Reminds me about schools of thought on rates of change:
> ## Accelerating Change [One School]
>
> Our intuitions about change are linear; we expect roughly
> as much change as has occurred in the past over our own
> lifetimes. But technological change feeds on itself, and
> therefore accelerates. Change today is faster than it was
> 500 years ago, which in turn is faster than it was 5000
> years ago. Our recent past is not a reliable guide to how
> much change we should expect in the future.
>
> Strong claim: Technological change follows smooth curves,
> typically exponential. Therefore we can predict with fair
> precision when new technologies will arrive, and when they
> will cross key thresholds, like the creation of [AI].
>
> Advocates: Ray Kurzweil, Alvin Toffler(?), John Smart
https://www.yudkowsky.net/singularity/schools
I guess this would be fine if there was no such thing as anonymous betting, right? Some public official weaseling his way onto a bet he has insider knowledge on is fine, as long as everyone knows that he's doing that. Or am I wrong?
Edit: then again, in EU banks regularly force you to fill out a questionnaire where you declare whether or not you're affiliated or closely related to any public officials for precisely corruption prevention (or detection) purposes. Why are people not forced to do that on these platforms?
Then get rid of it. Make it illegal or tax it to death.
My point is that the entire premise of "why it's ackchyually good though" is wrong. The thesis is that the markets let intelligent agents flourish, adding value to the real world. When really, the insiders can be idiots and still win.
We gain no new information because the insider has every incentive to hold off on their move until the very last minute, maximally reducing the effects of theta and vega, to maximize profit. This adds little to no practical information to the market while potentially removing super-predictors from the market.
It just becomes a vehicle for insider-trading, so make that illegal, cancellable, or just get rid of the market altogether.
What would you say if every manufacturer did this? Build your own? Further, you can't blame a person for not knowing that a machine has these planned obsolescence traps or repair-hostile traps: the manufacturer does not tell you the costs he has hidden. Further, this shouldn't be legal: it's little more than swindling.
I personally like to call it "forced obsolescence."
Forced obsolescence is when the consumer always buys the cheapest product that checks their boxes, regardless of build quality. This forces you to either use cheap parts that you know will break, or leave the market entirely. The consumer may bitch at "planned obsolescence", but when push comes to shove and they're looking for what their next <thing> is going to be, they only look at the price and features, not quality and longevity.
We should be re-framing this in consumer's minds, and list "price divided by warranty" as an important dimension to evaluate a product on.
In Europe everything has a warranty of 2 years for private individuals and 1 year for businesses: it doesn't work as a useful metric: there's no device that I rely on that I expect to run for less than ~5 years, except maybe toothbrushes. That's great as a "it's illegal to make something attrociously low-quality", but I expect at least 5 years out of every electronic appliance I have, and there's no way to assure that, except private insurance, which is more expensive than rebuying the devices that end up being defected.
So, I buy the cheapest thing that ticks the other boxes. Not because I'm inherently cheap, but because I have no trust in the market. There's no way for me to know if I'd be paying extra for luxury features, brand premium, or reliability. Yes, I try to research things I buy, and avoid red-flags, but there's only so much you can learn that way, and most people don't have neither the experience, nor the know-how, nor the time to research everything properly to high exhaustion.
Depends how its planned. If its planned to fail but designed in a way thats cheap and easy to replace its ok. Because sometimes it can be the case that to much is spent over engineering a high use part when would be more practical to let it break and replace it every 2 years or so.
Products like this simply shouldn't be allowed on the market. As if we need to destroy the planet so my Mother can enjoy looking at her 401k balance in the morning.
Sure, if it's truly planned. I think the tricky part tends to be that it's hard to distinguish between "planned obsolescence" and "incidental obsolescence".
I think there is: It is the line between "not spending extra money to make sure it works" and "spending extra money to make sure it won't work".
There is a related problem with warranty: an inferior third-party replacement part may cause damage to higher-quality original parts. There is a line here between "making sure you don't have to deal with follow-up damage caused by inferior parts" and "preventing the use of inferior parts". This is a bit more blurry because most cases won't be clear-cut, and dealing with them will be a burden on the original manufacturer.
