"Under a specific set of circumstances related to the ‘Thumbs Up/Down Table Reaction’ feature, which involves decompilation of our Windows game client, interception of network traffic, and alterations of our game packets, Moneytaker69 was able to customize his own game client."
I'm wondering if someone with a web security background can chime in.. but allowing this seems like a rookie mistake if you're running a large poker site to me.
Not really, you can spend unlimited resources trying to prevent modifications and people will still figure it out. It's best to not overly worry about it and spend the resources detecting abnormal activity and banning users while making it difficult to get back on. No doubt there are players using bots to their advantage, but as long as their game play is indistinguishable from normal human play the advantage is minimal.
- The Q* model is very small and trained with little compute.
- The OpenAI team thinks the model will scale in capability in the same way the GPT models do.
- Throwing (much) more compute at the model will likely allow it to solve research level math and beyond, perhaps also do actual logic reasoning in other areas.
- Sam goes to investors to raise more money (Saudi++) to fund the extra compute needed. He wants to create a company making AI chips to get more compute etc.
- The board and a few other OpenAI employees (notably Ilya) wants to be cautious and adopt a more "wait and see" approach.
I'd ague this is exactly how it's supposed to work in a democratic rule of law:
- The press is free to dig and find out stuff - that's what they did here.
- Intelligence officials disagree about the NSA deal. Leadership wants to continue, line officer disagrees and goes to the independent control service for the security agencies.
- Several investigations are conducted showing differing results (independent control agency thinks laws are being broken, subsequent investigation found no wrong doing).
- Secret information is leaked, investigated by the security agencies and a case is brought.
- Courts decide on how the case can be brought and ultimately the case is dropped due to the Supreme Court wanting only partially closed doors (so the public will see some of it).
- ANOTHER investigation will now be conducted into how the Justice Department and/or the Prime Ministry has acted.
While many mistakes have been made by different parties here, the checks and balances work well. Nobody has any supreme power or anything here.
The press did not collude with intelligence officials. The press did exactly what they were supposed to do, they looked for sources where they could find them and reported on the findings.
Findsen should not have been speaking to the press a secret source that much is obvious. Imagine the head of the CIA speaking anonymously to CNN about secrets on his own? Unheard of.
This public case has damaged national security much more than just having him fired, and there are some threads to politics (he's rumoured to be hated by the head of the department of the prime ministry, Barbera Bertelsen). However the fact that he is "outraged" or anything of this sort is insane. He dodged a prison sentence and should be happy about that.
The case against Claus Hjort Frederiksen (confusingly called Frederiksen in the article, which is also the last name of the prime minister, Mette Frederiksen) is absurd. He confirmed the cable agreement with the NSA which was public knowledge since Snowden.
Both cases saw vast overreach by the domestic spy agency (PET) in that they used a statute of the law reserved for traitors which is not remotely close to fair in either case.
It's worth noting that the Guardian article is over a month old. Since then all charges have been dropped because the procecution claim they cannot procecute unless everything is in secret, which the supreme court has denied.
Very dependent on location. I pay $18 for a sandwich and $5.50 for a latte, so this seems pretty cheap in comparison. I'd pay for it in a heartbeat. YouTube Premium at $14/mo is IMO one of the best value subscriptions out there.
I'd pay 5.5 for a delicious latte that will push me through my day, produced by a shop that cares about quality and that I also want to stay in business. There's a lot of strings attached to the price tag.
I use so much YouTube, the bundling didn't bother me. I didn't initially care about YouTube Music, but after giving it a try I find it better than Spotify for my purposes anyway so it worked out.
Youtube's relationship with the music industry has led to this weird situation where they basically cannot separate the licensing concerns, hence the pack-in of the music service. I respect that you want to dig your heels in on some weird principle of not paying for something twice, but on a pure time-value-of-money basis, pretty much any music or video streaming service is worth the subscription if you use it more than a couple of hours each month.
When you subscribe to YouTube for ad-free content, you're essentially paying for an uninterrupted viewing experience.
This is similar to how you'd expect no ads when you pay for a service like Netflix.
For example, imagine watching "The Matrix" on Netflix and being unexpectedly interrupted by an Oreo commercial—it would be frustrating, especially since you paid for an ad-free experience.
The issue with YouTube is that if they were to remove baked-in in-stream ads for Premium users, it might require them to compensate content creators more indirectly, which in turn could reduce Google's profits.
This creates a financial disincentive for YouTube to fully eliminate ads.
As a result, you might find be better if you use software like SponsorBlock.
This situation is paradoxical; ideally, paying customers should receive the best user experience directly from the platform, and be rewarded for that.
Technically, there is no limitation, LinusTechTips can perfectly take 1 minute to add a marker for its sponsored segments, at the moment he ticks "This video contains sponsored content".
