That's some fine problem solving, albeit not the problems the prison wanted to be solved.
I sometimes wonder if these sorts of people who "succeed" in these odd ways on the wrong side of the criminal fence, would have had rather successful careers had just a couple of things gone differently towards the start of their life.
Of course they would. A criminal is just a person. And with such an extraordinary percentage of the US population in prison, you can expect the full spectrum of ability, intelligence, passion, compassion, and everything else. Our prison system is an extreme tragedy that most people are numb to because it's been that way forever.
There are way too many people that think the human condition can be fixed through powers of the state. The overly broad application of the "justice" system is one aspect of that.
Unfortunately there's no clean way to prove this right or wrong, it is a religious like belief the populace holds. Therefore changing the status quo probably requires a religious like message that anyone coldly analyzing it with facts is incapable of delivering. The very method of changing it is out of the hands of those that might recognize what's wrong.
I've seen claims that the average IQ in prisons is roughly equivalent to the average IQ of the general population. The line most commonly mentioned after that fact is "and those are the ones that got caught."
I'm not sure how true that is but what I do believe is that the following is 100% true:
- smart people
- who grow up in disadvantaged locales
- and have emotional trauma due to the above
- may end up in a life of crime and then prison
How do I know this? I've worked with a couple people like this. Some ended up in prison, others almost went to prison and later on went to work in corporate America (no sarcasm intended here).
Some people really activate their brains once they get locked up. The things I've seen people construct from literal garbage in prison. Tattoo guns are a popular one. Obviously half the population has a way of making some sort of device analogous to a car cigarette lighter in prison by finding staples, bits of wire, foil etc that they can stick in a 110V outlet to heat up and light their drugs from. Necessity really is the mother of invention.
A friend and I got split up into different cell blocks because we were helping each other with litigation. Knowing this would happen we'd come up with a way to communicate across the facility. We had these 5x5 grids of letters, no "K", where 11 on the grid was A, 15 was E, 55 was Z etc. They had these touchscreen commissary kiosks where you could order food. The quantity of each item allowed up to 4 digits, e.g. 9999. So that gives you two letters. 1121 = AF for instance. We'd start at the top, Beef Noodles, 1121. Chicken Noodles, 2412 etc and work through the menu. We shared our login IDs with each other. We'd place these huge orders into the cart but never checkout. Then we'd log in to each other's accts from our separate cell blocks multiple times a day, read our messages and write our replies. Got caught eventually, 10 days in the Hole. I FOIA'd their investigation and it was very amusing seeing the report from the facility "Intelligence Dept" trying to decode all the messages.
Yes, especially when it is civil rights litigation, e.g. facility conditions. They will do everything within their disposal to interfere with litigation. A lot of county facilities in the USA will retain private counsel, not government lawyers, for these kinds of cases, and it is enormously expensive. I can remember one case where they took a newspaper from a prisoner and he sued, and the jail took it to trial and lost and had to pay not only damages of $15K, but also their legal fees, which were somewhere around $1.5m, but also the plaintiff's counsel, which was another $900K IIRC.
The United States has one of the highest incarceration rates in the world, with approximately 541 to 614 people imprisoned per 100,000 residents as of 2022–2026. While representing only 5% of the global population, the US holds roughly 20% of the world's prisoners, totalling over 1.8 million people.
For many crimes, the U.S. loves giving eye watering long sentences for offences that would result in a tenth of the prison time in other countries.
I read ‘helping the litigation’ to mean they both may have been involved in the same crime, and they mean to stop collusion after the fact, before trial concludes?
Both ways. Mostly it is just helping with the legal process. Rarely is it a multi-plaintiff case as the courts don't like those from prisoners. It causes too many logistical nightmares. How are two plaintiffs to communicate their wishes to each other on how to proceed? How will they both appear in court together if they are in different buildings or even different institutions?
I remember being on one join-plaintiff civil rights case and the government lawyer told the judge they were going to criminally charge me with impersonating a lawyer as I "must have given legal advice to the other plaintiff." The judge asked how they thought the complaint was written. "As I see it, one plaintiff must have pressed one key, then the other plaintiff pressed the next key on the keyboard. That is our belief."
Incarcerated people have the right to sue, right? They have right to appeal. Prisons shouldn't be able to interfere with prisoner's rights, specially when it's about suing the prison itself.
I wonder if there are any benefits of the adaptations made by those with higher ACE scores. Surely the adaptations we've evolved to make can't be entirely maladaptive.
