But also entirely predictable. Anyone paying attention for the last 30 years or so should realize by now that:

1) Data aggregated for any purpose will eventually be abused.

It is probably the only thing as certain as death and taxes... (sorry could not resist)

Of the top of my head...

People trying to mis-characterize leisure/personal travel as business expenses. Claims of S-corp business related deductions and credits are generally cited high audit trigger risks. I assume that is because the IRS at least believes they are widely abused.

Just as a general top line way to flag people who have life styles that don't seem align well to their reported incomes...and by extension are likely not reporting things they are required to do. The US tax codes is very well weird, we should never forget. You are for example required to report income from illegal activities, but the 5th amendment protects you from having to disclose what those activities are. So for an example that might fit here:

let's say fraudulently arranged some business travel for yourself to meet a client that does not exist, because you want to take a free trip to Monnaco on the company dime. That trip is income. As far as the IRS is concerned you need to report those 10k business class tickets and those 4k hotel fees you received. They may be curious if that was really a business and just how someone with AGI of 68,000 with three dependents managed to bank roll such an extravagant trip if it wasn't.

Well I can't argue with that. I was there too and saw a good deal of it.

I was looking at this at a macro level. At that level I think the net number of people will be around the same but you are right we will rotate out competent people who understand this stuff for a smaller handful of expert fixers, and ultimately a number if incompetents who will inherit systems they don't understand and can't maintain, and more inflexible policy band-aides.

There is a way to play that too. Government; especially one as divided as our current one; can't do anything fast.

There will almost certainly be in the event a major market crash the idea ballots floated.

Someone like Massie or Rand Paul will threaten to be votes to derail it.

- Sell this news (in this case exercise those PUTs) because we all know after Washington does its things for a couple weeks (maybe longer) something will get done.

There is a pretty simple script here. People say you can't time the market, that is true. However if you get the initial hypothesis right (there is going to be an AI driven crash in this case) you absolutely can time it; if you are not trying to call the absolute tops and bottoms. If you buy those puts now.. sure maybe we go up until q4 earnings start get turned in, so what you shave a couple percent. Maybe on the other end the bailouts take a little longer to get done and its four weeks not two like the current shutdown. Again you'll still do just fine.

The only things you have to be right about is proposition #0 - there is a major crash coming in the somewhat immediate future.

- For the record again, I say "Aint happening"
I think we are going to see a 'correction' we go down 10% or or less from recent highs and trade sideways for a while. Maybe that correction happens now maybe in a couple months and I am not investing in tech right now, because that will be epicenter of said correction.

Here is the thing, you are posting on Slashdot. Don't tell me you are not sharp enough to find a broker, and buy some long dated at the money PUTS either on the AI and AI adjacent firms or just the market over all with funds like SPY / QQQ.

You If you really had conviction about truly big enough crash for Main Street to feel it to commit 18 or 20K; you'd make enough to keep the mortgage current and food on the table for a year right there after there return of the principle.

The thing is you don't really believe in such a crash. The bigger part of you thinks this will all just blow over in couple quarters, you might not get a great Christmas bonus either for 2025 or 2026 but mostly you don't think your financial life will be all that greatly impacted. I think that bigger part of you is right. OpenAI's investors are going to lose a lot of money, probably Anthropic and anyone else not actually in the business of making the compute hardware, or using the compute hardware to make physical things like drugs, better plastic, etc. I don't think there is going to be any 2008 like crisis..

People building actual stuff will do just fine.

NVIDIA and anyone building the rest of the compute support chips to run the ML accelerators.

There is huge money to be made ultimately, once drug companies, like GSK, BASF, Dupont, 3M, etc use it to advance chemistry and materials.

OpenAI and its peers on the other hand is likely to crash to earth in a flaming wreck and many of the hyper-scalers that have over invested will probably have to suffer some big write downs on data centers once people realize the LLMs are not going to replace actual thinking persons, anywhere where the outcomes matter. Ditto for reading X-rays and such, it might aide actual techniations and doctors but it won't replace them. Even the self driving cars, it might move your cabby to some desk some place rather than in the car with you, it might even let him monitor 4 or 5 fares at a time; but it wont cut the numbers or the expense by 5x - you'll still have to have people to do the other things he did like clean the interior etc. All in all it might represent a 2x savings, in the end.

