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> The narrative they "investigated" was so obviously false, bodycam evidence directly contradicted multiple key facts. Officials are interested only seeking to prove the case. Thankfully the jury came to the right verdict.

I don't get it, if they only care about prosecuting and proving the case, wouldn't they go by the bodycam evidence? They didn't prove the case. Maybe if their incentive was to prosecute and prove the charges, they'd go by the obvious evidence. Or am I missing something here?


The most insane thing which I wouldn't believe if I hadn't experienced it myself, but Samsung will periodically just install random apps and games on your phone. You delete them, then a month later, new apps show up. It's one of the most aggressive anti-consumer thing I've seen and it's coming from such a large player.

I'd guess it's happening during silent updates to your android OS. Those can come packaged with anything Samsung wants. I had a similar fight lately with HP's printer software which insists on waking your computer up for a printer health check and reenables the scheduled task randomly even without updates. Finally excised it from my PC.

I prefer prediction markets to gambling because the platform isn't the bookmaker. This reduces the adverse selection of players. For instance, if you actually win regularly on these platforms they'll actually ban you, much like a casino. My understanding of prediction markets is that it's pure market making which is preferable

In theory this should limit the damage insiders can do, since as the probability of encountering an insider rises the market makers will need to widen the spread.

> I prefer prediction markets to gambling because the platform isn't the bookmaker.

Just because you prefer poker to slots, that doesn't suddenly mean that poker isn't gambling.


Slots have odds which change throughout the day and are usually (on average) pretty bad. In Poker, you play against other players, not the house. There is a rake which is very minor when compared against the average returns against other players.

They are fundamentally different. In slots, you bet against the house, in poker you bet against other players. So slots are gambling in the traditional sense. Poker however is no different than buying a house. There is still a house fee in both cases and in both cases you are betting against other people. And in poker, new players can enter and inject capital just like the housing market. You going to ban buying houses next? You can't eliminate risk from life.

You are basically trying out outlaw luck and randomness at this point.


I'm not trying to outlaw anything. I'm trying to make gambling addicts stop delusionally coping when it comes to "predictions markets" and just admit that they're gambling.

poker and slots are two very different variants of gambling. Sure, there is plenty of chance/variance in poker but there is an undeniable skill component that is lacking in slots.

The one that really infuriates me is blackjack where - if you apply skill by counting cards - you get kicked out of the casino.

This has always been the case for most high-stakes gambling. The problem isn't winning big, the problem is getting the counterparty to pay. Skilled gamblers (when it comes to games with any skill component) throughout history have been adept at winning subtly and then moving on before anyone figures out they have an edge.

Where did I say it wasn't gambling. I said prediction markets are preferable to sports books like DraftKings. I don't like either personally but its an important distinction

Except there is still adverse selection, just like there is in the stock market. People who have inside information are going to bet more, and you will take the other side of that bet not realizing that has happened.

Serious question, but when companies like OpenAI and Google roll out something like this they likely get millions of users overnight. I get why it's a distraction, money sink and they don't want to work on it. But presumably it's worth something? The user base alone.

Why don't they ever sell these things? Keep a good chunk of the equity w/ some exclusive deals to use their models, but spin it off. How much could a social network like this be worth?


> this seems to be exacerbated by government cuts

What government cuts? 2025 FAA air traffic budget was up around 7% from 2025

https://enotrans.org/article/senate-bill-oks-27-billion-faa-...


Notably 2025 was also the year that Elon started firing people and shutting down things that were in the budget, as well as several shutdowns.

From the article:

> The crash has raised fears that operations at US airports are under extreme stress. Airports have been dealing with a shortage of air traffic controllers, exacerbated by brutal federal government personnel cuts by Donald Trump’s administration at the start of his second presidency.

Not my opinion, just reading from there.


So where there budget cuts or not? That was the claim. I have yet to find anything that suggests there were budget cuts, just vague mentions of "brutal federal government personnel cuts".

