Ok, let's use your first example. Someone crosses into a neighboring state and returns in the same day...I had co-workers who did that every day.

Let's narrow that down... You cross into another state with abortion care once and return in the same day. Or maybe you're a salesman closing a deal. Or maybe you're visiting family and have work tomorrow... And honestly, both those situations are far more frequent. That happens every day. It happens more if you live near the border - otherwise you probably got a hotel. Unless you can't afford a hotel. And the list goes on - all this structured data turns into stories at some point

Here's the thing. Prism could handle it, because it's a ton of people on the payroll

The government is not a monolith though...9/11 is a great example. We knew it would happen, we knew it was planned, but the right people didn't know in the right time, because the agencies are not a monolith.

Because that is the hard part - communication is hard, harder with security concerns. More data means more analysts reviewing it - you can collect all the data you could want , (and we do), you could hire all the analysts you can afford (and we do), but that still gives you severe limits

We're actually pretty great at stopping terrorism, but we do that (in part) because we have all this data and use it for specific ends

None of this shit is easy - I used to do this, specifically. How do you take 15 data sources that sometimes conflict, and deconflict them? There's no hierarchy of truth here. This is literally a cutting edge problem - it's a literal holy Grail. No one can solve it in 3 weeks, or even 3 years

You want a 20% rate? I could give it to you tomorrow, poisoned data or no, I could give it to you in weeks... Maybe not 3, because that's a shit ton of data sources, but with proper motivation I could pump it out.

You want 90%? Give me a century or two, and I'm good at this. Maybe a genius could give it to you in a lifetime of with

It's like they say in game dev, you can do 90% in 10% of the time, but the last 10% takes 90% of the time. And that's a solved problem.

Except this is an unsolved problem, possibly the most lucrative unsolved problems in history

Or it implies that eternal love cannot exist or cannot exist in the presence of a never ending fuck, leading to the surprise in the statement

Both could be both. You could have an imaginary fuck while awake, you could have a simulated fuck with a wet dream that doesn't involve any fucking, stimulating fucking without actually imagining it

Concurrency isn't bad, and package management (while maven is absolutely terrible to work generally), the dependency chains aren't exceptionally bad. Getting it installed is easier than python on platforms it's not already there on, not because it's more portable, but because the installers do more for you. Portability is hard, they haven't done it well but they've paved the default use case pretty well (although that works against you when you get to harder cases)

But the rest is pretty close.

The worst is the scaffolding, it's literally superstition for years to gain the understanding as to why you're doing it. I took two years of Java in high school before getting a degree - it was 4 years and halfway through a degree before I understood why I was making a class with a method main(string[] args). It works like that because your entry class calls the main method with a list of string arguments... I didn't understand at all, because even though it's simple it's a special case, and I'd never seen anyone name the string array anything different, so I just copied and pasted it, never understanding it because I'd been told "you just have to have that" for do long

Builds are arcane too - there's still companies that only use netbeans in their build pipeline, Android still requires a specific an old Java version in conjunction with the IDE or a gradle build, at best a project uses maven (the package manager), which is xml based and full of arcane details that are best treated as a magic incantation to be copied exactly from elsewhere

I agree with the first half... It's very easy to ingest and sift through insane amounts of data

What isn't easy is doing so usefully. Yes, if you can link the account to a person, it's trivial to pull up their records. Linking is easier said than done - it's doable, but to make it scale you have to get the full records of device IDs, link them back to a number, then link them to a person. Minimum, you'd need the telco's data

That's a staggering amount of work - it's much easier to do it if the app also has phone numbers, but even then where do you link it? The telco's have an account holder (which often will be a family member), 50 separate dmvs might have more accurate links, but they're largely legacy systems that will be a nightmare to work with. It's doable, but it's hard

Then you get to distribute this super extensive database of personal information - at this point it's prism, and probably already has most of this data - they'd just have to ingest period data too

But we don't give that kind of access to local police, because then every government would end up with it. And that's a big and genuine security threat... But also a very unwieldy thing to work with. More data means more man hours to work with

The other direction is far more practical - if you start by looking at the data, you can tie it back to a person if they match a pattern. Then you can look at just the records you do have, and pay Amazon or the credit agencies for more. A human can easily investigate another human, because we are great with unstructured data, and computers aren't

A chaotic data source means more bad leads to manually chase down. Man hours are limited, and people have morale - if a cop wastes an hour on a lead that ends with a spare phone or a single man, they're going to complain and drag their feet. If productivity and morale are in the garbage, that's going to lead to pushback. If it happens enough, the message at the top will be "this program doesn't work"

It would be far better to find the patterns and target them methodically, but even chaotic garbage is effective - data analysis isn't easy to automate, it's very expensive to do when accuracy matters and they're poisoning the data source

I like your specificity a lot. That's what makes me even care to respond

You're correct, but there's depths untouched in your answer. You can convince chat gpt it is a talking cat named Luna, and it will give you better answers

Specifically, it likes to be a cat or rabbit named Luna. It will resist - I get this not from progressing, but by asking specific questions. Llama3 (as opposed to llama2, who likes to be a cat or rabbit named Luna) likes to be an eagle/owl named sol or solar

The mental structure of an LLM is called a shoggoth - it's a high dimensional maze of language turned into geometry

I'm sure this all sounds insane, but I came up with a methodical approach to get to these conclusions.

