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How would this have worked in practice though? How could things like trade standards been harmonised or a common currency adopted without the trade union being able to do legislation?
And once you get there, you're no longer a trade union. Or a trading block, which is probably the better word since a trade union already means something else.
It absolutely works with hardware. And it's not that difficult to add channels for extra software like a tainted Linux kernel.
And in return one gets a saner programming language than the Nix language.
The slippery slope of being held liable for an AI overview leading to neo-Hitler is certainly a take, and a ridiculous one at that.
It's one thing for an LLM to get things wrong. This case is not that though. And if big tech can't make sure that their models don't libel companies and individuals then good riddance. Whatever diminutive economic advantage one can get from "competitive LLMs" probably isn't worth it anyway, especially with all of the other disadvantages of these "competitive LLMs" compounding on our societies and the planet, as the resource usage of the data centres necessary to run and train them exacerbate the ongoing climate crisis.
And the solution to this is to go through the German political system. The courts can't just decide to not follow the law just because it's a bit silly, and for as long as the laws are the way they are, this unfortunate loophole for removing negative reviews will continue to exist. But clearly the law can have both positive and negative consequences.
There is a disclaimer, yes, but you have to admit that it's pretty shit, innit? I mean for one, it's about the size of a human hair, and at least when I tried it, the disclaimer came up only when I clicked the "Show More" button. It might admittedly show up earlier if the response is shorter, admittedly I don't know. Also personally I'm a bit uneasy with the idea that just with a simple disclaimer they could avoid any and all liability. Not your argument, I know, but still.
As for not wanting to force companies to release only "safe-for-children products", I do actually agree. However I consider it to be a matter of degree, and in this case for example, I think that if nothing else, Google should say the very least make the disclaimer a bit more prominent and maybe tweak the model so that it's not quite as confident in its claims in the AI Overview.
If our standard for laws would be that "well no reasonable person would do this/believe this" then nothing would be illegal, there'd be no need to label any product as potentiality harmful, etc.
Do you really want to go there? That everything in the world would have a literal "caveat emptor" attached to it?
Georgism? In the big 2026? Now that's a blast from the past!
Now, land value taxes obviously have their place in the gamut of different taxes to levy, so I don't wish to badmouth them too much. But as a consumption tax, VAT also does have its place. Sure, they are absolutely regressive, but this also helps them to act more like Pigovian taxes, since they can be used to make certain categories of goods and services more expensive. And so if one can afford to pay the value of the negative externalities, why not. And hopefully it can then steer people towards better choices.
Ideally the workers. But failing that, legislation would probably be a good thing to at least try to reduce e-waste from closed, discarded devices. Like, if a device line is at its end of line from the company, then they might as well make it open for the community. They're not supporting it anymore, after all, but someone might want to.
Would such legislation be perfect for dealing with these kinds of things? Of course not, but it would be better.
Yes, it matters.
Does it actually matter? And if so, why?
You can try to distract and do as much mental gymnastics as you want but everyone rational can clearly see that one thing is doing politics for software (free drivers, open source, no DRM, …) and the other is about virtue signaling about subjects that are completely unrelated.
Okay, but you would still have to answer a really important question. Why does it matter?
Let's say that it's virtue signalling, for the sake of the argument (although people tend to not know what virtue signalling actually is, and just claim any public acknowledgement of one's values as such, which is incorrect).
So, why does one being virtue signalling and the other not being such actually matter? Does it actually change the messaging in any meaningful way? Does it make it less legitimate or whatever?
Btw, feel free to label me however you want (others did already), which shows that they have no arguments and resort to pidgeonholeing and name calling.
I wasn't going to, but thank you for the invitation!
This implies that the difference actually matters. In both cases there is a political goal behind the actions. Yes, printer driver software itself is very different from sexual and gender orientation, but wanting for the printer drivers to be free is a political statement and principle, and so is the uplift of LGBTQ+ people and celebrations of PRIDE month. Both are political despite being about distinct subject matters.
You can disagree with the politics in question, but to say that FLOSS has no room for politics is itself a political position, leading you to a paradox!
The Free Software community has always been political. Where have you been?
Introducing a non-binary mascot for KDE is no more or less political than for example Richard Stallman demanding that printer drivers should be free, back in the 1980s. And same way the use and preference of the term "open source" over "free software" -- or vice versa -- is also very political because it depends on if one wants to go with the described values or not necessarily want to stand behind them.
