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> I have some side projects that I don’t really care about making money from but some people do use and it’s easier for me to just block all European users than worry about complying with all the random laws and regulations.

GDPR fines scale based on annual turnover so blocking EU users on a non-commercial product is utterly pointless and just being mean.

Sometimes building a new organization is easier than trying to improve a legacy one.

That’s not what the poster meant.

What treating this biometric info as public means is that it won’t be accepted as valid proof of identity. Just because you posted a video on TikTok shouldn’t mean that a scammer can take out a loan in your name.

Why bother with the scan if you can have a perfect guard in place?

> How big and politically connected are you?

I’m not allowed to divulge that information. Can you tell me where to apply?

> but this is a can worse than climate change we are kicking towards future generations.

That’s just nonsense. Even if we turn a large area into a radioactive waste dump, that problem pales in comparison to the massive external and internal migrations, food crop failure and wars that climate change will cause in our lifetimes.

If these things really become good enough to automate software engineering then it’s just a matter of time before they are used to automate all information work.

That would be such a radical societal transformation that I’m not sure we would come out of the other side even having a capitalist society.

First time I hear about this funding. Where can I apply?

Maybe off-topic but I remember when people were worried about services becoming digital and older users no longer being able to access them without a personal computer.

Fast forward a few decades and now the old users are on desktop and we’re worried about services only being available for smartphones.

Wouldn’t you? If I switch context and interrupt my flow to answer a question I’m losing at least 20 mins to regaining focus, why shouldn’t that be reflected in billing?

Knowledge work is knowledge work, no point belittling colleagues in a different profession.

> I think that often theres a difference in ability to put capital to work between the US and europe.

It’s because the EU is 27 different countries with different regulations while the US is 1. Some work is being done to fix this but remains to be seen if we can reach a point where we have unified capital markets instead of national ones.

> I recall reading somewhere that, in the Culture novels the Sapir Worf hypothesis was true to start or the AIs re-engineered the people to make it true, and the language of the regular biological citizens is designed to control how they think through its structure.

You read that in Consider Phlebas, where the anti-Culture protagonist claimed it. You’ve fallen for propaganda in a work of fiction.

Eternal or not, right now JSON is used everywhere which means the performance gains of a more optimized Stalin would be significant. Just because we don’t know if JSON is around in 10 years doesn’t mean we should settle for burning extra compute on it.

The EU has a homegrown tech industry that could pick up the slack, though it would be expensive.

The real problem is that the US would leave Ukraine and Europe alone against Russia which has a real chance of turning into WW3. Most likely this isn’t discussed in the US media but feels like every week some notable politician or high-ranking military is warning that Russia will invade NATO after Ukraine. Trump knows our weakness and is squeezing hard.

The mood here in eastern Europe is very much that we’re talking when, not if, Russia attacks us.

Certainly a flawed system is better than an outright broken one? At least the former can be improved.