He didn't say "everybody" wins.
He specifically says quite the opposite.
"it’s a bit like taking down the primary bull in a large herd. It’s messy, painful, chaotic, disruptive and brutal, but the end result is a healthier herd."

You can dispute whether that end result is true, but his comment did not make any claim that this kind of activity benefits current individual customers.

Are you going to go around and provide that your expert consultation on this issue at a discount to the thousands of municipal, state, federal, educational, NGO, nonprofit, and other enterprises who are focused on a mission which is inherently not profit-driven and therefore does not amass a corporate war chest of $$$ with stock options and 401k matching and generous WFH/flex scheduling to attract the best and brightest to come work there, because the goal is to at least attempt to make their community/city/country better but they are constrained by 10 million bureaucratic compliance policies which force them to select vendors based on mandated criteria? Or, are you going to provide your expertise to the corporation that will pay you the absolute maximum the market will bear for your expertise?

If the former, then your dogmatism over what other people should have done is rational and acceptable, because you are right now out there voluntarily being underpaid while increasing the humanitarian nature of the world around you.

If the latter, then your dogmatism is just social darwinism repackaged as tough love. No different than the Musks and Ellisons and capitalist aristocrats saying "Let them eat cake". Yes, what you're saying is true, that is what everyone should have done. With what resources? With what personnel? With what support? With what project management?

Beth sums it up quite well on Rick & Morty:

JERRY: Beth, do you still love me?
BETH: Ugh, what kind of question is that?
J: The "yes or no" kind?
B: Jerry, do you want homeless people to have homes?
J: Yes.
B: Are you gonna build them?
J: Mm... No.
B: Then what good was the "yes"!?
J: Wait... is.. loving me the house, or the homeless people?
B: Loving you is work, Jerry; hard work! Like building a homeless shelter -- nobody wants to say no to doing it, but some people put the work in. So, what do you say? Do you see me working here? Does this conversation seem tedious to me?
J: Sort of.
B: Then I obviously sort of love you, don't I? So stop asking, and maybe I'll love you more.

It didn't happen with a Flock camera millions of times.
But overwhelmingly (in the millions, right now, as a daily fact of life in pretty much every metropolitan district court), DAs clear cases via plea deal.

Only a very tiny percentage of indictments or arrests ever go to trial in front of a jury.
Only a very tiny percentage of indictments or arrests ever have their evidence examined in a courtroom.

Instead, DAs use the indictment/arrest/imprisonment as powerful leverage. For most of the accused, it is most rational to take a plea deal - regardless of innocence and even regardless of whether they might win at trial - rather than spend tens of thousands of dollars, deal with lost wages, lost jobs, and all the other things I listed previously, in the 1-3 years it will take for a jury trial.

The government has the benefit of overwhelming physical force, overwhelming bureaucratic force, and infinite deficit-spending funds. To paraphrase the quote about irrational exuberance in finance markets -- the DA can stay doggedly incorrect about your prosecution longer than you can stay solvent.

The statistical fact is, we have no idea - and never will have any idea - how many convicted people would have been found not guilty if they had been able to afford a trial. We do not in fact know what "normal" is with regard to people prosecuted incorrectly or unjustly. The choice architecture and pressure gradients of the system make such measurement impossible; the data is permanently lost the instant the plea deal is signed. And that happens in the millions of times.

"...and then you give them a sizable bank deposit for all of their legal costs, not justice served the towing of their car, the income they were unable to earn while jailed, the job they quite likely got fired from due to missing work, the ruination of their reputation, the destruction of their family, the diseases/injuries that occur while they are in jail, the mental damages, the spoiled food in their fridge, the bills that go unpaid, the overdrawn checking account fees, the credit card APR that jumps to 29% due to a missed payment, and the plea deal they finally agree to - despite being innocent - because the DA uses the full force of government power to leverage all of the above, making it rational to take a plea rather than spend 2+ years fighting it with income you no longer have, right?

...RIGHT???"

AnakinAmidalaMeme.gif

Your simplification of this scenario - which is playing out millions of times every week in the USA across thousands of criminal courts - as a simple mistake that can just be un-done, is one of those perspectives that "seems philosophically interesting but is not interesting pragmatically" because the system does not operate in that philosophically ideal way for anyone.

Are cigarette manufacturing services inciting lung cancer?

One of my gripes with the cigarette industry is these smokable-paper-cylinder models are designed around engagement. They prey on human behavior and the elderly who grew up with smoking, the young who have weak critical thinking skills, and those with mental health issues (like compulsivity and anxiety) are especially vulnerable. I don't believe a Nicotine molecule itself has any intent (it cannot) nor does the company that owns and manufactures the smokable-paper-cylinder model likely have any specific harmful intent to "incite" major disease/death beyond engagement and purchases of cigarettes.

