Hrm. I plugged in the first 4000 words of this essay into my free Pangram account and it says "59% AI generated", "We believe that this document is a mix of AI-generated, AI-assisted, and human-written content".
I noticed that the company is glossed as "Flock" and not "Flock Safety (YC S17)" in posts like this and last week's "US cities are axing Flock Safety surveillance technology", https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47689237.
Did YC house style change a while back to drop the "(YC xxx)" annotation since so many popular firms particpate / or because it's well known?
At one point recently the Mirai came with a fuel incentive program: when you buy the car, Toyota gives you a gift card worth $15,000 towards fuel at hydrogen stations.
An interesting second part of the program was that if you live near a hydrogen station but it's broken, Toyota will instead reimburse a rental car and gas for the rental, one week at a time but presumably for as long the hydrogen fuel station remains broken.
(1) It doesn't give Adams enough credit for his work on WhenHub. I was reading Scott Adams's posts about WhenHub contemporaneously as he worked through the startup's various pivots. He had a really good idea that people would want to see a map with a little live-location icon of where their friends & acquaintances were on the map and he pushed really hard on different ways of getting this idea towards reality. We have this now (in various other social map apps) and he showed good product sense.
(2) It gives Adams too little credit for the sincerity of his views.
> There’s a passage in the intro to one of Adams books where he says that, given how he’s going to blow your mind and totally puncture everything you previously believed, perhaps the work is unsuitable for people above fifty-five, whose brains are comparatively sclerotic and might shatter at the strain. This is how I feel about post-2016 politics. Young people were mostly able to weather the damage. As for older people, I have seen public intellectual after public intellectual who I previously respected have their brains turn to puddles of partisan-flavored mush. Jordan Peterson, Ken White, Curtis Yarvin, Paul Krugman, Elon Musk, the Weinsteins, [various people close enough to me that it would be impolite to name them here]. Once, these people were lions of insightful debate. Where now are the horse and the rider? Where is the horn that was blowing?
This is not fair. Adams knew exactly what he was doing and exactly what he was getting into for all of 2015-2026. He was an extremely smart guy. We should treat him seriously, not infantilize him. He was not a Nobel Prize winning chemist or Fields Medal winning mathematician coming up with wacky perpeutal-motion machines or cranky Riemann Hypothesis solutions that everyone politely agrees to ignore. His hypnosis stuff and all the rest were genuinely what he really believed -- it's not like Sir Michael Atiyah's Todd function.
Adams was in the prime of his life, he was doing what mattered most to him, and we should take him at his word that he genuinely believed what he said and we should judge what he said on its merits.
(3) I don't really have a disagreement but I am fascinated by the implication in the last 1/3 of the eulogy slatestarcodex view that Scott Adams was trying to establish a guru cult community - in convergent evolution with the sort of thing that the squishy half of TPOT tends to sprout in the East Bay. It's an interesting observation which tells me something about what is going on with Bay Area rationalism, though I don't know quite what.
I thought that many of the things that happened to Adams -- especially his family troubles with his stepson, but also his illness -- were really sad. I'm sorry things didn't turn out differently and grateful for the cartoons.
Wow, I read the linked case ( https://caselaw.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ewhc/kb/2025/3063 ) and the High Court judge's ruling has a remarkably strong and thorough discussion of both modern Internet forum culture and the law. Really interesting writing.
Watched a fantastic film about this on the plane a few years ago, "Liar Game - Reborn". There is some fairly sophisticated logic puzzling and scheming going on (see e.g. sample illustration https://imgur.com/a/0AOb67G from an interlude about 50min in where there are 3 groups of people who mutually distrust each other, each know a secret collection of 3-4 integers unique to their group, and want to deniably pass share integers with each other which are "not my team's". Another participant watches what happened and realizes in retrospect this is how the info was shared.)
Gergely Orosz, whose writing is influential in tech spheres and fun to read, has been a loud proponent of the theory that TCJA's elimination of the immediate expense of R&D research cost was the skeleton key explaining technology sector layoffs.
