They say financial literacy is poor in the US.

Did you miss the part where it has to be invested in a market tracking index fund? The S&P 500, which is what people usually mean when they say "the market" has returned almost 10% / year over the last hundred years. Index fund fees are usually a fraction of a percent. So ~9% / year, subtract the US average inflation rate this century of 3% and you've got 6% real growth. No imaginary leverage scams needed.

Thanks for adding that. And to make it worse, misappropriation of money is usually involved in this type of situation, though perhaps not in this case if they expected to be in a convent for life... It was probably already all given away.

Give it time, he also doesn't watch TV, but only just recently stopped announcing it.

I'm sorry but I can't make heads or tails of that comment. I don't think we're on the same page. My claim was that if there's not a known strategy that's more effective than an auction at allocating resources (to create the most overall value), then although the claim I referenced may be too strong--"auctioning assets ensures they are put to the best use they can be"--it's still directionally correct.

Or to make this more concrete, can you think of a realistic way auctioning off a portion of the radio spectrum would yield a less valuable use than if a government just tried to choose who should get it or tried to utilize it themselves (a la some kind of public broadcast)?

Though let me give a counterexample, if you'll permit me to argue both sides: if a service has diffuse benefits like GPS (ignoring the fact that it's a military asset), or a coordination problem gets in the way, a government could use a resource more valuably than a private owner. Are there a lot of situations like this or is an auction typically the winner?

It's not a recall when you do a firmware update on our phone or laptop.

Right. It's a recall when you need to get a certified technician to do it.

It's actually pretty understandable.

Despite the meme power of a broken login, the bug affects a fallback feature you might well go years without using.

It requires you have PIN/Touch sign in enabled; which if you've enabled that, that means that is how you normally login.
And that works just fine. Nothing is broken there.

What is missing is a "password" icon in the 'fallback' options to "sign in a different way" (using a password, e.g., instead of a PIN or fingerprint.)

So despite being on the login screen, its not actually something you are going to regularly interact with normally, unless you forgot your pin or something. And its hardly something human beta testers are going to think to explicitly test for, every single build. And since the bug is a missing element as opposed to a visibly broken element, well, its easy to fail to notice something you almost never use isn't there.

Meanwhile, clicking where its supposed to be still actually works, so its entirely plausible that you could have automated test scripts that continue to pass if they've been scripted to click at coordinate (X,Y), or to select the password button programmatically by an identifier or something, and then 'expect' something to happen in response, because the button is there and it works just fine, its just missing its texture or something. This would slip past a lot of test frameworks, the button is "in the model", "its active/enabled", "its selectable", "its clickable", and "it fires a click event if you click", "and whatever it is supposed to do happens", and its probably even "visible" (though you can't see it); most likely the icon or texture is missing or unassigned or referencing a transparency by mistake, and its just a "transparent button". So unless you specifically add checks to screen capture and compare a pixel block range to a reference image bitmap or something, you aren't even going to catch it with an automated test.

Tests like THAT do exist and can be written, but its not usually very useful, and the cost to write and maintain such tests with reference images is huge. change an icon or font or background color and a zillion tests need to be updated. Its a difficult balancing act to decide what to test, even for a highly competent QA team.

It's possible it just outright incompetence too... but in this case, for this bug... its pretty understandable.

The summary makes it sound like much ado about nothing, but from the article:

So they're being told they can stay if they don't complain about what the church allegedly did.

Proprietary service drops support for proprietary protocol..

Thanks for attributing it properly at least. This is just a lot of words that aren't adding significant insight.

It's illegal most places to do business with criminal organizations. If not, its easy enough to make it so.

The quote you provided didn't say LLM, it said neural network. Neural networks, like any model, can interpolate or extrapolate, depending on whether the inference is between training samples or not.

LLMs are neural networks. You seem to be referring to a particular method of producing output where they predict the next token based on their conditioning and their previously generated text. It's true in the simplest sense that they're extrapolating, and reasonable for pure LLMs, but probably not really true for the larger models that use LLMs as their inputs and outputs. The models have complex states that have been shown to represent concepts larger than just the next token.

Yeah but radio ads are generic and not 2 way conversations. They are not an asking what you are saying and twisting it towards explaining why you need product X.

It will be as reliable as asking a used car salesman for advice. Somehow it's gonna be advice about how a car would for me

WTF is a proper pronoun?

Are you referring to the "altruistic" in the summary? It's used correctly, as an adjective. They could have said "behave altruistically" but they did not.

Is there another distribution mechanism that puts assets to more productive use? I don't see how imperfection makes it less ideal, absent an alternative.

Actually I think this is interesting, because the free market makes amazing things happen, wonders that no centrally planned economy could dream of. But we wish people wouldn't engage in exploitative trade--like when Russia privatized USSR/state owned assets, good people would wish ordinary people would have invested in them instead of gangsters with an eye toward a long investment. (Plus a couple Western hedge funds.) This is one reason why people say Russia's elite is literally criminals, not figuratively--they were mobsters, then they became very rich investors by being positioned to buy assets for a song. (Imagine an oil refinery that was selling for much less than the value of its finished barrels, let alone its capacity to continue refining.)

But the alternative to freely selling assets is choosing who can buy them. That could be good in some cases, but it invites corruption. Economists would say auctioning assets ensures they are put to the best use they can be. But that would have ended with Russia not being owned by Russians.

The point of this all is to say there's no easy solution to deciding how trade/commerce is conducted, and it's interesting to see where it goes right and wrong. (And to anyone that thinks it would be best to simply disallow most international trade, I would recommend checking out some economics podcasts.)