Oh come on. So you're rooting for the evil genius in the comic book movie? You would harm millions of people to move up the financial success yardstick?

I don't think many people would agree with such positions.

I do think that people who have succeeded financially might adopt that ethos as an ex post rationalization.

You could engineer the feed to maximize user satisfaction, rather than maximizing usage.

But what if maximum satisfaction causes maximum usage? If you make the perfect feed that shows someone exactly what they want to see at every moment, people are going to use that all the time.

You're assuming wanting to watch something always leads to being satisfied after seeing it. Which is increasingly not the case. People are doomscrolling for hours, and then regret doomscrolling for hours rather than doing something meaningful instead.

If Intuit and other tax preparers can protect their tax preparation rents at the expense of all income earners, then it is not difficult to believe that the medical industry is also able to protect its own rents.

There are two basic topics:

1. Talk about them. Start by paying attention to them. Then when you notice something that was clearly an intentional choice on their part, say something nice about it. Listen carefully to what they say, and follow up in response without filtering yourself.

2. Talk about us. Notice some aspect of experience that you are both sharing. The weather is the most popular and safest topic.

Can you think of any instances where powerful tech companies broke laws, perhaps in ways that increased profit?

I think in social media and search, clear ad labeling laws exist and are also enforced. I can imagine that OpenAI will be under a lot of scrunity and it will be easy enough for outside investigators to prove how ads are served and if it's are done illegally (e.g. by creating an ad account and then testing how their ads are served).

Will they still try to skirt the laws? Of course.

I can't think of any. Thankfully, we are saved.

tries to think .. 67 .. sigma rizzler .. AI cats dancing .. hehehe .. gives up .. yeah no. nothing comes to mind

It's not complicated. That random garbage increases advertising revenues. Maybe not from every user, but certainly in the aggregate.

It's also possible that users could misuse the reporting system, in order to get other users' accounts suspended.

Requiring N distinct reports of a suspension reason would seem to reduce misuses of the reporting system.

The 17-reports threshold might have been found to balance type-1 and type-2 errors, as account removals are costly actions when made in error or as a result of reporting-system misuse.

It sounds to me like you should contact your good friends more often.

Many people do not know that Impact Factor is gameable. Unethical publications have gamed it. Therefore a higher IF may or may not indicate higher prominence. Use Scimago journal rankings for non-gameable scores.

Science and Nature are mol-bio journals that publish the occasional physics paper with a title you'd expect on the front page of The Weekly World News.

claims like these require a source

Source for what?

That Thomas Jefferson would be cagey around nukes?

Or sources that Privateers were a thing?