Chebucto Regional Softball Club

I've used the subway every time I've visited NYC (though not a huge amount because I really enjoy walking through the city when I'm there). The only slightly scary time was when I had a late flight into JFK, around 20 years ago.

First, I got on an empty train. A few stops later, someone got on and started having a loud argument with herself. She stayed at the other end of the carriage though, so not too worrying. Directly outside the window at the next stop, someone was being handcuffed by the police. No idea why, they train didn't stay there long, but it wasn't a great impression.

But the actual scary bit was when I arrived at Bowery (which, I subsequently learned, is the least-used station in the entire network). The station was completely deserted. Not just a few people, literally no one except me. No staff, no other passengers. And the exit was blocked by a locked gate.

Fortunately, there was another poorly labelled exit somewhere else that was still open and I did escape, though I didn't appreciate the extra distance with a heavy suitcase.

Much more scary was reading that the street outside my (very cheap!) hotel exploded a few months after I was there. It had one of the old steam heating systems with a boiler shared between multiple buildings. It turned out this was decades past its rated operational lifespan. When it finally exploded, it took out a big chunk of road. Fortunately, it happened at something like 3am and no one was injured.

@futurebird

I did something similar with my wife. She used to complain about a single jalapeño in a dish that we were both eating. Now she puts chilli sauces in / on things herself.

But she's half cantonese and grew up eating instant noodles that, as far as I can tell, are seasoned with actual lava. My mouth is on fire if I put any of the water from them in my face. They are far more spicy than anything I cook. But those are, apparently, a different kind of hot and so don't count.

@malwaretech

@futurebird , this paragraph is relevant to your recent query about using LLMs for stock trades:

I ran into this issue very recently during a joke research project in which I gave an LLM several thousand dollars, a brokerage account with option trading enabled, and complete autonomy to place trades. I’ll publish the full breakdown once the project has run its course, but one problem it ran into a lot was the LLM not using RAG to fetch current data on stocks. The LLM would just quote stock prices based on whatever they were at the time it was last trained, which in my case was over a year ago. This lead to the bot making trades based upon completely inaccurate price information.

I hadn't anticipated that problem, so it looks as if it will be even worse than I expected.

@futurebird @kelson

There is a related issue though. Even before Citizens United, the loophole for spending dark money in US elections was ‘issue ads’. Some organisation cares about issue X (typically because some rich people care about that issue). Rather than endorsing a candidate, they run a campaign telling people that issue is importantly and that one of the candidates is opposed to the thing that they’re pushing. It’s hard to ban this kind of thing without trampling on legitimate free speech.

@kelson @futurebird

Why is it a problem if these people aren’t allowed to bribe candidates? They can still provide expert opinions to candidates, and the candidates can choose the degree to which they trust these organisations, without a direct profit motive.

@nazokiyoubinbou @csgordon @ireneista @futurebird

So they'd only do that if they're seeing an overall gain somewhere else somehow

They are. In their stock prices. Microsoft’s market capitalisation was around $800bn when I started working there and around $2tb when they bubble started to take off in earnest. It’s briefly passed $4tb last week.

Stock is basically a private currency. You can create more of it, which causes inflation (the stock value goes down) and sell it for other currencies (both state-backed currencies and other companies’ stock, the latter of which lets you eventually buy them entirely).

The MSFT stock price has gone up by more than the total profit the company made over that period. Why worry about people buying your products when people are willing to buy the money that you print?