Mismanaged monoculture forests are one of the first examples of states seeking simplified legible solutions to managing complex ecosystems in Seeing Like a State.
It hasn't happened in this case. Your example has causality reversed. Khamenei wasn't killed because there was a prediction market about the political leadership of Iran.
Or he cares more about promulgating the philosophy of cryptoanarchism than he does about his personal enrichment or safety.
Most attempts to analyze what Satoshi would do suffer from a serious theory of mind blindspot. Just a failure to imagine someone who's motivated by significantly different things than the average person. It's the same failure as when people marvel at billionaire CEOs who continue to work despite having more than enough money to satisfy their every material whim.
Yes, if I were Satoshi or Bezos I'd have fucked off to a private island long ago. But they're not like me.
The thing is, most of the people heavily involved in early Bitcoin are fairly characterized as cryptoanarchists, a group strongly devoted to the principle of privacy and liberty effected through technological means.
The refusal to provide personal communications metadata by such a person is evidence of nothing but their steadfast commitment to the philosophy that presented them with the opportunity to be part of those email conversations in the first place.
>Because agentic AI can parse unstructured data and make purchasing decisions regardless of whether your site allows it, which avoids the chicken-and-egg problem.
People can do that too, and also benefit from actual structured data. But the avoidance of the chicken and egg problem didn't seem to result in widespread structured data stores beating out the SEO-spam-style listings.
>The marketplace that builds "agent-friendly" commerce (verified listings, structured data, transparent pricing, API access) becomes the default backend for AI shopping.
I'd like to believe this, but claims like this have been made since the early days of internet commerce. After all, it's not hard to specify structured data about items and run queries against it. But it largely has not materialized outside of a few special suppliers.
You can't actually search Amazon or eBay or Wayfair for things with specified dimensions or characteristics. You can, however, find lots of listings for things like "Gzsbaby 6 Piece Jumbo Dinosaur Toys for Kids 3-5 and Toddlers, Large Soft Dinosaur Toys for Lovers - Perfect Party Favors, Birthday Gifts "
Perhaps this time is different? But why is it different? What economic incentives will lead to good structured data and transparent pricing, rather than whatever the AI equivalent of glurge/slop listings is?
3. It won't reliably play music anymore! I have a good set of songs in my iPhone's Apple Music library. When I say "Hey siri, play <song/artists>", it asks me for access to Pandora (which I do have on my phone). I don't want to play it on Pandora. I have the song! I have just spent the last 10 minutes trying to figure out how to change this, and neither the youtube video I found searching nor this reddit thread (https://www.reddit.com/r/ios/comments/y18ioq/changing_the_de...) seems to work.
Amusingly (?) the reddit people have the opposite problem. They want to use a 3rd party music app but can't get their phones to stop preferring Apple-provided apps.
I can sometimes get this to work by saying "Play <song/artist> on Apple Music", but even that is not reliable.
Rigid whiskers have other sets of problems. Below someone mentioned that rigid whiskers will break when they contact objects. If the whisker is as rigid as the drone itself, it plausibly breaks the same cables that the drone breaks. You also have the problem that in the event of drone failure, you now have a spike-covered drone falling out of the sky. What kind of damage does a bamboo chopstick or thin piece of steel do when it hits someone or something at ground level at drone-falling velocity with the mass of a drone behind it?
It's quite possible that these problems are solvable and can be engineered around, that there's a whisker-based solution, but I don't see it. It's certainly not an obviously workable solution.
Thin lightweight whiskers are going to be challenging to manage on a propeller-driven vehicle. They'll get blown all over the place. Having them extend out past the propellers will likely get them tangled in the propellers.
Honestly, my experience with Siri is that it works worse than it did 10 years ago. It's not clear to me if that's with Siri itself or just the general decrease in quality of Apple software over the past N years, but zero changes would have been an improvement.
Things that seemed to work reliably for me 10 years ago but now do not:
1. "Call mom". Siri has apparently forgotten who my mother is. I tried "Hey Siri <name> is my mother" and I got an error. I'm sure it's resolvable but come on.
2. "Directions to <destination>" This always used to fail when it couldn't find places, but lately, when I'm driving, Siri will respond "Getting directions to <destination>" and then... nothing. No directions come up. I have to do it 2-3 times to have the directions actually start.
And the die-hards will put up with just about anything. But not everyone is a diehard. On the margin, people who might have watched the game some night will find it too much of a hassle or expense and skip it. And if they do so enough times, they'll get into other patterns and stop caring as much about the team, or the sport, and so on.
What we're talking about here is elasticity of demand. For some people and some things, the short-term demand is very inelastic. But in the long term, it's not. And maybe the people making these decisions have better models of that than I do and they're going to continue to raise revenue with customer-hostile choices. But maybe they just don't care what happens past the next quarter or two and years or decades from now it will be clear they fucked up.
>Everyone benefits from it except the consumer, who's the only party who can't choose.
But of course they can choose. They can choose to not go to those events and venues and do other things with their time.
And I expect that pro sports will look back on these moves and realize that they cannibalized their future fan growth for higher revenues today. I go to fewer pro sports games than I might otherwise both because of the absolute cost and because it feels bad to pay a bunch for a ticket and then also have to pay like $15 for a hot dog. And I take my kids to fewer than my parents took me to for similar reasons.
It feels like the recipient company did an awful lot of work in response to what was at best a fishing expedition. A serious complaint about licensing that demanded a real response would have been sent by post. It's not clear to me that scattershot LinkedIn messages deserve any response at all. The fact that the initial message lies about trying to contact him another way is another check in the "ignore this completely" column.
The same way that I wouldn't bother to fact-check a spam phone caller, why give any credence to this kind of thing?
What if the company that is about to go bankrupt fails to pay its insurance premiums? Seems fairly likely to happen. About-to-be-bankrupt companies generally get behind on all their bills.
There is no way that human space exploration is ever cost effective with robot space exploration.