The reason they do these things is that their first priority is to keep the gamblers happy, and the gamblers hate to think they got cheated.

This just gestures at the meta-problem with prediction markets, who pays for the alpha? With stocks, companies generate returns to capital. With commodities, there are buyers and sellers of the underlying. But there is very little economic usefulness about most prediction markets, especially by volume. The only way to get enough users to justify the effort to figure out accurate prices, is to turn it into an entertainment product. And in an entertainment product, if the customer doesn't like X, then you crack down on X.

Those other two laws seem like an even weirder fit for the fact pattern in this subthread.

Control tool access like OSes enforce file permissions: I understand it’s a metaphor, but also isn’t the track record of OSes here pretty bad?

Check whether the agent is allowed to use the booking tool: so a web browser? Isn’t a browser a pretty powerful general-purpose tool, which by the way could also expose the agent to, like, a jailbreak?

> As such, security researchers have to devise new mitigations to prevent AI models taking adversarial actions even with the virtual machine constraints.

An understated reminder that yes, we really ought to solve alignment.

> I think God made all people good. But if we had to take a million immigrants in, say Zulus, next year, or Englishmen, and put them in Virginia, which group would be easier to assimilate and would cause less problems for the people of Virginia?

Nevertheless, his comments drew contemporary accusations of racism. So how modern are we talking about? This was well-trod discourse in 1992.

Buchanan and Vance had every possible culture to draw from to make their points, but they reached for Zulus and Haitians, two nations of Black people whose most famous historical event is a somewhat-successful war against White people. It strains credulity that this messaging is not fine-tuned to the electorate.

> As you can see, in a typical day of mine one can count some twenty-five separate activities in which I participated, mostly information-gathering and - giving, but also decision-making and nudging. You can also see that some two thirds of my time was spent in a meeting of one kind or another. Before you are horrified by how much time I spend in meetings, answer a question: which of the activities -- information-gathering, information-giving, decision-making, nudging, and being a role model—could I have performed outside a meeting? The answer is practically none. Meetings provide an occasion for managerial activities.

I'd only reiterate that if the question is whether there can be high-trust societies with a lot of local self-governance, that also have a lot of immigration, then Massachusetts proves that the answer is yes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dummy_(nickname)

As an author of software, sometimes you make mistakes, and those mistakes are often of the form, "I permitted the user to do something which I didn't intend." How do you correct something like that? In the Java world, the answer is "add newer & safer & more intentional capabilities, and encourage the user to migrate."

In the Python world, this answer is the same, but it also goes further to add, "... and turn off the old capability, SOON," which is something that Java doesn't do. In the Java world, you continue to support the old thing, basically forever, or until you have no other choice. See, for example, the equals method of java.net.URL: known to be broken, strongly discouraged, but still supported after 20+ years.

Here's an example of the difference which I'm talking about: Python Airflow has an operator which does nothing -- an empty operator. Up through a certain version, they supported calling this the DummyOperator, after an ordinary definition for "dummy." But also -- the word "dummy" has been used, historically & in certain cultures & situations, as a slur. So the Airflow maintainers said, "that's it! No more users of our software are permitted to call their operators DummyOperator -- they now must call it EmptyOperator instead!" So if you tried to upgrade, you would get an error at the time your code was loaded, until you renamed your references.

This decision has its own internal consistency, I suppose. (I personally would not break my users in this way). But in the Java world it wouldn't even be a question -- you'd support the thing until you couldn't. If the breakage in question is basically just a renaming, well, the one thing computers are good at is text substitution.

So overall & in my opinion anyway, yes, it's very much true that you can upgrade Java & Java library dependencies much more freely than you can do the same sorts of things with Python.

As you note, it's not an option to take it easy in the summer because otherwise the plants would cover everything and the roads would be impassable. Somebody has to mow it, and they need a place to cool off.

For another example, the author notes that the fruits are wrapped in plastic, but I don't think he realizes how much faster food spoils in Florida than the UK where he's from. Every bad apple that has to be thrown away is another apple which needs to be trucked in.