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> This is an inconvenient reminder for people who want more "regulation"

Some people say they want more “food,” but did you know that consuming calories can lead to obesity?! The existence of fat people is an inconvenient reminder for people who claim to be “malnourished” or “wasting away.”

Google (and other search engines) gave you an easy and reliable way to opt-out of having your content indexed and linked to. People did in fact object pretty loudly every time Google attempted to surface the information on google.com rather than sending traffic to the source.

Well, the government can use Flock camera footage, and YouTubers can film with personal devices on public property. So I guess their capabilities are already pretty different

Yeah! Nobody should be able to track your movements along public roads.

> It's worse for the technician in this case, because he really was being followed --- that's not unlawful but it's unnerving.

The technician was in public, bearing a company logo, performing an activity in which there is widespread public interest, and identified himself to law enforcement as an agent of Flock Safety. He is entitled to be unnerved but has no reasonable expectation of privacy here.

No, I didn’t say anything of the sort.

I, too, often think of the early 2000s as the peak of humanity. But I find it's important to recognize when your judgment is being clouded by nostalgia, especially the extremely well-known and extensively documented bias to see how things were when you were in your early adult years as the way things ought to be in perpetuity.

There were a lot of things that sucked about tech in that era! It was literally when pets.com ads blanketed the airwaves. (edited to add: And more specifically, I think the exact time the OP is describing was already too far down its current path of ubiquitous social media (remember Friendster, MySpace, LiveJournal, AO3, etc.?) and omnipresent commercial surveillance. The fork point to avoid those fates was probably a decade earlier.)

But I think we can all agree that it is absolutely when music peaked, and pop culture has just gone downhill since then. :)

People were definitely building bomb shelters and doomsday retreat bunkers in the aughts, although they were signifiers of adherence to a particular political outlook.

There was definitely a sense that US hegemony would not be contested by a rival great power, but there was also widespread belief that that hegemony would be undermined and chipped away at by a million insurgent groups and terror cells. IIRC a rivalry with China was speculative and sometimes dismissed as fanciful within the foreseeable future, but we had literal terrorism response drills at my high school. We currently live in the craziest possible international arena, but it's not like the Bush years were some utopia by comparison.

I don’t know the author’s age but suspect this is an entry in the “<my teenage years/early twenties> were the peak of humanity” genre.

Where exactly is the imminent threat of deadly force in that example?

Was this reported and quantified somewhere, or does 95% reflect your experience? My experience was the opposite -- everybody I cared to follow left and never went back -- but I'd be willing to believe I'm in the 5%.

5G towers are typically much smaller and less conspicuous than the towers they are replacing. One of 5G's hallmarks is its "small cell" architecture.

The introduction of mechanical looms (is this what you mean by "modern"?) was famously terrible for workers. Weaving went from a high-skill, safe task to a dangerous, low-skill one and was largely responsible for the rise of factories. The original Luddites were weavers.

You may recall that the DMCA was originally written to protect music and movies. It does in fact apply to creative works. If you have ever purchased an MP3, eBook, or streaming movie, you will also be aware that you purchased a license to the underlying IP. This is also true of physical media, but the license agreement you have to accept when obtaining a digital work makes this explicit.

I agree that you can't patent a book, but I would point out that you can patent an idea, which may only appear in a book or journal article.

> I doubt these will have worse protection than software does, which has far better protections than copyright

Software is protected by copyright. Some software may also be protected by patents, but last time I checked, AI generated output of any kind was not patentable.

Many are openly working to create AGI with the aim of harnessing it to solve humanity's problems. Do you really think being able to command an entity with human-level intelligence would be morally equivalent to using a tractor?

You could tell from tone and polish how much effort someone had put into writing an answer. That was a pretty good signal for some topics on forum sites like Stack Overflow. There were always nuts and cranks who would happily spend an hour writing well-formed prose about nonsense or something obviously wrong, but the eloquent ones were few and far between. Now every crank is equally eloquent and can spit out 1,500 words of passable prose in seconds.