Here's one
Emotional abuse: verbal threats, swearing at, insulting, or humiliating a child.[1][3]
I'm trying to imagine what someone would be like if they reached 18 without ever having been "sworn at, insulted, or humiliated." Given this is one of the gentlest ways of correcting anti-social behavior, I can only imagine such person would be a maladapted nightmare.
there are strategies that can be taught to increase resilience, and sometimes that may include some tough love.
but there are differences between some tough love to build character vs. years of emotional and verbal abuse. one of the big kids calling you a loser on the playground is not ACE; your mom telling you're worthless and she hates you and you should have never been born for most of your childhood is.
put another way, 8 weeks of military boot camp teaches you to handle some of the stresses you might encounter; it builds resilience. but 18 years of it would create someone deeply screwed up.
The extra line supposes that being smart reduces the chances of getting caught.
Which from what I gather isn't very true - being smart can often lead to over confidence and making mistakes, and also a lot of crime is not premeditated.
And 80-90% of the adherence to 80-90% of those laws are self-imposed.
Once upon a time I used to buy tamales from a guy on the street corner. He was probably breaking half a dozen business licensing and preparation laws by doing his little street corner business.
HN dwellers would mostly debate for days about getting the right license or some other silly nonsense. Meanwhile tamale man is cooking, tamale man is selling, tamale man is doing his thing. Is he paying his taxes? Who knows. No one ever bothered to find out and from what I can tell nothing ever happened to him.
There's also probably the majority of the US who just make up laws that don't exist and then enforce it against themselves. Most people think they have to give an ID to a cop if he asks for it on the street.
They assume everything is illegal and self police because that's what the tyrant programmed them to do.
Same effect in HN comments also. Many people hold back from expressing their real views here because they are afraid to run afoul of the Flag Police.
They actually did change that law. Citizens of the Great Empire are now required to identify themselves to any cop who asks their name. For the childrens.
The "show him your government ID which you are now required to keep on you" part hasn't yet been instated, but it's coming. That will be introduced along with a whole heap of other big anti-freedom changes (like Central Bank Digital Currency) during the coming World War.
No, crime does not mean violation of morality. It only means violation of the law.
Now some people, say, look at a pair of expensive shoes and comically blurt out "these prices are criminal!"
That type of usage is a linguistic device known as "exaggeration", but these types of comical exaggerations don't actually change the meaning of words. Like when someone says "You're robbing me!" when a seller proposes a high price, they are not actually changing the meaning of the verb "to rob" and this does not mean that the definition of "to rob" involves charging high prices. That, too, is just an exaggeration.
You don't get to decree whatever it is that you like and then call it "law". If a "law" is un-Constitutional, as most US "laws" are--or in violation of the highest laws of the Universe (the Laws of Nature), as the most US "laws" are--then it is not law. It's the scribblings of a tyrant.
There just might be an entire army of goons ready to enforce that so-called "law." With an Empire, there always is. But any so-called "law" enacted without permission of the The People are in fact the workings of a tyrant and deserve no serious consideration among free individuals, except whatever minimum is necessary to protect oneself from the tyrant while awaiting (and planning for) his inevitable downfall.
Why would I enjoy an over-dramatized, inaccurate, and heavily slanted movie from Hollywood (but I repeat myself) about people shooting cops? Especially when the entire point of the movie is to program people like you to think there's something wrong with people like me.
You assume that because I don't appreciate or accept the attempts of your arrogant, murderous empire to enslave me, therefore I'm a murderer? Hollywood programmed you to believe that, but it is you who are in fact the murderers.
Fortunately Iran is putting your glorious military in check as we speak, and Russia/China will finish the job later.
For further details on the days to come, read Biblical prophecy, especially concerning the fate of "Babylon the Great." Hint: there's nothing left of it, just a pile of sand in the desert.
I make it a point to keep a healthy distance between myself and Imperial Officials.
During any unavoidable interaction with Imperial Officials, I always pretend subservience and submission. I am aware that many others do also.
The result is a large and growing body of people who secretly despise Imperial Officials, while said officials are under the increasingly detached from reality impression that everyone loves them. It usually doesn't end well for them.
It's probably a better system for what to live by. The government can and will imprison anyone they want by a variety of methods they have for putting anyone they want away at any time. If you follow "god's / natural law" as they put it, it is a better guide to whether you will anger some victim who will call the police on you. Most of the rest of the law are just the excuse the powers that be will use for putting you away if the powers that be find you threaten their order. The vast majority of victimless crime laws are selectively chosen to be "enforced" for the actual reason that you've done something to challenge the ruling class, trying to adhere to them as if they are applied as 'rule of law' is probably irrational.
Or being disliked by a DoJ who can pressure a judge (who's other legal experience is being a career prosecutor for the feds as well) to not allow many forms of defense, while expending millions upon millions of their own money and "expert witnesses" to tell lies that you can't afford to defend against, and if you will only sign on the dotted line you will only get 3 years instead of a gazillion.
This is how they got Samourai Wallet guy to admit to "operating an unlicensed money transmitter" business despite FINCen saying he wasn't even a money transmitter which means how would he even get a license?
