This in spite of the tendency of said Dear Leaders to keep their charges in famine conditions, something absent even from most modern systems that are close to chattel slavery, for example in the Gulf states and in human trafficking operations.

https://www.maxwellanderson.com/pompeian-frescoes-in-the-met...

[1] https://www.worldhistory.org/image/2232/fresco-of-a-statue-o...

On a related note, I think the whole mystery of the Bronze Age collapse becomes fairly obvious once you consider the nature of Bronze Age societies and the way they'd be affected by a technology [iron] that allows a village with a can-do attitude to resist the predations of the local god-king. (Or to become predators themselves, perhaps by taking to the sea.)

One begins to suspect that the reason Kutuzov replaced Barkley was for a sort of reverse-DEI reasons.

If anything, we're seeing the opposite results, where economists publish influential papers demographics, crime and social structure.

"When dealing with humans, linear regression is going to be good enough" is a huge assumption to make.

They say long ago somewhere far away an astrologer managed to cause a panic by predicting a devastating volcano. People didn't just flee, they sold their homes for nothing, because they were convinced their homes would be under 3 feet of lava soon.

And that brings us to the key question - is your home worth less, just because everyone on the same streat is selling their houses for pennies? Isn't the opinion of the USGS slightly more important than the opinions of the real estate market?

There's willingness to be upset at anyone with deep pockets who can be found accountable. And the motivations for that aren't emotional, they are purely material.

There's a reason why people have spent decades trying to find pharmacological cause for autism, in spite of the enormous amount of evidence that the condition is mostly hereditary.

And a very good reason why vaccines in America are exempt from the legal system.

Delaware law exclusively protects the interests of the board of directors. It allows for a unique provision - the hilariously misnamed "Shareholders Rights Plan" that enable a board of directors to issue shares as they please, in order to make sure every attempt at takeover isn't against the interests of the directors.

The only check on the power of the board in a Delaware corporation is the Delaware court of chancellery.

If I see some example of an LLM saying dumb stuff here, I know it's going to be fixed quickly. If I encounter an example myself and refuse to share it, it may be fixed with a model upgrade in a few years. Or it may still exist.

Edit: Come to think of it, training on a Q&A format is probably better - "Is there a seahorse emoji? No, there isn't."

Having had unfortunate encounters with government IT in other countries I can bet that the root cause wasn't the national culture. It was the internal culture of "I want to do the same exact same thing I've always done until the day I retire."

Absent outside pressure, civil services across the word tend advance scientifically - one funeral (or retirement) at a time.

The direct attempts at a crackdown failed, and the civil service keeps telling them it can't find any welfare fraud, (which looks fairly unlikely, given certain regional patterns), so they are trying to attack the problem indirectly - by synchronizing the identity numbers of different government record-keeping systems - HMRC, national insurance, the NHS, the land registry, council records.

KYC has already killed any financial privacy people may have had.

I particular, I'd be very curios to know how many of the replicable results require a "behavioral" explanation and how many are explainable trough the utility functions and rational agents.

Given the prevailing trend of virtually all modern governments in the developed world that seems to be rather short-sighted. Who knows, if you won't be made a criminal for dissenting? Or for trying to keep your communication private?

It depends. Here's a nice example for you - A while ago the BBC ran a series on council house investigators and their cases. It was very clear for it, that councils don't routinely check whether a prospective council tenant (who'd eventually become a buyer) doesn't already own a property. No checks are done with HMRC for their income levels either.

Of course, if a future government just wants to round up dissidents and send them to camps, I'm sure it won't be that big of an issue. But as of right now, this is enough to stop routine fraud prevention, which is likely an immediate threat to far more people.

Can someone explain to me why phones seem to be considered more secure than online communication channels or desktops? The way I see it, it's a computing device you install all sorts of crap on, sourced from all sorts of questionably trustworthy sources (especially as all sort of retail companies have started moving from loyalty cards to apps).

The Estonian solution from the early 2000s - a dedicated identification device, seems far more secure and reasonable than the modern Swedish one. If any bank in my area started offering YubiKey in leu of app authentication, I'd switch to it in a heartbeat.

I'd like to sidestep the question, and ask, is lethal violence justified as a retaliation? But I'd like to ask that as an ethical, not as a strategic question.

Suppose the starts align and the omens are good. Imagine the assassination of Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk would be highly beneficial to all your pet political issues. Would killing them be a good thing?