Matt Levine often repeats the phrase ‘everything is securities fraud’. Any statement which turns out (with hindsight) to be false is grounds for a shareholder class-action lawsuit. Even many correct statements are grounds for shareholder class actions. The problem is that the only people who actually profit from shareholder class actions are the lawyers.
> The country went insane when inflation crossed 5%
This is actually one of the few reasons I'm hopeful for the next election (assuming we still get one) - last time, regardless of the root cause, the country blamed those in power right then.
> How does one even go about accusing someone of insider trading? The illegality sounds pretty unenforceable.
Much of it is data analysis. My favorite examples of this are actual hacks - once foothold is established instead of encrypting & ransoming, the attacker just listens to the CEO/CFO. One hacked a law firm that handled some sizable mergers.
Personal tangent: Once had an opportunity to insider trade on a particular huge aerospace company. Playing a squad-based PvE game, matchmade into a team with 3 real-life friends at said company who chatted on in-game voice comms about their day, talking about court cases and senate hearings, and later panicked when they realized I could hear it all. They were nice guys, and I assured them that I wouldn't misuse what I overheard - I don't work in a relevant industry, and my investments do just fine without an illegal edge (plus I know Matt Levine's Laws of Insider Trading #1: Don't).
Not combat-armor, but a lot of motorcycle protective gear is exactly this. D3O is soft/flexible normally, but goes rigid on impact. I have plates of it in my own riding gear. I believe there's also some progressive versions that harden more or less based on the impact force.
Also, the additional task of tracking down all the monthly charges when my personal credit card number was compromised yet again and I need to update my payment details
> LAION “only maintains a database containing links to image files that are publicly available on the Internet,” arguing that it does not keep the image data so there it can’t delete the file.
The difference is the Pirate Bay was a list of links to obviously pirated content. LAION is a list of links to content that is, for the most part, hosted at its original source or a place authorized to host it.
As I see it, this is another step in a field whose history is a story of force-multipliers. 60 years ago, they used punch-cards. Every decade or so sees a sizable jump in how much an individual programmer can accomplish in a given time frame, and it has only increased the demand for such specialists.
For most of that time, we made middle-class money like most other engineering disciplines. We're due for a reversion to the mean.
Lately I keep thinking about Star Trek - everyone can issue commands to the computer, but they still had vast armies of engineers.
>Lately I keep thinking about Star Trek - everyone can issue commands to the computer, but they still had vast armies of engineers.
There's a certain truth to that. I have a few colleagues that can't force-multiply with StackOverflow and Google yet.
Their command of English is just not on the level to search the American internet. So they restrict themselves to the German internet.
While ChatGPT works just as well in German as in English and this might enable them to harness it better. I think there will again be some people that are and some people that aren't able to use it properly.
If you can verbally express your issue you can ask it, and then you need to make sure the response actually works and isn't hallucinated, and you will need to make sure it works in conjunction with the rest of the code base.
In essence what we have been doing with StackOverflow and Google is being supercharged now. And while you can find almost every answer on StackOverflow, putting it all together, testing it, designing the system as a whole has taken up more and more mindshare.
Bingo. I, and others I've known, don't fit in California, so we bootstrapped somewhere with a low cost-of-living and fiber-to-the-home with a proper privacy agreement. Many don't have the goal of growth, but subsistence for the nerds - freed from the tyranny of MBAs, spend company and personal time on side projects unrelated to the Business.
Some have drawn the attention of the SV crowd - they sold, to YC grads or bigger corpos, and immediately bootstrapped again. The money is a Means only; We just want to solve puzzles and learn things.
