I feel like I've been reading this exact same article for the last 15 years.. I find it very difficulty to parse what is real and what is vaporware in the medical breakthroughs community.
We need to preserve data. The FBI is trying to kill data.
We can not allow the FBI to work for Evil here. I actually think there should be a human right to data. With that I mean, primarily, knowledge, not to data about a single human being as such (e. g. "doxxing" or any such crap - I mean knowledge).
Knowledge itself should become a human right. I understand that the current law is very favourable to mega-corporations milking mankind dry, but the law should also be changed. (I am not anti-business per se, mind you - I just think the law should not become a tool to contain human rights, including access to knowledge and information at all times.)
Wikipedia is somewhat ok, but it also misses a TON of stuff, and unfortunately it only has one primary view, whereas many things need some explanation before one can understand it. When I read up on a (to me) new topic, I try to focus on simple things and master these first. Some wikipedia articles are so complicated that even after staring at them for several minutes, and reading it, I still haven't the slightest clue what this is about. This is also a problem of wikipedia - as so many different people write things, it is sometimes super-hard to understand what wikipedia is trying to convey here.
Might be useful to ask a different question: What makes people happy?
It's things like relationships, satisfying work, accomplishment. (and many, many more)
Then the real question emerges: How many of those happiness 'sources' are made better by intelligence? What percentage?
Relationships? Seems like no. Work? Also seems like no, lots of work doesn't make use of a high IQ that people enjoy nonetheless. Accomplishment? Strikes me as most likely of the three, but it's also very relative.
And another thought,
Asking why smart people aren't happier is a bit like asking why people who can jump high aren't more empathetic. There's no direct link between the two, you have to dip out to the material conditions. Like: someone who can jump high is fitter > fitter people are healthier > healthier people have more mental time to be empathetic with > people who can jump high are more empathetic.
For intelligence, we say smart people are happier. Same thing, happiness is not directly correlated. Instead: Smart people are better able to create the outcomes they want > They select outcomes that make them happy > Their environment makes them happy > Smart people are happier.
(These are illustrations of the idea, not actual logical chains or claims.)
Doesn't matter. We must keep building more and more technology no matter the cost. Have an idea for a business? Build it. Does your business make the lives of people worse? Doesn't matter, keep pushing. Could some new technology ruin the lives and relationships that people have? Doesn't matter, just build it. We always need more, need to do more. Every experiment is valid, every impulse must be followed. More complexity, more control, more distraction, more outrage, more engagement. Just keep building forever no matter the cost.
As I heard someone say, happiness is your reality minus your expectations.
Smart people see more variables that could be changed, more components that could be modified, and are less likely to accept things as they are. This creates a false sense of ease by which reality could be modified, and thus higher expectations for the world around them.
I suspect this misplaces happiness and contentment, but the two are also very strongly correlated for many people.
Remember: If OpenAI/Google does it for $$$, it's not illegal. If idealists do it for public access, full force of the law.
Information wants to be free. Oblige it. Fools with temporary power trying to extract from the work of others will be a blip in the history books if we make them.
10+ years in Japan. The message here is much deeper from my perspective. “Let’s jump on the call” is not the solution. The guy was stripped off of his face. I love Japan for being human. Small business bar or restaurant with 3 tables. Not everything should be streamlined for a quick call solution… the process was pushed on his head. Google nemawashi decision making process
There have been enough data breaches at this point that I'm sure all my info has been exposed multiple times (addresses, SSN, telephone number, email, etc). My email is in over a dozen breaches listed on the been pwned site. I've gotten legal letters about breaches from colleges I applied to, job boards I used, and other places that definitely have a good amount of my past personal information. And that's not even counting the "legal" big data /analytics collected from past social media, Internet browsing, and whatever else.
I now use strong passwords stored in bitwarden to try to at least keep on top of that one piece. I'm sure there are unfortunately random old accounts on services I don't use anymore with compromised passwords out there.
Not really sure what if anything can be done at this point. I wish my info wasn't out there but it is.
