> a class of "elite thinkers" who go on loafing about
So you agree we need a wealth tax that applies to billionaires?
8,830 karma · joined August 8, 2016
So you agree we need a wealth tax that applies to billionaires?
I'm not expecting you to accept that philosophical position, but I hope it explains how the governmental policy is only an overreach to the extent that a particular unprovable and unfalsifiable philosophical position is correct.
So-called "intellectual property" is neither intellectual nor property. If I randomly mash the keyboard for a few minutes, the resulting jumble of letters can have its redistribution restricted by copyright law, despite not requiring any intellectual feat to produce. It is also not property, since I cannot own ideas that exist within your head or the sound waves that emanate from your mouth when you whistle a tune I wrote.
> You can steal them.
No you can't. The legal definition of "stealing" requires that the perpetrator takes someone else's property (which an idea isn't) without permission with the intent to deprive them of the property. You can't deprive someone of an idea by making more copies of that idea, much less is that the intent behind copying, so the label of "stealing" is completely inapplicable.
(You may have been using the "historical present tense"[1], in which case what you said is technically correct, but potentially misleading to some readers.)
[0] https://www.makeuseof.com/twitter-unbans-donald-trump-truth-...
[1] https://www.thoughtco.com/historical-present-verb-tense-1690...
"Whoever embezzles, steals, purloins, or knowingly converts to his use or the use of another, or without authority, sells, conveys or disposes of any record, voucher, money, or thing of value of the United States or of any department or agency thereof, or any property made or being made under contract for the United States or any department or agency thereof; ..."
It's definitely possible to imagine a situation in which Snowden "knowingly ... sells ... any record ... or thing of value of the United States" to Russia, namely a copy of the information he had available to him while working for the NSA.
I'm not sure how courts have interpreted "record ... or thing", and whether (for example) a copy of a page from an internal government wiki would count, but let's assume that digital information is a "thing" and that copies of it are still "of the United States".
I'll further grant, for the sake of argument, that the US government has secret evidence that such a selling did take place (perhaps witnessed by a double agent working at the Kremlin, who could be called upon to give a witness statement at a trial held in secret), although I don't actually believe such selling occurred.
My main point, though, was that I don't know of any court interpreting "steals" in a statute to mean "making an unauthorized copy of" or "leaking". You're right, though, that there are other laws that cover what Snowden did.
Isn't that a bit of an exaggeration? Surely what the EU is proposing is that browsers have to accept just those companies which pay the necessary fee and which some EU body declares to be trustworthy.
You're right, though, that this still adds to the attack surface, because now you have to trust not just your browser vendor, and all the CAs that they trust, but also this EU body and all the CAs that they trust.
(For those who haven't been following, here's what the EFF has to say about it: https://www.eff.org/fa/deeplinks/2021/12/eus-digital-identit... )
> We are excited to carry the lessons from this release into the deployment of more capable systems
so I immediately assumed that ChatGPT is basically a ruse for generating training data that will be used to ensure GPT-4 passes the Turing Test.
It's unlikely that OpenAI would have set out with that as their primary goal for GPT-4, but it's been two and a half years since GPT-3 came out (twice the time span between GPT-2 and GPT-3) so it's possible they realised while developing GPT-4 that it would be theoretically capable of passing such a test, and if they didn't aim for that milestone, then one of their competitors would beat them to it.
I know that a lot of commentators and researchers are becoming increasingly cynical about the value of passing a Turing Test, especially as it requires the AI to be capable of deception (which has various ethical and safety implications), but I still think that OpenAI would be tempted to try to pass it if they thought they were close with GPT-4. In particular, I think that the incentives point towards OpenAI creating a carefully stage-managed version of the test, using unsophisticated judges, such as school children (or rogue Google engineers?).
Even with all the caveats of such a test, I think GPT-4 could be meaningfully described as "AGI" if it ends up being able to hold interesting conversations and solve mathematical problems and produce digital art and play Atari games and write code snippets, all using the same internal model.
Governments may complain about "Big Tech" having too much power, but in reality they love the amount of power, and how concentrated it is, as long as those who wield it are subservient to them.
Once the power is decentralised, and spread around the world (in jurisdictions they can't reach - which the author of the article doesn't seem to consider), then exercising the sort of control they are used to becomes a lot more messy.
I think that, on balance, that could lead to a better state of affairs, and I'm glad that federated ActivityPub instances have started to gain popularity just in time to shift the ecosystem before the OSB (or something worse) arrives.
> It need only happen once for the results of this scenario to become the equilibrium conditions in the Galaxy.
The only logical step missing is realising that any civilisation capable of generating these self-replicating probes would also be smart enough to look at the game theory and think "Either we become the berserker, and set the equilibrium conditions to be the ones that favour us, or we sit back and wait for another civilisation to do that to us."
This is a bit like the thinking that must have happened when US strategic planners in the 1940s considered the consequences of other nations gaining nuclear weapons, except they could have relied on the (questionable) possibility that mutually assured destruction could lead to a permanent stable equilibrium, whereas that doesn't seem to be an option when dealing with berserkers.
For most of the period between her losing the election and now, Trump has been in power, and Biden has had more important things to focus on than getting revenge against Assange/WL/Russia. (Also, it would be hard to maintain plausible deniability if the website started failing right after Biden took office).
