Federal agencies are regularly audited - internally by their own inspectors general, and externally by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) - and most of those reports are publicly available. There are numerous checks on these agencies including management by the president, who can typically fire at will, and oversight by Congress.
Like him or not, Elon Musk is not an auditor, has no relevant experience or expertise and is deeply compromised as he profits from large federal contracts. Giving him unchecked power with no accountability is not the proper way to shine a light on fraud, it's a way to get more of it.
GAO audit is not a perfect tool, the evidence is a $2 trillion deficit that is ballooning every year. Very easy to pass GAO audit as long as there is some "paperwork" backing the expense.
What DOGE/Musk is doing is auditing expenses not in terms of "have these expenses been properly authorized with the paper trail?", but rather "are these expenses vital for the US taxpayer, can we remove them?"
GAO can only find some bogus expenses without paper trail
DOGE is funding expenses with proper and perfect paper trail, but ultimately unnecessary for the US taxpayer
The deficit is a result of deficit spending authorized by Congress. Audits have nothing to do with reducing the deficit.
DOGE is literally one deeply compromised person deciding what is "necessary" or "unnecessary" to spend, after Congress already authorized it. That is blatantly unconstitutional. There are checks and balances in the system for a reason.
I have news for you. The Republican budget plan will increase the debt by about 4 trillion [1], an unprecedented amount. They're slashing spending in tiny departments and then handing out multiples of that as tax breaks, mostly to very wealthy people. So if you're relying on "DOGE" and the Trump administration to bring down the debt, you're going to be disappointed.
On a larger scale, people want more housing, vote for it, and vote for politicians that pass appropriate legislation. On a local level most people don't want it next to them, although they don't actually own the land in question. Developers that do own the land would love to build more housing but are opposed by their neighbors. How do we reconcile the different interests? Whose goals are considered "democracy" here?
Not in the US but it's similar where I am. Often older people will complain their children can't afford to live near them.
Some of the same people will protest any developments near them that could add more accommodation to the same area.
One of the arguments often used is that the area doesn't have the amenities e.g schools, larger roads, shops etc to support an increased population. But the development of more amenities in an area is blocked "because it isn't needed right now" etc.
This is the point that gets me the most. They donMt own anything 99% of the time outside their specific lot. They are basically saying "My investment gives me dominion over that which I have invested $0 because it happens to border MUH propert"
Just appease me, non-investor and non-owner of whatever property is in question. I bet they circumcize their children as a matter of policy too. Cuz why should anyone else but me decide what happens to another person's body. After all, I sort of "own" them too"
Sick!
Edit: have these folks ever heard of buying surrounding lots or like, I dunno, buying options or whatever stuff pertains to this? The biggest NIMBY/Narcissitic trait is "I get everything, don't even have to pay! You get nothing! Im taking all your blocks and I refuse to share, here on the daycare mat!" ridiculous. Can't wait till they're all pallitaive and finally decisions can be made externally and with EVERYONEs best interest at heart, not just your chronically selfish nonsense.
K, that was admittedly excessive. My life experience up to now (btw definitely Boomers+Xers who display identical entitlement and offensive conduct) What say now?
If I'm role-playing as a boomer, I just cant understand how I dropped out in grade 10, got the good job at a local factory over a handshake and an all-expenses paid 3-martini lunch the moment I expressed interest in applying, and got a full pension plus zero or close to zero education costs and I have like 3 cars between me, wife, daughter, vacation at least 1x/year, and protested every subsequent development after I bought my house outright for $50k, and now my daughter needs to leave (she's 18, we HAVE to kick them out at that point?!) and she has nowhere to buy that doesn't rely upon me since she has no money and I fomented this monster?
Why me, Lord?
Edit: and even if I purchase nearby properties for fun and profit, she definitely can'tafford what I demand to be paid for rent in exchange for transferring partial use of the property that I aquired purely because I was stupidly financially empowered to have all these opportunities cuz my dad fucked my mom at the right historical timeframe to make sure that the content of mybirthdate took precedence over the content of my character or intentions or worthiness
The people who live there and vote clearly don’t want it, or they’d change the zoning?