Likewise a lot of crime isn’t “crime” at all. Kill someone by putting lead in their lungs by means of a firearm and we call it murder and you go to prison. Do it by dumping lead into the air from your factory smokestack and we call it business and you get rich.
Murder some foreigner at the behest of your empire and they'll call you a hero and pin shiny medals to your chest. Kill the guy who ordered you to murder the foreigner and they'll call you a murderer and feel self-righteous when they murder you.
Prison IQ is a very different distribution. As I recall, the top 2% IQ of the general population makes up something like 20% of the prison population. You also have quite a few at the other end.
The gifted are more over represented in prison then black males, however, most of those gifted are themselves minorities.
I’ll have to see some evidence on that, in my search it’s basically a normal bell curve shifted 8 pts down. The idea that 130+ IQ individuals make up 1/5th of the prison population does not pass the sniff test, that would be a crazy statistical aberration. In my search I found reports that 130+ IQ individuals only represent less than 0.4% of the prison population.
Roughly yes, it is declining. The Flynn effect was just smart people having kids later which has now normalized and reversed (with smart people having fewer kids).
>I've seen claims that the average IQ in prisons is roughly equivalent to the average IQ of the general population. The line most commonly mentioned after that fact is "and those are the ones that got caught."
This includes white collar crime and all kinds of non-violent crimes though.
IQ is negatively correlated with reactive violence, but positively correlated with premeditated violence, per the evolution of our species. Despite our greater emotional regulation and lack of reasonable contextual circumstances to support the need for violence, we're still killing people all the time just like our ancestors.
>Hmm, what would make you assume perpetrators of violent crimes would have a different IQ level than other crimes?
For starters there's the lead exposure relation to violent crime, that is accepted as a factor, and which is also known to lower IQ.
That lead-affected criminal population would drive average violent criminal IQ down, even if the lead exposure worked through a different causual mechanism and lower IQ was just an orthogonal effect.
Besides several studies have found the general correlation.
>My initial instinct would be that violent crimes are often committed out of passion, and are unrelated to intelligence.
Choice of outlet for the outburst, impulse control and other factors however are related to intelligence.
Besides you're just covering "crimes of passion" here. There are career criminals doing homicides, gang shootings, etc, plus physical violence unrelated to passion, but related to intimidation, theft, etc.
Higher IQ would correlate with an increased ability to predict the consequences of one’s actions. “If I stab this person I will go to prison” versus “if I stab this person everyone will think I’m great because that person sucks.”
>"smart people - who grow up in disadvantaged locales - and have emotional trauma due to the above - may end up in a life of crime and then prison"
I believe this to be true and some of my former schoolmates who were brilliant IQ wise and got high marks on math and physics still ended up in jails. Some were later able to recover and lead more productive life
Crime is also just more accepted in "disadvantaged locales."
Drinking openly is illegal in most of Mexico and the USA. If the area is run down and the shops are broken I will crack open a beer on the street without a second thought. I wouldn't think of doing it openly in some yuppie neighborhood where some Karen will rat your ass out in 5 minutes.
Sort of yeah, but in this case "broken windows" are used to determine the culture of an area, even if you fixed the "broken windows" I would use some other clues. I think the broken window theory relies on the idea if you fixed the broken windows crime would change, which I don't think is necessarily true.
This is the other side of the coin of Uber violating state and local regulations for the better part of a decade to get their business off the ground or HSBC laundering money for the cartels.
You'd be incorrect. It's been well established that lower IQ is moderately associated with higher rates of criminality.
I have no comment on whether C-suite types commit more crimes than prisoners, but I'd wager they don't.
Not everyone in jail got busted for benign stuff like selling a joint. There are lots and lots of incarcerated murderers, rapists, fraudsters, drunk drivers, etc.
Parent meant that almost no white collar crime gets prosecuted or results in jail time for defendants. Which is a very fair statement to.make, no conspiracy involved.
The claim is that the makeup of the prison population would be different if the law was as expeditive and indiscriminate with the well-to-do as it is with the poor: the entirety of Enron in prison, of VW, of Uber, etc.
Your correlation is by and large about criminality among the poor. It would still probably hold in the above scenario, but you can't claim it looks at "criminality" full stop.
I wonder about the IQ distribution in mental health facilities. The mental health system is basically a penal system in white coats.
My parents often pointed out a very tall bearded homeless man who would stand in the intersection and shout at cars. They called him “Bigfoot”. Mom explained that he had multiple college degrees, such as physics, and indicated that he was a waste of a life.
Maybe he realized screaming at cars was more productive than being an actuary so someone who inherited their way through Yale and Blackrock could make the world a worse place.
> Not everyone in jail got busted for benign stuff like selling a joint. There are lots and lots of incarcerated murderers, rapists, fraudsters, drunk drivers, etc.