It seems to me to that many technology-industry trends are driven by vibes:
* People seem to love reading articles in any kind of media source about their company's products and are remarkably credulous of them / influenced by their content. Not just PR generating roundup reports of media coverage, this is also engineers and leaders who follow any coverage of their firms quite closely.
* There really does seem to be a sort of contagion effect with layoffs where, once one firm began doing it, everyone did (layoffs.fyi has a lot of data supporting this kind of hypothesis)
* Among founders and engineering leaders, there does seem to be a common set of ideas - not just the group-chat consensus that helped kill SVB, but just an overall whisper network of facts that everyone knows is true - which guide their choices.
Overall it seems reasonable for software-industry employees to hope a narrative takes hold like "we had to lay off lots of people because their headcount didn't pencil out during the annual FP&A cycle under the new TCJA R&D rules, but now that the new law has restored immediate R&D expensing the formula is going to make the opaque headcount number higher, and jobs will be more stable". The idea might even become true if enough people believe it.
Personally I think the layoffs are better explained by another phenomenon, superpersuasion from AI. (My niche view is that the first superpersuader success story was when the chatbots convinced business leaders to reallocate resources to buying more GPUs and LLM tokens and lower investment in the rest of their lines of business.)
I think it's worth reading both the 2015 OIG report on the topic ("Title: Numberholders Age 112 or Older Who Did Not Have a Death Entry on the Numident", A-06-14-34030) and also the 2023 followup you submitted. I left a comment over on that submission after reading both.
It's nice that the hard work of investigating government inefficiency is being noticed and celebrated -- you can really see the tensions between providing reliable services and fighting fraud risk in the 2015 & 2023 reports.
If you care about finding waste, it seems like a really strange choice to summarily fire the inspectors general who have worked hard on this sort of investigation.
It was interesting to see that in the 2015 audit, a total of 13 people were found to have received Social Security benefits despite being older than the oldest known human.
It was also interesting to see that in the 2023 audit the costs questioned ended up being $0, i.e. there was less evidence of misdirected money, though in OIG's opinion strong evidence of an opportunity for fraud in other ways.
I think I understand why SSA might be reluctant to accept recommendations to bulk disable the SSNs of people who seem to be very old. If they get it wrong and a legitimate beneficiary had their benefits cut off because somebody typed in their birthday wrong, this could lead to bad press and a frustrating experience with Congressional constituent services.
Seems to me that it would be a perfectly reasonable policy choice to order SSA to implement the OIG's recommendations and take a more forceful approach to shutting down old SSNs. The odd thing here is that instead of doing that in 2025, the inspectors general were all laid off, and their recommendations about fraud are being gradually rediscovered from first principles, but without any of the institutional understanding of where the bad data come from and how to fix them.
I spent a fair chunk of the mid-90s to early 2000s on a moderately busy MUD with a group of people who, it turns out, were all about the same age. No idea in retrospect how I juggled this with school/friends/work - I guess kids just have a ton of free time.
Kind of drifted away for a couple decades during college and after, as other things filed up the time.
I came back decades later, after going to a memorial service for a friend who died untimely of a serious medical condition, and seeing that a bunch of the people there were from her online community. They talked about the MUSH she hung out on had been a real lifeline when she was bedbound for immune-system reasons -- it was really, really cool to see, and I went back and checked out my own place and met up with folks again.
During 2020 a TON of people all had the same idea and all logged in to my place again. There was a brief resurgence of activity (from dozens of people online to a hundred+). Very few new players, but very cool to see people who were all, more or less, the same cohort -- just grown up now. Folks have slowly drifted away again in the past couple years, and that's fine too. I'm glad it's there.
It's nice to have these subcritical, human-scale online communities. Not everything has to be a subreddit or even a 10,000+ person discord - you can just hang out on a server!
The chat logs show that he was quite stoic about the whole thing and treated it as a mundane business action to protect himself ("is a liability and I wouldn't mind if…"; "I've received the picture and deleted it. Thank you again for your swift action.").
Given that he is now free, and may have access to substantial cryptocurrency wealth, I think it would probably be best under the circumstances if everyone forgot about these allegations and just left him alone to live a quiet life.
I skimmed the literature on this and the ritonavir story seems legit.
