schroeding

> The term artificial intelligence [...] means technology or intellectual property that could be used to contribute to artificial intelligence or generative artificial intelligence capabilities

> The term "export", [...], includes [...] the release or transfer of technology or source code relating to the item to a foreign person in the United States.

> PROHIBITION ON EXPORT (& import) - [...] the export (& import) [...] of artificial intelligence or generative artificial intelligence technology or intellectual property to or within the People's Republic of China is prohibited.

Ehhh, do I misunderstand US legal terms or wouldn't this be a death sentence for open source AI research and any AI papers by US researchers in journals & conferences? Or does public distribution on the web not count as (indirect) export?

The big sörge

I also own a 4a - the amount of hoops Google performed to explicitly prevent downgrades for (only) the 4a by removing all old Android images (and only for it) leads me to fear your charitable view is true. Only the tinyest sliver of customers would ever try to downgrade / reflash their phone, it IMO doesn't make sense to do this if they just want to increase sales a bit. And then again, why only for the 4a.

Which, should it be true, would make the lack of explanation from Google horrible and asinine. If (and this is a big if, it's all speculation, because Google doesn't open their mouth) there is a hardware fault with the battery, I would very much like to know outright as a customer, no matter the PR damage for Google.

Göring also directly gave the order to Reinhard Heydrich to organize the "Final Solution of the Jew Question" aka Holocaust. So code of honor with strict restriction to "Aryan" pilots of the western Allies, if at all, IMO.

They maybe just forgot the extend of it. Don't forget that many don't even know the difference between the "normal" (already incredibly horrible and vile) concentration camps like Dachau and the pure extermination camps like Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka or Sobibor. The Brits and Americans only liberated the first kind, and it (mostly) wasn't their citizens who were gassed or shot by Einsatzgruppen.

Also doesn't help that some think it was only done and caused by the SS or Hitler / Himmler / Göring, as if there was no connection with the remaining government, the police or the Reichsbahn, and as if the Wannseekonferenz[1] and Reichskristallnacht[2] had never happened.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wannsee_Conference, also https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=URSNN5mnI2g

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kristallnacht

Yeah, actual comparable hard data would be nice, agreed :D

That it was done via TikTok was widely reported by news outlets on all sides of the political spectrum where I live.

Why they've done it via TikTok - I simply don't know. :D

Maybe better discoverability via the For You page?

... I do not think that it's immune? I don't see where I implied this, sorry if I was unclear. ^^'

This specific campaign was done via TikTok, though, and had massive impact, which shows that TikTok has heavy usage and is popular, outside of the US and China.

(I'm not American, I have no horse in this "ban foreign TikTok" race. :D)

At least in Germany, for Gen Z, Facebook is quite dead and Instagram co-exists with TikTok, both with >70% of the cohort [1] using them. There is no clear winner. Anecdata, but for freshmen, TikTok is way more popular.

TikTok-based social media campaigns also e.g. managed to unexpectedly swing an election in Romania (for Georgescu, was later annulled).

[1] https://www.absatzwirtschaft.de/tiktok-vs-instagram-ein-verg... - sorry, I only found a German source

Same, but with rum. Just doesn't work as well with the diet stuff for some reason, too.

Classic coke + Cuban rum + lime == very good time. :D

I don't think it's a super super rare sentiment. Also fits that there is a rising number of NEETs and (basically, for the lack of a better word) hikikomoris, which is just this feeling taken to the logical extreme (at least IMO, I may be wrong).

For the last thing you said, in German, there is even an explicit word for this, "Torschlusspanik", the fear and sense of urgency you get when you feel a (imaginary or real) deadline or "last shot at something" starts to approach. So also a common feeling.

Feel hugged. Childhood trauma sucks big time. :/

Europe isn't a homogeneous block in this question, though. Some parts do what GP said, IMO.

For example, Germany also increased its military spending, true - but from a low starting point, with an army even sometimes lacking basic supplies like dumb ammunition due to massive underfunding since the end of the cold war.

The (possible, maybe!) reintroduction of drafting will be agonizingly slow, as the military doesn't have the capacity anymore (and will lack it for years to come!) to even examine even a small percentage of each year, let alone equip and train them. There are no KWEAs (Kreiswehrersatzämter, drafting centers) anymore, and the new "Career Centers" have abysmal throughput.

