Explicit types are just laziness, you should be catching exceptions anyways.

As long as they aren’t putting ridiculous terms on model usage like SD3 and the weights are provided I’m happy with it

This often happens to me on Windows with the Index so it might not even be a Linux specific issue

It’s good to be skeptical of institutions, just don’t go dismissing or accepting science based on ideological/class association, that’s how you get shit like Lysenkoism

“We immediately began to sink, they saw that… They heard us all screaming, and yet they still left us,” he told the BBC.

"The first child who died was my cousin’s son… After that it was one by one. Another child, another child, then my cousin himself disappeared. By the morning seven or eight children had died.

It replied that its staff worked “tirelessly with the utmost professionalism, a strong sense of responsibility and respect for human life and fundamental rights”, adding that they were “in full compliance with the country’s international obligations”

…

I used to write that kind of stuff for a living when I was really poor and scraping by, it paid by the word and so low that you could realistically only crack minimum wage if you kept typing continuously and didn’t stop to think or do any research.

Microsoft hasn’t detailed ESU pricing for consumers yet, but the company did previously reveal it will offer these extended updates to consumers for the first time ever

They’re actually gonna make us pirate security updates huh

I think it’s an inherent part of not-face-to-face communication

I don’t know about that, I’ve had many good arguments online and few face to face. In person people are generally going to put too much effort into avoiding conflict to fully or accurately express their possibly controversial thoughts. I think the tendency to talk past someone and take a very combative stance is mostly a culture issue rather than an anonymity one; bad arguments get praise and attention because people agree with it for tribalistic reasons, and treating the ‘enemy’ like people provokes criticism. People end up seeing argument as a vice, something you do purely as a way to vent, and not as a way of working through ideas and seeing new perspectives.

The person who predicted 70% chance of AI doom is Daniel Kokotajlo, who quit OpenAI because of it not taking this seriously enough. The quote you have there is a statement by OpenAI, not by Kokotajlo, this is all explicit in the article. The idea that this guy is motivated by trying to do marketing for OpenAI is just wrong, the article links to some of his extensive commentary where he is advocating for more government oversight specifically of OpenAI and other big companies instead of the favorable regulations that company is pushing for. The idea that his belief in existential risk is disingenuous also doesn’t make sense, it’s clear that he and other people concerned about this take it very seriously.

I remember conservative conspiracy types were all over the idea that covid was going to be uncontainably catastrophic right up until the pandemic really happened and the party line was suddenly that actually the virus isn’t real after all, at which point they did an about face rather than delivering actually well deserved "told you so"s.

Point being, as soon as they see

the petrolium companies don’t want us to see it as a problem

They will suspect this sentiment is disloyal to their political tribe and definitely automatically discard it on that basis.

Yeah but it’s funny in a different way; they are giving ignorant and condescending advice because while big cats have impressive hunting abilities, they don’t normally hunt mice.

From the article:

By shutting down a studio instead of selling it off or even letting it buy itself out, Microsoft ensures that no studio it has ever owned can become viable competition.

They benefit by killing off art and culture that could replace or take attention away from the art and culture they already control and profit from. They don’t need to profit from it directly.

I feel like reading statutes is unreliable because a lot of how the law works is how courts interpret the law, which can be very different from the commonsense interpretation of the letter of the law. Lacking broader context, I can’t know from just this exactly what the consequences might be. Here’s some parts that are possibly concerning though:

The Commission may, in its discretion, prescribe the forms of any and all accounts, records, and memoranda to be kept by carriers subject to this chapter, including the accounts, records, and memoranda of the movement of traffic

Not sure if this increases the ability of the government to spy on people through their ISPs or if that remains the same.

(a) Requirement to restrict access (1) Prohibited conduct Whoever knowingly and with knowledge of the character of the material, in interstate or foreign commerce by means of the World Wide Web, makes any communication for commercial purposes that is available to any minor and that includes any material that is harmful to minors shall be fined not more than $50,000, imprisoned not more than 6 months, or both.