The Free software community involves people, and with people come shared values and politics. That's kinda what "community" implies. And if we really want to go into it, given the circumstances of the invention of things like computers, the Internet, etc. it'd be very erroneous to asset that software in general has ever been value-free or non-political. Computing artillery trajectories is political just the same way as promotion of LGBTQ+ people, even if people get more upset about the latter rather than the more kinetic kinds of politics implied by howitzers et al.
While I'm sure people here have seen these, might as well link the rest of them to set how this can be evolved while keeping it small.
- <http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/> - <https://evenbettermotherfucking.website/> - <https://www.thegreatestmotherfucking.website/> - <https://perfectmotherfuckingwebsite.com/>
And there are probably even more.
It seems that Yarvin didn't realise -- accidentally or more probably intentionally -- that the society in Soylent Green was not supposed to be taken as a model to emulate. It's not supposed to be a documentary! To even joke about it is telling.
As a tech industry we'll probably be complacent on whatever is coming up in the future, no matter if it's something like this or something far more insidious. But hey, some of our class got very wealthy and got to enjoy material prosperity so it's all good, right? People would chase ever higher wages and shiny trinkets and end up working for Evil Megacorps because "one needs to be able to afford to live comfortably".
Racism. They seem to be irritated about the existence of migrants and member countries not being allowed to tread on their human rights.
I'd say that the onus falls on the engineer insofar as they need to ask the questions of "why are we making the new better tool", "according to what criteria is it better", and "do we need the better tool". And at least for me, that onus falls on the engineer instead of falling on the user because it's the engineer who is creating the tool, not the user, and if the engineer chose differently, the tool wouldn't be out there to be used for evil.
Sometimes it might just be better to not do the thing, especially if it conflicts with one's morals. And well, the idea that "if I don't do this, someone else will" seems to not work out well in practice.
And pray tell, what does the American or the Chinese worker in this case get out of their higher productivity and competitiveness? Because it really seems that it's not quality of life, that's for certain.
More money and material comforts? Well perhaps, but then again, I do wonder just how many would willingly take that rather than for example a proper work-life balance or clean environment. And we'll probably have to rethink the relationship of our societies with material consumption etc. in the coming decades anyway due to the climate emergency, and so maybe it'd actually be better for the US or China to adopt our "less competitive" stance rather than for us to try to agonise on trying to get ourselves competitive with them.
No one has yet figured out just what one's material possessions will do for them after they're dead. At best you can pass them to your next of kin, but that doesn't need the kind of hyper competitive, hyper capitalistic mindset espoused by the US or China.
Maybe we need a cultural shift then, because if one needs to use a platform like X, nowadays owned and operated by fascists, then there's something deeply wrong with the tech world. It'd probably take a lot of effort to do so, but it'd be absolutely worth it.
Besides, even if that wasn't a consideration, only posting the announcement to X is just crazy. As others have said, you'd expect for GitHub to make the announcement on their official website. Any paying client would then just follow that for their announcements.
To be fair to us, the Euro is also a world reserve currency, alongside of course the US Dollar, the British Pound, the Japanese Yen, and the Chinese Renminbi. And the Euro is in fact the second largest in terms of external reserves, being only beat by the USD.
Of course, the USD has been for a while the largest one of these, but as you say, they're really trying to get away from that. And a currency falling in relevance isn't new, one can always ask the Pound about that.
Yes, actually!
Well, it does require you to install an extension[0], but it can be done.
While this is very pithy, we need to acknowledge and remember that there's a gulf of difference between normal terminal interfaces and command line interfaces, and whatever the chatbots are doing.
Yes, both have a prompt where you type text to do things and get text back, but the type of text you write in one is very different than what you'd write in another. Prose versus commands and so on. Oh, and normal terminals don't waste electricity and water in amounts approaching small countries.
Well good thing is that they didn't. The only thing you need is to provide a USB-C port for charging. Nothing stops a manufacturer adding additional ports for charging, data sharing etc.
So Apple could give people the ability to use their oh-so-superior Lightning cable while also being able to use USB-C for charging. If nothing else, it means that there are no longer any "does anyone have an iPhone charger" discussions at parties because people can just charge all their phones with USB-C.
Well hatered for USB-C for charging connectors seems to be strong in this thread alongside the dislike for being able to have changeable batteries.
