It's only required on public roads. You can drive on your own property all you like without plates.
I'm all for privacy for things that are truly private. But wanting to secretly consume public resources and remain unaccountable for harm to others is what I think is truly absurd. Although it's an increasingly popular one recently.
That's funny. The vast majority of people's "own property" they could drive on would be on average about 50 feet. I grew up on 3/4 acre lot, and my dad let me drive up and down the drive way to practice before I had a license, so I get what you mean. Just funny that it's such a bold suggestion knowing that it's applicable to such a small number of people
I'm pretty sure, most of these weird laws are for farmers/ranchers. For whatever reason, they chose to word it more generically that sounds ridiculous applying it to everyone. Just like the whole red dye diesel, farmers just get special carve outs to give them a fighting chance on surviving to be able to provide us affordable food.
That is more because the gas tax is intended to pay for the roads. Red-dye diesel is declaring your intention to use the vehicle exclusively off-road, and thus not needing to be subject to the gas tax.
I contend that the only sensible way to measure freedom (of which privacy is an aspect) is within the context of societal interactions. It's not particularly interesting to move to the middle of nowhere and be able to do do what you want while not interacting with others (what it takes for "on your own [real estate]" to be meaningful). The pertinent metric is how well society can maintain a level of individual liberty (ie tolerance) as it scales up in density of interactions.
And nobody said anything about wanting to be unaccountable for harm. Rather it's a matter of being vulnerable to ne'er do wells. When we get a US GDPR equivalent with teeth, develop a widespread societal taboo against the surveillance industries, and so on, then we can talk about an equitable tradeoff with accountability for harm. Until then, the dynamic is an overwhelming vulnerability.
That analysis seems pretty confused to me. Freedom without accountability for harm to others is nonsensical.
As is dramatizing license plates as "overwhelming vulnerability". Just look at the US's 40k traffic deaths per year, with countless lesser injuries and accidents. Balanced against which specific harms of license plates?
The problem with Flock, etc, is their massive, unaccountable, for profit surveillance, which uses much more than license plates, and is working hard to move beyond them.
Nobody but you has said anything about "freedom" from accountability for harm.
The specific harms are exemplified by things like Flock, but also individual businesses tracking, private investigators, etc. If you want to stop that harm other ways, I've already agreed that I would find that acceptable. But until something actually changes on that front, it's not really an argument!
Given modern technology, we can imagine different ways that would provide less of a general vulnerability while actually providing more of the accountability you're putting foremost. Imagine say e-ink plates or a radio beacon that rotated the broadcasted identifier every minute, only being linkable through a database with an audit trail, etc.
Ahhhh, that makes more sense. Academic fraud may not always be used to boost the reputation of an academic, it could boost the reputation of a science/technique/medicine. If you see 30 authors with 1,000s of citations saying x is superior and 3 authors saying y is superior, from a quick glance x seems a lot better.
Chicago is pretty great, bub. This year I opened a pinball museum here, so I can testify that it's a fine place to run a business. Some friends just came from the Bay Area for a week and had a lovely time. If only for your mental health, you should step out of your media bubble now and again
Pretty well, honestly. Somebody with both technical knowledge and familiarity with a particular subculture can get access to entertainment videos with some work. But they've managed to keep piracy economically negligible. Basically everybody uses streaming services, 90% of US households pay for at least 1, and the average household pays for 4. [1]
Brand was wrong. Information doesn't want to be free, just cheap.
You can watch a lot of TV series online on some random pirate sites by simply googling "show x free online". It doesn't even require the relatively simple technical knowledge of using a BitTorrent client.
This is only the case because streaming services today are so cheap and convenient. Jack up the price, or decrease the convenience, and see people sail the high seas en masse again..
Indeed, the origin stories of these streaming services are deeply intertwined with combating piracy if you go back 20+ years. And I agree, if they outlaw open weight models, then only outlaws will have open weight models. But good luck finding and prosecuting the outlaws beyond a few whales.
The biggest barrier for people with knowledge, understanding, expertise, and the willingness to work hard was certainly time. But there were a lot of people with plenty of time that never got anything done.
In the beforetimes there were a lot of would-be founders running around looking for people who actually knew things and could do things (that is, technical cofounders). Will some of those people use Claude Code to make successful products on their own? A few, I'm sure. But I expect a lot of them will stay ignorant fools who have prompted their way to a pile of garbage.
I can be confident of that because there were plenty of founders with FFF money who could suddenly hire "capable coworkers" that produced garbage. "AI" is certainly removing barriers. But as I deal with a big increase in polished but idiotic email and PRs, I have to think that barriers were helpful both to the world at large (by keeping fools at bay) and to the promising but incompetent (by giving them a chance to build character and wisdom).
Exactly. It's a pretty small number of people who are this terrible. Thinking of it in evolutionary terms creates a sense of fatalism. If you look globally since the invention of agriculture, it's very clear that a) humans are extremely flexible, and b) culture matters hugely to how societies turn out.
Culture is something we inherit, but it's something we can change. If we want things to be less fucked up for the next generation, we can do that. As many before us have.
I was one of Twitter's first 500 users. Later, I worked at Twitter on anti-abuse. I was a big fan. But I quit using it after Musk's takeover because I didn't want to be supporting somebody who's awful in a half-dozen ways that have only become more obvious. [1] And X reflects that.
I'm not the OP, but anybody honestly wanting to know why people think good humans should not use Twitter does not have far to look.
Elon Musk is racist to the type of people who would require me to sign a statement supporting their systematically racist hiring quota if I want to do some physics research.
Which is kind of ironic. I remember realizing that they called it nitter for specifically horrible reasons after finding the online git web panel with the source code which was called "gitler" (hitler in russian for anyone who speaks it). Can't find it now but 4 or 5 years ago it's hard to forget. It even had some kind of nazi anime theme.
4-5 years ago is also about when Kanye West started to go insane, posted the raelian swastika/star of david hybrid on twitter and elon said something like "this is not love" and banned him, which to me explains the motivations for nitter coming up in the first place
Great dogwhistle dodging there but man that shit is stupid as fuck and if you're here to wash over facts all I can say is get stuffed. Elon is actively pandering to nazis in Germany, the whole tactic of normalizing hate is gross
“Everyone always wants to go back in time so they can kill Hitler. But I’d be afraid if they sent me back in time I’d get just caught under the spell of his beautiful fucking eyes. Knowing me I might even join the party!” -Norm
Do you measure anything about complexity or brevity? I'm currently working on importing some LLM code and it's 5-10x bigger than it should be for the actual needs.
One of my open questions is how much that increases over time. It could be that is a constant. But it also could be that, say, coding agents will infer false needs from the excess code/docs and elaborate further.
I wouldn't say no impact, but a trailing impact. They understood the cultural changes demanding new ways for people to status signal and maintain connections with friends & family.
That's what I mean about reversing cause and effect. There are larger causes (see my other comment below) that Facebook was innovative to take advantage of.
fair enough, but among the movement between around 1970-2020 -- what were the top 3 factors in degradation of communities? would facebook be in the top 3?
I'm all for privacy for things that are truly private. But wanting to secretly consume public resources and remain unaccountable for harm to others is what I think is truly absurd. Although it's an increasingly popular one recently.