in a typical clean-room design, the person writing the new implementation is not supposed to have any knowledge of the original, they should only have knowledge of the specification.
if one person writes the spec from the implementation, and then also writes the new implementation, it is not clean-room design.
I believe the argument is that LLMs are stateless. So if the session writing the code isn't the same session that wrote the spec, it's effectively a clean room implementation.
There are other details of course (is the old code in the training data?) but I'm not trying to weigh in on the argument one way or the other.
if you make an exception to obeying licenses because "that person/company/country are bad" or whatever, exceptions start sneaking in all over the place, and the entire fabric deteriorates quickly afterwards.
edit: did not expect people to be in favor of blatantly ignoring licenses. huh.
anyone want to tell me how we determine who the bad people are that we can ignore their licenses, and who the good people are where we will honor them? what is the criteria?
We could have reciprocity laws. If a country won't respect software licences, or permits hacking gangs as long as they don't rob from their own, then they should get the same treatment in return.
The argument is that we should only obey the rule of law with counterparties who reciprocate, rather than voluntarily hamstring ourselves for no benefit other than moral purity.
right, damn pesky morals are always hamstringing human progress.
my thinking is that once you start selectively applying rule of law to "good guys" and "bad guys" (or whatever criteria you pick), you have lost something really important. fingers crossed no one ever alters the criteria such that you fall on the "wrong" side!
i did not expect people to advocate for ignoring licenses, and further, arguing that the rule of law should be selectively applied. but, i am too old to expend energy trying to convince people that the rule of law loses all meaning if it is selectively applied.
so, sure, fuck licenses. if someone pisses you off, just say they were born in the wrong country and steal their shit. thankfully i am retiring soon, so i probably wont see the winners of this race to the bottom.
I think you're entirely right. I also think that what you're warning about is already in the past, due to the practicalities of globalization.
There are so many laws around the world that apply to "websites", that currently, you can't operate any sort of online presence anymore without at least implicitly picking and choosing which laws on the planet that you're going to follow. Nobody hires hundreds of lawyers in every country of the world to comply with every website law on the planet, and if you did, I bet you'd find you probably can't practically operate one.
there is some interesting and nuanced discussion to be had with your main point, but
>This isn't to say that you should ignore software licenses, [...]
the main/only reason that i started this comment chain, and continued it, is that the other commenters are saying you should (if they are from the "wrong" country, anyways).
>i did not expect people to advocate for ignoring licenses
> am too old to expend energy trying to convince people that the rule of law loses all meaning if it is selectively applied.
Again, for what feels like the third or fourth time, this is already happening all over the globe.
It's an open secret, for example, that the AI companies trained their models on pirated textbooks. It's not even an open secret, just the bare-faced truth, that the AI companies trained and continue to train on source-available software without regards for license. It's common knowledge that Russian and Chinese companies (among others) benefit from state-sponsored corporate espionage and sanctioned software piracy. The Rule of Law is dead in many countries, including the United States.
There's literally nothing to be gained by not following suit. You can't pay your rent with ethics.
>fictional idealized world we wistfully discuss in classrooms.
you can live in the real world without stealing software from people and justifying it because they were born in the "wrong" country.
i have done it my entire life.
"two wrongs dont make a right" is a pretty simple rule to live by, even in the real world. perhaps unsurprisingly, it is also good for ones mental health.
The software in question is, IIUC, a bastardized AGPL. You'll have to clarify for me how forking it constitutes stealing. Explain it like I'm in kindergarten.
I mean, that sort of already did happen quickly in Feb 2022, with contracts a lot more significant than open source software... like when leases for 400 commercial jets were terminated over night, and Russia responded by seizing them. And the US started seizing yachts, real estate, and bank accounts of oligarchs.
I'm not in favor of ignoring licenses, but practically speaking, they require legal nexus to function.
China has been at this for centuries and is doing just fine. I can imagine Russia has too for a while and this in particular seems to have had very few negative consequences for them.
> the entire fabric deteriorates quickly afterwards.
It just disproves this entirely. China has been at it for decades, which entire fabric has detoriated? Have licenses been meaningless for decades because of the existence of China?
the moral fabric of not stealing software and ignoring licenses.
>Have licenses been meaningless for decades because of the existence of China?
uh, in china? apparently yes!
if that is how you want the rest of the world to operate too, that is your opinion. i think it will suck, but whatever.
selectively applied law is fun when the laws are selectively applied against people you dont like. just gotta make sure you never get put in the wrong pile.
Adherence to licenses is completely meaningless if it's a one-way street. The whole concept of them is based on reciprocality. Since there's zero chance a Russian court is going to hold up a Western entity's complaint about a Russian entity's violation of their license, reciprocality is dead.
This is a very mainstream concept so I'm not sure why you're so worked up about it.
43% (of the 158 3rd-party requests) is... google. youtube, fonts, and analytics. 55% if you include facebook and twitter.
a government app shouldnt have crazy analytics and tracking and whatever. but i dont think loading google fonts or embedding youtube videos is really all that wild in the grand scheme of things.
given the title, i was half expecting some sort of egregious list with, like, palantir and some ICE domains or something. i dont like the app, but google? facebook? that is pretty boring.
the title probably should focus on nature/severity of the requests. titling it with a % of all requests feels bait-y if google/facebook/twitter isnt off in its own category. they have all sorts of dumb little requests to all sorts of domains that really inflate the numbers.
(as a note, atomic.computer also loads analytics and google fonts. which is whatever. but if they are going to imply 3rd-party requests are inherently bad just by nature of being 3rd-party, they may want to clean their own house a little bit.)
edit: original title at the time of my comment was "We intercepted the White House app's traffic. 77% of requests go to 3rd parties"
> given the title, i was half expecting some sort of egregious list with, like, palantir and some ICE domains or something. i dont like the app, but google? facebook? that is pretty boring.