I think what you’re saying is ‘people in general want to be able to live there but currently can’t afford to do so, and those jerks who live there won’t budge on making it happen’.
You’ve completely skirted the question with most of this comment
> Whose goals are considered "democracy" here
The people who actually live in the area where decisions are made. People outside of a city enforcing their terms on a place they don’t live is tyranny actually.
You're missing the point. The people in the area often do support building new housing, they just don't want it where they are. This is a fundamental paradox, as it has to be built _somewhere_, but seemingly none of the people who agree there is a problem want to disadvantage themselves to fix the problem.
Anyways, can I just say how absurd it is to call the government allowing developers to build new houses "tyranny"? Seems like a hysterical reading of the situation.
> Can I just say how absurd it is to call the government allowing developers to build new houses "tyranny"?
Yes, please do say this.
If anything in the system is tyranny-adjacent, it's zoning. Not to say I am against zoning holistically, but zoning is others telling you what you can and cannot do with your property. To characterize a liberalization of zoning as tyrannical is a great inversion.
There's only so much highly desirable real estate. There are only so many beachfront properties. There's a shitload of millionaires out there. There's an assload of multi-millionaires out there. There's quite a few billionaires out there now.
If you make $100,000, you're not living on a beachfront house in Miami. You're not going to live in Downtown San Francisco in a nice home.
That's life. Life's not fair.
Too bad.
Poor people are going to have to reconcile that they can't afford to live in the cities. They're going to have to be content with the suburbs, because the affluent people want to live in the cities, and they don't want people around them that are going to bring down their property values, period.
Those affluent people, especially in places like NYC / SF / LA don't have the goddamn moral courage to just say, "I don't want a buncha poors around me, doing poor people shit, that's going to reduce the value of $4,500,000 home. This isn't just my house, it's an investment, and I cannot and will not allow you to tank my investment just because you want to live where I live."
Now that's the truth.
People should accept it, because you're not gonna change it; you're not gonna change it because it's human nature and you aren't going to change human nature without a lot of pain and suffering.
There's entirely too many people in Big Tech that don't want to accept this. "If we just XXXXX, we can fix XXXXX!"
No you can't. Evolution fixes these issues, not your money, not your regulations. We have to evolve into better angels - there are no shortcuts.
So in this version of NYC / SF / LA, where do the service workers live? Who tends bar? who runs security at the door? who's sitting at the reception desk? Who cooks the food? Who delivers the food? who teaches the kids? who cleans the toilets? Who roasts the coffee? who delivers the Amazon packages?
Those people (clearly you are not one of them) need to live somewhere. They don't need to live in a luxury condo in downtown, but they do need to live somewhere, and if they all need to live in Yonkers / Fresno / Riverside to afford rent, they're not going to commute into your city of aristocrats.
we're seeing this in sf, with restaurants unable to hire, so self-sevice kisoks aren't a choice for the restaurant to use, they're sometimes the only option available. which is neat if you have a technology fetish, but sometimes we want a human person to talk to who understands something that hasn't been programmed into the computer.
Can we just stop with the nonsense about "people wanting to live where the rich people live" as if a good majority of the people who are fighting for affordable housing aren't people who _already_ live there and are fighting against being priced out of where they grew up?
Your only response is an absurd defeatist appeal to human nature and trite clichés like "life isn't fair", ignoring that legislation is very capable of addressing this particular issue. That is currently the plan, and the plan is being executed by the state of California. If you think individual rich homeowners are more powerful than the state, then I think it might be you who is out of touch with the state of reality.
> People outside of a city enforcing their terms on a place they don’t live is tyranny actually.
This is ludicrous. Just like no man is an island, no city is self contained. Should the city be able to dump whatever pollutants into the river it sits on? Burn whatever, whenever as much as they want? Nobody else gets a say?
Other people share the same regional, state, and national identities with people who live in the city, should those people not get a say in how the place they actually live is run?
Fortunately we don't just have cities: we also have counties, and states.
