US sanctions Italian hosting provider Autistici Inventati
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49451343
US Government designates host of noblogs.org a "global terrorist"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49464391
A Statement by A/I Collective About US Sanctions
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49477854
[0]: I was going to write this comment manually but pasted this comment from @ChrisArchitect from: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49511568 (Thanks Chris, I appreciate you writing these comments and have a nice day!)
Worse, without sharing the data with feds!
The stated reason for the "terrorist" title was not them being not-rich. It was facilitating a platform which hosted organizations which behave on the extreme end - because it's privacy centered and those elements obviously want that.
If would be a valid discussion point wherever that justifies setting the whole platform on fire, but the way you're making the point ultimately sabotages your message.
The first and most evident is that the reason is false. That hosting provider makes it clear in its ToS that extremist groups aren't allowed, and when one is detected they actively ban those accounts. They've show documental proof of both.
The second is that it violates the first amendment of the US's own constitution, which uses universal language, not discriminating between citizens and non-citizens, nor between inside and outside US territories, nor between nationals and foreigners. So any federal US action trying to prevent people anywhere from saying anything they want between themselves, and with people in the US, is, in principle at least, out of bounds.
>We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
Although more generally I do believe even without the preamble it would still be implied that the US government does not have jurisdiction over the entire planet. We would never be able to invade a foreign country if their government was entitled to third-amendment and fourth-amendment rights.
> The second is that it violates the first amendment of the US's own constitution, which uses universal language, not discriminating between citizens and non-citizens, nor between inside and outside US territories, nor between nationals and foreigners.
If you take this universalist interpretation, that would mean it's fine for US citizens to truck guns into Canada (which they can't, but they still occasionally do, largely for much more boring reasons than believing there's a constitutional justification) with no restrictions because the implication is that the US constitution supersedes other laws in other countries.
It is, however, against the spirit of the document, and it's arguably an abuse of the existing framework of sanctioning organizations which take part in terrorist efforts. It's another case of the US legal system falling short because of an assumption of good faith by those in power.
This is why, for example, the US gives itself the right to tax people in other countries. If those people happen to be Americans, the US enforces that by threatening them with this or that the moment they step back anywhere the US has enforcement means. This is also why the UK tries to enforce its censorship laws on US companies, why my country tries to enforce our censorship laws on SpaceX, and so on.
Hence, if the US considers itself capable and allowed to enforce this and that law internationally, it follows that the supreme law that governs all those more limited laws also applies internationally unless a specific point in it says otherwise (and several do, so this delimitation is in fact meaningful and coherent).
> Every country believes its laws apply universally
Canada has the Canada Health Act, which describes the specifics of what provinces and territories must provide in terms of public health services, and how, and how those health services are funded, how the money gets disbursed, and how the money gets reimbursed by various parties within the system. It would be absurd to think that the expectation of anyone in the Canadian government is that this should apply worldwide.
The UK has the Highway Code, which describes a number of driving laws, restrictions, conventions, and requirements of drivers, among them, their (at this point rare) left-hand drive rule. Do they expect that to be enforced universally? Do they have some kind of plan to power-project onto the rest of the world with that by having agents of their government travel abroad to, say, France, Mexico, or South Korea, and ticket people for driving on the right?
The same goes, I suppose, for the UK code you refer to. I imagine the British legislators specified clearly what roads are under its control. If not, then yes, that's the expectation, exactly like is happening right now with their censorship laws.
To learn more on this Google for the quite famous phrase "Parliament can criminalize smoking on the streets of Paris”. You're going to either double facepalm, or be horrified, if not both.
Anyone can be a terrorist if “different opinion than the President of the United States” is all it takes to be labeled a “terrorist.” The label has lost all meaning.
>the president is able to make you into a state enemy just because you said you are against some technology.
not only technology. Any opposition to the Great Leader on any issue.
Yes, billionaires are shovelling money at the midterms. Yes, Trump is likely holding rather a lot of AI stocks. This is what happens when you allow money into politics and politicians into money.