A more truthful description for YouTube Premium could be: "Pay 10 USD / month, to remove a lot of, but not all the ads", and then you understand it's not that of a good deal.
No, I pay YouTube to not show me YouTube ads. Separately, I also pay several content creators for their content without ads. I pay the person showing me ads to stop showing me ads.
> Wouldn't you get upset if Netflix is streaming to you "The Matrix", and in the middle of it there is an advertising for Oreos?
If that ad is a part of the movie as it was shown in theatres or on other streaming services, then no, I wouldn't be upset at Netflix.
> No, I pay YouTube to not show me YouTube ads. Separately, I also pay several content creators for their content without ads. I pay the person showing me ads to stop showing me ads.
When you use YouTube Premium, you are paying the creator for each view, and they still show you the ads, and you find it acceptable ?
> If that ad is a part of the movie as it was shown in theatres or on other streaming services, then no, I wouldn't be upset at Netflix.
Sounds like you agree to pay for Spotify Premium but still get interruptions in the music.
> When you use YouTube Premium, you are paying the creator for each view, and they still show you the ads, and you find it acceptable ?
Yes. Most (though not all) of the channels I watch don't have inline ads. For those that do, the YouTube client makes them easily skippable (tap your finger four times on the video to skip 30 seconds), but usually I just unsubscribe if they're egregious enough. I wouldn't watch LinusTechTips if he paid me :)
> Sounds like you agree to pay for Spotify Premium but still get interruptions in the music.
You seem not to understand that ads come from different sources and pay different people. Platform ads come from the platform and they pay money to the platform. Many platforms let you pay them to avoid these ads. This is what YouTube Premium is.
Separately, the content provider may also include ads in the content you are streaming on the platform. You can try to find a way to pay the content provider for an ad-less stream, but the system isn't as well set up for that situation, at least for video. Podcasts are pretty well set up for this model, and I do pay for many ad-less podcasts.
> "The Matrix", and in the middle of it there is an advertising for Oreos, though you paid for the ad-free experience
Interesting that you picked a movie series quite well known for it's product placement marketing-- I'm sure if Nabisco had been on board, the Oracle would happily have given Neo an Oreo instead of a fresh baked chocolate chip cookie.
"Neo, we're going to meet the Oracle, (camera panning out), but first, let me introduce you to Twinkies. Have you heard about this sponge-cake ? Get 2 boxes for 4.99 USD, and get extra -10% if you enter THEMATRIX code during checkout."
ARPU is an average so it includes every user, including users that never buy anything from an ad because they can't afford it. The average goes up a lot due to a minority of wealthy users. Those users will also be more likely to pay to remove ads. So Meta is afraid that the ad revenue will go down a lot and that's why they increase the monthly subscription by more than the current ARPU.
This is similar to collective insurance. If the rich people all self-insure and remove themselves from the pool, the viability of the collective insurance gets risked because you're only left off with the people that actually need help and nobody with a surplus to share.
For ads you get left off with a cohort of users that can't afford to pay to remove ads so can't also afford to pay for stuff advertised in said ads. Which means the ads will become more like TV ads for awareness rather than direct purchase, which will lower ad-based ARPU.
Wouldn't you also need to factor in that the people who will pay to avoid ads are likely already using ad blockers (or hate ads, in which case showing them an ad for your product is likely counter-productive)?
It's per Q so ~80/years. Difference between $80 (average ad revenue per year) vs $120 per year subscription is reasonable as subscriptions skew power users.
Not universally, it all depends on how one values the use/enjoyment/value that they get out of the experience, and everybody values their time/enjoyment/convenience differently.
Wouldn't that mean that Facebook could charge a lower ad-subsidized price? Facebook earns 18/user*year - so 10/month is adding a 100$ surcharge to not see ads. If they offered an ad laden service for 8/mo and the ad-free experience for 10/mo that'd line up with your logic.
Prompt:
"I will give you a logic puzzle. You should first write [Reasoning] and explain your reasoning. Then write [Answer] and write your answer. Ready?"
I then gave it the original puzzle and got this.
Answer:
"[Reasoning]
We are given two statements:
If it rains today, I will drive home.
I did not drive home.
The first statement is a conditional statement, meaning that if the condition "it rains today" is true, then the outcome "I will drive home" will also be true. However, the second statement tells us that the outcome "I did not drive home" is true.
In logic, this is an example of Modus Tollens, which states that if we have a conditional statement (if P, then Q) and the negation of the consequent (not Q), we can infer the negation of the antecedent (not P). In this case, P represents "it rains today" and Q represents "I will drive home."
[Answer]
Since we know that the outcome "I did not drive home" is true (not Q), we can infer that "it did not rain today" (not P)."
