What's wrong with this? The code is doing... exactly what it says. Call doSomething and if it returns an error do something else. What part of that is noise?
Some of these threads seem like that party game where people write a story together, but each player can only read the previous sentence of the story when writing the next one.
It's unreasonable to expect researchers vet someone who promises them $500K? In what insane world does this statement make any sense? It's not just common sense, but also necessary for keeping track of conflicts of interest.
It's reasonable to expect some level of vetting, sure. It's unreasonable to expect that vetting to uncover 100% of fraud in 100% of cases. A lot of people spent a lot more than $500k in FTX and none of their vettings came up with anything.
>SBF was treated as the king of crypto by the mainstream for whatever reason.
I think the reason is getting more and more obvious with every passing day.
His father and mother are professors of Law (and Business) at Stanford. (The mother is also one of two founders of Mind The Gap.) His aunt is a dean of Columbia University's School of Public Health.
His brother was running a lobby group called Guarding Against Pandemics. FTX's head of policy and regulatory strategy was a Commodity Futures Trading Commission commissioner under Obama.
The reason was actually marketing and he was the first to admit it. During the invite only Chicago money trade show he explicitly said he spending all his money on brand awareness and marketing, basketball teams, stadiums, TV ads, the sponsorships were relentless and shaped public opinion that he was trustworthy. He' main spokesperson (and investor) was pretty much the most trusted athlete in the last decade. He knows how to build trust through marketing and politics.
Selling something with no value other than the attention it gets on Twitter and the reputation it gets via reputable investors.
What gets 'reputable investors' to invest in the scheme is the most interesting part of this story, if you at all care about stopping it. Something that has existed long before crypto.
> The best video I've seen is SBF basically admitting it was a ponzi scheme: [link omitted]
> Selling something with no value other than the attention it gets on Twitter and the reputation it gets via reputable investors.
But that is clearly not a Ponzi scheme. A Ponzi scheme involves an obligation to pay people returns on their fake investment. Here, the pitch was "I don't know why people want these things, but they do. Want one?", and that pitch was honest and accurate. There was no pretense that you'd be getting any special returns.
By your standard, all trading in any commodity or stock is a Ponzi scheme, unless you're planning to consume the stuff yourself. Did you buy 300,000 pork bellies? Ponzi scheme. Do you have a bar of gold? Ponzi scheme. Do you have a share of Tesla? Ponzi scheme.
Compare Charles Ponzi, whose investment thesis was "guaranteed returns of 50% in 45 days", who specified the exact trade he was making (buying American stamps in Italy, where they were cheap, and selling them in America, where they weren't), and who never actually performed that trade. A Ponzi scheme is defined by paying off people who have invested in you with funds from other people who have invested in you.
Does it strand legitimate scientists or does it indicate that there is corruption in science? From what I'm hearing, this whole FTX thing reeks of clever, politically connected fraud and money laundering:
>Nevertheless, the attitude-change techniques used by so-called “brainwashers” are no different than standard persuasive methods identified by social psychologists, such as encouraging commitment to goals, manufacturing source credibility, forging an illusion of group consensus, and vivid testimonials
Ok, let me get this straight. You openly admit that brainwashing techniques are now routinely and knowingly used in "casual" settings, but you want me to stop using the term, because it's so routine and because it never was never long-term effective. Faulty reasoning at best, manipulative bullshit at worst.
In my experience if someone uses the term “brainwashing” they are not trying to have a real conversation, they are trying to avoid any nuanced conversation actually.
I think in most cases the argument of precision is warranted, but this might indeed be a bit much. Especially since psychology and clinical psychology needs accountability and the author used the weakest meaning of brain washing, a term quite precise for the worst deeds of the profession.
Wikipedia is one of the worst things that was ever launched on the web. Many people say that it's reliable, except in cases of controversy. That's a spin. A more honest way of describing it is that it's a system designed to accumulate trust by providing people with trivial information and then spectacularly fail them when the information is critically important for some society-wide issue. The failures aren't unfortunate mishaps, they are inevitable by design.
I'd say it's foolish to turn to an encyclopedia, which by definition is merely meant to impart knowledge not much deeper than introductory, for information of critical importance.
It's almost as if building a hypercentralized faux-communication system that tries to encourage mindless behavior and doesn't have any notion of locality is an inherently bad idea that will always lead to misery and suffering. Hm. Nah, that's can't be true. That would mean a lot of things I've read on the internet recently are lies, which is completely impossible. Yeah, I think this is just a sign that people suck and we need more centralization to control them. If we tied all TikTok accounts to some kind of social credit score, that would probably fix everything.
The reality is that W3C and Mozilla do not matter anymore. I'm not saying this because I like it, I'm saying this because it's the obvious state of things. Google controls the standards and protocols for the Web.
A few lines later:
"Tell me, how many lights you see?"