Every city needs teachers, firefighters, service industry workers, etc., and if they're not providing a place form them to live that they can afford with their current incomes, then they're not a real living, breathing city: they're Disneyland.
The state is well within her rights force cities to build housing for the people that are required to keep that city running, rather than externalizing their problems and forcing these folks to overflow into neighboring cities and endure inhumane commutes.
Most of the grassroots level opposition is because developers lie, bribe and threaten their way out of honest development. I used to live in Cupertino (left 5 years back) and you had to be there to see the heavy handed tactics. Developers will promise one thing then once the contract was signed, bit by bit they will work with the city to roll back public benefits. And then the fights amongst city council - ugly at times in social media (Nextdoor). Nextdoor may be ugly itself but sometimes it exposes the fault lines very clearly since you see the same people parroting the lines over and over, after some time you just understand their tilt without anyone having to tell you so.
And this is not just Cupertino. I read stories from Saratoga, Sunnyvale, and San Jose. Wherever you get big money, some people get corrupted, and they don't work in the interest of the society. I mention San Jose but that is an example of city so big that neighborhood complaints can be killed quite easily since mobilizing the entire city to fight in behalf of one corner is not easy, so that's where the cities end up winning - they can do whatever without worrying "much" about the residents. But smaller cities can fight back and IMO they should until they get delivered what was promised.
Why is it the responsibility of a developer to provide public benefits? That's the responsibility of the city. The developers should just be building the actual housing, which the cities by and large do not allow at all.
On the other - real estate/physical locations are the one thing that fundamentally is limited and where distance and control really, really matter for a specific outcome or circumstance to exist.
Rural Idaho, little/no competition, no need for heavy rules to avoid it turning into complete anarchy.
Manhattan? Completely different story.
And there is only one manhattan (and only one of any given spot in rural Idaho, too, but a lot of any given spots).
The way these things tend to work in the cities is heavy rules, and then you have to apply for exceptions. Often, the rules are ‘no, you can’t build without an exception’.
So then, it’s all about making a good case you need an exception. The ‘benefits to the community’ is the ‘bribe’ as to why your good case should get the exception.
It’s hard to see what the alternative is, frankly, when you look at the on the ground reality - there is rarely a rule anyone could write that wouldn’t cause massive problems if applied naively in these dense environments.
And if the people living somewhere want to reduce/avoid certain types of problems, what else are they going to do?
And someone can say ‘fuck ‘em, they don’t get to say no’ - but most people saying that will very much change their tune when they’re on the other end of the bargain.
Manhattan got the way it is today precisely because it DIDN'T use to have all of these restrictive rules prohibiting development. Indeed if those rules had been around a century or more ago, it wouldn't be the #1 city in the country. Chicago would be.
You've got it precisely backwards. The excessive rules are harmful, period, and are significantly hurting housing affordability. The lack of them is what made this city great back in the day (and it's still coasting on that inertia, though only growing more and more unaffordable over time).
The most recent dumb rule that was tacked on recently essentially made it impossible to build new hotels* (see https://therealdeal.com/new-york/2022/12/09/how-special-are-... ). Not a single hotel has been granted permission since that law passed several years back. Now add on top the AirBnb ban and we're making it significantly more expensive to visit NYC, which is hurting our tourism industry. All for completely dumb reasons. Build more hotels, build more housing, let the city thrive.
* This law was passed not because it's a good idea, but because of captured interests, namely, the existing hotel operators who didn't want further competition. It's anti-competitive, not "a good law that you need in a dense city" as you are characterizing things.
None of what you’re saying changes anything or conflicts with what I’m saying, near as I can tell?
Of course the rules are there to maintain the status quo?
Do you think they don’t know that?
The rules won’t change until long after it’s started to be unsustainable either. That’s normal.
The only people who are going to pre-emptively change the rules to make things better are the folks who are competing to be the next ‘big thing’, not the already big thing.
The already big thing is trying to not lose what they already somehow got. They’re going to be fundamentally conservative unless they’re very risk tolerant, which is rare.