In US federal prisons, drug offenders make up over 40% of the total population, by very far the largest group. The next largest tracked category, "Weapons, Explosives, and Arson" is 23%. [0]
Granted, these are almost entirely US federal offenses, which have of course been flux throughout US history with respect to proper authority, and drug offenses have tended to grease the wheels of jurisprudence so as to be regarded constitutional (albeit with a very inconsistent set of underlying principles). Murder for example is not generally a violation of federal law absent (a fairly long list of) special circumstances.
I do not believe there is any state where the number of people incarcerated for fraud convictions is in the same order of magnitude as drug convictions. In Ohio, where this story takes place, drug offenders are about 14% of the population while "fraudsters" are about 1%.
I think it's pretty reasonable to assert that a significant portion of prisons in the USA are convicted of offenses that are not easy to understand as a moral affront to society or an infringement on the rights of anyone else.
The weapons offenses are by a longshot "felon in possession of a firearm." That one is crazy to me. You're going to send people out into the free world, where guns are legal, and owning a gun is legal, and they are supposedly off the books, and then just tempt them with owning something to defend themselves that everyone around them already has but then lock them away for a decade for doing so? Obviously most of the drug ones are just as absurd -- you're locking up drug dealer A who is immediately replaced with drug dealer B with absolutely no change to drug operations or consumption but at great expense to yourself. Thankfully we've pretty much stopped putting drug users in federal prison.
You could probably wipe out over half the federal prisons without any real change to greater society.
Go to your local county jail lockup, by far the most common charge is driving on a suspended license - because many crimes will get your license suspended as a matter of course, and others will give you payment plans and paperwork filing dates and if you aren't on top of everything well enough you will get suspended for missing a payment or failing to submit your stuff properly, then enjoy violating probation with an additional misdemeanor, impound fees, court fees, and possible jail time.
>"C-suite types commit more crimes than prisoners, but I'd wager they don't."
On behalf / or covered by corporations they openly do things for which any normal person would be criminally charged and put behind bars. Wake me up when people who for example were involved in Bradley development scandal are punished. Or ones involved in DuPont PFOA contamination case etc. etc. So they do have criminal mind. They just know they would personally get away with it and in a worst case the corporations get fined.
"For the little stealing, they give you prison, soon or late. For the big stealing, they names you emperor, and puts you in the hall of fame when you croaks. If there's one thing I've learned from from twenty years on the Pullman cars listening to the white quality talk, it's dat same fact."
There's a guy by the name of Michael Lacey who is popular in Tiktok under the name Comrade Sinque [1]. He spent 21 years in prison. It was a much longer sentence. I'm not sure what happened to get him out much earlier.
What was his crime? Felony murder. Sounds bad, right? So what were the details. At age 19 he and a friend burgled a house. The homeowner killed his friend. That was it.
Many Americans don't realize how this works and how insanely unjust it is. It's called the felony murder doctrine and it is unique to the US. It means that if a felony is being commited and if anyone dies then you, as the felon, can be charged with murder regardless of how they died. In states like Alabama, all burglaries are felonies. So if you and a friend break into a house, the police respond and kill your friend, you can get convicted of murder and sentenced to 30-years in prison.
Not a made up example [2].
Anyway, Comrade Sinque is better read than probably at least 95% of Americans. He is thoughtful and intelligent. He wasn't born a criminal (that's 18th century thinking). He's certainly not low IQ (as some would have you believe criminals all are). No, the issue is material conditions. Poverty and a lack of opportunity.
We probably spent about $1 million convicting and incarcerating him for 21 years. This doesn't really seem like a good investment.
Convictions/punishment is also meant to be a deterrent.
That one being: don't rob a house in a state with a castle doctrine where the owner is allowed to fucking kill you. If you first hand help someone get killed, you're at fault. Sounds reasonable.
But, I also wish we had far far more deterrents, and far more deaths, when it comes to robbers.
Deterrents assume criminals make good decisions though. While deterrents matter for career criminals who have the experience to make good choices about their crimes, I think they're almost entirely ineffective against initial offenders.
The uS has 4% of the world's population but 25% of the world's prison population. We have a higher rate of incarceration than, say, Russia or Iran [1].
If deterrants worked, why do these incidents keep happening? Why isn't this the safest country on Earth?
Poverty costs all of us but rather than lifting people out of poverty, we'd rather spend way more on the prison-industrial complex, slavery 2.0 (ie convict leasing) and law enforcement.
Look at the low numbers in Africa. Is it because they elevate their criminals out of poverty? Maybe their police have good relationships with the community? Maybe they're good at re-habilitating convicted criminals in prison? Or maybe it's counseling to heal generational trauma?
Obviously, stoning all the criminals isn't the solution, but having society rigidly define acceptable bounds of behavior that get you removed from that society if crossed (temporarily or permanently), isn't unreasonable.
To understand that high number in the US, I think you would have to look at who is in prison, and what they did, to understand. Good luck. They collect the data in a way so you can't do a multivariate analysis, because that would be unethical!
