Even better, add emotions!

Season with salt until it tastes angry.

I prefer milligallons myself.

Microacres^(3/2)

I have a little blog where I post oddball essays when the spirit moves me. In the discussions of the recent healthcare CEO shooting, I’ve seen a lot of vague references to the amount of people Brian Thompson hurt. But usually it’s just referred to as “thousands” or similar. I wanted to take a crack at actually calculating a specific number. And I put together a little analysis here:

https://forestreflections.substack.com/p/mene-mene-tekel-upharsin

It’s not a perfect analysis, but I listed all my sources and assumptions. For some reason, I was inspired to take a particularly old school, fire-and-brimstone framing of the subject. I’m agnostic myself, but sometimes I’m drawn to this type of framing.

I assume you’re some sort of serial killer. 😁

It really depends on how much they’ve invested in building AI chips.

Yup. I walked the whole path. Slashdot->digg->reddit->now lemmy I guess.

Also, I think the unaccountable moderators really are a problem. You end up with major subs like r/politics or /worldnews getting camped by people who just happened to get there first, and then being forever unaccountable for bias or stupidity. And then you get sitewide bans if you subvert the bans from the tinpot dictators camping on what should be community-led spaces.

You should look up the absurd pay structure of Musk at Tesla or how at Facebook, despite it being a publicly traded company, Zuckerberg literally cannot be fired.

The reason tech tends to chase stupid trends like AI is that there really aren’t that many people in charge of the whole place. They all know each other; they’re all buddies. And they all chase the same stupid fads together.

I think they’re going to be bankrupt within 5 years. They have way too much invested in this bubble.

Wow. Good find. It looks like they were concerned about a potentially suicidal person opening the hatch. So much so that they actually installed a padlock on it in future flights.

Look, if we in ‘fuckcars’ can’t agree on entirely reasonable things like setting fire to cars parked in bike lanes, what are we even doing? 😂

🔥 🔥 🔥 🔥 🔥 🔥 🔥 🔥 🔥 🔥 🔥 🔥

That makes me wonder. What happens if an astronaut just…refuses to come back? They’re up on the station and their mission is at its end. They broadcast to NASA. “Actually, I’ve decided not to come back. I live here now.” How would NASA handle that situation?

You know. That’s actually an interesting hypothetical. How does the Secret Service react if two people with Secret Service protection try to fight each other? I imagine they would first protect whoever has the most seniority, as in the current serving president, then current vice president, etc. But what if say, two former presidents try to duke it out?

Or can the president waive Secret Service protection? Since the president has broad immunity for ‘official acts’, does this mean the president can now duel someone on the White House Lawn at dawn?

Taliban government proudly announces that they too have found trillions of dollars of oil and gas in Afghanistan’s territorial waters.

I’ll be…out here…where there are witnesses!

And that’s what people miss when quoting sports statistics. They confuse culture with biology. We live in a society that imparts certain roles based on gender. Men are encouraged to exercise and run more from a young age than women are. In an egalitarian society, that disparity wouldn’t exist. We really can’t say how things would play out. That’s why studies of paleolithic skeletons are a much better tool than just navel-gazing based on modern sports. Those statistics cannot be separated from our current society. Instead of just speculating, we can look at the actual skeletons of paleolithic people, which this article discusses. These skeletons record a record of the kinds of lives these people lived. There’s no need to speculate; we can ask these people directly how they lived.

I don’t buy that. I think it’s fraud. Yeah, the victims of the fraud are not nice people, but the law is supposed to protect all, not just the nice people. This isn’t “gaming the system,” it’s fraud. Uploading the AI-generated songs is fine. The problem was the fake listeners. That’s where the real fraud is.

My city has a modest bus service they contract out to a private company to operate. At the front of the buses, there are scanners that count the number of people that enter the bus. These passenger counts are then baked in to what the company is paid for their services to operate the city’s bus system.

In theory, the contractor company could park a bus somewhere, set up a conga line of people, and just have thousands of phantom passengers board a bus, and then try to bill the city based on these inflated statistics. If they did that, I would absolutely hope they would be charged with fraud.

The law isn’t stupid. There’s a reason laws are enforced by judges, not algorithms. What this person did was little different than hacking a bank account and just stealing money from it. Yes, you could say, “they didn’t do anything wrong, they’re just gaming the system!” You could just as well call guessing someone’s password and stealing their money “gaming the system.” After all, is there anything on the bank’s login page that explicitly tells you not to enter someone else’s account and transfer their money to yours? No judge in a million years would buy that.

This was effectively just a hack. This guy had to create thousands of phantom people to pretend to listen to songs. He was clearly not making any good-faith attempt at making music and was just trying to exploit a weakness in their system design to extract money from them that he didn’t earn. The law thankfully doesn’t work on a standard of “well, they never told me I couldn’t.” Cases like this take into consideration the totality of the circumstances and weigh whether it is fraud or not. And this? This wasn’t some clever technicality a legit artist used to boost their earnings. This was unambiguous fraud.

I really don’t see how this is any different from pretending to be someone else to access their bank info, conning someone out of money by pretending to be a person in need, deep-faking someone’s voice to get their relatives to send money to you, or a hundred other scams involving fake identities. Yes, the victim in this case is a villain themselves, but that doesn’t make it any less a crime.

If this shocks you as an expert, you have no business calling yourself an expert.