New Jersey is much more friendly zoning and taxation wise than New York, for example.
Right, none of that is the responsibility of the developers to provide. That's for the city to provide.
What's going on, however, is that California has hamstrung its ability to charge its existing citizens the costs of the services they are incurring thanks to Proposition 13, hence why expensive taxes, fees, and required public improvements are levied on new development. The wealthy older people who already own property (and aren't paying much for it) are being subsidized by the younger generation, and are paying out more than their fair share.
> Most of the grassroots level opposition is because developers lie, bribe and threaten their way out of honest development. I used to live in Cupertino (left 5 years back) and you had to be there to see the heavy handed tactics. Developers will promise one thing then once the contract was signed, bit by bit they will work with the city to roll back public benefits.
I live in the state capitol of Washington. I could not agree more. What is even more galling is how open it is. Because I've done a lot with public services here, I have a lot of people on my FB feed who are involved in city politics, and several of them are close personal friends with many of the larger developers in the city. Not just socializing and meet and greets, but "We're going on vacation to Vegas together" and such. And then people wonder why our city is so "developer-friendly".
One way that I've seen this explained (not that I necessarily agree with it or care to defend it) is that the city somehow has an obligation to _future_ residents. Or put another way, to a minimum level of sustainability as a going concern.
Another commenter framed this as ensuring that essential service workers can afford to live in the area.
>it could be argued that it's a unique derivative work
Creating a derivative work of a copyrighted image requires permission from the copyright holder (i.e., a license) which many of these services do not have. So the real question is whether AI-generated "art" counts as a derivative work of the inputs, and we just don't know yet.
>b) often has explicit licensing and therefore intent on its usage
It doesn't matter. In the absence of a license, the default is "you can't use this." It's not "do whatever you want with it." Licenses grant (limited) permission to use; without one you have no permission (except fair use, etc. which are very specifically defined.)
"Creating a derivative work of a copyrighted image requires permission from the copyright holder"
That's why "fair use" is the key concept here. Under US copyright law "fair use" does not require a license. The argument is that AI generated imagery qualifies as "fair use" - that's what's about to be tested in the courts.
If a person trained themselves on the same resources, and picked up a brush or a camera and created some stunning art in a similar vein, would we look at that as a derivative work? Very interesting discussion. Art of all forms are inspired by those who came before.
Inspired/trained… I think these could be seen as the same.
I don't think we should hold technology to the same standards as humans. I'm also allowed to memorize what someone said, but that doesn't mean I'm allowed to record someone without their knowledge (depending on the location)
Training a human and training a model may use the same verb but are very different.
If the person directly copied another work, that's a derivative work and requires a license. But if a person learned an abstract concept by studying art and later created art, it's not derivative.
Computers can't learn abstract concepts. What they can do is break down existing images and then numerically combine them to produce something else. The inputs are directly used in the outputs. It's literally derivative, whether or not the courts decide it's legally so.
Goalposts can be moved on whether it has "truly learned" the abstract concept, but at the very least neural networks have the ability to work with concepts to the extent that you can ask to make an image more "chaotic", "mysterious", "peaceful", "stylized", etc. and get meaningfully different results.
When a model like Stable Diffusion has 4.1GB of weights and was trained on 5 billion images, the primary impact of one particular training image may be very slightly adjusting what the model associates with "dramatic".
> If the person directly copied another work, that's a derivative work and requires a license
Not if it falls under Fair Use. Here's a fairly extreme example for just how much you can get away with while still (eventually) being ruled Fair Use: https://www.artnews.com/art-in-america/features/landmark-cop... - though I wouldn't recommend copying as much as Richard Prince did.
> The inputs are directly used in the outputs
Not "directly" - during generation, normal prompt to image models don't have access to existing images and cannot search the Internet.
I would say that abstract concepts is the only thing that computers can learn at the moment, at least until they are successfully embodied.
> It's literally derivative, whether or not the courts decide it's legally so.
To be a derivative work you should be able to at least identify the work it is a derivative of. While SD and friends can indeed generate obviously copyright infringing works (then again so can photoshop or a camera or even a paintbrush), for the vast majority of the output you can at best point out to the general direction of an author or a style.
