Unpopular take. While I agree with the sentiment, I still think it took some fortitude to walk away from the golden handcuffs of a successful finance career to do an Internet startup at that time. Bezos said he ran the idea past his boss at the time, and the boss said something like "that's a good idea, but not for someone who already has a great job like you." So I do applaud him for that. Bloomberg made a similar transition.

Suppose Bezos burns 80% of his net worth playing with his willy in his garage and decides to wrap it up. He goes straight back to his cushy HF job, 3 years behind in his career if he can't manage to market his experience as some kind of lofty journey landing him a better role than when he left. Let's not pretend it was brave - he had the foundations to take the risks and still come out just fine.

Nonsense. He had comfort and security to fall back on. His family was also loaded.

He wasn't walking away from anything. He would have been fine if it didn't work.

The reality is he had a safety net to fall back on. 99% of people do not.

From the point of view of a good 50% or so of the world (if not more), pretty much every Westerner has comfort and safety to fall back on.

Except it is simply not true that every Westerner has safety to fall back on. There would be no homelessness crisis if this was true.

I said "pretty much". The homelessness crisis in, say, the US, affects a relatively small portion of the population; from quick looking up figures, it's less than 1% of the population.

I'm no expert on any of this, but as far as I understand it, homelessness is usually 1. transitory, and 2. usually tied to other serious issues like mental health issues, drug abuse etc. It's usually not a "lack of resources".

The homelessness goes up and down woth economy and housing availability. Sure, people worh mental health issues are first to loose ... and being homeless makes all the mental health issues worst.

Like, common. And beyond homeless, you have people one paycheck away from being homeless. And people unable to pay for drugs they need - like insuline.

Yes, if all you know about West is what you see in movies, then everyone is rich.

> 99% of people do not.

Which really reflects to how most people's parents/family/society is pathetic.

Now I'm not merely talking about a safely net after one burns up millions in a startup but I'm taking about say a safety net after loosing a job etc. I think most people (like me) would be just happy to have stability in life rather than yearn for being financially successful. The precarious existence is depressing.

Are you saying the free speech of Racists should not be defended? Sorry, that's what it seems like from your comment?

The workouts, including P90X, were great. The MLM part, which you and I may not have been aware of, was on the coaching side. Coaches would try to recruit other coaches to be downstream of them, and so on. Part of it was also selling their over priced protein shakes. But yes, if you were just a person who bought a P90X dvd and did the workouts, your were oblivious of this and just got in good shape and loved the products.

This. As a junior lawyer at a large law firm, one of my jobs was checking every cited case to confirm that it was cited correctly, that it actually supported the theory that it was being used to support, and that it hadn't been overturned or qualified by subsequent case law. It's a process called Shepardizing that every law student does. So I can't fathom how fictitious cases could possibly be included in a brief. Also, just slightly mischaracterizing a case in a brief could be cause for being sanctioned. So I don't see how this type of issue would not undoubtedly result in sanctions.

I understand why AI would find and use the weird phrase (vegetative electron microscopy) if it's used on the Internet. But I'm confused about the term being used in scientific papers? Does that mean the scientific papers were written by (or with the help of) AI systems? And the folks writing the scientific papers didn't proof read their papers?

> Does that mean the scientific papers were written by (or with the help of) AI systems? And the folks writing the scientific papers didn't proof read their papers?

That seems to be exactly the implication, which is extremely disappointing.

Not surprising at all though.

It was digitized and translated wrong by computer systems pre-Generative AI then GenAI comes along and uses it in reference material. People either reading the original text or brainstorming via GenAI comes along across this term and judge it as authoritative. So it persists

Not only that, AI is used for translation a lot nowadays, and the trust in its output seems to be quite high. If you're not a native English speaker and aren't surrounded by many, you might have a much harder time finding such a mistake while proofreading.

I've seen students hand in auto-translated garbage 10 years ago. Nowadays auto-translation works well enough that you are at least able to read it.

Just another vote here for Free Tax USA. Another point is that they iterate and improve every year. Last year my son had to file in two different states, and the process flow was a bit wonky (you had to create a space holder return for the second state before returning back to the first state form). They fixed it this year and it worked great.

Good points. But they did open themselves up to this by blatantly discriminating against Asian students. I mean, "you have an ulterior motive in arguing against our hugely racist policies" is not a great defense.

I run a small 20 year old service business in the US. Just getting a $300K line of credit from a bank required a lot of paperwork and both the company and me personally being on the hook. It took about a month to secure. In contrast, on a different occasion a secured a personal home equity line of credit for $100K in a bout 5 minutes.

Was there a mortgage right in the mix in your second occasion?

Nice job. I played with the industrial set (grouping) and it worked well. The groupings concept looks good. And the intensity adjusting is an interesting concept. I've tried or signed up for a lot of ambient sites over the years, and this one definitely introduces a few concepts I haven't previously seen. Good luck!

--I think there is a reason why legalese is not plain English

This is true. Part of the precision of legalese is that the meanings of some terms have already been more precisely defined by the courts.

This opens an interesting possibility for a purely symbol-based legal code. This would probably improve clarity when it came to legal phrases that overlap common English, and you could avoid ambiguity when it came to language constructs, like in this case[1], where some drivers were losing overtime pay because of a comma in the overtime law.

[1] https://cases.justia.com/federal/appellate-courts/ca1/16-190...

Yeah, my theory on this has always been that a lot of programming efficiency gains have been the ability to unambiguously define behavior, which mostly comes from drastically restricting the possible states and inputs a program can achieve.

The states and inputs that lawyers have to deal with tend to much more vague and imprecise (which is expected if you're dealing with human behavior and not text or some other encodeable input) and so have to rely on inherently ambiguous phrases like "reasonable" and "without undue delay."