Proziam

This is a pretty common claim, but in the US you can buy similarly 'pure' beef and it's still cheaper. I prefer the EU approach for general food production, requiring every stage of the process be clean enough that you don't need to chlorinate chicken, for example. But, Americans do have access to the same quality food at much lower prices (and they earn more besides).

Thank you for the comment!

I think the negative reaction people have comes from fear of punishment for human error, but fraud (meaning the real legal term, not colloquially) requires knowledge and intent.

That legal standard means that the risk of ruinous consequences for a 'lazy kid' who took a foolish shortcut is very low. It also requires that a prosecutor look at the circumstances and come to the conclusion that they can meet this standard in a courtroom. The bar is pretty high.

That said, it's very important to note that fraud has a pretty high rearrest (not just did it, but got arrested for it) rate between 35-50%. So when it gets to the point that someone has taken that step, a slap on the wrist simply isn't going to work. Ultimately, when that happens every piece of work they've touched, and every piece of work that depended on their work, gets called into question. The dependency graph affected by a single fraudster can be enormous.

Non-academics can definitely offer valid critiques of academia.

You don't need to be in academia to understand that scientific progress depends on trust. If you don't trust the results people are publishing, you can't then build upon them. Reproducibility has been a known issue for a long time[0], and is widely agreed upon to be a 'crisis' by academics[1].

The advent of an easier way to publish correct-looking papers, or to plagiarize and synthesize other works without actually validating anything is only going to further diminish trust.

[0] https://www.nature.com/articles/533452a#citeas

[1] https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/jou...

I've lived in Sweden, Germany, and the United States. Just being honest about my experience here, but the cheap stuff (like potatoes) are cheaper in the EU but the expensive stuff (like beef[0]) are more expensive.

[0] https://www.globalproductprices.com/rankings/beef_price/

Fraud implies intent, either intent to deceive or intentionally negligent.

If you're taking public funds (directly or otherwise) with the intent to either:

A) Do little to no real work, and pass of the work of an AI as being your own work, or

B) Knowingly publish falsified data

Then you are, without a single shred of doubt, in criminal fraud territory. Further, the structural damage you inflict when you do the above is orders of magnitude greater than the initial fraud itself. That is a matter for civil courts ("Our company based on development on X fraudulent data, it cost us Y in damages").

Whether or not charges are pressed is going to happen way after all the internal reviews have demonstrated the person being charged has gone beyond the "honest mistake" threshold. It's like Walmart not bothering to call the cops until you're into felony territory, there's no point in doing so.

Stealing more than a few thousand dollars is a felony, and felonies are handled in criminal court, not civil.

EDIT - The threshold amount varies. Sometimes it's as low as a few hundred dollars. However, the point stands on its own, because there's no universe where the sum in question is in misdemeanor territory.

If I steal hundreds of thousands of dollars (salary, plus research grants and other funds) and produce fake output, what do you think is appropriate?

To me, it's no different than stealing a car or tricking an old lady into handing over her fidelity account. You are stealing, and society says stealing is a criminal act.

False equivalence. This isn't about "using AI" it's about having an AI pretend to do your job.

What people are pissed about is the fact their tax dollars fund fake research. It's just fraud, pure and simple. And fraud should be punished brutally, especially in these cases, because the long tail of negative effects produces enormous damage.

All 3 of these should be categorized as fraud, and punished criminally.

The price sensitivity thresholds of your median customer is not likely to be a factor in this range.

What is a factor is 'getting a deal' and customer conviction. You want to give them an offer that makes them feel good about signing up immediately (increase conversion) and makes them feel like the product has substantial long-term value (induces post-purchase rationalization).

The annual plan with significant sale price accomplishes both goals, with the benefit of smoothing out your revenues and making it much easier to estimate your ROAS.

For a single user I would start pricing at $5/m on an annual subscription or $9 for monthly. Getting customers in the door and retaining them through the early product evolution cycles is the major hurdle in the early stages.

Beyond that, I would create an offering with 1-2 features tuned towards business customers. This kind of tool is a great knowledge management addition, and knowledge sharing is hugely valuable for business customers.

I'd price it the same per seat at the start ($5/m annual vs 9$/m monthly) and sell multiple seats at a time this way. If this works well, you will have found an existence proof of a highly lucrative customer group.

The article doesn't seem to address fully how much of the "Humans are to blame" part is Waymo cars driving in a manner that isn't normal.

The cases they highlight, such as a multi-collision hit and run, are obvious bad human situations. But, this article feels like it's being a bit generous in its interpretation.

After all, I've seen Waymo cars cause wild traffic jams, and that sort of unexpected behavior could absolutely cause collisions.

Management perceives people to be more replaceable than they are. Years of working in, or being the architect of, the company's core product will make you a true expert in it.

But, from the company perspective, your value is based on the 'market rate' for your generically defined skills and experience.

As a long-time consultant, the truth is that unless you aim for more hours, the drought periods are likely to kill you.

"Nobody is coming for anyone" is just wrong.

If there's an edge, people will use it. Car manufacturers share data with insurance companies[1], which can impact drivers' insurance rates or lead to coverage denial.

Do you believe the same thing will never happen in healthcare?

Do you believe that sophisticated criminals won't engage in large-scale fraud attempts? In 2021, about 23.9 million people (9% of U.S. residents age 16 or older) had been victims of identity theft during the prior 12 months.[2]

You haven't been hurt by this sort of thing, which is great for you. But millions of other people aren't so lucky.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/11/technology/carmakers-driv...

