229 karma · joined September 27, 2023
The EU is one of the primary tools all these authoritarians use to push their agenda. In which functional democracy do parliaments have to vote AGAINST a bill? Which sane democracy establishes a literal ministry of truth? Which non-dystopian government introduces highly destructive laws (forcing every small online store to hire a legal representative in every single memberstate they want to ship to) and then telling desparate small business owners not to worry, because surely their countries wont enforce those laws?
And all of those happened AFTER the British people saw the writing on the wall and forced their rulers to downgrade their rank in the new aristocracy.
The decline is entirely by design.
I really wonder why this was never fundamentally fixed. How performant a certain instruction on a specific platform is, how well it is supported and potential equivalents or sets of other instructions to emulate an equivalent are usually all very well understood.
So there should be some graph of operations which can transform any software from and to the specifics of each platform. Especially because firmware + compliers + platform abstracting libraries are basically already just that graph, although (usually?) to lossy to be applied in reverse. Add the recent developments in very large scale statistics to it and it'd probably be quite possible to transform from and to generic intent in the implementation to the uniqueness of each platform. E.g. the theming differences between a MacOS UI and a terminal application served over serial or the processing capabilities of a VLIW CPU compared to a FPGA or a GPU server.
Considering the enormous amount of work that went into compilers, better debugging and intermediate representations it seems like a huge missed opportunity nobody seriously asked the question whether information could be emitted that would allow for decompiling all the way back to the generic intent.
All these projects only took off because people were forced to contribute back. Want an example? Look at the state of opensource boot firmware on x86. The "open source" version heavily relies on proprietary firmware blobs and the only actual open source alternative had been heavily ridiculed for pursuing that goal and trading basically any significant compatibility for it.
Copyleft licenses make software basically self-regulating utilities. You can draw power from the grid and in return help finance it for everyone else, or you could build your own power plants.
You can draw excellent pre-made software and tooling from copylefted repositories and contribute back, helping to make the software even better for everyone else, or you could build all of it yourself. Or, you could put in the work to replace all major copyleft software with non-copyleft versions, eventually gaining the ability to pull up the ladder behind you.
You wouldn't want to decide what's worth training on and what isn't manually, so there is almost certainly an automated pipeline to do so (certainly at least for the free accounts and those that dont opt out of training).
Then there's the question if this pipeline only sorts through the data or also transforms it and to what degree. E.g. for removing personal details, locations, medical information and so on. The data that comes out of this pipeline might have VERY little information left in it a human could connect to the original input. Even worse, since we're talking about companies specializing in sota statistics, the input data could have been transformed into a representation that is very well suited to represent all the novel and interesting parts, but is awful at modelling all the things that could end up identifying where the data comes from (or causes legal liabilities otherwise).
In the end the only thing a potential whistleblower might even have a chance at observing in the first place, is whether a company's data enters such a pipeline or not. And I have my suspicions that the major AI companies operate at a scale and level of automation, that absolutely nobody has a chance at figuring out where anyone's data is at any point in time and what any specific piece of equipment is currently busy with.
So the only place to figure out whether data is trained on that shouldn't be trained on is by looking at whatever configurates every single system that could take a peek at some customer's data or the systems themselves while processing the data.
The latter would be such a huge violation of a customer's rights, no whistleblower is going to attempt that or admit to doing it.
And the configuration for the former could live just about anywhere, from regular config files to the CI/CD pipeline, pre-compiled libraries, kernel modules, modified vendor firmware, the compiler itself ... and probably plenty other scenarios you'd have to train an LLM on the ramblings of a crackhead to come up with.
So I'd say a whistleblower is pretty out of luck even becoming one.
As if an online community of mostly software developers had never heard of such obscure writings like the GPL, AGPL, LGPL, and so on.
I get it, the person running GrapheneOS happens to be ... special, but there could hardly be any community that has benefited more off copyright than the free software one.
Is that even a question? Of course everything not kept on premise at gunpoint is going to be trained on. The chances of getting caught are 0 and the consequences of getting caught are 0 (as we've seen with copyright laws going from sending people to jail for years to unenforced within months). Yet the benefits are through the roof. Your customers aren't going to pay for having the very same data vibe enriched twice, it's exclusive, extremely high value data your competitors will never have access to.
All of these side effects just disappear if we were to engineer this dust to emit a lot of radiation outside of the absorption spectra of water vapour and CO2, absorb a lot of light in the the absorption spectra of water and CO2, mix it as pigment into paint, rooftiles, road surfaces, and so on.
That way absorbed direct radiation gets its climate change contribution cut about in half and probably much more for diffuse radiation.
We could also biologically engineer e.g. grasses to have similar effects.
I'm a huge fan of engineering various plants to emit light in specific wavelengths anyway, and making sure that e.g. insects pollinate and birds spread them much more preferentially. That way you can outcompete or naturally cross invasive species with them and then you'll just look from satellites were the stuff you dislike is spreading and send in automated drones to highly selectively spray anything that has weirdly glowing pollen stuck to it. And after repeating that a few times, you get rid of your trojan-glowies.