I don't know, we would have to look at the data. Again, due to ethical concerns, they don't record or report the data in a way where more meaningful conclusions can be made.
I think many many things contribute to the difference in imprisonment.
But, federal imprisonment is 42% drug charges [1]. Just looking at that, US has a cartel run country, with a near 20% GDP based on drug trafficking [2], at its poorly controlled border, with a whole continent below that containing exactly zero first world countries, some having > 40% GDP from drug trafficking! I've walked across the Mexican border. I've seen caravans of cars driving across. It's near fiction. Now, try to smuggle some drugs into an inner European country! Or, alternatively, just hop over to Amsterdam to avoid your countries laws. And, we also have the benefit of corporations fueling drug epidemics [3]. Is that imprisonment a deterrent? I didn't look up numbers, but have some useless anecdotal evidence: I knew two drug dealers in high school. They both stopped because their buddies were arrested, and lives ruined.
For direct evidence to answer the question "is punishment a deterrent" (I find it hard to believe this is an argument), see California Prop 47 [4].
I mostly think the US system is too punitive, but I don’t see a problem here. Someone died because of what he did. He did it deliberately and the death was a foreseeable outcome of what he did. I’m not too upset that he spent two decades in prison as a result.
some simply wanna be Pablo Escobar and become a reggaeton poster child. they don't do it for other reason than become their mental image of a gangster.
yes, they are intelligent but they insist and insist into do what they consider cool, and that coolness come to be a "hacker" or a criminal
so far from top of my mind I remember a serial corporate scammer, a social media middle man who constantly sell access to people working in meta (unlocking/locking accounts), a drug precursor middlewoman, a money laundering mule/scammer/errand boy. every time it was the same. they wanted to show a gangster luxury life in ig. the middlewoman was something else, never got to understand her. 60 years. probably she was just for the thrill of it.
had they opportunities to do something else? repeatedly. specially after prison or with family help. but they refuse, the next business will be the one. they will become millionaires for sure. jail again.
>Investigators found software, pornography and articles about making drugs and explosives on the machines.
These are the "winners" you are championing btw. And that's after whatever heinous crime landed them in prison in the first place, and after they stole computers from a program designed to assist them with training and reintegration.
But the soy-faced bleeding hearts of HN can't see past the sheer ingenuity of throwing a PC in the ceiling and plugging in an ethernet cable...
As a US citizen, everything you described sounds pretty god damn American to me. What's more patriotic than getting wasted and looking at some nice melons while blowing shit up? That's real freedom right there mf'er. Only thing missing is some guns. Sounds like you hate freedom.
> That would be true if We The People were reliably informed when we showed up to cast our votes.
Weren't the democrats criticised for campaigning on the message that voting for Trump was a significant risk to due process and democracy? I feel like every voter was aware of what happened on Jan 6th and still voted for him with some level of knowledge about that.
> I feel like every voter was aware of what happened on Jan 6th and still voted for him with some level of knowledge about that.
What a particular voter was “aware of” regarding Jan 6th and the events that caused it very much depended on where that person got their news. For example, one prominent network was found in court depositions to have knowingly reported complete BS about what Jan 6 was all about: “During pre-trial discovery, Fox News' internal communications were released, indicating that prominent hosts and top executives were aware the network was reporting false statements but continued doing so to retain viewers for financial reasons.”
That his vice president confirmed the result still should tell these people everything they needed to know. That at the very least the story peddled by sources like Fox was dubious and they should seek to corroborate that source with others. NPR is a reasonable source that all Americans know about, so I don't think its a reasonable excuse.
Do you believe that there is a large share of people who get their news from Fox News and also trust NPR? And vice versa?
More than ever before, people now live in news silos where they get only the news that engages their prior beliefs. And people who are in the Fox News silo have been told, repeatedly, that NPR is fake news from “far-left lunatic” Democrats. Do you remember all the air time Fox News gave to people arguing for the defunding of NPR? How much do you think a Fox News viewer is likely to trust NPR?
Think about it. If you are like the vast majority of people, almost everything you know about what is happening in the world, especially about the highest levels of government, is something you have been told from a source you trust. You are not a part of government policy decisions. You do not speak to people who are primary sources in those decisions. You know only what has been reported to you by third parties. Now imagine that you are getting those reports only from third parties that tell you something that is not true. How would you know that you are being misled?
I agree. People had already experienced one round of Trump before, and had every opportunity to see what he was planning for this term. There is no reasonable conclusion other than that they indeed wanted exactly what we got.
The US has very low voter turnout. Winning is mainly getting your voters to turn up, but usually apathy wins. Of course the media plays a huge part in this, but voter suppression is the US is fine art.
Personally I feel that non voters effectively voted for Trump, and they should own that as much as die hard MAGA types.
