They're a government contractor specializing in identity and a monopoly who loves not being regulated. They're really a straw donor - this is the government donating money to lobby itself. All of this is money leaving the government proper and being put through barely two degrees of indirection to be sent both to politicians whose job is to direct the government, and to the media to misdirect the public.
This (an end to general purpose computing) isn't anything that people can prevent through civil channels. It will happen with or without public approval. You will have as much control over it as you had over the decision to go to war with Iran. It will never be on any ballot. People who help will get rich, people who don't, won't. Eventually, people who help will barely be middle class, and people who don't, won't. Their kids will own your kids.
> Every single Linux kernel currently operating within the borders of any of these states should turn itself off and refuse to boot
What exactly do you think Linux is? I would say that Linux would be forked in like 2 seconds, a bunch of different companies would start offering "attested Linux," and all you'd have to do was change your repos and update.
I would say that, but what would really happen is that we'd find out that Canonical, Red Hat, and a bunch of other distributions had been talking to the government for a year behind closed doors and they're already ready to roll out attested Linux. Debian would argue about it for six months, and then do the same thing. Hell, systemd will require age attestation as a dependency. Devuan and any other stubborn distribution would face 9000 federal lawsuits, while having domain names blocked, and the Chinese hardware necessary to run them seized at the ports with the receivers locked up on terrorism charges.
I have no idea where the confidence of the IT tech comes from. You (we) are something between a mechanic and a highly-skilled janitor.
> The only way to stop this from happening is half the country refuse to buy any tech that implements OS age verification.
You have consumer activist brain. Next you're going to suggest that we complain to the manager or start our own government and compete in the marketplace.
> The only thing that talks is money
No, the only thing that is talking is money. Money wants this. You're busy pretending like you're going to do a boycott; they're going to boycott you.
Complain about the internet? They'll just blacklist you from it. Complain about the phone? Well now you can't use one; try smoke signals. Complain about the landlord? They'll settle the case, kick you out on the street, and blacklist you among all private equity landlords and the management companies that service small landlords. You'll just go to a small landlord that doesn't use one of the management companies? Well they won't have access to a bunch of vendors that have exclusive contracts with and share ownership with the management companies; now they can't make any money and have to sell to private equity.
You've been fooled into thinking that being victimized is a moral failure of the victim. The perpetrators taught you that. They taught you that the only appropriate action is to beg and threaten to leave, and they shut down customer service and monopolized the market. But, again, the worst thing they trained you to do is to blame the victim.
At the end of the day, this stuff is headed by humans. Humans are fragile, weak even. They like silly things like food and safety.
Look, I'm not saying we need to be killing people. However, I AM saying that just about every single significant rights progression in human history was achieved that way. So, draw whatever conclusions you want.
Ideally, we are above that. Christ, it's not the 20th century anymore. So hold up a sign or something.
>You're busy pretending like you're going to do a boycott; they're going to boycott you.
What do you mean? They still need people purchasing software and hardware.
You can argue effectiveness, but if enough people say no, then a boycott is extremely effective. The issue is always on awareness and making people take hard actions.
Short of a general strike, this sort of thing is going to move forward.
They don’t need you to purchase hardware or software any more. We’re moving to centralized economic planning, where resources for datacenter buildouts are reserved for people with sufficient political loyalty (and come from tax dollars), and the only products are surveillance and collective punishment.
If you don’t want that to happen, then you’ll need to help build an alternative.
>Short of a general strike, this sort of thing is going to move forward.
Yes, I agree.
>They don’t need you to purchase hardware or software any more.
Need? No. But they still want as much money as possible. That's why a boycott/strike will still be effective. They don't need money anymore but will still bend over backwards for it.
>If you don’t want that to happen, then you’ll need to help build an alternative.
I want to help. Not sure what I can do to help, though. Seems like simply calling my reps is talking to the wind.
It's very important to pretend that ICE goons are significantly different from regular cops, because Democrats are going to wave a magic wand and declare ICE to be regular cops again when they are in control of them again.