GPT-4, seems solid. It also solves the original without any issue but gives a simpler answer:
"Based on the information provided, it can be inferred that if it rains today, you will drive home. However, you mentioned that you did not drive home. From this, we can conclude that it likely did not rain today."
"Wealthy Chinese who want to get around limits on moving money out of China “buy” the $350,000 from Li’s couriers in the U.S. They often use the U.S. dollars to buy real estate or pay for U.S. college tuition. "
You can buy real estate in the US in cash no questions asked? Is that true?
> A Form 8300 must be filed by any trade or business (including real estate) that receives more than $10,000 in cash in the course of a single transaction or two or more related transactions. It is not a SAR and is not used to report suspicious activity. Form 8300 is an information report that is required to be filed by any trade or business (such as a car or boat dealer) that receives in excess of $10,000 in cash in a single transaction. Therefore, if for any reason a real estate agent or broker receives more than $10,000 in cash from a buyer or seller in the course of a real estate transaction, the form must be filled out and filed, and can be found at http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/f8300.pdf(link is external).
This is also usually how drug dealers get busted after paying cash for a car. It goes to the IRS and then basically every federal agency has it (DEA, FBI, etc)
Ah man. The dealerships do not appreciate a large bag of cash. I found a car that I wanted and got a cashiers check for it at my local bank. They wanted what I considered an outrageous amount of fees (like $8) to do it. So... I asked for cash. Nope - don't have that on hand... will take time, yada yada. At that point, it was the principal of the thing... and said fine, see you in a day or two. Eventually I got it - drove over to pick up the car, and the dealership freaked out. They took it. Filled out all sorts of extra forms. My Bride is correct - I am a dumbass. Won't do that again.
I suspect the "cash" referred in the article are actually 2 distinct things. First being literal dollar bills and the second being bank account balance.
When you buy a house using account balance no actual paper note is involved but it is referred to as "cash".
IRS considers many things beyond currency “cash.” See section 32 of the form where it has you quantify how much value of each of 6 financial instruments were received in the transaction.
If you’re expecting a wire transfer being a loophole, the cash has to get into the bank where the funds exist and they are required reporters for AML/SAR.
$10k seems really low. Like 1980s low. That's not even earnest money on a $1M house typical of California. That's a down payment on a car slightly nicer than a Civic today. Saw a Civic listed for $30k at the dealer last week.
There was a bill to raise it to $30k and reform various other parts of the Bank Secrecy Act that would have likely passed congress but then the Coronavirus hit and derailed the whole thing. Now with this whole Russia-Ukraine thing any effort to sensibly update reporting thresholds will probably never happen.
Yes, agents do minimal due diligence on the origins of cash. As long as buyer and seller are happy to make a deal, agents get paid and everyone gets what they want.
A friend of mine who is an interior designer in an affluent area has received calls from clients that go like this:
1. A Chinese couple showed up at their door with a suitcase of cash in the middle of the day offering to buy their house, on the spot. The cash value was about 2x the value of the home.
2. The client declined. They _just_ remodeled, why leave?
3. The Chinese couple gets upset, not understanding why paying 2x for a home on the spot isn't a sweet deal. They leave to go find someone else willing to take the cash to move out ASAP.
Why fudge when you can just buy a mcdonalds as an investment and make clean money on top of it? Or real estate and hire the services of a property manager?
Even better when the "impacted area" your visa is fixing is in midtown Manhattan and you solve the blight by building your own luxury pied-a-terre after moving Harlem 80 blocks south.
Let's say you sell a house for $1MM on paper where in reality you've accepted 2MM more in cash.
There's not much the government can do, but you now have 2MM in cash that you need to hide. The buyer knows you have 2MM, and who knows who they'll tell about it.
Now, if you accepted cash for the full value of the house and deposited it in a bank, then yes, the bank reports it for you, and the IRS - if it is a priority - would look into it.
The IRS got a massive funding boost recently. Let's see how they use the money in the next little while.
No problem with that. The reporting happens when you deposit the money. At that point the question is one of, "from whom did you get all this cash and how did they get it?"
Yes OK, but there is nothing illegal there is there? Just wondering what legal tools there are for the police/FBI to interfere. Maybe if they can prove collusion they can confiscate it? Or maybe it's enough to bog one down in trips "to the station" that require taking constant days off or legal fees that become a hassle.
You get added to a suspects list, subject to more audits and investigated, which even if your legit is an unpleasant cost itself, and with the amount of things illegal in reality, could still bust you for something nobody cares about, like having some hunting animal bust from great grandpa or whatever.
the payer was 123 Main St Trust who just bought the property at 123 Main St
the trade is over, it was compliant
when you make enough money the IRS stops being an adversary and that has nothing to do with how well funded the agents are. most of what the IRS does is not enforcement (in number of distinct roles, not frequency or headcount), it is collaboration with wealthy citizens. sooner you learn that, sooner more doors open up for you.