Are ICE and Palantir forbidden from buying data from Google or Facebook?
This sounds like a smart way to own an app where you decide what you want to track and nobody is stopping you from getting the data you are phoning home. And you can launder it through normal tracking providers.
No but Google and Facebook generally do not sell data. They collect data and sell advertising spots based on this data. The data exfiltration to Google/Facebooks comes stock with a lot of mobile tooling. You can object to this arrangement but it is pretty common and often the easiest development path. As the parent points out the author of the post is engaged in the same practice so it is not exactly malicious or unusual.
If you read through the article, you'll see that the author focuses more on the OneSignal and Elfsight requests. The generic third party requests to Google, YouTube, etc. presumably were included for completeness + transparency and aren't meant to be some damning evidence against the White House app.
Though if your comment is solely based off of the previous title alone, then fair enough.
> given the title, i was half expecting some sort of egregious list with, like, palantir and some ICE domains or something. i dont like the app, but google? facebook? that is pretty boring.
Current government tries to steer the ship that is the US in the direction of an autocratic state as can be seen by most of their actions. But it's a huge ship and it takes time, no matter how hard you try (luckily).
"(as a note, atomic.computer also loads analytics and google fonts. which is whatever. but if they are going to imply 3rd-party requests are inherently bad just by nature of being 3rd-party, they may want to clean their own house a little bit.)"
Opinions may differ on this but mine is that this form of argument^1 is extremely weak and only strengthens the counter position, i.e., that third party requests are _in practice_ worth reporting on. As with any reported information, the readers of the reporting may draw their own conclusions and make value judgments about what is "good" or "bad"
1. The form of argument goes something like "X website is reporting on Y phenomenon, e.g., data collection, tracking, etc., using Z website as an example, but because X is also an example, X cannot or should not report on Y." The later is arguably "shooting the messenger"
AFAICT this atomic.computer web page does not suggest third party requests are "inherently bad". That is a conclusion presented by the HN commenter. What the atomic.computer web page does is examine the use of third party requests as a means of data collection and tracking. The HN commenter then cites an imaginary opinion about third party requests being "inherently bad". For me, this suggests there may be something behind that idea. Perhaps the commenter has "insider" knowledge of some sort regarding data collection and tracking. It's like a leak from a guilty conscience
Generally, there is no way for a computer user to monitor and control how data is used once it is collected nor where it may or may not be transferred
As such, this is not question of "bad" versus "good" in any universal sense. That may be something that weighs on the minds of people connected to data collection and/or tracking practices. But every user is different. The issue for the user is control. The user cannot limit how the data is used or where it could be transferred, even he had some opinion about what uses were "good" and what uses if any were "bad"
What companies do with data collected from "apps" is within their control, not the user's. Generally the operators of "app" endpoints have no obligation to disclose (a) how the data collected is used, whether it is used to "improve the service", improve their own sales/revenue, improve someone else's sales, etc. or (b) where the data might be transferred, whether that transfer is voluntary or involuntary, e.g., data breach, mergers and acquisitions, bankruptcy, requests from law enforcement, etc.
did you really need to link me to a wikipedia page of "shooting the messenger"? are you aware of how condescending that appears?
>Perhaps the commenter has "insider" knowledge of some sort regarding data collection and tracking. It's like a leak from a guilty conscience
>That may be something that weighs on the minds of people connected to data collection and/or tracking practices
what are you even trying to say here? you seem to be trying really hard to call me something without actually calling me something.
anyways, my comment was not trying to convince you of anything or win any argument. believe what you want. i believe that this was a boring article, and the original title was clickbait. that is about it.
p.s. you might be the first person i have ever met that is unaware of the implicit negative connotation associated with "3rd-party requests". especially given the full context and the previous post by the blog author, i suspect you are being willfully ignorant here.
i am not sure what you are intending to imply. what suits me and how?
i called it boring. flip on a news channel, click any other link on the front page here, or look outside and you will find something more interesting than "app sends a lot of requests to google".
that doesnt mean i think it is good or that i am making an excuse. it means that it is boring. this site is supposed to "optimize for curiosity" or however dang phrases it.
for what it is worth, when downloading the latest .exe from github, firefox says "this file is not commonly downloaded" and i have to select "allow download".
scans of it are fine.
probably just a heuristic-based false-positive, and not a news-worthy story of chrome abusing their monopoly or whatever.
Do these little speed bumps even work? I have to admit I'm so numb to all these popups and to apps warning me this and begging me that, that I just don't read anything anymore. Each app that hits me up with yet another dialog is just another brick in the wall.
The only speed bump that I find super annoying is when your browser tries to prevent you from going to a site with an incorrectly configured certificate (or a self signed certificate). The UX browsers make you navigate in this case is extra-horrible. Apparently, my use of a self-signed certificate for some local machines means I'm about to die.
I have been using the internet since before the www. In the last few years I pay attention to every speed bump and evaluate it seriously. I check the url of every financial site I log into. I disable automatic security blocks as a last resort. There's just too much consequence for failure.
We recently rolled over an SSL cert that is used for RemoteApps. Most of my users rely on these RemoteApps. They all got the 'yellow warning box' that the SSL cert was different, and we got swamped with tickets.
Safebrowsing does not provide popularity metrics for downloads, to my knowledge. It only states whether a URL is malicious according to some Google checks. No amount of popularity would turn a malicious URL into a benign one.
>"They were not adequate" - yet, after the redesign, they kept those same O-rings
presumably "redesign" means some stuff changed. why is it not possible that the O-rings were inadequate for the old design, but adequate for the new design?
