12 Step recovery and adjacent programs fill this niche quite well, and new communities are popping up all the time to deal with more modern addictions, like internet/technology addiction.
I'm sober and have been in that world for several years now, and the most important (and hardest) part of getting sober was accepting that I had a problem and needed help. Macro policy decisions can help with access to an extent, but addicts fundamentally cannot make better decisions for themselves until they first realize they have a problem. And as prohibition taught us, once the demand is there, it can't just be regulated away.
That's certainly part of it - but there's some distance between prohibition and infinite alcohol dispensaries in everyone's pocket (which is what gambling has become).
The major benefit of legalization of something like marijuana is that you nix a lot of criminality associated with the drug being illegal. You also wind up with a better quality product, labels that help with dosage, potency, etc.
The no-holds-barred legalization of gambling apps has none of these benefits, and almost everyone I've talked to, no matter how libertarian their instincts, seems to agree we've gone way too far. I think (and hope) we'll see a backlash on the gambling stuff that pushes legal gambling out of the insanely public and accessible places where it currently lives.
> The major benefit of legalization of something like marijuana is that you nix a lot of criminality associated with the drug being illegal.
These days, if you exclude ‘possession’ and ‘selling’ from weed-related crimes, there’s almost nothing left. Weed is commoditized and is one of the few products that has gotten cheaper over the last 6 years.
There’s very little violence in the weed trade, the profit margins aren’t high enough for people to murder each other like they are for cocaine, heroin, and meth.
I completely agree. Fundamentally, prohibition showed that legislating morality ultimately fails. As immoral as mobile gambling is (and I firmly believe it is), people are going to do it. And when you start coming up with top-down technology solutions to stop people from gambling online, you realize that there isn't a workable solution that privacy advocates would support en masse.
Increasing awareness and creating programs to help people seeking treatment are the way to go.
I think everyone agrees you can legislate morality, just they disagree where that line is (even the Oldes™ like Aquinas, who argued that prostitution is immoral but the state shouldn't outlaw it because the alternatives are worse for the state).
12 step recovery is just bullshit christian religionism wrapped in some psychobabble. Id much rather have a program that doesnt use "scary man in the sky" doing bad stuff to you.
We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable.
Came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God, as we understood Him
Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.
Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.
Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
Continued to take personal inventory, and when we were wrong, promptly admitted it.
Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.
Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics and to practice these principles in all our affairs.
I disagree, as someone who doesn't practice any religious faith.
The fact is, many people in AA and related programs do have faith, and the program is wise to engage with it and help those people orient themselves in a way that compliments that worldview and strengthens their resolve to get sober.
For the members who don't have faith, my experience with the program has been that it does not impose any Christian worldview onto the actual practice. There's no imposition for non-believers to conform to that belief.
I've never left a meeting and felt like I was being pushed a religious agenda. The vague talk of a "higher power" is a way for believers and non-believers alike to articulate a personal spirituality that will bolster their likelihood of success in the program.
I've been to many meetings over the years to support friends and am heartened by the nature of AA as an organization. It's been a wonderful experience. I often leave joking that I wish I had a problem so that I could come back more often and participate with the community and the program.
I have a lot of positive things to say about the program, but they're beyond the scope of this comment.
That's a common criticism that doesn't hold up. Anyone with program experience will tell you that you get to determine what your higher power is and how you define it.
> God, as we understood Him
AA is 90 years old, practiced all over the world (in many non-Christian countries) and has helped millions of people get sober. It's not for everyone, but I'd ask for an example for a more successful and long-lived organization that has saved as many lives as AA. I struggle to think of one.
I met a forensic accountant recently who mentioned a corruption investigation she participated in involving a school district nearby, several high-ranking board members and admins were on the take. She pointed out the futility of the project, it was a large sum of money for a school district, but nothing like your headline-grabbing Medicare scams. She wound up leaving the investigation due to threats to her safety and took another job. It felt like one of those unresolved endings to "The Wire".
I have had enough insight into enough school districts that I'm confident lots of them are hotbeds of corruption. Mostly at the upper admin level (superintendents and such). Kickbacks for contracts, hiring absurd numbers of assistants and secretaries to the point that one wonders what work remains for the top dogs, creating do-nothing decently-paid positions for people they're having affairs with. That kind of thing.
It doesn't even have to be outright corruption or fraud. It can just be "fraud lite" as I have come to call it. Won't actually qualified as fraud in any "academic study by the experts" but anyone who stuck their nose in and witnessed the ongoings would immediately call it for what it is.