Long story short trouble there is a profitable business in the like OpenAI as well but nothing like the current valuations reflect.

and safe deposit boxes are not all that strong, the vault is open all day, and if someone walks into the bank waving a gun around the the staff will step aside and let them take whatever they want.

The real security of the bank is - the cops will show up in 5 to 10min and insurance will cover whatever cash disappears. That last part importantly not so for the contents of your box if that does get cleared out. Nominally bank robbers don't go for the boxes because prying them open would use to much of that 5-10 they have, to get out of there..

Ultimately its a lot of security; but I am not sure I'd want my bulk of my net worth relying on it. The FDIC/SPIC seems like a little more secure bet there.

The other thing you have to ask is does it really protect your person. If the guy with the wrench is any less than entirely convinced that you don't have a copy anywhere else, or know the information - they are still likely to beat you to death trying to get. Look at it from their prespective "I swear the only copy of that wallet information is locked up third-federal, I can't tell you anything" - "Sure buddy, let's just see if your story changes any after I take this hammer to your left hand then.."

bitcoins are highly trackable; most activities that can convert large sums of crypto to spendable cash are typically trackable. At least by nation state actors.

The norm right now and they way they get away is people say - "Oh Salt Typhoon, nothing more we can do than have the ambassador send a pointed but respectful letter" is in China.

If instead we just had some human intelligent asset, kill some of those operators, things might actually change. They could also escalate of course, but then that is really just acknowledging we are in a real conflict rather than letting our enemies bleed us and gather all the intel they'd like.

For private enterprise I'll agree you might we right that private enterprise paying ransoms emboldens criminals, and encorages more of the same. I don't agree people should be told they can't pay. It is not *MY* responsibility to fall on my sword suffer the destruction of my enterprise because law enforcement / national defense can't or won't do what is needed to protect me. Kinda like I have a dead bolt on my door, someone could still kick it in. I rely on the local sheriff to create an environment where few criminals would be so bold.

Same, unless I'm using up some credit card points, I just book directly with the airline and the hotel as much as possible. They will generally bend over backwards to help direct book people before they do whatever they can for those who booked third party.

Exception, at work we use AMEX travel, and they get stuff done for us. I assume that because they represent so many large company travelers and they negotiate for good rates, but aren't the ones going for the $40/night room specials the hotels and airlines offer them good cancellation policies.

Everyone needs to pick up a Koran and read those sword verses at the very least.

Islam isn't just a religion it is also a political system and it hell bent on conquest. We are at war with Islam, it is wholly incompatible with western culture. Islam does not make any room for pluralism, unless subjugation of people 'of the book' counts and you are alright with death for everyone else.

That is what the text says, there ain't any getting around it. Anyone who especially if they claim to be islamic either actually isn't, or is lying to you (something the Koran also tells them to do).

Anyone professing to be a follower of Islam fundamentally can't be trusted, full stop! We need a Muslim ban, or the very instant they think they have the numbers, our culture, our freedoms, our very lives, will be lost!

None of it matters unless the threat actors believe there is no degree of pain to severe they could inflict that would make governments chose to pay.

These are at least in some cases foreign state sponsored actors - there is no reason to think say that when attacking hospital / public health administration, that some number of people literally dying because care can't be manage is 'a problem' for them.

So all no ransom payment policies do unless they are truly absolute is make the threat actors so their are serious first. Just like resisting ransom payments in kidnapping results in a few severed fingers or an ear in the dead drop.