Exactly. They re-designed the tang and clevis joint so that the metal parts of the joint did not spread under gas pressure and the o-ring did not lose compression. They added a heater to ensure that the o-ring remained in it's usable temperature range. And added a superfluous third O-ring.
Speaking of which, has anyone ever adequately explained why Challenger's Right SRB joint temperature was measured as -13 deg C using infrared pyrometers, when the lowest ambient temperature that night was -5.5C, and the Left SRB was measured -4 C? What subcooled the right SRB?
Allan McDonald's "Truth, Lies, and O-Rings" is mandatory reading for anyone who wants to discuss the details of this particular bit of corporate and government malfeasance. It's 600 pages of technical detail and political intrigue. He suggests that a plume from a cryo vent could have impinged on the field joint and cooled the o-ring to lower than ambient temperatures. No proof though.
>why is it not possible that the O-rings were inadequate for the old design, but adequate for the new design?
Boneheads getting lucky, happens to the worst of them more often than lots of people want to admit :\
I came from Florida and am not a fan of cold weather.
That morning of course nobody knew about defective engineering at NASA contractors when it comes to o-rings. I got in to work, and the office people had turned on the seldom-used little black & white TV in the office manager's room so they could watch the Challenger launch. That was about the only time anybody watched TV at work, except for baseball playoffs when they occasionally occur in the afternoon.
It was 19 Fahrenheit at the launch site so I never thought for a minute that they would go through with it. It was simple common sense. You don't even try anything "normal" during the one day per decade when it gets that cold, and that would be in north Florida. You wait years for it to get below freezing at 32 F, especially on the central Florida Atlantic coast. And no matter what, you never have to wait long for it to get above freezing. I just naturally couldn't imagine anyone not fully on board with living to wear shorts another day. I was thinking about the rubber seals that must be there to keep the crew hatches airtight, for one thing, but aware there were countless other variables which I didn't have a clue about that could also be cold sensitive, like electronics.
I went into the back where my lab office was, thinking they were surely going to delay the launch, at least to later in the day. I didn't get back to the front office until a little after liftoff time, where I expected to find out how much of a delay or reschedule there was. It was very quiet. I asked what happened and they said "it blew up!" I actually thought they were kidding me because I missed the liftoff. Then I saw the tragic replay that was enough to make anybody sick.
Eventually, the o-rings were pointed to, and publicly disclosed and it was stupidly worse than I imagined.
A few years earlier I had experienced a dramatic o-ring blowout on some high-pressure apparatus that one of our engineers had designed at a previous employer. That was an engineering lab, and I'm no engineer but it turned out they needed more help than just chemistry lessons for experiment design. Since I was the one who had taken a reading within the blast zone minutes before I went back to my desk, I took over the redesign of the heavy-walled high-pressure custom cylinders, going over every little thing from alloy properties, dimensional characteristics, reinforced thread strength, etc. It was helpful that I had worked in a machine shop before, but I was the only one there who had any full time experience at metal fabrication. Well constant overtime really. When I got to the critical o-ring design parameters, that alone required more engineering effort than the rest of the project. Each standard o-ring has its own precision design parameters, highly dependent on the durometer hardness of the rubber among many other things.
Without considering durometer, here's a very simplified chart of some key parameters (primarily US inch units):
Never did look into the Challenger o-rings this much until now, all I knew was that defective o-ring design is more likely than not, and you would be a fool to use any o-ring that was not standard size without the equivalent of decades of destructive testing yourself.
All I needed to know was these o-rings circled the entire booster, so that alone was a no-no since it was nowhere near standard. Now in the clearthinking article I see the nominal measurements, 38 feet in circumference but only 1/4 inch thick. Yikes, what were they thinking? No wonder they used two o-rings, it was plain to see that one would never be enough :\
Look back at the d2t1xqejof9utc.cloudfront chart. Notice that a 1/4 inch thick o-ring is not expected to have nominal reliability outside the tolerances listed.
Notice the Groove depth and the gland depth are two different things but actually need to be as close as you can get in practice, within 3 thousandths of an inch altogether across the entire (38 foot!) diameter, or half of that when measured at any one point on the arc. This requires some precision machining and quite rigid metal substrates or it will never come true. This is precise enough that large temperature swings would always be a factor, but more so the greater the diameter of the substrate. And the maximum eccentricity of the groove relative to its substrate must be within 0.005 inch. The widest tolerance on this little chart is the "squeeze" of the rubber to be between 0.040 and 0.055 which is not for the machine shop but depends on the o-ring thickness being within its own design specifications. Not surprised to find out they were Viton rubber which is widely known to be some of the most chemically resistant for a non-teflon compound. Probably would have been better if Thiokol also was aware how "good" Viton is for its intended purpose, strong resilience at temperatures 200 F and above, below which it doesn't seal as well as ordinary rubber. Viton is just too hard and non-tacky at room temperature by comparison.
After all these decades, now I'm even more convinced it was always an accident waiting to happen :(
>This thing also has a "Text the President" button that auto-fills your message with "Greatest President Ever!" and then collects your name and phone number.
when is the onion going to go bankrupt? it has to be soon, i imagine. no way it can compete with reality at this point.
(the rest of the article is a bit too depressing for me to comment on at the moment, other than saying "wow, gross")
I remember when I was young seeing videos of North Korea, of audiences always giving rapt standing ovations and many people fake fainting, and I always thought "How dumb and stupid does everyone have to be to carry on this absurd, ridiculous charade."
What if the whole world population would have F-Y money enough for subsistence and would not have to perform the act of asskissing or complying? Not luxury but basic needs met alright, something like the basic income the democrats blocked during Nixon era(twice actually).
It is still bad news. The last sentence refers to things working out for everyone except the reader:
"Sources went on to report that, due a minor oversight that also occurred as you slumbered, your student loans must still be repaid in full and are now subject to a highly predatory ballooning interest rate."
