It's unreasonable to expect researchers vet someone who promises them $500K? In what insane world does this statement make any sense? It's not just common sense, but also necessary for keeping track of conflicts of interest.
>SBF was treated as the king of crypto by the mainstream for whatever reason.
I think the reason is getting more and more obvious with every passing day.
His father and mother are professors of Law (and Business) at Stanford. (The mother is also one of two founders of Mind The Gap.) His aunt is a dean of Columbia University's School of Public Health.
His brother was running a lobby group called Guarding Against Pandemics. FTX's head of policy and regulatory strategy was a Commodity Futures Trading Commission commissioner under Obama.
Does it strand legitimate scientists or does it indicate that there is corruption in science? From what I'm hearing, this whole FTX thing reeks of clever, politically connected fraud and money laundering:
>Nevertheless, the attitude-change techniques used by so-called “brainwashers” are no different than standard persuasive methods identified by social psychologists, such as encouraging commitment to goals, manufacturing source credibility, forging an illusion of group consensus, and vivid testimonials
Ok, let me get this straight. You openly admit that brainwashing techniques are now routinely and knowingly used in "casual" settings, but you want me to stop using the term, because it's so routine and because it never was never long-term effective. Faulty reasoning at best, manipulative bullshit at worst.
Wikipedia is one of the worst things that was ever launched on the web. Many people say that it's reliable, except in cases of controversy. That's a spin. A more honest way of describing it is that it's a system designed to accumulate trust by providing people with trivial information and then spectacularly fail them when the information is critically important for some society-wide issue. The failures aren't unfortunate mishaps, they are inevitable by design.
It's almost as if building a hypercentralized faux-communication system that tries to encourage mindless behavior and doesn't have any notion of locality is an inherently bad idea that will always lead to misery and suffering. Hm. Nah, that's can't be true. That would mean a lot of things I've read on the internet recently are lies, which is completely impossible. Yeah, I think this is just a sign that people suck and we need more centralization to control them. If we tied all TikTok accounts to some kind of social credit score, that would probably fix everything.
The reality is that W3C and Mozilla do not matter anymore. I'm not saying this because I like it, I'm saying this because it's the obvious state of things. Google controls the standards and protocols for the Web.
Yeah, US was a very trusting society until it started using money, cars and converted to individualism. If only we could go back to our Communist roots. /s
That's all nice and well, but I no longer can tell the difference between Big Tech's "Abuse Prevention" and abuse. They need transparency not because it's going to make their job easier. They need transparency because literally millions of people hate their companies and don't have one iota of trust in their internal decision-making. Big Tech workers might think all those people are morons and can be ignored indefinitely. In reality, it simply doesn't work this way.
>Sure, we use the word "learn" to describe what they do, which is one word that we also use to describe what people do. But ML models are always wielded by people or corporations for particular purposes.
This is extremely important. "Learning" in machine learning is an aspirational label, not a descriptive one. People who claim otherwise either drank too much of their own Kool-Aid or are simply dishonest. This isn't just "wrong" in some taxonomical sense, this is dangerous in a very practical way. Conflating machine "learning" and human learning will inevitably lead to various kinds of sabotage of human learning.
>Why does no government anywhere run a non-profit dating site from tax-payer money when this is becoming the most popular way people are meeting?
Sounds like a great idea. I nominate NSA as the host organization. You wouldn't even need to bother creating a profile, they will just use all the surveillance data to find you the best matches.
The article is full of misrepresentations, some of which were already pointed out. One I have to point out myself:
">People really, really, hate Peter Thiel and Elon Musk. So much so that they will refuse to give my small business money if it goes through Paypal on the off chance that those two guys might get some of it."
This looks like pure spin. I don't know of anyone who refuses to use PayPal because of this reason. (Thiel and Musk are not running the company anymore.) I know a lot of people who refuse to use PayPal because it has some kind of directive to ban people for wrongthink. There are countless instances documented on ReclaimTheNet.org [1], and those are just the ones involving people of notoriety.
There is literally a campaign of people closing PayPal accounts in protest of company's behavior right now. (That $2,500 fine proposal was the last straw.) Guess what? Many people see "errors" when they try to close an account. Dark patterns everywhere.
In short, if you choose to use PayPal as a sole payment method for your business, know that you are alienating a lot of potential customers.
We keep seeing more and more abstractions, but unfortunately they are the wrong abstractions. We need working process isolation, not endless VMs inside other VMs. We need a logical layer on top of TCP/IP, not crazy complicated VPN schemes. Etc. This is completely obvious to some people, and seems completely incomprehensible to others. Unfortunately, the companies with resources are mostly staffed with the latter.
A few lines later:
"Tell me, how many lights you see?"