I think it is important that we reward the nice players as much as we punish the bad ones. A blanket "all companies bad" just means that no company has an incentive to be anything less than bad.
I wonder if the gauge is just a horrible design that uses the battery to keep some memory alive.
Microcontrollers with persistent memory are not expensive, so something like that would just be horrible design, not something you could even try to justify as a cost reduction.
I had an interesting situation where we had failure of a Thule bike trailer wheel and could see where the connection-to-the-trailer design had changed from an earlier version (from the company that Thule bought). The wheel functioned the same, but you could see a clear difference which fully explained the failure. I expect it was a cost optimisation, and we only encountered the failure because we used it very heavily.
Edit: they also failed to honour their warranty commitments, but that was secondary.
Israel/the US started the war by murdering 160 Iranian school girls and has been murdering civilians non-stop since (and before) then. How many civilians has Iran killed?
It's ironic how they've been so instrumental in bombing Ukraine's civilian targets (for years) and now they're likely to get their civilian infrastructure bombed, by a third party. Strange times.
That’s an oversimplification of what your parent comment said, which was someone who has betrayed your trust.
> It would be interesting if you didn't
Why? What’s interesting about it? You don’t have to actively wish harm on people who harmed you, but there’s nothing strange about not wishing them well.
You make it sound like wishing harm or wishing wellness are activities while not wishing anything is just the default passive state. To me the default posture is not indifference, but wishing wellness.
We throw around words like "interesting", which is a subtle way to say "not normal", which is a subtle way to say that that's not how we would behave and that we think that others shouldn't behave that way either. So I take back what I said about what is interesting to me, and I'll just say that I wish it was normal to wish well to others, regardless of their actions or repercussions you impose on them.
> You make it sound like wishing harm or wishing wellness are activities while not wishing anything is just the default passive state. To me the default posture is not indifference, but wishing wellness.
It looks like you've misinterpreted both what I said and what latexr said. Allow me to clarify and reorient the conversation back to the original direction...
First, neither of us is the universal subject. Your default feeling and my default feeling are not "the" default feeling. There's no such thing as "the" default feeling.
Second, nothing I or they said has anything to do with any "default passive state", because this is not a "default passive" situation. The word "betray" here is important. "Betrayal" happens actively, not passively. Feel however you want to feel about your passive default situations. This situation is different.
The only way someone can "betray" trust is by invalidating trust on purpose. If they harm you on purpose without trust, they have not betrayed any trust because there was none. If they invalidate trust accidentally, they have not "betrayed" the trust. They only "betray" your trust if you put trust in them and then they invalidate the trust intentionally.
> I'll just say that I wish it was normal to wish well to others, regardless of their actions
How very noble. Anyway, sorry Siddhartha, if someone actively "betrays" me they can go die in a fire. That has nothing to do with my "default passive" feeling about people.
I agree there's no universal default or normal. That was my point too. We are in agreement that betrayal and purposeful harmfulness don't have a default reaction. I expressed how I choose to react, and you expressed how you choose to react. Our choices don't match, and I think that's ok.
I've not read Siddhartha. I take it you didn't like it.
> You make it sound like wishing harm or wishing wellness are activities while not wishing anything is just the default passive state.
Not what I said.
> To me the default posture is not indifference, but wishing wellness.
Same here. I’m not convinced that’s the default state for everyone, though. David Foster Wallace’s “This is Water” comes to mind.
> We throw around words like "interesting", which is a subtle way to say "not normal", which is a subtle way to say that that's not how we would behave and that we think that others shouldn't behave that way either.
Sure, I get that. Though you’re still answering as if what was in question was the neutral state of “people you don’t associate with” rather than the negative state in question mentioned by your original parent comment of “someone who has wronged you”.
> I'll just say that I wish it was normal to wish well to others, regardless of their actions or repercussions you impose on them.
Interesting. No criticism on my part. My wish would rather be that we don’t wrong each other (which, crucially, requires intentionality) in the first place. And while I don’t typically wish ill on others, I don’t think it’s wrong to not wish well on those who cause harm. If you’re a despot oppressing millions of people for your own selfish benefit, I don’t really think wishing you well is a positive action.
