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Comment Perhaps of interest (Score 4, Interesting) 42

The SF Democratic machine is all in on Flock. That might have something to do with the Flock being in the SF Democratic Party.

Mar raised another concern: Two of the committee's current members -- Lily Ho and Trevor Chandler -- work for Flock. Last month, the San Francisco Standard reported that a prior version of Mar's resolution was removed from the party's agenda by a subcommittee chaired by Ho. Neither Ho nor Chandler offered to abstain from voting on Wednesday. The committee does not have rules related to conflicts of interest for issues like this one, Tung told Mar. They then proceeded to count both Ho and Chandler's votes.

Comment Re:Correct. And oh, no. (Score 1) 51

We now live in a fully connected world where most users are connected through web browsers and are the intended victims.

This particular story is an exception to that. Remote software, accessed through a web browser, normally does not have read/write access to your local filesystem. But people are granting local filesystem access to proprietary AI services.

I think that granting such access is .. wow. I wouldn't do it, though I can see how if you use a specialized account for it, and if you're confident that your OS has no local user priv escalation bugs, it might be ok. In your sandbox you trust.

But GP's comment is about whose decision that is. If you use Linux, then it's your decision. If you use iOS, then it's Apple's decision. And MacOS is becoming less Linuxy and more iOSy every year. I think it makes plenty of sense for stories like this to result in people dumping MacOS for Linux. (But daaamn, their values surprise me. You wanna make your computer less secure instead of more? Oh well, like Rumsfeld said, freedom is untidy!)

Comment Re:Elections are cheap (Score 1) 37

No, if the state were renamed, it would be to Old America. NM might not be the true original, but if you look at it through the eyes of European colonization and continuous governance, then New Mexico has the best claim of the fifty. (Though if you take a less racist view, then I guess Alaska had the real OGs.)

Comment Re:If they are thermally efficient enough (Score 1) 115

Stupid and malicious are different.

The offered narrative is "let us build the data center AI control grid now because it's only temporary until we can move it to space".

You and I both know that's not thermodynamically possible with known science.

So do the people saying it.

We have a real problem with Positive Projection where we are decent folks so we project that on people who are not. That is an error even though most people are decent folks. The parasites are not.

I only recent learned that Hanlon's Razor comes from a humor book about Murphy's Law from the early 80's. It's not some ancient axiom of wisdom - it is used by the Cluster B disordered to mask their nefarious deeds.

If you talk about this with most people these days you'll get the Positive Projection script executed like an autorun.

Everybody should turn off autorun whenever possible. Major risk.

Comment Excessive fine under 8A? (Score 3, Insightful) 37

Randi McGinn, a lawyer for New Mexico, said applying the full $5,000 penalty to the number of violations would create too large of a penalty under the US Constitution's protections on due process.

I ass/u/me this refers to the Eighth Amendment, but I don't remember seeing any monetary constants encoded within that text.

Google's telling me Meta is worth about $1.8 trillion so how would a mere $40B be "excessive?" It's only about 2% of their worth! Civil penalties in excess of 2% of someone's worth are routinely accepted as constitutional, aren't they? If this case were about me driving drunk and killing a whole family, I bet no one would flinch at the 8A implications of taking 2% (!?!) of my assets, and everyone would laugh at my lawyer if he brought up 8A for such an insignificant fine.

I understand why we have 8A, and everyone deserves mercy, but I don't see why Meta deserves exceptional mercy as a singular special case that we would be horrified to see applied anywhere else. Bringing up 8A for such a tiny fine would be giving Meta a very unique carve-out that we normally would not apply.

It may be that $5k is too much to charge criminals per act, in that each crime didn't really cause that much loss, but bringing up due process concerns seems like bullshit when the fine is already so small. NM and Meta had been trying to negotiate the cost of illegal business for years before negotiations failed and it went to trial. Meta decided to let a jury decide, and the jury's come up with a fairly tiny fraction of their assets.

If Meta thinks the price of illegal business is still too high, then they can lower the number of willful violations they commit per year, to optimize the advantage they gain from illegal actions at an affordable rate.

Geez, Zuck, just do less of it. If $40B seems like a lot, then maybe try only $10B worth of crime next time. What's the big deal? Live and learn. After this little fine you still have 98% of the company left to go on and incur the next wave of liabilities.

Comment Re:We're probably going to find more (Score 0) 34

> Gardasil

It's sold as an "HPV vaccine" but it only targets about 4% of HPV viruses, specifically the ones most likely to cause cervical cancer in women in their 40's. It's described in the Merck literature.

Not even the HPV most likely to cause throat cancer in men (usually acquired from lady parts).

If cancer treatment advances at the current rate (AI discovery docs estimate 9 years for the supermajority) it's possible that the Gardasil fatalities will have killed more teens than prevented deaths of women.

It's like a Drake Equation for cancer - the coefficients will determine the narrative either positive or negative. This is where free choice is ethically mandated.

Unfortunately there is considerable religious fervor about such things so very few people wants to scientifically discuss nuances.

Comment Correct. And oh, no. (Score 4, Interesting) 51

This looks like the final cell-phonification of the Mac. I'm bummed.

But they're right - if you assume that a significant fraction of Mac users are going to install some sort of third-party interface with an LLM, it is either significantly extend and harden the security perimeter deeper into the OS or your customers will routinely have everything exfiled as a matter of course, and it would just be cheaper to make iCloud into an anonymous FTP site.

And given Zuckerbook's demonstrated willingness to brazenly, actively subvert OSes, I'm willing to bet they're going to go Russian on their subjects, er, customers, anyway. ("You probe with bayonets: if you find mush, you push.")

It will probably be what finally pushes me to a Linux laptop, though. I'm old, I spend a lot of time at the shell. I like Macs because they're great unix workstations, still. But I don't see how you can accommodate both people like me and people who need to be protected not only from themselves, but from Zuckerbook and worse.

And they're a much bigger market than people like me. And "AI is the Footure."

Comment Re:Constructive responses anyone? (Score 2) 69

Why isn't EU sponsoring specific features and fixes it needs?

Or assign some of their own developers to submit pull requests.

Or hire *some Europeans* who are unemployed because their war is killing industry.

Let's hear from their project manager instead of faceless wankers and the people responsible for sales.

Comment Re: And people wonder (Score 1) 120

We'd all be trillionaires if we could see that far into the future with sufficient clarity.

Consider whether a Depopulationist psyop is more or less likely than that The End Times have finally come (unlike the previous thousand pronouncements).

People who are anxious and scared are easy to control. Have a look back at Al Gore's slide deck and see how much they really knew.

Though Competitive Advantage should not be discounted as a very real driver of evolutionary fitness.

Comment Re:No surprises (Score 1) 70

burn down institutions that actually work; they are too stupid to understand how they work.

Khrushchev would love that our government is full of people who disagree with the principle of Chesterton's Fence. It's appalling that "conservatives" have become so far to the left of "The Left."

Vote conservative: vote Democrat.

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