We sold a very very significant chunk of our military bases and heavy equipment. Those are gone, the federal government often doesn't even own the land anymore. We have almost no working bunkers anymore, both military and public. Etc, etc.

Those are things which we would have to start to change immediately, as it takes ages until we see results. We do sorta, but on a tiny scale - it's not the massive investment you would expect for a country readying itself for conflict.

German politics / state departments are, IMO, in no way readying the public for the real prospect of military conflict. Pistorius, the German defence minister, basically screams into the void. Yes, many agree in talk, but the walk is quite underwhelming.

The defence ministry says we have to be ready for war until 2029. Most projects which are started now will, based on information by the same ministry, never ever be finished until before the 2030s. And yet, there is no hurry visible. We still have time.

> Passwords

Which reminds me, to strengthen your point, it doesn't have 100% keystroke recognition, but there are works[1] on keylogging via audio, and 93% via Zoom-quality audio streams is concerning enough for me.

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.01074

The Framework laptop does this for both microphone and webcam, and there are privacy focused Android phones which also have a microphone switch which cuts the power to the microphone. It's definitely possible.

Agreed. I find so much peace of mind in the microphone / webcam hardware switches of my Framework laptop.

Seeing the webcam actually vanish from the list of devices is very nice. :D

It's a different cable, even though they were close together.

This is true now - it definitely wasn't in the past, especially until the 80s. My mother was still beaten (!) as a child by her teacher in Munich when she spoke too Bavarian. Eradication of dialect was the goal at the time, Hochdeutsch the only thing acceptable.

(But the reason was people thinking it's a "Bildungshindernis", a roadblock in the pursuit of knowledge, like if people speaking dialect were mentally challenged - not national unity)

Eh, I wouldn't agree with that. In Germany, we had multiple top-down orthographic reforms in the past (e.g. Rechtschreibreform 1996, had many many significant, brand-new changes to make spelling and speaking more consistent) which were pretty forced, i.e. was not organic at all. I'm not saying it was bad, I like the current state of the German language - but it was not organic or democratic. Germanys equivalent to The Daily Mail even had an entire campaign against it with stickers and all.

And there is no true way to "vote with your feet" if you get punished for violating the official orthography.

Not to mention other sources of non-organic language change, like e.g. suppressing dia- or sociolects, but I also don't want to delve (hehe) too far. :P

Well, agree to disagree. :D I see your points, and I would agree that the majority would still keep their trust.

> I don't understand why you think people wouldn't trust this.

Because people are not always rational beings, often don't understand statistics and, in my experience, the set of people not trusting journalists and having doubt on past elections having significant overlap. If you are not convinced the press isn't lying, and maybe just prints what the government wants, you will not expect that they uncover election intervention. And your friends may be on a list of the city hall, "they" know that they vote for certain parties[1]. This is basically verbatim what voters sometimes tell you, why they don't vote via mail. It's easy to transfer those fears onto electronic voting.

It's very hard to keep believing in serious election fraud if you see how (this kind of) analogue voting works, though. You have to trust nobody, only yourself, at least in regards to your local polling station.

> The whole process you're describing for physical polling places is a million times more work for any individual. It requires a massive amount of time and attention.

Yes, I don't disagree. It's significantly more work, inefficient and antiquated. All true. I'm just not convinced that the convenience of electronic / online voting is worth the risk that a) a fuck-up due to any kind of bug / security problem and b) people losing even the slightest bit of trust into elections because of "magic computer", even if they are caused by delusions, would pose.

[1] Germany has no "registration" as Republican or Democrat (w/ German parties of course) like the US has - they don't have such lists

I don't know what the US does, but in Germany all ballots are poured onto a big table and then sorted into staples for each candidate / party. Especially since the votes / crosses are always at the same position for each staple, it is trivial to keep an eye on 5, 6 staples at once, and the remaining parties get almost no votes anyway. After that, the staples are split into 10s and counted by two people, independently, after each other. All results are called out loud. The results are also given to the city hall via phone, so everyone in the room can hear it. City hall publishes the official results per party per polling station as nice images, easily digestible. I don't see how this is next to impossible to supervise, even for a single individual.

