Will it actually help his coin and the crypto bros? I'm not so sure.

A lot of crypto bros believe that all that crypto-assets need now is legitimacy and they'll blow up and take over the world. They also think, probably correctly, that regulation will legitimize crypto-assets. In some sense that may be true, but the ability to sidestep regulation is and always has been crypto-assets' killer feature. Take that away and they may be legitimized, but they'll also lose their only actual reason for existence, which I've got to think will ultimately be bad for crypto-coin valuations.

Trump is clearly terrified of it being released. That's why he's taken to insulting anyone who brings up Epstein, attacking the credibility of the file contents (just in case he is ultimately forced to release them) and engaging in delaying tactics like this grand jury testimony order.

More than that, grand jury files are secret and can generally not be released to the public. The president can ask, the AG can ask, but only the court can approve the release, and the court can only do that only as defined in the Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure, Rule 6(e)(3)(E):

The court may authorize disclosure—at a time, in a manner, and subject to any other conditions that it directs—of a grand-jury matter” in a number of situations including:

(1) in connection with a judicial proceeding;

(2) to a defendant who has come forward with evidence that something improper occurred before the grand jury and he may be entitled to have the case dismissed; or

(3) at the request of the federal government, to another jurisdiction that needs it to prosecute a case.

Which of those apply in the current situation? Granted the language says "including", rather than "limited to", but the judge will take guidance from the specified situations and unless there's some similar reason to release the files, the judge will refuse.

No, he's throwing it to a judge to decide, for three reasons (which he probably didn't come up with and probably doesn't understand).

The first is to delay and hope that people demanding the info calm down and forget about it in the meantime. The judge probably won't act quickly (they generally don't), and while the judge is thinking about it the administration can just point to the order and the judicial process and shrug, saying "Trump ordered the release, that's all we can do". That's bullshit of course, because Trump absolutely could just order the DoJ to release the files it has, but because it's mostly Trump's own people who are upset, and most of them know nothing about the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure, they'll probably buy it. For a while.

The second is so that when the judge ultimately refuses, Trump can throw the court under the bus. "Hey, I tried, but those damned courts and their activist judges", again ignoring the fact that Trump doesn't need the courts to do anything. As you pointed out, Maxwell's pending appeal may help him get this outcome.

The third is that because the grand jury testimony was focused on what Epstein and Maxwell did, so in the unlikely event that the judge does order its release, it probably won't include a lot of damaging information about other people in their circle, like Trump or his associates, that might be in the full files the DoJ has. As you pointed out, Bondi also gets to decide what parts are pertinent, so there's that filter as well.

To be clear, I strongly doubt there's a "smoking gun" in the Epstein files that could convict Trump of sex crimes. If that were there, the DoJ would probably have acted on it after he left office. But there definitely is something in those files that Trump is afraid of. Maybe it's about him, maybe it's about someone near him. But there's something he doesn't want to come out and that's why he's refusing to release the files and trying to pre-emptively discredit them in case they leak or he is somehow forced to release them.

Statistics is highly useful for CS, and calc is a prerequisite for (real) statistics.

Not if coding is all you can do. That's his point. He's not saying you don't need a degree, he's saying you do need it because it teaches more than just how to code. If all you want is to code, you don't need a degree. But if you want to be a computer scientist or a software engineer, you probably do need a degree... and Google hires computer scientists and software engineers, not coders.

Heh. That reminds me of a conversation I had with my academic advisor in the CS department back in college (~35 years ago). I had been working as a programmer for a couple of years while going to school to get my degree, and had been writing code of various sorts for a decade. I was also young and very cocky. While laying out my path to graduation we were looking at scheduling the required software engineering series. I asked if there was a way I could skip it because "I've been writing code for a while, so I'm pretty sure already learned everything on my own". The professor gave me an indulgent smile and said "I think you should take it anyway".

Looking back, I'm embarrassed for and amused by my younger self. So clueless. So arrogant! I assumed I had discovered, on my own, in a few years of solo projects, the software engineering lessons accumulated by the industry over decades of large-scale projects. I took the classes and immediately realized how much I didn't know, and that the classes were only going to scratch the surface. In hindsight, I'm not sure "scratch the surface" is even accurate, but they did at least make clear to me that I had a lot to learn, and show me something of what the shape of that knowledge might be.

As for whether you can get hired by Google without a degree... you actually can. Google cares about capability, not credentials. That said, there aren't many non-degreed SWEs at Google, because auto-didacts smart enough and dedicated enough to give themselves a good grounding in all of the things a decent degree program provides are pretty rare.

It is hard in practice to get hired without a degree because the recruiters generally discard resumes that don't include a degree (or clearly-equivalent experience), but if you happen to know a Google SWE and can convince them to give you a mock interview (most are happy to unless it's clear to them that you're going to fail badly), and you pass, they can jump you past the screening process, straight to the onsite interview.