I'm just looking for: budget was X in <2026 and in 2026 it is Y, where X > Y


Analyze staffing, not budget. That gets more directly at workload.

You said budget cuts, not me.

> Build one of most valuable companies in history and grow to be one of youngest billionaires

> tinfoilcondom (account created 5 min ago): dude has no talent or original ideas

I love this platform


> grow to be one of youngest billionaires

Are you equating intelligence with networth? :-)

I think it's more like this https://www.amazon.com/Accidental-Billionaires-Founding-Face...


IQ is highly correlated with both income and wealth so it seems like a fair comment. Of course not all billionaires have a high IQ, but far more billionaires do than your average person.

Not in the way you're implying. There's an IQ threshold that correlates somewhat with income, but correlated gains drop (kind of vanish) after it, and that threshold is pretty low; it might be 100.

Nothing you just said disproves anything I claimed. Billionaires tend to have significantly higher IQ than average. The same is true for high income people.

I think it is in fact not the case that high income people generally have significantly higher IQ than average. As for billionaires: when was the last billionaire IQ survey done?


Funny, neither of these decades-old papers includes citations to the billionaire IQ survey you're quoting. :)

Huh? The very first study studied billionaires. A simple Ctrl+F would've identified this.

I think you missed my point.

survivorship bias.

there is absolutely nothing stopping a poor child in sierra leone from becoming the next einstein, outside of access to things that should be considered mandatory for human life.


Blank slate theory has been thoroughly discredited so many times I'm not sure why I'm even responding, but this is complete nonsense. If you're born with 62 IQ like the average Sierra Leone citizen, no amount of education will get you to 120. It's literally not possible.

According to research, a full education can add ~15 IQ points.

So someone from Sierra Leone who's average and receives a full education can expect to have around 77 IQ, which means severe issues with reading comprehension, math beyond simple arithmetic and following multi-step instructions.


so geographical region of birth dictates intelligence? how intriguing.

i would like to know if that child was fed well, provided with shelter and given a good education -- would it still be, in your words, "not possible" for them to break even 100IQ?


I didn't claim that, this appears to be a strawman. I specifically stated average IQ, and yes, necessarily your region of birth does inform your average IQ.

Environmental and educational impacts on IQ are very minimal. Someone with an average Sierra Leone IQ is not becoming a genius after world-class education and the best environment possible. They'll be measurably improved, but not by 50 IQ points.


your region of birth does inform your average IQ.

I doubt you can demonstrate this empirically, because there is no such thing as a regional survey of average IQ.


I'm going to go out on a limb and say you have to be above average intelligence to start a business and become a billionaire from it

Why is this good? I want an impartial consistent system for shopping. If I can find it at a different site for a lower price, I should be able to do so. I should also be able to have it give me non-bot reviews and ask relevant questions about the product.

The same way I think shopping at Amazon is better than a place like Nike due to objectivity and comparison, I think a chat interface has the potential to take this to another level since places like Amazon have degraded considerably in terms of things like fake third party products and fake reviews.


The buyer of this technology is not shoppers, it's retailers. The measurement of quality is "does it make us more money?" not "does it help me make better buying choices."

Retailers do not want you to make better choices. They want you to buy the widget.

A lot of evidence suggests that also shoppers aren't that interested in making the best choice either. They want to make a tolerable choice with as little effort as possible. There is no basically no consumer market for "power shopping" outside of weird niches like pcpartpicker.com etc.


Is there a way to measure users "making the best choice?" You could measure the amount of time spent comparison-shopping, but most people are terrible at that anyway; it's an acquired skill for sure. Besides a willingness to spend time, it seems like an impossible-to-quantify metric even in the abstract.

Maybe the best proxy metric is whether the customer returns the product. But the store will also be willing to eat more returns on a higher margin item if they make more profit at the end of the day.

I don't think I agree. If I overpay by 10%, I'll never know it and probably wouldn't return it even if I did know--once the shrinkwrap is off, too late. If a superior product exists but I don't find it, by definition I wouldn't know and wouldn't return the thing I did buy.

