Presumably, when this generation comes of age they will largely answer this question with "sure, I don't see the problem", which many will consider a big win.
I think the problem here is that a bunch of people in these threads are pursuing different goals (those who want a non-spying TV for themselves, those who want it for their relatives, those who want the entire spying TV ecosystem destroyed), and each of them treats the other groups as if they were misplacing the goalposts from their own preferred location.
> You must realize there are things like 3blue1brown, Veritasium, and Numberphile on YouTube, right?
There are things like "Left: the Bible in Chinese, Right: Mozart's 40th symphony" on YouTube too, but I wouldn't take that as evidence of the existence of a significant contingent of polyglot religious split-brain multitaskers. Conversely, I do in fact know several people who run explainer videos in the background simply because they like the feeling of a reassuring voice making intellectual noises at them.
Some people think it’s ok to waste their life configuring Linux PCs to do standard non-custom appliance stuff, and some people just buy appliances. The appliance people in this case get to easily use Bluetooth speakers and HDR and the Linux PC people get to spend hours they won’t get back configuring their PCs to do the same thing that the appliance people get out of the box.
> The appliance people in this case get to easily use Bluetooth speakers and HDR and the Linux PC people get to spend hours they won’t get back configuring their PCs to do the same thing that the appliance people get out of the box
> spend hours
Sorry but your knowledge seems to be quite outdated. HDR on Linux has worked for a while now and Bluetooth is just as easy to use as it would be on a TV. Installing the entire OS takes less than an hour.
Not sure what you are on about regarding "configuring Linux PCs", you just install an OS once and forever not have to deal with insert proprietary TV OS bullshit, which is far more annoying and time-wasting than configuring something on a Linux PC. Not to mention the conveniences that you get with a real PC instead of some Android toy OS.
The "appliance" is more "convenient" right until you find something wrong/annoying/inconvenient about it and have to deal with the usual bullshit. I mean, sure, if all you need is watching Netlix it will be fine.
tl;dr your comment might have made sense ~5 years ago, but right now you have no clue what you're talking about and basically just repeating "linux pc hard and bad" propaganda
I have a NUC running LibreElec in my living room, on the input to my TV immediately adjacent to the input used by the Apple TV. I'm speaking from direct personal side-by-side experience.
> Who the fuck knows what can happen with the current US admin
The ratchet of authoritarianism has been turning steadily in the US (and the rest of the world) for at least the past 25 years, and a big part of why no coherent opposition to it managed to manifest is how it was turned into a partisan issue. Republicans and the apathetic centre tune out Democratic complaints about the authoritarianism of a Republican administration just as it happened when the party associations were reversed some 5 years ago, because a group resenting its outgroup wielding power is the most unsurprising dog-bites-man event.
At the same time, neither side is willing to criticise authoritarianism by their own, both because they do not want to "stab their soldiers in the back" in the culture war and because in practical terms more power to wield against the outgroup is too useful to forego. Would you still be happy to support a durable circumscription of the current US admin's ability to regulate local AI, if it also meant that no future Democratic administration could interfere with a cataclysmic AI-driven campaign of right-wing misinformation and propaganda that is threatening everything you hold dear?
Right but one side publicly directs the department of justice to investigate its political enemies and interfere in elections and the other side doesn't.
Lawfare has been an increasing problem for several administrations now. Like the parent poster says, each side is largely blind to their own abuses, but they're still abuses.
And then the other side uses it as justification to escalate further.
> Are we at a point where former presidents are immune to prosecution for actual crimes?
Name the last time a president was prosecuted and you'll have your answer. Trumps lawsuit over presidential acts just forced into the open what was before a gentlemen's agreement about presidential power. Outside of office, I don't think any of the former presidents had a huge drive to commit anything above financial crimes and using their status.
Biden I can not think of anything scaling beyond putting his ego over country when he went for a second term. He clashed with the legal system but challenges in court is typical for the role. And even in that, he choose to comply (example loan repayment) over Trump who rushes to complete his goal before legal can step in (golf course, ballroom, etc).
When that user writes "suspiciously bot-like GOP-propaganda", he means "normal American citizens who democratically blew my party out of the last popular election", FYI.
I truly hate party politics and just want politicians cooperating to make the country run as well as possible for as many people as possible. But Republicans reliably cut taxes for the rich, dramatically grow the national deficit, and start stupid wars.
If you are serious about this preference, would you also be okay with a compromise solution where only you (and anyone else who feels the same) die, rather than taking everyone else with you?