Meanwhile, regular cops have been doing the same awful things that they've always been doing, literally at the command of Democratic mayors who are pompously declaring that they won't enforce immigration law in speeches. They'll send cops to throw your shit into the street when your rent suddenly doubles, and won't report an illegal immigrant felon (whose history we know nothing about) to ICE.
Organized white supremacists are nobodies with no power, they're all over the military, the cops, prison guards, and ICE. Meanwhile, Parchman Farm in Mississippi doesn't even report the people who are dying there, and has plastic all over the floors because the roofs are open to the elements. That's just legal American black people who this country actually owes something to, though. That was trendy like five years ago, it's so over now.
If you set aside social justice issues, the Democrats and Republicans basically agree. Republicans want a theocratic authoritarian state that can micromanage the workers and keep the economy going. Democrats want the same thing but with freedom of religion and more female CEOs of color.
Now you obviously shouldn't set social justice aside, and given the choice, I absolutely prefer the capitalist hellscape where my friends and I are not being rounded up and killed, but that's a REMARKABLY low standard I've had to settle on as a voter.
The Democrats and Republicans both are different approaches for the same billionaire class.
They're not "opposite sides of the same coin". Instead, they're more akin to 2 sock puppets. One wears red, and the other blue.
Like the Trump tariffs? They were initially Biden's tariffs that Trump increased and extended. Different clothes, same game.
But I'd be willing to try a good run with democratic socialism, or hell, communism. What we have is the cushy gold-parachute socialism for the elite, and unabashed hardcore capitalism for the poorest. And that fucking sucks. Burn it down.
You're being silly, the missile thing was hyperbole. Your computer will direct the thugs to your door.
> Nobody stops the government from sending goons to your door right now for a snarky comment.
This is just dumb. They literally don't know who wrote it, and have to assign somebody to track you down. The fact that they're putting infrastructure on your computer and on the network to make this one click away for them matters.
I was afraid this would never happen again. Two very good episodes, too.
I just pray that we'll get to see a few more Troughton episodes. He's the doctor that set the standard that all future doctors followed, yet the least known because the moronic BBC wiped basically his entire run, and now we only have about half of it.
Tom Baker was "my Doctor" because he's the one who made me love the show when I was a kid, but Troughton (and Zoë and Jamie) are my favorite era.
edit: Zoë and Jamie are from way back when the companions were expected to be useful, before Sarah Jane. Zoë was better at math than the Doctor; imagine them doing anything like that now.
The Tom Baker doctor had the best companion in K9. I was disappointed as a kid at the time when it chose to stay with his other companion.
I largely stopped watching from the "Five Doctors" episode onwards. Didn't like the 6th and maybe watched only a few episodes of the 7th doctor before not watching much free-to-air TV at all after that.
The problem with a lot of current companions is that they get dragged into soap opera. I have always seen the doctor as pretty much asexual and as a father figure to the companions, not a lover. (Or mother. I didn't take to Jodie Whittaker but I've never had an issue with a female doctor as such.)
No, they're cute, neurotic, complain a lot, and fall in love with the Doctor (who is a Great Man with the weight of the universe on his shoulders.) They're all Sarah Jane.
There was the one companion where both elements happened at the same time; the last primarily useful companion, the first companion to be in love with the Doctor: Jo Grant, the UNIT agent with a certificate from an "Escapeology course," but would look up at the Doctor with puppydog eyes. She had suddenly replaced Liz Shaw, the super-competent UNIT scientist who sometimes seemed like she could barely tolerate him. They made Jo Grant a rookie and a klutz.
Up to Jo Grant, the companions were primarily there to do things, so the Doctor didn't have to be everything. Jo Grant was the one who would free them when they were tied up and locked in a storeroom; like how Zoë would make fun of how bad the Doctor was at driving the Tardis. Sarah Jane, by contrast, was as helpless as a fetus, constantly complaining, and hopelessly in love.