Hell, this thread even has a person whose argument against USB-C is that mandating it will mean that the EU will get conquered by Russia.
Not even that. > Consumers still need to buy replacement cables, because they break. > And the USB-C cable end connector is a fragile piece of shit designed by committee and forced upon everyone buy another committee, neither of which must’ve had a single mechanic engineer even once walk passed their bike shed.
Well, the USB committee did ask Apple for the superior connector, but for whatever reason they said no. So we're stuck with this.
OTOH, USB-C is not nearly as bad as your bizarre post would seem to imply. It could be better, but as we know from experience with things like micro-USB, it could be much, much worse.
Future historians will do a postmortem on the EU and discover the USB-C enforcement act as an inflection point that marked the downer trend to the EU’s eventual collapse, and the reclamation of its land and people to the great nation of Russia, where it always belonged. > Or some other equally as dreadful outcome befitting the UBS-C Bike Shed & Enforcement Committee formerly know as the European Union.
Russia can't even handle Ukraine, a country significantly smaller in population, economy, and land area than Russia. And you think that they could take on the EU‽ A block, mind you, which has more population and a significantly larger economy. Oh, also nukes.
And you think that the EU would fall in this case because of... USB-C? Please explain the mechanism which would lead to this situation.
Well I don't know about you, but I at least think that it's good that the "hive mind" questions people who don't hate neo-nazis. Because that tends to be a warning sign when it comes to many other nasty opinions one might hold.
And I'll just pre-empt any argument about how Elon is not a neo-nazi because that gesture he did on that stage wasn't a Hitler salute or whatever, I'd suggest any potential person wanting to argue that to save their breath. Or whatever other arguments one can possibly come up with to excuse some of the statements and actions of Elon.
As for an objective discussion about the tech he's involved with, he has objectively ruined any good reputation and potential goodwill people had for... what exactly?
It's fine if all you (impersonal) want to do is talk about how cool SpaceX's rockers and whatnot are, but one shouldn't be surprised if others get uneasy due to the entity behind said rockets or that they wish to discuss that.
To complete the Godwin quota, it's like trying to have an "objective discussion" about the V2 rocket while ignoring that those rockets were built by the quite literal Nazis for their war capacity. And that some of the scientists and engineers working on said project, built by slave labour, ended up in America and the USSR due to operations Paperclip and Osoaviakhim respectively.
Doesn't this idea presume that the hate that Elon gets isn't totally justified?
And pray tell, who comes up with common law? And who enforces the judgment of the court? And what gives the court the authority to judge on the matter of glass shards in your tomato paste?
Fun fact about the common law in fact is that it came into existence because the English government after the Norman conquest needed a unified theory of law for the king's courts that was distinct from manorial and canon laws. 1154 Henry 2 the Plantagenet ascended the throne and wanted a code of law that would apply everywhere in the realm as opposed to local laws, the aforementioned manorial laws, as well as being secular, unlike canon law.
So without the government, you wouldn't have this common law your legal theory relies on.
If you want a government of saints, you will be sorely disappointed. The four people who want to kill Bob and eat him for dinner will always exist, and the important part is to not let them actually decide on the dinner plan instead of just throwing your hand up in the air and giving up on planning dinners because some people are loonies and should not be given power.
Yeah, just like with Chat Control and such, it takes vigilance and informing people around you in order to deny these sorts of things from happening, but we can take some respite in it not happening. The USB-C regulation changed things for the better by forcing the most obstinate member of the mobile phone ecosystem to adopt the connector. The replaceable battery regulation will force manufacturers to make their devices more repairable, and that is a good thing.
Discounting that because of political mistakes that were only narrowly avoided seems frankly myopic. You can't just argue against all the good things the EU has done with "whatabout Chat Control"
This feels to me like a false dichotomy. The only alternative to the current way of doing things isn't a planned command economy, no matter what "libertarians" or tankies might argue.
One question about this doomsday scenario: "cui bono"? What does the EU gain from squashing free speech in your mind?
The Party doesn't care about the Proles, only the members of the Outer Party.
I think that it's rather funny that people like to appeal to 1984 as if the only point of Mr. Orwell was that surveillance is bad, missing the entire point about stuff like the control of the language or the idea that the only self-justification of the (Inner) Party is power for the sake of power (see also: The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism).
I'd even go as far as to say that if "telescreens are horrible" is the only thing that someone takes away from 1984, they've frankly missed the point.