The real problem is not really drivers being tracked, but how the tracking data is or might be used. Timestamped delivery notifications might be just as bad in this regard.
As often, the solution is probably more about accessible and pro-human law. No idea how that should work, maybe certain sensitive data services having to be provided by a third party or even the government itself? There are probably much smarter ideas or variations of this...
1. Is the law aligned with moral and ethical expectations? Probably not.
2. Is the process reliable? At least since the Derek Chauvin trials, I'm having doubts, but it doesn't seem it had failed in this case.
Sure, cases of the former need urgent fixing (and we're not getting that), but the latter scenario falls into the "The end is nigh" category.
Despite its huge size and it installing several services that constantly run in the background, it's still one of my favorite "languages" of all time. It's the only one I've ever seen people going from never having programmed before to making simple but meaningful contributions in within a single day.
After that that scam would result in the scammer paying the (e.g.) $10 upfront, the (up to; e.g.) 10% for every hop between networks and likely and transaction, processing and legal fees for the civil case (if he's not cooperating).
And he'll likely end up with criminal charges on top of that.
Also it's not like the scammer gets sued by some powerless private citizen authorities are likely to ignore. His opponent will be a telecom provider in his own jurisdiction.
Result: All routes to non-cooperating networks get dropped within days to weeks and scam-calling stops being a lucrative business basically instantly.
Also, have you considered AI being necessary to fill in for missing surveillance footage if the cameras are failing (the ruling class)? E.g. the whole Epstein (PR) disaster could have been avoided if the cameras could have been kept running and the footage post-processed in time.
Isn't this solving a slightly, but very significantly different problem?
You could serve the very same data in two different ways: One to present to the users and one to hand over to scrapers. Of course, some sites would be too difficult or costly to transform into a common underlying cache format, but people who WANT their sides accessible to scrapers could easily help the process along a bit or serve their site in the necessary format in the first place.
But the key is:
A tool using a "pre-scraped" version of a site has very likely very different requirements of how a CDN caches this site. And this could be easily customizable by those using this endpoint.
Want a free version? Ok, give us the list of all the sites you want, then come back in 10min and grab everything in one go, the data will be kept ready for 60s. Got an API token? 10 free near-real-time request for you and they'll recharge at a rate of 2 per hour. Want to play nice? Ask the CDN to have the requested content ready in 3 hours. Got deep pockets? Pay for just as many real-real-time requests as you need.
What makes this so different is that unless customers are willing to hand over a lot of money, you dont need to cache anything to serve requests at all. Potentially not even later if you got enough capacity to serve the data for scheduled requests from the storage network directly.
You just generate an immediate promise response to the request telling them to come back later. And depending on what you put into that promise, you've got quite a lot of control over the schedule yourself.
- Got a "within 10min" request but your storage network has plenty if capacity in 30s? Just tell them to come back in 30s.
- A customer is pushing new data into your network around 10am and many bots are interested in getting their hands on it as soon as possible, making requests for 10am to 10:05? Just bundle their requests.
- Expected data still not around at 10:05? Unless the bots set an "immediate" flag (or whatever) indicating that they want whatever state the site is in right now, just reply with a second promise when they come back. And a third if necessary... and so on.
Cash just about never sits just around as long as whoever holds onto it has no current need for extremely liquid assets. Like insurances.
I doubt that the ratio of cash that ends up bound up that way to the one that doesn't changes a lot overall.
The real problem to UBI is governments creating income via debt, IMO.
Also why does the Tier list keep expanding downwards? Wasn't being called a Tier 4 basically exclusively an insult? Sub culture not being satisfied with just embracing rotting anymore, but now racing for the bottom of the sea?
Maybe a 3 to 4 tier inbox. Known and trusted user being able to contact you without paying, a high value inbox for the $1+ range, a low value inbox for the $.2 range emails wont be auto-deleted in and a very low value inbox emails will be deleted in depending on the amount paid, with free mails being gone within e.g. an hour, all the way up to e.g. a month for $.19 mails.
Then unify those inboxes and set up notifications to the users' likings.
Also, I'd normalize e.g. 10% going to the e-mail service providers and enshrine that amount into the protocol right away. Otherwise the protocol wont get a lot of attention from the major providers and if it does, the provider taking his share is going to become normalized anyway. But then the split isn't going to be in favor for the users. Which isn't negative per-se, but it'd be nice to have at least one type of service where this is split is reversed. And it is fair to assume whoever takes the larger split has more influence on the prices, potentially either making this feature useless or pricing very casual users out of the service.
It's also not like China is an overachieving outlier, but western nations actively having been sabotaged by its leadership at least since 1990 and MUCH MUCH more so since occupy wallstreet.
FFS Germany is blowing up its nuclear powerplants on a never before seen record breaking schedule so that a potential successor government cant reactivate them.
The base then started demanding this from their reps and Trump almost picked up on this himself. It took years to undo that damage and even now we're barely back at a pro-clean air, pro-solar and pro nuclear position...
The majority opinion argues that this is one of the primary differences between a bribe and a gift of gratitude.
> A gift as a thank-you, post-hoc, where the prosecution cannot prove the gift was part of an effort to "corruptly" influence a prior decision, was always fine under any interpretation.
