grobbyy

It's also worth noting that's US stocks. The story in Europe or Argentina would be completely different, and there was no way to figure that out in 1920.

Terms of service often contain illegal provisions. I teach kids to flout them too. One of the biggest sins in school is kids learn to follow rules uncritically.

There are specific protections allowed when the goal is to maintain / break compatibility. If Microsoft locks competitors out, competitors are quite often permitted to pick the lock.

I can't comment on this situation since I don't know the details, but it's very likely this is fully legal.

See Oracle / Java API lawsuit, garage door opener suit, etc. To see where the lines sit.

I mean, with Trump, you don't need to look for allegations. You have "grab them by the pussy." We know he was a sexual predator.

However, I've seen both credible and less than credible allegations even against him.

I have no idea about this specific one, but we live in a disinformation sphere on just about everything these days....

There's a lot of just plain simple fraud too. I've seen embassies issue visas only with bribes, or employees simply collect salaries without doing their jobs. As in you're hired to review documents by some legally mandated criteria, and they simply toss them into piles without even glancing at them and go home early.

That benefits no one, except for the employee.

My experience is that for anyone sufficiently famous and polarizing, there are widespread false allegations. It's hard work to work from primary sources and sort fact from fiction.

It's impractical to check everything, do I tend to do deep dives spot checking a small number of things.

For readers, I'd suggest the same thing here. Disregard claims on the Internet, or even court rulings, and just look at primary evidence. Pick a small number of issues.

I make this statement generically, without prejudice to the outcome here.

There is widespread fraud in the government. It needs to be addressed. There is widespread inefficiency too.

I think the people in DOGE have the skills and access to address it.

I have no evidence that they are doing so, and some evidence of widespread loyalty tests which, while not identical, remind me of how Stalin came to power.

However, absence if evidence is not evidence of absence, and some evidence is not the same as proof.

I have dozens of explanations which fit the facts, and I don't have any way to determine which, if any, is correct.

A basic problem is they're trained on the Internet, and take on all the biases. Ask any of them so purposed edX to MIT or wrote the platform. You'll get back official PR. Look at a primary source (e.g. public git history or private email records) and you'll get a factual story.

The tendency to reaffirm popular beliefs would make current LLMs almost useless for actual historical work, which often involves sifting fact from fiction.

That's not quite my point. "Productive" is for a reason. Is manufacturing perfume productive? Making video games?

It depends on your goals.

However, in a great power conflict, they're much less productive than tanks, drones, fighter jets, and guns.

Conversely, money thrown into weapons can't be used for quality-of-life improvements.

Neither of these is "good" or "bad" per se.

Some industries are hybrid. A ship yard is dual purpose.

If two hypothetical countries are playing this game, and one exports movies to buy ships and vice versa, when war breaks out, one country might be stuck without movies and the other without ships.

Yes, I could, but I'd have a 90% chance of hurting myself. Ditto for giving some cancer with radiation, many covert poisons, and similar. I can name a dozen ways I could kill or harm you, but:

1. I'd need to be wacko enough to want to harm you

2. I'd need to be sane enough for a major engineering project

3. I'd need to be competent enough to succeed without hurting myself

The set of individuals with all the traits required is small. It's not zero -- we had Ted Kazinsky -- but very small. Most major crimes are also never solved, and many more people can just take a gun and shoot someone. That's probably even harder to track down since a lot more people have guns than labs and PhDs. Esoteric technologies make for easy investigations.

So in the end, I think state actors have these. They also make good plot lines for a novel or video game (I have about a dozen I came up with in the context of a half-baked creative project).

But for real life individuals, I don't see how they'd become prolific. We'll probably see a crazy someday, but nowhere close to gun homicides. They just don't make much practical sense for an individual.

World War II was won because of US and (less advertised) Soviet manufacturing capacity.

Ukraine is more constrained by weapon supplies, especially drones and artillery, than by manpower.

I'm not sure both sides are playing the same game. In the game I think might be afoot, if your economy is management consultants, therapists, and hair stylists, that's "bad" GDP. Resources and manufacturing are "good" GDP. Resources are complex in that stone are renewable, and some go away when you export them.

I'm not even going to talk about education or, related, R&D capacity.

There's a huge step to I'm capability with 16gb and 24gb, for not to much more. The 4060 has a 16gb version, for example. On the the cheap end, the Intel Arc does too.

Next major step up is 48GB and then hundreds of GB. But a lot of ML models target 16-24gb since that's in the grad student price range.

An yes. The inevitable, long-predicted end of Moore's Law.

My guess is that most people on a jury would convict, but the odds of an entire jury convicting are less than fifty percent. I don't know how much less.

Tha kind of flexibility is the point of a jury. Laws aren't purely mechanical in most countries, for good reason. There's a lot of complexity and nuance, especially when some people have political power.

I don't have enough background here to make a judgement about what a jury should do, but I do have enough background to know that things like jury nullification are important to a well-functioning justice system.

Silent is hard, but safe and efficient is virtually any modern jetliner. The interesting problem is safe, easy, low-maintenance and cheap.

Your notes are quite wrong. Most regulations are not about not killing people with checks notes state-of-the-art-1970-technology.

This is even more true in zoning. There are much better ways to build homes possible, but not when a regulation is phrased in terms of distance between wooden stuffs, rather than safety and durability.

Economies of scale continue to mean that entrenched technologies get used.

Pilot licensing is especially onerous, where control systems allow flight to be a lot simpler, and a lot of very hard-to-fly technologies (like autogyros) can't be brought to mass scale not due to technology but simply due to regulation.