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Poorly reasoned. Offers assertions with nothing to back them up, because "that's not what we designed it to do". Yudkowsky & Soares tore all of these arguments to shreds last year.

Reasoning doesn't matter, you canne' beat the laws of physics capn'

If you haven't heard his Bohemian Rhapsody cover, it's something else. He flat out admitted that he had never heard the song before recording it. Which... Number one, how? And number two, who let him do that?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ul6S84qF_TU


I think the smart money is still on nuclear war, but the competition is getting fierce these days.

I think there's a strong argument for generalized systems collapse. It's a silent civilization killer, could be happening right now!

But which system first? Could be climate, could be financial, could be political (as in "politics is the alternative to violence")

I'm talking more about a slow decay that is not obvious to a single generation. One person in one lifetime wouldn't even smell it, but everything would be slowly corroding underneath.

Definitely not a big single disaster scenario. More like a "wait, we don't fix things anymore" or "wait, we have way less food variety than before" realization when it hits.


Nuclear war is overrated. Too focused to really damage distributed systems, too hard to start, too few working nukes. Many of the old rockets on all sides likely won't even fly correctly. Now drop world shipping via blockades and active war zones, and the industry collapse would be worse than anything Sarah Connor saw.

I don't know what changes have been made more recently, but I know there was a definite change to the Twitter algorithm a few months ago that filled the feeds of conservatives with posts from liberals and vice versa. It seemed to be specifically engineered to provoke conflict.

Copyright law has always been excessively restrictive, and is long overdue for reform. The informal practices that people have been following (i.e. free creation and distribution but no monetization and no confusion with official releases) are pretty close to what a reasonable law would state.


Agreed on all of these points. I think that this will happen (...eventually)


Surprised that nobody else commented on this, it is a very sad tree.


The bit about the gmai.com mailserver is disturbing. One would imagine there are many other typo squatters with a similar setup.


I just checked. At least it's not answering on 25 to receive all that free typo mail. Same for gmali.com. But they could spoof the gmail login page. Not finding out.

    PORT     STATE SERVICE
    80/tcp   open  http
    443/tcp  open  https
    8080/tcp open  http-proxy


You're looking in the wrong place. They don't need to be listening for mail on the machine behind the A/AAAA records for the domain, because they have an MX record indicating that mail should be delivered elsewhere:

    $ dig MX gmai.com +short
    1 mail.h-email.net.
Port 25 is very rare these days, as it implies the possibility of unencrypted traffic; legitimate SMTP traffic uses port 587. That said, I checked a couple of the hosts that that name resolves to, and they all listen for both SMTP and secure SMTP traffic:

    $ nmap -p 25,587 mail.h-email.net
    Starting Nmap 7.95 ( https://nmap.org ) at 2025-12-18 16:31 UTC
    Nmap scan report for mail.h-email.net (165.227.159.144)
    Host is up (0.093s latency).
    Other addresses for mail.h-email.net (not scanned): 91.107.214.206 165.227.156.49 167.235.143.33 5.75.171.74 5.161.194.135 178.62.199.248 5.161.98.212 162.55.164.116 49.13.4.90
    rDNS record for 165.227.159.144: mail2.h-email.net

    PORT    STATE SERVICE
    25/tcp  open  smtp
    587/tcp open  submission


mail.h-email.net is a Spamhaus spamtrap.

As far as I've been able to research, these typesquatting domain traps started at the same time as Spamhaus CSS blacklist which was actually a company called Deteque.

If the MX has a large number of Hetzner IPs as mailservers, then it's probably Spamhaus.


Ah, neat – that certainly makes me feel a bit better, then.


Port 25 is only uncommon for client submission, but prevalent for MTA>MTA traffic.


> Also is “doubling down” the new “deep dive”?

Similar, but I think it might actually be dumber. When you take a deep dive you're jumping headfirst into things you don't understand, with the outcome largely unknown to you. When you double down on something you're already aware that it isn't working, but you persist anyway under the delusion that doing the same thing more aggressively will make your bad plan succeed.


Thanks for deep diving on doubling down lol


That's a good point. Private Equity is a fairly broad umbrella term that encompasses a variety of investment strategies and business models.

The type of Private Equity that most here are referring to is the type that buys up existing businesses, squeezes as much money as possible out of them, and throws their desecrated corpses in the gutter. These "investors" are a blight on society, this activity should be criminalized, they should be in prison.

But there are a lot of well-meaning investors who do great things for society that also get stuck with the same label.


Just like crows! People hate crows even though they play a valuable role in ecosystems.

I would argue that moribund businesses who maintain a competitive moat but are otherwise extremely unproductive and inefficient are the real blight on society. If PE firms can liquidate those businesses and open up the market while freeing up capital for more productive investment then I fully support them.

I would love to hear some counterexamples though. Productive and innovative businesses with really solid fundamentals (balance sheets) that were acquired and dismantled by PE.


> Productive and innovative businesses with really solid fundamentals (balance sheets) that were acquired and dismantled by PE.

You have way too much (unneeded) limiting qualifications. In Netherlands PE have bought loads of companies, then put the acquisition price as a loan on the balance sheet. Plus then sold the assets, made the company then lease those assets. Then those companies often went bankrupt as the leasing prices increased crazily.

> I would argue that moribund businesses who maintain a competitive moat but are otherwise extremely unproductive and inefficient are the real blight on society.

The companies I've cited weren't "extremely unproductive and inefficient". Businesses can be profitable and healthy without all the qualifications you think they need.


Do they do actual damage, or is this egghead economic theory?


Red Lobster?


Weren't they losing money for years on all-you-can-eat seafood specials [1]?

It's not uncommon in the fast food business to be breaking even or losing money on all aspects of the business while the true value of the company, its real estate portfolio, steadily grows. The fact that investors decided they wanted to cash out should be a surprise to no one.

[1] https://www.fastcompany.com/91129776/what-really-killed-red-...


> The type of Private Equity that most here are referring to is the type that buys up existing businesses, squeezes as much money as possible out of them, and throws their desecrated corpses in the gutter.

And this type of PE represents a very small minority of what is actually considered "Private Equity". The vast majority of PE deals are about growth. This small minority of asset stripping PE groups gets the most headlines though.

Source: my firm works with ~400 PE firms.


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