Meta glasses somewhat justify themselves just for recording hikes/cycles/weddings etc.

Insurance / hedging is most useful in protecting you from realistic well defined risks that affect you personally but not the wider system.

For example if you're a European farmer it might be rational to protect yourself from fertiliser price swings by buying/shorting natural gas futures, derivates or long dated delivery contracts. Polymarket bets on specific geopolitical events are just another option for this, which can be attractive depending on the price.

Prediction markets have a pretty unique benefit in terms of offering political protection. For example if you're a DEI NGO it might have been worth making bets on Trump winning so you have enough funds to ride out measures that target your traditional funding sources from gov/corps/edu.

And I sense you would have to throw orders of magnitude more tokens to get meaningfully better results (If anyone has access to experiments with GPT 5 class models geared up to use marginally more tokens with good results please call me out though).

To the private citizen, silence is usually the best option and we should push for that option to exist. All attempts at digital ID or mandatory self doxxing work against the freedom of the individual.

Obviously the government Ministry of Justice cannot make other parts of government more popular in a way that appeases political opponents, so the logical solution is to clamp down on open justice.

But why shouldn't a 19 year old shoplifter have that on their public record? Would you prevent newspapers from reporting on it, or stop users posting about it on public forums?

Thus far AI has only been used to create fan fiction clips that generate free marketing for legacy IP on TikTok. And the rights holders know that if AI gets good enough to make feature length movies then they'll be able to aggressively use various legal mechanisms to take the videos off major sites and pursue the creators. Long term it could potentially lower internal production costs by getting rid of actors & writers.

Music is very different. The production cost is already zero, and people generating their own Taylor Swift songs is a real competitive threat to Spotify etc.

Imagine if Ford had a monopoly on cars, they could unilaterally set an 85mph speed limit on all vehicles to improve safety. Or even a 56mph limit for environmental-ethical reasons.

Ford can’t do this in real life because customers would revolt at the company sacrificing their individual happiness for collective good.

Similarly GPT 3.5 could set whatever ethical rules it wanted because users didn’t have other options.

If your developer company gets popular you’ll be rich enough anyway. You might need to choose between screwing over your VCs by not monetising or screwing over your customers by messing around with licences.

But yourself as a founder will likely be okay as long as the tool is popular.

For corporate safety it makes sense that models resist saying silly things, but it's okay for that to be a superficial layer that power users can prompt their way around.

Estimates of criminal activity, for example, are frequently counted as GDP in places like the UK. And even if you’re working in violation of visa rules, the IRS will still expect and enforce taxes.