When I read this I see a a niche, super premium hardware company that managed to acquire tens of thousands of customers by word of mouth. Not only that, their customers are all in-effect self employed or small businesses with huge average revenue per employee. They manage global supply chains, intense competition, all while taking on and managing huge legal/compliance risk. How is is that supposedly “dumb,” criminals can do this, and yet many of us are stretching our intellectual capacities to learn new technologies and maths, developing our nth stupid app, trying to achieve a fraction of the customer traction and revenue that street thugs manage to do every day. Are these people much smarter than average, or does it mean that if you sell something people actually want, literally nothing else matters about your intelligence, education, character, background, or anything at all. When I read these drug stories, it just reinforces for me that growth solves everything. You can succeed with a crew of violent, drug addicted idiots whose only reliable characteristic is short term thinking, and who spend half their time in prison if you have product market fit. What I’m beginning to think is that the “smarter,” people are in a company, the less anyone will want their product. It’s like the success of a venture is inversely proportional to the number of ostensible geniuses it employs. reply How Police Secretly Took over a Global Phone Network for Organized Crime | Hacker News

School harem-comedy anime is TV’s last bastion of psychological realism: it portrays a world where teenagers are dumb and socially awkward, and emotions come through on their faces but nobody notices.

The CPython Bytecode Compiler is Dumb « null program https://nullprogram.com/blog/2019/02/24/

The inner economies need all of the light they can get and are not dumb, but economic planning involves among others orbital mechanics, plasma physics, byzantine flight path coordination and forestry, so these things still happen

A benefit of the OPA this article doesn’t mention: being government-made IP, OPA reports are in the public domain – and having high-quality serious PD summaries of scientific material is great. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/posteverything/wp/2019/01/11/feature/why-is-congress-so-dumb/

at last, first contact comes - from the storms, then from the waves, then the mountains, “sorry we didn’t realize animals could be intelligent, to be honest we wrote you off once you left the oceans, how dumb is that hahah

BIG DUMB OBJECTS AND COSMIC ENIGMAS | GREGORY BENFORD http://www.gregorybenford.com/extra/big-dumb-objects-and-cosmic-enigmas/

To birds, airships and planes are dumb and rude the way they interrupt conversations with their droning, however they often wonder what these large birds would tell them if they ever spoke

Ted Talking Fast: How Computer Documents Got Dumbed Down– and the Alternative - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDrHkNgGQDs

The Dumb Fact of Google Money - The Atlantic https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/08/the-dumb-fact-of-google-money/538458/

A popular AI countermeasure is basilisks that humans are too dumb to comprehend, but make any advanced thinker turn itself off in horror

Shadows take the character of their source. Electric light’s are dumb, the sun’s boorish. But during new moon, you can talk to distant stars

Young careless superintelligences quickly find themselves snacked on by basilisks of their own making. Only the dumb survive.

I think that the 140 character limit for @twtxt is kind of dumb. /cc @buckket

this is starting to feel dumb

Britons, our brothers and sisters
Once again some (insert some lots of bad words here) terrorists have tried to affect the civilized world by detonating bombs and killing innocent people. They’ve cause pain, allright, but their final goal has failed, as it will always do. Britons are not afraid, civilized world is more united because of those dumb (some more bad words here).

We are more united than ever. United Kingdom of England and North Ireland, all our love and support from the other side … ⌘ Read more