otterdude (u/otterdude)

otterdude commented on Investors expect AI use to soar. That's not happening economist.com/finance-and... · Posted by u/gaius_baltar

david927 · 25 days ago

I watched the Google interview with Ilya yesterday and this came up. There's a large disconnect between the evals and the real-world performance, and he admitted that the evals are targeted.

There was a storm of hype the last couple weeks for Gemini 3 and everyone, correctly, rolled their eyes. Investors are demanding a return and it's not happening. They're just going to have to face reality at some point.

otterdude · 25 days ago

did you forget up is down and down is up?

otterdude commented on GoDaddy is auctioning a 15-year-old .org from an FOSS volunteer group – help? somosazucar.org/... · Posted by u/icarito

icarito · a month ago

Hi all — I help manage somosazucar.org, one of the local volunteer groups of Sugar Labs, the nonprofit behind the open-source Sugar Learning Platform originally developed for the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project.

SomosAzúcar has supported open education and children’s digital literacy initiatives across Latin America since 2009.

The domain expired on 2025-10-06, but due to a Postfix configuration issue on sugarlabs.org, GoDaddy’s renewal notices never reached us.

By the time we discovered the problem — about 35 days after expiration — GoDaddy informed us that the domain was already being prepared for auction, and that the only way to recover it would be to bid for it like any other buyer.

It feels wrong that a long-standing nonprofit project could lose its .org domain over a technical mail glitch.

Has anyone here faced something similar with GoDaddy or other registrars?

Is there any way to appeal to PIR (.org registry) or GoDaddy executive support to restore the domain before it’s auctioned?

Any advice or contacts would be deeply appreciated — this domain represents more than 15 years of open education work.

otterdude · a month ago

First off you should get a better, less douchy domain provider than GoDaddy. I like namecheap.

You're better off just dumping them and changing domains don't put up with this kind of BS.

You could try suing them but they'd probably roll you

otterdude commented on Convex raises $24M to reinvent back ends news.convex.dev/convex-ra... · Posted by u/janpio

otterdude · a month ago

"We're not just reselling Postgres. We're trying to create something both novel and foundational at the same time. It's not easy!"

otterdude commented on Unexpected things that are people bengoldhaber.substack.com... · Posted by u/lindowe

twelvechairs · a month ago

I dont think youd get less rich-people-friendly decisions from ccongress. It may well be the opposite. Certainly it removes some of the separation of powers.

otterdude · a month ago

No but i think you get more accountability and visibility. Right now we could never do this but in a functioning democracy I think it would be prudent.

In civil law when there is no clear precedent congress gets involved preventing the kind of critisisms we get in our legal system of activist judges ect.

otterdude commented on Unexpected things that are people bengoldhaber.substack.com... · Posted by u/lindowe

wtetzner · a month ago

"Person" in legalese means something specific. It's not the same as the dictionary definition.

otterdude · a month ago

I would like to see the law defining that!

otterdude commented on Unexpected things that are people bengoldhaber.substack.com... · Posted by u/lindowe

Supermancho · a month ago

Slaves generally don't get to choose not to participate. Sports players are as much wage slaves as Hollywood actors or Walmart greeters, albeit with much shorter runways to comfortable lifestyles.

otterdude · a month ago

My argument is created to test the original "corporations are people" legality in common law.

- slavery, the owning of people, is prohibited by the 13th amendment. - the law of the land is that corporations are a type of legal person based on the famous ruling based on the 14th amendment - corporations are bought and sold, and owned by shareholders. Can they be people if this is so?

obviously there is a problem here with all of the contradictions involved, but thats the point of my argument. The legal system picks and chooses the desired outcome, and doesn't actually pay attention to the words involved.

otterdude commented on Unexpected things that are people bengoldhaber.substack.com... · Posted by u/lindowe

anon291 · a month ago

The treating of a corporation as a 'person' (which is a widely held misconception that doesn't really exist) rests in English common law, not any statute. Corporate personhood does not mean anything of what most people think it does. Corporations are obviously not people and are not treated as such.

otterdude · a month ago

My point is the benefit greatly from the distinction, never codified in law. They have more rights and fewer responsibilities than actual people!

They way it "should" be is that congress creates a legal framework for coporations, then justices enforce that. Instead we are living with a nearly two centuries old common law that makes peoples lives worse.

My argument that if corporations are people, then they cannot be bought or sold is the kind of argument you can use to create legal precedent by suing some company over a merger or buyout to test the law and the strength of the original case law.

otterdude commented on Unexpected things that are people bengoldhaber.substack.com... · Posted by u/lindowe

niam · a month ago

"Money is speech" is kind of a misleading interpretation because it comes with all sorts of baggage that people typically infer from a thing "being speech".

Phrased another way: the argument is that limiting one's ability to spend is practically a limitation on their speech (or their ability to reach an audience, which is an important part of speech). If some president can preclude you from buying billboards, or web servers, or soapboxes on which to stand: he has a pretty strong chokehold on your ability to disseminate a political message.

I'm not defending that argument, only saying what it is as I understand it.

otterdude · a month ago

My arguments are as bad-faith as the arguments that lead to corporate personhood and citizens united. Fight fire with fire.

otterdude commented on Unexpected things that are people bengoldhaber.substack.com... · Posted by u/lindowe

mattmaroon · a month ago

Corporations aren’t people in the literal sense which the 13th amendment uses, nobody ever said they were. They just have the ability to do some people things. They can have a bank account or sign a contract. They cannot vote or enlist or do lots of things people can do. (The technical name is ‘juridicial people’ and what they can or cannot do is spelled out in law quite well.)

Money isn’t speech, and no court ever said it was. The ads you buy with money are speech. What’s the difference between a Fox news editorial show or a right-leaning ad on Fox News? (The answer: who pays for it.) If news organizations are just things owned by people, what makes them more worthy of expressing opinions than other things owned by people? Just because they have “news” in their name?

You just think they’re half-assed because you have the cartoony idea of what they are expressed by media that doesn’t like them. They’re quite sensible.

otterdude · a month ago

I guess my larger point is that words are manipulated to get to a desired effect in the justice system.

Slavery is defined as the practice of owning a "person" which the 13th amendment prohibits. As corporations are people why couldn't this apply using the same flexible level of logic our court system uses??? Its just picking winners and losers!!!

Regarding "money is speech", this is the implication and argument from Citizens United. https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/citi...

otterdude commented on Unexpected things that are people bengoldhaber.substack.com... · Posted by u/lindowe

chemotaxis · a month ago

Wouldn't personal property in the US fall under the same criteria, in the sense that the government can sue the property itself (civil forfeiture)?

But I think the boring answer here is that we sometimes need legal abstractions. If they don't exist, Microsoft is no longer a distinct entity; it's 200,000 people who for some reason talk to each other, and you can't really audit their finances, punish them collectively, or set any ground rules that apply specifically to their joint activities.

This obviously has negative externalities, because while a corporation is easy to fine, it's hard to put in prison... but trying to approach it differently would be about as fun as modeling a CPU as a bunch of transistors.

otterdude · a month ago

The answer if for congress to make a legal definition of corporation, instead we get the justice system coming up with a handwavy explanation that helps out their golfing buddies.

The answer is to get rid of the common law justice system and codify laws in congress like a civil law system. That way you dont get rich people trying to buy favors or "tip" judges.