You don't have to want to give the policeman status: once he pulls you over after running a red light at 2am and you realise he might let you off the hook if you are nice and deferential, the status gradient almost establishes itself. People knew this, and decided to become policemen for the status. So it was with tech wizards, once you encountered a problem you could not solve without their help.
I think gradual rollout is underrecognised as the utterly devious way of implementing user-hostile changes that it is. It doesn't take a lot of scrolling through the comments here to find instances of people who are unaffected by some change or another being inexplicably hostile towards posters who are, implicitly accusing them of anything from incompetence to drama-mongering and misinformation. In that way, some of those who would complain about a change are worn down early on, and by the time the change is rolled out to more people they have already resigned and moved on, preventing a critical mass of opposition from forming.
Yes, it's a kind of boiling the frog where instead of slowly cranking up the degree of enshittification you do it with the number of affected users instead. In both cases the goal is to avoid a critical mass of user outrage.
A/B tests in general should require informed consent just like any other study on human participants. But then most software developers don't care about ethics so this is nothing new.
That's the magic of A/B testing. You get to send an entire "B" group into paranoia and upset about the change they didn't want/like while everyone in "A" gets to gaslight B that B isn't experiencing what they're getting and that it would never happen to A...
I never understood what are the technical obstacles to building the phone network in such a way that caller numbers can not be spoofed or suppressed. Then, you could just build a system where receiving an unsolicited phone call from a commercial entity entitles you to a compensation in small claims court, to the tune of 50 EUR, unless the caller can prove that you explicitly authorised them.
The problem is not that the originator can be found. The current, existing, legacy, phone system already can find the exact originator.
The problem is that enforcement of breaking the regulation is so non-existent that the criminals just place millions of calls knowing, at most, they might get a minor slap on the wrist that can be budgeted for as a "cost of doing business".
Every single call carried across the phone network is billed, and every hop along the path knows who to bill for their part of carrying the call. The billing system is the method to trace back to the originators, and then apply a fine sufficiently large enough to no longer be a cost of doing business.
But the regulators seem to have no idea that the billing system provides the traceability to find the criminals and then go after them. Instead we get things like stir/shaken that are trying to patch "authenticity" on top of a network never designed with that in mind.
AFAIK, the problem is that the system works like international mail used to.
There are strict barriers at the borders to ensure everybody pays their dues. But once a call is accepted, there's no control at all about where it's going to.
The problem is that it's a network. The hard part of networking isn't the technology - it's the other people. And short of a government regulation or a monopoly, they'll never all agree.
STIR/SHAKEN has an exception for calls passing through TDM trunks, which don't support it. This created a small industry for passing spam calls through TDM trunks. Such calls can trivially have their caller ID spoofed.
Phone companies used to be monopolies, in Europe they were owned by the government as a public service. But when they become profitable politicians betrayed their citizens and sold them. Nowadays, phone companies are a source of scams, spam and everything wrong with big corporations. And all that profits are now private instead of helping to fund the country.
On this topic, phone lines are so ubiquitous that it is irresponsible for representative governments to continue to let private companies mess around with them. Doubly irresponsible to go from public to private after the increase in popularity.
That was in the 2000s. Phone lines are an anomaly now but cellphones are not. The phone number is more like an ICQ number than an identifier of a physical connection, but is still regulated like the latter.
Why are those non-STIR/SHAKEN TDM trunks serving as transit trunks (non-terminating), rather than terminal-only trunks? Seems a pretty obvious hole to close.
The only limitation is cold hard cash. The phone companies make big bucks from telemarketers by providing an endless list of new numbers and multiple lines. The whole racket wouldn't work without the companies' greenlight.
Exactly. The same reason the bulk of paper mail is unsolicited garbage. The spammers/scammers are paying customers, without regulation the incentive for the phone company is to keep them flowing.
Compare to how effective spam filters are on email. It's a much harder problem, but the spam costs the provider money, so they address it.
Historically, in a world of analogue phone lines, spoofed phone numbers were a legitimate feature: if my business has more than one phone line, each of those lines is going to have its own distinct number; but I'm going to want outgoing calls from any of those lines to appear to originate from the same number (the one that I put on my promotional material, invoices, etc.).
Much the same as e-mail, identity within the phone system was, historically, entirely built on trust (because only Ma Bell could make configuration changes, and they could verify that what their customer was asking them to do was legit). Those assumptions were carried through deregulation, and are very deeply entrenched in the technical design of the network. Changing them will hopefully become easier over the next few years as analogue service is turned off entirely (e.g., BT/OR in the UK are set to turn off all analogue phone service by the end of January 2027).
