There are 189 active legislative bodies to choose from; it's hard to imagine, but yes in the worst case they all fall in lockstep on this issue and none of them provide this kind of freedom. The obvious next step is to buy a remote island (better yet: some foreign body in Space) and form "Freedom (tm) Republic".
Remember that "pirate" guy buying an oil rig and building "freedom" crypto / torrent "country" there, with Datacenter running on the rig? That did not end well. Another case is Kim DotCom. And just look at the "success" of UK's freedom.
TBH, we all are f...d.
This will end Linux as end user OS, it will stay only in Cloud and containers. Arguably, the goal here is to destroy home PC altogether. maximum we will be allowed is a laptop with endpoint verification and mandatory touch ID, locked boot and non-replaceable hardware. If you think Linux is the end of it – think again. The same crap will be implemented in BIOS/UEFI, on "HW management" level. Essentially, your bare HW only laptop will not even start without you touching fingerprint sensor and allowing it to "validate your age" against – of course government approved – HW manufacturer.
Same with smart phones – it's already here, if you tried to activate iPhone.
And projects like Open/Free BSDs? Government will sure their leaders happily retire and ... well, the community will just "die" naturally.
Kira is probably too young (good for her! I am not cynical here) to remember how the software development worked when PHP just came out. We are at that point of time now, again.
Next stop will be Perl: write only language.
And then we will hit the "Java EE" wall.
Again.
And our LinkedIn will get red hot from recruiters looking for "experienced crisis devlopers".
It's not only marketing. We are witnessing total restriction on advanced AI use. People started asking questions and think. We can't have that, can we? "AI Licensing" is coming up soon. And it will be much more strict than license to carry or even sec clearance. Soon, we will have a AI models per industry fine tuned on pre-approved bank of answers only.
We are obviously limiting access to be read-only for anything customer-facing (it will be able to put recommendations in the dashboard but not actually change things directly) but I think the point of GP's comment was literally just to get a reaction.
No, the point is that with human in the loop the downside is (usually!) rather limited, as common sense would stop obvious fuckups (ok, not always, but still).
With an agent (especially incompetently employed), the danger of unwittingly destroying your company (or at least, the crucial data/reputation) is rather higher. We are notoriously bad at estimating the downside risks in complex systems.
The most obvious case is the downside risks in complex financial constructs... things look great for a while ... until a sudden surprising collapse arrives and totally destroys all the upside you think you have created.
There is a tradeoff to be considered between the utility gained from using the stuff, minus the risk severity/likelihood, plus available mitigations. As someone else posted, none of us are in a position to make that balanced post because we don't know if the guy has an airgapped backup or not etc.
In any case, GP's post was not such a balanced consideration; it was just parroting a beloved risk-aversion meme that can easily be deployed against building anything (what if the building falls on top of someone?) or even leaving home to go to work ("travelling in a hunk of steel at lethal speeds – let me assure you that absolutely nothing can go wrong here, mate.")
What I find tiresome about that meme is the presumption that "something can go wrong" is useful input on its own. It's not. Mistakes are made all the time, the only way to avoid that is to stop breathing. Even in the process of me standing up and going to the loo, something can go wrong.
If the guy wants to make a case that it's too dangerous for the expected benefits, he has to actually make that case. Saying "risk exists" with no elaboration is a waste of HTML. "something can go wrong" every time he swallows food, yet mysteriously he still does it.
(the suicide analogies may seem mean-spirited, but I kind of mean it. If you consider every action primarily from a standpoint of "what harm or irreversible change can result from this", the only permissible path is to do nothing. To be moral is to be as close as possible to a rock or another inanimate object.)