There are more texture mapping approaches which can be added on top of normal mapping to make the illusion even better, such as parallax [1] or displacement [2] mapping.
Any large tech company has teams dedicated to improving developer productivity. So how do you assess the quality of those teams' work, or that they're worth the investment, or help them prioritize projects? Just don't bother?
No - I've worked with several teams with "productivity" right in the name, and to be honest, I'm usually skeptical when these teams claim that their work will "improve productivity" and am interested in how to evaluate their claims. If we just give up completely because the space is hard to measure, there's no check on these teams that keeps them actually working on important things, vs. making changes that they subjectively prefer.
Software engineering is a form of process automation which by its nature is a form of productivity improvement. So if some teams are not streamlining and consistently improving business processes then asking another team to help them do so with more software is kinda nonsensical.
For a while I worked on build tools and CI pipelines and I can honestly say that I never improved anyone's productivity. Most of my work was figuring out how to remove performance bottlenecks that unwitting software engineers would invariably add to the build and test process because a manager was breathing down their neck about delivering some feature yesterday. If business processes are dysfunctional then that's not a software productivity problem and can not be fixed by adding more software.
Oh dude… believe me I had TDS big time. Watching the last 17 months of medical fascism cured me of that real quick. Now I’m not on anybody’s team.
There is a large group of people I used to know and respect that completely and literally lost their marbles this past year and a half. And I mean that in all sincerity… they are a shell of who they were before. Blindly listening to “experts” coupled with a visceral hatred for “the others” and intense, unexamined fear can land you in a very bad mental state.
Question authority. All authority. Even “the experts”. Always. They do what they are incentivized to do, which often has nothing to do with what is in the best interest of society at large.
Epic is a great example. Their own store lists alternative stores on the Epic store, like itch.io. But they don't take a cut of games bought from those stores. Once you launch itch, you're in itch.
This would be true if they listed "alternative store_s_", but what they actually did is add itch.io to their store in a token way once they started the lawsuit in order to say "Look, we have no problem working with other stores". It's a stunt for the lawsuit. Even the Itch founder who signed the deal said they basically found it bemusing and an effort to gain legal leverage without really doing anything else.
It'd be like if Apple took all of the developers who testified against Apple, reduced their commission to 0% in perpetuity, and then asked the judge to throw out their testimony because the complaints were moot.
(That being said, I do think there are conditions where stores would/should allow other stores, and I think those conditions could be more permissive than the Roblox example. Apple should, medium term, resolve the GeForce Now/XCloud objections.)
I bought The Division 2 after seeing a promotion on the Epic store. To install it, you have to install the Ubisoft store Uplay, which is launched through an integration with the Epic store.
After playing that game, I saw promotions for Assassin's Creed Odyssey on Uplay, and purchased it. I later went on to purchase many other games on Uplay.
In short, Epic allows Ubisoft to sell games on its store, for which they presumably pay a cut - for those sales. But Epic has no problems letting Ubisoft require their store be installed for those games, and if you buy something there - even though the Epic Launcher installed it - they don't get a cut.
This is more akin to the App Store installing Fortnite - which Apple could get a cut out of, but not getting a cut for purchases in the app.
Both Apple and Valve (Steam) allow similar arrangements, although not precisely the same. EA games on Steam, and Ubisoft games on Steam before they left Steam, require installing Origin and UPlay respectively. But don't you find it notable that Epic does not distribute Uplay on its own, unbundled from purchases?
On the Apple side, it's ok for applications to require the user make an account on services like Uplay (I believe several Ubisoft games require this; and Fortnite requires the Epic equivalent). You can then use that account to buy stuff on the stores. It's not an exact parallel because there are no (non-jailbreak) external app stores on the iPhone, but it's a close parallel.
My friends and I play Apex through Steam, which I downloaded for free. When you click to purchase "Apex coins", it takes you straight to EA's website. Apple wants to enforce a cut on every purchase of in-game currency. Steam does not do this.
