Why did he do it? It must have been like a video game for him. He rarely interacted with people directly. Most of his dealings were through employees. The pharmacy business gave him a lot of money within its first 4 years (before the FDA caught wind) so he had a lot of game fuel to play with. And his criminal dealings seemed to occupy him every waking hour, just like a game addiction. Maybe that's why he surrendered so easily, it's just another part of the game, and it interests him.
A Coder Who Became a Crime Boss
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Re: A Coder Who Became a Crime Boss
#62Longer version of this story here (2016): https://magazine.atavist.com/the-mastermind -- fascinating story and these articles captivated me. Have had them bookmarked for ages :-)
Incredible read indeed, someone needs to make a movie about this.
So the inevitable factual errors in that movie will become mainstream opinion until the truth falls into obscurity?
Happens every time Hollywood makes a movie about any topic that would be better served by a documentary. It's never not infuriating.
Re: A Coder Who Became a Crime Boss
#63Why did he do it? It must have been like a video game for him. He rarely interacted with people directly. Most of his dealings were through employees. The pharmacy business gave him a lot of money within its first 4 years (before the FDA caught wind) so he had a lot of game fuel to play with. And his criminal dealings seemed to occupy him every waking hour, just like a game addiction. Maybe that's why he surrendered…
You're describing a cartoon character, not the psychology of a human being.
Re: A Coder Who Became a Crime Boss
#64Why did he do it? It must have been like a video game for him. He rarely interacted with people directly. Most of his dealings were through employees. The pharmacy business gave him a lot of money within its first 4 years (before the FDA caught wind) so he had a lot of game fuel to play with. And his criminal dealings seemed to occupy him every waking hour, just like a game addiction. Maybe that's why he surrendered…
You're describing a cartoon character, not the psychology of a human being.
If you read the full story, you'll see that many investigators were perplexed by his motivations and the sheer scale of his enterprises. His underlings described their duties as being like something from a James Bond movie. It was all so much larger than life, and erratic. So why did he do it? Not for money, which he didn't seem to care about. If you think about it as playing for rewards as in a video game, it makes a lot more sense. https://magazine.atavist.com/the-mastermind
Re: A Coder Who Became a Crime Boss
#65Reminds me of Ross Ulbricht.
Re: A Coder Who Became a Crime Boss
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
Incredible read indeed, someone needs to make a movie about this.
So the inevitable factual errors in that movie will become mainstream opinion until the truth falls into obscurity? Happens every time Hollywood makes a movie about any topic that would be better served by a documentary. It's never not infuriating.
> Happens every time Hollywood makes a movie about any topic that would be better served by a documentary. It's never not infuriating.
As if documentaries were accurate.
I wish there was a genre of movies that take it as core principle to not abuse artistic license in service of making the plot flow.
Re: A Coder Who Became a Crime Boss
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think that’s probably a rephrasing of Einstein’s alleged quote, ”It should be possible to explain the laws of physics to a barmaid.” That quote as relayed by de Brolgie seems to have mutated quite a bit, changing the meaning to something more general. Of course it’s also worth pointing out that Quantum Mechanics sort of throw a superposition of wrenches into that puppy.
> Quantum Mechanics sort of throw a superposition of wrenches into that puppy Maybe because we don't understand it enough quite yet! I'm sure gravity was hard to explain when it was first being talked about.
Rough idea for a barmaid-level explanation:
"Quantum mechanics pop up because the stuff we're made of isn't very small balls. It's really a manifestation of waves. How can something that's made of waves behave like particles? Let me show you:
[proceeds to pull out a length of cable, tying one end of it to some structure]
[proceeds to wave the other end, creating a wave on the cable, pointing out how the peaks move forward]
[proceeds to wave faster, creating a standing wave, pointing out the nodes]
Roughly like this. You can think of the moving peak, or the standing node, as particles - stationary or in motion. They're not really there, but you can point to them and name them. Now all the weird stuff that quantum mechanics is about - quantum tunneling, double slit experiments, etc. - appear when you stop looking at particles, and start doing the math on the underlying waves."
Re: A Coder Who Became a Crime Boss
#68Am I the only one who found this to be very poorly written? Its like the author keeps telling me how cool and mysterious this story is, why doesn't he just tell me the story and I'll decide if its mysterious or not? "Like a handful of random jigsaw-puzzle pieces, each one was incomprehensible without an understanding of the larger picture." He keeps going on about how unrelated these events are, and how mysterious it…
Don't forget a full page about that Filipino garbageman, that ends in him basically knowing nothing, seeing nothing and being completely irrelevant character to the whole story...
Oh man that part was ridiculous. Its like, you could spend a whole page talking about some guy taking a dog for a walk and talking about how he bagged up the dog poo and put it in a bin. Then say "little did I know this dog poo was actually related to the murder of a journalist in Australia... The dog belonged to an infamous hitman who hired a dog sitter to look after his dog while he was in Australia on a job".
The whole thing sounds like it was written by a 15 year old.
Re: A Coder Who Became a Crime Boss
#69> Pure methamphetamine manufactured in North Korea. Yachts built to outrun coast guards. Police protection and judges’ favor. Crates of military-grade weapons. Private jets full of gold. Missile-guidance systems. Unbreakable encryption. African militias. Explosives. Kidnapping. Torture. Murder.
What is unbreakable encryption doing in that list?
Re: A Coder Who Became a Crime Boss
#70Why did he do it? It must have been like a video game for him. He rarely interacted with people directly. Most of his dealings were through employees. The pharmacy business gave him a lot of money within its first 4 years (before the FDA caught wind) so he had a lot of game fuel to play with. And his criminal dealings seemed to occupy him every waking hour, just like a game addiction. Maybe that's why he surrendered…
>Why did he do it? It must have been like a video game for him. He rarely interacted with people directly.
Seems obvious to me. He got sick of the open-plan office environment he had to suffer with at regular jobs as a coder, but as a crime boss he got his own private office. Plus, he probably didn't have to attend any more boring meetings.