When your a wealthy citizen who the IRS understands and your integrated with the US political machine, yes, it's just tax paperwork. When your the kind of person with a lot of abnormal imbalances with cash vs. how they understand you, an outsider to the political machine, your audit score goes up and you get a lot more scrutiny in general, because your a high value target to collect more in taxes and such. You get more unpleasant interactions at any government interaction checkpoint. It's bureaucratic, but still unpleasant and could land you jail and to them, it's just another day at the job where the computer machine said to poke you more.
The person we are talking about here is immigrants with dirty cash basically, not doing it properly, a pretty different kind of person in the US gov's eye, and might be drug related, which is a great career boosting lead for their buddies at the DEA.
If you are a recurring subject of high value CTRs or CMIRs I think sooner or later you will get a friendly knock from the guys over at Homeland Security Investigations or maybe you'll notice one day you're being followed when you're driving. You still need to say on whose behalf the transaction was conducted in the form 8300.
Yes, the real estate industry successfully lobbied for exceptions to the KYC/AML laws. Whether we're talking about the Bank Secrecy Act or the Patriot Act.
It's not about the cash per se, it's big brother wanting to know how you got the money in the first place. If you can show it's all legal and taxes paid then no problem cash is fine. But of course as soon as you mention cash, eyebrows are raised "why would someone want to keep that much cash and not want to put it in a bank if they are all clean?"
Big brother wanting its lion share in everything you earn is the crux of it.
When your an immigrant and your money is from places with bad records, they can't really push too much beyond it, or tax you for money made out of the country where you were not a citizen or resident of the USA. Shitty undeveloped countries are essentially a laundry for cash in general.
The US is absolutely infested with ads. Visiting from Europe turning on the hotel TV is unwatchable. Also a fair amount of the ads are outright scams.
"Buy this rare silver dollar by calling a phone number" LIMITED SUPPLY!!
Making money by any means necessary even by scamming people who don't know better. The worst thing is that Americans I asked about this thought it was perfectly fine and normal.
Living in Australia, we get a lot of US TV, and it was weird when there was this weird pacing cut within a TV show. Then you realised that it was put in as a US ad break, but AU rules didn't allow as many ads so it just sort of faded to black and then came back again.
Contrast that to UK TV, which we get a lot of too. The pacing and breaks are much more in line with what you're allowed for ads in AU, so there's no weird interruptions in the middle.
I always found it a fascinating mirror to the broader cultural differences writ large.
I watched the Ironman world championships for women the other day (the men's race are happening right now) and it was so full of ads. Not only are the race named after a sponsor, even the aerial photography was "courtesy of Qatar airways", even when it was clearly from a helicopter and a cable mounted camera. The hosts took every opportunity to talk about their sponsors, at the podium ceremony the sponsor's car was more prominent than the winner, etc. And this is an event where the price of entry is more than $1000 for the thousands of participants, and they have to qualify by doing at least one other event from the same organisation previously.
Same thing with other American sport events, every single thing is "brought to you by x". It permeates everything.
It's different though. I get what the OP is saying. It's happened in Aussie sports too - the commentators announcing any replay as the "Harvey Norman replay" during the NRL, as an example. Sponsorships of features of a programme stand out much more than sponsorship logos on jerseys, probably because you're much more actively focused on the commentary audio than you are on the particular images on a jersey of a player.
I got the men's event on now. Instead of "look at the time" it's "look at the time on the Wahoo Element" (a Wahoo Element is a particular sports watch). Instead of the swim leg it's the Roka swim leg (Roka makes wetsuits). There's a Vinfast logo on screen all the time (Vinfast is a car brand and the title sponsor).
It's not just the commercials (I've seen a beer commercial so far) or the brand logos on the athletes, it's the fact that every single thing is "courtesy of x", which means that even between the ad breaks the commentators has to talk about sponsors.
This is different from soccer games, cycling races live Tour de France, most world championships, etc. But I recognize it from UFC and various clips I've seen from NFL and other American sports.
The quantity is one thing, the quality is what shocked me. The US has Hollywood making movies and the cheapest ads I’ve seen compared to European offerings. Think the difference between the ads that run on your average clickbait page compared to what you’d see on cnn.com, just worse.
I guess there’s a race to the bottom when you have a lot more TV channels to fill with ads, but it’s quite jarring.
I know 50 years of Americans since I am one and no one thinks it's ok...but it's so common I suspect we are expert at ignoring it, which is a slippery slope, to your point.