And Valve allows you to sell steam keys on your own website also without paying the cut, so long as you don't undercut the steam store.
They take a cut for microtransactions that they process, but you are free to use your own service. They do require price parity. That link doesn't seem related at all.
Do you have any sources on how restrictive valve are or have been with that, or is that just speculation? Can developers default to their own payment systems and bypass valve's, or is theirs required to take a secondary, less-accessible option (when it's even allowed)?
the person you're responding to meant statements like yours:
>Frankly, the symptoms you describe apply to pretty much everybody, and are just the things one deals with in life.
According to the NIH, prevalence of severe ADHD in children is around 4% [1]. This differs by degree from "the things one deals with in life" for most people - it's an extreme version that can be debilitating without treatment.
You’re right. I didn’t like that bit of my comment, and was in the process of lopping it off when you were composing your reply. Apologies for not getting the edit done in time.
Mostly I’m alarmed that so many parents are happy to put their small children on a lifetime supply of medicine for something that’s not immediately life threatening.
> Mostly I’m alarmed that so many parents are happy to put their small children on a lifetime supply of medicine for something that’s not immediately life threatening.
I don't think you get it. My son can either be on medicine, or he can fail middle school, and high school and be uneducated. If you're volunteering to sit next to him, and redirect him to his work every 3 minutes, or pay for someone to do it, by all means, let me know. At the same time, he's brilliant, and can solve any problem he puts his mind to, and he can do the actual work, if he can focus on it.
Maybe re-think this without the judgement--good parents aren't happy about doing this. They are just less unhappy than the alternative.
As a parent who has made this decision myself, I certainly wasn't "happy to" do it. But it's very clear to me that without medication, my child lacked control over his thoughts and actions, and it was affecting his life - school, friendships, etc. - to a degree that was very frustrating for him. He's happier and more successful now. And, it's not a "lifetime supply" for sure - many kids do grow out of it and stop requiring medication by the time they reach adulthood. Some don't, and they can decide where to go from there.
ADHD can be indirectly very life threatening. Untreated, it can affect every single aspect of a person's life. Even just society being a bit more forgiving of ADHD can improve that situation greatly. We really need to have a class of mental handicaps that are every bit as protected as physical handicaps. A sort of "mental ADA". This would obviously not include self-assessment simply because that would be too easy to game. But, for example, I was formally diagnosed with ADD/ADHD at the age of 8. Others in similar situations should absolutely be given affordances that others who don't need them don't get, because those affordances could actually be harmful to those who don't need them (similar to how stimulant medication is like speed to "neurotypical" people, yet it slows down those with ADHD). However, in the drive for "fairness", some insist that means treating everybody identically, in a "one size fits all" mentality, which disadvantages everyone who isn't neurotypical.
I have two children with ADHD and myself (non medicated).
Having a child with ADHD is extremely hard. All we try and do is workout the way for them to navigate life with out destroying everything around them.
We haven’t had to medicate them yet but the decision would be a very considered one and weighed up to if it would change their lives for the better.
From TFA: Qelbree "may increase suicidal thoughts and actions in some children with ADHD, especially within the first few months of treatment or when the dose is changed,"
Tylenol is widely considered a safe drug even though overdose of 4x the normal dose is near certain death. You do have to watch out for these things.
In this case, medication tends to report silly things as side effects because they report every single thing the patients are experiencing. There's no frequency of reports here, but it could be just a few reports with no causation established.
I also have great hope for the psychedelic research that is starting to happen again. Anecdotally, I have highly improved focus control when under the influence of low doses of LSD or mushrooms (I prefer mushrooms because they feel more "organic", if that makes sense). I am preparing to begin a regular mushroom microdosing regimen, because that focus control does fade in-between experiences when I take 1g weekly. I'm not after the reality-altering properties of psychedelics (except the very rare use of DMT for a "kickstart", as the last big trip I had with that gave me six months of focus control and ADHD mitigation). I plan to take a quarter gram every other day.
So don't. Just write code yourself. I promise you some of us are still doing it.
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