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Which is fine, because those are owned by private citizens and companies and those citizens are giving their permission to the police to use them. That's the difference between centralized government survalience and CCTVs


For anyone else whom the above awnsers absolutely nothing without googling what defines the boundary - A more verbose version of the above comment is that they communicate only simple, situational signals (like warning cries or information for action) and not using a symbolic, rule-governed system capable of abstraction, past and future tense, and infinite combination.

Of course, with all generalizations, this is sort of a lie, but no - whales, chimps and cephapods don't meet the official bar.


The impossibly high bar they set "Perfect" at in order to make it the enemy of good, and fight against any progress being made to keep children out of adult spaces.

That being said, it's my personal opinion that I'd love to simply have my device store a token and send it to any site when requested. I'd then like those sites to give me toggles to remove all non-verified content - and therefore my internet experience could be sans-juvenile squeakers.


It takes a good programmer to write it, and most good programmers avoid JavaScript, unless forced to use it for their day job. in that case, there is no incentive to speed up the part of the job that isn't writing JavaScript.


Some of us, already have all the speed we need with Java and .NET tooling, don't waste our time rewriting stuff, nor need to bother with borrow checker, even if it isn't a big deal to write affine types compliant code.

And we can always reach out to Scala or F# if feeling creating to play with type systems.


> It takes a good programmer to write it, and most good programmers avoid JavaScript, unless forced to use it for their day job.

Nonsense.


This is also known as "Hosting" which, I found amusing.


Hosting without section 230 protections is "Distributing" whatever content you've (un)wittingly downloaded that's deemed illegal.


we are talking about books. books. illegal. Saint Leibowitz ora pro nobis.


> we are talking about books

I would love for the authors of in-print books to be paid - even when it's usually not a lot. Buy books - they are cheap, or borrow them from libraries - they buy books. If you need books for not-reading, and at scale, you should still be paying - especially if you can afford to pad Nvidia's fat margins.

Even if you're self-interested, I would urge you to pick your crimes carefully, and to remember to commit one crime at a time. If distributing copyright material is your chosen hill - more power to you! Just don't sleep walk into it thinking it's harmless.


Allowing anonymous people to host files on your server is a great way to collect (and distribute!) illegal porn, stolen data, stolen software, police warrants, etc...


Every useful tool is useful for bad things.

Everything with the power to protect the innocent, also has exactly the same power to protect the guilty. The two facets are inseperable.

Observing only the negative side, or only the positive side, is a null argument. The fact that a tool can be used for bad is exactly cancelled out by the fact that it can be used for good. Neither is a valid basis for any kind of policy.

Except that on balance, it's better for everyone that we have tools and capabilities and knowledge than not.

It's better that we have knowledge of say, poisons, than not, even though some people apply the knowledge to do harm.

This manifests in at least a couple different dimensions. The simplest one: there are more good or neutral people using knowledge and tools for good things than not. A less direct way: It's better for you to have options to help yourself and others deal with problems and meet needs than not.

Even if someone can use a tool against you, you are still better off having a lot of useful tools at your disposal in general than not, including to counter the one going against you, which zeros that out, and then also to deal with everything else, which becomes a net positive.

The alternative is to be an animal. Either a wild animal totally at the whims of nature, or worse a voluntarily domesticated animal that knows that tools exist, but has abdicated all responsibility for their own welfare to some farmer claiming to take care of them. And you still have the exact same bad guy problem, only now without any ability to deal with it.

Acting like the bad side of a useful thing is the only side, or even the most important side, is simple bad math.

Aside from any other unflattering quality that results in fear of any obvious easily identified harm being one's highest priority that outweighs all other considerations.


Pro: You arguably make the world a better place by letting people share knowledge more easily.

Con: Possible 25+ year jail sentence, multi-trillion dollar fines, might be distributing actually harmful material.

This is one area where I'm letting the limited liability corporations take the risk.


And yet, Dropbox exists


Gwtar seems like a good solution to a problem nobody seemed to want to fix. However, this website is... something else. It's full of inflated self impprtantance, overly bountiful prose, and feels like someone never learned to put in the time to write a shorter essay. Even the about page contains a description of the about page.

I don't know if anyone else gets "unemployed megalomaniacal lunatic" vibes, but I sure do.


gwern is a legendary blogger (although blogger feels underselling it… “publisher”?) and has earned the right to self-aggrandize about solving a problem he has a vested interest in. Maybe he’s a megalomaniac and/or unemployed and/or writing too many words but after contributing so much, he has earned it.


I was more willing to accept gwern’s eccentricities in the past but as we learn more about MIRI and its questionable funding resources, one wonders how much he’s tied up in it.

The Lighthaven retreat in particular was exceptionally shady, possibly even scam-adjacent; I was shocked that he participated in it.


I’ve been to Lighthaven many times and it has always been great. Can you explain what you’re talking about?


What does any of that have to do with the value of what’s presented in the article?


Wow, thats one hell of a reaction to someone's blog post introducing their new project.

Its almost as if someone charged you $$ for the privilege of reading it, and you now feel scammed, or something?

Perhaps you can request a refund. Would that help?


What's up with the non-stop knee-jerk bullshit ad hom on HN lately?


We're tired, chief.


The earth is falling out from under a lot of people, and they're trying to justify their position on the trash heap as the water level continues to rise around it. It's a scary time.


Technically it’s only an ad hominem when you’re using the insult as a component in a fallacious argument; the parent comment is merely stating an aesthetic opinion with more force than is typically acceptable here.


I read your BRILLIANT synopsis in the tone of Sir Humphrey (the civil servant) from "Yes Minister". Fits perfectly. Take a bow, good sir ...


I was with you until you said react. Just export to existing metrics software like Prometheus. Or do anything other than use an entire JavaScript framework for a simple UI. I swear, JS-Brain is as terminal as microservice and cloud brain.


If I keep getting married at the same pace I have, then in a few years I'll have like 50 husbands.


This comment has made me glad for LLM in Gmail. If someone is going to over analyze my every word because he firmly believes it portrays who I am, I'd appreciate the layer obfuscation between me and this creepazoid.


Assuming you did not use an LLM to craft your comment, I’d say “case in point”.


If your words don’t portray who you are, what does?


People make mistakes in the words they use, I often think “oops, I shouldn’t have said it like that”.


If said once, yes.


Actions? I generally judge people by what they do, not what they say - though of course I have to admit that saying things does fall under "doing something", if it's impactful.


The truth is that both words and actions communicate something, especially in combination. And sometimes words are the action.


That's exactly the point. In your case, you don't want to show who you are, connection or not does not matter.


Because a difference in scale can become a difference in category. A handful of buggy crashes can be reduced to operator error, but as the car becomes widely adopted and analysis matures, it becomes clear that the fundamental design of the machine and its available use cases has fundamental flaws that cause a higher rate of operator error than desired. Therefore, cars are redesigned to be safer, laws and regulations are put in place, license systems are issued, and traffic calming and road design is considered.

Hope that helps you understand.


Is the sarcasm really that opaque? Who would unironically equate buggy accidents and automobile accidents?


I’d like to introduce you to the internet.

There’s a reason /s was a big thing, one persons obvious sarcasm is (almost tautologically) another persons true statement of opinion.


Thanks. I wasn’t aware of that.


It took me a minute to realise you were joking too! :)


How much time have you spent around developers?


I got my first tech job in 1998. Some of the most sarcastic people I’ve ever met.


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