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Comment Re:Play stupid games, win stupid prizes (Score 0) 52

Your side shot Charlie Kirk and got Nick Fuentes. You shoot Trump and you get ?

So what about the attempt to kidnap Gretchen Whitmer? What about the attacks by Vance Boulter in Minnesota? What about the attack by David DePape in California?
DePape claimed to have been radicalised by conspiracy theories (no arguments from me there), you swim in the same pool so maybe you could tell us where these theories originated and who propagates them?
Trump is saying that

developers should not "intentionally encode partisan or ideological judgments" into a chatbot's outputs

. I have no problems with that if it is really applied that way, but I think it highly likely that the definition of "partisan or ideological judgments" he is envisaging are viewpoints which diverge from his.

Comment Sorry, but the right to read is fundamental (Score 1, Troll) 37

Pretending publishers/authors should have some fundamental right to restrict what you do with the knowledge in their books is asinine. They themselves took the alphabet from somewhere (phoenicians), tooks the tropes they use developed over time (check out tvtropes.org), etc etc etc. Imagine if a math book author demands royalties for doing math in your head... even though they really didn't come up with anything novel.

The only thing you ensure if publishers/authors can restrict AI is that your country/region loses out to countries and regions with no such restrictions. This type of petty protecitonism why Europe is so far behind in info/sci tech the last 40 years.

Comment Re:TL;DR: Gotta keep the bubble going (Score 2) 127

And anyway, Presidents cant make laws.

US Solicitor General John Sauer disagrees.

In the oral arguments for Trump v Slaughter, on Monday, Sauer said this isn't true when Justice Kagan pushed him on it. She said that the Founders clearly intended to have a separation of powers, to which he basically said "Yeah, but with the caveat that they created the 'unitary executive'", by which he seemed to mean that they intended the president to be able to do pretty much anything.

Kagan responded with a nuanced argument about how we have long allowed Congress to delegate limited legislative and judicial functions to the executive branch in the way we allow Congress to delegate the power to create and evaluate federal rules to executive-branch agencies, but that that strategy rests on a "deal" that both limits the scope of said rulemaking and evaluative functions and isolates them to the designated agency. She said that breaking that isolation by allowing the president detailed control over those functions abrogated and invalidated the deal, unconstitutionally concentrating power in ways that were clearly not intended by the Founders.

Sauer disagreed. I'll stop describing the discussion here and invite you to listen to it. The discussion is both fascinating and very accessible, and the linked clip is less than seven minutes long.

The court seems poised to take Sauer's view, which I think is clearly wrong. If they do, it's going to come back and bite conservatives hard when we get an active liberal president, as we inevitably will someday if the Trump administration fails to end democracy in the US.

What's very sad is that we already went through all of this and learned these lessons 150 years ago. After 100 years of experience with a thoroughly-politicized executive branch, we passed the Pentleton Civil Service Reform act in 1883 specifically to insulate most civil servants from presidential interference. Various other laws have subsequently been passed to create protections for federal workers and to establish high-level positions that are explicitly protected from the president. SCOTUS seems bent on overturning all of that and returning us to the pre-Pendleton era.

Those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it, and it's looking we're gonna repeat a lot of bad history before we re-learn those 19th-century lessons.

Comment Re:Okay. (Score 2) 127

With one important difference, this reminds me of the 1974 Emergency Highway Energy Conservation Act, which established a national speed limit of 55 MPH. States had to either adopt a state speed limit of 55 MPH, or else lose out on funding, i.e. get punished.

Of course, that was a law enacted by Congress, not an Executive order. I guess, traditionally, they say that for first quarter millennium of America, Congress held the purse strings because some inky piece of paper said they were supposed to, as if Congress could ever handle that much responsibility! Can you imagine?! Anyway, we've decided Fuck That Tradition, let's try something new and put a thieving tool in charge of the purse.

Comment Re:Such a lack of commitment... (Score 1) 199

Not sure the right-wing nutballs behind this really understand that, since their proposal actually enforces it.

To be fair to the nutballs, their proposal will actually slow it down as compared to not limiting immigration. That is, from their nutball perspective the proposal is an improvement, just not a total solution. For a total solution, they need to go full right-wing nutball and also ban women from working so they'll stay home and have proper Swiss babies.

Comment I've been saying this sense day 1 (Score 2) 30

The only defense against a bad AI is a good AI. There has always been an arms race between the hackers and the security consultants; AI just accelerates the pace. Ultimately, we will have to rely on AI to defend us from AI. Better get to training those paranoia AIs, boys... Aren't we already at the point that we need to use an AI to detect AI-generated content?

Comment Re:"Now with 38% FEWER hallucinations!" (Score 2) 64

Like, would you consider your girlfriend having 38% fewer hallucinations to be a big win? (I once had a girlfriend call me up while she was experiencing delirium tremens and describe to me how demons were raping her mom. I told her she was hallucinating. She insisted it was real, she could see it!)

Comment Re:Open for now (Score 1) 21

Unlike iOS, Android is already open by design

That's not an argument they will be able to make once they block sideloading.

Except that they aren't blocking sideloading. With the planned changes you can still install apps via:

1. Other app stores. The apps will have to be signed by a registered developer account.
2. By one-click installation from a web site. The apps will have to be signed by a registered developer account.
3. By ADB. No registered developer account required.

And for the cases that require a registered developer account, that account can be anonymous and free as long as the number of installs is small.

Comment Re:“Country” (Score 2, Informative) 262

Americans are reaping what Trump has sown, but as usual, he's engaging in denial.

FTFY

This is a gaslighting that he'll probably largely get away with, since most Americans -- especially his voter base -- have little contact with tourism or people from other countries.

His ongoing attempts to gaslight them over grocery prices, though, that one's going to be tougher. I'm surprised he's trying that. I mean, he's dumb, sure, and insulated from truth, but surely someone around him is smart enough and clueful enough to tell him that it would be better to sell it as a period of unfortunate but necessary pain on the way to long-lasting economic revival and stability. His base would eat that up, but even his diehard supporters are having a hard time reconciling "grocery prices are down!" with their own grocery bills, and he just keeps repeating it. He can cherry-pick specific item prices or gush about the lower-price of a (conveniently scaled-back) Thanksgiving dinner basket all he wants but people who actually buy groceries (such an old-timey word! <eyeroll/>) can see the truth during every weekly trip to the store.

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