[2] https://bjs.ojp.gov/library/publications/victims-identity-th...

It only takes a company messing up exactly once, and the damage is catastrophic.

Everyone gets their social security number leaked...identity thieves have a field day.

Everyone gets their medical history leaked...insurance companies suddenly find another edge against the consumers.

Everyone gets their texts leaked...scammers now have blackmail against anyone who ever got spicy with their significant other.

Huge companies have been exploited before, and they will do so again and again. The only long-term winning strategy is to not let them have your data in the first place.

This is the process that I see happening:

1. Money is printed, inflation occurs

2. Cost of living rises, wages follow (but not closely enough)

3. Buying power is decreased, but the tax brackets don't change much

4. The lower income groups proceeds to pay more taxes than they "should" while simultaneously being the group that can afford it the least. At the same time, this group is the most affected by inflation, hurting even more.

The money printer hurts everyone. Spinning it up as the expedited solution to every problem for political expedience is how we ended up with an enormous and ever-growing amount of debt.

The US has painted itself into a corner.

On one hand, culturally, we pushed young people into colleges and universities at ever-increasing and frankly unethical price points. Many people have spent "buy a house" money on education. These people are then given a heavy burden which holds them back significantly both socially (raising families) and financially (owning a home, saving for retirement).

On the other hand however is the many people who decided not to go to school because it was simply unaffordable. They went to work instead, and often in the kinds of careers that are unappealing to college graduates who prefer white-collar work. Any student loan forgiveness is coming directly from the pockets of these people, who have on-average lower incomes and shorter career spans than their white-collar counterparts.

It's easy to see both sides on this one. The only meaningful solution I can see is to remove the (again, unethical) protections which prevent students from declaring bankruptcy over student loans. In turn, this would hopefully force wiser lending and more price-competition to bring the cost down.

I suggest the following stack:

Supabase - User Auth & Database

Stripe - Subscriptions & Payments

React or Svelte - Building landing and product pages

These tools are extremely popular and well documented, so anything you get stuck on is bound to be readily searchable online. If you've already got over a decade of front-end work experience I'd say just spin up Sveltekit or NextJS and follow along with a guide like this one:

Supabase Auth - https://supabase.com/docs/guides/auth/server-side/sveltekit

After all the security events, including the most recent. And after learning they didn't even deploy basic techniques like canary builds to prevent these events. And now this.

The pattern seems to reveal that CS truly has no concept of risk management whatsoever.

In finance this level of recklessness would get you banned from the industry.

I'm expecting restaurant owners to fire bad valets.

Or in Microsoft's case, via regulatory, social, or software, prevent Crowdstrike from causing harm to their customers.

I'm aware it's a sticky regulatory situation, but CS has a history of these failings and the potential damage could be severe. Despite this, no effort (that I am aware of) was made by Microsoft to inform customers that Crowdstrike introduced potential risks, nor to inform regulators, nor to remove the APIs CS depends on.

I don't believe Microsoft is solely responsible, but I do believe that throwing all of the blame for the very real harm that was caused onto CS alone is missing a piece of the puzzle.

Last aside, every large corp has team(s) focused on risk. There's approximately zero chance they didn't discuss CS at some point. The only way this would not have happened is negligence.

This is the correct interpretation. I am surprised that people took it in different directions.

You could also prosecute the establishment that keeps a valet with an abominable record on staff.

Microsoft took no steps to force-eject them from their ecosystem, despite their long history of issues.

One step further, many rust libs use `#![forbid(unsafe_code)]` to explicitly disallow any unsafe. The rust community really likes that sort of thing, and for good reason.

It's not just the type system either. It also helps that rust has a great ecosystem of tools that catch all kinds of errors at build time. The compiler and clippy together genuinely do prevent a lot of mistakes.

This is a big part of why people often say "if it compiles, it works" in rust.

Another anecdote:

I do a lot of consulting, and as a result I am often (honestly, almost always) work substantially more than 'full time'

I have more aha moments in the shower when I'm working intense hours, not less. My theory on this is that more exposure to the problem space gives the subconscious mind more to chew on.

I genuinely have no regrets about working a lot as I've found the personal and professional growth to have been very satisfying. I've launched far past most people my age in terms of skill and experience by simply putting in more hours than they have.

Regarding health, it should be noted I don't drink or smoke at all and never did. And my naturally eating habits include zero junk food. I haven't felt any negative health effects from my work/life balance, but I am fairly confident that's largely due to those healthy habits.

I am one such person. I have no issue reading obscure or difficult content (legal documents ala Companies Act 2006 to historical documents written in non-native languages). However, for me, his particular style forces me to read many things twice or thrice to determine whether or not I've understood him correctly.

Despite that, I still get a lot from his writing.

The same reason sex is pleasurable. We would not be here if it were not this way.

Put in different terms, there are many experiences which have an evolutionary origin. Disgust reactions to certain sights/smells are a near-universal experience, for example. Individuals that don't share these experiences (or who are attracted to them) are considered weird or degenerate precisely because they are so universal.

This stance strikes me as odd.

Every parent was once a non-parent, and therefore can compare their own experience before and after. I'm sure parents are a little (intentionally) delusional at times, nobody wants to seem like a 'bad' or 'uncaring' parent. But to assume that the extreme majority of parents are lying about enjoying an experience that they've been evolutionarily primed for seems like flat-earth level reality-denial.

The last time I considered Apple Silicon I discovered that there were a few compatibility issues. I can't recall which softwares specifically, but it put me off "for a generation or two" and I ended up buying a Framework instead.

What is the compatibility story at this point?