Have you ever worked for a US defense contractor?

For some of the roles at those companies, you need a SECRET (or higher) national security clearance.

So the "private company" thing is a bit of a false distinction because of how much classified/top-secret national security material is developed and held by "private" corporations in the US.

For example, the coatings and techniques for applying them to US stealth aircraft are secrets developed and/or held by US private companies.

Employees at those companies who attempt to exfiltrate secrets to foreign governments are absolutely committing espionage against the United States, and should be considered for execution.

Frontier AI work is becoming a matter of national security. It is _possible_ that secrets exfiltrated from OpenAI could be implicated in foreign espionage, and the death penalty might be appropriate. I don't know the specifics of what was leaked or to whom or for what reasons. My strong suspicion is that secrets were leaked to a party acting on behalf of a foreign government.

I don't have a moral objection to moving the work in house, but I have practical doubts about the execution.

Governments deliver excellent results quickly only under narrow circumstances, and all of the examples I can think of are essentially some form of authoritarian rule.

For instance, In WW2 we had USA, Germany, and USSR, and they were nominally three entirely disjoint political systems, but all of them adopted nationalized command economies, and restricted personal freedoms and non-wartime activities of the citizenry. Each party claimed it was locked in an existential war of ideas and values against the other parties; but all three adopted functionally the same authoritarian wartime command economy (in principle)

Each had astonishing and rapid achievements despite very nominally different structures.

The American advantage in all this is that compared to its national peers, it is functionally the least odiously-authoritarian towards its citizenry. In both NSG and USSR, too much disobedience towards the state micro-managing your work was cause for execution.

The US model of significantly privatized R&D gives an interesting blended model: you have authoritarian corporate leaders (like Musk), who work people _hard_ and crank out results quickly - but if someone doesn't like working for Musk and quits, they are not committing a crime against the state. So America gets good results fast, but the people are oppressed somewhat less.

China is "nominally" communist but is really more National Socialist (with Han ethnic supremacy being the analogue to what Germany was doing); the key is they have a society run by authoritarian technocrats that has "communist" window dressing the pragmatic advantages of diverging from Communism when doing so would be beneficial. They are doing the "big results with blended authoritarianism" thing pretty well these days.

The speed of US sector private innovation is nothing to sneeze at, as much as we have stupid companies doing stupid things slowly and badly.

SpaceX has dramatically outperformed NASA at manned space flight for the last decade. I think most engineers want the Apollo-era NASA to come back.

It seems that without the ruthless focus of being in a war you might lose, govt seems to not be in any particular hurry and to have a lethal inability to focus on the right things and to shut off distractions.

Our form of government is slow by nature and by design, which is why we simply throw it away when there's something scary going on (WW2, Covid, etc). The Romans at least codified this into their system and national mythology for a while. We still fight for "freedom" while having price controls, conscription, and butter rationing...

BTW, i was corrected in a different thread.

I should have said espionage, Not treason.

No declared war (Yet).

Ooh. thank you, you are correct. I apologize.

The Rosenbergs were executed under the 1917 Espionage Act.

Legally, the Espionage Act is the correct play here.

You may recall that I support the US nationalizing OpenAI for national security purposes.

Industrial espionage in the US is frequently performed by foreign nationals on behalf of foreign governments. Even though the nominal targets of this espionage is "some company", this is nation vs nation espionage, and should be accorded as such.

If a Saudi national was stealing the secret of how Palmolive dish detergent softens hands and exfiltrating it back to the Saudis, nobody would care (except, presumably, whoever owns the Palmolive brand... ist aht P&G these days?).

It wouldn't be treason.

But when foreign nationals conduct industrial espionage at GE Jet engines division, or any fronteir AI lab, or in many hundreds of other places where the focus is national security... this is nation states fighting nation states. It is treason.

If you have any sort of private sector involvement in work that has national security impact (and America does), then yes, you definitionally have fascism - govt influence of private sector for national interests.

I award you full points for managing to accurately diagnose something as "fascism" in this instance.

Two questions:
1) So what?
2) And what's the preferred alternative?

Do not let him out. Most obvious flight risk in history.

The penalty for treason against the United States is execution, by the way.

No, it doesn't.

WP mentions, and links to this page (for example)

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2F...

