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I think it's very safe to assume that no major US based platform has 'real' E2E encryption. They're almost certainly all a part of PRISM by now, and it'd contradict their obligations to enable government surveillance. So the only thing that's different is not lying about it. Though I expect the other platforms are, like when denying they were part of PRISM, telling half truths and just being intentionally misleading. 'We provide complete E2E encryption [using deterministically generated keys which can be recreated on demand].'

Signal is open source

Snowden endorsed last I heard? He doesn’t email of course.

Rather than an affinity for artisanal stuff or there being some bias against AI itself, I think it's simply that most stuff that's going to be made with AI is going to be very derivative. Even before AI you'd read posts from people, including on here, like 'I made a highly competent knockoff of [popular indie game] but got no sales. Woe is me.' But games aren't commodities. If people like a game, that doesn't mean they want to play, let alone buy, a complete knockoff of it.

The biggest barrier to success has always been having a good idea and AI is just going to make that ever more apparent, because you'll be able to cook up knockoffs ever more rapidly.


He was supposed to be their "Senior AI Reporter." Him including basically anything from LLMs, without verifying it, in articles not only demonstrates a complete lack of credibility as a writer, but also a complete lack of understanding of AI. Even if they might have personally wanted to keep him on, you just can't after something like this.

It would be rather nonsensical to completely ignore ethnicity in your operations when the wide majority of illegal immigrants are going to be of that ethnicity. Obviously that would not justify widespread harassment of that group, but nothing like that seems to be happening. Mostly people seem to be trying to stop them from deporting people genuinely in the country illegally, which is divisive - independent of partisanship.

If the DNC has chosen this hill to die on, I don't think they're going to do anywhere as near good as they should do in November given Trump is engaging in some extremely unpopular and foolish behavior that people, again going beyond partisan lines, could easily rally together against.


> Obviously that would not justify widespread harassment of that group, but nothing like that seems to be happening.

Exactly that is happening in places ICE focuses on. Kawanaugh stops with, like, beating or multi day/week/months imprisonment are a thing.

With legal immigrants, strategy seems to be to hold them in as bad conditions as possible until they sign off own deportation.


I completely agree they're a thing, but at what scale? The current administration has deported something like 600,000 illegal immigrants. What do you think their accuracy rate is carrying out those deportations? An accuracy rate of 50% would mean there'd be 600,000 errors. An accuracy rate of 70% would mean we'd expect to see around 250,000 errors. An accuracy rate of 90% would mean we'd expect to see around 67,000 errors.

A quick search [1] on this topic showed 50 people have been wrongfully detained. Even if we increase that figure substantially, it implies an extremely high success rate, which isn't really possible if you're just engaging in widespread fishing expeditions.

[1] - https://www.propublica.org/article/immigration-dhs-american-...


Stopped ≠ detained. The government doesn't release stats on who was stopped. Kavanaugh stops are literally about using race as a criterion for the stop. No other probable cause is required.

Biden deported more people then any previous president and did not needed any of that. Fun fact, he even focused on criminals, proving that in fact, it is possible to not be dumb about it.

Meanwhile, what do we have here is complete breakdown of legal process, judicial orders being ignored and agency that repeatedly provably lies about everything. Including about multiple murders. All the accuracies rates you listed are absolutely terrible for anything that wants to pretend rule if law matters.

----------

The article YOU listed shows: nearly 20 children, including two with cancer. 50 Americans detained for being latino and no other reasons. From 130 Americans detained for protesting, 50 had charges dropped or rejected by court. That is so far. These were simply abusive detentions.

These are horrible statistics. In a democratic rule of law country, a few journalists wont be able such frequent and routine abuse of power.


NASA Space Flight [1] is the forum for anything and everything space industry related.

[1] - https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/


I'm not sure that Iranians in Berlin holding signs written in English are necessarily widely representative, nor entirely organic. Here's a comparable scene of what's going on in Iran for mourners of Ali Khamenei: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/QQMGijEMJfc

I'm not saying this to be argumentative. I do not know what the "real" internal state of is in Iran in terms of support/opposition for their leadership, and I don't think there is anyway to find out this information. Our media will lie, and so will theirs. And people themselves will also lie, and not even necessarily intentionally. Imagine polling Americans (let alone expats long since removed from America) on what percent of Americans they think support Trump without knowledge of polls/votes to inform them.