Don't disagree with you in principle but 2024 saw a very, very, very large turnout for US standards - the biggest one... Kamala's 75m+ votes basically are good enough (by very wide margin) to win any previous election (slimmer margin in 2020 than others but you get my point...)
thanks for the correction, I keep forgetting just how awful 2016-2020 years were that 81 million people came out to vote for a senile grandpa (exactly the point I was making, you need strong against case much more than anything else)
> 81 million people came out to vote for a senile grandpa
Yeah, people were getting fed up with the chaos. Biden owes his presidency to Donald Trump, for sure. He tried several times in years prior and could not win on the merits.
Weird, and why didn’t those people show up to vote for Kamala? How did Biden get more votes than Obama, but Trump won the popular vote four years later?
> why didn’t those people show up to vote for Kamala?
Enthusiasm gap. And not during COVID. 2020 was an interesting time as you may recall.
> How did Biden get more votes than Obama, but Trump won the popular vote four years later?
You will be less likely to fall prey to grifters if you look past absolute numbers and realize that the voting age population tends to increase about 10 million every four years. And with turnout generally abysmal, under 60% most times, there is a lot of room for variation.
His whole schtick seems to be getting voters to show up at the polls who otherwise don't bother to put forth the effort. I've heard it said that this was also Mamdani's trick in NYC (heck, maybe that explains why Trump is so smitten with Mamdani).
So GOP politicians do significantly better any time Trump is sharing the ballot with them. I won't be surprised if the 2026 midterms go very poorly for the GOP. And given that Trump won't ever be on a ballot again, I won't be surprised if his control over congressional GOP members starts to noticeably erode even before the midterms. They definitely know how the game works, and they are going to start looking for ways to keep their jobs.
Running against a President (especially one that is not on the ballot) is much easier than people think, all you have to do is pitch that while I may be terrible, your alternative is much, much, much worse which is exactly what the Trump campaign was all about.
It worked because a lot of people bought that story (and many continue to buy it evidenced by DJT's approval ratings among the GOP voters). The whole campaign basically had no platform other than your cookie-cutter "migrant crime", "economy bad" ...
It worked because as bad as the GOP platform was, the dems' strategy was just awful, and their tactical decision making was abysmal.
* focus on abortion, which is an important issue ... mostly to evangelicals
* focus on threats to democracy, which sounded shrill and got blown off
* no real message on the economy, which was widely perceived as floundering under Biden, and was very important to a lot of swing voters
On top of that, Trump's approval ratings on the economy were pretty good when he left office. People remembered that and thought he'd do better.
Then of course there's the whole "hey, let's not tell the senile old man that he basically promised to be a one-hit-wonder, and wait until the last moment to switch to his running mate instead".
In a way, it's impressive that the dems didn't lose by larger margins. Trump wasn't that popular, the dems were just that incompetent. I hope they pull their head out of their ass for 2028. But I'm not counting on it.
I don't disagree but I don't believe there was any way Democrats would have kept power in 2024. They were unable to sell any positive news about the economy (DJT does not seem to have learned this lesson and is doing same stupid thing as Dems did in 2024). The no real message on the economy was real but economy was doing great in post-COVID world especially compared to the rest of the world and there wasn't a reputable financial outlet that did not agree with this (Economist, FT, WSJ, Bloomberg...).
While I wholeheartedly agree with everything you said I do not believe there was a way for Democrats to beat DJT. His machine was just too good and no matter the candidate and no matter the message I don't believe it would have mattered.
> I guess good on Steve for doing what he does so well, and getting so much hype around a vibe coded mess.
Shit coin aside, I don't get the hate for Gastown, we all know its theoretically plausible and he's giving it a shot. We get value either way, either we learn its not just theory or we get to watch it burn in the flames of a legal/financial/security/maintenance nightmare for its practitioners.
Because he should know better? Because it’s obviously a shit show but he keeps on being very vocal about his shit show? Because it’s annoying to have to see yet another delusional vibe coded project being hyped up instead of this forum being used to discuss actually industry relevant information?
he's doing it in the open. Its instructive for us all either way.
> he keeps on being very vocal about his shit show?
I'm not really sure what this complaint is. You want someone doing something to not.... write a blog about it?
> Because it’s annoying to have to see yet another delusional vibe coded project being hyped up instead of this forum being used to discuss actually industry relevant information?
I think I've seen around 2 posts, one the original gastown one and then the gascity one. Is two posts in like a year too much or do I miss a midday rush where the front page is all Yegge?
> Because it’s annoying to have to see yet another delusional vibe coded project being hyped up instead of this forum being used to discuss actually industry relevant information?
It's industry-relevant. This is what the industry is now. All in two short years.