Christians do not believe that we are God or can become God.

I've also generally had positive experiences with Mormons. And outwardly, there is much to admire about them.

Theologically, their view of Christ is what makes them non-Christian.

for example: this doctrine:
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2F...

or, that the LDS Church rejects Trinitarianism.

Theologically, they are not Christians, and I explained why. The claims I made about doctrinal differences can be investigated.

Their name is good marketing.

Surely you don't accept that the "Church of Scientology" is based on the scientific method?

You fell for the marketing.

Mormons may claim to be Christians - especially when doing evangelism.

But Christians who look into the doctrines of the Mormon faith usually conclude that Mormonism is not Christian, for the reasons I mention.

A better law might simply say:

"if you cannot be sure that the person trying to access your content is an adult, don't serve them the content"

The porn industry has done a pretty good job of pushing back against _any_ requests for them to not peddle porn at kids by whining that the only way to fix problems is technical impossibilities that break the internet for everyone else.

That's nonsense, of course. The actual appropriate mechanism is to have the following policies:

1) "the internet gets to be private and anonymous by default
2) "the owners/operators of porn websites are criminally liable if they show adult content to minors"

It's up to the latter to figure out how to do business under those rules.

OT, but

Utah is Mormon country, not Christian/Jesus land.

Mormons are profoundly _not_ Christian; they have a non-Christian view of Jesus.

Christianity requires trinitarian monotheism, with the fully man, fully God nature of Christ the defining feature, and that Christ is unique in this regard.

Mormonism doesn't posit Christ as a theologically unique being. Mormonism holds that Christ was a special individual on _Earth_, and _became_ a God of this planet -- but that he was not previously divine, and more importantly, that his divinity is not unique.

tl;dr - Mormonism posits that mortal men may ascend and become Gods of their own planets; Christ just happened to do that here on Earth.

I saw the video before anyone else on the internet told me what it was going to do. Total surprise.

I was totally amazed.

I am quite curious about the active downforce fan system because those have appeared in real race cars and real road cars - although not to the extent seen in the Tesla demo.

You always hear that an F1 car creates enough downforce (at speed) to drive upside down on a ceiling. Last night we saw a car actually drive up a wall and then drive upside down. Not theory - real car, real result.

Of course its completely ridiculous to have thrusters on the car. That's ok. It's ok to make ridiculous things. I was more shocked by the reveal last night than by the chopstick rocket catch. (I knew that was coming.. i had no idea what they were planning with the Roadster)

It's ok to do something for no other reason than "it would be cool".

I am disappointed that so many people here are shitting on it because its Elon. When someone - anyone - demos a car with fucking thrusters that jumps/flies/whatever, it is cool, and you're allowed to like it.

You're allowed to be amazed by things. You're allowed to experience happiness in life.

This is nerd stuff. This is science and engineering turning "magic" into real things.

None of the awful things about Win11 are ram usage.

You know what else saves ram?
Letting us turn off all the unwanted shit you put in there.
I don't need ads in my start menu. I don't need web search results in my start menu. I don't need sharepoint in my start menu.
I do need the programs I have installed on my computer there.

More than 50% of the time the full-retail/enterprise w11 start menu fails to find a program that I know is actually installed. But it can show me irrelevant web search results...

The architecture and product decisions are wrong and cannot be fixed until they are changed. The problem is not lack of efficiency or implementation bugs.

The problem is that it is doing the wrong things for the wrong reasons.

reminder: you can dump MS/AWS/Google and adopt Nextcloud instead.

Nextcloud has been touting itself as a way to gain digital soverignty for a while now. Many facets of EU public sector have adopted Nextcloud for this reason.

It's not popular yet with US small businesses, but I haven't found a good reason for that. I've had one customer do a NC trial. They didn't really identify any issues with it, other than it was not what they were used to seeing (gmail, MS office).

I think it's a good fit _now_ for a small org that needs basic digital-office workloads, and has become motivated by some reason (financial, ideological) to untie themselves from massive corporate cloudware offerings.

There were depts within German government trying to dump Microsoft 25 years ago. Since then, FOSS has continued to improve and close feature/experience gaps. Whereas American tech platforms have continued to get shittier and abuse the public trust.

I think the tipping point has been reached, software capability wise.