OUSHI THE BLOGGER

When I get REALLY close to capturing a flag, I'm never sure if I should be proud that I got so close, or disappointed that I didn't get close enough. It's a real "tip of the tongue" feeling. The answer is RIGHT THERE, but I just need 1 little hint to get it.

It feels to me like spending time making robots more human is a backwards approach to progress. Instead, focus on making humans more robotic. Quite a task to program intelligence, sentience, morality, etc. into a machine. Less so, I would think, to program greater physical functionality into something that already has the capacity for intelligence, sentience, morality. 

It's been pretty frustrating to watch the early days of the Elon Musk Twitter acquisition. Mistakes are to be expected, but the consequences of some of these mistakes should have been obvious. Elon purchased Twitter and campaigned to rid the platform of bots and fake accounts, and then made the verified badge purchasable thereby creating an easy solution to add credibility to bots and fake accounts. Maybe he thought the $8 would be cost prohibitive, but it clearly has not been. The most severe consequences of these actions, like the Eli Lilly incident, were not some highly improbably scenario. They were the most obvious and easily predictable potential consequences. The badge is literally called the blue verified badge...it exists to show that an account has been verified to be who it says it is. It's in the name! I grant that Elon's responsibilities here are greater than they seem from the sidelines. The company needs to cut spending and make more money. Sponsors were had ...

All of the Republican pushback to Biden's student loan relief efforts seems like a pretty poor political move to me. I get that it caters to the most vocal, solidly right base, but that's a smaller percentage of the population than it appears to be. I'd wager that a good percentage of consistent Republican voters have hefty student loans and they're going to miss that that $10,000 once it's yanked away from them. It's very difficult to be so ideologically consistent as to overlook personal gain in favor of some perceived greater philosophical good. I suspect that there's a significant percentage of conservative leaning voters that are going to suffer noticeable harm if these student loan relief efforts are yanked away from them forever. It's very easy to lie about who you voted, and I think most people are predominantly self-interested and will vote in ways that best satisfy those self-interests, even if they don't always admit to it. 

I recognize that Elon's attempt to monetize verified status on Twitter seems to completely misunderstand the point of verified status while opening the door for more legitimate looking bots and scams. I understand the irony given that fixing the bot and scam problem seems to be a major campaign for him. I also recognize that a sizeable portion of the complaints about monetizing verification have no substance and originate from a population who wants to retain all of the functionality and convenience the internet provides, without actually have to bare any of the cost. I think Elon is wrong about monetizing verified status, but he is right that bills have to be paid which is always challenge on a platform that can be used by anyone for free. Any worthwhile argument against the monetization of verified status needs to be of the form "This idea you have is bad, here's why, and here's a better idea that accomplishes the same goal."