delusional

I think they're just asserting control. They want to control what you see on your devices. They own the worlds largest search engine, and they think they get to pick what's on it.

> we gratefully acknowledge the assistance of GPT Astra 6.0 and GPT 6.1 Sol in drafting this post.

Holy. This is the closest thing I've seen one of these AI guys get to accepting it as the machine god. "Dear god, we gratefully accept this divine gift of sustenance that we are about to consume."

That might be a good time to consider what the fuck is going on.

I don't recall it having one of those? Maybe you're thinking of running a Unix LPAR?

Either way, I looked it up in our internal documentation. It's called SCRIPT/VS, and it's part of IBM DCF. It's apparently not a direct descendant of RUNOFF, but instead based on RUNOFF back in 67.

At my dayjob, our legacy customer communication generation (for letters and such) has a runoff syntax. It's z/os, so not groff, but something of that lineage. People are still working with those documents to this day, generating millions of them a year. They all look at me funny when I identify it as runoff, everybody else thinks it's something custom in-house.

I can't help but feel like this is the wrong way to interpret legislation. The Code isn't some sort of program you run to get your outcome. There's people and "intent" and societal vibes involved. Amendments end up bearing on each other, and changes to one law might change the relative weighing of it related to some other law.

It's all messy human stuff that I don't think "diff" handles all that well.

The fairy tale is not about the capability of technologies. That part is wonderful. The fairy tale is the techno-optimist "democratization" nonsense. I can recommend reading "Cyberlibertarianism" by David Golumbia if that distinction doesn't make sense to you.

In that scheme, would regulation be based on where the servers are located? What's to stop me from routing American traffic to Armenia, where the laws don't exist? What's to stop me routing it to Russia, where the general legal principle is that illegality won't be pursued if it's no against Russian citizens?

journalistic media resolve this by having independent editorials. There's of course still structural issues, especially if those media outlets are traded or seen as investment targets, but the general structure has worked for 50-60 years.

This is one of the problems with the neo-journalistic outlets and "citizen journalism". They don't have the staffing or discipline to run that sort of operation.

Tons of media outlets have covered privacy failures in the past. The public doesn't care, and so the journalists stop caring as well.

The problem with regulating big tech is the unplacable internet. Who can regulate the internet? Who gets to make rules for the global network?

Politicians are keenly aware that regulation has to be administered, and administration costs money. The internet subsists on low overhead, and per jurisdiction administration would significantly change almost everything about the current internet. The public wont allow that.

If the public actually starts demanding regulation, we will see a fracturing of the internet into national networks. It will become impossible (or at least uneconomical) to run reddit, youtube, or facebook as global networks. They might continue to exists, but they will be sectioned off.

> There is a counter incentive, the money the companies pay the politicians.

That's disingenuous. The public has been told a beautiful fairy tale about technology for years. There are huge outcries every single time any politician tries to regulate big tech.

Now I know that this isn't because the public is somehow ideologically opposed to regulation. We have been paid off, just as much as the politicians have. When they increase the prices of televisions and say it's because they this new regulation, we show up to support them.

> Cool analogy, but there's another possibility: software is uniquely suited for being boosted by LLM-based coding agents.

Or the pretty obvious third possibility: The tech sector is the part selling the LLMs. They're not digging up more gold with their cool shovel technology, they are selling the shovels.

> but the computer itself is place-oriented

You could similarly argue that the computer is in fact fundamentally functional, since the core instruction cycle (Fetch Decode Execute) does not modify any memory.

The key insight into that system is that we've embedded a functional system within a mechanism that makes it imperative. The functional cycle can output commands to fetch it more data, that it can then use in the next cycle. It becomes imperative by the addition of time, which it needs because it's limited in the amount of input and output.

That's what I was led to believe by my dentist when I asked. I just checked danish national guidance, and they say the dose of x-rays is so low the increased risk is incalculable. Instead they say the dentist should only ever use an x-ray if they find it medically necessary out of a principle of minimization.

So it sounds like it's the individual dentists judgment, and their organizing body says that they base it on the occurrence of dental problems in the population the clinics they oversee, with some adjustments based on patient age and risk factors.

So according to Danish authorities, you should be safe getting x-ray'ed every 6 months. They just don't recommend it, since it's a waste.

> I reckon AI CSAM is the same as Lolicon, which is illegal here in Sweden. I believe the same applies to Denmark, though I am by no means knowledged about Danish law.

