If an active shooter is the anticipated threat, how does a turnstile effectively stop that? Many of these turnstiles are specifically meant to allow people through in emergencies, and aren't strong enough to withstand bullets or even a sturdy kick. The elevator restrictions would be a better chokepoint, but as the article noted they didn't turn those back on.

It doesn't effectively stop it, but it forces them to give up some element of surprise. They have to either start the attack or start a trespassing action that will initiate contact with police.

Many turnstiles can be jumped over. In this case it’s more about preventing theft and espionage.

I knew someone years and years ago who worked as an assistant to lawyers. The firm had a second office in the state capital, turns out someone was walking in and stealing laptops. I think they had done it three times the last I had heard.

Lawyer laptops going missing is a problem. I don’t know how they ended up fixing that.

> Lawyer laptops going missing is a problem.

It shouldn't be. If there was a particular profession that I would expect to properly secure their devices lawyers would be near the top of the list.

I think you're right, but I also think it's worthwhile to look at Edward Bernays in the early 1900s and his specific influence on how companies and governments to this day shape deliberately shape public opinion in their favor. There's an argument that his work and the work of his contemporaries was a critical point in the flooding of the collective consciousness with what we would consider propaganda, misinformation, or covert advertising.

> There's an argument that his work and the work of his contemporaries was a critical point in the flooding of the collective consciousness with what we would consider propaganda

I would rather say that Bernays was a keen observer and understood mass behavior and the potential of mass media like no one else in his time. Soren Kierkegaard has written about the role of public opinion and mass media in the 19th and had a rather pessimistic outlook on it. You have stuff like the Dreyfuss Affair where mass media already played a role in polarizing people and playing into the ressentiments of the people. There were signs that people were overwhelmed by mass media even before Bernays. I would say that Bernays observed these things and used those observations to develop systematic methods for influencing the masses. The problem was already there, Bernays just exploited it systematically.

My blog post is a more detailed expression of a sentence that starts with "my personal experience". I think that's fine.

And of course I read the article. That's why my sentence explicitly says "satisfied or very satisfied" whereas the text you quote only selects the "very satisfied". One can imagine that if I had only linked without reading I could not possibly have guessed 81% correctly either.

I'm not saying "just stop being depressed". I'm questioning that any significant portion of the population is depressed. I think that's valid.

I can only speak anecdotally from what I have seen in TikTok videos and TikTok comments, and yes, a significant portion of people in society are very depressed, and drinking/smoking/screwing their way through it, putting on a Joker smile.

I think certain populations have this effect, yes. As an example, teen suicides have genuinely risen in the US in the post-smartphone/post-social-media era. So I think the evidence (suicides are not subject to measurement error as much) is pretty strong that certain populations (all teenagers, for instance) are encountering unhappiness to a great degree.

But TikTok is renowned for having an algorithmically tailored feed that is specifically engagement maximizing. While there are some selection effects in the people one encounters in normal life, surely one must concede that an algorithmically tailored feed maximizing engagement cannot possibly be anything but highly selected.

Learning is effortful. People can travel and not learn anything, but people can not learn from many things they should learn from. Travel is something you can learn from no matter where you go, but you typically have to put in the effort.

This is an interesting idea, I think clickbait titles are one of many problems with our engagement-based social media tools today. For the sake of experimentation and transparency, here's the suggested titles from ChatGPT 4. They seem to be more descriptive and accurate overall.

---

Possible alternative titles that better match the article’s content:

How Phishers Are Using SendGrid to Target SendGrid Users with Political Bait

– Accurately reflects the mechanism (SendGrid abuse), the audience, and the novel political/social-engineering angle.

SendGrid Account Takeovers Are Fueling a Sophisticated Phishing Ecosystem

– More technical / HN-native framing, avoids culture-war implications.

Phishception: Politically Targeted Phishing Sent Through Compromised SendGrid Accounts

– Highlights the core insight and the self-reinforcing nature of the attack.

Sure, it worked and then it stopped working. Upvotes, reviews, social media, and word-of-mouth have been co-opted by advertising and marketing.

Or maybe companies turned products that were one-time purchases into monthly subscriptions. Or companies made it incredibly hard to cancel monthly subscriptions. Or companies will continue to charge and auto-renew us even when we clearly don't use the product. Or companies will unilaterally degrade our service or push us to lower tiers in order to better serve customers who aren't you. Or companies will have us pay a monthly subscription, and then also sell our data to the highest bidder anyway.

Maybe many of these companies have never had our interest at heart, and people are tired of feeling constantly screwed over and seen as a revenue stream instead of customers.

One thing I don't understand in these conversations is why we're treating LLMs as if they are completely interchangeable with chatbots/assistants.

A car is not just an engine, it's a drivetrain, a transmission, wheels, steering, all of which affect the end-product and its usability. LLMs are no different, and focusing on alignment without even addressing all the scaffolding that intermediates the exchange between the user and the LLM in an assistant use case seems disingenuous.

> If the only tactic the police knew was to pull over every Infiniti with tinted windows and no plates, the crime rate would drop to zero.

Then the question is, why don't they do that? Why do we need a surveillance state to enable police to do what residents might consider the bare minimum?

I think the broad thrust of your argument is right on the money. Officers' perception of heightened (or unfair) accountability has turned every police interaction into a risk for the officers and department, too. However, I think the problem actually goes even deeper. The incentives are all aligned to launder responsibility through automated systems, and we'll end up sleepwalking into AI tyranny if we're not careful.

Where I am, police officers get paid healthy 6-figure salaries plus crazy OT to boot. $300k total comp is absolutely not unheard of. I think the police have basically figured out that the best way to stay on the gravy train is to do as little as possible. Certainly stop enforcing traffic laws entirely, as those are the highest risk interactions. Just rest n' vest, baby. So you get to hear about "underfunded" and "overworked" police departments while observing overpaid police officers who are structurally disincentivized from doing their jobs.

The bottom line is: People want policing, but adding more police officers won't deliver results and anyway is too expensive. What to do?

Enter mass surveillance and automated policing. If we can't rely on police to do the policing, we'll have to do it some other way. Oh, look at how cheap it is to put cameras up everywhere. And hey, we can get a statistical inferential model (excuse me, Artificial Intelligence!) to flag "suspicious" cars and people. Yeah yeah, privacy risks blah blah blah turnkey totalitarianism whomp whomp whomp. But think of all the criminals we can catch! All without needing police to actually do anything!

While police are expensive and practically useless at doing things people want, this technology can actually deliver results. That makes it irresistible. The problem is that it's turning our society into a panopticon and putting us all in great danger of an inescapable totalitarian state dominated by a despot and his AI army.

But those are abstract risks, further out and probabilistic in nature. Humans are terrible at making these kinds of decisions; as a population we almost always choose short-term benefit over abstract long-term risks and harms. Just look at climate change and fossil fuel consumption.

Well, then we should judge the ideas on their own merits. And it's also not a great idea.

It's a shallow, post-hoc, mystic rationalization that ignores all the work in multiple fields that actually converged to get us to this point.