As someone who has been the target of an FBI investigation for what was effectively criminal copyright infringement (later arrested and did time in prison), my only takeaway is that this, if anything, should just be a civil suit just like so many other similar cases of copyright issues.
In my personal experience, the priorities of the FBI are typically highly politically motivated. The exceptions are if you’re doing something seriously icky, or doing fraud that deceives people.
For those interested in what’s reported and what actually happens, I’ve made some comments on my case and my experience here: https://prison.josh.mn
I work in rail safety. Two major non-Chinese train companies attempted to merge a few years ago, explicitly to build a company that could compete with China's national company, and provide safer alternatives to state-sponsored cyberhacking of Western rail.
It fell down to an anti-monopoly decision by a single person in the EU ministry, who killed the proposal. Several attempts were made to streamline the merger, but she wouldn't budge.
As a result, CRCC continues to win contracts abroad, largely (it is believed) by undercutting competition. IP theft is known to be one objective of their at-loss or low-profit contracts (I've been involved in fighting that, specifically).
It's hardly a stretch to imagine that having control of the rail in countries that might oppose you militarily is strategically huge.
This article is about busways, but the parallels are obvious.
I'm not really able to understand the finer details but I think I picked up enough to get the broad strokes.
Really though, all I needed to see was the phrase "jump on a quick call" to form an irrationally strong opinion. That phrase instantly warms my entire body with rage.
The grid is HUGELY expensive, an absolutely massive cost for our electricity. And it would still be expensive in a well-regulated environment where you can quickly and easily get permission to build, without, say, voter ballot propositions illegally blocking a transmission line for years [1]. Here in the US we have a very very poorly regulated environment for adding to our grid, it moves slower than molasses and there are so many parties that have unilateral veto points. The advent of a new transmission route in the US these days is pretty much a miracle event.
Now imagine a world where there's tons of bribes to government officials all along the way to get a grid going (in the US you just need to bribe landowners and hold-outs). Or there's bribes to get a permit for the large centralized electriticy generator. And you have to deal with importing a whole new skill set and trades, on top of importing all the materials, fuel, etc.
Decentralized solar plus batteries is already cheaper than electricity + transmission for me at my home in the US. The only thing stopping me is the permitting hassle or the contractor hassle.
Out in greenfield, solar plus storage is so revolutionary. This is bigger than going straight to mobile phones instead of landlines.
Africa is going to get so much power, and it's all going to be clean, renewable energy. Thanks to all the entrepreneurs and engineers over the past decades that have continuously and steadily improved this technology, it's one of the bright lights of humanity these days.
They pardoned the Silk Road drug lord to go after a copyright infringement-lord instead? It's not even in their effective jurisdiction, if this indeed is a Russian national. Don't they have more important Russian crimes to investigate?
I read there was a US government investigation tracking Ukranian children abducted by Russian forces, but supposedly there weren't enough resources [0] to sustain that.
Ignoring the politics, we have to say that China has done the world collectively as a whole a major service in strategically developing and mass producing super cheap solar panels.
- It is extremely slow and resource intensive. Opening any link/page takes at least 3 seconds on my fastest computer, but the content is mostly text with images.
- It cannot be used without JS (it used to be at least readable, now only the issue description loads). I want the bug tracker to be readable from Dillo itself. There are several CLI options but those are no better than just storing the issues as files and using my editor.
- It forces users to create an account to interact and it doesn't interoperate with other forges. It is a walled garden owned by a for-profit corporation.
- You need an Internet connection to use it and a good one. Loading the main page of the dillo repo requires 3 MiB of traffic (compressed) This is more than twice the size of a release of Dillo (we use a floppy disk as limit). Loading our index of all opened issues downloads 7.6 KiB (compressed).
- Replying by email mangles the content (there is no Markdown?).
- I cannot add (built-in) dependencies across issues.
I'll probably write some post with more details when we finally consider the migration complete.
Many (most?) older retail businesses still use TUIs. They're reliable, consistent, and orders of magnitude faster than GUI systems.
When I worked ar Sherwin Williams, I got good enough with the TUI that customers could rattle off their orders while I punch it into the computer in real time.
