230 prevents sites from being prosecuted. So, right now, they do b all moderation of any kind (except to eliminate speech for the other side).

Remove 230 and sites become liable for most of the abuses. Those sites don't have anything like the pockets of those abusing them. The sites have two options - risk a lot of lawsuits (as they're softer targets) or become "private" (which avoids any liability as nobody who would be bothered would be bothered spending money on them). Both of these deal with the issue - the first by getting rid of the abusers, the second by getting rid of the easily-swayed.

USENET predates 230.
Slashdot predates 230.
Hell, back then we also had Kuro5hin and Technocrat.

Post-230, we have X and Facebook trying to out-extreme each other, rampant fraud, corruption on an unimaginable scale, etc etc.

What has 230 ever done for us? (And I'm pretty sure we already had roads and aqueducts...)

I'd disagree.

Multiple examples of fraudulent coercion in elections, multiple examples of American plutocrats attempting to trigger armed insurrections in European nations, multiple "free speech" spaces that are "free speech" only if you're on the side that they support, and multiple suicides from cyberharassment, doxing, and swatting, along with a few murder-by-swatting events.

But very very very little evidence of any actual benefits. With a SNR that would look great on a punk album but is terrible for actually trying to get anything done, there is absolutely no meaningful evidence anyone has actually benefitted. Hell, take Slashdot. Has SNR gone up or down since this law? Slashdot is a lot older than 230 and I can tell you for a fact that SNR has dropped. That is NOT a benefit.

I wish I could say I'm surprised.

However, this has been a consistent pattern that goes back to the 1930s and I wouldn't raise an eyebrow if you corected that to the 1830s. Companies know that you make the most money by selling to both sides.

This will be great for Haiku, FreeBSD, and OpenBSD installs, there's not the remotest possibility there'll be binaries for these. Not because the software couldn't be ported, but because the sorts of people politicians hire to write software would never be able to figure out the installer.

This is why Elon's claim that Tesla was using photon counting to overcome the dynamic range limitations of camera only sensors was complete rubbish. Actual photon counting sensors are extremely tricky to do well.

But hey ho, Tesla stock goes up.

I still can't get ChatGPT, Gemini, or Claude to write a decent story or do an engineering design beyond basic complexity. They're all improving, but they're best thought of as brain-storming aids rather than actual development tools.

You can't bet a company on ideas like that. There is absolutely zero assurance that we can even build an intelligent machine using classical computing techniques, and even less assurance that any of the basic AI techniques we are using can achieve it. It would actually be remarkable if we happened to stumble upon the design of an intelligent machine, given we have so little idea how our brains actual achieve this, and it would be ludicrously serendipitous if we were also able to stumble upon a super intelligence that can exponentially improve itself at the same time.

It would be like suggesting that cave men might have stumbled upon a working nuclear fusion reactor by smacking enough rocks together. We even understand the principles behind fusion and we're struggling to build one. But hey ho, we will just create a super intelligence even though we have no idea how intelligence works in our brains.

The people pushing this angle are delusional. Yes, it is entirely likely we can create better and better agents that appear to be intelligence and can perform useful tasks. But this super intelligence thing is dumb. If you wanted billions to setup a research lab to try to define intelligence and study the human brain, then that would make sense, but these people are saying they'll be able to time travel using anti-gravity thrusters before they can even speak some basic words.

My bet is that these superstar hires Zuckerberg has found are very intelligent grifters who will milk the situation for all the personal wealth they can. Those in actual revenue generating roles can probably see this, and that probably explains the rift.

I worked for a farming automation company over 20 years ago now. There were a few things I noticed:

The first was that much of the low hanging automation tasks had already been automated a long time ago. People think automation is replacing a field full of 100 workers with 100 humanoid robots. But the reality is that we replaced those workers with a tractor and pesticide sprays. It's this observation that makes me skeptical about the whole humanoid hype fest.

The second thing is that people are damn cheap. I mean, a human can pick a lot of tomatoes in an hour. If the human breaks down, you just fire them and hire one that is in better condition. There is no capital cost for a human (perhaps a little to train them) - the farm doesn't have to pay to 'build' them. Even if a tomato picking robot was a few 1000's of dollars (not going to happen) that would still be higher than the cost of just getting another human. Further, if markets change you just fire your humans, or get them to pick something else instead, but if you've invested significant capital in tomato picking robots you've got a big problem.

