> For instance: you can crash a machine by DoSing it, but you can't crash a court case the same way: the judge will look at you and your truckload of motions and hold you in contempt.
I mean, not to nitpick, but isn’t endlessly filling motions a often-used method to deny justice and avoid consequences, especially in the US?
> The fact that they’re refusing to back down and admit they made a mistake is not a good sign for the company.
I wish this were true, but the current political and corporate climate is that nearly anything is justifiable as long as you win, where winning is money or power. Fraud, corruption, extortion, etc.
> I would not want to be one of their clients when it came to trying to dispute something.
I find most b2b transactions are hostile, and the purpose of sales or customer success is to smooth over the hostility. Tremendously more true in the B2C space, and only accelerated by the aforementioned political and corporate climate.
In other words, as long as their staff is charismatic / crafty enough, this “scandal” will slough right off.
Assuming OP means they used beam search on the sub trees of possible moves, which yields some local minimum / maximum in the objective space. Especially useful here because of the sheer multitude of possible moves, and also RNG.
Beam search can be googled for useful results, beam solver can not.
Given the breadth of LLM knowledge, I somehow doubt this. Sure, it’s probably responsible for the quality of LLM insights, but I don’t think anyone was asking experts about e.g. the complex ecological effects of invasive zebra mussels and their provenance in Lake Michigan.
“Chasing tech debt” vs “more sales” is a false dichotomy. A dangerous one, too, if you simply expand “chasing tech debt” to “listening to engineering concerns”. That’s how you end up with a Boeing.
> The […] tried to achieve artificial scarcity for profit. All scammers?
Yeah, I don’t really see a difference between scamming and certain types of rent seeking. So many things could fit in the blank there, not just the entertainment industry.
If:
- you’re not creating value
- you’re exploiting the value someone else has created
- you’re engaging in anticompetitive, anticonsumer behavior
- etc.
You’re rent seeking and the only reason we’re don’t use the word “scammer” is because the concentration of wealth of the western world is built on rent seeking behavior.
> I don't think we should ever head toward licensing/a credential body for software development, but I do think now is a good time to have discussions around liability for defective products.
Liability is how a credential body would organically grow. It already exists in the security, compliance, and enterprise parts of the software world.
That can be okay. The problems we're worried about come when it's government mandated.
The EU Cyber Resilience Act puts heavy liability on vendors for software vulnerabilities that get exploited, including in open-source components they incorporate. OSS devs are shielded - liability is on the companies who incorporate OSS into commercial stuff.
In practice, what’s the difference between a government mandated license and a government that quickly rules in favor of parties who are damaged by companies that don’t use licensed software engineers?
E.g. “Your software caused serious damages to our company / livelihood, and you best hope that it turns up in discovery that you used properly licensed software engineers who were following licensing best practices, otherwise this will be a slam dunk case.”
Genuinely an interesting question to me. Seems like the latter is a better option, generally, but it does lock restorative justice behind a paywall - you have to be able to afford a lawyer.
Having lived through it myself, I found the government’s actions extremely mild when compared to something like what ICE has been up to. Zero people were directly killed by authorities because of Covid noncompliance.
From my perspective, it’s hysteria borne out of the difference in requirements for urban health policy vs. rural health policy, and the fact that rural people quite often travel through urban areas (e.g. airports).
Talk to anyone from Wyoming and ask what Covid was like during the worst days, and then talk to an ER doctor who worked in New York City.
Cynically, I want to blame it on the absurd lack of empathy of rural Americans and a complete lack of ability to imagine day-to-day lifestyles that do not match their own.
Were there a few scandals? For sure, I will not deny that. But I have the distinct urge to invent time travel for the hemmers, hawers, and devil’s advocates and transport them to New York Presbyterian in April of 2020.
Edit: I also have to credit rightwing media, of course, for capitalizing on the opportunity to manufacture a wedge issue that every American had an armchair opinion of. Chicken and egg, of course, but media ghouls will be media ghouls.
> Cynically, I want to blame it on the absurd lack of empathy of rural Americans and a complete lack of ability to imagine day-to-day lifestyles that do not match their own.
Doesn't that cut both ways, though? Controls needed to keep densely populated areas safe aren't always necessary in low density areas like Wyoming. Yet some of those controls affected the livelihood of many people in areas of the country that are often poorer than those in dense urban areas.
And, yes, if a rural person is traveling to an urban area, they would have to abide by the same rules. Same as an urban person traveling to a rural area should be able to relax some of the restrictions they had to deal with. But it was mostly all or nothing, helping the divide grow even larger.
