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I think it's actively harmful to your own cause when you suggest corruption without any evidence. Just because politicians don't take action on an issue you think is important doesn't mean they're corrupt. It's more likely that the issue you think is important is simply not important to most voters.

Suggesting politicians are corrupt without any evidence will make that worse. If people think their politicians are corrupt they will further disengage with the political process, which will ensure there's even less pressure on politicians to take action on niche issues like this.


The EU Commission was caught breaking the law in order to lobby for Chat Control: https://noyb.eu/en/gdpr-complaint-against-x-twitter-over-ill...

The EU Commission also gave a foreign tech company called Thorn (they pretend to be a charity), special access to government officials: https://netzpolitik.org/2022/dude-wheres-my-privacy-how-a-ho...

I think both of those cases would be examples of lobbying and corruption.


The thing is that "The EU commission" is an entity composed os politicians, appointed by member states.

It's little coincidence that national governments want Chat Control (laundering that through EU), and the EU parliament is the entity that shots it down (coincidentally the entity that is most beholden to the public).

It would be nice to learn which comissioners are lobbying for it.


Neither examples are evidence of corruption. That doesn't mean they're not problematic, but there's no evidence here of a politician receiving a kickback for any of these actions.

https://fortune.com/europe/2023/09/26/thorn-ashton-kutcher-y...

$600K+ went to kickbacks, er… “lobbying”, and thorn was hit with some pretty nasty scandals involving sex crimes.


That's my point though, conflating lobbying and corruption doesn't help. Both are indeed problematic, but unlike actual corruption lobbying can be countered with activism.

Corruption does not necessarily mean a politician receiving a kickback. It can be a lot more indirect and subversive.

I think a hearty fuck off is warranted for responses like this. What the shit do you base the converse off? Pretend there's no corruption and there won't be any??

> Pretend there's no corruption and there won't be any??

If you look at that person's responses to others in this thread, that is exactly what they are doing. I do hope they have proper health and safety training for moving the goalposts so much.


Of course not, if there's evidence of corruption then those involved should be rooted out and prosecuted to the full extent of the law.

What I'm saying is that if there's no evidence of corruption, then simply assuming corruption will harm your cause because it will make it seem like political activism is futile in the face of supposedly hidden corruption.


Moscow and St Petersburg will be the absolute last places where you will see people struggle precisely because Putin knows it's important to keep those cities prosperous even if it's at the cost of people living outside of the major cities.

The enlistment bonuses tell that story: from St Petersburg, you get 10x the bonus compared to Dagestan.

Sure, but that's already 20% of population counting metro area. Add other well off areas, university towns, upper class in small towns, etc. and it doesn't seem to be looking super bad in the short term for them.

When corporations were posed with this question numerous times in the past, their answer has always been an emphatic "Yes!".

This is such a motte-and-bailey argument. Whenever people point out LLMs aren't actually intelligent then you're an anti-AI Luddite. But whenever an AI does something catastrophically dumb it's absolved of all responsibility because "it's just predicting the next token".

I'm getting so tired of this.


I think they are not actually intelligent. Fix all random seeds and other sources of randomness, and try the same prompt twice, and check how intelligent that looks, as a first approximation.

On a more technical level very serious people have voiced doubts, for example Richard Sutton in an interview with Dwarkash Patel [1].

[1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=21EYKqUsPfg&pp=ygUnZmF0aGVyIG9...


The financial derivatives are (supposed to be) regulated, there's laws against insider trading that keep the market fair. For sports betting there's laws against match fixing.

The prediction market CEOs on the other hand seem to be actively encouraging insider trading and match fixing, it's practically their main selling point.


Many languages considered green and blue so closely related that they grouped them together under a single term: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue%E2%80%93green_distinction...

grue

It's better than bleen I suppose.

Speaking of, I'd be curious about a similar experiment but one that compares how grotesque, for lack of a better word, certain words sound. The word bleen makes me uncomfortable, I think because my brain automatically goes to spleen; grue isn't my favorite either but I prefer it to bleen.

I'm curious how universal that is though. Do others have similarly aligned preferences for one word over the other, or are our feelings about them more evenly spread?


This one in particular is going to be difficult to get good results. Depending on your era you may have been eaten by a grue at some point.

Not a native speaker, bleen for me got auto corrected by my brain to green. It doesn't make me uncomfortable, but I'd prefer grue because my brain will immediately understand we're talking about the umbrella term. If grue is said out of context, I'd imagine Gru from despicable me, when written I'd imagine gruel, but, again, because I'm not a native speaker, instead of yucky food I'd instead think about that episode of Masha and the Bear where they end up with a houseful of the porridge.


"grue" has a specific meaning in philosophy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_riddle_of_induction

I have been eaten by many of those.

Apple is, because of vendor-lock in. Once you're sufficiently dependent on Apple's ecosystem it becomes painful to switch to a competitor because it requires switching to a different smartphone which then locks you out of most of Apple's ecosystem.


> So I'd say things are already exactly as you wish.

Except, you know, the "don't take others with you" part.

That is a crucial, fundamental part of liberalism that people often skip over. Everyone only seems to remember the "I have the freedom to do whatever I want" part and skip over the "until that freedom impedes the freedom of others" part.


Absolutely, which is why smoking in public, offices, bars, restaurants, etc is banned...


So it logically follows that you don't have the right to sell cigarettes

Good job everyone!


> It's easy to turn off the crypto stuff

I'm living under a rock, but my first thought was that you turned off TLS.


Instead of turning it off, you can just make it useless: https://youtu.be/M1si1y5lvkk


If your mind goes to TLS when you read crypto, you surely do live under a rock ... in bliss.


As a developer, personally I would be worried if that wasn't my first thought when someone uses browser and crypto together :D


Indeed, the problem is that people tell lies on the internet. We need to do something about that, because it's interfering with our super-intelligent AI models. /s


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