As a result I think most of all media along these lines is much more likely to mislead rather than inform.


And for anybody that didn't see this coming somehow, a planned four day operation has now turned into a 4 weeks long one. [1] Want to guess what happens in 4 weeks?

[1] - https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/trump-military-...


I don't understand why people, generally on both sides of the issue, just ignore the social effects of it and instead just focus on the personal. I suspect most don't intuit how rapidly fertility shifts population sizes, because it's an exponential. A fertility rate of 1 means each generation decreases by more than 50%, compounding. So after just 5 generations and your generational size is down 97% with your population doing the exact same, staggered out by a few decades.

And fertility determines not only the size of a population, but even the age ratios within that population. Low fertility means you end up with far more elderly than you do working age. Far from this vision of being a society with more for everybody, we'll be creating societies where labor is ever-more scarce, economies are primarily dedicated to helping sustain the elderly and simultaneously collapsing at the same time. It's not going to be pretty.

For these reasons, and many others, I think the social aspect is one of the most important. Self fulfillment and these other things are very important and good, but if we don't have children then we're going to be creating some pretty messed up societies for our descendants. We're likely going to get to see this play out in South Korea during our lifetimes. And I do wonder what their descendants will think of the South Koreans of today.


Western societies solve that problem by letting in immigrants. I'm not sure what SK or Japan are going to do though.

I don't really think immigration is a long-term solution, because of the scale issue - which most greatly underestimate. We're talking about needing a never-ending stream of hundreds of millions of people. And you'd ideally want people that speak the language, have at least some basic skills, and so on. It's not particularly realistic, even before getting into the social chaos that such would cause.

And it becomes even less realistic if you look outward to times when this becomes necessary. Japan is a good example of this issue. Migrating to Japan is not difficult. The only meaningful barrier is learning basic Japanese. Beyond that, after just 5 years of residency you can even apply for citizenship which has a very high acceptance rate. And there are a ton of 'Japanese enthusiasts', many of whom already speak basic Japanese.

And many of them have tried to migrate, but they don't last at all. They quickly realize that a Japan in decline is not the Japan in their minds. Getting paid $1500 a month to work a job with extremely high expectations and demands in a country with a median age of 50 (and increasing) isn't the Japan they thought they were moving to.


Yes, of course! No one expects a bunch of western weebs to save Japan's demographics. Obviously, Japan will have to change their insular culture and work ethics, if they attempt to deal with the problem by significantly increasing immigration.

Yet there are many western countries where the issue is how to prevent all the people attempting to get in from doing so.


The people America is trying to prevent from coming in are largely low skill, low education, generally do not speak the language, and so on. These people are no more a solution than our idealistic weebs. In most cases, they're rather worse off since weebs at least tend to have language and other skills, but are trying to move to a place that doesn't exist.

> The people America is trying to prevent from coming in are largely low skill, low education, generally do not speak the language, and so on.

US also put a lot of roadblocks in a way of highly skilled immigration. For example, check the waiting time of Indian engineers to obtain Green card.

> These people are no more a solution than our idealistic weebs.

Not sure I agree with this assessment. Unskilled immigrants tend to be over-represented on hard low-paying jobs, both in EU and US. Someone has to build, pave roads, cook, deliver, tend of elderly, etc.


You've gotta separate cause and effect, especially when these things will change in the future. For instance decades ago I had family that worked in construction. They were earning about $20/hour in a rural area back when that was quite a lot of money, even in an urban area.

It was enough that, even with the on-off nature of the work (you're not getting paid when nothing's getting built), they could easily raise a large family very comfortably. Now a day construction in the US pays awfully and a big factor is the large number of illegal migrants working in it for sub-market wages. So you're talking about the necessity of solving a problem by expanding the thing that caused it.

It's very difficult to predict what demographic collapse will look like in a place like the US, but one general trend that might inform us is that fertility within places like the US remains strongly inversely correlated with income. Those who are earning a lot aren't having children, those who aren't earning much - are. Pair that alongside fairly low upward mobility, and again I think it's unlikely that significant numbers of unskilled workers will have any real value in the future (or present).


