jonathanstrange

He could end this illegal war of aggression any day, just like Putin can end his war against Ukraine any day. There is nothing to discuss here.

Gemini Pro has become so bad for my purposes -- copy & paste Go programming and code analysis with the web GUI -- that I'll take any model with equivalent capabilities at the same price or lower. I don't care where it comes from, I'm not dealing with state secrets and, frankly speaking, US corporations have an abysmal track record regarding safety and surveillance.

Question about this from a EU citizen who doesn't know the details of how the EU works (who does?): Are there legal means to challenge this vote based on the procedure that was taking place?

You need a centralized developer program but only for the apps for the secure enclave. The whole point is that they would require special privileges.

The people who are against this do not trust any of them for good reasons, so that ship has sailed long ago, too.

The problem is easy to solve by making 99% of all apps normal apps that don't get any special privileges and don't require any developer certification, and having a certified developer program with heavily locked down run mode for the 1% of high security apps like banking and payment apps. It's not hard to attest unambiguously to the user in some way whether they are running one of these rare secure apps or a normal one, a restricted API suffices but you could also just add an LED for it.

You can't possibly convince me that Google couldn't develop something like that if they wanted to.

Wars are sometimes caused by small acts of violence (e.g. at the border) that are mutually retributed, becoming larger and larger, until the hostilities turn into an all out war. This is sometimes called "escalation of violence." If wars are sometimes caused in that way, then there must be some wars for which a slippery slope argument concerning the escalation of violence is not fallacious.

What Anthropic is doing is illegal in many jurisdictions. I don't know about the legal situation for the Chinese domains they mark, but steganographic data extraction without user consent would definitely be illegal in the EU, for example.

That's not correct. Many slippery slope arguments are perfectly valid and sound, namely whenever there is plausible evidence for the existence of the respective slippery slope. It can for instance be based on historical precedents, or on probabilistic or convincing balance of consideration sub-arguments for the slippery slope premise.

Whether its a fallacy or not depends a lot on how warranted the slippery slope premise is (notwithstanding other, possible logical errors that might me made in setting up the argument, of course).

The world you describe is not plausible from a technical perspective. Any kid who wants to will be able to download a tool that will enable them to surf the net like an adult. It will be as common as our access to cracked C64 games during the 1980s. The only thing to limit this in any reasonable sense is to crack down hard on all operating systems and network software.

At the very least, you will need to make sure that no child can install Linux. Otherwise, why wouldn't they? Most kids aren't stupid and want to know what their braindead parents are doing on the internet.

I really believe it's dangerously naive to believe this is about the children. It's quite obvious why suddenly ominous entities are shilling for age verification, digital IDs, digital wallets, and so on (more is to come). Countries in the EU used to get valuable SIGINT from the US that prevented many serious crimes. They still get it but now they've realized that the US might not always remain aligned with them and panic because they have almost no access to modern operating systems except for buying 0-day exploits on shady black markets. They desperately need to get their foot in the door to get the right surveillance infrastructure going. At the same time, politicians are rightly worried about the influence of bots on elections.

These are the principal reason why governments are suddenly pushing for this. If this was about the children, they'd have done it 30 years earlier. Until very recently, this discussion didn't even exist. It's manufactured.

Yes, in an ideal world, it would all go down to parenting. Since we live in reality, some of that work is shifting to ensuring defaults are in place.

No, they aren't in place at all. It's the parents' job and vast majority of parents do it fine. Nobody wants the Nanny state you propagate.

Why do parental software / settings and filters not work? Aren't there even approaches based on whitelisting?

First of all, the sane chip card design will not take place. That's virtually guaranteed. As a closely related example, banks all over the world have moved away from this design to merely trust the (nonexistent) security of mobile phones. Why? Costs and convenience.

Second, if you hand over a chip card, you still need to lock down and tightly control every executable on every machine. How else would you guarantee that kids cannot access content the government deems unsuitable for them?

Third, I still haven't seen a coherent argument why parents shouldn't be in charge of what content their children are allowed to consume. I'm not at all against governments providing free parental control software, for example, or voluntary industry standards similar to the movie ratings.

Finally, "protecting the children" is obviously a pretense. The sole purpose of the push for this is for governments to get the foot in the door of operating systems they currently can't control well. It's the starting point for a surveillance infrastructure: age verification -> digital ID verification -> tracking who said what and handing the data over to intelligence and law enforcement.

Kids will simply find a way to circumvent it without any extra steps. To make age verification useful for protecting kids, you'd need to lock down every software on every operating system and put it under tight government control. We're talking about things like every programming language with a networking library, wget, curl, every web browser that was ever developed, etc.

All kinds of tools and software would need to be locked down or criminalized. Otherwise, some smart kid is guaranteed to get around the restriction and give that method to others, and if it's at school on a USB stick.

I was replying specifically to someone who insinuated that all social media (or, at least, all supposedly addictive social media) should be banned for everyone, including adults. To me, it's a matter of personal freedom that they shouldn't be banned for adults.

[citation needed]

No, but I'm not against selling alcohol and fast sports cars to adults, for example. I'm not very fond of a nanny state that prohibits almost everything to adults "for their sake" and because the government knows so much better.

How about taking some personal responsibility for your life?

This shouldn't even be a consideration concerning adults.

Very simple, just don't use it and switch to another model (e.g. a Chinese one).

I'm creating cross-platform GUI applications in Go. Besides that, there are numerous reasons why an extension/scripting language might need various security and sandboxing features on a server, too.

Thank you so much! For some reason, I didn't even know about Distrobox!

Very cool. As a Linux Mint user, I'm starting to get interested in SteamOS. So maybe someone with experience can answer my question:

How good is SteamOS as a general distro for a desktop machine? What are the Pros and Cons?

From what I can gather from the site it has no security or sandboxing features. Or am I missing something?

I'm asking because I'm thinking about R7RS Wile scheme[1] as an embedded language, which has some basic security features. But it's heavily vibe-coded and that puts me off a bit, so I'm looking for other Lisp or Scheme dialects in Go.

[1] https://github.com/aalpar/wile

I'm tired of this story and the corresponding fake discussions because it's completely obvious that Anthropic was singled out because they didn't play along with the current US administration and this whole charade is just part of an extortion scheme.

Because they siphon off data to US intelligence, and if you claim they don't, you couldn't possibly know because the CLOUD Act can mandate them to do so without telling you or allowing you to admit it. Of course, if you're in the US this doesn't matter but for the rest of the world it does.

IMHO, models by US companies are the biggest security risk so I'm fine with using models on this "blacklist."

A dying country that doesn't want small business to continue, that's not something I had in my 2026 bingo card collection. Be that as it may, I would just close down the business and incorporate elsewhere. Let them sort out their population crisis on their own, I'm sure children will magically pop out of nowhere.

US companies cannot comply with the GDPR because of the CLOUD Act. The two frameworks are fundamentally in conflict with each other and it seems to me that everybody in the EU knows about it, yet this is somehow swept under the carpet and ignored even by government authorities. I've always wondered why this is so and how these kind of dependencies could be allowed in the first place. It's even worse for AI use than it is for productivity suits and email.

The point is that without copyright you can' do it professionally. Someone will just sell whatever you created for you and you will not get a cent from it.

It's worth pointing out that some people under some circumstances need to use VPNs. For example, timestamp.apple.com stalls when I call it from my machine, so I cannot sign any executables for macOS. When I use a VPN that changes my IP number, signing and notarizing works perfectly fine. My CI chain would literally not work without a VPN.