Ravus

The argument is not about who you, personally, are willing to trust. Nor about two specific CAs. It is about the fact that Let's Encrypt, which is US based, is an obvious necessity. As such, anyone not in the US should realize that they need to trust CAs that are outside of their national borders.

This is a US website with a Let's Encrypt certificate.

Anyone who is not in the US saying, on here, "I do not need CAs that are not my national ones" would realize the problem before even posting.

You can see it in the way we structure college courses: engineering curricula often cover in one semester what mathematicians study over one or two years.

This is because have fundamentally different goals: being able to use results in calculation versus having a deeper understanding of the subject matter.

Yeah. About that.

The tolerable daily intake of erucic acid is 7 mg per kg of body weight and the legal limit for erucic acid in canola oil is 2%. This means that an average adult (70 kg) could hit that intake with 24.5 grams of canola oil, which is less than 2 tablespoons for the non-metrically inclined.

Nope, still different.

If you save the image as png, the tip of the leftmost arrow is at 68 pixels and the one of the rightmost one is at 393, while the crooks are 73 and 388.

> "Müller-Lyer illusion, the two lines that look like they’re different lengths but aren't"

I hate that the author gave a picture in which the two lines actually are of different lengths, as you can see from trying to pick a rectangular screenshot.

I'd quantify the exact feature in the line that I'm using for reference (which would be by itself ironic considering the discussion on well-defined relations between entities attached to that picture), but it's unnecessary - none of them match!

Concrete high-profile example: in "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!", Feynman told of a ball which, in a Brazilian college-level physics book, was described as having a 40% higher acceleration that it would actually have in practice.

Turns out that the author had done a thought experiment but neglected to factor in the rotational inertia.

> Recognise it is simply a zero-intelligence search engine

I think that this highlights the problem: it's not even a proper search engine. If it were, it would find existing material and link to it. The chatbot instead re-elaborates the message. This is different enough to have legal consequences (see the recent German ruling).

By squashing everything together, one loses the ability to evaluate sources, including their credibility and ulterior motives. With a search engine, I can tell if I am getting climate information from the National Snow and Ice Data Center, from an oil trading consortium, or from a random blog.

The parent poster's suggestion is trying to work around the selection of sources, but such an attempt is fighting against the questionable design of the whole thing.

I don't think it's currently solvable, as selling those models as oracles is an essential component of their business plan.

If we're on the topic of hardware, let's remember that a few years before ARPANET, Olivetti was a powerhouse rivaling IBM. The ELEA mainframe came out with a competitive design in 1957.

One of the reasons why things did not pan out is that, three years later, 58 years old Adriano Olivetti died of a heart attack on the train to Switzerland. Even discounting the theory of a CIA assassination (which has, nevertheless, been floated around), that was a butterfly-flapping-its-wings moment; without pressure from the US government wanting to maintain technological supremacy, he might have been under less stress and survived.

In that scenario, maybe the same international visitors who currently visit Milan for luxury fashion would also haul back high tech from the so-called Valle del Silicio stretching towards Turin along the Fondo river.

Or, of course, another one between a million different outcomes could have happened. Human creativity and inventiveness finds a way to flourish everywhere.

Completely agreed, it is rational to de-escalate by several steps (e.g. to have cloud providers "spontaneously" decide to split into different, actually autonomous but still privately owned, corps, which in turn is a threat to returns of the home corp so they would put pressure on the US government not to escalate this far politically, and so on).

It's just that the possibility of the "nuclear option" works as a deterrent.

> In the cases provided for by the law and with provisions for compensation, private property may be expropriated for reasons of general interest.

Excerpt from article 42 of the Italian constitution. This would cover, for instance, the entire eu-south-1 availability zone in AWS. I'm sure that other member states have their own provisions and you need to keep in mind that Google/Amazon/Microsoft employees in the relevant countries would predictably comply with local authorities, not obey a foreign power trying to collapse their governments.

If your power comes from saying "I own that", it's crucial not to enter complete hostility with nations, the only entities who can reply, "Says who?".

> It's why the US entered WW1 and WW2 even if it didn't have to. Because if it didn't and just decided to sit it out chilling away from the conflit, it would have missed out on all the major industrial and technical progress the war effort has led to and the USSR would have swallowed everything.

The USSR was formed in 1922. Up until September 1917 (a consequence of the February revolution), Russia was ruled by the tsars. The US declared war on Germany on April 2, 1917.

> a lot of the time when servers start getting turned off the team that could do this work has been dissolved or are working on other things.

That is precisely why the SKG initiative mandates it - so that it's available from the start because it's a legal requirement. Without that, you have no financial nor legal incentive and you end up exactly like you mention - reassigning or dissolving the team.