That solves the problem by removing western society. Which can hardly be called a solution

I think this can be falsified by just considering the history of humanity. It wasn't that long ago that human language literally did not even exist. And our collective knowledge wasn't all that much more than 'poke him with the pointy end'. Somehow we went from that to putting a man on the Moon, unlocking the secrets of the atom, and more. And if you consider how awful we are at retaining/sharing information and just general inefficiencies due to the fact that we're humans and not just logical information processing machines, we did all of this in little more than the blink of an eye. This is something that seems to certainly be rather special.

All that humanity has achieved happened due to the simple loop of identifying a desire/need and finding a way to satisfy it. Also known as reinforcement learning. The only thing that really differentiates humans from machines is... history. We've been learning and passing on our knowledge to successive generations over millennia. Nothing really special there; give the machines a few years to learn and see what happens.

What needs do machines have? What desires do they have?

None, yet. But you can be 100% sure it's something we'll eventually succeed in adding, as it's through the guidance of desires and needs that intelligence really expresses.

Not sure how that follows but okay

What a ridiculous take lmao.

What are your contributions again?


And what exactly is ridiculous about it?

Reinforcement learning requires a well defined goal and a well defined way to quantitatively measure progress along that goal. In reality these don't exist without a hand of God guiding you. In the case of machine learning that hand of God is our own. Even given infinite processing power, you could not construct a reinforcement learning system that would mimic humanity's progress - it simply is a nonstarter due to the nature of reinforcement learning itself.

Conceptually, it's really not as hard as you make it seem. There are layers, but once you peel them away there's only one thing left, which all living things share: the drive to survive (maintain internal state parameters within a certain range by accessing nutrition, protection from environmental elements, security from other survival-seeking entities, reproduction to pass on genes, etc). No need to bring God/gods into it.

There's also no need to specifically mimic humanity's progress; that's just an accident of survival facilitated by opposable thumbs and language ability. We've already made machines with the base abilities, and emulated the drive (see evolutionary algorithms[0] for example). We just need to put it all together in a few units and let them "loose" to evolve on their own for a while. It took humans ~300,000 years to get where we are today; I'm positive that it'll take machines a small fraction of that. Nothing special.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_algorithm


Very little, certainly approximately 0%, of what humanity has done has been driven by base survival instincts. You're describing the process to mimic a roach, not a human.

You do work, don't you (or at least are in school)? Do you do it for sheer fun? Or to be able to afford things that allow you to survive?

Even those who do something like art "for fun" do it because it sates an internal need (not all actions need to make sense, because the inherent randomness of evolution is messy and leaves artifacts). Though also the desire to create some form of legacy can be considered a kind of survival: to be remembered by others beyond one's own lifespan.


I’m not claiming an LLM is structurally or functionally equivalent to a human brain. I just said that what we call “creativity” is in fact a very derivative thing.

The most interesting thing to me is that he was apparently assassinated while working at his office. It's not like the US/Israeli actions were a secret, yet he seemingly made no effort to secure himself. It's hard not to see this as an intentional martyrdom. So it will be interesting to see whether his calculations were correct, or whether the US' were.

The one thing I think must be true is that I can't imagine an 86 year old cleric was an especially effective leader. So assassinating him is quite the gamble. I'd love to know what the military's chatbots thought about this idea.


Prophets are more dangerous when they're dead. At 86 he would either die from old age or fighting "imperialistic, evil" Israel/US.

This Prophet believed/taught that school girls should be raped before they are executed for not wearing hats so that they can't get into heaven (believing God would judge a child for being raped).

Should a believer/teacher of such things even be called a prophet? Old boy was straight trash with a horrific morality.


> Should a believer/teacher of such things even be called a prophet? Old boy was straight trash with a horrific morality.

Sadly, that has been a fairly common attribute for a fairly large majority of people anointed as 'prophets' and 'saints'.


He's not a prophet and he didn't teach that.

You don't need to lie about someone you don't like.


I have no horse in this race but I did find some daunting google results about that.

