People with schizophrenia are often not lying, they really believe the bizarre things they say. How do you know what your brain is telling you is true?
Plenty of intelligent people entertain this possibility, as well as many other possibilities, around how our world works.
If they then become obsessed with the idea being a fact and refuse to even consider updating their mental model when presented with evidence contradicting it then they have developed a fixed belief.
When that fixed belief is not common among their culture, it becomes a bizarre fixed belief.
When, as a result of their obsession with those bizarre fixed beliefs, they are unable to function (hygiene, nutrition, finances, care of their dependents, etc.) - then there’s a problem.
Or do you think a mind is a perfect thing that can never be ill?
> When that fixed belief is not common among their culture, it becomes a bizarre fixed belief.
> When, as a result of their obsession with those bizarre fixed beliefs, they are unable to function (hygiene, nutrition, finances, care of their dependents, etc.) - then there’s a problem.
But why does the issue of whether it is “common among their culture” matter? A person unable to function due to a non-bizarre fixed belief has just as big a problem as a person unable to function due to a bizarre fixed belief, if we assume the same degree of functional impairment in each case. The question of whether the belief is “bizarre” seems irrelevant, and possibly even encoding cultural prejudice
“Common among their culture” is a quick way of determining whether lots of other people are able to hold this belief and function fine. It also suggests an origin for the belief that isn’t unique to the person. You can’t go around saying “ah this person’s problem is they believe in angels” if the person’s belief in angels is simply part of their religion or culture. “But they believe in imaginary beings” is not a helpful observation in that context.
> “Common among their culture” is a quick way of determining whether lots of other people are able to hold this belief and function fine.
But some people’s functioning is impaired by beliefs common to their culture, whereas other people have very unusual beliefs but aren’t impaired by them to anywhere near the same degree
One person obsesses so much over “culture war” topics they lose their job… another person spends all their free time contemplating elaborate idiosyncratic theories of parallel universes, yet still manages to put a lid on it at work to a sufficient degree to keep their job. The first person has a non-bizarre obsession with serious functional impairment (they lose their job due to it), the second a bizarre obsession but the degree of functional impairment is significantly less. So the fact that we label one obsession “bizarre” and the other “non-bizarre” seems of little relevance
Spent about 12mo on Linux (Ubuntu, Debian, Mint) and there were just too many issues.
Ubuntu had weird quirks that almost always turned out to be related to my using a snap package. Of course I wasted countless hours getting to the point where I realised that was the issue.
Mint stopped booting once for unknown reasons on modern hardware and I had to reinstall. Another time I wasted half my day trying to get my whatever-the-distro-calls-taskbar to reappear when it decided to disappear. Debian was stable but every time I had an issue I had to battle through advice that was too new to apply.
Linux is great at making me feel like I’m crazy - I must have wasted 2 hours trying to figure out how to get an app image to run nicely from the whatever-the-distro-calls-a-start-button. Everything seemed so complex and backwards compared to Windows. I have to configure the icon myself?! This was automatic in Windows 3.1. I wasted so much time thinking I was missing a better way only to realise, nope, this is the way. It was bizarre that everybody was happy to run a random 3rd party GitHub app to solve this. Unbelievable that in 2025 downloading an app and getting an icon to start it involved so much complexity (appimage vs flatpak vs snap vs gz vs sh… who the hell has time to figure this out?!).
Eventually I decided I’d had enough and don’t want to spend the rest of my life messing around like I’m a teenager with all the time in the world, and switched everything over to Apple, which is working out great.
OTOH I recently started a new position and was given both a win11 laptop and a win11 cloud desktop and the experience after having used Fedora at pro level for the last 10 years is frustrating.
Virtual Desktop is broken. You can't quickly move a window both on a different screen and virtual desktop at the same time. You need to do it in 2 steps. There are some type of windows (like auth ones) that will appear on all virtual desktop regardless of your wishes.
Windows updates that don't go through with obscure, non informative, codes. When you use a search engine for it, you are led to Microsoft Community with absolutely zero solutions. Sometimes after a random amount of days failing and random reboots, they end up going through.
Hitting win key and trying to search for an app or document randomly freeze. The popup menu appears but you can't type anything. Badically if you don't put apps icons in your taskbar you are never sure you will be able to start it without opening a terminal and starting it from powershell.
There are various stupid stuff, like why can't I create a symlink in my own user directory without being an administrator?
I can't put the taskbar wherever I want. I am fairly sure that last time I used a windows 10 years or so ago I could have the taskbar at the top or on the side. In win2000 and XP too.
UI is super slow all the time.
Peoole complain about appimage/flatpal/snap, this is worse on windows where you have random exe installer, winget, chocolatey, scoop and the windows store. Worse even when winget you seem to still have to go through the interactive installer. If I am using the command line, that's because I want a modern package installation and the app ready, not having to click next n times.
It also took my IT 2 weeks to solve an issue where whatever security tool they are using was complaining that my brand new computer was infringing a number of security policies and my access to some resources online would be limited.
And I am forgetting a lot of other frustrations but basically it feels like you are fighting the OS all the time and an insane amount of time is lost doing so. It doesn't help that I am not allowed to install WSL.