The version I know is a little different: A Russian visits America and meets an American at a bar and they get talking about life in Russia. "How is the propaganda?" says the American. "It's everywhere, but it's easy to ignore it" says the Russian. "Yours is much better." "But we don't have propaganda here" says the American. "Exactly" says the Russian.
idk how a person can be forced to pledge allegiance to the flag every morning and not think that's some North Korean style shit.
When I was in kindergarten, I refused to do the pledge one day. My teacher was livid. "Are you American or not?"
Being 5, I didn't know the difference between ethnicity and nationality (I'm Asian but I was born here and didn't know any life outside of America). So I was afraid that my teacher would not let me be American anymore if I didn't say the pledge. So I said it and never refused to say it in school again.
It wasn't til I was well into my adulthood that I realize how absurd that situation sounds.
So you were actually pledging under duress. Contracts and statements made under duress are usually treated as null and void, so you have that going for you.
Have you considered, however, how that event shaped your developing and impressionable subconscious and possibly influenced your future behavior as an adult?
It's not something I fully understood as a child. I didn't even fully grasp the concept of "nationality" so when she asked if I was American I just said yes because I didn't know what it meant. I just understood that not saluting meant teacher mad, just like not cleaning up my toys in the classroom meant teacher mad.
What they think they see is actually a short snapshot of North Korean life with a red circle, a red arrow and a red caption text that says "North Korean propaganda here!!! -->", carefully drawn by their local propaganda.
Sanity check: I present you a country X, whose language you don't speak, and whose news you don't read day to day. I show you their politician saying something. Can you tell if that was propaganda? Substitute X from "North Korea" to a country you know nothing about and see how the answer changes.
People don't believe native speakers of their own language when they're told things that conflict with their political world view. Why would they trust someone who says "that's not an accurate translation" if that collides with their political opinions?
For any outsider telling me about North Korea, including South Koreans, I can't tell if I've been pranked with e.g. the South Korean version of The Onion, let alone something milder like I'm being told about this by someone who takes their version Breitbart more seriously than their version of The Wall Street Journal.
Sure, and this 70% of Americans bullshit is propaganda by that measure. It is frequently trotted out on HN and is met with enthusiastic belief despite being total ass pull. There are US Senators pushing this propaganda and people enthusiastically agreeing.
The phrase "live paycheck to paycheck" means "To spend all that one earns without saving anything", not the literal interpretation of "failing to die between paychecks" that you seem to be using here.
(IIRC, 60-70% is based on surveys, that percentage of people feel they're living like that, but actual stats are much lower, like 25% or so, but it's important to make sure the same thing is being discussed when having conversations like this).
In a marvelous twist of irony, the commenter unwittingly and perfectly exemplified how easily it is to get people talking as if they were good little disciples of Goebbels. But don't worry: he's here to make us all woke, or red pilled or whatever specific propaganda term the party has commanded during this election cycle
a. LendingClub: "According to a Reality Check: Paycheck to Paycheck survey conducted by LendingClub and PYMNTS, 60% of employed U.S. adults, including more than four in 10 high-income earners, are living one paycheck to the next with little to no financial cushion.": https://www.lendingclub.com/resource-center/personal-finance...
f. All those are neutral. If you want, I could also find slight D-leaning: CNBC / SurveyMonkey: "more than half of Americans (61%) consider themselves to be “living paycheck to paycheck,” up from 58% in March of this year": https://www.cnbc.com/2023/09/07/majority-of-americans-feelin...
g. As previously mentioned, 60-70 is a vibes check, asking people how they feel. Those same vibes checks from R-leaning sources do much the same, they just don't report it with the same phrasing. Which is fine so long as everyone's on the same page about what words mean, but even with the stricter phrasing that R reporters prefer for "paycheck to paycheck", it's not even close to the same meaning you were using which comes across as being needlessly literal-minded for the sake of rhetoric rather than situational awareness.
Haha, I can’t believe I said “you’re just falling for startup content marketing” and you’re like “okay, so here are my sources from startup content marketing”. Truly an art form, my dear fellow, your performance.
Uh, what? People don't "agree" with stats. They either believe it at face value, or they fact check the stats and find, oh, this is actually true but the study was limited, or they find that it is indeed just bullshit. No agreement necessary.
Politicians taking advantage of the fact that their constituents will not fact check them is propaganda 101.
My comment has nothing to do with the actual statistic of living paycheck-to-paycheck. OP could have used a completely different (made up or not) statistic. Of course the statistic will change when you change the definition.
The question was about North Korean propaganda and American propaganda. Both are powerful and hard to see when you are immersed in them. That some countries do not take the same approach makes this no less true. However there are other forms of propaganda. What I did not mention was that I am vegan. Only when you stop eating meat do you see how immersed in it we are. The pervasiveness and shared assumptions are there. Whether it’s who to hate or what to spend money on or what to eat. In the US the real propaganda is the stuff both parties agree on.
Because some nations are leader-oriented and some nations are system-oriented. Ask any European if they support the state system in their country. Or ask any muslim if their branch of Islam is the best.
Almost all countries in the world will have heavy handed propaganda that their way of organizing things are the best and most fair that could ever exist.
Mark Carney's famous speech at Davos was a breath of fresh air compared with anything ever spewed by the deranged current president of the USA. I am so glad I live in the best country in the world with him as prime minister and that we have no propaganda here in Canada. We will do so much better when we enter trade agreement negotiations with that degenerate loser south of the border in the next few months. That guy can't even ties his own shoes because of his cankles, but Mark Carney can tie not only his own shoes but he always wears sensible socks too.
You may have missed propaganda because you missed the propaganda.
