rswail

The main question to government is:

1. You already know who everyone is. By definition identification as an individual is by government.

2. Why is there not a system that allows a business or other service to ask for government identification that is encrypted and only visible to government, but that allows a business to ask for certain details, required for the operation of the business (eg confirmation of driving license, or age)?

3. Why is that evidence not provided directly, but as a confirmation from the government service ("Yes, this person is over 18", not "Yes, this person is 37")?

Governments need to protect the public, not allow businesses open slather on collecting PII.

I'm against anything secret about spending on political campaigns.

Candidates should only accept funds from natural persons, that amount should be limited per person.

PACs and other candidate-adjacent activities should require 100% transparency on the source of funds and not be allowed to co-operate/co-ordinate with any candidate's campaigns. Companies can fund PACs, but they should be required to receive shareholder endorsement and not co-ordinate with their employees.

Laws impacting on the 1st amendment require strict limitation on how the government legislates and for an explicit need.

In this case, it is to ensure the integrity of the political process of selecting candidates and electing members of Congress.

You said "People" a lot in your post. Corporations are not "people".

Only natural persons should be able to contribute to political candidates.

Corporations can lobby, as a corporate person, just like a union or other organization, but not contribute.

They can run ads themselves, but there needs to be a much greater wall between PACs and candidate campaigns, with the previous restrictions now null and void due to lack of enforcement.

Roe v Wade and the resulting multi-decade clusterfuck is because your Congress are weak-willed pussies who are unable to actually work through a legislative process to find a consensus.

Yes, it took decades, but in Australia our various states have worked through the "it's criminal" -> "It's criminal but not enforced" -> "we're deliberately vague and won't prosecute doctors" -> "we have a legal framework that makes abortion legal up to {20,22,24} weeks on demand, after which it requires the consensus of two independent medical opinions".

The US needs to do the same. Yes, it will take decades. No, it shouldn't because abortion is a medical procedure, but religion is a scourge.

Not necessarily the same in every nation, but any treaty ratified by Congress in the United States has the same status as any law passed by Congress.

It is subject to judicial review, but has equal standing.

So the US cannot "violate [it] at will".

Could but hasn't. What exactly is xAI's USP compared to the others?

Having had to edit the documentation from native English speakers in the past, rewriting "in their own words" made it unclear, way too detailed about unnecessary options, and badly formed sentences.

The average person cannot write good documentation (or website copy). It's an actual skill to learn how to phrase things, ensure that the documentation delivers the right level of detail to the different reader types etc.

As English writers, software developers make great programmers, not authors.

No, if anything there will be more because some of the funds freed up can be spent on healthcare delivery.

But you will lose endless billing departments at general/specialist practices, hospitals etc, because actual consumers would not engage. Hospital administrations will be driven by the government setting reimbursement rates for services that are transparent, so the argy-bargy between someone paying cash, someone getting insurance etc will disappear (mostly).

I'm in Australia, and the billing departments, even at private hospitals are minimal. Ditto at general practices. Reimbursements for GP/specialists that are not "bulk billed" (ie paid at the government rate) are automated into a nominated bank account and are usually instant.

Medicare for All in the US would move the 2/3rds that are not covered by Medicare, VA, etc into the same systems, with the reduction in overhead from 10-20% to the 2-5% of the current government run health systems.

Allowing Medicare to negotiate both drug prices (as a large purchaser) and health services will also dramatically reduce costs, because the government has the purchasing power to drive hard bargains.

Actual healthcare delivery is a growing field because boomers are getting old and dying and advances in health care mean that people that would otherwise die (eg people with cancers) are now receiving treatments that keep them alive.

Note that this is a Good Thing.

The issue with US (and privatized) healthcare delivery is that there is an incentive (by insurers) to deny treatment, as well as an incentive for healthcare suppliers (hospitals, doctors) to over-deliver treatment, as well as incentives to use more expensive solutions.

Demand in healthcare is inelastic, no one is ever "too healthy".

Supply is always insufficient, so there needs to be a mechanism to resolve that.

In the US, that mechanism is money, or the cost of insurance etc to provide a restriction on demand.

In universal healthcare, that mechanism is a combination of subsidizing medications based on results and waiting lists for limited supplies, prioritized by need (eg surgeries).

Yes and no, evolution by natural selection is essentially relying on random mutations.