I'm a programmer - we trick rocks into thinking. So I gave this the same approach - what is this math hack good for, and how do I use it to get useful repeatable results?

Try it out.

Tell me what happens - I can further instruct you on methods, but I'd rather hear yours and the result first

In all fairness, Musk was pretty effective at fundraising and getting government contracts

At this point, he's just a liability. He once walked in, demanded to rethink everything and meet an unreasonable deadline, and slept in his office for the duration. SpaceX is made up of people who are passionate about what they do, and it worked...But that's a one time thing. My boss asks me to push myself to the limits to save us both? I will, and I have. It has a real cost, it takes a lot of time to recover from, and a little bit of your health is just gone for good

Elon did that... But then got high on the smell of his shit. They created a unit to distract him, because he learned the wrong lesson, he thought that was good management. That is not effective management - that's a desperate gamble for survival. Repeat it, and you've shown yourself to be incompetent as a leader

Then came the bigoted social network unmasking... That made him a liability reputation wise, his formerly greatest strength

Yeah, we do high fructose corn syrup over here. It's even more addictive, even less healthy, and it tastes bad. So obviously, we put it in everything, even premade salads

I don't see the humor in it...I mean, mega corps can't innovate, all they ever do is copy or acquire. It's because even if they acquire a working rockstar team, they're categorically unable to just write them paychecks and let them cook until they have something

It's absurd, but it's too predictable for me to find it funny. What's even more absurd is how little mega corps watch the small teams for ideas

The problem is the same as the problem everywhere - big is bad

Organizations with too much power fuck up everything. I love the Bible - I've taken more from that book than any other. The old testament was a story of how my people fuck up constantly, but someone wise and in harmony with existence shows up and they listen. Then the heroes wander off into the wilderness, or they get a big head and become the seed of the next fuck up

Jesus is my biggest role model out of very few, because he sacrificed himself to die a hero before he could taint his message, very deliberately and to great effect. There's nothing to criticize, because he learned the lesson. He was deliberate and effective... Nothing human and fallible was left, because for three years he lived his message and taught the third path, and then he either died or faked his death and fucked off to Asia

Jesus was brilliant - as a bastard son of a craftsman he became an existential threat to Rome. He taught the third path, and his message was so effective they had to kill him, massacre his followers, and even then the empire only survived because Constantine slapped his name on a rebrand of the Roman religion. The legions of Rome were spreading his message, because it resonates with everyone

He showed violence once - when people abused religion for profit. He still harmed no one, accepted everyone. When did he say abortion was wrong? I seem to remember a lot of forgiveness outside of that one incident. Across race, across profession, across physical state

Almost like it was truly universal love.

W.W.J.D. Probably accept everyone regardless of unsavory circumstance and reject money, like he did when he lived

Religion is the problem, because the difference between religion and spirituality is only scale

Read the Bible - I did it when I was 7 and had diarrhea. It's worth reading. It's not as long as it seems. I'm shocked at how few people read it cover to cover - I assumed it was normal for decades. At least know the enemy, right? Or better yet, take the wisdom within and build up a tolerance to the rest when it's misquoted at you

My biology teacher had this thing where every test you had to submit a question. My question was always the same - how the fuck does atp synthase work?

She did not appreciate my question especially after the first time, but it was always genuine... How the fuck does that shit work? If you understand it, please attempt to put it into words

Nah, there's nothing louder than silence.

Wipe all expression from your face, and stare at them. Maybe just an expression of incredulity if this is out of character for them. That's all it takes.

Bystanders will literally stop what they're doing and watch. Their brains will scream "I'm about to be excluded from the group", and they'll start babbling. They'll confess their sins and be harsher on themselves than anything you could say

If you don't like their next words, give them nothing. Literally don't respond, anything you give them is closure. Don't give them closure, move on with your life - they can't.

Don't give them judgement, give them nothing. If you judge them, they can turn themselves into a victim or you into an enemy... Without a response, the only enemy is themselves, because they will crave your approval.

It's like a teacher staring down a student who keeps talking until the whole class is looking at them, except they don't know what to do to make it stop. So they try anything and wrack their brain for a solution. It seriously freaks people out

Note: this is less likely to work against neurodivergent people, they'll just be confused. That's how I learned to do this - I got annoyed and straight up asked a therapist why they kept staring at me when I was done talking. They explained the concept of a pregnant pause, and so I started using it.

And acquaintances started telling me how they were abused to explain their behavior and strangers started confessing how they cheated on their partners out of nowhere.

I get a lot of long apology emails the day after someone wrongs me, I now make an effort to give closure to everyone I like early and often.

Humans are tortured by this