I'm outside both and I'm not seeing a lot of difference. Main one is that one is threatening everyone with nukes, and the other one isn't making any threats I can understand because they're in Korean.
It's ming boggling just how....cringe... these billionaires that want to run the world are. Makes you wonder if the personas that seek billions are correlated strongly with mental illnesses.
The drive to achieve that level of success often comes from weaponized poor self esteem.
Well adjusted individuals just chill out after a few million and work on whatever is fun/important for them.
Only rarely does this also happen to be something that can take you from 10M to 1B. (and if it can it would take a lot of work you can't be bothered to do unless it's some core value like helping the poor beat malaria)
Trump saying recently that he hates hanging around successful people and prefers losers because he doesn't want to listen to other people's stories really speaks to the poor self esteem angle
“I always like to hang around with losers, actually, because it makes me feel better.”
“I hate guys that are very, very successful, and you have to listen to their success stories. I like people who like to listen to my success,” he added.
Being critical about billionares is empirically supported. Trump wouldnt exist if not supported by other psychopaths and now he selects even more unethical bootlickers for offices and rewards equally deranged amigos.
Jazz9k just drank too much coolaid from billionare owned and election meddling twitter, i guess.
Well now he'll be remembered for associating with pedophiles, infidelity, and walking back things he allegedly stood for, like climate change, as soon as they become inconvenient or he stops caring or whatever.
It comes down to two things. One is the well documented issue of how, when you are that rich, you are treated differently, and how that will ultimately modify your behavior. The other is the prerequisites to get to the job. Chances are you aren't fully self-made, receiving no investment. From convincing investors, to having immense faith in a project that cannot be obviously good, as otherwise you'd be building what already exists, to the personality to handle the road upward.
This second effect happens in all kinds of places where you have to jumps througha lot of hoops to just get to get there. Every hoop discards candidates, and promotes different things. Sometimes in ways that make sure that nobody capable of attaining the job is fit to actually do it well. You can see the issue all over the place, once you track people's careers. Sometimes things that should be disqualifying for a role are actually requirements in practice.
There's an old SF short where one of the people who won't gets forced to. Battery of psychological tests followed by "you're one of the rulers now, and you're going to hate every minute of it, but we enslave you so the rest of us have a peaceful, prosperous planet."
- Own a monopoly
- Inherit your fortune
- Run a criminal enterprise
Using just these three filters alone, you encompass more than 99% of all billionaires in existence.
The amount of billionaires who do not fit into these categories can barely occupy a family sized vehicle.
The criteria here suggesting that there is a specific sociopathic personality requirement to being a billionaire as each category can be argued as harmful to societies.
And mathematically, only businesses at the top of the graph are capable of generating a billion dollars. Hence, if you are looking to be a billionaire, the path lies either through a Ponzi scheme or through a monopoly. Both of them, in their most pure form, are illegal, and the challenge in the business model is to execute on them while staying just barely on the right side of the law.
I do not think it is the money that made them terrible. I know all sorts of terrible people that would do the exact same things. The only difference really is they do not have the money to execute on those ideas.
Money does not make you a good or bad person. It just makes you more of who you are already.
I specifically did not say money makes them mentally ill, but rather the type of person that seeks to hoard so much wealth that they have billions is correlated with mental illness.
> the type of person that seeks to hoard so much wealth that they have billions is correlated with mental illness
Do we have any actual evidence of this? I know plenty of exorbitantly wealthy people who aren’t hoarding anything, they just didn’t sell their piece of the closely-held business they started, and they spend their time skiing, reading, travelling and taking care of their friends and family.
> they would suggest that the thing those exorbitantly wealthy people are hoarding is money
And I’d say they’re literally wrong. They may be hoarding capital. And yes, some wealthy people do hoard money per se. But outside the Epstein class there are lots of people we just don’t hear about because they aren’t on social media talking about how rich they are. Because while it’s fun to postulate that the rich have mental illnesses, it’s documented that social-media addiction causes them.
while this distinction may be important to you, i dont think it really changes anything about malfists question/point.
>Because while it’s fun to postulate that the rich have mental illnesses, it’s documented that social-media addiction causes them.
and cigarettes cause cancer. not sure what this has to do with the conversation, but yeah, social media is bad (smoking, too).
(please note: i am not arguing for or against what you or malfist have said, just thought there was a little something lost in translation re: you asking for evidence after a conversation that started with "makes you wonder")
> i dont think it really changes anything about what malfist question/point
Of course it does. Turning capital into spendable or transferable wealth takes work. Plenty of rich people are just enjoying their lives in the same way retirees do.
> not sure what this has to do with the conversation, but yeah, social media is bad
I’m saying the folks we tend to get upset about being rich at are also the rich who are prominently on social media. The problem isn’t that they’re rich. It’s that they’re on social media so much. I think there is a genuine argument to be made that even Elon Musk would have been a better-liked person, maybe even a better person, if he never got on Twitter.
> thought there was a little something lost in translation re: "makes you wonder"
Perhaps. And appreciate your clarifying for them. In 2026 I’m just sceptical of the “just asking questions” bit, particularly when it comes to cultural tropes. (And for what it’s worth, my query for a source was genuine. I’m always down to change my mind on a loosely-held belief.)
> a hell of a difference between a multimillionare who has a successful business and a billionare
Yeah, I'm saying the ones worth hundreds of millions to low billions who aren't on social media are, in my personal experience, often fine people. The ones I don't like are the ones on social media, but that's also true of the folks worth a few thousand dollars.
Plenty of billionaires are assholes. The world's GDP is over $100 trillion. That's going to produce diversity among the rich.
And who are you to personally know enough billionaires intimately enough to absolve them of any guilt they might have earned hoarding enough wealth to reach that level?