Our media environment is "intelligently designed" and can be modified by concerted action. We don't need to "evolve" to meet the monopolist social media ecosphere, we can modify it to remove the monopolies/oligarchies.

There is absolutely no reason why X, Google, Facebook, Oracle etc can't be "trust busted" and broken up. The SpaceX IPO, conflating a space company with an AI and social media company to defraud people of the losses of Musk from his xAI and Twitter.

It's actually a "conservative" move to break these companies up and democratize ownership via IPOs of spun-off companies. It worked when Standard Oil was broken up into Esso, Mobil etc.

I've been on the "internet" since before there was one, back in 1984-6 when bang paths were email addresses and DNS hadn't been invented yet. I was on one of the earliest BBSs (pre-FIDO) in Melbourne run by Peter Jetson and "Bear's Bull" running on a CDC-6000 at RMIT.

It's been an "eternal September" since Prodigy & Compuserve and then AOL joined the net, Usenet started degrading, people had more then 4-line sigs without a "-- " at the start of the sig, people top-quoted messages etc.

So the internet has been dying all that time. Lived through the dotcom boom/crash, growth/death of Yahoo Groups/Geocities/stumbleupon/slashdot/fark/etc.

I'm not sure whether AI/LLMs are really killing it more than the advent of social media and the endless slop that is time descending blogs.

I'm not sure whether the internet is just becoming yet another broadcast media, where small voices are drowned out by media conglomerates and the endless suck of advertising, or whether it really is "dying".

Either way, it will evolve, but whether it will evolve "well" is a very open question.

The problem of the jets on September 11 is the use of the jets themselves as weapons.

Even without the jet fuel on board, the destruction would still have been substantial. Whether the Twin Towers would have fallen without the fuel is not really relevant.

Most of the security is security theater. The primary improvements to security have not been people taking their shoes off or emptying water bottles. It was locking the cockpit doors and passengers knowing that they cannot rely on the hijacker wanting to survive. Other than that, making sure passengers are on board if their luggage is has meant no more Lockerbies.

All the other stuff is pretty much a waste of time.

Was going on memory and didn't want to google. :)

Not quite. It was already starting, but the Federal government at the time was very anti RE.

South Australia had a single interconnect to the rest of the Australian Energy Market that covers the states except for WA and Northern Territory.

There was a big storm that took out an interstate interconnect and the voltage spike caused all the other generators to disconnect to protect themselves.

Then Elon promised to build utility storage in 6 months or the state would get it for free.

That was the Hornsby battery which is mainly used for Frequency services (basically when supply/demand fluctuates, it keeps things stable).

That used to be done by gas plants, but the battery saved a large chunk of its cost in the first year by being able to switch on much faster.

You could combine the best of dodgem cars with drone nets by encasing all the highways in electrified wiring.

Some people drive as if they're in dodgem cars as it is.

Wholesale power is ~37% of the customer bills.

The other costs are the "poles and wires" distribution network and the HV transmission network.

The government is also building out the transmission network to various renewable energy zones, which has the added benefit of making the transmission network more resilient.

With large coal plants, the network was only one interconnector failure from blacking out a state (as happened to South Australia).

Now there is a much better network of interconnected transmission across the entire east and south coast of Australia, covering something like 80% of the population.

The government just bailed out an aluminium smelter that was going to close because of the increased cost of power because it was relying on an old coal plant. Now that will be replaced with renewables.

So we get the benefit of the continued operation of the smelter, as well as the build out of replacement generation for the old coal plants at EOL that will be closed by 2030.

In Australia people do both. We don't have V2G yet, but EVs plugged in at home overnight with L1 charging can get charged by the home battery that was charged up during the day by the PV on the roof.

The solar PV and now storage rollouts in Australia have been one of the best government investments in public infrastructure in my lifetime here.

The more we electrify, the less reliant we are on the crude -> foreign refineries -> imported/distributed fuel risk.

Harvesting solar power is an awesome thing to do both at home and utility level.

PV and wind utility installations are being built with storage co-located, there are companies building synthetic condensers to maintain the grid stability and the job of frequency support is now done mostly by batteries, not gas.

We need to make electricity basically "too cheap to meter" and electrify our primary industries, mining and agriculture.

In an oligarch owned media ecosystem, with obvious corruption of the regulators (FCC, DOJ) to ensure proper use of the public radio spectrum and monopoly restrictions, having a non-partisan publicly funded independent media is vital to the health of democracy.