This interests me. I don't know of any specific ruling we can draw any conclusion from, but the ruling in question here cites some procedural texts that specifically state that the danish CSAM laws only cover "reproductions", which they then also specifically define as not including "drawing and paintings, such as antique vases".

It seems to me that a compelling argument could be made on both sides of that distinction. On the one hand, lolicon shared on X share nothing in common with art on antique vases. On the other, they would not be included in the textual definition of reproduction.

In this specific matter I think it's most likely that drawings of CSAM is legal, at least under these statutes.

The relevant danish law and procedural texts state an intention to align with the UNCRC (Rights of the child), danish law therefore doesn't contain a substantive claim for why fictive (and therefore also generated) images of CSAM should be equated to non-fictive CSAM.

The answer to if it generalizes is, as with all new law, that we just don't know. In this case, the procedural for the passing of the last amendment to the relevant section includes the specific point that fictive CSAM should be included. It seems doubtful that other such procedurals would contain the same language. That doesn't rule out that this case is used as a basis for claiming that AI generated images should be treated similarly to real photographs when the two are indistinguishable.

I might to you. They are not different as they relate to CSAM as a matter of Danish law.

That's why I also go get a "poke around and look" checkup every year. The X-ray is to spot deeper things, but you can't do that every year without the x-rays becoming a risk factor themselves.

> checked against official boundary maps, not listing descriptions.

Were you ever seriously fooled?

My dentist shows me the xray they take once every 5 years. Then they walk me through what a cavity would look like. Then they show me that i have none.

I can understand that the external "poke at it" method requires some judgment, but an xray shouldn't have that much variance.

The court was asked to annul the previous judgment since the defendant did not think that the pictures in question were CSAM, since the children depicted were fictional. The court found the pictures similar to photography and therefore rejected the appeal.

In my mind, this is pretty substantial technology news, at least in Denmark, since it rejects the notion that AI generated pictures are substantially different from other pictures, and therefore has to abide by the same laws.

I will be interested in seeing if anybody charges the big AI providers for producing these photos.

The problem with his argument is that he put the cart before the horse. He presupposes we've found and validated a cancer cure, but at that point any rational person would accept said cure. The moral quandary is how you are going to validate it against all the other possible candidates, when you don't have a coherent rationale for it to work.

Primeagen is a youtube reaction guy. You may as well tell me what hbomberguy, Jay Leno, or Ben Shapiro had to say about it.

One mans "censor" is anothers "brand protection". Given that they are currently allowed and expected to decide who gets to use their payment networks, it seems pretty obvious to me that they won't allow extreme content next to their logos. If you made clear rules that specify when they have to extend service, I'm sure they would love to relinquish that responsibility. Visa has no moral objection to what you do, as long as they make money and aren't exposed to political pressure.

"Value add" is the wrong framework for thinking about these sorts of services. The reason Visa and MasterCard exist is that there's value in relationships. If you want to have your accounting system available in all stores, you have to talk to Visa or MasterCard. Conversely, if you run a store and want to accept payments, you only have to deal with Visa and MasterCard. Sure, "public service", but run by who? Visa and MasterCard are cross border, good luck getting any sort of international coalition of governments to build a payments system in the current political climate.

That's always the question. Any mid-level engineer who comes into a CI setup can trivially spot several inefficiencies, that they could solve. They also know that solving those requires implementing some specific tweaks that won't generalize outwards from that project, or will require extra maintenance. Which they will now be the only ones aware of. 6 minutes in CI time is rarely worth the trade-off.

i think he's saying that you can't add the soul, and that soul can't be boiled down to "the graphics are uninteresting".

> Right now, all top tier LLMs are as eager, bright 20ish year old interns. > Yet directly guide them, monitor everything they do, some value emerges.

That's simply not true. I've had some very talented interns, and they are leagues ahead of what the LLMs can do. Not that it matters though, because the point of having interns wasn't to have them produce value. What made the investment worth it was that 12 months down the line I would have a competent colleague that I could have an interesting conversation with. A human person that could challenge some of my blind spots. A person that could take responsibility of something. Maybe not my most important work, but some of it. You don't get ANY of that from the LLM.

Claude told him to do it this way.

> You are just refusing to take experiences that do not match your preconceptions.

I am both validating your experience, and rejecting your analysis.

> Who gets locked in an office?

If you can't engage with that statement in more thoughtful way than that, we have no common ground for a discussion.