Many people are trying to make this thing, this is the one we can all see. I'd rather have the visible one remain visible because it gives us a useful data point and/or entertainment.
from my admittedly brief research into it, $GAS was sending him transaction fees, as it desired the association. So it wasn't him selling a tangible number of coins to a particular person. So I figure to pay it back, he'd have to trace down the owners of every tx and pay them back the tx fee. Perhaps that's easy, perhaps its non-trivial. According to the tweet[0] he made yesterday, in order to donate the combined funds to charity he has to submit 230 separate transactions on his phone.
If its all obviously shit then it shouldn't be that hard. Maybe point Claude at it and ask it to find the most stupid stuff that you can then manually verify as being wtf.
My point is that just calling him names has no substance, but mocking his source specifically does.
> We're supposed to be engineers. Criticising a concept based on conjecture and insult is unbecoming of our culture.
The entire thing is nothing but conjecture. No real software has been produced by the concept to date, except more garbage software that takes hundreds of thousands of lines where a few thousand would do.
And to be clear, Beads and Gastown are unbecoming of our “culture” and any self respecting engineer would recoil in horror at the concept.
There are some good ideas in the tools. I hope our culture has room left for curiosity and exploration in that way. I also highly doubt these will catch on over one-shotting and Jira though. Here’s one quick thought from each:
Beads keeps the issue tracker state in git. This can only work if you don’t have a PR/Review-Gate to submitting patches (to file bugs/issues/etc) but I’ve found it unexpectedly helpful for personal projects. Helpful enough to entertain the idea in other contexts.
Gastown uses an AI Agent _as the orchestrator_, and to kick stalled agents, and, that’s such an obvious thing in hindsight I can’t believe I hadn’t thought of it. I have adopted this in a few other contexts now.
Wow that's so innovative. I'm amazed Linus didn't think of that twenty years ago when he invented git.
Oh wait... It's been tried and discarded half a dozen times since then. Git is literally just a bunch of text files with a tree pointer. You can fit any data into it you want, but as it turns out, most people who report bugs don't want to use git to do so.
> Gastown uses an AI Agent _as the orchestrator_, and to kick stalled agents, and, that’s such an obvious thing in hindsight I can’t believe I hadn’t thought of it. I have adopted this in a few other contexts now.
I too can't believe you didn't think of it. Literally can't believe it.
How is it conjecture when you just admitted you're aware of a repo with hundreds of thousands of lines of code.
Your argument belies a lazyness or skill issue. You abandon the possibility of proof to sling mud.
People have made a shit ton of economic value with shit code over the course of history of software and now that's accelerating with this sort of shite. I appreciate its ugly but i will not follow you by fashioning a duvet out of arrogance and throwing rocks people investigating the ugly.
What they're doing it at least an interesting spectacle and ill wait for the show to end before writing my review.
What it means is that it is easy to shit on other people's work. Much harder to give constructive criticism - especially on what looks like a throwaway account.
It’s not “other people’s work” because Steve didn’t do any work. He vibe coded hundreds of thousands of lines that don’t do what they’re supposed to with many thousands of lines of documentation that are inaccurate at best and aspirational at worst. He wrote some blog posts and got them picked up by vapid outlets that had nothing else to add to boost his exposure.
Case in point: no one talks about beads or gastown on HN because it’s crap that no one uses. Even *claw and that dumb fad get more mileage. meanwhile, CC vs Codex is an ever ongoing battle and Anthropic employees announce policy changes in “Tell HN” posts which stay on the front page for days.
If you actually follow the links you posted, you will see that he didn't create a meme coin and didn't rug pull it. Someone else made the coin and set it up so he got transfer fees.
I did an induction at some ISO certified company some years back, reading their docs. A good 50% of them contained significant content that basically read:
> the thing must be in the place where it should be
With no further information e.g. what place, where, how, when, who facilitates that?
> the person who facilitates it, is the person who facilitates it.
Yea thanks. So their ISO accredited process was basically no process. Would have been way better with a talking fox.
So I feel like humans are capable of just as bad. I'd be interested in what answer the Fox could spit out and I kinda wonder where it might fit on the bell curve of all non Gas-Town "auditable" processes. I'm all for skepticism but I feel like it would be more tangible if we instead criticised the response instead of just conjuring it as "definitely awful" because it happens to be on top of a generated stack.
I mean: I don't want it to work, but maybe we're not as good as we think we are, or the stuff we rate as super important is actually way less important with a generated context. As much as I love good code, the thought that gnaws at the back of my head is the truism that some of the most profitable code in history has been some of the "worst" code (e.g. MySpace's janky code base ontop of ColdFusion or Twitter's "Fail Whale" era).
So I'm happy that someone is exploring this space in an open way. I'm just glad I'm not the one finding that out with my face first.
Which ISO certification matters, but the key thing people should be aware of is that the primary value of the certification to customers is that your processes are documented and that deviations are tracked, so that customers can check whether the processes makes sense before signing a contract. It's important not to expect the certification itself to guarantee quality.