As I suggested in 2011 in this video, theft may rise if people lose faith in the exchange economy. Other interwoven economies of subsistence, gift, exchange, and planned could also alternatively take up the slack if they were improves -- instead of people becoming more inclined to crime.
"Five Interwoven Economies: Subsistence, Gift, Exchange, Planned, and Theft"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
"This video presents a simplified education model about socioeconomics and technological change. It discusses five interwoven economies (subsistence, gift, exchange, planned, and theft) and how the balance will shift with cultural changes and technological changes. It suggests that things like a basic income, better planning, improved subsistence, and an expanded gift economy can compensate in part for an exchange economy that is having problems."

My thanks to a Slashdot commentator many years ago who suggested I add a "theft" economy to the other four.

So, my hypothesis is that theft around SF could be substantially reduced if some mix of these were made to happen:
1. It was easier to do subsistence production (like using 3D printers, solar panels, and gardening robots etc.)
2. the SF gift economy (charity, sharing, freecycle, free 3D models, etc) was stronger.
3. the California exchange economy was working better for everyone (i.e. less wealth concentration through inflated property prices, limits on multiples of CEO pay vs lowest paid worker, a basic income, etc)
4. the California planned economy was working better (i.e. fairer taxation of property, public investments that create good jobs or reduce product prices or increase product quality, changing zoning restrictions to make affordable housing more feasible, more responsive democratic government, etc)

Sadly, because people tend to focus on only the exchange economy when talking about economic (and so ignore strengthening those other areas), we will likely see increasing theft as we go into a recession and as AI takes enough jobs to disrupt the exchange economy.

More ideas I've collected are here:
"Beyond a Jobless Recovery: A heterodox perspective on 21st century economics"
https://pdfernhout.net/beyond-...
        "This article explores the issue of a "Jobless Recovery" mainly from a heterodox economic perspective. It emphasizes the implications of ideas by Marshall Brain and others that improvements in robotics, automation, design, and voluntary social networks are fundamentally changing the structure of the economic landscape. It outlines towards the end four major alternatives to mainstream economic practice (a basic income, a gift economy, stronger local subsistence economies, and resource-based planning). These alternatives could be used in combination to address what, even as far back as 1964, has been described as a breaking "income-through-jobs link". This link between jobs and income is breaking because of the declining value of most paid human labor relative to capital investments in automation and better design. Or, as is now the case, the value of paid human labor like at some newspapers or universities is also declining relative to the output of voluntary social networks such as for digital content production (like represented by this document). It is suggested that we will need to fundamentally reevaluate our economic theories and practices to adjust to these new realities emerging from exponential trends in technology and society."

I know there is an XKCD about standards (and adding yet one more to create yet more confusion).
"Standards"
https://xkcd.com/927/

But that said, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript are all terrible standards in many ways because of their complexity (and major design flaws like JavaScript having vastly too many global variables). Asa an alternative, what if, say, we all just used something like Scheme (or Common Lisp) to encode web documents and web code as S-expressions in some semantically standardized formats? Scheme can be very compact in its implementation.

Or as the XKCD mentioned here says:
"Lessons learned from implementing minimal Scheme six times"
https://twolodzko.github.io/po...
https://xkcd.com/297/
"Lisp cycles XKCD #297: âoeThose are your fatherâ(TM)s parentheses. Elegant weapons for a more⦠civilized age.â"

Now, it doesn't have to be Lisp-like.I get the paren hate:
"What makes Lisp difficult to read?"
https://www.reddit.com/r/lisp/...

And there is a lot to be said for significant-indentation languages like Occam or Python. Smalltalk is another great language. Or even some variant of a safe C.

Even a Forth-derivative perhaps that could be literally less than ~2K in size at the core. Although I get that there is a fine line between flexible and flabby in readability in a language that can change its own fundamental syntax or that makes naming intermediate variables unlikely as a form of documentation. Same with any language that supports arbitrary macros like C or Scheme which can change the fundamental nature of the language. Although at least in, say, Racket Scheme you see the language level set at the start of some code to know what you are getting into.

The main point is just that yet another adhoc problematical language like JavaScript was not needed (even as TypeScript papers over the worst warts). And CSS conceptually is broken for big projects ("Atomic" CSS is one style to help with that). And adding end tags with names in HTML (like XML) is another broken concept as are other aspects of HTML. Yes, programmers can work around and manage the issue in these web fundamentals, but why should we have to?

While a simpler browser for HTML etc is a good thing if it really is well written, better standards for encoding and sharing information will ultimately get us further and be more energy efficient and be more reliable and be more programmer-friendly.

I've long been a fan of triples for doing some of that data encoding, but that is even further out.

Tangentially, here is a Libre Plane 2021 talk I put together on free standards for social media being more important than free implementations:
"Free/Libre Standards for Social Media and other Communications"
https://pdfernhout.net/librepl...