But again, no judgement, I was trying to understand your position, so thank you for clarifying. Have a nice weekend.
No, if I believed wishes, hopes and prayers affected anything why would I waste the finite quantity of them on random people let alone people I professionally separated myself from?
As Donald Draper once said "I don't think about you at all."
If we get into it, I think that beliefs are a better abstraction that wishes. Beliefs structure relationships. How does a person believe that he relates to another person. So when I think of "wishing someone well", it's an English-language nuance that makes it an activity, but in reality it's a choice of what beliefs I hold. And, I find, the only beliefs that are a chore to carry around are those that don't serve me.
Yes. But I'm not working at either company and I'm 99.9% sure that it would lead to absolutely nothing other than a lot of misery for myself. The NDA's I sign have some pretty stiff penalties attached. I was actually hoping to see my trust in the auditing company confirmed and I'm still more than a little bit annoyed that they did not respond in a more constructive way.
My response however is a simple one: I used to steer (a lot of) business their way and I have stopped doing that.
Similar boat. Seen the same shenanigans being played with actors who really should know better - everything from military secrets to medical data, and absolutely YOLOing it with an audit mill. I have it on good authority that there are superuser credentials floating around for their production systems that they’ve lost track of.
And no, I won’t whistleblow either, as it would mostly be me that would face repercussions, and I am unafraid to say that I am a coward.
We choose the battles we fight, and I’d like to believe that ultimately, entropy will defeat them without me lifting a finger.
No NDA can prevent you from making protected communications about fraud, illegal activity, etc. If you have seen fraud that involves the military you can make an anonymous report to the DOD IG. If it involves medical data you can make an anonymous report to the HHS IG. Or, if you want to get rich off of it, there's another option. Happy to chat.
I've already established that it was improper. It's up to them to make the most of that knowledge and then to determine of this is a singleton or an example of a class that has more representation. In that sense it is free to them, I'm under absolutely no obligation to provide them with a service. But I'm willing to expend the time and effort required to get them to make the most of it. What I'm not going to do is to allow them to play the blame game or 'shoot the messenger'.
I didn't mean it as a criticism, I think giving them the opportunity to improve and refusing to offer a scapegoat were both standup things to do. I'm just wondering if they were ever in a position to take that opportunity.
I'd called out fraud (blatant lying in investor updates) at a VC backed startup where I was a technical co-founder, once. I emailed all the investors and presented all the evidence to them. They decided to not rock the boat and keep my charlatan co-founder. So, I left. Now, the company is slowly bleeding to death.
There are thousands of companies where the shady practices are rewarded, the companies thrive and make money for the investors. So the investors are incentivized to reward this behavior just on the chance that they are rewarded back.
Whistleblowing sinks those chances and the investors and VCs know it. It doesn' just take away the money, it even takes away the plausible deniability. They put a lot of effort to absolutely punish any whistleblower to discourage the rest. Anything for a dollar. and this is probably all you'll ever need to know about almost every VC out there. Beyond the witty "I'm rich so I'm smart" blog posts and tweets, they're very much just the "anything for a dollar" type of people.
if they touch the federal government, feel free to ping me. I can walk you through how to report to people who will actually do something about it and do so anonymously
To be fair, I’m not sure blatant lying in investor updates alone constitutes fraud. There needs to be harm (or the intent thereof) AFAIK. The other party needs to be using that information to make a decision. If you give me a dollar and then later I tell you I’m actually Beyonce, is that fraud? Or am I just a lying sonofabitch?
Lying in investor update was merely the tip of the iceberg. There was lots more, fabricating customer traction pre-investment, paying oneself back-pay for months spent twiddling thumbs pre-investment (before I was involved), etc.
My lesson from the whole kerfuffle was that investors (at least the ones I’d dealt with) prefer hustle over integrity and execution abilities.
This makes sense because investors in startups just care that they aren't left holding the bag. As long as they aren't the final fool in the buy in chain, they don't care.
If I give you a dollar and you say it’s being spent wisely, Beyonce loves the product, you’re about to land Taylor Swift as pro bono public ambassador… yeah that’s fraud.