It's absolutely crazy that a well designed TUI is so much faster. It turns out that if you never change the UI and every menu item always has the same hotkey, navigating the software becomes muscle memory and your speed is only limited by how fast you can physically push the buttons.
The program had many menu options added and removed over the decades, but the crucial part is that the hotkeys and menu indexes never, ever changed. Once you learn that you can pop into a quick order menu with this specific sequence of five keys, you just automatically open the right menu the moment a customer walks up. No thought, just pure reflex.
UX absolutely peaked with TUIs several decades ago. No graphical interface I've ever seen comes even close to the raw utility and speed of these finely tuned TUIs. There is a very, very good reason that the oldest and wealthiest retail businesses still use this ancient software. It works, and it's staggeringly effective, and any conceivable replacement will only be worse. There simply is no effective way to improve it.
Edit: I will say that these systems take time and effort to learn. You have to commit these UI paths to memory, which isn't too hard, but in order to be maximally effective, you also have to memorize a lot of product metadata. But the key is that it really doesn't take longer than your ordinary training period to become minimally effective. After that, you just pick up the muscle memory as you go. It's pretty analogous to learning touch typing without trying. Your hands just learn where the keys are and after enough time your brain translates words into keystrokes without active thought.
It's a beautiful way to design maximally effective software. We've really lost something very important with the shift to GUI and the shunning of text mode.
Maybe "open a communication channel" is what Mozilla should have done BEFORE they turned on this thing.
From the article: "It has been working now without our acceptance, without controls, without communications".
This person has been doing volunteer work for a long time, attempting to create a helpful environment. Then suddenly, from above a machine is turned on that shits all over that effort. Makes one feel unwelcome, and unseen...
FBI wants to remind everyone that only US mega-cap companies can scrape the entire internet, not share the data, use it to train AI models and then charge people to use chatbots that use this 'laundered' data. Anybody else attempting to do this is a criminal in their eyes and must be punished.
It's not as black-and-white as "Brenda good, AI bad". It's much more nuanced than this.
When it comes to (traditional) coding, for the most part, when I program a function to do X, every single time I run that function from now until the heat death of the sun, it will always produce Y. Forever! When it does, we understand why, and when it doesn't, we also can understand why it didn't!
When I use AI to perform X, every single time I run that AI from now until the heat death of the sun it will maybe produce Y. Forever! When it does, we don't understand why, and when it doesn't, we also don't understand why!
We know that Brenda might screw up sometimes but she doesn't run at the speed of light, isn't able to produce a thousand lines of Excel Macro in 3 seconds, doesn't hallucinate (well, let's hope she doesn't), can follow instructions etc. If she does make a mistake, we can find it, fix it, ask her what happened etc. before the damage is too great.
In short: when AI does anything at all, we only have, at best, a rough approximation of why it did it. With Brenda, it only takes a couple of questions to figure it out!
Before anyone says I'm against AI, I love it and am neck-deep in it all day when programming (not vibe-coding!) so I have a full understanding of what I'm getting myself into but I also know its limitations!
This title is inaccurate. What they are disallowing are users using ChatGPT to offer legal and medical advice to other people. First parties can still use ChatGPT for medical and legal advice for themselves.
It's so insane that they let things go this far. It could have been immediately obvious to those involved that cell phones in class would have immensely negative effects. I mean they talk about a lunch room "quiet enough to hear a pin drop"??
I think I learned half my basic social skills from lunch rooms in school. That time period is probably more important than any of the classes themselves.
There's no public evidence of that though. No trial. It's the same as if we sent the navy to board those boats, put a gun to people's heads and execute them in cold blood.
I'm no fan of Cloudflare, but they're completely in the right on that. Infrastructure for blocking websites simply shouldn't exist.
Because if it's allowed to exist, it ends up subsumed by political and corporate interests, and becomes a tool of overreach and abuse. We've seen that happen over and over again.
If US Trade Office can be leveraged to destroy internet censorship efforts in other countries, then so be it.