The impression I have is that YotLD windows migration evangelism is honest so long as you don't go off the beaten track, but as soon as you do it gets hairy quick and that's where I find some of the evangelists dishonest by omission. It's fine if you just use a browser, or software as provided by a repository, or your steam games work and you don't need/want to mod/tinker with them. Otherwise you might be dropping someone recently transplanted into unfamiliar territory and they haven't build up a new knowledge base yet.
A prison sentence for not providing captions on an OF video isn’t overreach? I’m not sure if I’m being hyperbolic or not, the article didn’t go into any meaningful depth.
I bet you a beer nobody will go to jail for not captioning an onlyfans video, because that is not how regulations work.
There is a range of fines, and a minor non-repeat infringement will obviously not get you the maximum penalty.
But consider the case where a person cannot book a medical appointment, or ask a refund, or claim insurance. The company will be fined, and if the offense does not get fixed than _at some point_ the responsible person may face jail time.
To given an idea, one of the more relevant lawsuits on the GDPR was about linking to Google Fonts/Google CDN resources on a blog.
The judge in that case held that doing so is a privacy violation since the webpage now connects to Google without the users' consent. Total fine? €150. An extremely token amount because the blog owner obviously didn't intend to break the law. Quite the contrast to the million dollar fines you hear about for big tech companies.
This is the first time I've heard about these new rules on EU digital accessibility and yet I am absolutely sure that you are being hyperbolic about "a prison sentence for not providing captions on an OF video". Assume good faith.
Laws are not computer code. They're not run, unthinkingly, by a judge acting as a CPU.
We have humans (like juries) looking to see whether an offence was committed. Are they going to find someone guilty of an offence like this?
Then we have judges who look at the whole facts of a case to determine a sentence[0]. Would they think it proportionate for a first-time offender to be imprisoned for this?
On the other hand, if a large content creator has been repeatedly warned not to break the law and they've ignored those warnings, why shouldn't they be punished?
[0] Yes, some jurisdictions have sentencing guidelines and mandatory minimums.
That’s perfectly valid. Maybe add it to the top of your readme explaining what problem it solves (need to sync files between machines and all you can use is python).
It’s the kids who win big you need to worry about (anecdotal, not me, but a big win concurrent with a bad time during formative years can have a lasting impact on people who then ultimately become addicts).
> I suspect the technical structure is not determinative
Correct. The courts care about intent, structure is secondary.
This is the classic “you don’t get to walk into my house just because you found an unlocked door” that HN users struggle to understand when the digital equivalent is under discussion e.g. an unsecured API.
> This is the classic “you don’t get to walk into my house just because you found an unlocked door” that HN users struggle to understand when the digital equivalent is under discussion e.g. an unsecured API.
Except this is not how DeFi and dApps work. The network is decentralized. At no point was any unauthorized access to a system performed. This is not the same as entering private property through an unlocked door, or using SQL injection to gain unauthorized access to a system.
This is not to say Medjedovic is innocent; he made extortionist threats, and gleefully admitted he stole money from people, so wire fraud charges seem obvious. As you say, the courts care about intent, and his intent was clear. But you can't apply the normal charges of accessing a computer without authorization here.
> MEDJEDOVIC understood that his conduct circumvented the intended functioning [...] MEDJEDOVIC discussed a plan to "steal crypto," referred to the exploit as involving "glitch" and "fake" liquidity, and described the code for the exploit as a "rape."
> MEDJEDOVIC also prepared a "POST-EXPLOITATION" plan for himself, which included, among other things, "KEEP the configs Burn the evidence, including the histfile" and "Book flight to: Pack Bags," as well as another file labeled "Decisions and Mistakes," in which he wrote, "Going On the run / Yes / Chance of getting caught<Payoff for not getting caught"
> Immediately after obtaining the flash loan, MEDJEDOVIC wrote "Raping Now" in the public event long for the transaction.
There's extremely strong evidence that he believes he's committing a crime, and specifically "steal[ing] crypto" in his own words, so yes. And when you have records effectively saying "I believe I am committing a crime", it becomes a lot easier to convince a jury you committed a crime.
Thanks for this; so we have: wire fraud, money laundering, and an interesting charge “unauthorized damage to a protected computer“ that sees the Ethereum EVM as a distributed computer…
Yeah, this one is very interesting; the charge is for "intentionally caus[ing] damage without authorization to one or more protected computers, including the Ethereum Virual Machine (EVM), which was implemented through, among other nodes, a full Ethereum node running in the Eastern District of New York."
This seems ambitious. The implications seem quite dire; if I'm running a full Ethereum node do I have the ability to say which smart contracts are "authorized" to execute on my implementation of the EVM? If I see a smart contract do a trade I don't like, is someone committing a crime against me? I don't think this will stick if Medjedovic ever goes to court.
> when you interact with a smart contract, the smart contract is the contract
This is one viewpoint but certainly not the only viewpoint and definitely not the viewpoint of the authors of the contracts in question.
Smart contracts are a novel method of executing contracts, but like all contracts the parties involved and the contract itself is subject to legal oversight in the relevant jurisdictions.
You’re assigning a set of beliefs to an entity that doesn’t hold them. The authors of the code are pursuing the matter in court i.e. they see smart contracts as an efficient decentralised solution to a complex problem within the existing legal framework.
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