Leela, Romana, and Adric (although Adric was constantly humiliated, then killed) were still left to come, and Ace allowed the useful companions from the original series to go out with a bang(sorry), but in Nu Doctor Who it was to be strictly Sarah Janes forever.
People even thought Donna Noble was a breath of fresh air because even though she was useless and constantly complaining, at least she wasn't constantly simpering and crying over him. The absolute nadir of this trend was when Martha Jones, actually a medical doctor(!), was nearly suicidal with lust over him and he was just not into her at all. Doesn't like career women, I guess.
It's not you, Martha, it's me. Now I'm off to haunt a little girl's bedroom and cuck the sweet, perfect boyfriend who would be willing to wait 2,000 years for her. Maybe you should look up Mickey, that other guy whose fiancé I stole while I let him ride in the backseat. He's single; I ruined his girl for anyone else.
No companion was like that until Sarah Jane. All companions were like that after the revival. It was decided by the person behind the revival that they would be women, never any more useful than Teagan, never as obviously hot as Peri but always cute. They would never be a threat to super Doctor and his magic screwdriver, or hot enough to make women angry.
Just sort of a cynical calculation by somebody who thought of women as tasteful accessories.
The literal reason for including companions from day one was so that the husbands had something to watch. The BBC have never hidden the fact that the companions were always there for eye candy.
When you look at the pre-UNIT episodes (before Dr Who went colour), the actors often left after only one season because they were fed up with their role just being there for the doctor to rescue. It’s something they’ve commented on in interviews since.
And you can see that when you watch them.
There’s also the the running joke of bringing in a female character who was supposed to be a computer programmer yet she never seemed to use a computer.
And there was another companion who used to talk pseudo-science with the doctor but they slowly dumbed her down as the show went on.
Unfortunately back then, female roles weren’t written to be strong and independent like they are now. Not just in Doctor Who, but in TV in general. And while things did improve in the 80s, you’re still greatly overstating things.
To talk more about that last point, let’s look at Ace. She really wasn’t written any differently to modern companions.
That all said, one thing I absolutely hate about the modern era, or Russel T Davis, specifically, is all the Doctor and Companion romantic plots. There was absolutely no need for any of that.
There are notable male companions such as Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart as well as Jamie. The Brigadier is one of the best Doctor Who characters, a military man who is adaptable and can deal with strange situations.
The Brigadier got some great lines:
* (To other soldiers) "Chap with the wings - five rounds, rapid."
* "Most of their work's so secret, they don't know what they're doing themselves."
* "Look, just tell me this: Are you or are you not the Doctor that I met during the Yeti business and then later when the Cybermen invaded?"
> Realistically, those are three completely different policies in every way that matters.
I think that the failure to distinguish them is due to a really childish outlook on law and government that is encouraged by people who are simple-minded (because it is easy and moralistic) and by people who are in control of law and government (because it extends their control to social enforcement.)
I don't think any discussion about government, law, or democracy is worth anything without an analysis of government that actually looks at it - through seeing where decisions are made, how those decisions are disseminated, what obligations the people who receive those decisions have to follow them and what latitude they have to change them, and ultimately how they are carried out: the endpoint of government is the application of threats, physical restraint, pain, or death in order to prevent people from doing something they wish to do or force them to do something they do not wish to do, and the means to discover where those methods should be applied. The police officer, the federal agent, the private individual given indemnity from police officers and federal agencies under particular circumstances, the networked cameras pointed into the streets are government. Government has a physical, material existence, a reach.
Democracy is simpler to explain under that premise. It's the degree to which the people that this system controls control the decisions that this system carries out. The degree to which the people who control the system are indemnified from its effects is the degree of authoritarianism. Rule by the ungoverned.