Well, that depends. I don't consider it breaking down because it was still doing what it was designed to do... generate text.

It's very simple. Experts need to continually prove they're worthy of trust. If they do that, people will slowly start trusting them again. If they abuse that trust, people will kick them back out. This isn't rocket science. And I can tell you that there's a rot at the core of academia, and people know about it and are fighting back. We won't put it behind us until we see significant reforms.

It's just a text generator. It's not thinking. People are ascribing thinking to LLMs the same way Catholics see the image of the Virgin Mary in their french toast.

You should first study the long winding path that brought us to this point, to give you perspective, and then you should look at current events as the tiny small footsteps that they are when compared to the long stretch of time. Sometimes we stumble on long walks. When this happens we should avoid spending all our time despairing at the road stretching out endlessly ahead of us, and take some time to appreciate the distance we've already covered. Then we need to return our eyes to the ground before us and allow the stumble to focus our mind on the importance of carefully considering every step.

We happened to go through a period of many decades (perhaps even a hundred years) called modernism, where the populace generally respected experts and expertise to make our lives better. But post-modernism has long challenged this idea of faith in science, expertise, and the enlightenment, and there have been many very public failures of experts to do the right thing over that time. From Thalidomide, to toxic chemicals being dumped into the environment, to the Challenger disaster, to the second Iraq war, and the 2008 financial crash, then actively talking about managing public perception in the middle of the pandemic, and yes, even the Epstein saga, these events have all eroded public trust in the experts and the institutions. The current spate of populism (literally framing all issues as the masses vs. the elites) is a direct result of this loss of public trust. People are simple... they will only believe something that they have an incentive to believe. It's hard to get them to believe that outsourcing all the manufacturing to China, or bringing in lots of foreign laborers is a good idea because it makes the GDP numbers go up, especially when they themselves compete in that low-end labor market. We can regain a sense of modernism, but putting the reins of government back in the hands of trusted experts starts by regaining trust, and we have a long way to go before we get there.

Human progress is hardly monotonically improving. But the general positive trend over time is substantial and impossible to ignore. While we're throwing away many of the substantial gains we've made over the last 75 years (globalized trade, a rules based global order and the relative worldwide peace it provides), we're not likely to completely lose these things, and a few years of seeing what life is like without them will probably change people's opinions in the years to come. Mostly history acts like a ratchet, but sometimes we backslide.

While it's important to keep working on issues of the day, it's also important to look back at where we were and how far we've come. Progress like this is based on small incremental improvements over decades and even centuries. About a hundred years ago, the death rate from measles in the US averaged about 5 per 100,000, which would mean roughly 15,000 deaths per year today just in the US. All those lives are being saved *every year* just due to a single vaccine program. We need to be thankful for the work that prior generations did that are truly amazing and have improved our lives immensely. It's trendy to complain about how bad life is, but that's disingenuous when you realize how bad people had it throughout history. Heck, just look at the infant mortality rate in the US.

Observations of Trump's character and behavior, plus the fact that he's set up extremely hard to trace ways for anyone to funnel arbitrary amounts of money to him.

If he'd like not to be accused of selling favors for cash, he should do what previous presidents have done, put all of his assets in a blind trust, first selling anything non-fungible (e.g. hotels and golf courses), so that no one can give him money except by dropping off a briefcase full of cash which will undoubtedly get noticed and reported.

If you set out to make it easy for people to untraceably bribe you, you have to expect everyone will assume that it's because you want to be untraceably bribed... and when you make governing decisions that generate windfall profits for some people you have to expect that people will assume it's because you've been paid off.

This is why it's important to avoid even the appearance of corruption.

It occurs to me that there's one important difference: Investment. If they won't give me a straight answer but I've invested several minutes of my time in talking to them I might give in to their crap process. If I haven't invested that time, though, just gotten a report from the AI caller that they won't answer unless I come in, I won't feel like I've wasted my time if I just give them a miss.

On the other side, businesses might find that giving the AI the runaround is ineffective, because of the lack of investment by the potential customer. Then they'll have a choice: Either just hang up on the calls and ditch those customers, or else start being clearer about their pricing and services. Ideally, they'll be clearer by just putting the info on their web site, so no one has to make or receive a call.

About as anti-social as I am. I hate talking on the phone. Given the choice between calling some business to ask about their pricing or just not using their service, I'll do the latter every time. What I really prefer is that they put their pricing on their web site. Then neither of us have to be bothered. If they don't want to do that and would like my business, though, they should appreciate the AI calls, because with that feature I just might buy from them. Without it, I almost certainly will not.

Google has customer support lines for paid services. Forcing them to provide customer support for free services would just force them to begin charging for those services.