Landmark verdicts shatter the Section 230 shield, turning ‘addictive’ product design into a legal thicket for Meta, Alphabet and others.
The fact that social media is designed to be addictive is now court-tested fact.
Good news! Someone hacked it into existence.
It's done wonders for my addiction to Win 3.x games.
Fraud. I'm talking about fraud.
When I say "destroyed the market for that model" I mean "the short-seller spread misinformation that severely and permanently reduced the value of the vehicles, such as falsifying evidence they were dangerous, from which the brand never recovered."—even if such deception were prosecuted (which, increasingly, under the current administration, it isn't) there is a massive temptation to attempt it, which is amplified by leveraging debt.
That is ideal. Economic growth is not an unqualified net positive for society, and lending is the root cause of most of its ills. With borrowing as it is practised by hegemons today, there are only two endings: either they must close the loop, using the dirty money to architect a revenue-extracting monster that milks non-borrowed money to pay off the debts, or the system collapses under its own weight, like Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme in the 2008 financial crisis. Debt creates its own incentives to abuse the commons and impoverish the public.
Of course, not being content with abusing the commons, there are also implications for abuse of single wealthy lenders, too. It would also effectively outlaw short-selling, since that consists of borrowing assets—the items being traded—then destroying the price, and pocketing the difference. If you think about it, this isn't even adding value to the economy; it's just skimming value off the inventory of whomever you're borrowing from.
If anyone tried this with a physical asset the lender would be apoplectic: "You borrowed 50 cars from me, sold them, destroyed the market for that model, and bought them back at a pittance. Now my inventory of 1,000 cars of the same model is worth a thousand pittances! Why would I ever do business with you ever again?!"—it only works as a system if the lender assumes that the assets will recover value over time, but the degenerate gambler doing the borrowing is incentivised to outright ruin the assets they're borrowing beyond any hope of recovery. In a sense they're even less ethical than corporate raiders, since both the company who issued the stock and the lender are being abused.
In theory slippery slopes are a fallacy, but it's really something else when there are people out there actively looking for slanted surfaces and applying experimental lubricants to every single one they can find.
Yes, Polymarket is the most degenerate, nihilistic, accelerationist bullshit imaginable. At best its creators are willfully in denial about this, since they have tried to ban assassination bets, but more likely they are just trying to maintain a facade of plausible deniability.
In a healthy society, the case of Polymarket would be studied as precedent in an ongoing debate about the possibility of criminalizing the very concept of financial speculation, especially placing a bid with borrowed assets.
The administration of President Donald Trump has warned that news outlets could have their broadcasting licenses revoked over critical reporting on the war against Iran, accusing the media of “distortions”.
This is a very clear sign that Trump's war is not going well.
does anyone really need AI?
Need? Not really. But AI allows automation of routine tasks. For example, in healthcare up to 30% of time is spent on processing paperwork. This is not a good use of medical professional's time, if you can cut that in half that would be massive efficiency gain.
The downside is that once system is automated with AI, it is not typically designed for manual review and/or intervention. So AI mistakes tend to be hard to fix, because there is no built-in mechanism to trigger manual review of the results.
The program isn't debugged until the last user is dead.