Cynically, the customer might not know if they overpaid but the retailer doesn’t care about that. Where “making the best choice” actually cashes out is the customer DAU dropping (rare) or product returns increasing.

That's a cynical way to look at it. Most likely the LLM will take a cut of sales and they'd be more or less indifferent who cuts the check. There's a market for this sort of thing. People will go to the best LLM for shopping. If the LLM is a shitty product, people will switch. LLMs are increasingly commoditized.

All you say is true for an aggregator like Amazon. But Amazon is better than Nike.com because as an aggregator they go from 1 to many retailers. LLMs will go from 1 aggregator (Amazon) to many so it will be better. And they don't have to invest a lot in UI/UX as chat is the interface.


It's not cynical it is materialism.

Shoppers do not want to pay to shop. Retailers pay thousands to encourage you to shop with them. They are the economic buyers of this feature.


> impartial consistent system for shopping

> for a lower price

Catalog is impartial, chatbot is ads pretending as advice.


I do agree with your conclusion, but the catalog in most online shops is certainly not impartial. Amazon sells the entire first page of search placement, for example.

But we know it and it's obvious.

Within a few years people will be accustomed to the idea of AI chatbots selling them stuff and it will be obvious then too. The first time paid placements appeared in a catalog, it was probably also not obvious then.

catalog ads are labeled. "what's the best something I can buy?" is begging for unlabeled ads that go against your interest. if you literally cannot tell between ad and not ad, you can't skip to actual results, it's useless.

Catalog is an ad, the SKU database behind the catalog is impartial (at least as much as it gets), but no one is giving you access to that.

Catalog is impartial? Then why are ~40% of every search I do on Amazon a sponsored product? There is no pure "catalog" especially with cheap crap coming out every day from no-name Chinese labels.

Am I the only one that think Amazon has gotten pretty awful in the last 5 years?


You can skip sponsored products

more like 20 years. Basically when they introduced third party sellers.

> First, roughly 90 percent of politically relevant social science articles leaned left 1960–2024, and the mean political stance of every social science discipline was left-of-center every year during the period.

> Second, all disciplines showed leftward movement between 1990 and 2024.

> Third, policy-proximal disciplines generally showed limited rightward moderation between roughly 1970 and 1990, though policy-distal disciplines did not.

> Fourth, disciplines with greater leftward orientation generally displayed greater ideological homogeneity

> Fifth, sociocultural content was more consistently left-leaning than economic content, and that gap widened over time.


Is that because people interested in social science are generally left leaning, or because when actually researching social issues you discover that progressive liberalism has the better answers?

What does post-USA world mean?

Who is the leader in culture, business, technology? The only other contender I can think of is China.

And this is better?


>> What does post-USA world mean? >> Who is the leader in culture, business, technology? The only other contender I can think of is China.

>> And this is better?

Who says you need a leader in each of those? Maybe it's post-centralization, or in other words decentralization which people have been wanting for the internet for a while now.


Goes against pretty much all of history. I guarantee you the Chinese officials dont think this way and if your head is in the sand and its up for grabs they will grab it. They exert influence on geopolitics heavily and think in centuries rather than political cycles. Who owns AI and social media/tech will basically excert their values on the worlf

Not really? Technology spread fairly quickly for the last few hundred years, at least in the western world.

Why couldn't China be better? It can't get much worse than what the US is currently doing. It's getting dangerously close to 30s Germany levels of madness. China at least at the moment seems like a better run country, and much less interested in forcing its will on other countries.

Bunisess and technology. Culture ? Highly debatable and certainly not in the last 10 years.

I figure china would be pretty similar for the rest of the world honestly.

Much better.

China is far more reliable and dependable than dealing with a lying narcissistic paedophile and his cronies.


Much better is rather an exaggeration. China is ruthlessly 'colonizing' Africa for example. Not that 'the west' has any leg to stand on criticizing China for it of course.

But China currently is a lot more stable and somewhat more trustworthy than the U.S.