> And, yes, if a rural person is traveling to an urban area, they would have to abide by the same rules. Same as an urban person traveling to a rural area should be able to relax some of the restrictions they had to deal with.
Isn’t this precisely what organically happened? Again, there were no federal agents armed with guns and pepper spray roaming the nation, enforcing Covid compliance. Rural bars, restaurants, stores pretty much all remained open the whole pandemic minus the couple of weeks where we weren’t sure if it was thousands or millions of people who would die.
People were “forced” to wear masks, which again, in practice, meant that once you got a certain number of miles away from an urban center there was no enforcement.
Plenty of Americans never got vaccinated. Their travel was restricted. Fair trade off all things considered. Urban people shouldn’t be forced to eat (i.e. live) where rural people shit (i.e. gallivant around as a disease vector).
> Yet some of those controls affected the livelihood of many people in areas of the country that are often poorer than those in dense urban areas.
This is very bad faith. The rural poor were completely unaffected by Covid measures. I traveled to Kentucky throughout Covid for hiking and pretty much never saw a mask. The rural poor also were unaffected by travel restrictions because the rural poor do not travel.
I swear the only acceptable policy for some people would have been no policy at all. Any active policy would have eroded “trust in institutions”.
I was more middle of the road. I live in a rural red red state. Then during COVID people would yell at my dying of cancer mother on chemo for wearing a mask while grocery shopping. Eventually the stores had to set special hours so people like her could shop without harassment. My politics have been greatly impacted. I was shown there is no compassionate conservative, that is just cover for 'fuck everyone who is not me and my in group'. Or if there are compassionate conservatives, they don't care to step in an impose compassion, so they might as well not exist. My mom died afraid to go shopping in her own community because she would be verbally abused. My politics are never going back.
Zero patrons inside the stores cared/did anything. A business structuring things to prevent a scene is not compassion in my mind, just like pride awareness by businesses wasn't actual pride awareness.
Deciding whether someone's helpful actions or lack thereof is good or bad based on your perception of their internal mental state seems pretty fraught. How do you know why the business implemented this? How do you know what the other patrons felt about it? Do you regularly pick fights with psychopaths in public?
If a woman is being harassed, especially an old one, yes, I have always stepped in. That used to be a part of me I thought was conservative. But it doesn't appear to actually be a trait they hold.
I'm not litigating my mothers treatment here. I am expressing the damage done.
I am so sorry that happened to you and your mom. We've become so tribal there's very little space for compassion for the vulnerable as we are positioned to fight tooth and nail.
I lived in Manhattan in April 2020 and specifically know doctors who worked in the ER at Mt. Sinai. I think the vaccine mandates, to the limited extent there were any, were not paternalistic in a way that was unreasonable.
I would not say shutting down all discussion about a topic (lab origin) that ends up getting vindicated is a minor scandal. It's something everyone observed that erodes trust at a national level.
> I would not say shutting down all discussion about a topic (lab origin) that ends up getting vindicated is a minor scandal.
“Shutting down all discussion” - lol. I mean this is grossly hyperbolic. Were social media companies coordinating with the government to slow disinformation? Yes. Was it applied too broadly? Maybe. But describing it as “shutting down all discussion” is a disservice to people who don’t know as much as you and I do.
And yes, in the grand scheme of things, it is a minor scandal. Have you watched the news recently? Save your energy for issues that matter.
Harris lost by a couple percentage points in few key states. Perhaps the news you are talking about wouldn't be happening if trust in institutions hadn't fallen so low.
I don't think whataboutism is helpful here. I think the FDA was broadly well-intentioned, and this administration is not. But this article isn't about ICE.
You're right, this article is about the Trump administration going out of their way to pick political appointees who go out of their way to make us sicker in such a despicable way that even they cannot justify it.
It's wild to me that we keep talking about Biden/Kamala as if they are the ones responsible for the lost in trust in institutions when we have a Republican party and Fox news that blast that the government can do nothing right for the last 3 decades of my life.
Sure, the Democrats can do a LOT better for the common folk, but it's so misplacing the blame as to be mind boggling.
What I often hear is that it's not useful to blame conservatives, but conservatives can live 90% of their political lives by blaming others, shifting the blame even for things they actively choose to do on their own.
People reject science because of misinformation spread by conservatives?! Oh that's the scientists fault for not doing a better job of countering the conservatives!
I mean, not to nitpick, but isn’t endlessly filling motions a often-used method to deny justice and avoid consequences, especially in the US?
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