BobaFloutist (u/BobaFloutist)

BobaFloutist commented on How well does the money laundering control system work? journals.uchicago.edu/doi... · Posted by u/PaulHoule

nostrademons · 3 days ago

Hanlon's razor: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity." Occam's razor is "the simplest explanation is most likely to be true". Hanlon's razor is a special case of Occam's razor if you assume that stupidity is simpler than malice, which is a hard statement to prove in concrete terms, but intuitively seems to be true.

BobaFloutist · 3 days ago

Stupidity is simpler than malice because a plan that seems dumb would need to be far more complex to be secretly smart and malicious than to just actually be dumb.

BobaFloutist commented on Florida lawmaker floats ban on HOAs amid growing backlash tampabay28.com/news/state... · Posted by u/bilsbie

LargeWu · 3 days ago

"someone needs to assess and allocate costs which isn't always obvious"

In most places, this is called the city government.

Ultimately this feels like the "low tax area" myth is getting exposed. You still need to pay for all the same things your taxes would otherwise pay for, but for some reason it's different as long as it's not called a tax.

BobaFloutist · 3 days ago

Ok, how about "Other people in our city refuse to raise taxes enough to maintain things to our standards, let's make a coalition of neighbors that all donate monthly to pay for additional upkeep for our neighborhood instead of each negotiating individually with different landscapers etc?"

It's popular to shit on HOAs, largely because Americans (of which I am one) are allergic to paying taxes and being told what to do, but if you call it a "Neighborhood co-op" all of a sudden it's not clear why it shouldn't be allowed. Whatever happened to freedom of association?

BobaFloutist commented on Florida lawmaker floats ban on HOAs amid growing backlash tampabay28.com/news/state... · Posted by u/bilsbie

dgrin91 · 3 days ago

I think what GP is saying is that if I was a homeowner for 30 years, paid HOA fees all those years, then last year sold to someone else, who gets the HOA reimbursement then? I paid thousands over years and would presumably get nothing, while some other guy who just moved in all of a sudden gets a big check? That seems unfair.

BobaFloutist · 3 days ago

I would assume the sale price of your property would be higher if it's part of a well managed HOA with 500k in reserves than if it's part of a dysfunctional, insolvent HOA, so the previous property owner kinda already got paid out for their contributions.

It's like selling shares of a company with significant cash reserves before/after they choose to liquidate a chunk of them into dividends or stock buy-backs, I would hope you priced the shares accordingly and have nothing to be mad about.

BobaFloutist commented on Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears telegraph.co.uk/business/... · Posted by u/pera

jopsen · 4 days ago

True, but adoption of AI has certainly seen exponential growth.

Improvement of models may not continue to be exponential.

But models might be good enough, at this point it seems more like they need integration and context.

I could be wrong :)

BobaFloutist · 4 days ago

> True, but adoption of AI has certainly seen exponential growth.

I mean, for now. The population of the world is finite, and there's probably a finite number of uses of AI, so it's still probably ultimately logistic

BobaFloutist commented on Mark Zuckerberg Shakes Up Meta's A.I. Efforts, Again nytimes.com/2025/08/19/te... · Posted by u/voxadam

Der_Einzige · 5 days ago

Unironically a lot of AI researchers are trash at leetcode and will cheat on interviews.

BobaFloutist · 5 days ago

How good can they be at AI if they can't even cheat effectively in interviews

BobaFloutist commented on Mark Zuckerberg Shakes Up Meta's A.I. Efforts, Again nytimes.com/2025/08/19/te... · Posted by u/voxadam

frosting1337 · 5 days ago

"He stayed on top by having the foresight to buy up anyone he could that even smelled like a competitor and had the luxury of still being under the radar at that time."

While it's easy to shit on such a strategy, that does in-fact make him a great CEO.

BobaFloutist · 5 days ago

But it does somewhat rely on luck to operate in a regulatory environment that allows it. I don't know that anti-competitive behavior requires any particular genius.

BobaFloutist commented on Calling Their Bluff anguscheng.com/post/2025-... · Posted by u/4pkjai

Schweigerose · 5 days ago

These times are long gone. Not only with government efficiency, but the transition to digital services, railroad services, you name it. And yet people voted for a 68 year old Blackrock manager without any kind of governmental expertise on any level as their new saviour.

BobaFloutist · 5 days ago

Yeah these days the masters of officiencynard probably Japan.

BobaFloutist commented on Calling Their Bluff anguscheng.com/post/2025-... · Posted by u/4pkjai

ricudis · 5 days ago

Nowadays 90% of the "Sponsored" category that I see are scams and clickbait sites The most "innocent" of them are competitor ads trying to convert you from what you're actually searching for.

Unfortunately there are no incentives for Google to fix this. Apparently they make too much money out of it.

BobaFloutist · 5 days ago

The most most innocent just duplicate the natural correct search result.

BobaFloutist commented on How to Build a Medieval Castle archaeology.org/issues/se... · Posted by u/benbreen

rester324 · 6 days ago

A bit offtopic. Is it possible to cast these videos somehow from the browser to a TV? I know it's possible to download them, but I am wondering if it's possible to stream them to the TV instead...

BobaFloutist · 6 days ago

Does your TV let you use it as a wireless display? I've found that to work as basically HDMI without cables, which is nice.

BobaFloutist commented on 'Ad Blocking Is Not Piracy' Decision Overturned by Top German Court torrentfreak.com/ad-block... · Posted by u/gslin

jasode · 6 days ago

>A direct analogy here would seem to be a newspaper publisher arguing that if a reader chooses to fold up the newspaper into an origami duck,

No, that type of manipulation isn't the legal argument Axel Springer is trying to use. It has nothing to do with re-using newspapers/books as birdcage liner, or fireplace kindling, etc.

Instead, Axel is focusing on the manipulation of the text/bytes itself (i.e. the HTML rewrite). A better direct analogy would be the lawsuits against devices deleting ads or muting "bad words" from tv broadcasts and movies. E.g.: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/06/child-safe-viewing-a

That's the legal angle they used to pressure ReplayTV to remove the automatic Commercial Skip feature from their DVR.

And yes, sometimes us nerds really want to slippery-slope those lawsuits into wild scenarios such as ... "But doesn't that also mean that when I shut my eyes at a tv commercial during a baseball game or go the bathroom during an ad it's a copyright violation?!?" .... No, the courts don't see it as the same thing.

Probably the more convincing analogy to justify ruling against Axel is the more prosaic "Reader Mode" in browsers that analyze HTML and rewrite it. Is Apple Safari Reader Mode a "copyright violation" ?!? I hope not.

BobaFloutist · 6 days ago

If I have a volunteer service where people ask me to come after the paperboy and individually redact all the ads in the newspaper with a marker, am I breaking the same law?