I'd love to see a link to them. My cursory googles aren't finding it.

Look, not trying to defend the guy, but I don't like this sort of hyperbole. People have the wrong view on what Iran is like. It's ran by religious fundamentalists, which is bad, but it's also probably one of the more progressive muslim theocracies in the region. People tend to mix up shit that Saudi Arabia does with Iran.

In particular, Iran has a very progressive view on education. They have one of the best educated populations in the middle east (men and women).


I really don't want this on my comment history but here you go:

~redacted google serarch~

And I understand your point. There's a ton of bias. We must be careful with the "facts" on the internet.

Admitedly, these link results don't inspire me much confidence.


The only one attributing a similar quote to khamenei is an x user. The rest appear to document that an exiranian official saying that counter revolutionary women sentenced to death are raped.

I hope you can see how these are pretty different things.


First link:

"Based on our findings, some of the various forms of sexual torture, such as the rape of virgin girls prior to their execution, were conducted in a systematic way and were based on the interpretation of an order by Ayatollah Khomeini (1979-1989), the Islamic Republic Supreme Leader at the time."

https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201314/cmselect/cmin...


> women who were captured in battle with the kuffar (infidels) were akin to property and slaves of the army of Islam (a practice of the Middle Ages which had subsequently been accepted, at least theologically, as a part of Islamic war practices)

Look, bad and disagreeable, but not the claimed quote. This is a much better attack that doesn't use hyperbole.


I don't have it bookmarked but he did teach that and had his friend Lajevardi whom he supported and praised carry it out. And his Islamic enforcement police regularly engaged in it. And he has defended his Islamic enforcement police the Basij, whose job is to enforce his teachings, when they have conducted systemic rapes.

https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201314/cmselect/cmin...

Here he is defending the practice https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/aug/27/iran-ayatollah...

Amnesty talking about his Basij Islamic enforcement police conducting the practice: https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2023/12/iran-security...

Challenges to his systemic use of rape and if it disqualifies his legitimacy back in 2009 https://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/15/world/middleeast/15iran.h...

2011 Frontline coverage of the practice https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/tehranbureau/2011/0...

More coverage of the practice https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/1890900/iran-rape-tortu...

In addition to the routine/sactioned religious police rapes how many executions have there been under this moderate? How many women arrested for religious reasons? Under his leadership the death decree against Salman Rushdie was never lifted. How many died of torture in detention after he called for people to be punished? If this is moderation then what does fundamentalism look like?

Hmmm, this may have been a 'mis-interpretation' but it seems odd that it wouldn't, you know, be corrected with a public 'correct' interpretation in all these years and with so much rape being done by religious police serving directly under him. Instead of easily issuing a public statement he defended the rapists indicating that in fact, it was a correct interpretation. https://wncri.org/2015/11/13/female-prisoners-virgins-raped/


> I don't have it bookmarked but he did teach that and had his friend Lajevardi whom he supported and praised carry it out.

Look, I'm simply not going to believe this claim without evidence.

You are presenting terrible practices in Iran that I disagree with, but that wasn't your original claim.

From the links you've given, rape was because political prisoners were believed to be slaves. That's a despicable and gross practice. It is not, however "school girls should be raped before they are executed for not wearing hats so that they can't get into heaven". The reason for the rape of prisoners was because the prisoners were viewed as slaves, not to keep them from heaven (from what I've read).

> If this is moderation then what does fundamentalism look like?

Relative to the region. Iran has been brutal to it's dissidents and enemies of the state.

However, if you compare the rights of women under Iran vs Saudi Arabia, you'll end up finding that women in Iran have more rights and freedoms. That's what relative means.

I'm not here to defend Khamenei. The reason I pushed back was because, as I said, you don't need to lie about someone you don't like. These are the facts you should present and represent. Talk about how Iran rapes political enemies. That is a horrible practice. But the extreme "He said to rape girls without hijabs and then kill them to keep them from heaven" is just a lie. Hell, you can pretty accurately say "He taught that political prisoners are slaves, which his government used to justify raping female prisoners". That's a true statement that makes him look horrible.


