>As a consumer, the last things I want in an interface are to a) be sycophantic enough to lessen my judgment
This is EXACTLY what people like/are addicted to about chatbots.
My sister-in-law bombed an interview and asked AI about her answers to the interviewer's questions, chatgpt or whatever it was told her that her answers weren't bad, but that the interviewer could not see the gold in her responses. She said she felt much better.
I see this effect with all the non-tech people in my life
It is an emulator for a console that does not exist in real life. People make games for this "console" because they are fun to play and fun to program.
I sometimes think that passionate nerds love their niche so much they forget that other people might not have the foggiest of what they're talking about.
I'm sure you'll just come back and say you shouldn't have to google it. But you have to draw the line somewhere. If they sold Cherry Pie, and you said "what's cherry pie, never heard of it" do I have to define both pie, cherry, and cherry pie? Or is that just up to you to go learn in on your own.
Sounds like you're in AU, I will point out that trades are not looked down on at all in this country. In fact culturally we value chippies and sparkies higher than desk jockeys.
Yeah this was a generalisation across the US/UK/AU. I come from the UK but now live in AU, and know the US a bit.
I think the looking down on trades is not quite as simple as I summarised it as, and I think AU does a lot better at all of the above than the US/UK, but I still see aspects of it. Tradies make good money in all 3 countries due to lack of supply, and yet there are still stereotypes of jobs like lawyers, doctors, (software engineers?) being better in some way.
It's a nuanced problem, but I don't get the impression that trades here are culturally valued higher than a lot of "white collar" work. Compared to ambiguous "desk jockeys" yes, but that's due to negative stereotypes about bullshit jobs, if you actually named a specific job I think you'd find different attitudes. Lawyers, accountants, sales/marketing, various engineering disciplines, IT, I think these are widely considered "better" jobs than trades, even though in most ways that's far from true.
If you had read the whole sentence, you would have found a few other words, which say “just because you have privilege.”
All men are created equal. Civic duties apply equally to everyone. Once people have met their legal obligations (say, paying taxes and obeying the law), any additional generosity is voluntary, not owed, so having more privilege does not automatically create greater moral obligations.
Say, I am beautiful and you are ugly. That’s my privilege. Do I owe more than you? No. It sucks for you. Sorry but that’s life. Stop whining and keep making the best you have with your God-given privileges (maybe you are say, taller or have more money).
What an odd world view. Of course the priviliged have greater social obligations, because they are greater benefactors of life. We're all equal under the law but that doesn't mean that those with greater means shouldn't have greater impacts on society.
Meritocracy is often a buzzword of the elite to avoid paying their fair share.
also the rich absolutely _do_ owe society at large something: taxes. a thing which, as you get richer, it apparently becomes optional due to financial engineering
If I were to nitpick, I would say that they try to move to a idealised version of the US that never quite existed. This romanticised version has been pervasively depicted in mass consumption media for many decades.
More meaningful perhaps would be to count the immigrants from developed countries and immigrants that earn above the median in their respective countries and/or go to the US and earn above the American median.
There are a lot of desperate people in the world right now who’ll take extreme action to escape their immediate predicaments, such as risking a Mediterranean crossing from Northern Africa to Europe.
citation needed on that last claim. do you have universal healthcare free at point of service? do you have a healthy supply of public housing? do you let children starve, through no fault of their own but the circumstances of their birth? do you engage is ears of choice and murder 100+ innocent children in a primary school on the first day of the conflict?
the answer to some of these questions should be yes, and others should be no, if you're going to make the claim that the United States of America is the "Greatest Country on Earth, Ever".
I realise you're joking, but crypto is now a heavily regulated industry, the KYC/AML requirements are no-joke and non-compliance will get the company's licences in a given country/state terminated.
For the end user it looks like an evil cash-grab, but really it's the company protecting itself from regulatory vengeance.
The missing bit is that compliance is for governments and business partners, not for any end-users. For the purposes of KYC/AML process, end-users are objects, not subjects.
Your coins frozen with no reason given even internally except for "machine said no" - no one gets any slap on the wrist unless you sue real hard, happen to win, and most likely that'll be just a scratch that won't be noticed enough to change any attitudes.