Could simply be doing the bullshit "spend down the year's IT budget on stuff likely to sit in shipping crates at district HQs until it gets e-wasted". The latter being one of the few I directly witnessed - millions of dollars of Cisco gear sitting there for 5 years before it was trashed. Never needed in the first place. I have no reason to believe anyone was on the "take" for it - just general incompetence and grifting to keep one's Very Important job going for internal politics.
This was for a district where a few million could easily have paid to fund a district-wide music program that was recently cut, among myriad of other in-the-classroom things.
The older I get and the more I witness things like this, the more I understand why a large and growing segment of society has completely tuned out the "experts" trotting out studies and reports. Those have largely been weaponized, and the erosion in trust of both institutions and expert knowledge may now be terminal due to it. You can only be told the sky isn't blue by so many experts until you tune them out entirely.
There hasn't been enough said about the corruption of public life in the US. (And elsewhere.)
It used to be this kind of thing was - maybe not exceptional, but certainly not expected.
Now it's common but underreported.
So there's a kind of dream world where "education" and "health" are still considered official public goals. But the reality is that government procurement is mostly grift and corruption. There's been an epic collapse of almost any kind of public service ethic in favour of opportunism and profiteering, sometimes covered over with religious/moral pretexts.
It happens in the private sector too. I was involved in procurement at a megacorp for several years.
At one point one of my colleagues asked for assistance in getting an order of 500 iphones approved. As "spares".
Fortunately the corp had a policy that phone purchases needed to have a named individual declared.
I declined politely to assist.
It was common to see certain mid level execs churning through 2x - 5x the equipment of IC's (who would never get out-of-lifecycle approvals anyeay) and some quid pro quo stuff. As a fraction of their total comp it was modest ultimately, and for this reason my boss advised me to keep my mouth shut.
I've just been assuming it's all gotten way, way worse over the last 20 years or so, too. One of the main things keeping it even slightly in check was local newspapers and TV stations with actual reporters.
Those are all gone, either shuttered or snapped up by huge companies that fired most of the staff and are milking them for the last money they can provide, or using them to distribute propaganda (e.g. Sinclair), and nobody's ever going to (be able to) do a proper accounting of how much the resulting waste and corrosion of public trust has cut into the actual overall cost/benefit of this whole "Internet" thing.
I remember hearing David Simon, creator of The Wire, predicting this (fall of local news enabling unchecked corruption). Here's an article on it from nearly 20 years ago:
> "Oh, to be a state or local official in America over the next 10 to 15 years, before somebody figures out the business model," says Simon, a former crime reporter for the Baltimore Sun. "To gambol freely across the wastelands of an American city, as a local politician! It's got to be one of the great dreams in the history of American corruption."
One of the seasons of The Wire is largely about a major newsroom (the Baltimore Sun, unsurprisingly) taking its first hard punch from the collapse of the news market and unchecked M&A activity, so I'm not surprised he commented on it elsewhere too. God, what a great show.
I'm not sure there is a viable business model for local investigative reporting waiting to be discovered, any more. At least not in the US, not in mid-sized or smaller markets. It's semi-functional in rich, dense cities. Might remain so for a while longer. It's just everywhere else that now has no watchdogs aside from the occasional, lazy, probably partisan look-see from state regulatory agencies, and maybe resource- and access-starved hobbyists if they're lucky. The pros are gone. A few still watching big national-scale stuff (bigger audience!) but all the smaller parts of the system have gone dark.
Corruption is not new- in fact looking at US history it appeared to be the norm. Tammany Hall, railroad barons, the Prohibition, Standard Oil. There were just a brief few decades after WW2 when it slipped into the background.
There’s probably a feedback loop: as people have become convinced that the government is only useful for corruption, that becomes an expected perk of the job.
Unfortunately, I don’t see a way out of that loop. Move to a state that still has some civic pride I guess.
The way you get out of that loop is by creating immense pressure from the outside until the governing system breaks, then supervising the reconstruction as an outside power until it can function by itself again. The issue is that there's a very high risk of it suffering malformed development during that reconstruction, or even worse it's abandoned early and never even builds the functionality needed to sustain itself. The risk is so high that people prefer to let the system degrade with the hope that it will eventually halt or in the slimmest chance even regress to a better previous state. Meanwhile the success rate is so low that I can think of a myriad of failures off the top of my head including Panama, the Kingdom Of Italy, Albania, the American South during Reconstruction, and Indonesia with the only success coming to mind being Japan.
