!

To play devil's advocate, there was a potentially legitimate complaint about increased weight/size and potential loss of features (Waterproofing, durability, etc) during the earlier stages of these consumer products' existences when requiring these sophisticated features would represent a relatively larger burden on their creating entities.

However now that we've seen the establishment of these consumer systems, I think it's quite fair to begin requiring the corporations making these gadgets to respect the environments in which they were able to flourish while incurring/leveraging many externalized costs. These corporations won't begin to reduce their rate of externalized environmental debts without government regulation until it begins to damage their profit and forecasts, by which point it will be far too late...

Unfortunately, this marketplace has only the illusion of consumer choice because the flagship mobile devices are unilaterally designed by entrenched trillion-dollar companies. Beginning the modularization of these ubiquitous tools through their most environmentally-impactful components seems like an encouraging start to creating a 'real' marketplace for mobile phone technology. As others in this thread have pointed out, this regulation will require infrastructure to be most effectively and can most certainly be screwed up/sabotaged to the point of tragic ineffectiveness but I believe that if there is a place to begin this struggle for consumer freedoms, it is clearly with batteries.

Anecdotally, I think pesticides become 'necessary' when a specific farm desires greater than a particular density of crop. Sure, the collective can achieve sufficient production with less use of these chemicals however when a farm is at a point where their plants are touching each other then serious pesticides are required if they wish to increase their yield further without pests becoming a catastrophic risk to the entire operation. If only we could all agree to just grow 'enough' instead of growing as much as science allows...

If you believe that a computer can and inevitably will create this content, it’s also a foregone conclusion that its origin will be obfuscated and diffuse. I can’t see how an actor working in country X will collect on use of their likeness generated by a computer in country Y. Similarly, if 10,000+ individuals with computers are producing infringing content, I fail to see how anyone could seek recompense with any effectiveness. Additionally, if the content is generated from a computer it would seem relatively simple to alter it just enough to call into doubt the likeness used and make it prohibitively difficult for an individual to claim it is in fact their identity and not a fictional derivative protected by some fair use laws. I’m not a copyright expert and I expect we’ll see attempts at legal battles as you suggest, but I expect they’ll pretty much go nowhere unless the ‘offending’ counterparty is seeking conflict, and the result will be a fundamental undermining of the authority that the current copyright system holds.

Edit: I think the closest approximation of a solution to the compensation/control questions re digital content in an age of on-demand generative AI will involve content creators of all stripes self-hosting and self-publishing to make it easy for fans to directly patronize. Trying to stop clones is a fool’s errand.

It's clear we're seeing a revolution in funding models for media companies of all kinds from Spotify to Motion Picture/TV Producers and Journalism/Journalism-like enterprises.

The core commodity of these businesses used to be Information, the Tapes/Records/Printed Newspapers. Now that such information has been quite literally made free by the advent of digitization along with the internet, these entities need to find new ways to create scarcity from which to profit. Some respectful ways that the times may do this:

'Private' Investigative Journalism: Open an office where companies can pay their skilled, resourceful journalists to promptly investigate a lead. Ideally the results would be published afterwards but I don't see a reasonable mechanism for enforce that.

Physical Installations: Use immersive media to create a multi-dimensional storytelling experience. Sell tickets if it's 'fun' enough, or seek corporate partnerships that benefit from this message who want to sponsor.

Sell Premium Access of 'specialty' analysis with SLAs to other Corporations: Reuters sells Refinitiv/Westlaw, Bloomberg has their Terminals... Publicly publish the data every hour but within 50ms to paying organizations.

I don't see it as my job to find a business model for these entities, but I do se a bunch of opportunity in B2B relationships. I hope more knowledgeable folks can do better...

I think it's a sad but telling sign the so-called leadership at these collectives is dedicating effort to the paradoxical, Sisyphean task of stopping casual readership from accessing/sharing the content they worked so hard to create instead of seeking new avenues that exist in abundance.

As others commenters have noted, having a constant, public and freely auditable record is the only way to keep these entities honest.

This south park excerpt is... frighteningly realistic https://youtu.be/Z5ZZ8bO9-Ig

Since I've gotten an upvote or two, anyone interested in learning more may find this video a good place to start understanding

1) How the market 'truly' operates and 2) how this operation is being abused

https://youtu.be/nLnw2_q5iMk

Thanks for this crucial point of both clarification and further confusion.

