To add to your point: Someone should let the author know that considering oneself informed and taste-driven is itself cheugy. The performative aspect is the essence of cheug. So I hope he was being ironic.
Costco itself, in a way, is a sort of Wittgenstein's ladder, or Wittgenstein's warehouse, because eventually you realize that everything sold under the Kirkland label is just a de-badged top brand. If you still reach for brand names for staple goods at Costco knowing full well the Kirkland product is either the same or superior, then you know that the shadows of brand names still haunt you and occlude your sight. When you are able to escape these shadows and see the sun, then you are free.
The screenshots for Red P method look pretty basic. Breaking Bad had more detail. And anyone can write a basic keylogger, the hard part is hiding it. And the carfentanil steps looks pretty basic as well, honestly I think that is the industrial method supplied and not a homebrew hack.
In my opinion, the article should be classified as harmful speech for containing polarizing language about conspiracy theories. We live in an era of rampant disinformation, we should stop polarizing people. Therefore this article is harmful.
Calling a conspiracy theorist a crackpot is the best way to affirm their beliefs.
I believe the mechanism, at its core, is that engineering or anything technical is to some degree a competitive field (not as in pay, but as in having clear performance differences between who is good and who is bad). This means any newcomer will be a reason for the team to flex and prove that they don't need the consultant. Similarly, the consultant is trying to show just how much of an absolute maven he or she is.
There is an element of truth in what you say. And yet, when people actually behave that way, it often becomes toxic, which ironically makes them worth much less as either employees or consultants.
I agree, doxxing yourself to some shady gray-market adjacent data broker is not acceptable as age verification, and age verification was safer using the honor system as before. But for some communities, especially social media communities, some kind of verification is better than none, otherwise what's to stop them from being overwhelmed with alt accounts that are used simply for harassment or other targeted objectives?
People should not be able to misrepresent themselves on the internet, it may have been safe in low volumes but it is scary now and will be outright dangerous as a modality in the hands of AI agents. If you think teen mental health is bad now, wait until social media campaign capabilities previously only available to nation states fall into the hands of ordinary school bullies.
Maybe age verification isn't the way to mitigate this obvious risk, but there has to be something that can be done to stop rampant sockpuppeting.
Everyone should have abandoned ship sooner, namely when they were consuming content for Copilot without permission. When it became obvious that pushing your code to GitHub meant giving it directly to Microsoft I stopped using it altogether and ran my own git/gitlab/gitea (I've changed approaches several times).
It may already be cheaper if you calculate the hidden cost accumulated by LLM generated tech debt. At least some of it could be avoided by manually doing it better to begin with.
I searched for "Show HN" for the first time ever and I got the impression that most of the costs associated with the projects could have been avoided by never starting them to begin with.
"VibeBrowser", "Financial Database API for Vibe Coders" followed by dozens of self feeding AI projects with barely anyone doing anything that isn't related to AI.
Social media is a cancer today. When I read news like this, I think "darn kids will never know how good we had it, the internet was for nerds and not hostile!"
But as I roll that thought over in my head I wonder, was the internet ever really safe? Maybe there weren't companies messing with your psychology for profit, but perhaps it was all an espionage platform the whole time. The internet, http and html in general, has a smell of being designed from the ground up as a spy tool. It's as if we've all been filling out Obsidian documents on ourselves and voluntarily linking them, and somewhere there is a central node that can see the whole brain.
Maybe it wasn't hostile in the same way where it turns your brain into mush, but it seems like it was never safe.
Sure, it may not have been safe back in the day, but the internet wasn't in your pocket at all times and pinging you with notifications. It didn't replace nearly all your in-person social interactions. It's the ubiquitousness of social media that is a big part of the problem.
The special forces soldier bet on his team's success. He risked his life. His bet would not alter his behavior in anyway incongruous with mission objectives. Is that really that bad if the direction of the bet isn't unethical?
He could have died and this would be a non-story, just someone throwing 32k away before they were killed in action.
People are focusing on the use of confidential information and calling this insider trading, which is fair, he had knowledge that the trading public did not. But to lump him in with refs who call games wrong on purpose is ridiculous. In one example you are betting on something you want to happen anyway, it is not deception. In the other, you are profiting from deliberate fraud. I think there needs to be some sort of category difference between these two.
While it seems like an interesting point - a kind of 'doubling down' - its not clear cut at all.
Firstly, the dichotomy you presented for the individual is: succeed, live, and make loads of money vs fail, die, and lose a fair chunk. The argument you make with this dichotomy is that the gambling doesn't affect anything. However the reality is that there are many ways for the mission to end - fail, live, lose a fair chunk being notable because when the mission is going sideways the individual becomes incentivised to put themselves and others at greater risk to make a successful outcome more likely. Succeed, live, lose your squad mates, make loads of money becomes more likely as well as fail, live, lose your squad mates.
Secondly, insider trading is and always will be a signal for others. If you're only allowed to bet in one direction it becomes a form of information leak - monitor who is liquidating their assets to gamble on outcomes. For any project it becomes a signal to others - if your boss isn't remortgaging to gamble more then you know its time to jump ship. This will in turn have significant effects on outcomes.
I think the bigger issue is that he effectively leaked the raid. Now intelligence agencies will be constantly watching the geopolitical questions on prediction markets for big bets. Of course the Trump administration seems to be leaking through prediction markets as well and I doubt they’ll face any consequences.
Costco itself, in a way, is a sort of Wittgenstein's ladder, or Wittgenstein's warehouse, because eventually you realize that everything sold under the Kirkland label is just a de-badged top brand. If you still reach for brand names for staple goods at Costco knowing full well the Kirkland product is either the same or superior, then you know that the shadows of brand names still haunt you and occlude your sight. When you are able to escape these shadows and see the sun, then you are free.
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