You get downvotes, but even if China is an authoritarian oppressive regime, they are not going around starting wars and threatening their allies, changing directions daily.

I am not Chinese. In fact we feel threatened by China.

However, if China does come to occupy a majorly influential seat at the table it will not be the for the first time. The last time it did, it did not impose it's will beyond its boundaries.

It is to be seen whether that repeats.


Generally, historically it didn't because of what happened during the Sui Dynasty, which was short lived. The lessons from that period is still fairly engrained in the mindsets of Chinese people.

Careful what you wish for, their History revisionism is remarkable and soon you'd find a narrative preaching that Western culture was all made up (in part by the usual suspects), not even the Holocaust will survive - just follow some social media trends and you'll see what's already happening.

> not even the Holocaust will survive

Which one ?


I didn't understand the question, can you expand on it?

My interpretation is that you're asking "which Holocaust won't survive historical revisionism", and there are two options (both are red flags):

- you're deliberately trying to dilute the designation of Holocaust, by stating there are other "holocausts", by which you're probably referring to other genocides - when in reality the Holocaust is the name given to the genocide at the hands of Nazis; it's the same has asking "which Holodomor?" in the context of my statement.

- you're implying the Holocaust didn't exist, as if there was a list of "many holocausts", some historically true, others historically false;


I am questioning the idea that there is one "the holocaust". I understand that is not a very popular notion at some places. (As I anticipated, here comes the downvotes)

Being at the other end of colonialism, we are aware of many holocausts and acknowledge them if not equally we don't identify any one as 'the holocaust'.

Don't get me wrong, I suspect our values mostly agree.

I literally have a 3ft by 3ft Anne Frank's photograph as a poster in my bedroom as a reminder. Lest we forget.

I wrote the code myself to enlarge and distribute, with minimal pixelation, a small photograph of her at her desk. I printed it out split over multiple letter sized sheets. I did not have access to a wide form factor printer then. I still remember figuring out the libpgm libppm libraries from source. Assembled and glued the jigsaw puzzle and framed the result. There are some millimetric misalignments due to printer roller slips.

This was from many decades ago, when I was in college. It is still there on my bedroom wall.


Ok, thank you for clarifying because I thought you were coming from a different place.

Well I disagree.

I don't think the Holocaust took away the word "holocaust" and stripped it off from it's meaning, and from being able to be used to describe other events. I also don't think that was the intent behind the choice.

So much so that I've capitalized the Holocaust.

If it's the right choice or not to name it, I trust the institutions that studied this event.

I also don't think it takes away from the crimes against humanity and genocide of other cultures, some from colonialism, others from racial and ethnic hate.

There's still genocide and colonialism happening to this day, for example at the hands of Russia we have the current genocide in Ukraine and attempt to colonize it. Or what's happening in Gaza.

Maybe it's a cultural difference, but the word "genocide" to describe these crimes strikes me as a very loaded and meaningful word, and accurate word - the Holocaust was a genocide, it carries everything that the Holocaust, Holodomor, native American, Chechens, Armenian genocide, and many other cultures suffered.

Also genocide not only has a definition as a word, but also has a specific legal definition.

While holocaust has its own definition which I don't think it applies to all genocides and crimes against humanity.


Perhaps a Hebrew word would have been the most appropriate in this case. Holocaust is an English word and it is not a proper noun. In any case it's too late to change anything.

Upvoted because I think your comment was downvoted out of emotions this topic triggers.


It is actually a Greek word, that's why it is the same in most other languages.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocaust_(sacrifice)


Thanks. I did not know about the etymological roots.

Which is more important:

(A) Government programs that redistribute resources to workers displaced by AI, potentially reducing efficiency and slowing innovation, or

(B) Policies that enable American tech companies to rapidly innovate and ensure U.S. leadership in AI.

After the results of that poll, we can write a new article titled:

Americans Recognize AI as a Catalyst for Broad-Based Prosperity and Economic Advancement


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