I mean, I think we all recognize that these are gambling sites trying to skirt gambling regulations, so all of their arguments are going to seem ridiculous. “We’re a prediction market, and individuals with specialized knowledge improve our accuracy.” “We allow people to hedge against adverse events, like Elon Musk tweeting over 300 times this week.” “These are financial contracts, not wagers.”
The interviews I’ve seen with “prediction market” CEOs, they’re openly begging for people to trade on confidential, privileged, or classified information, because that’s the source of their markets’ supposed predictive power.
Don’t even get me started on the 1990s. Every new processor generation actually felt faster. Web pages had blinking banners because the creator thought it looked cool, not to advertise a personal information vacuum. There was no better introduction to the public’s absolutely awful sense of style. But I went from talking to international friends for $0.50/minute to free, and it was amazing.
Those companies have extremely well developed propaganda machines. They have to sell their technology and products as benefits to governments (i.e. society) and solutions to chaos (i.e. crime and terrorism), and they have extremely well refined language to describe themselves in positive term. If you don’t look past the company line, it’s easy to believe that the skeptics and warnings are all just FUD from haters, especially when the propaganda pays your mortgage.
Then Palantir goes and publishes an actual fascist manifesto…
To me, that’s the ‘fancy search engine’ mode of AI where it works well and basically focuses the human effort. A needle-in-haystack problem. It might still be missing things, but they’re things you’ve already missed yourself, so no loss.
It’s different from asking Claude, for example, to create a new guest VLAN with limited internet access and access to only a specific service on the private network. For that, you have to 1) trust Claude because you lack the expertise to review, 2) spend time learning the config system well enough to review, or 3) already know the system well enough to check it. 1) just sounds bad. 2) sounds like Claude isn’t saving much time, but maybe helps focus the human where to study, and 3) seems like the human might have been able to just do the job in similar or less time than writing the prompt + reviewing the result.
I feel like the big mistake they continue to propagate is failing to distinguish among the uses of AI.
A lot of hype seems to be the generative uses, where AI creates code, images, text, or whatever, or the agentic uses where it supposedly automates some process. Safe uses in that way should involve human review and approval, and if the human spends as much time reviewing as they would creating it in the first place, then there’s a productivity loss.
All the positive cases I’ve heard of use AI like a fancy search engine - look for specific issues in a large code base, look for internal consistency in large document or document sets. That form lets the human shift from reading hundreds or thousands of pages to reading whatever snippets the AI returns. Even if that’s a lot of false positives, it’s still a big savings over full review. And as long as the AI’s false-negative rate is better than the human, it’s a net improvement in review.
And, of course, there’s the possibility that AI facilitated review allows companies to do review of documents that they would otherwise have ignored as intractable, which would also show up as reduced productivity.
Not familiar with opnSense, but on your PC, you can check the address it assigns - if it’s /128, it’s a single address.
My ISP does not assign a prefix for delegation unless you specifically ask for it. I had to add “request_prefix 1” to my dhclient.conf file to get a /64 I assume opnSense has a friendly setting somewhere for that. For me, the key phrase was ‘prefix delegation.’ After I got that, I could search around and get my solution.
Pretty sure that reflects its stage in the legislative process, not support/opposition. i.e.: out of 100 bills that get introduced, only 1 becomes law.
He believes he is the smartest person in any room - great genes, uncle at MIT. He thinks we are more stupid than he is.
I’m trying to imagine Mohammad bin Salman or Kim Ju Ae going on a “re-elect President Trump” tour of the US. I can’t imagine it would be received well by either party. Can’t imagine why JD thinks this is a good idea. Maybe I’m just not that good at imagining.
From a non-lawyer perspective, it is not yet clear how such regulations apply to a non-commercial, volunteer-driven project like Debian, which does not sell software and provides it in a highly decentralized way. It seems plausible that obligations, if any, may primarily affect redistributors or commercial entities building products on top of Debian. In such cases, Debian would as usual be open to contributions that help downstreams meet their requirements, while keeping such features optional and respecting the needs of users in other jurisdictions. However, this is an area where proper legal analysis is still required.
I found this part very reassuring. Being neither a lawyer nor having read any of the legislation (of which I am not a subject, anyway), the “it’s not our job” approach seems very reasonable. Facilitating downstream vendors who do want/have to comply seems like an exceptional effort to show good faith to local legal processes, while remaining, fundamentally, just people freely sharing knowledge.
I hope their lawyers can make that work.
Because US businesses will only compete and innovate if you force them. Leave them safe behind ramparts of protective trade policies, and they’ll keep coasting on 1990s technology, as the country as a whole slowly becomes a backwater.
Logging power use by my server was one of the motivators to add homeassistant. That also showed me that specific containers use a (relative) ton of background power. Immich and authentik each raised power consumption by 2-3 watts, so I leave them down unless I have specific need.
fud: Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt. A tactic for denigrating a thing, usually by implication of hypothetical or exaggerated harms, often in vague language that is either tautological or not falsifiable.
I remember cataloging and transferring a bunch of a laboratory’s “Bernoulli” cartridges to Zip because they worried that they wouldn’t be able to replace the Bernoulli drive if/when it failed. Then to CD, because it was incomprehensible that optical drives would go the way of the floppy. Probably a decade of data, and I think it fit on like 20 CDROMs.
For a while, I thought it was ok to just keep everything on multiple hard drives, but now it would take a special effort to get data off those IDE HDDs. And SSDs decay if not powered. It’s hard to keep electronic data for 100 years.
Making the government small enough to fit into every aspect of your life. No crevice too small.
If the birthdate field is just a random number, then I don’t see why anyone cares - it would have less personally identifying information than the MAC address. I thought the whole reason people are up in arms about this is the proposal/hypothetical where the OS is required to validate that field against government ID databases, thus giving a third party - the OS vendor or whatever contractor performs the validation - a link to real world identity of any computer user.
So, I can see where commercial OSes, like Windows and MacOS, but maybe including Chrome, Red Hat, and similar, would welcome the requirement to collect user ages. Another piece of user data for telemetry, ad serving, etc, with the cover of ‘government made me do it.’
Linux is always going to have weirdos, ready to spin up their own distribution for their own reasons. Like, I remember when the majors all started switching from init to systemd. There’s still a bunch of distros, even some good–sized ones, that avoid systemd. If age verification works its way from facilitating tools to distro mandates, I guarantee that there will be distributions created in jurisdictions without age mandates that exclude any tools that require age validation or with systems to spoof age validation. It’s simply too easy to change linux to avoid this.
Shelly makes miniature switches and power monitors that are small enough to fit inside a 1-gang electrical box beside a manual switch or outlet. It’s tight, but it’s a fair way to convert existing hardware. Zigbee/bluetooth/wifi https://us.shelly.com/products/shelly-1-mini-gen4
For example, in the question about homosexuality, one can think that being homosexual is a choice, which is morally wrong; a choice which is not wrong; or an innate thing and not a moral issue. Few people would would consider being black or left-handed a moral issue, but society is clearly undecided where homosexuality fits.
It’s kind of shocking to me how many people do not consider beating their children to be a moral question, and suggests to me that a lot of respondents don’t actually understand what morality is.