4bpp

> Who the fuck knows what can happen with the current US admin

The ratchet of authoritarianism has been turning steadily in the US (and the rest of the world) for at least the past 25 years, and a big part of why no coherent opposition to it managed to manifest is how it was turned into a partisan issue. Republicans and the apathetic centre tune out Democratic complaints about the authoritarianism of a Republican administration just as it happened when the party associations were reversed some 5 years ago, because a group resenting its outgroup wielding power is the most unsurprising dog-bites-man event.

At the same time, neither side is willing to criticise authoritarianism by their own, both because they do not want to "stab their soldiers in the back" in the culture war and because in practical terms more power to wield against the outgroup is too useful to forego. Would you still be happy to support a durable circumscription of the current US admin's ability to regulate local AI, if it also meant that no future Democratic administration could interfere with a cataclysmic AI-driven campaign of right-wing misinformation and propaganda that is threatening everything you hold dear?

I always got the sense that solutions for significant "unsolved problems in medicine" would be at least 10 years out from the point of total AI dominance in the theoretical sciences. Doing actual experiments is bottlenecked by real-life constraints (organisms are slow to grow and unpredictable, human laws won't let you build a factory to brute-force biology on a million test tube guinea pigs, let alone humans), and the theoretical side of biology is also relatively underdeveloped, to the point that "solve aging" seems as hard to formulate as Navier-Stokes would have been with 15th-century mathematics.

If you are serious about this preference, would you also be okay with a compromise solution where only you (and anyone else who feels the same) die, rather than taking everyone else with you?

You don't have to want to give the policeman status: once he pulls you over after running a red light at 2am and you realise he might let you off the hook if you are nice and deferential, the status gradient almost establishes itself. People knew this, and decided to become policemen for the status. So it was with tech wizards, once you encountered a problem you could not solve without their help.

I think gradual rollout is underrecognised as the utterly devious way of implementing user-hostile changes that it is. It doesn't take a lot of scrolling through the comments here to find instances of people who are unaffected by some change or another being inexplicably hostile towards posters who are, implicitly accusing them of anything from incompetence to drama-mongering and misinformation. In that way, some of those who would complain about a change are worn down early on, and by the time the change is rolled out to more people they have already resigned and moved on, preventing a critical mass of opposition from forming.

I never understood what are the technical obstacles to building the phone network in such a way that caller numbers can not be spoofed or suppressed. Then, you could just build a system where receiving an unsolicited phone call from a commercial entity entitles you to a compensation in small claims court, to the tune of 50 EUR, unless the caller can prove that you explicitly authorised them.

I can see humanity walking to its collective doom with a sense of satisfaction, like "at least/last it is happening to those other guys too".

I would imagine a lot of things touching upon progressive politics would be affected (there were a few high-profile incidents demonstrating bias like Google's black Wehrmacht soldier pictures, but has anyone rigorously tabulated how the various commercial LLMs respond to questions about the gender binary or heritability of human traits considered good or bad?). Overall, I'm too reluctant to even write out in the abstract sequences of words that I never want to explain to a future job interviewer or HR employee who used GPT-7 to comb the internet for all text that stylistically can be traced to me, but just imagine whatever you believe to be vile and wrongheaded opinions in that general space which it is certainly more than justifiable to prohibit. The things that make you think "banning this is good actually" are exactly the things most likely to be banned (and this is true in China too).

Another thing I would try if I had access to the models and enough proxies to hide behind is asking for advice on software/movie piracy or seeing to what extent the models can be elicited to straight up argue against the validity of intellectual property, though there it seems more probable to me that the US models would be permissive.

And some people might want to know about [insert your favourite beyond-the-pale-in-the-US topic here, we're on a US forum after all]. I think it would be great if those people could turn to Chinese models, while anyone wanting to know about Uyghur camps can ask the US ones.

It's still selective degradation of functionality, as presumably people who download a snowglobe animation program don't do it to see any sort of statement apart from normative depictions of wintery things. The problem would be the same if it showed Russian flags only to users with Ukrainian locale, or ads for Mountain Dew only when the user's locale is set to French, or even just something as impossible to interpret as offensive on its own as adding lots of little cactus men whenever the locale is Dutch.

The imputed discriminatory part is that the software only shows the additional flags to users with Russian locale, not that it shows the flags at all.

Define "come from". Could they have gotten those frontier capabilities, or any capabilities, without internet training data? It seems to me that without the private data, you might get a slightly less competitive model, but without the CommonCrawl-style data piles used in "pretraining", you get no model at all.

Even accepting the copying-as-theft framing, if I go to a village, steal some vegetables from everyone's gardens and ham from their sheds, and then add some prohibitively expensive spices I bought myself to make soup, do I get to claim it as mine and punish the villagers for trying to take it?

Maybe I'm slightly projecting my European sensitivities here, but I think there is more going on there than just the emptiness. There is a common theme that the spaces depicted are, on their own, quite unpleasant (barren, made from flimsy materials, probably emitting some amount of toxic fumes); it's just that this unpleasantness is normally masked by their human use and interpretation, which invariably some form of commercialism and hype. (Hence the abundance of hastily erected American mall architecture.)

A historical European town devoid of people does not work as a liminal space picture at all, because it still looks nice; and neither do the postapocalyptic settings that Japan is so fond of (YKK etc.). Eastern European commieblock and UK Brutalist hellscapes are actually quite similar in terms of the feeling they evoke, and have their own fandoms, but are considered their own genre - so I would conclude that "liminal space porn" is spaces only made tolerable by commercialism with the commercialism taken away, and the related "/r/UrbanHell" material is spaces only made tolerable by human habitation with that taken away or suppressed (e.g. if the humans are so bereft of vitality that they can no longer overcome the space's badness).

After reading your first paragraph, I was already drafting a slightly standoffish response in my head, to the effect that the children who grew up on our sanitised fairy tales seem to be blowing each other's heads off on the battlefields of 2026 with undiminished enthusiasm and sadism, and the only difference is that now more of them need a Xanax prescription afterwards. I appreciate that you actually addressed this view with less snark than I was able to.

The problem here is that there is more than two metaphorical people involved: there is the developer, the would-be user, and the evangelist who harangues the developer with "rewrite it in Rust brah" drive-by comments or blog posts about how nobody sane would use memory-unsafe languages/ecosystems without a vibrant community package management ecosystem in the year of our lord 2026.

The last person, I think, most clearly, does "owe" you supply-chain security, in the sense that he bears moral (and ought to be made to bear professional) responsibility for any adverse consequences you may suffer from its lack, though in practice he will probably often protest that he couldn't do anything about it because it's not like he is developer. Whether the developer also owes it is a more interesting question, and I think it greatly depends on what attitude he takes towards the evangelist (does he consider him a nuisance who makes implicit promises the developer is uninterested in delivering, or an ally who raises the dev's profile?).

Long ago, I remember seeing a cartoon which involved a tag-team of two people robbing a third, with A pointing a gun at C and saying "give your money to B", while B comments "I'm really just standing here, but I figure it's best if you do as he says". I'm not sure what exact piece of day-to-day politics this was made to comment on (though it was probably some or another flavour of political violence), but it seems somewhat applicable here as well. The lines just become "accept the supply chain, or suffer my public ridicule" and "I'm just providing the software 'as-is', but you probably should do as he says".