If a data broker collects data without the consent of the consumer, then their only real risk is a class action lawsuit which drags on for six years, gets settled for a few days profit, and the consumer gets $13.50 after the legal fees. This massive skew in the risk reward calculus of data brokers is why we have the problem. Because there's little to no real downside, the trend is automatically collect as much data on as many people as possible.

Fixing this means big, mandatory, cash penalties in the law code - say $5k per consumer data leak, directly to the affected consumer, with added penalties if the company lies about the leak or delays payment. The fine must be big, mandatory, and paid directly to the consumer. Only that changes the risk reward ratio.

In that new world, companies would have to re assess their risks. They'd either build invulnerable systems and hire a lot more people reading HN to protect their golden goose, or better still they'd decide to exit the business entirely. That sounds bad, but the only reason the industry exists is because regulators failed to foresee massive leaks like this happening every three months.

We need a consumer data privacy law, with massive fines, to force companies to change their behavior. What we're doing now clearly does not work.

Still, it's worth remembering that a fixed supply currency will inevitably fail just as the metallic standards (which were semi fixed supply) did, and for the same reasons: politics. Metal backed currencies fell because the political will required to coordinate the system fell apart. Newly-enfranchised workers didn't find the message "suck it up, the gold standard requires it" very appealing politically, so they voted for other things that entailed fiscal and monetary policy. Central Banks, seeing the writing on the wall, abandoned gold en masse, with the US retaining it only for other central banks.

Bitcoin would have the same problem. It would be inevitably deflationary - halvenings, for example, are tied to computational power. Presumably, more demand for Bitcoin means more computational power, so its supply decreases just as demand increases.

Deflation is even worse than inflation for working people. Investment dries up, because why would somebody take a gamble on a business if they can keep their cash in their closet and make money, risk free? Employment therefore drops, while people decrease spending - why spend $100 on something today, if you can buy it for $85 in a year? Additionally, loans get more expensive in real terms, wages decline, and a whole host of other bad things happen.

That's why central banks target +2% inflation, in part. Inflation is preferable because it encourages investment, discourages nominal (and only nominal) wage decreases, decreases the real value of loans to the benefit of the debtor class, and other benefits. Central Banks also have a pretty successful record dealing with runaway inflation - hike rates, cause a recession, wait - whereas they lack tools to deal with deflation. At its simplest, the solution to deflation is for everyone to get a check from the government, but this whole field is considered weirdo experimental land and has only barely been tested.

All that is to say: Bitcoin is fundamentally ignorant of history and is incapable of becoming anything other than digital gold. It has a floor value which it cannot sink beneath: online gambling, illegal things, and privacy advocates (in that order) guarantee it will never truly hit $0.00. But it would be an absolute catastrophe for any country to adopt as its actual currency.

Now that I think of it, Bitcoin is perhaps one of the earliest examples of technophiles assuming society should work according to computer code, thereby "cleaning" these imperfect human systems by replacing them with the inevitable future: A philosophically-driven (rather than pragmatically or empirically, for example) system, with clear and inviolable rules, limited to no exceptions, and a happy ignorance of why existing systems came to be. After all, why study the past when we're creating the inevitable future?

LLM has been vastly oversold to the general public as "AI" when the technology is nowhere near that. We haven't invented turing complete robots that independently identify problems, learn the solutions, and respond. LLM as a technology might not ever be able to do that, by the nature of how it works. We have only created chatbots that reply to prompts, with a higher than acceptable inaccuracy rate. And yet this justifies $7tn.

But silicon valley figured out that saying "AIAI" on repeat works for funding, then other companies started pretending they were the same for the instant stock gain. Rising interest rates and this wave led everyone to pull out of other companies and dump into anything vaguely related to AI. They rode the price up, and now that interest rates are falling (making other companies more attractive) they are rotating out.

This probably didn't become a full on bubble like crypto did because interest rates were high. It's still a bubble, but seems to be pricking of its own accord as opposed to becoming a gigantic, systemic problem.

That said, when rates fall again, we might see a second boom there. Or maybe another fad will strike silicon valley, to continue the trend.

VR - Crypto - Metaverse - LLM?

Should the hacker have tried more? Sure, maybe. Do I really care? Definitely not

The amount of methane they leak is estimated to be gigantic, but without full coverage we'll never know.

I'm convinced the back to office mandates come from people who thrive in office environments. Those people succeed, get promoted, become leadership, and then assume everyone else works just like they do. It's absolutely not the case.

That's without going into the many, many studies of office environments which provide empirics disproving common myths about office work, such as the oft-repeated lie that open offices encourage collaboration. Those facts just don't compute for people who love working in those spaces, so they ignore them and repeat happy lies instead.

I enjoy it because you can genuinely interact with FSB influencers.

> Passing comprehensive privacy legislation would be a major public good–but APRA no longer can be called comprehensive. Civil rights guardrails are essential for consumer trust in a system that allows companies to collect and use personal data without consent. The new draft strips out anti-discrimination protections, AI impact assessment requirements, and the ability to opt-out of AI decision-making for major economic opportunities like housing and credit. We cannot abide a regime that would perpetuate, in the words of Dr. Ruha Benjamin, a form of ‘Jim Code’: ‘the employment of new technologies that reflect and reproduce existing inequities.’

That said, I'm completely opposed to urban food gardening (including chickens) because the land you're growing in is likely poisoned by years of urban pollution. Whatever you grow in those areas is going to bring that bad stuff along with it, which means your backyard tomatoes probably wouldn't pass FDA approval.

Chickens are even worse, because they'll eat whatever's on the ground and that stuff gets into the eggs. So while it looks great on Instagram, your backyard eggs are probably full of rubber, asphalt, gasoline, plastics, and all the other stuff that's wafted into your property over the years.

So anyway, by all means garden and have fun doing it, but if you haven't had your urban soil tested and verified as safe, don't eat anything that comes out of it.

To them*

Which is the whole problem. These narcissistic egotists think they, alone, individually, are capable of deciding what's best not just for their companies but for humanity writ large.

I'm kinda surprised nobody's done this before, given how important estimating wastage is.