The Man sees that someone they don't like transferring their coins through the fintech company - that's what those companies are really concerned about, because it would be a punch in the gut the company will feel.
Thus, the incentives. Current social design doesn't punish for false positives (until they hit really high levels), only false negatives.
Coinbase gave my confidential "AML" information to criminal extortionists-- I hadn't even had an account with them for a decade because I realized they were bad eggs long ago.
What licenses of theirs were terminated? Seems to me that the regulatory oversight is a joke.
No I'm not joking. That is the bullshit answer they (note: crypto/fintech space in general, not necessarily Coinbase) give. But when pushed on the occasions I've had my funds frozen they are never able to provide any evidence or what specific reason they have for triggering KYC/AML, just vague bullshit handwaving and AI customer service agents that lie about them "being on it" or some such and then your money gets returned when they're done squeezing it for interest (yes no one cares about your $50 but they do when it's some fractional percent of millions of accounts getting triggered at any particular point in time.) You can check something like the customer support reddits of a variety of crytpo and fintech companies, it is always filled with people have their money frozen for some long period while conveniently no one is looking at it while it is sitting there drawing interest, then maybe after a month someone tells them they need to hop on one leg while reciting Deuteronomy chapter 1 with a passport booklet in their hand and blink their eye 3 times while turning their head and that is all they were waiting for all along (I'm embellishing a bit here but that seems to be what KYC checks are like nowadays when they pop up).
Just a vague nonsense about compliance, that magickly aligns with padding their float. In reality they are using compliance and regulatory language as a shield to prop up their numbers. They are using KYC/AML to hold your funds hostage, as it's the most plausible explanation that also allows them to legally seize it under a legal sounding explanation. The fact that they do have to perform KYC/AML and there are penalties for not doing so just happen to make it a valid enough sounding excuse for when it's used overly aggressively because it lines up with other goals.
If they move the hair trigger to freeze funds 2x as often as they need to against the innocent false-positives to pass compliance checks, due to a hair trigger, then it falls under plausible deniability and even better when the regulator comes they can say some insane bullshit about how good their KYC/AML is. If they freeze it less often but instead just steal some for a little while and then return it, then it's more obvious a crime has been committed. It's obvious what they're up to.
Of course the KYC/AML/ regulatory officers are probably just pawns in this. The executives in the crypto and fintech space tell these people they need to set the sensitivity up to the 9s which does increase KYC/AML 'true positives' but the unspoken part is that money is now locked up into the company's accounts which creates a moral hazard in their fiduciary duty. They know damn well what that actually does is inflate their float, at the cost of a bunch of false positives. In theory that's satisfying AML because a function of doing so is you trigger more true positives, but in reality it's merely stealing money to increase floats not actually optimizing to meet the cutoffs to keep your license. But no one is actually going to come out and say this. It will probably take a class action suite, which I have little doubt will eventually happen when someone comes out and admits one day that these regulatory compliance triggers were intentionally set on the sensitive side for non-regulatory reasons.
> In the specific case of “Why did the bank close my account, seemingly for no reason? Why will no one tell me anything about this? Why will no one take responsibility?”, the answer is frequently that the bank is following the law. As we’ve discussed previously, banks will frequently make the “independent” “commercial decision” to “exit the relationship” with a particular customer after that customer has had multiple Suspicious Activity Reports filed. SARs can (and sometimes must!) be filed for innocuous reasons and do not necessarily imply any sort of wrongdoing.
> SARs are secret, by regulation. See 12 CFR § 21.11(k)(1) from the Office of Comptroller of the Currency...
The fact they may not be able to in one circumstance doesn't prove that they're merely following the BSA.
It's obvious when someone gets their money frozen for a month only to just have to perform a KYC check that even if the KYC check was legitimate, and these kinds of results are common over years, the delay was a result of a business decision that increased their float.
I think you're conflating the requirements with the BSA with how executives are using it in a hostile way against customers. They can make the deliberate decision to slow down KYC/AML officers and checks after a trigger, while putting them on a hair trigger, while citing secrecy under the BSA. That is the regulatory nonsense under which they are dressing up a business, non-regulatory decision. It's there to provide plausible deniability.
The compliance officer in this case is plausibly just following the law but in reality they're just running cover for increasing the float -- maybe even unwittingly.