It's also why the biggest sign of political childishness for me are these sort of simple ideas of "international law." International law is a bunch of understandings between nations that any one of them can back out of or simply ignore at any time for any reason, if they are willing to accept the calculated risk of consequences from the nations on the other side of the agreement. It's like national law in quality, but absolutely unlike it in quantity. Even Costa Rica has a far better chance of ignoring, without any long-term cost, the mighty US trying to enforce some treaty regulation than you as an individual have to ignore the police department.
Laws were constructed under this reality. If we hypothetically programmed those laws into unstoppable Terminator-like robots and told them to enforce them without question it would just be a completely different circumstance. If those unstoppable robots had already existed with absolute enforcement, we would have constructed the laws with more precision and absolute limitations. We wouldn't have been able to avoid it, because after a law was set the consequences would have almost instantly become apparent.
With no fuzziness, there's no selective enforcement, but also no discretion (what people call selective enforcement they agree with.) If enforcement has blanket access and reach, there's also no need to make an example or deter. Laws were explicitly formulated around these purposes, especially the penalties set. If every crime was caught current penalties would be draconian, because they implicitly assume that everyone who got caught doing one thing got away with three other things, and for each person who was caught doing a thing three others got away with doing that thing. It punishes for crimes undetected, and attempts to create fear in people still uncaught.
I think your objections miss the point. My informal specs to a program are user-focused. I want to dictate what benefits the program will give to the person who is using it, which may include requirements for a transport layer, a philosophy of user interaction, or any number of things. When I know what I want out of a program, I go through the agony of translating that into a spec with database schemas, menu options, specific encryption schemes, etc., then finally I turn that into a formal spec within which whether I use an underscore or a dash somewhere becomes a thing that has to be consistent throughout the document.
You're telling me that I should be doing the agonizing parts in order for the LLM to do the routine part (transforming a description of a program into a formal description of a program.) Your list of things that "make no sense" are exactly the things that I want the LLMs to do. I want to be able to run the same spec again and see the LLM add a feature that I never expected (and wasn't in the last version run from the same spec) or modify tactics to accomplish user goals based on changes in technology or availability of new standards/vendors.
I want to see specs that move away from describing the specific functionality of programs altogether, and more into describing a usefulness or the convenience of a program that doesn't exist. I want to be able to feed the LLM requirements of what I want a program to be able to accomplish, and let the LLM research and implement the how. I only want to have to describe constraints i.e. it must enable me to be able to do A, B, and C, it must prevent X,Y, and Z; I want it to feel free to solve those constraints in the way it sees fit; and when I find myself unsatisfied with the output, I'll deliver it more constraints and ask it to regenerate.
> I want to be able to run the same spec again and see the LLM add a feature that I never expected (and wasn't in the last version run from the same spec) or modify tactics to accomplish user goals based on changes in technology or availability of new standards/vendors.
Be careful what you wish for. This sounds great in theory but in practice it will probably mean a migration path for the users (UX changes, small details changed, cost dynamics and a large etc.)
I tried this recently with what I thought was a simple layout, but probably uncommon for CSS. It took an extremely long back and forth to nail it down. It seemingly had no understanding how to achieve what I wanted. A couple sentences would have been clear to a person. Sometimes LLMs are fantastic and sometimes they are brain dead.
If LLMs can't deal with those legacy file formats, I don't trust them to be able to deal with anything. The idea that LLMs are so sophisticated that we have a need to dumb down inputs in order to interact with them is self-contradictory.
While I agree, the parent also talks about efficiency. If a different format increases efficiency, that could be reason enough to switch to it, even if understanding doesn’t improve and already was good before.
Thank you, yes, efficiency was entirely my point. :)
Humans are far more efficient when they interact with information that's in a format that suits their abilities or preferences; it seems pretty obvious that in some ways the same would likely be true for LLMs.
> There are other solutions, utility bills in the families name, ownership/rental documents, etc.
Will these cause injustice and false positives even more than license plate tracking? What is your point?
> Personally, I think schools shouldn't be funded solely by the taxes of residents that reside within their bounds, but as a collective pool of all tax revenue.
