Most open source repositories do have eyes on the code. Debian often has separate maintainers who maintain patches specific to Debian.

It's not a coincidence that Linux distros are much less susceptible to malware in their official repositories. It's a result of the system. Trusted software currated and reviewed by maintainers.

The play store will always have significant amounts of malware, so this entire conversation is moot.

It also only solves that very specific problem. You don't need to side-load an app to scam someone. There's plenty of malware on the play store you can use. And, you don't need malware. There's plenty of legitimate apps you can use for scamming.

And, you don't need an app, I would imagine most scamming is done without an app.

So, really, we're solving a subset of a subset of a subset of a subset of the problem.

Yes, he did.

"A frightening number of people swallow every lie a cop tells them" - I'm answering why that happens.

It's the just world fallacy, and it's very common. Nothing I'm saying is meant to be mind blowing or offensive.

That most people have a simplistic, naive, and child-like perspective of the world. One based on just-desserts, on causality, on fairness.

You see, there are good people and bad people. Giving the good people more tools is always good, because they're good people. If you're a good person, you need not worry either. Bad things don't happen to good people.

Cops are good guys, criminals are bad guys. The government fighting criminals is good. If you get caught up in it - well, that's fine right? Because you're a good guy, too. So that's good for you. And, if something bad DOES happen to you... well then you were never a good guy. Obviously, because bad things happen to bad people.

We see this in so many things. Well, rich people MUST be hardworking and moral, right? Because good things have happened to them, so they must be good. Well, the janitor must be lazy or stupid right? Because their job is bad, so they must be bad. Well, the cops raiding my house must be good thing right? Because I'm good!

If there's one thing I have learned from life, it's that life is not fair. Children starve, innocents get murdered, the evil can thrive, and happiness isn't doled out to who deserves it. It's never about who deserved what or what is right. It's about systems, structure, and incentives.

They're only popular because people are routinely lied to. We see this same issue time and time again in "free markets".

If you tell people this will help stop crime and that's it, everyone and their mama is gonna say yes.

If you tell people the truth, that police don't really care to look at the data and this surveillance is going to be used to target innocent people for unrelated "crimes" on the taxpayers dollar, then everyone would say no.

This is also why 99% of surveys are broken. You can get people to agree to literally anything if you just lie a little. After all, Adolf Hitler got elected by promising to fix the German economy and, in a way, he did.

Right, in an ideal world we'd peer into the minds of people and compute what they know. But if we did that, our eyes would probably catch on fire like that lady in Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

We need some way to distill the unbelievable amount of data in human brains into something that can be processed in a reasonable amount of time. We need a measurement - a degree, a GPA, something.

Imagine if in every job interview they could assume absolutely nothing. They know nothing about your education. They might start by asking you to recite your ABCs and then, finally at sunset, you might get to a coding exam. Which still won't work, because you'll just AI cheat the coding exam.

We require gatekeepers to make the system work. If we allow the gatekeepers to just rubber stamp based off of if stuff seems correct, that tells us nothing about the person itself. We want the measurement to get close to the real understanding.

That means AI papers have to be given a 0, which means we need to know if something is AI generated. And we want to catch this at the education level, not above.

Nobody can really because it's complicated. Or, at least, nobody can agree, which is why we have the terms. However, I think the terms have some validity, because the broader concept does.

I mean, is Hitler a murderer? Is your run of the mill burglary gone wrong worse than the Holocaust? Obviously not. So there has to be some kind of understanding of organized death.

There's infinite levels of badness and eventually it does reach a point, be it in risk, probability, magnitude, or impact, in which it is super bad, and we may consider it violence, or murder, or crimes against humanity, or what have you.

Everything is not everything else. Scale not only matters, it's almost the only thing that matters.