There really is a peer-reviewed paper saying that there are five crystalline forms of the stuff. ("Elucidation of crystal form diversity of the HIV protease inhibitor ritonavir by high-throughput crystallization", Applied Physical Sciences, Feb 2003).
It really does seem that in 1998 the more stable Form II suddenly started coming out of the factory, with lower solubility and such bad oral bioavailability that the oral capsules were withdrawn from the market until Abbott figured out a new way to make the drug. (I think they were already moving from a capsule to a gelcap and the gelcap didn't have the same issue? Just reading … this is not such a good source perhaps but lovely bare HTML: https://www.natap.org/1998/norvirupdate.html )
Honestly any time I read the procedural history of this stuff I get nerd sniped by the bizarre details and I lose track of the big picture. I feel like the whole thing could be three competing Dateline NBC style six-part crime specials and I still wouldn't get tired of it.
Ross heard that one of his Silk Roads moderators was arrested, and so he hired someone to kill the mod? The assassin sent a confirmation photo of his mod, asphyxiated and covered in Campbell's Chicken and Stars Soup?? The supposed assassin was actually a corrupt DEA agent who later served federal prison time for crimes so embarrassing that they were never fully disclosed?!?!
There is some kind of thorny moral question I cannot quite wrap my brain around.
Ross did not successfully have anyone killed, but it seems that he must have thought he was successful?
Ross (it is alleged, and chat logs seem to show) ordered someone's death and paid for it and got explicit confirmation that they were dead. [actually several someones.] Did he feel like a murderer at this point? What a fascinating, real life Raskolnikov style figure.
Later, perhaps much later, he gets strong evidence that the murder was fake. Nothing has changed in the outside world after he learns this -- the victim is no more alive before or after he learns this. Does this change his identity? Is he more or less of a murderer than before?
Do the people who kill with modified Xbox controllers from a warehouse in Las Vegas do the same kind of killing that Ross thought he did?
And then there is some kind of moral thought experiment happening at a Silicon Valley Rationalist, Effective Altruism kind of scale that I can't quite wrap my head around. Do people matter as much in person as if they're just blips on a screen you'll never meet? If Ross could have sent 1 BTC to prevent fatal malaria in a dozen young kids, thousands of miles away, but he didn't, should he feel responsible in some way for their death? Is he about equally responsible for them as for the online people he is pretty sure he ordered killed from afar, but never met?
It's just a lot. The whole story is supernaturally intense; it's hard to believe it was real. It will make for great TV.
Cell phones and laptops in general have changed a couple of things for me, as someone who grew up without them:
- I realized about 20y-25y ago that I could run a Web search and find out nearly any fact, probably one-shot but maybe with 2-3 searches' worth of research
- About 10-15y ago I began to have a connected device in my pocket that could do this on request at any time
- About 5y ago I explicitly *stopped* doing it, most of the time, socially. If I'm in the middle of a conversation and a question comes up about a minor fact, I'm not gonna break the flow to pull out my screen and stare at it and answer the question, I'm gonna keep hanging out with the person.
There was this "pub trivia" thing that used to happen in the 80s and 90s where you would see a spirited discussion between people arguing about a small fact which neither of them immediately had at hand. We don't get that much anymore because it's so easy to answer the question -- we've just totally lost it.
I don't miss it, but I have become keenly aware of how tethered my consciousness is to facts available via Web search, and I don't know that I love outsourcing that much of my brain to places beyond my control.
> There's a lot here that feels like... Bad statistics. Not to say that there's no truth in the accusations - but they don't seem to be acting in good faith, and that will wreck them when it comes to the court.
Well…
There are a couple of cases here:
* 1:24-cv-11801, Northern District of Illinois (class action with Radner's Markets as lead plaintiff)
* 1:24-cv-11816, Northern District of Illinois (class action with Alexander Govea as lead plaintiff - a person who bought frozen potato products at supermarkets)
The complaints were filed only two days apart, by different lawyers; I wonder whether a lot of firms were looking into frozen potatoes and these two ended up first to file?
I hope one or both of these lawsuits goes far enough that we can get to discover and will get to see some emails. That's always the fun part.