The US is not a "free society".

Which is why the BBC, ABC, CBC, etc exist in civilized societies.

An authenticated chain similar to the crts for TLS certificates.

So we need to "prohibit to the states" the power to enforce medical procedures (or the prohibition of a medical procedure) on individuals.

Which amendment protects someone's bodily autonomy or medical treatment from interference by the states?

If the Federal Congress passed a law providing that abortions are legal on demand up to the 22 week of gestation, after which it would require the corroboration of two doctors, would that stand, or would it be struck down by SCOTUS?

Same for legalization of marijuana, and many other "social" issues.

One of my first jobs, back in the 1980s, was a project for a government department that the supplier (Wang Computers) had bet on MS-DOS being multi-process.

Of course, it wasn't but there was MP/M-86/CCP/M/CDOS/DR-DOS which allowed you to have 4 "users"/virtual TTYs.

So we ended up using that along with some tweaks to the software (including an IBM 3270 emulator, MS-Word/Excel (the DOS versions), and a custom software app) that ended up getting deployed to a few hundred government offices.

Mostly worked except some of the software really didn't like the fact that it was being swapped out of keyboard/screen access.

Does this apply to Apple to have something separate to Siri in iOS?

When you are integrating to other people's stacks, then you need a test facility where people can bring systems together, sometimes there are also physical elements that are required.

I work in Automatic Fare Collection (think railway passenger gates, ticket vending, contactless readers, bus driver consoles and readers etc as well as the backends that deal with the fare calculation and payments).

There are usually multiple vendors involved, and even with the best API and interface documentation and individual system testing against the specifications, you still need to bring the entire environment, including the hardware, together.

These ITFs (Integration Test Facilities) tend to be in existence for the life of the systems, including after hardware refreshes etc.

Yes you can test performance with jmeter etc, but sometimes you need 20 people walking in a circle between an entrance gate and an exit gate.

Depends on the type of testing. If you're doing integration testing between systems, then it's not just a matter of spinning it up on a developer's local machine.

You need a testing environment, especially if there are other physical elements that are being integrated (embedded and other equipment).

Corporate personhood is a common legal practice, where necessary the law distinguishes between "persons" and "natural persons".

That's the same in the US/UK/AU/NZ/CA/DE/JP/IN.

The difference in the US is that SCOTUS basically made it impossible to restrict corporate spending on politics. That is what needs to be fixed in the US, not Corporate Personhood.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_personhood

The first paragraph talking about reviewing, editing, and refining, is literally the job of a Literary Editor when working with an author on their literature.

Editors do not have any IPRs over the resulting literary work.

Following that simile, the AI is the "author" and the developer is the "editor".

Given that an AI cannot be an "author" under copyright law, there is no copyright in the final product.

I've been a programmer for 40 years, I've never considered myself to be an engineer.

We don't have the same level of "proven solutions" and constraints and mathematical rigor that engineering has, nor do we have the legal/liability requirements of "Professional Engineers".

I hope that I qualify as the equivalent of an artisan, like a carpenter that makes furniture, that has elements of both art and craft. Even as I've moved up (and down) the hierarchy of programmer/senior/"architect"/manager.

Programmers fit the "craftsperson/journeyperson/apprentice" model much better than engineering practice.

Just prompts are not considered to be "direction". The example in the US Copyright Office report was of a client providing "direction" to an architect, which did not provide the client with any claim of ownership over the actual architectural drawings.

On the other hand, the architect using CAD tools to create those drawings did include the necessary human creativity/direction even if the tools did things like apply building code rules etc.

Source code being subject to copyright and also considered to be "speech" has provided much more protection to the public from government overreach, eg restrictions on cryptography source code.

There are two different but related copyright problems with LLM generated code:

1. Making a derivative work of already existing copyrighted code that breaks that code's license (eg injecting GPL code in output).

2. Fully LLM generated code is not able to be subject to copyright, because there is not a human author, which means that it is not able to be subject to a license.

#1 is a problem that the AI vendors are indemnifying customers for.

#2 is not something that AI vendors can change, as it is part of the enforceability of IPRs under law.

Companies are going to have to rely on trade secrets for protection of their closed source code, FOSS/GPL projects don't have that option.

Do they offer the same indemnification that the code they generate IS subject to copyright and that you own that?

Because the US Copyright begs to differ.