If you want, you can even stay the whole day and keep an eye on the whole voting process except when the voters make their choice behind the privacy screen, you can see everything which enters the ballot box. I've seen myself someone regaining trust in the democratic process because of this - a guy who openly accused us, the polling station workers, of voting manipulation, being openly hostile, agreeing that everything was done correctly in the end. This would've been impossible while using electronic or online voting.

> it's about a million times easier.

If you, as a random citizen, know SUM() and even think about downloading the data for Excel, you are the top-n% in computer literacy. You are aware of that, right? ^^'

For most people, verifying their own vote on a website with no understanding of the underlying process is the absolute maximum you can expect, IMO. In this case, it is "trusting a magic box with a display". You compared it yourself with HTTPS, for which the same is true for the general public.

> What's important to rely on is the fact that people are able to verify that their own votes are consistent with what's in the public votes

But will people do this at scale and do people trust that they do so? The latter is the most important. It doesn't have to make statistical sense, it's about feelings in this case.

Because if most people (of a certain demographic like the elderly) don't check their own vote or a significant amount of people don't believe that they do so, you cannot automatically assume that all votes in the polling station have been counted correctly. It may have been e.g. only the votes of certain demographics (who are unlikely to check their own votes), which have been tampered, even if this believe is statistically unjustified.

If you supervise a whole analog polling station, you see for yourself this is not the case.

> Voting doesn't have to be any different.

Yes, it has to be. If you break the ability for the average citizen to understand exactly how and why your vote is counted, you undermine trust. Trust into the democratic process is the thing keeping a democracy alive.

If someone currently says "<Country> / <Party> interfered with the voting process!", I can tell them to just observe their local polling station or even become part of the polling station staff themselves. Be there, check that the election staff doesn't start throwing away votes and count correctly. Check that the numbers they count are equal to the one on the official result for the polling station. It's all paper. It's easy to follow.

If we put anything between this, which requires trust into a magic box with a display, I cannot do this. If your credit card is abused, you see it on your bank account, always. You cannot have the same certainty the same for an anonymous election - yes, they may have proof that their vote was correctly counted, but what about the polling station as a whole? The votes of the other citizens? Most people will not check, just as you may only get one observer per polling station max today (which is already enough to prevent fraud for the whole station, in the case of paper ballots).

"Trust the journalists" does not fly.

> And remember, physical voting is actually tremendously complicated as well

It doesn't have to be. You don't need complex equipment, you can count directly in the polling station after it closes. Paper and people suffice.

> Also, good old-fashioned pen and paper, when used, is surrounded by various systems and various equipment

I don't know what the US does, but this is how it works in Germany: Around half-ish of the polling station staff are clerks of the local administration (normal office workers of the city hall, who almost always serve their whole life - they are not re-appointed by the current ruling party), half (or more) are citizens. If not enough citizens sign up voluntarily, random citizens are drafted.

The equipment is: A list of all eligible citizens, who can vote (no registration is required), a ballot box with a very flimsy padlock, for which the polling station staff has the key, mobile privacy screens for the voters, pens and the actual ballots.

If a citizen wants to vote, they show their national ID (something which the US does not have, I know, but that's not the fault of the paper voting process) and get a ballot. They make their choice behind the privacy screen and put the ballot in the ballot box.

After the polling station closes, the ballot box is shaken around a bit and anyone[1] can come to look / supervise the polling station staff as they count the votes. The number of votes must be round about equal to the number of voters. The result if given to the city hall via phone, the ballots get put into the ballot box and can be recounted later, if necessary. City hall puts all results on their website, so the polling stations can verify.

If a ballot has more than the allowed number of votes or something written on it, the polling station staff holds a quick vote, majority decides.

That's all, the whole process. No ink, no complex seals (the key for the ballot box is in a box with the blank ballots, it's only there to prevent accidental opening of the ballot box), no timed process (except "voting until 18 o'clock"), no politically motivated selection of polling station staff or observers.

Would you really say that this is more complicated than electronic voting, including understanding the algorithms? Especially for someone with no CS background.