I'm not saying that there isn't a point at which an automatic tomato picking robot wouldn't be viable - there definitely will be. But ultimately it's just an economics question. At the moment, making such a robot that can even perform that task well, let alone be cheap and, importantly, reliable, is a very difficult problem. I definitely think we could solve it - we could have solved it a decade ago - but there is very little investment for this stuff because the low price of humans sets a limit on the value of the resultant product, and that value is very low.

Social media has become a toxic dump. If you wouldn't allow children to play in waste effluent from a 1960s nuclear power plant, then you shouldn't allow them to play in the social media that's out there. Because, frankly, of the two, plutonium is safer.

I do, however, contend that this is a perfectly fixable problem. There is no reason why social media couldn't be safe. USENET was never this bad. Hell, Slashdot at its worst was never as bad as Facebook at its best. And Kuro5hin was miles better than X. Had a better name, too. The reason it's bad is that politicians get a lot of kickbacks from the companies and the advertisers, plus a lot of free exposure to millions. Politicians would do ANYTHING for publicity.

I would therefore contend that Australia is fixing the wrong problem. Brain-damaging material on Facebook doesn't magically become less brain-damaging because kids have to work harder to get brain damage. Nor are adults mystically immune. If you took the planet's IQ today and compared it to what it was in the early 1990s, I'm convinced the global average would have dropped 30 points. Australia is, however, at least acknowledging that a problem exists. They just haven't identified the right one. I'll give them participation points. The rest of the globe, not so much.

The issue is that the hardware costs money to run. If you don't have a way to generate a proportionate return from using it, then you are still just sinking money into the black hole, and that is not sustainable.

Think about how it works with BTC mining - at a certain coin price and electricity cost, a given chip cannot mine a coin for less than the cost of the electricity to do so. So you would be a fool to run such a chip under those conditions, even if the chip was free.

AI at the moment is not generating anywhere near the revenue required to sustain the operating costs. It's entirely possible that if the bubble blows, many of these data centres cannot find loads that are not loss making. TBF, I imagine if you could discount the capital cost (which will happen when they go bankrupt), then I'm sure they'll be able to find some uses in things like research/rendering/simulation etc, but it will be brutal.

Search for 'Multi-Bit Error Vulnerabilities in the Controller Area Network Protocol'. (It's a thesis by Eushiuan Tran)

This issue is quite subtle, but essential, the fact that the CRC is applied before bit-stuffing means that a single bit error can cascade into multiple errors that exceed the detection limit for the CRC. The potential for this is fortunately rare, but it's like having holes in your bullet proof vest.

This is why CAN FD (apologies, I said 2.0 in the previous message) includes the stuff bits in the CRC (and then has to transmit the number of stuff bits), but this also has a problem, though I can't quite remember the details. It's better though.

Using Chat GPT to encroach on the lucrative search/advert market would have been fine if Google hadn't been able to catch up. But they have. So why would everyone keyed into the Google eco-system bother switching over to Open AI adverts/search now?

It's surprising Altman didn't push for this while he was ahead - that would have been a decent strategy. But instead he went on this crazy train about how they would have the super-intelligence blah blah blah.

The big problem he has now is that if open Ai employees see that their stock options might end up being worthless, they won't stay around, especially since Google/Apple/Meta can give them big $$ right now, not at some hypothetical IPO that might not happen anymore. If he starts bleeding the best employees he is screwed and the end will come quickly.

Even when I studied in the late 90s it was like this for anything applied. There was a push to make the degree more 'industry relevant' - i.e. companies want people who could do Java or Protel, not solve partial differential equations or analyse matrix decomposition techniques. The university wasn't really setup for this, so some of the younger professors who had used those tools as part of their research would run the courses.

Most of the faculty at my school were pretty switched on, so I think it was fine as an introduction. Fortunately outside a few of these introductory courses, most of the course was extremely theoretical (kinda the point of going to university but whatever).

I imagine in the mean time university has become much more vocational, so the demand for these sorts of 'end of the pipeline' skills has grown. The latest thing is AI, so here we are.