No, which is a large part of this whole argument. The interpretation the government used and was (indirectly) backed by the minority opinion, was, that the statute would not cover "innocuous or obviously benign" gratuities. But what counts as "innocuous or obviously benign" was never established. And this "innocuous or obviously benign" line is EXACTLY what distinguished between whether a gratitude was accepted with a corrupt state of mind.
And that's where we arrive back at the core of the problem.
For a bribe, the question of whether or not a corrupt state of mind existed can be judged at minimum by if the official act was corrupted. Usually this standard doesn't exist for gratitudes. These do not require a corrupt state of mind to be criminal, but their criminality derives solely from the heightened standard of responsibility of an official when performing official duties. Just like a heightened standard of responsibility when operating a motor vehicle or carrying.
> If students said "if you give us a good grade, then we'll give you a Best Teacher Ever mug," that is functionally identical to a bribe but is now legal.
Not really a good example, because unless that's something like a theater performance there is basically no way forward from this, which could end with the teacher handing out good grades and receiving a mug from these students without this scenario becoming bribery.
And gratitudes do not become legal in general. It's just that the involvement of the federal government ends and states are now free to handle such cases however they think is appropriate.
IMO that's not the case, because if a legislation looses its intended focus, it gains a lot of arbitrariness in return. The more interpretations you consider valid, the more options you can choose from when applying it.
So, obviously, the legislation had to be returned to a single interpretation, the one Congress intended (or the one the court thinks is the best if you believe courts should hold legislative power).
Which leads directly to the second issue: Which was the interpretation Congress intended?
> From dissent of disagreeing SCOTUS justice: "absurd and atextual reading of the statute is one only today’s Court could love."
The majority opinion analyses this issue with 6 different approaches, including a textual one, arriving at similar conclusions from each.
The dissenting opinion on the other hand argues, that all other approaches but the textual one should be rejected.
The dissenting opinion's textual interpretation strongly asserts, that Congress intended with "accepts or agrees to accept, anything of value from any person, intending to be influenced or rewarded" to address both bribes (intending to be influenced) and gratitudes (intending to be rewarded).
The majority opinion argues that if you were to divorce the concept of a reward from the prior intent during the influenced/rewarded actions in a statute that criminalizes accepting something of value rather than the intent itself (because how would that even be possible?), you end up with a situation in which being promised something of value, but only receiving it after the influenced actions have been completed, would no longer fulfill the requirements to be considered a bribe.
Basically the majority argues that if they are correct (666 being a bribery rather than a combined bribery + gratitudes statute), Congress still would have had to use language at least equivalent to the one at hand and therefore additional tests to deduce the intent of the 99th Congress can not be disregarded.
The question the court looked at: Did Congress intend "receiving gifts as a bribe" and "receiving gifts as gratitude" to be two separate crimes for non-federal employees as it is the case for federal ones (In which case handling the issue would have been left up to the states)?
The majority opinion refused to consider the moral argument (although they snuck it in in their argument on a lack of fair notice), but IMO that's by far the most intuitive one, when you allow yourself to look at the problem from the legislative perspective. By looking at the extremes it becomes very clear that there are two very different problems:
Imagine a group of students doing much better than their peers on their final exam thanks to the efforts of their teacher and they gift him a "Best teacher ever" mug.
But now reverse the causality:
Imagine a teacher demanding to be gifted a "Best teacher ever" mug before putting extra effort into preparing his students for their final exam. The group that gifted him the mug does much better than their peers as a result.
IMO these should be two very different crimes, but there is also a valid argument that they are about equivalent, as pursued by the dissenting opinion.
But that's not something a court should legislate.
Also, he's a man of strong faith, not that he knows he'll win in the end, but more like that it just doesn't have the same importance for him as it would have for us. I only had a short opportunity to ask him about it since then and basically he doesn't think there is just about any chance to win this, what he's most worried about is ruining the public image of his students (including his accusers) and since his order allowed him to rejoin and start over, in practice, he got all he wanted to ask for already.
I honestly wonder how much of this is made up. Given the size of whole organization and it holding onto its weird priciples regarding the personal relationships of its members (introduced in the far past to limit the secular power of its clergy), there certainly will be SOME cases.
But in the one case a frater, who I knew, got convicted, he definitely didn't do it. He was accused by several independent former students and even some of the staff backed the students claims with first hand accounts of him having been alone with some of the students at the time. This supposedly happened on a trip with tight schedules, so all accounts and stated times were quite specific, even in the pre-smartphone era.
The only problem: He wasn't with the group at that time at all. I screwed up embarrassingly (and the staff, too, leaving a young student stranded in the middle of nowhere) and he thought he could slip out, come pick me up and nobody (but maybe me with him) would get in trouble over it. Turned out he forgot refueling, both of us stayed at a pastor's guest house and he called the group telling them, that they should go ahead without us and that we would drive to the event directly on our own. The supposed abuse was claimed to have happened at another short stay of the group where they spent a day visiting some mine before joining with us again.
Almost 3 decades later he got railroaded in court, me learning about it in the news.