Comment by topspin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by topspin | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> Why would anyone living in a democracy be against this?

Because the language I'm reading here doesn't mean anything.

"Researcher" can mean anything. In the US we see DOGE people rifling through government finance records, pipelining the data to the executive, for targeting of specific political interests. "Research" means whatever the present democratically elected regime wants it to mean.

"Systemic risk" can mean anything. Last month in the US, millions of "undocumented" people were walking around relatively unconcerned. This month they're all a "systemic risk" and being actively hunted down for deportation or worse.

Maybe tomorrow you become a "systemic risk," and whomever is in elected office at that time designates and funds some academics to "research" all your X/Facebook/Mastodon/whatever activity. There is a non-zero possibility in Germany that AfD will one day get to designate what "research" means and what the "systemic risks" are. How does that sound?

So it's not the least bit difficult to understand why members of a supposed democracy might think this isn't a power "researchers" should have. It's only a problem for the naïve, who suppose the future is governed by only the right people.

The data is publicly available. Researchers could get it by scraping, this law says that companies must provide more convenient ways to access that public data.

This has fuck all to do with government overreach or access to private data.

I dunno. There's an argument to be made that information which one could obtain piecemeal being made easily accessible at mass scale can create a qualitatively different situation to one in which significant labor is required to acquire it.

It's not a perfect analogy, but we can consider the case of recording in public being legal and the majority of people feeling this is reasonable, versus people's gradient of unease with uniquitous CCTV surveillance, versus how people would feel if the government made sure a law that all CCTV cameras are made remotely accessible at all times.

How convenient does the law say that it has to be?

I don't know. Perhaps you could research it to found out?

We're talking about publicly available data. If Elon has access to this data, I'd argue that giving it access to German research, and even AfD which Musk supports, won't make it any worse.

As much as I would like to and as easy as it is to agree with you, it's about the public data, not the researcher or research.

And systemic risk doesn't mean anything. It means what you continue to describe: context.

> a power "researchers" should have.

Again. It's about public data. Nobody can or would prohibit counting cars or pedestrians and nobody would try to make it harder than it already is. This applies to platforms like Twitter as well.

> It's only a problem for the the naïve, who suppose the future is governed by only the right people.

The naïve suppose that exactly those people will govern who want the job, which, judging from their experience, are neither engineers, nor hackers, coders, scientists or scientifically literate people and definitely nobody who was ever concerned with their own education.

> are neither engineers, nor hackers, coders, scientists or scientifically literate people and definitely nobody who was ever concerned with their own education

I agree chucklingly that the statistical overrepresentation of lawyers in parliaments fits this assessment pretty well

All the words you deemed imprecise are explicitly defined at length in the relevant act.

Including a multistep application precess to be recognized as a vetted researcher.

> There is a non-zero possibility in Germany that AfD will one day get to designate what "research" means and what the "systemic risks" are. How does that sound?

I think if they'll ever be in a position to do that, they won't give two figs about prior norms and reticence and all this pearl clutching.

Observe the means through which a 49.8% mandate is doing just that in the US.

Could they use this to get at X data to train LLMs?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com