I know this all may sound pie in the sky (and it is, given current social dynamics), but consider if we used the usual buggy lot-of-library junky (and now AI slop) code only with an intent to translate web content encoded in problematical standards into content encoded in better simpler standards for other code to consume. Sort of like Amazon did at one point with a server-side engine to process HTML pages and transform them for low-end Kindle browsers -- but in this case converting HTML plus CSS plus JavaScript into something like, say, S-expressions for web content that was not yet written directly n the simpler standards. Maybe the junky translator code might not be perfect, but it might be good enough and runnable in distant containers so that the local code that processed the simpler standards could be more secure and reliable.

Also related: "Simple Made Easy"
https://www.infoq.com/presenta...
"Rich Hickey emphasizes simplicityâ(TM)s virtues over easinessâ(TM), showing that while many choose easiness they may end up with complexity, and the better way is to choose easiness along the simplicity path. ... We should aim for simplicity because simplicity is a prerequisite for reliability. Simple is often erroneously mistaken for easy. "Easy" means "to be at hand", "to be approachable". "Simple" is the opposite of "complex" which means "being intertwined", "being tied together". Simple != easy. ..."

Ideally a group like the US National Institute of Standards and Technology or the US Library of Congress should fund this sort of work. And a group like Archive.org should have a lot of input to those standards on how to make the content simply versionable and simply archivable.

Anyway, just something I have been musing on and off again for many years...

It is legal for you (and everyone else in the USA) to own and fly a helicopter to and from work every day. So why don't you?

Well, you don't because "own" and "fly" are doing heavy lifting -- those words represent a massive cluster of mandatory costs and regulatory approvals, not to mention the zoning and construction realities at your house and at your workplace.

Plus you have all the usual social/network effects where after a certain tipping point, your choices are still technically possible but there is no one supplying the choice on the market. For example, there are no laws mandating automatic transmissions in cars. And yet, if you go shopping for a brand new car and want to drive a manual transmission, you'll find the available choices are rapidly disappearing from the market.

So it will go with human driving.

I came to that exact prediction 10-12 years ago and have been saying it ever since. There will not be widespread common FSD so long as there are still widespread human drivers. Human drivers, human behavior, and human societal realities are the cause of pretty much all the edge cases in the FSD problem space. I believe in a few decades, personal driving will be made illegal or effectively illegal (by being so regulated by onerous cost/liability/equipment mandates that it is out of reach for 99% of the population, just like owning and flying your own private jet to work is legal but completely out of reach for 99.999% of people) as a necessary condition for deploying mass-scale FSD.

If TCP/IP packets had free will, Internet routing would be impossible.

Even if that electronic music turns out to be the recorded transcoded interdimensional screams of the entities who swim in the ocean of Warp space, that the Federation is killing by constantly ripping apart their dimension just so a few admirals can get to Risa faster and without cryosleep?

There's a moving image but someone decided to play midtempo electronic music over the feed. Sad. I was really looking forward to hearing the whoooosh of the ship to compare it to the way Enterprise's nacelles sound when they enter warp drive. So frustrating how every space exploration video I ever watch forgets to turn on the sound. You'd think these world-class engineers could mount a microphone somewhere. Yeesh.

None of those other mail platforms are fully integrated with the OS running on the overwhelming majority of enterprise desktops. The reward for successfully breaching an MS tool is an order of magnitude greater than any of those others.

That's not to defend Microsoft - their products weren't consistently that great to begin with, but they have been rapidly and radically deteriorating over the past 7 years. But there's no useful comparison between Exchange and any of those other mail platforms. There's plenty of room to criticize Microsoft on their own merits (or lack thereof).

On: "A Palantir spokesperson told Bloomberg the company "is not responsible for the underlying data nor identifying intelligence deficiencies" and that there is no evidence its software was at fault."

Is AI now an aspect of Mother Nature? Reminds me of:
https://2001.fandom.com/wiki/F...
  ""Let me put it this way, Mr. Amer. The [Palantir] 9000 series is the most reliable computer ever made. No 9000 computer has ever made a mistake, or distorted information. We are all, by any practical definition of the word, foolproof and incapable of error." -- [Palantir's] HAL 9000 to BBC reporter Martin Amer"

https://humanisticsystems.com/...
        "Dave: How would you account for this discrepancy between you and the twin [Palantir] 9000 [that did not kill lots of school girls]?
        HAL: Well, I don't think there is any question about it. It can only be attributable to human error. This sort of thing has cropped up before, and it has always been due to human error.
        Frank: Listen HAL. There has never been any instance at all of a computer error occurring in the [Palantir] 9000 series, has there?
        HAL: None whatsoever, Frank. The [Palantir] 9000 series has a perfect operational record.
        Frank: Well of course I know all the wonderful achievements of the [Palantir] 9000 series, but, uh, are you certain there has never been any case of even the most insignificant computer error?
        HAL: None whatsoever, Frank. Quite honestly, I wouldn't worry myself about that."

