I am looking at the last image in the article, captioned "The encrypted message instructs the viewer to appease the gods with offerings". The picture shows ... a person kneeling in front of a throned figure, offering something with both hands. Is something about this message supposed to be hidden?
Not sure I agree with the comment you're responding to. But the article discusses some of their funding troubles, and the main mage of arxiv.org itself has a donate link. So I think perhaps the media presence might be motivated by a desire to fundraise (and IMO they absolutely deserve funding because of the important work they do).
You're right. I didn't consider the funding angle at all, but only the accusation of "enshittification" which usually comes from a VC or an entity that wants to generate more profits by expanding. On the other hand, I do think Simons Foundations would not let arXiv die. Also, I don't agree that arXiv's media presence has ulterior motives after all. It might just be that it's getting its share of fame.
> If there was enough evidence to demonstrate that he attempted to murder someone, why wasn't he charged and convicted of it?
Wikipedia suggests this was because he was already sentenced to double life imprisonment. Clearly prosecutors should not waste time pursuing charges that won't really impact a criminal's status, do you disagree?
If they don't "waste time pursuing charges that won't really impact" the sentence then the unproven allegations should not be allowed to impact the sentence. You can't have it both ways.
What a lot of people are overlooking is that there were two separate indictments in two separate courts with two separate prosecution teams.
In one indictment, in a New York federal court, he was charged with several crimes, but not murder-for-hire. In the other indictment, in a Maryland federal court, he was charged just with murder-for-hire.
The case in New York went to trial first. The murder-for-hire evidence was introduced in that court as part of trying to prove some of the elements of the other charges.
For example to prove a charge of engaging in a continuing criminal enterprise one of the elements is that the person occupied "a position of organizer, a supervisory position, or any other position of management". Evidence that a person is trying to hire hitmen to protect the enterprise is evidence that they occupy such a role.
After the convictions and sentencing in the New York trial were upheld on appeal, the prosecutors in Maryland dropped their case because he was then in jail, for life, with no possibility of parole. They said it was a better use of resources to focus on cases where justice had not yet been served.
> What a lot of people are overlooking is that there were two separate indictments in two separate courts with two separate prosecution teams.
They're not overlooking this, they're criticizing it.
Suppose you have to prove that someone occupied "a position of organizer, a supervisory position, or any other position of management" so you introduce several pieces of evidence to try to prove it, one of them is some sketchy murder for hire allegations from a low-credibility source. The jury then convicts on the conspiracy charge without indicating whether they believed the murder for hire claim was proved beyond a reasonable doubt.
Should you now use the murder for hire claim to determine sentencing for the conspiracy charge? No, that's crazy, it's a much more serious crime and they should have to charge and prove that as a separate count if they want it to affect the penalty.
The issue is that the law enforcement agent investigating the allegation had serious credibility issues, but the same agent had access to the laptop, so now you have a chain of custody problem. How much of the chat logs are real and how much of them are made up by this guy who was convicted for extorting Ulbricht?
In particular, the chat logs allegedly contain multiple separate instances of murder for hire, but then the claim that Ulbricht had already been sentenced to life without parole as the reason these claims were never prosecuted doesn't make sense, because a conspiracy to commit murder has multiple parties, so where are the murder prosecutions of these alleged contract killers and co-conspirators?
They're unproven allegations because "proven allegations" mean something specific, i.e. that it was charged as a count and the jury rendered a verdict of guilty. This is especially important when it's not at all clear they could have proven it as a separate count, because those allegations were tainted by significant law enforcement credibility issues.
A lot of thoughts in this thread on what academic papers are or should be, let me give my own opinion as a person who tries to write papers.
Papers should be structured like fractals - that is, they should be "self-similar". The main text of the paper after the introduction should go into all the necessary details demonstrating the origins of the idea and proving that it has value. Then the introduction section should summarize all this, and take a less rigorous tone. The abstract should be a summary of the introduction. And then the title should summarize the abstract. If you really have a lot of technical work to do, maybe you can write a super long appendix and have the main body summarize that.
I myself probably spend as much time reading paper introductions as I do reading paper bodies, which means that probably 90% of the papers I read, I only read the introduction. I do this because I enjoy it more - I like new ideas, and the intros are a great way to get a lot of them. This blog post reads like a great paper introduction to me. It's easy to trick yourself into believing something is easy though, so an academic paper would have to back this up with an experiment.
What rubs me the wrong way about the mhils Github response is that it fails to answer the question that the commenter asked: Is there or is there not a target date for the next release (and if so, what is it)? It's fine to charge money to move the date up, but it seems like if you are going to make that offer, you should try to tell the person how much time they would actually be buying.
> What rubs me the wrong way about the mhils Github response is that it fails to answer the question that the commenter asked: Is there or is there not a target date for the next release (and if so, what is it)?
Why exactly do you expect him to answer that? It’s not like he is working for the guy. He can do whatever he wants.
Reading this discussion I’m starting to understand why so many open source maintainers end up calling it quit.
Yeah, back to what my grandma would say “if you don’t have anything nice to say…”.
Either…
This is something I, as someone spending some time on a passion or hobby project, don’t want to deal with and I’ll just ignore it.
Or
It’s a business transaction and I’ll at least try and explain what services I can provide, not just “lol pay me”. “We don’t have a release schedule. Except in the case of actual critical vulnerabilities making our users vulnerable, releases are tagged when we have enough functional changes to warrant them. If you would like to get in touch to discuss a support contract and us tagging a release just for you and your customers you can contact me at X.”
Refusing to engage on the question or how you can work together and just saying “lol pay me” definitely comes across as “fuck off” to me. And if that was the intent… better to not say anything at all.
He explained it already: the requested change is purely for regulatory purposes and has no functional value. He would release once enough functional changes accumulate.
You can hardly say that they switched to a private channel because they knew "that they would get blasted for such a response in a public forum" when the comment they were responding to was the one that suggested the switch to email.
The comment suggested email for payment, not an extortion accusation (i know accusation is bit too much of a strong word, i couldnt find anything better)
Plus, they did get blasted just because the email was made public. To me, that shows that they wanted a more private channel.
> power plants can generate five thousand kilograms of gold per year, per gigawatt of electricity generation