> But when pushed on the occasions I've had my funds frozen they are never able to provide any evidence or what specific reason they have for triggering KYC/AML
They are legally prevented from telling you by the regulators, at least in the US.
If you buy into it being regulatory, you've already bought into the fraud. They're often delaying weeks to months to actually look into whatever set their hair trigger. That's not regulatory compliance, that's increasing your float. Especially in cases such as "all we needed was an updated passport check while you do the Macarena." The regulatory bit just provides the cover for the operation, the fact that it's true that regulation exists doesn't mean whatever is done under the flag of regulation was actually regulatory in nature it just means you have a more believable pile of steaming bullshit to tell the hysterical customer to make it sound like something closer to breaking the law is actually an attempt to follow the law.
Put otherwise, suppose I run a bank and you deposit your paycheck. I decide our reserves are a little low so I set KYC/AML triggers even more sensitive on a hair trigger so that an extra of 0.2% of innocent paychecks get held up an extra 4 weeks (I have also conveniently slow down / underhire customer service) which also causes me to catch 1 or 2 more real criminals. That's not KYC/AML even though that's the mechanism by which I claim to have held it. I'm not bound by the BSA secrecy in such case since the underlying trigger was for increasing the float rather than actually KYC/AML compliance.
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I am accusing fintech and crypto businesses in general of committing mass fraud through intentionally setting KYC/AML on an artificially sensitive trigger to increase their floats, yes.
I do not know if Coinbase specifically does that
-- my limited experience with them is they are one of the few fintech companies that hasn't fucked me over.
I have an absolutely massive body of evidence that leads me to that conclusion, through my own transactions and frozen funds as well as studying a wide amount of CS complaints that show evidence that KYC/AML checks on frozen funds are stalled for weeks to months without any plausible explanation of what is happening which is not a KYC/AML regulatory action but rather an intentional choice to raise floats for free interest and padding their numbers.
Of course what's extraordinarily ironic here is when fintech claims you violate KYC/AML then "law says we provide no evidence" but if you turn around and accuse them then the industry shills will scream "without evidence" while simultaneously saying your counterparty doesn't have to provide it! They are hypocrites! The very people accusing you without evidence betray their own sins accusing you of same! They were the ones that set the bar that they don't need to present evidence, not me.
The level of unwitting irony here is off the charts.
Just one rebuttal ago, it was explained why it was okay to freeze customer funds without providing any evidence.
Now we are Jekyll and Hyde'ing back to getting upset about an accusation without evidence. That was a crux of my entire case! I am being damned, for allegedly, using the same standard of evidence as my accuser (though I dispute I am presenting as little as them)!
If that's your case, then you have concluded and rested my case for me in my favor. The entire KYC/AML argument falls apart because it fails your requirement to present evidence at accusation.
Either accusation without present evidence bad, in which case KYC/AML as it is used in stalling people for weeks to months without providing evidence totally falls apart and I rest my case -- or -- that standard of evidence is OK in which I've at least presented as much or more evidence as fintechs provide in their accusation against customers (nothing) and in that instance I also rest my case.
Whichever of these last two Jekyll and Hyde responses we pick, it isn't working against me.
AGI is 100% possible, even if the current breed of transformer-based models are not it, and even if silicon is not it. There's nothing special about human brains that we won't eventually be able to match (and then exceed) in vitro. We are living proof that intelligence can be built out of matter, and that human-scale intelligence can run on 20 watts. It's not a matter of if, but when.
It's not like the machines will ever be free, just the fuel. And it's not like the price of energy will go to zero, just be cheaper. To drive down the price of energy you first need to be taking a large slice of a trillion dollar pie.
If fuel or any other form of energy becomes virtually limitless and free, any form of matter will eventually also be kinda limitless and free. Could take longer than humanity will ever last though.
In the 'short' and current term there is still lots of money to be made in fuel indeed, but advancements in fossil free energy could make a real shift.
This is EXACTLY what people like/are addicted to about chatbots.
My sister-in-law bombed an interview and asked AI about her answers to the interviewer's questions, chatgpt or whatever it was told her that her answers weren't bad, but that the interviewer could not see the gold in her responses. She said she felt much better.
I see this effect with all the non-tech people in my life
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