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By whom? The regulators are the ones signing up for these services.

The FBI. This sounds like a CJIS violation

Buddy, I have some awful news. On the plus side, you can email the FBI director at his personal email to try to get him on the case.

You're being snide, but I have first hand experience in this area. If random Flock employees can just pull up production data on a whim without being properly vetted, agencies, states, and the FBI will take this pretty seriously.

They don't take it seriously because of some moral, "We care about your privacy" stance. They take it seriously because if there's something that makes them look bad in there, they want to be able to control the narrative. If a Flock camera catches and officer doing something they shouldn't be doing, the agency/FBI doesn't want a disgruntled Flock employee to be able to sign in and grab that video and give it to the news.


What does the FBI have to do with video streams at a JCC? And isn't flock doing the vetting?

This sounds a lot like BD guys doing demos with random data from a customer that agreed to show allow access and a local citizen getting very bent out of shape about it.


Because it's not a requirement, and most people are not intentionally or accidentally defrauding the government.

The issue is that there is no incentive to do the additional work necessary to generate reproducible results because of the pressure to constantly generate sufficiently novel results to publish.

If you spend the additional time required to have fully reproducible results and your competition is not, you're probably going to lose the game (where the game is obtaining more funding).

Not generating reproducible results doesn't mean you're a fraud, but the absence of a requirement to generate them in order to publish means that it's easier for fraudsters to operate that it would be with that requirement.


As I said to the parent poster, that's not what it means at all. It means that you should look at the system's incentives, not the behavior of individuals as the root cause of any issues.

You don't need to be a "cheating scum" to succeed, but there are not enough checks in place to prevent that from being a successful strategy for someone who wouldn't succeed otherwise.

The people who need to change the most are the nameless "they" who issue funding because they have the most control over these systems, along with the publishing cartel which has almost no redeeming value in today's environment.


Nobody says the phrase when they are calling people to look at a system's incentives. They use the phrase as a response to personal criticism excusing and rationalizing their own bad behavior.

It is a deflection of personal responsibility, full stop.


That's objectively false, with the article in question being example #1.

And yet changing the game generally has better results than trying to change the players.

Agreed. Accountability matters, but changing the game usually scales better than hoping for better individual behaviour under the same pressures. Academia needs systems that reward transparency, verification, and contribution more directly. That is part of what we are building with Liberata if of interest: https://liberata.info/beta-signup

Some unsolicited feedback from someone who was at one point part of your target audience for this product:

* You need to put some text on the pages on your site describing what this actually is and who is working on it. No one is taking the time to watch videos (especially one that is 9 minutes long!??!?!?!)

* The problems listed don't give me the impression that the team has much experience with publishing in academia and are generally unfocused

* Related to the item above, you're both making this way more complicated than it needs to be, and completely ignoring or glossing over the primary issues at hand (the network effect of the existing publisher cartel and the tension between the requirements for obtaining funding and producing reproducible research findings)

I don't think you're in a position to have much impact on the major issues, making any impact on the more minor ones kind of irrelevant, but if I'm wrong: I would focus on making it easy for academic communities to start their own open access journals (e.g. the Journal of Machine Learning Research) and provide a tool to automate citation checking to start, with steps towards content management for the content that would allow an external party to reproduce the results from the paper).

Recruiting people who can break away from the current model to build a new one is the only real chance of success, and your role would presumably be to make it easy for them to make that change. This is not a novel concept, and many platforms already exist to enable open access journal publication, yet their adoption is not widespread.

The question I think you should address on your website (in text form) is: What are you doing differently that will cause a different outcome?


> Don't get upset at me for being an awful person, I probably wouldn't have succeeded if I'd been a good person

That's not what that phrase means in general, and it's normally not used to describe one's own behavior (when it is, I would say your definition is closer to correct because it's being used as an excuse for antisocial behavior).

The point is that the system's incentives are at a minimum misaligned with what would be considered "good" behavior and in the worst case actively encourage undesirable behavior.

It is often the case that people have no meaningful alternative to participating in these systems and have no control over the rules, and the behavior they induce is generally not bad enough to be seen as "awful", let alone bad enough to call the person themselves "awful".


It's a lightly edited stream of consciousness commentary that appears to have been written by a non-native English speaker, potentially translated from Dutch into English after the initial writing.

I wouldn't say it's pleasant to read, but I didn't have any issue understanding it.


How do you delegate, direct, and validate results if you have no idea what you're looking at?

This is the same issue many managers of people have for the same reason.


In this case, the "fall guy" is the person who actually introduced the code in question into the codebase.

They wouldn't be some patsy that is around just to take blame, but the actual responsible party for the issue.


Imagine your a factory owner and you need a chemical delivered from across the country, but the chemical is dangerous and if the tanker truck drives faster than 50 miles per hour it has a 0.001% chance per mile of exploding.

You hire an independent contractor and tell him that he can drive 60 miles per hour if he wants to but if it explodes he accepts responsibility.

He does and it explodes killing 10 people. If the family of those 10 people has evidence you created the conditions to cause the explosion in order to benefit your company, you're probably going to lose in civil court.

Linus benefits from the increase velocity of people using AI. He doesn't get to put all the liability on the people contributing.


Cool analogy! Which has nothing to do with the topic in hand.


Want to bring something meaningful to the conversation?

That is a nonsensical analogy on multiple levels, and doesn't even support your own argument.


Nice rebuttal.


Why would I put much effort into responding to a post like yours, which makes no sense and just shows that you don't understand what you're talking about?


Why would you put any effort into it at all?


And how does picking and choosing which social media platforms they blast content onto fight fascism? Are Tiktok and Facebook leadership known for their antifascist stances?


Encouraging people to use X drives money into the hands of fascists.


Cross posting content isn't really encouraging people to use it.

If they want to make some principled stand against toxic social media, then have at it. This is pure pandering to a very specific group.


Twitter, before Elon, was the company that literally banned your account for sharing the hunter Biden laptop story. That story was purported to be a "conspiracy theory" but was actually true. And people were locked out of their account for sharing it. That is true fascism.


[flagged]


It's from Latin for a bundle of sticks.

Everything - government, companies, social clubs, etc - unified as elements of one cohesive State, all directed towards one shared goal.

It's not about being past some position on the badness meter, it's about how things are shaped.


That cost should be $0, so that's not the issue.


That cost being $0 would be the most extreme case of the issue.


What is the cost of posting to X in addition to Tiktok, Bluesky, and Facebook? If it's not effectively $0, it should be.

This is completely performative, and I personally don't think it's the best move.


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