Also sounds like something Ted Kaczynski would've been interested in using back in the day. It has all of the elements of a literal bomb delivery service: operates outside of the mail security apparatus, probably built on a shoestring budget so no background checks for the senders.
The fundamental problem with these frontier model companies is that they're incentivized to create models that burn through more tokens, full stop. It's a tale as old as capitalism: you wake up every day and choose to deliver more value to your customers or your shareholders, you cannot do both simultaneously forever.
People love to throw around "this is the dumbest AI will ever be", but the corollary to that is "this is the most aligned the incentives between model providers and customers will ever be" because we're all just burning VC money for now.
> but the corollary to that is "this is the most aligned the incentives between model providers and customers will ever be" because we're all just burning VC money for now.
Please say this louder for everyone to hear. We are still at the stage where it is best for Anthropic's product to be as consumer aligned (and cost-friendly) as possible. Anthropic is loosing a lot of money. Both of those things will not be true in the near future.
> The fundamental problem with these frontier model companies is that they're incentivized to create models that burn through more tokens
That's one market segment - the high priced one, but not necessarily the most profitable one. Ferrari's 2025 income was $2B while Toyota's was $30B.
Maybe a more apt comparison is Sun Microsystems vs the PC Clone market. Sun could get away with high prices until the PC Clones became so fast (coupled with the rise of Linux) that they ate Sun's market and Sun went out of business.
There may be a market for niche expensive LLMs specialized for certain markets, but I'll be amazed if the mass coding market doesn't become a commodity one with the winners being the low cost providers, either in terms of API/subscriptions costs, or licensing models for companies to run on their own (on-prem or cloud) servers.
Their bigger incentive is to deliver the best product in the cheapest way, because there is tight competition with at least 2 other companies. I know we all love to hate on capitalism but it's actually functioning fine in this situation, and the token inflation is their attempt to provide a better product, not a worse one.
100% this. We've seen enough model releases at this point to know that there hasn't been a single model rollout making bold claims about its capability that wasn't met with criticism after release.
The fact that Anthropic provides such little detail about the specifics of its prompt in an otherwise detailed report is a major sleight of hand. Why not release the prompt? It's not publicly available, so what's the harm?
We can't criticize the methods of these replication pieces when Anthropic's methodology boils down to: "just trust us."
>We've seen enough model releases at this point to know that there hasn't been a single model rollout making bold claims about its capability that wasn't met with criticism after release.
Examples? All I remember are vague claims about how the new model is dumber in some cases, or that they're gaming benchmarks.
Why would they need to release the prompt, as if it's a part of transparency? It's obviously some form of "find security vulnerabilities" and contains no magic in itself. All that matters is the output here.
You also have to look at how exposed your vendors are to cost increases as well.
Your company may have the resources to effectively shift to cheaper models without service degradation, but your AI tooling vendors might not. If you pay for 5 different AI-driven tools, that's 5 different ways your upstream costs may increase that you'll need to pass on to customers as well.
It's (at least partially) the layoffs. I've noticed significant degradation in the external-facing administrative layer at these companies. I recently did some work for a company that was trying to partner with Meta's e-commerce platform and even though there was a ton of documentation on how to integrate, etc. the human approval and planning piece of the project was completely dysfunctional on their side.
> Consistent with the U.S. Army tradition of honoring Native American tribes
The Continental Army enlisted Native Americans to fight alongside them against the British, and then once war ended, slaughtered them, took their lands and drove the remaining survivors to the parts of the country we cared about the least. At least we can honor them by naming our future tools of war after them.
Inferring from first principles, the down selected competitor looked to have more effective engineered lethality and manoeuvrability, smaller approach outline.
> It’s the official communication that sucks. It’s one thing for the product to be a black box if you can trust the company.
A company providing a black box offering is telling you very clearly not to place too much trust in them because it's harder to nail them down when they shift the implementation from under one's feet. It's one of my biggest gripes about frontier models: you have no verifiable way to know how the models you're using change from day to day because they very intentionally do not want you to know that. The black box is a feature for them.
I'm sober and have been in that world for several years now, and the most important (and hardest) part of getting sober was accepting that I had a problem and needed help. Macro policy decisions can help with access to an extent, but addicts fundamentally cannot make better decisions for themselves until they first realize they have a problem. And as prohibition taught us, once the demand is there, it can't just be regulated away.
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