Covzire

Really? How do you audit or control for who shows up to vote? Do you check some kind of government ID or can anyone simply vote by claiming they are who they say they are?

Because California has systematically made it impossible to audit elections there.

You have to be disinformed to think elections there are secure, you can't possibly know they are.

The article buried the lede. DEI was the bridge too far that lit a massive tinderbox among the electorate who wanted the vast majority of what happened with DOGE, to happen. DEI was the appetizer, and once the teeth starting biting it found a lot more than anticipated (USAID). The lesson is that real scientists should have stood up en masse to the political commandeering of their institutions by fringe activists peddling pseudoscience and this would have been avoided.

My actual view is that A) I don't know what's causing it, but B) neither does anyone else, yet certain hypothesis are going to be [flagged] no matter what, because they trip over certain biases inherit in our political climate.

This just isn't going to be a scientifically important forum anymore where competing ideas can be thoughtfully debated if this keeps happening, that's all my original view was expressing. I'm not even defending any particular post here, this is a more general trend, if the site were to stop brigading and instantly [flagging] wrong-think I strongly believe we'd see a resurgence of thoughtful debate even among hot-button issues, like it used to be back during the Snowden-era for instance.

PS I don't envy your task of moderating a site like this, but those are my 2c...

For sure, there's a line in Ecclesiastes : "he who breaks through a wall may be bitten by a snake". We have no idea what snakes await us beyond the next few years, but like nuclear power, the internet, and even social media (which IMO is toxic to large swathes of the population today) we'll eventually arrive at a place where we can harness the blessings while controlling the risks. The first nation to align their laws to a sane governance model will reap the most rewards.

I have a completely different expectation, based on what has happened with every major discovery or invention from electricity to refridgeration to transistors: Everyone has gotten wealthier relative to those who came before. The average "peasant" in every nation without a corrupt or totalitarian parasitic government live in more opulence and have a higher quality of life than every king of the past.

That doesn't always translate to happiness but I fully expect AI will reduce costs for all kinds of things, and those things that are now either rare or non-existent will become common. Today not everyone has a robot vacuum, I think in 20 years or so everyone who wants one will have a robot vacuum, and those who can afford the luxury of a robot vac today will be able to afford real robots who can do much more complex things. I'm quite excited about the next few decades, as long as we can keep despots from monopolizing the technology.

It doesn't add up at all, the cost of oil is just one metric and so far the prices are still lower than the last administration's self-inflicted high oil prices that we had just a few short years ago. Obviously the price of oil isn't the whole story.

Also Iran had been supplying Russia with a lot of parts for drones. Now they can't, making Ukraine's victory more likely than before.

I would be happy if congress passed a law saying a social media has no liability for anything their users post as long as the algorithm is completely open source. If we had social media like that, they'd even have APIs that let users design their own algorithm and we'd see a golden age of social media emerge from it. Twitter seems to moving in this direction but they enjoy no legal protections from being open at the moment. Blusky is already this way I believe, but without a neutral and trusted centralized control it's a bit different of an animal.

IANAL but it seems to have major implications beyond music piracy, like into the realm of ISPs and free speech in general, it seems the court (rightly) sees ISPs as a common carrier (like water pipes) and we may see more opinions of the kind that reach into the space of monopolies or duopolies in social media next.

Agreed, but the details released so far are pretty sparse on what exactly was being asked. If they're resisting general AI to help missiles find their target better, then I think it's pretty foolish of Anthropic to resist because that's happening come hell or high water. If it's about resisting mass surveileance without a warrant of American citizens, then I'd cheer Anthropic on for pulling out, but we just don't know apparently.

But.. we already have automatic weapons targeting systems and the PATRIOT act, which enjoys bi-partisan support already providing basically limitless domestic surveillance.

Does anyone know (more precisely) what the military wanted to use Claude for and what Anthropic was resisting?

By March 2020, the early John's Hopkins data showed a clear trend of those demographics who were actually vulnerable of serious harm, namely the elderly and those with already compromised immune systems. We knew even back then, that children and healthy adults were NOT at risk from COVID-19, even the early strains which were much more virulent than the later ones. It was censored, over and over, by Twitter, Facebook and even HN.

