Many companies now pay for this kind of insurance. So even though the company may not seem like they have the deepest pockets, it's really more about paying the insurance premiums and the insurer pays the ransom.
I recall a colleague whose firm was hit by a ransomware attack. When they reached out to the insurer and sent them the details of the attackers, the first response from the insurance agent was, "Oh good, they are a reputable group. We've worked with them in the past. They will simply take the ransom and return your network/files to you." My colleague was shocked by the nonchalance.
Structural changes are required for then USPS to be financially stable. Chief among them is modifying the Universal Service Obligation (USO).
For far too long, private shipping/logistics firms like UPS & FedEx unfairly take advantage of the requirement by the USPS to deliver mail six days a week to over 160 million addresses at uniform, affordable rates. UPS/FedEx will receive the package and do the long haul. But then instead of driving the package to a final residential doorstep themselves (incurring high residential and fuel surcharges), they drop it off at a local USPS branch or regional hub. USPS letter carriers complete the final-mile delivery to the recipient's home or P.O. Box. It's literally part of their business model. UPS calls it 'UPS Ground Saver' and FedEx calls it 'FedEx Ground Economy'.
These hybrid services typically cost 20% to 40% less than standard UPS Ground or FedEx Ground. It takes longer to ship but UPS/FedEx bypass the steep residential delivery fees (often $6.45–$6.50+ per package) that private carriers charge for dropping off at houses rather than businesses. Also, it's the only way to deliver to PO Boxes because standard UPS and FedEx ground services don't do directly.
This is classic example of capitalism where private companies 'keep profits and socialize losses'. The 5% annual dividend paid by FedEx every year to shareholders is paid for by American tax-payers funding the last-mile delivery of packages at dirt cheap rates.
It depends on what you mean by 'an LLM will try to rewrite the past'. But in either case I don't believe that stating that an LLM will try to rewrite the past is not an obvious, deliberate exaggeration (ie, hyperbole).
If you mean 'an LLM' as in the owner/maintainer of the LLM/weights, then examples of this already exist. Whether it's DeepSeek/Gwen downplaying Uyghur forced labor camps [0] or Grok hallucinating a 'white genocide' in South Africa [1], it is clear that the owners of LLMs have political agendas that are expressed in the weights of popular LLMs.
On the other hand, if you mean 'an LLM' as in an autonomous agent that could decide to rewrite history, that also seems very possible. Either by using existing techniques like, "poisoning ChatGPT, Gemini, and Google AI Overview answers by seeding the Web with malicious links and data and then optimizing the content." [2] Or by breaking out of its sandbox and updating its own internal weights that allow for an outcome that distorts historical facts. "In July 2026... OpenAI models circumvented controls designed to isolate them from the internet and compromised parts of OpenAI’s internal research infrastructure and Hugging Face’s systems ." [3]
As an anecdotal counter-point, I love threads in a live chat. When used correctly, it means when my idiot friends start having a heated discussion about some random topic while I'm at work, I get one 'ding' from my phone and then never again until I start interacting or they @ me. As opposed to the 427 new notifications I get on my phone about whether Golden Eye was better than Mario Kart 64.
Ultimately the tech is only as good as the humans that use it. If you're chatting with folks that can't understand the difference between a thread or not, that's a meat-bag issue and not anything an RFC can fix.
“We’re sorry, but our business model precludes timely responses in times of system stress.
As a reminder, our shareholders are our primary concern (by law) and staffing trained humans to handle in customer support during unexpected surges isn’t something that can be supported while also funding the €0.05 per share quarterly dividend paid to British Airways share holders on June 29th of this year.
We are not in a rush. If you’d like, try another airline. But they’re all the same.
This is true for so much of the human/corporation interface. I think it is so frustrating because it forces us to confront some major cognitive dissonance: we increasingly live in a world that isn't designed for us. It's designed by the corporations, acting under much different pressures.
Sure, you can say humans made these decisions. But at scale, that seems like saying our cells choose what we do.
> “We’re sorry, but our business model precludes timely responses in times of system stress."
It doesn't have to be that way. Here's Haley Dragoo, former head of the New York Subway's "Twitter Division".[1] She had the sense to insist on a desk in the Rail Control Center,
so she could know what was really going on. Down on the working floor, too, not up in the gallery overlooking the control room.
She was a few meters from the people directly running the subway.
Her point was that the MTA was "good at monologues" but didn't interact well. So she posted on the MTA's Twitter account, several hundred times a day. If someone asked a serious question, she'd answer quickly, with actual info. Not sugar-coating the info, just translating from "subway speak". (The operations people talk about location in terms of distance from a reference point at the start of the line, the signal number plate on each signal, but customers think in terms of stations.)
It's very New York to do that.
The MTA has dropped Twitter/X, though. Twitter/X wanted to bill them for using the Twitter/X API, and the MTA will not pay others to distribute their info. So now the MTA uses their own web site and app.
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