What do you call an AI (or human) that never asks questions, never seeks confirmatory evidence, never asks for clarification, never points out conflicting priorities, and/or never refuses illegal orders?

Onec again, the deeper issue is "the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity."
https://pdfernhout.net/recogni...
====
Military robots like drones are ironic because they are created essentially to force humans to work like robots in an industrialized social order. Why not just create industrial robots to do the work instead?

Nuclear weapons are ironic because they are about using space age systems to fight over oil and land. Why not just use advanced materials as found in nuclear missiles to make renewable energy sources (like windmills or solar panels) to replace oil, or why not use rocketry to move into space by building space habitats for more land?

Biological weapons like genetically-engineered plagues are ironic because they are about using advanced life-altering biotechnology to fight over which old-fashioned humans get to occupy the planet. Why not just use advanced biotech to let people pick their skin color, or to create living arkologies and agricultural abundance for everyone everywhere?

These militaristic socio-economic ironies would be hilarious if they were not so deadly serious. ....

Likewise, even United States three-letter agencies like the NSA and the CIA, as well as their foreign counterparts, are becoming ironic institutions in many ways. Despite probably having more computing power per square foot than any other place in the world, they seem not to have thought much about the implications of all that computer power and organized information to transform the world into a place of abundance for all. Cheap computing makes possible just about cheap everything else, as does the ability to make better designs through shared computing. ....

There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all. ...

The big problem is that all these new war machines and the surrounding infrastructure are created with the tools of abundance [otherwise they would not be so powerful or capable of so much rapid destruction as well as rapid creation]. The irony is that these tools of abundance are being wielded by people still obsessed with fighting over scarcity. So, the scarcity-based political mindset driving the military uses the technologies of abundance to create artificial scarcity. That is a tremendously deep irony that remains so far unappreciated by the mainstream.

We the people need to redefine security in a sustainable and resilient way. Much current US military doctrine is based around unilateral security ("I'm safe because you are nervous") and extrinsic security ("I'm safe despite long supply lines because I have a bunch of soldiers to defend them"), which both lead to expensive arms races. We need as a society to move to other paradigms like Morton Deutsch's mutual security ("We're all looking out for each other's safety") and Amory Lovin's intrinsic security ("Our redundant decentralized local systems can take a lot of pounding whether from storm, earthquake, or bombs and would still would keep working"). ...
====

Thanks for your confidence.

I've got it.

Computers can't commit crimes.
Same as 4-year-old kids can't commit crimes.

Parents of 4-year-old kids can commit a variety of crimes when they cause (or fail to reasonably prevent) their children to act in a way that damages property, limb, and life.
Companies that produce computers can commit a variety of crimes when they cause (or fail to reasonably prevent) their software/robots to act in a way that damages property, limb, and life.

Survivor bias.

You've seen the quip that goes something like: "LLMs are algorithms which produce hallucinations. Occasionally some of these hallucinations happen to be useful to humans."

So it is with people.
Our unscientific romanticism of notions like the Soul and Free Will make us retroactively ascribe Good/Bad-Decision cause-and-effect Narratives to outcomes.

100,000 people make 100,000 different decisions. Occasionally it happens that conditions in the world reward 1,000 of those decisions. Those 1,000 people then make 1,000 different secondary decisions. Occasionally it happens that conditions in the world reward 10 of those decisions. We then retroactively attribute narratives of Intelligence, Wisdom, Visionary Thinking to the 10 survivors and the animal/reptile brain kicks in with all sorts of neuroendocrine-induced reverence and casts the survivors as our bettors. We tell ourselves that the survivors deserve their rewards, because if we can believe that is true then we can believe that we too can hope to receive the rewards of Right Choices.

We are so biologically terrified to acknowledge the prospect of chaos in complex systems (such as the cosmos) that we would rather create and then worship a series of cruel and capricious Ubermenschen than live with the Conscious awareness that we are all amoeba flailing our array of pseudopods against the nature of reality. We need to believe we control the world we briefly blipped into and will soon blip back out of..

The ants that swarm your kitchen counter are there because that one explorer ant happened to go across your counter on that one time you happened to not notice that you dribbled a bit of fruit juice when you poured it two days ago. We would say that explorer ant's behavior was extremely successful. However, neither that ant - nor any of the others now spread across your counter - had Intelligence, Wisdom, or Visionary Thinking. If you had noticed the spill and wiped it up, that same ant may have expended its life and precious energy rambling around your entire kitchen finding absolutely nothing. Or falling prey to a spider. Or failing into the sink drain and drowning. Or being spotted and squished by you. The ant "made" the same "decision" and walked the same trail either way.