17,988 karma · joined March 24, 2013
Contact me at ben@binarysource.co.uk
Enemy of the State came out in 1998, Sneakers came out in 1992, If you are old enough to have been around in the usenet and later slashdot days most of us techies assumed then that anything technically possible with a giant budget and no oversight that could be done was been done.
Echelon was "known" to exist for example long before Snowden.
Snowden was essentially useful to confirm that suspicion, sadly it seems to have had little impact on how anything is done.
There is something about the complete free form nature of pen and paper that makes me think better, I bought a nice ipad/pencil a few years ago thinking that would replicate it but it didn't, it was closer but not close.
If it's something I want to keep I just take a photo but vast majority of notes are transient anyway.
Trust but verify except no one is verifying (not that I trust it either).
Second only to Justified on my list of “consistently brilliant across entire run”.
There are parts of PoI that stick with you long after the show.
Not saying which because spoilers, it’s one of those shows that is better for knowing little about it before watching.
Would be nice but none of the other <waves at cybersecurity for the last decade> events has been.
It seems like something horrific is going to have to happen before this is taken as seriously by government and private orgs as it should have been, that seems to be how it works with other stuff historically.
Was threatened with that early in my career after I resigned, I just replied "Check my employment contract, Good luck with that".
They where chaotically unorganised and the contract had no non-compete, they are enforceable in the UK but it's quite uphill to enforce an overly broad one (up to and including it just been nullified if you go too broad) and they have to show good evidence why it should be enforced.
You'd hope so because if it turns out there is an asymmetry between "finding the hole" and "filling the hole" in terms of model capability that's a certified Bad Time(TM) for everyone.
Hell even if there isn't, We still have decades of cruft to fix and we already knew before LLM's that in general defending is harder than attacking, they only have to be lucky once, we have to be lucky every time.
It's going to be a rough few years.
Then Khrushchev and the rest decided that if they let Hungary "go" they'd have a problem justifying to the people of the other not entirely willing Warsaw Pact countries why they couldn't also go.
(Dramatically simplifying for brevity), it was also a really bad time for it to happen because we (the British), French and Israeli’s decided to start a massive crisis in the middle east 2 days earlier which over shadowed events in Hungary.
My missus is Hungarian, god help you if you say that Hungary was in the USSR to her because no one else will.
Her family (and her father in particular) loathed the Hungarian Communist Party but he was something of an Anglophile which he passed on to her and indirectly that worked out for me, so when Hungary joined the EU/combined with the Hungarian government saying "If you don't like it leave" (summarising again) she decided to say "OK" and move to the UK.
https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rdriley/487/papers/Thompson_1984_Ref...
> Perhaps it's more important to trust the people who wrote the code
Yeah... about that.
I mean if they don't then the US companies could just release their weights and chop the Chinese off at the knee's at that point (reversing what is currently happening).
Opening the weights isn't just a technical thing, it's a geopolitical decision which likely in part comes from the top of the CCCP (by either request or just implicitly allowing it).
That's been my rule for years at this point, I think I switched back to debian everywhere after the netplan changeover in ubuntu so somewhere around 17-18 (not against it in principle, just the way they did it in practice).
No real regrets either.
Indeed, as the UK is finding out at the moment, the existing rules are insufficient and it's turning out that a rule is only a rule if it is enforced anyway.
Agreed however getting humans to understand probability is tricky.
I had this discussion with my son recently about considering the severity of outcome multiplied by the probability of that outcome been the way to look at some things.
Though AI code copyright is an unknown pretty widely either way, it's too new for the legal system to have caught up with it yet.
Says a lot about Bit Coin volatility that that didn't really narrow how long ago it was.
2023 for anyone else who wonders (the linked wired article is worth a read though).
You are defaulting to the US here (and I doubt Taxi regulation in the US is that homologous either tbh given the complexity of 50 states and then cities on top of that).
Taking the country I'm most familiar with (the UK), Taxis fall into two categories (only one of which is technically a taxi by law if not convention - Hackney and private hire vehicles) both are licensed in different but similar ways by the licensing authorities (usually the local council but not always), some of those laws go back centuries.
Also worth noting, in the UK Uber does operate under the Private Hire Vehicle laws and does have to comply with applicable licensing same as any other "taxi" (private hire vehicle) operator.
They tried to argue otherwise and lost (at the UK Supreme Court so it's essentially settled case law) so they are classed as a PHV Operator and must ensure they only use a properly licensed PHV vehicle and drivers and can't pull the "but they are independent contractors" card out when it explodes in their faces.
It was a little more nuanced than that. The actual case was about whether a private hire operator accepting a booking had to contract with the customer as principal, rather than merely acting as an agent arranging a contract between the customer and driver (which was essentially Uber's argument).
The (UK) Supreme Court said "nah, it's you, nice try though".
Though I'd say that Starfleet is in itself too "noble" to solve the problems that Special Circumstances solves in the Culture universe (though Section 31 isn't and they do feature heavily in DS9).
Frankly I think that Banks was smart enough to realise that if he want to have compelling narratives in a universe where you have near godlike AI's and everyone (including them) is nice, you need that edge somewhere.
Asher's universe which has a similar premise to the Culture (having come after it) solves it differently, some of the AI's aren't nice or even nice adjacent which also works.
On one level it's a shame on another exactly what you'd expect to happen given the amounts of money involved.
We had it good there for a while.
Not living in SF (or the US) and been around HN for a long time is an interesting view into how an influential part of the tech landscape thinks.
I think the number of lights is about the same at least where I live in the UK, the big change is the light is now bright white not the yellow of the older sodium vapour lights.
I kinda miss that but mostly because it wasn't as bright and is what I grew up with, you can't really argue that the white light isn't more effective at it's primary goal (illumination) though.