> who are you to personally know enough billionaires intimately enough to absolve them of any guilt
I'm not absolving anyone. I'm saying I know good people who are also billiionaires who most people have never heard of. The billionaires I've heard of I tend to dislike. But I think the correlate is the fame, not the wealth.
> guilt they might have earned hoarding enough wealth to reach that level?
This is where the hoarding metaphor breaks down. If you build a company, is it hoarding to not sell your stake off to a private equity firm?
Because practically speaking, those are their choices. Hold it, manage it and live off the income. (They all donate most of their incomes, but that's neither here nor there. You can be a good person even if not philanthropic.) Or sell it to a private equity firm and then have a pot of money to stare at.
What does "hoard wealth" mean to you? A vault full of gold that they swim in?
Jeff Bezos's net worth is mostly in the form of server racks and amazon inventory.
Elon's net worth is mostly in the form of share certificates that are marked to market and contingent on delusional investors swallowing Elons own promises.
This is the peg that society is constantly snagging on. The billionaire class doesn't actually have much "hoarded" wealth. If we want to go after wealth that more classically fits the idea of "hoarded", i.e. cash and cash equivalents, then the middle/upper middle class is the golden goose (most people are surprised to learn they have almost twice the wealth billionaires have too, not a very clickable headline though...)
The idea that everyone gets a suburban house and premium healthcare if we can only pass legislation that taxes billionaires, is a delusion on par with Jesus coming down to battle the transsexuals.
The actual strain in the economy is between the upper middle class and the lower class. The senior developers and the shipping room clerks.
Of course the money doesn't make them terrible. Being terrible makes them money. Lots of money. There aren't really other ways of obtaining so much money, which is why if you see someone that has that amount, they should be viewed with suspicion.
Right? If I had enough money that I could make a serious dent in local or even global poverty without noticing the change in my lifestyle, and I just... chose not to, I have no idea how I could sleep at night.
Huge numbers (billions) of people have enough money to make massive changes to the lives of those less fortunate than them, but don't, and prefer instead to make incremental upgrades to their own lives. New rugs, more savings, first-class airline tickets, eating out a few more times a month, etc.
This is just human nature.
People who are at wealth level x tend to say, "I can't believe that people at wealth level x+1 aren't more generous!" all the while ignoring their own lack of desire to give generously to people at wealth levels x-1 and below.
I remember wrestling with this in my therapist's office when Aaron died. I had known him tangentially - we hung out in the same IRC channels, and had several mutual friends in the Cambridge/Somerville techie crowd that he would hang out in person with.
As a college student and young adult I had always envied his fame, his intelligence, his money (post-Reddit acquisition), and the strength of his convictions. And yet, in that moment in early 2013, he was dead, and I was working a good job at Google (and this was 2013 Google, when it was still a nice place to work doing things that I could generally approve of). And he'd died doing the stuff that I wanted to do but had been too chickenshit to actually carry out.
I think that this illustrates why the world is the way it is. All the true altruists are dead, killed for their altruism. It is adaptive, in a survival sense, to think of yourself and your own survival and not worry too much about other people. Ironically, this is what my therapist was trying to get me to realize.
But I think this also goes back to the GP's point. When people at wealth level x give to people at level x-1, it doesn't raise the people at x-1 up to x. It brings the person at x down to x-1. There are more people at x-1 than x, after all; you could give everything you had away and mathematically, it would lower your net worth significantly more than it would raise theirs. And of course, it doesn't do a damn thing about the people at x+1. Why can't they donate instead, where their wealth would do an order of magnitude more good?
There actually do exist people who are like that: they would rather spread their wealth around the people at wealth level x-1, joining them at that level, than raise themselves up to x+1. I've met some; most poor people are far more generous than rich people are. That is why they are poor. But then, it doesn't solve the problem of inequality, they just disappear into the masses of people at level x-1.
I'm not talking about people with x+1, where X is a standard US middle-class amount of money. In that case, $20k or $100k or some amount that would make a tiny difference in the world is a huge amount of money to a middle-class family.
No, I'm talking about wealth level X*100. For them, the difference between $100M and $1B is basically no difference in the quality of life to that family. They'd have 1 fewer megayachts. They could give away $900M, and eliminate hunger forever in a large city or a small state. $100B is 100x that again, they could give away $99.9B, still have $100M, and solve poverty in most _countries_.
Or, if they don't want to, we institute a 90% wealth tax on everything over $10M, and solve it ourselves.
What you forget is, none of the x+100 people you are talking about would have ever become a x+100 person if they thought like you suggest they should. In german, we have a proverb: "Von den Reichen lernt man das sparen." (The rich teach you how to save money) And giving away huge sums without personal gain, is the contrary of saving.
> For them, the difference between $100M and $1B is basically no difference in the quality of life to that family.
I think money at that level is not about family quality of life. It's usually about buying companies, launching product lines, etc.
> They could give away $900M, and eliminate hunger forever in a large city or a small state. $100B is 100x that again, they could give away $99.9B, still have $100M, and solve poverty in most _countries_.
Ehhh...
Most people who have $X billion don't really have that. They just have controlling shares in a company that's worth a lot, and media companies like Forbes enjoy making headlines by pretending that's cash. Actually turning that into cash would be impossible.
Of course, they can still turn meaningful percentages of it into cash and give it away, that's true. And I think more billionaires should.
But also, many problems aren't money problems. For example, simply flooding a state or a small city with money isn't going to "solve hunger forever." Hunger and poverty are more often an issue around distribution and logistics, infrastructure, politics, culture and conflict, and things like that. Huge cash giveaways famously tend to disappear and accomplish very little.
The single biggest force that reduces suffering and poverty in an enduring way, imo, is the creation and proliferation of technology. Vaccines that are cheaper to produce. Water filtration systems that are easier to maintain. Seeds and crops that are heartier and more durable. Healthcare that's more affordable and available. Etc. Advances like this have reduced more suffering and ended more poverty and counteracted more famine and saved more lives than any amount of charity ever has or could.