I don't think society has the stomach for an absolute under no circumstances, even if that billion dollar power plan will be permanently disabled as a resulting in local industry will be crippled for years, we won't pay policy. It just does not relfect real world needs. Better to pay the ransom and make a big show of then following the money and running down the people responsible, taking kenetic action against them. Like when you find the guy the CIA/MI6 or whatever takes care of them with a car-bomb, or you have the air-force stike their yacht in Caribbean. What will stop these guys is making it clear they will be treated as terrorist-combatants and doing this shit will have them looking over their shoulder for the rest of their lives, and force them into hiding, because if found they will be killed, no trials, no plea bargins, just BANG

Would he actually be more comfortable with our Elected non-tech elites making the big decisions?

I just don't see our legislative process, or administrative state terribly equipped to deal with shaping AI technology.

I think their job is to:
1) Ensure societies existing guard rails are uniformly and fairly applied to all, independent as to if AI has anything to do with the activity or not.
2) Respond reactively. If we identify a specific activity when coupled with AI is in some way corrosive to the society we generally want to have, then enact legislation to curb it in that area. While generally speaking anticipating problems and trying to avoid them is good practice, with something like this evolving this rapidly, I believe you usually create more issues if you go trying to solve problems you don't really know you yet have.

A good example is work force reduction, a lot of people are convinced there is going to be a huge wave of job losses that are directly attributed to AI, we don't really have any evidence of that yet. There are plenty of equally plausible explanations for unemployment rate increases right now. So if you go legislation a bunch of 'things' companies are not allowed to use ML/AI tech for and it turns out the UE uptick isn't ai related all you have done is limited productivity gains and created more economic drag.

It is important to keep in mind this is mostly just computers filling out paper work, taking down orders, and churning out questionable quality music and video clips. Hardly things we can't 'shut off' if need be. It isn't like nearly as destructive and irreversible as all kinds of development projects we often give the private sector a long leash to run with.

All that is to say central planning has historically proven to be less than efficent and continues to do so.

It is still a huge leap to suggest they are on the brink of economic collapse. For example man us cities have pretty acute housing shortage / affordability crisis, would you claim the US economy is on the brink of collapse based on that? or even those cities and regions?

As to EVs so they over produced them.. Does it matter, if the government subsides pay for it, and they don't create system problems by slowing or halting future production, which they don't have to because the government can just subsidize retolling those factories to do something else to consume the inputs, it does not have to domino or snowball the way capital destruction often does in market economies. - Sure it will be drag on the economy over all, because the inefficiency and waste will have to be made up for with taxes etc, but then our government manages to light a lot of money on fire doing stupid projects that nobody needs or cares about too, as well as fighting foreign wars.

China built a bunch of cars nobody will drive and apartment blocks few will occupy. Its not good economics but the idea it is ruinous seems farcical; at least on the surface without real numbers to back it up and the CCP will never make real numbers availible. I say all this as someone who thinks the best thing that could happen to the world would be the collapse of the CCP but hope and wishful thinking does not make it so.

Modern Russia is absolutely socialist. Heck they national healthcare baked into their constitution.

It may also be 'autocratic' in practice if not form but it absolutely is socialist.

It needed to be "fixed" but not necessarily on anyone's time table besides the ffmepg volunteers, or alternatively given it is an issue with specific coded and not the core of the encoder or something, it is up to people that build and ship ffmpeg with they projects to disable that codec and rebuild and push an update.

If Google is paying or providing support infrastructure, hosting, etc they don't get a say in feature / fix priority. Just because 'security' gets added to the strings that constitute a bug report in a FOSS application should not suddenly mean that it becomes the most critical task, nor should it place some obligation on the authors to provide a fix at all.

The FOSS projects really need to learn to respond with "Look this is a hobby, and as a craftsman I take pride in my work, and i am trying to write clean, secure, correct code. However my priorities features and fixes that I care most about and other contributors sending high quality pulls care about, and those might not be yours, even if you think it they impact security. If you want determine how we spend our time directly, many of us are willing accept contract work."

FOSS projects need to reject this notion that just because a cabal of mostly commercial ISVs slap a CVE on something, they owe the world a patch even if it means losing sleep or skipping their camping trip to work on hobby they did not plan to make time for that month or three!