Now a good preface to add true or not to avoid being targeted.
It can also level the playing field.
Every human SHOULD have access to all human knowledge at their fingertips, and a personal assistant to help them navigate through it.
- LLMs give users more knowledge (debatable due to hallucinations and selection bias)
- having more data/knowledge means more power and therefore less authority / power imbalance (that was an argument for the Internet and social media, but it turned out exactly the other way around)
Both of these arguments is dubious, but somewhat reasonable, but requiring both to be true to achieve any form of net positive is a hard sell. That, plus as Al Khatib argues, AI is about taking away autonomy from the people. Beyond the cognitive studies about LLM impacts on our brains, having someone/thing else decide for you is decidedly incompatible with anti-authoritarian politics (autonomy vs heteronomy).
do you agree or disagree with the following:
- Knowledge should not be gatekept.
- At this point in our civilization, a single human cannot learn all of accumulated human knowledge, let alone remember it and master it.
- It's increasingly difficult to make progress in frontier fields without mastering a lot of other fields first ("shoulders of giants") or to even navigate through all the laws and social institutions governing daily life.
- Groups who employ many people to pool their knowledge have an exceedingly broad advantage over a single person.
I agree.
I absolutely think that is not what all this compute power is for.
I do believe that all this statistical inference and generation, alongside the massive data collection apparatus we have built, is designed explicitly to completely lock down the possible actions for any person targeted by the folks who own these systems, and these systems aren't owned by "every human".
Quite the contrary- historically the folks who own those systems are pretty, uh, specific about what they man by "human". Those folks are so capricious about that concept of human they can't believe brown folks are human while their kids suspect the computers might be human.
Oh, and they are using consumers prompts to gather even more data. LLMs are creating even greater asymmetric information situations than we had before.
Also, the common person has no say in how these systems are developed, the big actors do, and these systems are already used to automate decisions. That's a totalitarian potential, not just authoritarian.
So, your banking passwords?
>I think we should shed the idea that AI is a technological artifact with political features and recognize it as a political artifact through and through.
I mean it is a technology. Politicians may go on about it but didn't create it.
I think AI falls into the second category. Even the most optimistic interpretations of AI, such as in Asimov, are very totalitarian. They're only positive because AI is automating away human work to create more resource/financial equality between people. In our real world though, AI is just as totalitarian, but there's not a single glimmer of hope that it will be used to better share resources. That sounds more political than technical.
I guess you could argue AI is more a mathematical discovery than a technology. I mean the recent boom has been driven by the discovery that if you stick the internet into the transformers algorithm you get intelligent sounding results which is true regardless of the hardware involved.
I don't agree with the resource pessimism - I think it'll go more https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/27/business/a-world-where-al... though I guess time will tell on that one.
Interestingly, this article does not make a single argument why this is technically possible, but does point out that Musk and friends have no plan to make the wealth redistribution happen. The article does not quote a single researcher on extractivism, material sciences, ecology... This is religious dogma at its finest. You may be a believer, but that does not make it plausible.
On the other hand, there is an abundance of data points that ecological collapse is already happening. All scientists agree we are on a non-sustainable path. Many agree that this model's collapse is unavoidable, but the question remains: do you want to plan for a humanist degrowth making quality of life better for everyone and more sustainable? or do you want a Mad Max-like future where people fight for drinkable water?
somebody gotta build all those datacenters ... (a kind of reference to the gulag tremendously growing simultaneously with and being the major source of labor, and practically free at that, for the very fast and massive USSR Industrialization in 193x)
And with opposition to the datacenters in developed areas, and all the need for water and energy, the datacenters (and all that massive infrastructure like power lines, power plants, etc.) would probably be built in less hospitable areas, like China does in Inner Mongolia [1], and it would be very hard to make people to move there at their own free will. DHS is already building out their own large gulag, and i think it is only a matter of time with this administration when they decide to use the forced labor USSR style.