I've seen two reasons. 1) Backward compatibility--you would have to add an additional security layer, and some old legacy switching hardware (5% of the network?) wouldn't support this. 2) Phone companies profit from the calls, so they have no incentive to spend the money to upgrade and stop it.
Yes, but the premise here is that for national calls it becomes harder to spoof the caller id. In fact, here in Italy we're seeing an increase in telemarketing calls from Spain and France, so it's not entirely hypothetical.
The mathematicians could make an argument that applies to everyone. But that probably leads to outright communism, and that well is still quite poisoned. Maybe AI ultimately gets powerful enough to give us Banksian full luxury communism. Alternately, it gives a world where corporations don't need workers and tyrants don't need citizens.
And some people might want to know about [insert your favourite beyond-the-pale-in-the-US topic here, we're on a US forum after all]. I think it would be great if those people could turn to Chinese models, while anyone wanting to know about Uyghur camps can ask the US ones.
There aren’t any. The idea that the censorship environment is the same in the US as it is in China is nonsense used to ‘both sides’ away concerns about the CCP.
The models to themselves are currently generally not censored though and the guardrails are on the application layer?
Of course that might change in the future but as long as the Chinese companies continue publishing their research and models it only makes it easier for third parties to catch up with them.
Can you name one? It's an honest question, first of I'm not American, but also the stuff I do come up with (asking an LLM how to blow up a school or whatever) would also be handled similarly in China, so those would be a wash, and I can't think of any that aren't.
I would imagine a lot of things touching upon progressive politics would be affected (there were a few high-profile incidents demonstrating bias like Google's black Wehrmacht soldier pictures, but has anyone rigorously tabulated how the various commercial LLMs respond to questions about the gender binary or heritability of human traits considered good or bad?). Overall, I'm too reluctant to even write out in the abstract sequences of words that I never want to explain to a future job interviewer or HR employee who used GPT-7 to comb the internet for all text that stylistically can be traced to me, but just imagine whatever you believe to be vile and wrongheaded opinions in that general space which it is certainly more than justifiable to prohibit. The things that make you think "banning this is good actually" are exactly the things most likely to be banned (and this is true in China too).
Another thing I would try if I had access to the models and enough proxies to hide behind is asking for advice on software/movie piracy or seeing to what extent the models can be elicited to straight up argue against the validity of intellectual property, though there it seems more probable to me that the US models would be permissive.
What historical fact is the US trying to systematically suppress, is the question. This beating around the bush about things that are "considered uncouth in some circles" just underlines there either aren't any, or they're so perfect at it nobody knows of any. So let's just admit than and move on, because what you just said is true about any society, ever.
> The things that make you think "banning this is good actually" are exactly the things most likely to be banned (and this is true in China too).
Then make the case why it is better for the world that the Tiananmen Square massacre is memoryholed. You said A, now say B.
In the meantime, I'll make the case against it, and it's simple: totalitarian control of historical truth, by definition, to be 100% watertight, needs control of the whole globe. It doesn't mean everything needs to be controlled, it means everything needs to be controlled by at least an entity that cooperates on this matter. I.e. another totalitarian bloc.
That makes the CCP, just by their insistence about Tiananmen -- nothing additional required, at all, they could not harm a fly and have no prisons and it would make zero difference -- an enemy, a threat marching towards any thinking human who wants to have agency and dignity. Actually, it's more like a river flowing to the ocean, people in the CCP can have lofty ideals about honesty and factual truth, the system they require to survive in turn requires this to survive, as it is. It requires human spontaneity and human freedom to be dead, completely. That is what totalitarianism is.
And by the same token, we must be wary of those who take that lightly. A friend falling asleep at the wheel will kill you just the same as an assassin who messed with your car.
That is not "as opposed to the US or the EU or Russia or North Korea". It is strictly in addition. No other regime can behind another regime or use it as an excuse. Using the US to distract from the CCP is as odious as doing the reverse.
> I never want to explain to a future job interviewer or HR employee who used GPT-7 to comb the internet for all text that stylistically can be traced to me
So you want to work in an office wearing a tie. Well, people who want to work as roadies and fight all night would never hang with you if they found out. And if that was your priority, you would be more afraid of NOT being blacklisted by the corpos than not being part of them.
But seriously, are you saying you are as afraid of being found out as the person you are, because you're not already wearing that on your sleeve, in exactly the same way as people who have to fear that they and their family get disappeared, tortured, for remembering friends that got murdered? That would be totally a you problem.
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