bradley13

I would go much further. Almost nothing that a government does, should be classified. The government is there to serve the people. If it cannot do so in daylight, then it is doing something wrong.

Exceptions should be rare. Honestly, I cannot imagine any exceptions outside of protecting military secrets from foreign powers.

There are none. The planet is greener, even the Sahara is shrinking. The Great Coral Reef has just had its best 5 years ever. On average, crops produce more due to higher CO2 levels.

Pacific islands failed to sink. Hurricanes failed to become more frequent. Fewer people died due to cold temperatures (which kill far more people than hot temperatures).

There are basic skills that everyone needs, for example, the three R's: reading-riting-rithmetic.

There is shared knowledge and history that form the foundation of a culture.

There are basic life-skills, like understanding banking, the local political system, etc.

On top of all that: knowing how to think and reason, knowing how to find knowledge and learn new things.

So many parents are apparently incapable of covering these basics. In particular, many parents who home-school or, worse, unschool lack many of these capabilities themselves.

This. Currently, if you don't want web pages "computing", but you still want basic content, you can turn off JS. Add explicit functions to VSS makes this impossible.

IANAL and I know I'm a minority opinion, but: seems to me that scraping must be legal. If you put content online, it is readable by anyone (or anything) who cares to look. Don't want it read, put it behind a login or a paywall.

The problem is: how do, ou identify minors without requiring everyone to ID themselves.

It is offensive that browsers give away so much unnecessary info. What is necessary? Language preference, Javascript (yes/no), screen resolution. Optionally, latest supported html/css versions. That it, nothing else.

I understand Google having Chrome send way more info. Why do all other browsers go along with this?

Make it make sense...

Math is, of course, an ideal field for AI to work in. However, I find this quote revealing:

"It feels like something written by someone who’s on psychedelics. So much unclear and doesn’t make sense. Lots of name dropping of previous work without discussing why it can be used despite impossibility results. Basically the paper is so horribly written that it’s impossible to read it without AI help."

This makes one wonder how many of the proofs are actually valid, and how many are just impenetrable hallucinations.

It's an emotional problem. I love writing code to solve intricate problems. But knowing that a faster, and maybe better LLM solution is just a prompt away? Somehow that takes the joy out of it. Why spend hours, when you can get an equivalent result in minutes?

I will be curious to see how I feel about AdventOfCode this year...

Correct. You may demand clean water from your local government, in return for taxes, but it isn't any sort of basic right. And certainly is not mentioned in the US Constitution.

Much like food or medical care: fundamental rights can never depend on the work of other people. Otherwise you can demand that work, which imposes on their rights.

Meh. Maybe I'm a grinch, but I don't see this as easier. I have a little NUC running Ubuntu. Putting services on it is easy: PiHole, OwnCloud, Wireguard, etc.

Wow, autism in action ;-P

Choosing words that carefully takes some serious dedication. Imagine the backtracking required...

The European Commission has far too much power, and answers far too little to the populace. In reality, they want to be dictators.

If you don't know, the unfortunate way thf EU is structured, the Parliament cannot initiate legislation. They can only vote on whatever the Commission puts in front of them.

If the Parliament votes "wrong", the Commission just repackages the idea in a new bill, pulls a couple of dirty tricks, and tried again. They only have to succeed once. See ChatControl for a prime example.

So the EU will eventually require backdoors in encryption. It's only a question of how many tries it takes...

There are two main problems with the EU, both political.

First, the EU Commission has way too much power, and honestly wants to play dictator. Look at ChatControl: Voted down more than once, but the Commission just repackages and resubmits, with some dirty backdoor tricks, until they get it through. Parliament is not allowed to propose legislation, only the Commission.

Second, regulatory hell. The continual avalanche of regulations out of Brussels cannot be overstated. People make fun of the bottle caps, but those are absolutely illustrative of how literally everything is over-regulated. This is one of the main reasons that European industry is struggling.