What I would like to see more of is billionaires and even super-talented non-billionaires starting more organizations that are a force for good. Or using money from profitable enterprises to fund unprofitable-yet-charitable enterprises.
We can also tell because anyone who can take the time to use a computer with internet to write a comment in well-formed English is already comparatively wealthy or connected enough to provide food and housing for dozens of people.
I also think this could be a symptom of an economically unequal society (which creates a higher range of x), and is a big reason why it's important to fix it, on top of the extra money to the state.
So thats essentially communism right? Is human nature incompatible with communism or is capitalism incompatible with human nature?
Communism doesn't eliminate power relationships, it just papers them over with politics and bureaucracy instead of having them legible with prices and wages.
In the American golden age of capitalism from ~1950-1970, the top marginal tax rate was 90%, and so you didn't have CEOs get paid more than about 3x the median worker, because the government would get it all. Instead, they got perks. Private jets. Positions at the company for their kids. Debaucherous holiday parties. Casual sexual harassment of secretaries.
In Soviet communism, all production was centrally planned by government bureau run by party members. It was not uncommon for these bureaus to make mistakes, leading to severe shortages for the population. Nevertheless, these shortages never seemed to really hit the party members responsible for making the plans. Power has its perks.
And that's also why reforms attempting to reduce economic inequality need to focus on power rather than money. There have been a number of policies that do meaningfully raise standards of living for the poor: they're things like the 13th amendment to the (US) Constitution, the 1st amendment, the jury trial system, free markets, anti-monopoly statutes, bans on non-competes, etc. What they all have in common is that they preserve economic freedom and the power to make your own living against people who would seek to restrict that freedom and otherwise keep you in bondage.
On the other hand, it would have alleviated famine in 43 countries for one year and if your response to that is "but that's not ending world hunger and I will not do it", you really need a long hard look at yourself.
But then again, Musk is going to turn out to be one of the great mass killers of world history with his destruction of USAID. Why would he spoil that by helping some folks?
where do you draw the line? Suppose someone had a program that spent 6 trillion dollars that fed 10 people for one year. Would you then say "you need to take a long hard look at yourself". Not keeping people dependent on a program for just one year is exactly the point that Musk was trying to make. Solve the fucking problem, don't put a very expensive bandage on it.
> But then again, Musk is going to turn out to be one of the great mass killers of world history with his destruction of USAID. Why would he spoil that by helping some folks?
If you consider turning off an program that a group of people aren't particularly entitled to as equivalent to mass murderers who pulled the trigger on people like Stalin and Mao, maybe you need to take a long hard look at yourself. Suppose yanking USAID prompts the creation of a more efficient, more local solution that feeds more people. Will you give Musk the credit of saving people's lives?
Well before someone comes out with a ludicrous bad faith hypothetical.
> Suppose someone had [ludicrous bad faith hypothetical]
Whoops.
> Solve the fucking problem, don't put a very expensive bandage on it.
That only works for the most trivial of problems. Anything complex will need expensive bandages until a complex solution can be worked out and, more importantly, implemented correctly.
> maybe you need to take a long hard look at yourself.
I have, many times, and that's how I turned from a bad faith edge lord posting this kind of hypothetical drivel defending the indefensible for years into a slightly less problematic member of society. And I will continue to take long hard looks at myself to try and improve further.
> Suppose yanking USAID prompts the creation of a more efficient, more local solution that feeds more people.
Again a bad faith hypothetical but let's assume this does happen - great! That would be grand. It still won't take away from Musk being responsible for one of the biggest mass murders in history.
Also famines are political problems to start with. We have more then enough food. Getting it to people reliably is the issue - i.e. there's usually a plethora of other issues like an active war.
It also isn't an economically isolated enterprise: Ukrainian grain shipments traversing into Europe via Polish roads and not heading to Africa via their ports caused a bunch of price crashes which became political flashpoints.
The issue is that simply saying you're going to deliver food aid is elliding pretty much the entire problem. You cannot simply deliver food aid, because to do so you might have to fight and win an entire war against one or several insurgent groups or governments.
You could turn up reliably and distribute quite a lot of food, and yet at the end of the day find there's still a famine.
Right, which is why I never said I was going to simply deliver food aid like it just required trucks and gas. It's why UN World Food Program, an organization with actual experience, designed a plan to deliver and distribute food. Please explain why they are wrong.
They're not but it also won't end world hunger. Because world hunger is not being caused by accidental deficits in food availability: it's caused by serious local security threats and in many cases deliberate political action.
Good question I think. Norman Borlaug was known for transforming places with food importers into food exporters. And to ask the question again occasionally makes sense. In recent history we are exploring the idea of vertical gardening etc. I was joking to someone once that we should grow watermelons vertically so that the large heavy melons could power a carousel style escalator or water pumping mechanism.
Not all areas are equally good at growing food. That can be because of climate, soil quality, war or simply population density requiring housing and industry.
Maybe it's too malthusian of a view but I think a big issue to contend with is that some people should not be as populated as they are and there's no push against it from either government or the dominant economic systems.
And yes that includes the controversial poor population hotspots of africa that have grown super rapidly beyond multiples of what the land can provide
But also just the same places like arizona with comparatively rich folk growing the urban desert sprawl
Is shipping food there the correct solution? For war, an ostensibly temporary condition, by all means ship the population food. But if an area is already overcrowded beyond what the land can sustain (due to climate, soil quality, or population density) then is it productive to further bolster the population? Seems a human catastrophe in the making, supporting population growth in an area where the land can not supply enough food.