The amount of regret that exists doesn't fit either, don't forget Biden's warning that those who don't take it will die, the exact opposite of all the fear mongering happened and it's despicable people keep telling all the same lies.

Besides attempting to get him murdered by a crazy person seeing a chance to be famous, what possible reason does someone have to constantly broadcast the location of his transportation? What difference does knowing where it or he is make in the daily lives of anyone? What long term planning does the information give to people?

Science isn't always "science". If it's not clear by now it never will be that there is a massive amount of fraud in the "scientific" community as a whole.

Saw this in my car this morning myself. I only noticed it as I was getting out and right before turning it off.

At the end of the day, these attacks on privacy are always in reality for keeping incompetent politicians and bureaucrat's safe from meritocracy.

Built into the onslaught of demands of backdoors are two key ideas: A) That the backdoors will only be exploitable by the authorities and that B) they're even necessary to carry out their work in stopping trafficing.

I think most people know by now the first idea is preposterous. The second idea is too. The EU should focus on better police tools and tactics that detect and track the actual movement of goods.

That doesn't really clarify anything, but if I read between the lines, they're saying "we don't share information if we determine it will help (Trump) politically"

On one hand, this is the modus operandi of every political institutional from the CIA, to the CCP to city states to small towns in California, everyone acts in their own self-interest all the time. They're claiming nebulous "human rights" violations but don't state what they are. Could they mean blowing up boats suspected to be carrying drugs or precursors? I'd like to see Trump stop that myself, it's a pretty dangerous game he's playing.

On the other hand, I would expect the CIA/NSA have much greater potential value for the Dutch intel agencies than the reverse, so them prodding an administration after he was nearly assassinated twuce and many of his closest political officers and supporters were arrested and subjected to lawfare over the last 4 years doesn't seem like a particularly wise course of action. It's true this iteration of Trump is a lot more in tune with the way DC works so I wonder how wise the statement even is, they can accomplish what they're doing without announcing it, except now they announced what they're really up to and should probably expect some kind of retaliation.

That's a paywall, and I don't speak Dutch, what precisely are the human rights violations they're accusing the US of?

And these kinds of accusations go both ways, free-speech is under constant attack in the EU, the ruling class doesn't want citizens informed or even able to inform one another of critical political processes and actions without their thumbs in everyone's mouth, that much is clear.

Seriously though, the article doesn't say why they're more "critical" but say that intel sharing remains "excellent". That's a lot of words without saying anything, these kinds of articles are fantastic for one thing and one thing only: reinforcing pre-existing beliefs.

I call it the "unaccounted-for activist problem". Certain people will, without fail, like clockwork, if given the chance, ban or "silence" a LOT of other people from anywhere and everywhere that they can whether a bus, a playground, a public or private space, or a social media site. You have to account for these kinds of people, and you have to see through their bullshit of "speech is violence", no violence is violence and speech is speech and any platform that confuses the two will either fail or enslave everyone to many other lies.

That's awesome, now if it would integrate with Plex somehow...

That's true, although that also took an act of congress so it was very much a bi-partisan effort, something we're sorely lacking today.

What's certainly not going away is that Government waste and bloat is a home-run bipartisan issue where the size of the government has vastly and consistently outgrown the private sector in both times of feast and famine.

Everyone left and right instinctively knows this is, that it's a problem that they're both taxed directly for and (I hope) many people know they're also indirectly paying for it through inflation caused by government borrowing beyond their actual tax income.

DOGE may not be the right answer, but it's the first actual reduction in spending in my lifetime.

This is a tangent, but one untapped source of energy savings that seems to be invisible to climate activists is Microsoft Windows' constant drain on resources relative to Linux and MacOS. It's shocking how energy inefficient Windows is even when it's doing absolutely nothing noticable for a user.

This field is ripe for security consulting firms, but they seem completely uninterested. Weird.

Yes, its analysis is completely vapid and one dimentional.

"When I get what I want, there is rule of law, when I don't, there isn't" is not a valid way to parse whether actual 'rule of law' exists.

Prior to ACA all my colleagues in my peer group had employer provided health insurance that cost us very little, and it paid for virtually all medical bills except prescriptions. A HDHP was an option, but it only saved maybe a hundred or two a month, if that.

Today for most employees a HDHP is the ONLY option, and the cost is much higher than the old standard health plans were.