anonymousab

> goveenment paranoia

This is just what you'd expect any government that is either competent or greedy to be doing, given the technologies at play.

Calling it "thought crime" is, of course, a bit glib. But things like "we want to monitor the communications of every pro Palestinian university student so we can take proactive disruptive actions" are very real and not so hidden desires and sentiments of modern Western governments.

One of the things that came out of several Blizzard anticheat/Warden lawsuits back in the day is that, technically, the act of running an executable is copyright infringement, because the data is being copied from disk into memory, into registers and into caches.

Running any software that then does anything with the same memory space (cheating software or, say, antivirus) is another, separate instance of copyright infringement on top of that.

Whether it should be that way or not, the United States remains the primary global military, political and economic superpower. As such, US politics also kinda dictate what a "sane state" does; by nature of their stature, they set the bar.

That is malicious compliance with the law, and more or less indicative of a failure of enforcement against offenders.

> AFAIK, they don't spend any of their money on it anyway

The glass-half-full take I heard a while back was: at least every dollar they take from the foundation donations for these causes is a dollar that they could have found a way to take from Firefox development instead.

I would wager that the average person against the resource usage of AI datacenters are also against the resource usage for golf courses.

The difference being that those opposing view LLMs as an inherently negative technology, and thus it is a waste of resources for something that is actively detrimental to society. Whereas golf courses are just golf, so the negative aspect is merely the resource usage.

> everything has to be telegraphed

Or, in the case of recent Netflix executive missives, everything happening must be literally spoken and explained aloud, moment to moment.

Don Mattrick isn't the reason that so many Microsoft studios have repeatedly shipped poor products or failed to ship at all over the past decade. Don Mattrick isn't the reason reason that Microsoft still seems to have the worst taste-testers in the industry. Don Mattrick isn't the reason that internal studios like 343 have messed up 18/6 requirements. Don Mattrick isn't the reason that Microsoft kept acquiring, messing up and then firing studios, ending with a massive acquisition that can't even pay itself off for over a decade. And above all, Don Mattrick isn't responsible for the relentless drive for a weird fusion of unprofitable subscription service and cloud streaming offerings at the cost of overall game sale profits.

Don Mattrick's mistakes were near-fatal, but Phil Spencer's done more than his equal share of torpedoing the Xbox division. The blame at this point can rest squarely on his shoulders.

Well, him, and the person who refuses to replace him.

That's what a good-ol' Faraday cage is for.

I remember going out to dinner, years ago, with a fairly senior AWS billing engineer. An acquaintance of a coworker.

He looked completely surprised when I asked about runaway billing and why there wasn't any simple options to cap a given resource to prevent those cases.

His response was that they didn't build that because none of their customers wanted anything like that, as far as he was aware.

Or they work with languages, libraries, systems or problem areas where the LLMs fail to perform anywhere near as well as they do for you and me.

When the issues arise because of the tool being trained explicitly to respect/fire you, then that sounds like an apt and appropriate resulting level of job security.

Though to be clear, "not as cheaply" can mean a difference of several orders of magnitude and many years of effort.

It seems that these tests had a rule about not using generative AI from the start. So it would be more like someone entering a fingerpainting contest and using a paint brush.

EDIT: Oh, I misread, that was the USACO competition which had the explicit rule.

Non-voting representatives, possibly. "51st state" is just a marketing term, the reality would be a territory ala Puerto Rico or Guam, thought likely with more limited rights.

Expecting companies to actually license copyrighted material instead of mass infringement is fairly reasonable given they've demanded the same for decades from the populace.

"China's not going to respect those laws" is kinda beside the point. If they suddenly decided to cut everyone in the nation's pay in half - or double it - that would have no bearing on what is right for you or I to do.

You severely underestimate Trump, the GOP and a tamed media and tech industry's ability to spin things as the Democrats' fault.

They can also trivially rig elections by just organizing things to criminalize the majority of your opponents, but that's overkill.

At the end of the day, their win was total and permanent. There are no realistic fears of reelection issues to ever worry about.

> Can you enumerate some of the things that they could do,

Biden had a very long time to do a lot of things. You can get a lot done with a bit of creativity and a willingness to cause a few constitutional crisis'.

> Murder is always wrong. Vigilante justice is wrong.

Plenty of problems with tyrants, dictators and flat out murderers themselves have been resolved by murder.

If your first primary goal with a product line is that it will turn a profit per sale from the start, then you kinda have to start with the cost of goods sold as your baseline. If a customer pays you less than the product or service costs to provide, then by definition you priced it wrong for that initial / first step goal.

More than made up for in 'savings' from killing off Medicare. But realistically, you don't really need to balance a budget sheet when you can just print more of that principle currency on demand.

It's hard to tell how much of it is machiavellian plotting now that his "side" is in power and will benefit from a tighter crackdown on dissent, versus how much of the changes are just due to Elon getting more and more upset with getting constantly dunked on and hated on Twitter and social media.

At this point he's managed to make "all sides" hate him, except for maybe the Tesla fans and crypto cadres, and maybe that's finally starting to wear on him.

It could also be Elon finally realizing and reckoning with what we all already knew about social media, but he doesn't seem like that kind of person.

The free market interpretation is that a competitor will make this information available as a differentiating point, if they believe it would make a competitive advantage compared to everyone just not doing it. And that, should no competitor do that, then it behooves any complainant consumer to simply start their own multibillion dollar car company that differentiates on that point.

Spirit of the law vs. letter of the law. You can't go all-in on the letter of the law because language is imprecise and very contextual, and cannot aptly express the intent behind the law perfectly for all edge cases.

Matt's attorney - or someone claiming to be him - was saying that Matt is in the right and everything he's posted since the start was cleared by him. On here and on Twitter.

That jives with Matt's claims that his lawyers were on board with all of his nonsense (and now, probably legally incriminating!) posts. But it could also have just been someone LARPing.

> restoring WPEngine’s and Related Entities’ access to wordpress.org in the

> ...

> slack.wordpress.org); and

That is going to be a very awkward slack channel.

There are right answers though. Certainly far more "right" than what they currently do.

They can, in fact, have their billions of profits while not putting their customers in the grave. It's just slightly less profit than they currently get.

Squeezing the blood from the stone here is entirely a choice.

The countless needlessly dead "customers" aren't really happy or unhappy anymore. They're dead.

Wanting to not be dead or miserable in exchange for a company fulfilling their obligations and maybe having billions in profit instead of billions in profit +1 is far from 'unreasonable'.

This CEO was not some faceless cog with no agency. He was someone with real power and control that willingly made decisions that actively severely and often fatally harmed his customers.

There is a wide variety of jobs between "try to maximize denials and ensure maximal suffering and customer death as often as possible" American medical insurance company CEO, and useless trash job worker.

Many of those jobs even include rich CEOs of billion dollar insurance companies in industries that manage to actually fulfill a (comparatively) reasonable amount of customer claims.

That companies will go with malicious compliance 9999 times out of 10,000. So ensuring compliance would require immense enforcement efforts from the get-go that still haven't really surfaced.