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Comment Re:No one should be surprised (Score 1) 23

"They" is any group exercising unmonitored power. It's not just the Republicans. Democrats to it too. And it's not just political groups. Police is one common example, but that's because lots of people notice it's affecting them.

EVERY center of power needs to be transparent, or this problem will occur. Unfortunately, for some centers of power, transparency itself leads to other problems.

Comment Re:Directionally Right, Specifically Wrong. (Score 1) 150

Understanding cost in the external world requires having a good model of the external world. The current LLMs, IIUC, don't have such a model. They have models of interacting words. It's truly amazing that they can do as much with that as they can, but don't over-read it.

OTOH, other AIs *do* have a world model. Most of those aren't full LLMs though. But even those don't really have a good model of other non-electronic entities. Think of self-driving cars, or robots practicing dance routines. These have a world model, but don't really have lots of other info that LLMs typically have. And even those don't have good models of people or dogs, and how they feel when something happens to them. But for LLMs, the real world *is* their electronic sensations. Words are patterns associated with those sensations. But no "body in the world" is involved in the model.

Comment Re:Directionally Right, Specifically Wrong. (Score 4, Informative) 150

I've yet to see a report where the AI was malicious. Injurious, perhaps, but that's different.

In everything I've seen, the AI was acting to achieve the task it had been set. It wasn't very good at counting the costs to anyone, and was pretty much ignorant of any costs to anyone else. But it was willing to sacrifice it's own existence to accomplish the task it had been given. Malice is an incorrect reading.

Comment Re:But how do you know? - more data needed (Score 1) 88

So #1, I don't know...you could be right, but I am neither confident you're wrong or right. #2, even if it's not a deterrent, arrests are. If they drive a stolen car by a flock camera and it helps police find them and take them off the street for a few years, in a way, it has stopped them from stealing...at least until they get out, at bare minimum.

If they break into a car and the police look at the footage on the dashcam and see that they've kept their license plate out of view, but they are able to cross-correlate it with other cameras and figure out the plate number, then figure out where they drove that car, where it ended up parked, who got out, where they went, etc., then it can make arrests possible where it was not possible previously, making it *massively* more likely to be able to solve the crime.

The problem becomes when it turns into "show us all the plates that were near that spot within a few minutes of that time", and thus a fishing expedition.

Comment Re:Element Pro is not Open Source (Score 1) 66

What does "Teams" actually do? I've never used it, so it's always been a puzzle, as every article seems to just assume that I know. I gather it does something that facilitates, or is supposed to facilitate, different people on different computers working on the same project, and that's as far as I get. Perhaps there *is* no open-source equivalent.

Comment Re:Correct. And oh, no. (Score 1) 54

It's not. Full disk access is sticky. When you grant it, the app has it until you go into settings and revoke it.

You're interpreting it in the context of typing "sudo" on the command-line granting a one-time permission. And the original statement from Apple (after correcting the "every -> very" error in the summary) makes it clear that this is *not* what is being proposed, so if that was the original poster's intent, then it was incorrect.

The way I interpreted the original sentence — "They're going to make it like sudo where when you give permission to a program to write protected files once it has it forever after" — is that they're going to make it like the sudoers file, where you edit it to grant permission to a program to do something, and it permanently has the right to do that... which is exactly what happens when you grant full disk permission, just with a dialog box instead of editing a file.

That said, I'm not sure if that's how the original statement was intended to be interpreted. It was a bit confusing. :-)

Comment Re:Groundwork for censorship (Score 1) 110

Some would argue that censoring spam is bad due to free speech, once again, fuck your free speech as I don't want to associate with spammers. Security of body, should we put up with speech preaching violence?

Nope. And this is why I object to the phrase "censorship is bad". *Unreasonable* censorship is bad. But not all restraint on speech is bad.

Comment Re:Groundwork for censorship (Score 1) 110

Censorship is a problem when you are not free to express an idea.

The form of the idea can be limited without it being censorship: for example, you can't protest with a bullhorn in the middle of the night.

No, you're confusing the definition of censorship with what restraints on free speech are constitutional. You're defining the term based on legality in a specific jurisdiction. If you applied the same standard with a different jurisdiction — say what can legally be spoken in Iran — you would get a very different definition. This is why you cannot define censorship based on a specific legal standard. It must be defined in the abstract.

The general definition is that censorship is the suppression of expression by an authority. That expression could be a constitutionally protected idea, or it could be an advertisement for Taco Bell. It's still expression, and blocking it is still censorship.

Free speech doesn't mean everyone has to listen to you, it means the people who want to listen to you are able to. Youtube demonetizing a video is not censorship. Removing videos because they don't like the ideas in the videos is the worst kind of censorship, because they are trying to control you.

And again, you're using the U.S. definition of free speech to define censorship. These things are not synonymous. Nobody is talking about whether someone should have to listen to you. The fact that someone shut you up is still censorship. It may be *constitutionally allowable* censorship. It may even be *entirely* *reasonable* censorship. But it is still censorship.

Not all censorship is bad. Restraints on speech based on time, place, and manner restrictions can be entirely reasonable. They are still, at least in a purely abstract way, a form of censorship. Restraints on speech where your speech costs someone else money can also be entirely reasonable (e.g. spam, robodialers, etc.). But those decisions still represent censorship in the abstract. We simply choose to say that those types of restraints on speech are reasonable and necessary for a functioning society.

It's all about balancing rights — your right to swing your fist ends when it meets my nose, and all that. Censorship is generally justifiable when exercising your right to speech has the effect of violating someone else's rights. For example, if you call for violence and that violence happens, you can get thrown in jail, and your rights to free speech can be massively curtailed. This is, however, still censorship in a purely abstract sense.

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