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ElevenLathe commented on TikTok's 'addictive design' found to be illegal in Europe   nytimes.com/2026/02/06/bu... · Posted by u/thm
DaanDL · 2 days ago
What an unworldly remark. So, we should also not ban hard-drugs then?
ElevenLathe · 2 days ago
Yeah, prohibition is a terrible policy for everyone except the cops, jailers (including private, for-profit jailers), government spooks, smugglers, arms dealers, hitmen, chain and shackle manufacturers, etc. who make a living from it. I'm taxed to pay some of the world's most odious people to stop a small percentage of the supply of these drugs. Meanwhile, the vast majority of the supply makes it through and causes untold suffering for addicts, often thanks to other (or the same) taxpayer-funded bad guys and an onramp provided by the legal pharmaceutical industry. In the impoverished countries where the supply comes from, all this revenue funds hellish slave/feudal economies where a small violent elite terrorize, torture, and kill working people. Even in the developed world, addicts are weaponized by others for all kinds of violence (drug gangs, human trafficking rings, etc.) and net-negative property crime (stripping copper from abandoned houses, stealing catalytic converters, etc.).

In short, banning hard drugs is very very obviously a losing policy that serves only to enrich the world's worst people at the expense of everyone else.

ElevenLathe commented on The Great Unwind   occupywallst.com/yen... · Posted by u/jart
bandrami · 4 days ago
Sorry, copy-paste error:

https://www.housingwire.com/articles/38536-failed-bank-ceo-g...

https://www.justice.gov/usao-md/pr/former-president-and-ceo-...

https://oig.federalreserve.gov/releases/news-bekkedam-senten...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/business/wp/2015/09/02/b...

Again, literally just the first half of the first page of Google results. People can do this on their own, too, if they want to learn more about it

ElevenLathe · 3 days ago
Three instances of TARP fraud (which obviously happened after the crisis started since it was a response to the crisis) and one small time fraud case whose victim was a bank.

The fact remains that nobody who caused the crisis day saw a day in prison, and the banks who did were bailed out when it easily could have been the soon-to-be-homeless citizens instead.

Deleted Comment

ElevenLathe commented on Why more companies are recognizing the benefits of keeping older employees   longevity.stanford.edu/wh... · Posted by u/andsoitis
lotsofpulp · 4 days ago
>Nevermind that society dictates everyone must work to survive by default.

How does a society that allows not working function? How does it defend itself against attacking societies?

ElevenLathe · 4 days ago
How much of our labor is being used on activities that improve society's ability to defend itself, even in an indirect way? Isn't most of it being used to, as a schematic, serve coffee and send email?
ElevenLathe commented on FBI couldn't get into WaPo reporter's iPhone because Lockdown Mode enabled   404media.co/fbi-couldnt-g... · Posted by u/robin_reala
b8 · 4 days ago
They can hold you in contempt for 18 months for not giving your password, https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/02/man-who-refused-....
ElevenLathe · 4 days ago
Being held in contempt at least means you got a day in court first. A judge telling me to give up my password is different than a dozen armed, masked secret police telling me to.
ElevenLathe commented on 221 Cannon is Not For Sale   fredbenenson.com/blog/202... · Posted by u/mecredis
Analemma_ · 5 days ago
This is a Mad Libs autopilot reply which has nothing to do with the article.
ElevenLathe · 5 days ago
I wouldn't say it has nothing to do with the article. A real estate agent selling your land on behalf of someone that isn't you is roughly analogous to a bank giving credit in your name to someone who isn't you. Either way, someone who isn't you got scammed by someone else who also isn't you, but somehow this is your problem.
ElevenLathe commented on UK government launches fuel forecourt price API   gov.uk/guidance/access-th... · Posted by u/Technolithic
maffyoo · 6 days ago
totally agree, technology could make this much more cost effective (or time effective). what's the best use of my time versus the cheaper option..

It's interesting running the numbers though. e.g. if it only take 10 minutes to get cheaper fuel, how much cheaper does it need to be for your time to be worth more than the UK minimum wage (£12.21 for adults over 21)

based on my maths (from above calculations) it needs to be about 7p per litre cheaper to justify the extra 10 minutes and for your time to be worth more, per hour, than the minimum wage.

ElevenLathe · 6 days ago
I once had the idea to do something like this, though the intention was to pitch it to gas station operators as a way to keep their prices competitive (i.e. alert them when the station down the street drops their prices so that they can too and not lose business to casual price shoppers or, alternatively, when the station down the street raises their prices, so that you can too and not lose revenue needlessly) and learned that there are a couple entities, at least in the US, that have national data here. I couldn't even figure out how to contact one, and when I called the other I was essentially laughed off the phone by someone with a VERY New York accent -- it seems from context that their data is VERY expensive and used by Wall St. types, so the idea of some nobody from flyover country essentially reselling it to mom & pop gas station operators was funny, and out of the question.
ElevenLathe commented on In praise of –dry-run   henrikwarne.com/2026/01/3... · Posted by u/ingve
ElevenLathe · 8 days ago
I usually do the opposite and add a --really flag to my CLI utilities, so that they are read-only by default and extra effort is needed to screw things up.
ElevenLathe commented on The Five Levels: From spicy autocomplete to the dark factory   danshapiro.com/blog/2026/... · Posted by u/benwerd
exmadscientist · 11 days ago
In the long run, it's going to become about specifications.

Code is valuable because it tells computers what you want them to do. If that can be done at a higher level, by writing a great specification that lets some AI dark factory somewhere just write the app for you in an hour, then the code is now worthless but the spec is as valuable as the code ever was. You can just recode the entire app any time you want a change! And even if AI deletes itself from existence or whatever, a detailed specification is still worth a lot.

Whoever figures out how to describe useful software in a way that can get AI agents to reliably rebuild it from human-authored specifications is going to get a lot of attention over the next ~decade.

ElevenLathe · 11 days ago
One of the unexpected benefits of everyone scrambling to show that they used AI to do their job is that the value of specs and design documents are dawning on people who previously scoffed at them as busywork. Previously, if I wanted to spend a day writing a detailed document containing a spec and discussion of tradeoffs and motivations, I'd have to hide it from my management. Now, I'm writing it for the AI so it's fine.
ElevenLathe commented on Just Get a Better Job   idiallo.com/blog/just-get... · Posted by u/firefoxd
kevinfiol · 24 days ago
You hit the nail on the head, and it's very difficult to communicate this to someone who has only experienced the luxury of not having to worry about having a roof over their heads between jobs.
ElevenLathe · 23 days ago
I honestly have trouble understanding the other side of it. I have always been working class. I have a good job now in tech now and could weather 6 months of job searching if I needed to, but if I lost my job today, I would absolutely take the first available job I could find, even if that is something "beneath" me like retail or hospitality. I don't think I could ever be convinced that it was safe to be unemployed for any length of time. Sure, I could take the time now, but what if I need that money later on for something that I don't have a choice about, like an illness, natural disaster, etc.?

It's just too risky to ever be unemployed in the United States unless you are already so wealthy that you don't need to work at all anyway.

u/ElevenLathe

KarmaCake day3937March 17, 2015
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J. Random Hacker.

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