My worldview is based on the cities I've lived in, in which the citizens of that city have the means to purchase the food themselves. Therefore the movement of food into that city is in the economic interest of those supplying the food. Furthermore, that food _is_ grown locally, within half a tank of gas from the city itself.
I should note that the cities I'm familiar with, and thus my worldview, have multiple thousands of independent suppliers bringing food into the cities as profitable businesses, not a single altruistic organisation functioning off donations. Therefore there are much fewer catastrophic points of failure - an event that would prevent food from getting into the city would be a large, wide geographical catastrophe. Not the whimsical changing of political positions or sudden misfortune of donors. And in this worldview, when natural pressures such as population overdensity occur, the feedback loop stabilises at a sustainable level - those for whom food becomes too expensive move to cheaper places. I've done it myself.
I don’t get puzzled that the criminal doesn’t use his ill-gotten gains for pro-social causes. Why would a person ever use anti-social means to acquire funds for pro-social goods?[1]
This is not too disimilar from the case of the billionaire.
[1] Excepting some Galaxy Brain philosophies like Effective Altruism
Trump has largely not had that kind of money. He’s had a _lot_ of money, many many times more than most, but by all accounts except his own, those numbers are much lower than he likes to brag about. Well, they were - there’s been a troubling amount of money going out of the federal government that isn’t well-accounted for under his reign.
He had the kind of money that can hire expensive projects on trust that payment in full will be rendered, but only kept his money by often not paying out.
As with all things Trump, even up to the new ballroom not having a front door despite the massive staircase, his wealth is more in appearance, and less in actual assets…or was. Of course, someday maybe we will know the true extent or shortfall of his bank accounts
If you had that amount of money you would also be a sociopath. It's a precondition.
Good news is that you would sleep fine at night. No matter how destructive your existence was, and how much of a net negative you were to the world, you would still think very highly of yourself.
Trump specifically seems to hew awfully close to the symptoms of a long-term cocaine user. The hard drift into self-congratulatory vanity parallels that of Charlie Sheen during a certain infamous interview, for example, and at least two people (Howard Dean and Carrie Fisher) identified him as having compulsive sniffing reminiscent of a cocaine habit during debates prior to his first election.
Remember that Trump is not a first-generation member of the upper class; as a nepo baby, he was born out of touch and has spent his whole life falling deeper into bizarre social bubbles and media silos that were tailored by his ancestors and peers to reassure them that they're doing the right thing. In theory plutarchs should be receiving world-class education from private tutors, but being arch-Conservatives by definition, these teachers are invariably out of date on mental health, and would be forbidden from teaching it even if they had modern material.
Because of this isolation the ultra-wealthy often have certain very uneducated traits around self-esteem—which can paradoxically seem like the result of poverty. They do not have access to DARE or Sesame Street to give them the confidence not to take drugs when pressured, they've never seen Mister Rogers, their biological parents were always off running a business empire, and they have no surrogate figures because their nannies probably get fired at the drop of a hat, even for defending the child's interests.
Ironically, American republicanism makes this worse; in a planned aristocracy, parents internalize the belief that their children deserve "the best" because they are meant to be "the best", but without that noble lie, there is no pressure to create a positive environment for the next generation of tyrant. To make matters worse, these families never start off with healthy values to begin with—which produces a founder effect of regressive masculinity that magnifies everything else I've just mentioned.
This excellent list, I expand with my Daddy Issues Billionaire Archetype, which we see in basically all "ultra successful" people. (I haven't found any counter-examples yet, but I'm eagerly awaiting the first! It would be extremely valuable information.)
But crucially, in the face of Unrelenting Standards, what's the difference between total collapse and astronomical success? The belief that you can do it.[0] It's not just "you need to be better than you are." It's "and I know you can."
[0] Incidentally, I posted on this exact subject this morning!
To get moderately rich doesn't require a special personality type, but obscene wealth requires breaking laws and asking forgiveness later (throwing lawyers at the problem). Not caring who you hurt while reaching for a goal is a trait of sociopathy.
They are perfectly aware of their own optics and do it because you can't escape it. See Elon with his cringeworthy Twitter takeover that still hasn't collapsed, Larry Ellison buying up the media or Tim Cook gifting the gold trophy to Trump.
Nobody has the guts to boycott them anymore. Billionaires know that you depend on them for news, social media and smartphones too.
Well... it worked. The shareholders were made whole, Elon got his vanity project, and the only people who got the short end of the stick were the loss-leader Twitter addicts. From a game-theory perspective that's a pretty impressive political polemic to achieve with purely private capital.
When the dust settles the only person to blame is Jack Dorsey, who spent his halcyon years on Twitter pumping Bitcoin and looking even more coked-out than Elon. If people can't move on to better platforms then yes, they are doomed to eternal monetization by warring moron techbro tribes.
I think that's what bothers me the most about the last couple years. These ultra rich people are just brazenly being scumbags and there is nothing anybody can really do about it. I imagine this is what people felt like in the middle ages when their King was going senile.
Both are true. Some things can be done and are simple/healthy, like escaping social media. Others are fundamentally much harder and not worth the risk/trouble/time.
> Some things can be done and are simple/healthy, like escaping social media. Others are fundamentally much harder and not worth the risk/trouble/time.
I think the calculation is very easy, actually. Risk vs Reward. You could even use polymarket to crowdsource funds for the activity!
Aren’t sociopaths strongly overrepresented among the powerful?
(Assuming that) It’s a bit astonishing that we discuss things like that, go huh, and then go about our day. Effectively acquiescing to rule-by-personality disordered.
A number showing up in someone's SMS inbox and a government form explicitly pairing your name to your number with no retention policy are different data collection events.
The Onion is actually making great money on its print edition. Having a real newspaper is a novelty these days, almost like it's part of the joke, and you should subscribe.
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