The 'true believers' in this stock's idiosyncratic risk are expecting a short squeeze due to a confluence of relatively unknown market mechanisms such as FTD, CNS, reg SHO, and the formation of a short-busting coalition between Carl Icahn via BBBYQ and others...

It's a rabbit hole, for sure. But the fact is that the DTCC, FINRA, and other SROs controlling the markets are inscrutable black boxes that don't provide enough data for anyone to know the extent of the fraud they may or may not be perpetuating by systematically creating 'synthetic' shares in the publicly companies regardless of the officially authorized outstanding shares according to the companies' charters.

Look at the ongoing BBBY CH11 bankruptcy proceedings for an example of how difficult it is to get an idea of 'TSO' or (Total Shares Outstanding) for a public company. The claim is that more shares have been created within the DTCC than the company has authorized, and the right corporate maneuvering could force these 'extra' shares to close or cover which would drive demand exceptionally high.

Disclaimer: I own GME because the number of FTDs is in the high millions some days, and the notional values in the 10s of millions. Something is (still, 2 years later) up with this security in particular, and even if I don't become a billionaire from this investment I hope to shine some light on a corrupt corner of the market that has become 'business as usual' while I strongly disagree that it should be tolerated at all. (FTDs and Synthetic Shares)

Safety of systems isn't binary, so what's the risk profile?

Newer medical treatments have higher risk, just like experimental transportation methods carry greater risk.

Everyone gets sick/injured and everyone needs to get around, so some suffering in the name of advancing these endeavors seems both inevitable and tolerable. The question is to what degree?

Controlling access to and fallout from these automated driving systems is a temporary priority since the roads they're testing on are far more 'public' than an individual's body undergoing new medical treatment, but the long-term priority must be on getting the systems as safe or safer than other human drivers on aggregate. That will happen, sooner or later, and I'd rather see it sooner as long as the cost of the race isn't catastrophe. The only way to advance is to let it learn...

I used to think this way too; until I recently noticed it was a false dichotomy! There is plenty of room to be spent on money for impoverished youngsters of any background and we should be petitioning our politicians to spend MORE OVERALL on youth, education, and nourishment programs. It doesn't have to be a zero-sum, but our politicians don't want us to realize this...

American in particular needs nourishment funding for all socioecon/demographic classes.

I think you two are largely agreeing but speaking past each other. It's true that technology enables individuals to objectively act in ways that were previously cost prohibitive. These previously unavailable actions, looked at on the scale of individuals, is objectively 'more' freedom. However there is a complexity added to this analysis when you consider society beyond the scale of ones or tens of people that quickly becomes very chaotic. When everyone gets these new abilities, it's unclear whether how our 'net' freedom has actually changed. If everyone is louder, it's harder to hear anyone. It's more choices to pick from who we want to listen to, but if that choice becomes SO vast as to be overwhelming to the individual then maybe we're actually less free, in the ways that we'd like to be. I don't think freedom is a scalar value so can't really be directly compared/reasoned about, but I also think it's a mistake to finish the train of thought at: 'More people can do more stuff so we must be more free.' The world is more complicated, and these increasingly sophisticated abilities come with cost and responsibility. We're asking a lot of citizens to keep up with the deluge of data. There are definitely benefits to being informed, but what are the costs? How are the asymmetries in these costs leveraged by bad actors? There are so many questions...

There's no scalar measurement for stability, quality, or strength so there's no direct comparison to be made. It's comparing vectors and the properties of each vector may or may not be things you care about but leaving them unspecified and claiming they're collectively inferior or less meaningful than other things is the straw man you're defeating. People have faith in governments for various reasons, giving their currencies value. People have faith in crypto for various reasons, giving their currencies value.

Nobody is making a claim of general superiority except you. The guy you're responding to simply says THEY have more faith in one particular currency. Why is that so hard to believe? They may not be a US citizen! It's not an objective statement they're making about the quality of USD, but a personal one. The straw man you're attacking seems to be a reflection of your own general idea that USD is the 'supreme' currency and anything having comparable properties in any way is some foundational challenge to this multi-faceted strict dominance. The impure and complicated truth is that each currency has strengths and weaknesses. It is a fact that for any given application and person any given currency can be better/worse for their application. If you exist exclusively in the United States and never break any laws, I can see why this might be difficult to imagine.

For example, some people place great value on being able to transact without the enforcement of American cultural values. This quality of the currency for many is objectively a negative property. Since all currency are largely valued based on fiat anyway these days, why is it so hard to imagine people having preferences more closely aligned with groups other than one of the most geriatric and monochromatic governments on earth?