The biological systems that support human intelligence are notoriously messy and work together only tenuously with a great many failure modes, including "process for the sake of process"
555 karma · joined April 25, 2012
According to Caro, part of the background is that the relevant southern Texas precincts were well understood to have vote counts up for purchase; over the course of election counting, both sides would have their controlled districts release counts based on what the other side was reporting to stay in the race. These counts would vary in legitimacy and how skewed they were based on the precinct and need of the candidate that had swayed the boss to their side. But tactics like having armed guards supervise the casting of votes to ensure the favored candidate got a large majority, or simply distributing vote receipts to people who never voted at all and recording votes on their behalf, or making numbers up entirely, were quite common. Typically, though, Caro argues that because both sides did this, and they did it incrementally, it usually wasn't enough to sway an election one way or another, but rather was just part of the cost of doing business. He even says that LBJ lost his Senate election earlier that decade because he got cocky and told the bosses of the districts he had bought to just release all their numbers right away, letting his opposition then juice their numbers just enough to win.
It's really the timing, more than the margin, that makes it clear what happened (and the crudeness of the forgery); after every other precinct reported and finalized, they corrected their number by barely more than needed to win. The 100 to 1 vote margin was actually not that far off from the vote margin that the precinct reported in the first place (... which, of course, really tells you that the whole thing was made up from whole cloth).
Caro covers this pretty extensively in his LBJ biography series, but it's reasonably clear from the evidence that LBJ won his senate seat by some pretty crude paper voting record manipulation after the fact - changing a '7' to a '9' by writing over the number with a pen - almost certainly with LBJ's knowledge. Given that his senate seat eventually put him in the presidency, it's probably the most consequential voter fraud ever committed in American history (that we know about, I suppose).
How do you imagine that any of these things would strengthen Dropbox's business at a scale relevant to them?
Reducing price would be straightforwardly bad; most users do not understand resource usage complaints (though I'm not conceding that problem exists - it's a non-factor on my machine); E2E encryption is an anti-feature for a consumer audience who will lock themselves out and demand refunds far above the rate at which anyone will pay for E2E specifically; most users do not have half a terabyte all at once to store nor upload speeds such that the Dropbox app performance is the limiting factor, even if those performance problems are true.
> The lack of any major competition
Dropbox's core product faces substantial competition from multiple tech giants (Google Drive, One Drive, iCloud) who have incentive and ability to eat losses on a sync product to sell other services or devices. If they don't find other lines of business to sell alongside sync they will die, and building an incrementally better sync product will not save them.
(I worked at Dropbox a ~decade ago and no longer have any insider insight nor financial stake in the company, but I sympathize that they're in a brutally difficult position in building a sustainable business)
The comparison would be Orson Scott Card writing Ender's Game to set up the universe of Speaker for the Dead, but instead making Speaker for the Dead a third of its size and calling it the last few chapters of Ender's Game. They should just be different works in the same setting.
[0]: https://kmlawfirm.com/2022/06/23/whats-the-deal-with-a-year-...
This only happens because he was inside a computer simulation of the universe created just for him, so the Vortex shows him he actually is important. Had it happened for real it would have destroyed his mind just like everyone else.
Turns out that was not a design goal of the real exam and basically nothing worked out to neat, small integer solutions - I probably would have hard failed without the calculator. I'm still sort of confused why prep materials and the real exam diverged so much.
That, plus the fact that it's a premium service that is mostly only useful to higher net worth / higher income people, makes it seem reasonable that it would be quite expensive relative to a regular provider.
From Terry Pratchett:
"The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.
Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.
But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.
This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness."
Facebook appears to have disagreed with that; they amplified calls for ethnic cleansing and did not respond to concerns about it, so they must have believed that asking them not to was too much. That's the point.
> Gates
His father was a high powered lawyer in Seattle; his mother was a member on a number of corporate and philanthropic boards, including one that gave her direct access to the Chairman of IBM at the precise moment that Microsoft was attempting to sell software to IBM.
> Bezos
His parents loaned him a quarter million dollars to start Amazon in the mid 90s.
> Ballmer
His father was a "manager" at Ford, which could mean a wide range of things; he grew up in a very wealthy area.
> Allen
He seems to have come from genuinely middle class roots - his parents were a librarian and an elementary school teacher.
> Musk
This one is pretty complicated; his father owned an emerald mine and seems to have been quite wealthy, though Elon disputes his father's claim that he invested money in Elon's first company.
> Page
Both parents were academics in computer science.
> Brin
Both parents were academics, immigrating from the USSR to the US - his father ended up teaching math at the University of Maryland, his mother doing research at NASA.
So that's two (Gates and Bezos) where their parents were significantly wealthy and influential in useful ways; two where it's unclear how much they got real benefit from their parents' wealth, but they certainly didn't grow up poor (Ballmer and Musk); two where the parents weren't rich but academically involved (Page and Brin); and one where they were genuinely just middle class folks (Allen).
I'd encourage you to read The Power Broker, if you haven't. Some examples that aren't "policy decisions" we can disagree with given our knowledge of how it turned out (eg, building or not building public transit in a given place), but rather things that were clearly morally wrong at the time:
- repeated wholesale destruction of low-income neighborhoods through a variety of bridge, park, and highway construction projects
- evicting farmers and poor rural landowners through opaque legal methods to build highways and parks atop their land
- running a "slum clearance" program that primarily evicted people from slums and demolished them without providing any real place for the humans to go afterwards
- funneling vast sums of money into the pockets of collaborators, friends, and, in the end, himself
The Power Broker paints a nuanced picture, but he did some pretty terrible things in his time.
> write and explain me more optimised algorithms for certain cryptographic operations
This domain in particular strikes me as a poor choice for this approach. "Don't roll your own crypto... but definitely don't let a language model roll it for you, either"
This is what it took for me - having a few other people agreeing to a schedule and meeting to talk about what we had read. I ultimately very much enjoyed GR but it is really difficult to read alone for the first time. Both the social pressure to keep at it and the ability to have "what the hell was that" conversations with other people really helped.
(My father's favorite author is Pynchon, so while he slightly prefers Mason & Dixon to GR, it's been in my awareness for a very long time; I think my first attempt was in my teens and I didn't succeed at finishing until my mid twenties)
There's no particular reason to believe that the other users and scores in the league you're in represent other real-world humans, and could simply be generated algorithmically to put you at a specific point in a score distribution based on A/B testing for what works the best to keep people engaged. And if they do pull real human scores into that list, they don't necessarily need to make that list consistent between users; so if you get second place, the real human whose score is shown in fourth place could be looking at their own wholly separate list in which they were second (with a userbase as large as Duolingo, I think of these two things as largely isomorphic). As far as I know, Duolingo doesn't document or discuss the mechanics of league formation, so even if they were manipulating outcomes like this it wouldn't be outright lying.
My experience doing Duolingo regularly was that my own score would vary significantly week-over-week based on my time and effort, and I would always land somewhere in the top four-ish spots in the "league" I was in regardless. If I were really being put together with a set of humans at the beginning of the league and the scores just played out organically, I would expect to occasionally win big or get demolished, but that never happened to me.
And my guess is that being competitive towards the top of the league but not consistently winning is the best for user engagement, so they'd have every reason to fake/engineer that outcome.