And it works - will you sometimes have one ballot more than voters? Yeah, sure, because someone may forgot to count a voter. But those tiny, human discrepancies IMO don't matter when you have >1000 ballots. The result is correct enough, and based on keeping each other in check, not on technical security measures. Everyone can understand the process, and everyone can be a part of it.

It does not meet the correctness guarantees of (perfect, untamperable) electronic voting, but it's IMO a heck of a lot simpler, just as trustworthy at scale and anonymous.

[1] literally anyone, even non-citizens, no registration required - we even give them coffee if some is still left :D

Agreed, the classic process also requires no trust into something technical (which, to most people, is equal to magic - hell, even as a CS major it's non-trivial to understand this), but only trusting ten-thousands of your fellow citizens with very different political affiliations, keeping each other in check. Easy to understand, easy to implement, easy to be a part of.

> If you want "historical accuracy", you would have the actors speak in Latin or Greek, but these days I'm not sure it'd find an audience

I think Barbarians had quite a bit of viewers on Netflix, right? I can highly, highly recommend the latin-german version[1] of season 1 - even though the Barbarians wouldn't have spoken modern German, it's still superb!

[1] sneak-peak: https://youtube.com/watch?v=ojC-zTXSAsY

As a reference: https://youtube.com/watch?v=DOW_kPzY_JY

(I honestly think they have uploaded at least 90% of the show by now on Youtube)

While there are areas where the "Fachkräftemangel" (lack of skilled laborers) is actually real, the problem for gastronomy is the minimum wage, which is ~12 Euros. Why choose being a service worker or part of the kitchen brigade in (especially small) gastronomy (where, often, all you get is only slightly above minimum wage), if there are other, easier choices which pay basically the same?

As someone who was service staff as a student, I completely understand that, to be honest. It doesn't help that many restaurants just fired their whole service staff during COVID, even though there are other instruments like "Kurzarbeit" (where the state gives you welfare, and you temporarily only work few hours or not at all, if no work is available at your place of labor) - obviously people find new jobs in this case and aren't available anymore.

No you didn't. External audits and compliance forced you to install an EDR, said EDR had no option to defer this kind of update. Crowdstrike sold itself to the suits as said EDR. What do you do, ignore both your management and the security checklist given by the government?

> even though BAMF, Schufa and every law firm and government agency remotely interested in you can find out everything about you if they want to fine you for something.

This isn't true, IMO. German administrative offices in general don't talk to each other without your permission, with exceptions like the police. This is also the reason why it's e.g. a giant pain to change your name in Germany - everyone has their own independent database. Can you maybe clarify, please?

BAMF has no data of German citizens ("Bundesamt für Migration und Flüchtlinge", Federal Ministry for Migration and Asylum Seekers).

Schufa is a private company which only gets data from other companies, not the government. If you don't allow a company to give your data to the Schufa (which, to be fair, you have to do for many things), they cannot legally get the data (and in this case you could force them to delete it via GDPR).

German administrative authorities don't even have compatible databases. Like, if you go from Munich to Berlin, they have to basically enter your data manually. The software of the local municipalities (Einwohnermeldeämter) have no common API, and up until a few months, there wasn't even a unique ID for every citizen which could be used as a key in databases.

Law firms only can get some data if a court allows it.

If you get e.g. a ticket for speeding, and you didn't drive your car, but your spouse did and you don't tell them who the person in the driver seat on the picture is, there is nothing they can do (except forcing you to, from now on, keep a log book of who drives your car). They can't just call your local municipality and get the ID pictures of your spouse or something.

Faxes - I fully agree.

But there are areas where it definitely isn't just Luddism, especially in healthcare. See what happened in Finland [1]. Yeah, you can break into a GPs office and steal the physical data quite easily, but that doesn't scale, hacking a centralized service does.

(Sure, there are solutions which would be similarly resistant against hacks as paper - like saving the data on the actual insurance card. But those are not implemented - it has to be a centralized (often SaaS) solution, where hacks can scale nicely)

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-54692120

Every Windows executable can crash a Windows system with the SE_SHUTDOWN_NAME privilege (which, contrary to the name, not only allows safe normal shutdowns) if they want to, though, which most of the time every user has.

The "if they want to" part is the difference, kernel drivers can easily cause BSoDs on accident, e.g. by writing to an invalid address, normal processes can't, they have to jump through hoops by choice.