> Also keep in mind if your site is better indexed by crawlers you can literally influence future LLMs

Ah, what a glorious fate to aspire to.

Most people I know who have maintained blogs do so to build their personal brand, normally because they make a living through writing or consulting. Gently influencing the pre-tuning weights of future models is just providing unpaid labor to hyperscalers.

Most state legislatures work under a similar model -- being a legislator is full time work for a couple months of the year, and the rest of the time, delegates/senators are expected to have other jobs. (This is "enforced" by legislator pay being something like ~$10K/year.)

It's not a perfect system. There are very few jobs that just let you take off a couple of months a year, so legislators tend to have specific careers. Constituent services are required year-round, so legislative staff are full-time, year-round employees. And legislating has to happen quickly, so it's harder for citizens to interact and follow along with the process when they want to advocate for a bill.

I'm sure there is a way to use a step debugger with a specific unit test in Neovim or whatever, but it's one of the things heavyweight IDEs do with no setup or configuration.

It's been a few years since I worked in this space, but HIPAA doesn't really work under the same kind of legal framework. Oversimplifying here, but basically HIPAA defines what constitutes personal health information, how such information may be used, and establishes monetary penalties for improper use and unauthorized disclosure. The law doesn't have any certification standard, no more than the prohibition on stealing cars does.

Maybe there's some kind of third party certification system to support signing information sharing agreements ("BAAs") with other health information systems. I worked at CMS on first-party stuff so I'm not really familiar with how it works in the private sector.

> - can run individual tests seamlessly

This is the main one for me. If I am working on a large project with decent unit test coverage, the feedback loop in IntelliJ or Visual Studio is just much quicker than the alternatives because you can run and debug the specific tests you need.

By statute, an organization can only exist as a non-profit in the US if it is "organized and operated exclusively for exempt purposes"[0], and non-profit hospitals specifically must operate for charitable purposes.

It may not be wise to assume non-profits exist within the confines of the law that authorizes their continued existence, but I don't see how it's fallacious.

[0]: https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/charitable-organiz...

I will gladly pay you Tuesday for a hotdog today (if you want to get a circular investment bubble going)

> So what was valued? Physical robustness. Strength, perhaps brutality. Competence in physical tasks. Honesty. Parentage. Birth order (see primogeniture.) Those matter in per-technological societies, and they matter in failed societies now. Those are perhaps humanity's core values.

This is a "noble savage" conception of the past. Thinking/cleverness/craftiness was highly rewarded even in preliterate societies. Even in war, "polytropos" Odysseus comes out ahead of the dumb brutes with bigger spears.

Data & Society put out a paper on this role back in 2019 but used the term "moral crumple zones" since they were focusing on how to assign blame in autonomous vehicle crashes: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/351054898_Moral_Cru...

"Meat shields" has a nice physicality to it, though

Yep, that's why substitute teachers' interests are more zealously guarded by Congress than the interests of billionaires are. Teachers have wielded the enormous power they hold to get a <= $250 deduction for school supplies they purchase with their own money.

> consider how much lobbying money is coming from CEOs and companies who know the domain best and are agitating for better financial and social safeguards for all.

To hear Marc Andreessen tell it, the US tech industry's rightward turn in the 2024 campaign was specifically intended to head off any attempt to regulate AI [0]. So the blame rebounds to tech CEOs even if you believe that only the government should take a holistic view of a given technology's impact.

[0]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2025-06-11/marc-andr...

There are more recent versions with better names, like the Restore Trust in Congress Act[0], and one introduced a few days ago to ban congresspeople and the president (as well as their immediate family members) from betting on prediction markets[1].

I can only imagine the GP mentioned the PELOSI act (which, as I recall, was cosponsored by Nancy Pelosi and blocked by Republicans) because it was designed to be partisan messaging.

[0]: https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/5106...

[1]: https://www.politico.com/live-updates/2026/03/25/congress/la...

The $580MM transaction described in the article is already 1,000 times larger than the alleged congressional insider trading by Paul Pelosi that caused Sen. Hawley to introduce the PELOSI act.