klagermkii

> "the state" is just shorthand we use for "other people in my community"

It's a very different abstraction layer, in the same way as individual cells vs the entity that is you. The entity that comes together from all those "other people in my community" and its priorities are different to the individual desires.

> Does that actually mitigate antisocial usecases? No? Then it's not what I'm talking about :)

Maybe it does? Maybe someone is alive on the road today because they read the message and changed their behaviour. I'm giving an example of something where this liability mindset has created a world where manufacturers are no longer prioritising the desires of their users in order to appease a sense of harm-reduction. And you weren't limiting it to LLMs you were applying it to all sorts of tools.

I think that "reverse engineering" as the OP was talking about is one of those things where maybe 1/10000 uses could actually be harmful. This is not even a high-risk request such as to produce a weapon of some kind where maybe your "antisocial usecases" could be applied.

I don't think that "dystopian" necessarily goes far enough, this would be one of the rare times where I would call it a fascist mentality - the idea that everything's primary allegiance is to the state and the goals of the state rather than those of the customer or the user.

I want a default that has people empowered, rather than something where it's just another performative smokescreen caused by overzealous product liability. I'll thank you and your kind for needing to distractedly tap the "Agree" button on my car's infotainment every time I start it to confirm that I will pay attention to the road.

I suspect that BASIC may have got a bad reputation in the same way as PHP or JavaScript did, where the accessibility of the language and infrastructure around it allows people who just want to achieve a specific goal to easily participate.

That influx of people with the attitude of "I don't care how computers work, I just want to know enough to solve my problem" shifts the stereotypes around those language users and may erroneously put the fault of it onto the language itself. It certainly feels that way during hiring, where it seems like developers of vastly differing skill or aptitude tend to cluster heavily around certain "friendly" languages.

> I don't really understand why anyone who claims to be a proponent of a free market economy has an issue with a private corporation deciding what type of content they want to broadcast.

I don't think this is some irreconcilable gotcha. I support the free market as a tool when it delivers on the benefits that it can provide. Those are increasing choice and decreasing costs through increased competition and commoditization. If problems show up I'm happy to have legislation introduced to tackle those, such as not allowing food with known toxins to be sold.

It's like any tool. I support cars when they're used to deliver on the benefits that they can provide; getting people from point A to point B, and giving them the freedom to move between arbitrary locations. When they're used to run pedestrians over then I don't support that usage, and I will support legislation that limits the use of the tool in that manner.

Likewise if the free market is used as a way to reduce the availability of content, I can be against that while still supporting it as a guiding concept.

Protest needs to be disruptive or inconvenient in some way to draw any kind of attention or have an impact. Otherwise the complaints can be entirely ignored, but that often seems to be the goal of corporate-sanctioned protest; get everyone who is angry to channel their energy into something time consuming but utterly ineffective.

Categorizing a publicly organised protest tactic as a "cartel" seems like a stretch too, especially when on the other side we're looking at a company in a market with maybe three or four major players? If one was casting an eye for cartel-ish behaviour one should probably start with the major cereal companies, before going after a bunch of randos on Reddit.

With TP-Link you can run the Omada controller for their EAP line on a local device (I have it running on a Pi4).

I think many businesses will be happy with this change. Currently you have to run an instance of WhatsApp in a container that connects to the WA servers and provides the API that you then use. But Facebook doesn't let random businesses run them directly, so instead you have to use accredited third-party providers who manages the container and gives you their own API to work with. So ultimately you still have this third-party who has access to the message flow.

This sounds like it offers the possibility of cutting out that middle-man and will potentially provide an easier API and onboarding process.

Laws don't matter without the ability to enforce them.

Apple and Google reap the benefits of forced centralised control, but that is what allows those countries to very easily enforce these kinds of laws.

Maybe, as with the opposition to the Citizens United ruling, rights that are given to people should not automatically apply to companies.

Did it take 50-60 hours in ancient times to gather enough firewood to burn a fire for an hour, or does this limit the definition of artificial light to some kind of higher quality oil lamp?

Projected Electoral College votes could still be based on post-certified results from the states. The projection they're talking about might be the projection of who the electors would vote for (so ignoring faithless electors who could be bribed), rather than the projection of who the electors would be.

I think it's difficult to approach a problem with a Depth-first Search mentality without using "Strong Opinions, Weakly Held". If one goes in with "weak opinions" it's easy to find oneself constantly backtracking and checking the other nodes early on in the chain of assumptions and doing a mental Breadth-first Search instead.

That's not to say that it's the right approach for every situation, but for problems that will have a lot of dependent unresolved assumptions "Strong Opinions, Weakly Held" is sometimes necessary to maintain focus to break through the problem.

From an individual perspective I don't think there should be any doubt that solving death is a fantastic goal. It's the threat that is poses to the system, threats to which we have no better tool than death.

Old age and death is still the number one tool for solving: - empires and tyrants

- outdated societal opinions and prejudices (racism/sexism/etc)

- locked in privilege and wealth

- ossification of social roles

- stagnation within fields and industry ("Science progresses one funeral at a time")

We have no truly effective tools for these problems, except wait for people to die. I'd be much more supportive of ending aging if we had anything that worked.

This thing of misleading people on the details so that they make the Correct Decision in the short term seems very dangerous.

I know in tech there's a tendency to do something similar when faced with clueless management, feeding just the information you know they need to hear to get them to make the right choice and think they came up with it themselves. Really don't like this applied on a society level though.