The climate crisis is primarily a consequence of fossil fuels, not necessarily energy demand. I feel like its a poor conflation, despite it possibly being a truism depending on where the datacentre is based and what power source feeds it.
If we're keeping gas and coal plants online to power this or using gas generators to power data centers, I'd consider that a wasteful contributing factor.
but we could also argue that not investing in extra non-fossil fuel capacity is the issue here. OR not investing in more research on super conductors and/or storage. Iceland could possibly export considerable amounts of renewable energy if we licked those problems.
I mean, under the same logic couldn't we kinda argue that TV has ruined the planet? A lot of energy for something of debatable physical value. OR Motor racing, football, The Olympic games? All that energy and waste just to find out who can throw a stick the furthest every four years.
Agreed. It painfully overfits based on what I've watched. I've watched thousands of videos and it still doesn't understand me at all because it appears to treat every action as equal. As an example, I like watching the Starcraft II streamer uThermal but I'm not really interested in other Starcraft II content creators because uThermal scratches that itch. However YouTube will keep showing me Starcraft II content creators that I am not subbed to and whose content I will never watch.
Of the 30 videos currently proposed to be on front page I'd consider watching maybe 4 of them. To be honest I'm a big fan of the change they made to occasionally show new content because it actually provides some novelty (one of those 4 is of a video from a creator with only 19 subscribers).
The worst is that if you're someone who enjoys multiple niche things and who also interacts with the algorithm (like - dislike - not interested) your account gets marked as content discovery vanguard and it will endlessly feed you videos with <1000 views just so they can get more feelers on if the content is actually good.
Even if you consistently "not interested", the algorithm never ever figures out the overlapping theme is that you (generally) don't like low view count low subscriber count content.
- Of the topmost 4 videos I would consider watching one because I am already subscribed to the channel and even have the particular video in Watch Later (so what's the point?)
- Shorts appearing again and again after I explicitly remove them, taking up valuable space
- Below some random videos half of which I am already subscribed to so I can see them in Subscriptions - no need for duplicates
- The other half in large part is of doomerism, although I don't watch that content
I adore contiguous reads that ideas like that yield. I'd rather push that out to a read-only end point, then getting sucked into the entropy of treating what is effectively an unschema-ed blob into editable data.
Imperative mood "normalize" assumes that you had something not-normalized before you received that instruction. It's not useful when your table design strategy is already normalization-preserving, such as the most basic textbook strategy (a table per anchor, a column per attribute or 1:N link, a 2-column table per M:N link).
And this is basically the main point of my critique of 4NF and 5NF. They both traditionally present an unexplained table that is supposed to be normalized. But it's not clear where does this original structure come from. Why are its own authors not aware about the (arguably, quite simple) concept of normalization?
It's like saying that to in order to implement an algorithm you have to remove bugs from its original implementation — where does this implementation come from?
The other side of this coin is that lots of real-world design have a lot of denormalized representations that are often reasonably-well engineered.
Because of that if you, as a novice, look at a typical production schema, and you have this "thou shalt normalize" instruction, you'll be confused.
> But it's not clear where does this original structure come from. Why are its own authors not aware about the (arguably, quite simple) concept of normalization?
I find the bafflement expressed in the article as well as the one linked extremely attractive. It made both a joy to read.
Were I to hazard a guess: Might it be a consequence of lack of disk space in those early decades, resulting into developers being cautious about defining new tables and failing to rationalise that the duplication in their tragic designs would result in more space wasted?
> The other side of this coin is that lots of real-world design have a lot of denormalized representations that are often reasonably-well engineered.
Agreed, but as the OP comment stated they usually started out normalised and then pushed out denormalised representations for nice contiguous reads.
As a victim of maintaining a stack on top of an EAV schema once upon a time, I have great appreciation for contiguous reads.
> Normalization-as-process makes sense in a specific scenario: When converting a hierarchical database model into a relational model.
That makes much more sense as reasoning.
If I can also offer a second hazard of guess. I used to work in embedded in the 2000's and it was absolutely insane how almost all of the eldy architects and developers would readily accept some fixed width file format for data storage over a sensible solution that offered out of the box transactionality and relational modelling like Sqlite. This creates a mindset where each datastore is effectively siloed and must contain all the information to perform the operation, potentially leading to these denormalised designs.
Bit weird, given that was from the waterfall era, implying that the "Big Design Up Front" wasn't actually doing any real thinking about modelling up front. But I've been in that room and I think a lot of it was cargo cult. To deal with the insanity of simple file I/O as data, I had to write a rudimentary atomicity system from scratch in order to fix the dumb corruption issues of their design when I would have got that for free with Sqlite.
I sometimes wonder if these sorts of people who "succeed" in these odd ways on the wrong side of the criminal fence, would have had rather successful careers had just a couple of things gone differently towards the start of their life.
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