kolektiv

> a democratically-elected official can wield the power of the state against you and harm your interests just as much as a dictator can

Really? Can they? Because in a functioning democracy you generally have recourse to courts, tertiary adjudication of various forms, a (relatively) free press that you can try and interest in taking up your story, etc. In a brutal dictatorship you're likely to have none of those, and to go missing in the night if you try and suggest that you should.

It's absolutely right to oppose politicians you disagree with - that's what political engagement is all about! But beyond a certain level, hyperbole (and the general sense of "they're all the same") simply does serve to undermine not just democracy, but any rationale for political engagement vs. simple rioting.

Well, no, more accurately, when it comes to it, it's in the eyes of a judge (or a jury in some cases). You can have all kinds of arguments about validity of arrests, of prosecutions, etc., but it's still fundamentally a system where you'll be charged with an offence and then either convicted or not.

I don't know of a single case (and don't believe anyone can point to one) where people have been arrested for simply criticising politicians. Has the number of incidents risen over recent years? Yes, and while this might be partly explained by stricter legal approaches, I suspect it's much more to do with a drastic rise in far-right activity and a consequent feeling among many that they can now say/do whatever they like with impunity (including making threatening and inflammatory remarks about minorities, and so on).

This might be a British humoUr thing - as a local it read very much as a self-deprecating jab at our own English-centric travelling. Taken literally obviously it would be offensive, but it's not meant that way. I note that the author lives in Edinburgh, a place which has a reputation for quite dry, understated and self-deprecating style to start with - understandably, as the only way to stand the hordes clogging the Mile and other picturesque spots.

Another voice basically begging them to change the name here, yeah. It might be quite interesting as a tool, but please...

If anyone submitted such a PR to one of my projects and could explain compelling benefits for why doing so would be a general improvement, even considering trade-offs of increased complexity/maintainability, etc., then I'd be delighted they'd cared enough to improve my software.

It's why we see so many infants getting caught for DUIs. Seriously? You seem to be implying that there's no justification/efficacy for any law/ban prohibiting children from engaging in adult activities. That's... something.

Ooh, perhaps, but maybe not semantically identical? Visually probably the same though, devilish!

I was curious about Shakti after reading this and the comments, so followed the link to shakti.com on Wikipedia. It seems it now redirects to the k.nyc domain, which displays a single letter 'k'.

I wondered if I was missing something, so looked at the source, to find the following:

  <div style='font-family:monospace'>k

Nothing but that. Which is, surely, the HTML equivalent of the Whitney C style: relying on the compiler/interpreter to add anything implicit, and shaving off every element that isn't required, such as a closing tag (which, yes, only matters if you're going to want something else afterwards, I guess...). Bravo.

An anomaly for sure, and I think as much as anything else one caused by the fact that Covid meant that government couldn't do business as usual. It wasn't procured and developed in the usual way, it didn't have the usual political pressures and fights from all sides. Yes, it's an example of what could be done if government was insulated from the usual environment!

For me the objections in the UK is not really about the principle (although there are always going to be some privacy/liberty/etc. concerns in that sense), but about the likely implementation.

If we could be assured that whatever was put in place was genuinely privacy/security focused, had open and transparent governance, and wasn't susceptible to capture by corporations/other powerful actors, I suspect many people wouldn't be too bothered. But that's not really the offer, it never is with public IT infrastructure in the UK. The likelihood is that it would be farmed out to one more private corporations to build and maintain, generally for a lowest bid, and overseen by people without sufficient expertise to avert many/any of the potential harms from a poor implementation.

There are good ways to do things like this: public ownership, open governance, security/privacy baked in, all based on a reflective national conversation about trade-offs and the valid fears that many have. What people don't trust is not really the concept of ID cards, it is instead the track record of this and previous governments with both IT and privacy impacting legislation, and even more so the potential inclinations of future governments, particularly at a time when far-right parties are floating ideas like mass deportation of people legally entitled to be here.

Digital ID and a free society are not inherently opposed, but there is no sign that this or other administrations are sufficiently interested in, or aware of, the complexities involved to produce anything other than a semi-permanent disaster.

It's not really about whether it aligns or not, it's more about whether it's true. What he says about London isn't true, but it is divisive and fearmongering.

Yup, and just to add, for those not in the UK, or particularly connected to London, etc. - this take is utter garbage. The UK certainly has a variety of challenges, but they are not what the far right (and that's what the people he's talking about absolutely are) make them out to be. London is not what it's painted to be by external rabble-rousers and populists, and this mania/delusion that's being pushed (sometimes by the very wealthy who are often much closer to the problem than immigrants are) is a significant problem.

DHH is (or should be) pretty close to a toxic brand right now, and for someone who published various edicts on "don't talk about politics at work", it would be lovely if he followed his own advice a little more.

Absolutely, the technique of "you won't debate me so I must be right" has somehow risen from the playground to mainstream politics, but it's arrant nonsense. Not every idea is worthy of rational and moral consideration, and sometimes it is not weakness to reject even a proposition, simply humanity and a recognition of the underlying motive, which is not always to seek enlightenment, but sometimes to undermine the very idea of enlightenment.

Indeed, and "what Mosley believed" was pretty well known at the time given his fascist activity over the preceding thirty years. Mosley was not likely to change his mind, and while there may well sometimes be joy and enlightenment in the practice of debate and rhetoric, you don't have to do it with a fascist. Bertrand Russell had nothing to prove and was perfectly reasonable in saying, effectively, that they were never going to agree and there's no point in wasting more paper in proving that.

Way, way off-topic now, but if you ever get a chance to see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Disappearing_Number, don't miss it. It's rare to see a play weave mathematics and history into such a form, threading them through our modern world and showing the humanity of those who lived and breathed the equations on the page.