Some states have been experimenting with broad bans on online porn sites and requiring those sites and also social media sites to demand id from all users, maybe this provision could give a future FCC the power to apply this sort of thing to the internet nationally? Although this section already explicitly mentions the internet which is confusing if this whole thing is only recently being made relevant to the internet.

There are provisions about the FCC being able to come up with rules for the prevention of robocalls, maybe this could be generalized to prohibit some forms of automated network traffic?

Relevant Snowden quote:

Arguing that you don’t care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don’t care about free speech because you have nothing to say

I pay for vpn service anonymously even though I probably don’t need to, as my main use is torrenting. I can see a remote possibility that vpn payment records at some point end up being used against pirates, even just as some kind of risk factor flagging, in the same vein as what you are saying: “If someone is paying for a vpn, surely they’re doing something bad?” In countries that really want to crack down on speech and human rights, vpns get banned outright to varying success, and if you can’t pay anonymously in that situation you’re pretty screwed, this hurts those people.

In general I think everyone should be trying for some level of actual privacy online as a matter of principle, just because of how everyone being fully tracked and observed puts way too much power in the hands of those watching.

The current administration and its agencies have clear contempt for any sort of crypto privacy they have shown in a variety of ways. The Tornado Cash sanction and criminal charges, recent Bitcoin mixer criminal charges, the proposed rule putting a “Primary Money Laundering Concern” black mark on people seeking crypto privacy in virtually any way… if it’s possible to still purchase online services privately after this, I’m sure they will go on to take further measures to try to close the “loophole”. They don’t want anyone doing things without being able to monitor them.

It’s worth mentioning that obscenity laws apply whether Net Neutrality is a thing or not

Couldn’t this reclassification affect that sort of thing in a jurisdiction sense though? Again, I like net neutrality, mostly because the idea of something like the standard internet option being Facebook only is terrifying, but it sounds like a big part of this is reclassifying ISPs to be subject to rules made by the FCC. I’d really rather it be a law passed by congress, and I worry about how federal agencies might abuse their powers over the internet when those powers are expanded in general. I’m not really sure how much it generally expands their authority over the internet, but it seems like it might.

I think net neutrality is a good thing, but could this reclassification mean that the FCC will have increased authority to police content online? There has been a lot of worrying activity around that lately in general, and the FCC has a history of imposing censorship on traditional media.

it’s called milliseconds since epoch

if somehow the population of pirates increases, that will lead to maybe tighter controls on piracy or a more global crackdown of piracy

Yes, I think most people accept that this is how it would likely work. And it actually is the case that many pirates do not agree with what I am saying, and see this as something to be avoided by keeping piracy niche, and would like to preserve their own access that way, and use this reasoning to argue against greater accessibility. But it’s kind of like voting; any action you can take as an individual affecting the broader society is unlikely to make much difference in determining outcomes that affect you personally. It’s possible to mistakenly imagine that they do, it’s possible to not be thinking about it at all, and it’s possible to have different ideas about what you would like to affect; for instance a person wanting to keep piracy niche might have some idea of a group identity of more technically literate and connected insiders like themselves, and want to act to protect the interests of maintaining media access for that group.

To me, this subjectivity of goals and the relative absence of direct personal consequences make these choices very unlike a game of prisoner’s dilemma, in which you can expect the consequences of your choices to be unambiguous, tangible, and personally experienced. Instead of working out an optimization problem for clearly defined personal interests that are the same for all actors, the task is one of empathy and imagination - what can the world look like, what should it look like, who do we care about and what do we want for them? How do different visions of the world weigh against each other?

We definitely don’t want more people to pirate

Many of us do. Why would we seed torrents, donate to crackers and repackers, offer useful advice etc. if we did not? Personally I would prefer for everyone to stop paying money for software and media entirely, and for the industries that produce those things to collapse, and the legal structures protecting them to be dismantled, because I think we would create better stuff without financial incentives. Not everyone is operating under your idea of a rational perspective here.