A mandatory ID card says that every citizen has to prove their validity to the state, and it is the state which can grant or revoke that validity, rather than the state being the servant of the citizens.
There have surely been enough examples by now of successful countries not requiring mandatory ID cards, and examples of ID cards being abused by governments for discriminatory policies, that I don't know why they have such support.
http://www.preventgenocide.org/prevent/removing-facilitating...
https://privacyinternational.org/long-read/4472/exclusion-de...
https://bc.ctvnews.ca/99-of-indian-status-card-holders-have-...
Well, to be fair, a lot of people probably do support the idea that their own country checks the documents of people who enter and exit through their borders, and are maybe glad that the country they are visiting is similarly careful, but in principle, someone might want to emigrate to Antarctica, and never return to their country of birth, and for them it would be an unnecessary burden to have to apply for a passport.
Also, the status of the British Indian Ocean Territory is not a clear historical wrong, or at least it's only wrong due to being a by-product of the original policy of colonialism. Legally speaking, "Council of Ministers [of Mauritius] confirmed agreement to the detachment of Chagos Archipelago"[1], so the objections to this policy are based on the fact that Mauritius was not fully independent from the UK at the time (and therefore under duress), and that a country can't legally be split in two unless both pieces agree (and no one asked the Chagossians specifically if they were happy with the arrangement).
However, given the non-viability of the territory as a self-supporting entity, and assuming that Mauritius would not have wanted to support the unemployed population there after Britain closed the plantations, it's likely that much the same outcome would have happened even if all of our 21st century principles had been followed back in the 1960s. The only difference would have been that the Chagossians wouldn't have received their compensation, reparations, and British citizenship.
[0] https://warontherocks.com/2021/07/overcoming-the-diego-garci...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chagos_Archipelago_sovereignty...
It's a bit like a country supporting a whaling station on an island[0] and then later evacuating the island rather than continuing to pour resources in to maintain the presence of the now-unemployed workers.
For additional context, I should point out that the UK government did worse things to an island much closer to home[1] (albeit an island without any human residents).
One might also note that the Chagossians who lived in the British Indian Ocean Territory never actually owned any land there, nor were they self-sufficient in terms of food.[0] Also, the Chagossians were given[1] severance pay for their work there, and compensation for starting a new life in the Seychelles or Mauritius, back in the 1970s. Then, in the 1980s, the UK government paid out millions more in reparations[2], and this year the government offered them British citizenship too.[3]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chagossians#Eviction
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forced_expulsion_of_the_Chagos...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forced_expulsion_of_the_Chagos...
[3] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/mar/23/chagos-islands...
But surely a kingdom has to have a defined territory over which the monarch is sovereign?
Of course there is precedent for having a government in exile (which claims a territory it has no control over), and the Sovereign Military Order of Malta (which doesn't claim any territory at all), but I think if you want the "UK" to refer to an institution, then it should stand for "the United Kingship".
"the City of London shall have all its ancient liberties by land as well as by water"
These liberties being "ancient" even in 1215 AD means they date back to "time immemorial"[1] (that is, before 1189 AD) and thus their exact nature is not known. As such, replacing the legal basis for the City would likely have contravened or at least complicated the interpretation of that foundational document.
[0] https://www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/things-to-do/history-and-her...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_immemorial#English_and_Am...
To give an example, it was only in 2008 when the island of Sark abolished the feudal system (the last place in the western world to do so).
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laws_in_Wales_Acts_1535_and_15...
As an extreme example, the task of "Update the SSL certificate" is a low priority item that doesn't deliver any value, right up until about an hour before the certificate expires, at which point it suddenly becomes the highest priority task that everyone needs to drop all their other tasks for.
A slightly more realistic example would be the task of automating the certificate update process, or writing tests for that process, both of which might fail a short-sighted manager's heuristic of asking "Are there more important tasks right now?".
(Then, when something inevitably goes wrong due to the lack of automation or lack of testing, the manager blames whoever was supposed to be responsible for manually updating it, or blames the person who wrote the automation code but wasn't given the time to test it, while telling their own boss "There was nothing I could have done to prevent this!").
So, to align everyone's incentives, and make the problem less abstract, I propose the "jelly bean method". What this involves is having a jar of jelly beans, and whenever a manager tells you to ignore some technical debt to work on a "ticket" item instead, you should say "Sure thing, boss. That'll cost you 2 jelly beans". Then you take your jelly beans, and go work on the ticket, ignoring the tech-debt. However, when the next ticket estimation session happens, you bring with you the jar of jelly beans, and you weigh how full the jar now is, and use that as an inverse scale factor for all your estimates. For example, if the jar is half full, then you double all your estimates, and if it's a third full, then triple them.
Of course this isn't a scientifically rigorous methodology, and it won't make the estimates more accurate, but it should have the effect of making the manager and the team more aware of the long-term costs they are adding to the development process, which should make people less hasty to add tech-debt without accounting for it in some way. The system even allows for giving developers days or sprints where they can pay off the tech-debt: you just have to buy more jelly beans to fill up the jar a little. And even if the system doesn't have the desired effect and the level of tech-debt spirals out of control, at least you get to eat a few delicious jelly beans to take your mind off it.