hnfong

Ironically those on a government payroll are much easier to manipulate and control.

Education is not subsidized only because it's a public good.

Sure, for those who could upgrade their servers in a day that's fine.

For some, it might be relevant to assess the actual risk of being exploited while you figure out how to upgrade the PHP 5.x (or 7.x whatever) stack. There are still important decisions to make when you're put into such a sucky situation: do you take the site down? do you rush the upgrade? (faster probably means more money and bugs) or is it feasible to just chill and upgrade the servers at the normal pace?

I'm glad I don't maintain anything related to PHP but sometimes you don't get to choose your circumstances.

Well, it would be a $3001 TV without the extra money they collected on the side...

> Imagine how the internet would be if you were default blocked from accessing any website hosted in a different country.

It's a difficult issue for sure. It's almost a geopolitical problem -- the larger economic blocs (eg. EU, China, USA) can basically dictate terms and expect general compliance (eg. GDPR) because most companies can't avoid operating in those areas, while smaller countries can't really do much unless they're part of a bigger economic bloc.

FWIW, this theory was attempted in court with a bittorrent case in Hong Kong. [1]

Defendant's lawyer argued that seeding a copyrighted movie was not (active) distribution but merely "making it available" (which was not associated with a criminal offense in HK law as opposed to "distributing infringing copies").

Didn't work out.

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[1] HKSAR v Chan Nai Ming [2005] 4 HKLRD 142

I think the reason was that in the early days of the Internet, people absolutely detested the idea that any entity related to the government (eg. your post office) could know who you are and your personal particulars.

So everything developed in an ad-hoc manner. E-commerce web sites just asked for the information they need (and the information they didn't need), those who were comfortable using those websites used them, and the paranoid probably held out for much longer (and rejecting the idea of centralized auth loudly).

Most attempts by private companies to establish some de-facto identity/auth/login service mostly failed (well, the couple Big Tech companies got somewhat close, but none of them got close enough to be able to get other sites to use them exclusively)

Besides, even if there was some protocol to handle the payments and shipping without sending the info to the seller, you'd have to trust the payment processors and the postoffice to be secure. It's basically a choice between whether you want to put all your eggs in one big basket or spread them around somewhat.

Being the only(?) competitive European model probably makes them a de-facto monopoly for doing sensitive European stuff.

But.. how does volunteering at homeless services help with climate change?

I'm not saying volunteering isn't helping to create a better world, but there seems to be a disconnect in the logic.

At least if one is attempting to change the economic system, it would be tackling one actual thing that's preventing your desired change from happening.

Maybe it will fail. There's no guarantee.

Maybe your optimism is what we need, but I don't see the logic of it.

You've seen how the "money can't help itself". Individual choices matter only to a certain extent, and I haven't seen any evidence that "enough individuals making the right choices" is sufficient to effect any measurable positive change.

The logical conclusion of the evidence I've seen so far is to change the system. Capitalism sucks when your goal is not to make as much money as possible. But changing the system seems too hard (and too much like a commie/revolutionary/extremist), so instead people just try to try harder. It sounds almost like a religion (cult) -- if you are not favored by $deity, you don't have enough faith, so try to believe harder and your wishes will be granted.

It's not to say I don't respect your decisions and commitments. Just that there's 8+ billion people in the world and individuals are just one out of 8+ billion, and "try harder" doesn't seem to work so well given these numbers and facts.

Of the thousands of people bored with a swarm of AI agents, is it not plausible that somebody would just say "hey, let's do a vibe check to see whether any CAs are trivially crackable"?

I've heard that millions of girls wanting to get rich look up to those "OF models" as role models.

Pretty much in the same way that a significant number of people in tech who wants a good paying job looks up to people working for Zuckerberg.

> But the AI companies didn't gatekeep knowledge. They released all their math results.

There are some important fields of math that were conspicuously missing. In particular, cryptography.

There are obviously good reasons for being more cautious when dealing with cryptography results in math, but I'm not going to believe they released everything.

> Unless you mean they're charging money for a product that contains knowledge.

They have internal models that the public cannot use (at least not yet).

I personally disagree. I prefer the take described (in a sibling comment) by Lerc.

But I want to note that your line of reasoning seems to be a perfect answer to "if God loves us and is omnipotent, why does God allow suffering?"

.. and I'm not sure I accept that theological line of reasoning either.

> We're not taking about attachment to old ways. We're talking about attachment to human value.

Human values vary across time and cultures. I'm pretty sure if people 100 years later look back onto this discussion, they will think you're attaching to old ways. Society will adopt to super-intelligent AI, and nobody will understand why you'd intentionally deprive your loved ones of a better life and prefer to watch them "struggle".