Are you talking about undemocratically forcing a restructuring all school financing everywhere in order to avoid one school doing a $1K/mo license plate tracking contract to make sure kids live in the district that they're attending school in? What is the principle that you're trying to uphold?
> Are you talking about undemocratically forcing a restructuring all school financing everywhere in order to avoid license plate tracking? What is the principle that you're trying to uphold?
No, I'm talking about changing how schools are funded by making funds more evenly distributed across districts. Giving the kids in the "bad" areas the same opportunities as those in the "good" areas. Right now, if you can't afford that four-five-six-seven-hundred thousand dollar home, you aren't afforded the same level of public education as someone else who can. And doing so democratically, which is why I mentioned it'll never happen because no politician would be able to run on that. Their opponents would be outfunded by the top 10% to keep the status quo.
And this is coming from someone who own's a home in a "good" district. Where we got a total rebuilt elementary school 4 years ago, a new middle school actively being build, and a new high school that opened 3 years ago. Why should my kids have access to everything newer and better just because we can afford to live out in the suburbs, than someone else who isn't working in the cushy tech industry and instead is busting their ass only to live in poverty?
Newer does not mean better, or even imply it. Money spent on facilities has almost no correlation to educational outcomes.
What matters are the peers you go to school with, supported by decent curriculum and moderately competent teachers. None of which is expensive. Oh, and administrators who actually care about teaching being done vs. being terrified of the lawsuit fairy.
It’s the peers that matter by far the most - and that means parents. Parents that are self-selecting into good districts tend to skew heavily towards “involved” and some definition of functional. This can mean being able to and buying a home or rent an apartment in a good district, or finding some clever and/or creative workaround to get the same outcome. The latter is even better in most cases since those families are motivated at an even higher level to make sure it’s a success.
The best school I went to as a kid was a private highly selective school in “the ghetto” where my dad lived growing up. Nearly every kid there was on some form of subsidized or full ride tuition, with very “working class” parents. The facilities were barebones at best. The vast majority of kids had parents who held them to extreme expectations even if they didn’t have financial means or even time to be highly involved day to day.
The uber rich brand new high school I went to the next year in the suburbs wasn’t even close.
The difference was in the kids who attended the school and the expectations put on them for both classroom behavior, engagement, and work ethic. Shitty disruptive kids were kicked out within a matter of days so as to let kids who wanted to be there actually learn.
Anything beyond that is close to a rounding error for outcomes.
The inner city school district I pay taxes into spends more per student than many of the suburbs. You could triple it again and get zero change in outcomes - in fact so far since living here school budgets are inversely correlated with outcome, although I don’t see a causation there in either direction.
Schools that are allowed to be ran like schools and hold students to high expectations and standards do well. Schools that are ran like social programs trying to correct for all of societies ills do not. It’s pretty simple in the end.
You run it as a school, since that's what a school is for. Otherwise you fail at both being a school and a poor replacement for the social programs you're trying to do on the side.
For example - a school is not a correction facility. If a student is violent, they do not belong in school. Get them out and put into a proper facility designed for such things. It's not the school's problem anymore to think about.
The results speak for themselves on the topic.
A school is to educate students who are there, present, and want to be educated. They will fail at any other task.
Uh what's undemocratic about the state legislature, which created the current system of small local districts, Changing how schools are funded and governed?
Small parroquial government entities that are funded inequitably are bad, actually. And the current system of schools districts is a legacy of segregation and white flight. Local government boundaries are entirely arbitrary, should the city let water or fire services suffer in one council district because it doesn't produce enough taxes to support it?
A child's academic opportunity shouldn't be determined by their zip code and parents income. Everyone should have access to free high quality public schools.
This (an end to general purpose computing) isn't anything that people can prevent through civil channels. It will happen with or without public approval. You will have as much control over it as you had over the decision to go to war with Iran. It will never be on any ballot. People who help will get rich, people who don't, won't. Eventually, people who help will barely be middle class, and people who don't, won't. Their kids will own your kids.
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