There's the Newtonian world, which we can experience and intuitively understand with our five senses.
There's the quantum world, which defies intuition, and we cannot directly experience.
There's the information world, which we do experience, but with information being intangible, have difficulty thinking about.

Light. Time. Gravity. We experience them but they are intangible. Information is the same way.

"How to make a bundt cake" is information. Does it exist only in the context of life? Did it always exist, even in the time of dinosaurs?

There's the "Black hole information paradox." It seems to suggest that the universe should be playable both forward in time, and reverse. How does the basic information about particles map to information about bundt cakes?

The Platonic information world - how does that map onto reality? Does that have any relation to life?

Life does two things - create entropy and process and accrue information. What are the implications?

I have no idea. Just some questions I've been trying to formulate.

If they're not making it clear to people at purchase that the advertised price is not the full price, it's straight up bait and switch (the advertised price is the bait; the subscription and additional revenue stream is the price switch).

An LLM is, at is core, a database. It's queried with plain English and responds in kind. It's an amazing tool. But it's a simulacrum in terms of appearing to be a human with intent and deviousness.

I think LLMs are going to be big, real big, because they are a new, more effective way of information dissemination, similar to the relational database debut in the 1970's. An absolutely amazing tool. But pushing the "simulacrum effect" of LLM's to make non-technical people think they are anything but a database is... at best disingenuous.

Initially, there was an intense media flood-the-zone campaign blaming pilot incompetence when the Lion Air 610 and Ethiopian Airlines 302 went down due to the faulty MCAS system on the 737 Max. So much so that I was talking to a casual observer who said it was the pilots' fault.

Big corporations (and lobbying associations) do two things for media: 1) make their jobs easier by giving them pre-written stories (now we have AI generated) making generating content easier; and 2) paying them via advertising. Most people do not understand the political-corporate-media ecosystem.

In Maryland, half the covid deaths came from the vaccinated, and half from the unvaccinated populations.

Half the deaths came from the 90 percent who were vaccinated; half came from the 10 percent that were not.

I leave the math to the reader (out of a hundred people, 10 die. Five from group 1, which has 90 people, and five from group 2, which has 10 people).

Since taxes are required by the government, and go to fund the government, the government should be doing everything it can to make filing easy and accurate.

A good tax filing platform, like a road, is a public good. However, private companies also make tax filing platforms, and one provided by the government is competition to them, and reduces profit. So, it makes sense they would try to eliminate the government option. They can privatize and profit from this public good.

Government is influenced by everyone from individual citizens to large corporations, via money. I have found this page, at Open Secrets, to be very useful in understanding all the ways that legal constructs (businesses, unions, etc) and people can direct money to the government: https://www.opensecrets.org/resources/learn/glossary

They have all the solutions to hard lessons learned written in C for reference, so if they aren't lazy, this shouldn't be too bad.

Reading existing code is hard. Editing it without introducing regressions is harder. That's why IMO there's always a desire to sweep the board clean and start anew. That is more fun, and easier, than figuring out the nuances of the existing code. Programmers often don't want to be maintenance programmers. If you apply this analogy to buildings, it's the desire to raze and rebuild, rather than enhance existing structures.

I can't even opt-out. When I renewed my lease last year they added an addendum that they had the right to charge fees for included utilities. Guess what's a "utility" now? Internet.

All these costs have always been paid in rent. Landlords came up with some kind of a narrative to convince state legislatures to let them add additional ad hoc fees on top of the advertised rent, which they call utility fees (or "RUBS" fees), which are completely unrelated to any tenant's usage of any utility. Despite any narrative, these are just additional fees on top of rent, and are collected as rent. The purpose is to hide the true cost of rent (these fees aren't revealed till it's time to pay, per the narrative). Tenants now and have always paid every landlord expense plus profit. It's corrupt legislatures that are to credit for this. Not every state allows it - some have always banned it (e.g. North Carolina), some have recently outlawed it, and others have had it outlawed.

The problem is the legislatures legalize these fees as the law of the land. So if one is position that they must rent, they are stuck with it, unless they want to commute from another state. And many state legislatures have legalized these fees, so even that's not an option.

Concentration on things you don't want to concentrate on, requires effort. Concentration on an engrossing fiction novel is effortless. Reading through the latest draft Policies and Procedures manual requires effort. Phones totally remove the requirement to concentrate - just flipping the channels and content as soon as you get the slightest bit bored.

I think phones do increase literacy and information dissemination, but they reduce the ability to concentrate. And concentration-with-effort is a requirement for academics.

This is bog standard Bait and Switch: advertise a lower price, charge a higher one, with fees.

In this case, the government is merely explicitly legalizing it.

Personal note: I had my preference in the presidential campaign but also realized each side would come with its own costs and benefits. One cost of the current administration is they seem exceptionally partial to white collar crime and shady business behavior.
 

Why is the landlord getting their counterparty financial information in a negotiation at all? The landlord is often a rapacious counterparty trying to negotiate the best deal that they can, and they have iron control over many state legislatures. You, as a tenant, have no ability to view their proprietary information like vacancy rate and rents. Yet they are able to give the prospective tenant a financial proctosigmoidoscopy? That's not fair.

The landlord lobby is well organized and well financed, and includes the following:

National Multi Housing Council
National Apartment Association
Builders Owners and Managers Association International
Institute of Real Estate Management
National Association of Industrial and Office Properties
National Association of Real Estate Investment Trusts
National Association of Realtors
National Leased Housing Association
The Real Estate Roundtable
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce

This does not include the highly organized and well-financed local and regional lobbies, who exert yet more control over state legislatures.

Being required to give the landlord your financial information should be banned. Credit rating is probably the best way to find out if a tenant will likely pay. Income should be off limits - unless maybe if the state requires the landlord provide a legally binding fact sheet about their finances and vacancy rates and actual rents, to level the playing field. And of course, bank accounts and employer login details should be completely illegal to demand.