You're absolutely right, English - my family north of the border are no doubt cursing me as we speak, I'll go and replace the cone as penance next time I'm there.

Particularly when, as in the case of UK water privatisation, there's a fairly convenient revolving door between the supposed regulator and the privatised water companies. Poacher turned entirely ineffective and rather friendly gamekeeper...

It's useful as a term of understanding. It's not useful to OpenAI and their investors, so they'd like that term to mean something else. It's very generous to say that whether an LLM "knows" is irrelevant. They would like us to believe that it can be avoided, and perhaps it can, but they haven't shown they know how to do so yet. We can avoid it, but LLMs cannot, yet.

Yes, we can know whether something is true or false, but this is a system being sold as something useful. If it relies on us knowing whether the output is true or false, there is little point in us asking it a question we clearly already know the answer to.

But an LLM is not answering "what is truth?". It's "answering" "what does an answer to the question "what is truth?" look like?".

It doesn't need a conceptual understanding of truth - yes, there are far more wrong responses than right ones, but the right ones appear more often in the training data and so the probabilities assigned to the tokens which would make up a "right" one are higher, and thus returned more often.

You're anthropomorphizing in using terms like "lying to us" or "know the truth". Yes, it's theoretically possible I suppose that they've secretly obtained some form of emergent consciousness and also decided to hide that fact, but there's no evidence that makes that seem probable - to start from that premise would be very questionable scientifically.

A lot of people seem to be saying we don't understand what it's doing, but I haven't seen any credible proof that we don't. It looks miraculous to the relatively untrained eye - many things do, but just because I might not understand how something works, it doesn't mean nobody does.

Oh, ouch, yeah. We already know that misinformation tends to get amplified, the last thing we need is a starting point full of harmful misinformation. There are lots of "causal beliefs" on the internet that should have no place in any kind of general dataset.

Plus, regardless of what you might think of how valid that connection is, what they're actually collecting, absent any kind of mechanism, is a set of all apparent correlations...

You don't have to assume people are going to be bad, but it's reasonable and prudent to expect it from people who have already shown themselves to be so (in this context).

I trust people until they give me cause to do otherwise.

It's not always about mocking (in my cases it hasn't been). Sometimes it is about multiple "real" implementations - a filesystem is itself an abstraction, and a very common one, it seems like it would at least sometimes be useful to be able to leverage that more flexibly.

It always surprised me somewhat that there isn't a set of traits covering some kind of `fs` like surface. It's not a trivial surface, but it's not huge either, and I've also found myself in a position of wanting to have multiple implementations of a filesystem-like structure (not even for the same reasons).

Tricky to make that kind of change to std lib now I appreciate, but it seems like an odd gap.

> training them to accept the surveillance state

From the perspective of those pushing this kind of technology and political movement, is that a bug or a feature?

Given their positions on things like Russia, the Epstein files, free trade, etc. (where the position has changed from things that were either broadly "American" values or positions that Trump directly supported) I would guess it would take a day or two. The core "Trump is infallible" demographic will follow him no matter what. If he said the sun set in the morning, they'd blame the sun when it rose.

I can't take anything seriously with phrases like "it has not yet achieved AGI, but it is one leap forward in the race to AGI" - based on what? Nobody knows whether LLMs are a viable approach to AGI, nobody really agrees on what AGI is, hell, people don't really agree on what "I" is.

This is just not even science at all at this point, we're just into solid cargo cult.

Yeah, you're right, "adverts" as a catch-all term is doing a lot of heavy lifting there, and it's not focused enough. And thank you for a clearly, deeply considered reply!

You raise some interesting points, and I'm probably pretty unusual in finding most of those things even low-grade annoying (I am genuinely slightly irked by producers having influence over store merchandising because I'd rather be free to try and choose products which genuinely suit my needs rather than having my attention nudged by certain products being shoved into my eye line).

Movies are about the only one of those areas where I'd be hesitant, but that's mainly because I'd say yes, Hello Kitty is basically an ad, and Marvel Movies... I'm not sure. I'd say the movies themselves would be worth making financially without the merchandising spinoffs, and so they can be considered a product in themselves (and perhaps also because I've never bought a single item of Marvel merch despite having seen many of the films). But you're right to point out that in many cases the line is blurry. That said, for things like YouTube - it isn't blurry in the slightest, in most cases!

I'm not sure we're actually disagreeing that much, but I will say: even if you show me something I love, in a way that I appreciate, but you do it in a time or place where I don't want that thing? That's still an imposition. So in a way we agree because time + place + content + style is something that is not possible to get right. There will never be an advert brilliant or relevant enough to make me happy that you showed it to me while skiing in the Norwegian mountains, or while watching my child enjoy their birthday party. Most cases are less extreme, but then most adverts are much worse - the scale will never be tipped the right way.

As spoken by thousands of tech companies over and over - if only the ads were more relevant, users would like them! No, they never will. That's because an advert is effectively an unasked-for imposition on my attention intended to benefit somebody else more than it benefits me (should it be considered to benefit me at all). There's a name for behaviour like that: rude.

I am not blind to commercial imperatives, but expecting people to ever feel anything more positive than low-level irritation with advertising is unrealistic. People do not like feeling that others matter more than them, particularly where money is involved. Spaces without adverts in them, whether physical or virtual, are simply more mentally enjoyable to people than those with them. Imagine one of the worlds wonders, natural or otherwise. Imagine the Acropolis, the Coliseum, the Buddha of Leshan - or Lake Annecy, or the Great Barrier Reef, or the Amazon. Now try and imagine a single advert which is so wonderful that it would improve any of them, contextual or otherwise. You can't, and you won't. They're pollution that we tolerate.