It looks like it was the previous Ayatollah who was Khamenei's religious teacher, but this one could easily have corrected things but instead chose to defend the practice/practitioners and never on the occasion of abuse over decades chose to correct the interpretation.

"such as the rape of virgin girls prior to their execution, were conducted in a systematic way and were based on the interpretation of an order by Ayatollah Khomeini (1979-1989)"

So his spiritual teacher ordered it with the vague cop-out by someone else that 'maybe it was misinterpreted' yet even though his Islamic police were raping for decades he never corrected what his teacher/spiritual leader said/meant.

Undisputed facts: it happened and the people doing it thought that it was sanctioned by the Ayatollah. Even though it happened for decades, this Ayatollah never corrected people that they had misunderstood. Did defend his Islamic police and did on occasions when they inflicted the violence after him basically saying “Will no one rid me of this troublesome priest?”.

Decades and decades of rape, and of government officials thinking this is the official Islamic position, and he NEVER chose to say otherwise even though his Islamic police were acting on it.

I'm throttled after this but I believe it was his official policy, and nothing indicates otherwise. There was systemic rape and he defended/protected those doing it and never corrected the believed edict from his predecessor. Also it is extremely rare to get these edicts externally. We only have what I pointed out because an insider (Ayatollah Montazeri) was trying to defend his reputation after word got out of the justification for rape by Khomeini.


I know someone who was in prison with Lajevardi in the 70s and the latter was an asshole even then according to him so I believe this

AFAICT nearly everyone who is called a "prophet" by anyone is horrible, no?

Doesn't stop people from killing or dying in their name though.


I can't think of anybody, who has significant power, who isn't seen as horrible by somebody else, and often by quite a lot of somebody elses. With power people always end up trying to make the world a better place. The problem is one man's better place is another's dystopia.

>I'd love to know what the military's chatbots thought about this idea.

What a mad world we're hurtling ourselves into.


"You're thinking about this just like a professional warfighter would"

I'd say the main contemporary dynamic of the times is hallucination. Not necessary by LLMs per se, but rather by the humans wielding them to mainline their own bullshit.

In a way Grump himself is just society's own embodied hallucination from decades of Republican marketing hopium. Some scraps of dignity are surely about to trickle down any day now, once those mean libuhruls are out of the way.

(the "warfighter" terminology-coddling obviously coming from the user prompt)


Supposedly he had a very deep bunker under his house but he came up for meetings.

So the real problem for Iran is that mossad seem to know exactly when he was vulnerable i.e. there are spies within the inner circles of the IRGC

Edit: Or some very effective high tech surveillance, but that's also not good news to put it mildly


He was assasinated during a meeting with many other high ranking members of the regime. I doubt they decided on collective suicide.

> intentional martyrdom

He didn’t play 4D chess. I’d bet on pure hubris.


Why would you assume that someone with decades of experience could not be an effective leader?

People lose cognition as they age.

And gain experience

In every field where competence can be objectively measured, experience does not endlessly correlate with competence. There's always a growth phase but then there's a bell curve of age vs competence, that reaches a peak and then there's a constant decline from there. So for instance chess is primarily a mental game, yet the decline comes as early as one's mid thirties for world class players.

I'm fully willing to accept that for a field where scenarios are fuzzier and intuition more important, it may well be that peak on the bell curve comes somewhat later. But I think it's essentially inconceivable that one is near, or even remotely near, their peak, in their 80s, in anything.


>There's always a growth phase but then there's a bell curve of age vs competence

A bell curve tracks the distribution of a single random variable. You're mixing statistical metaphors.


That’s true, but it’s not always good—Americans have stark examples of the risks of octogenarian leaders whose experience leads them astray by discounting how much the world has changed since they were young.

I think of mental faculties and experience as two separate overlapping curves where there’s a sweet spot in the middle where both are high but either one being low can become a big problem.

They also just don’t have the same energy they used to so even if they have a good idea they’ll be less effective at motivating people to embrace it, and the younger people behind them are going to be acting with more thought to succession politics.


Biden's surely a poster child for the value of experience and connections in the Presidency. Whatever you think of him (and I would certainly agree that he should never have considered a second term), he was quite successful in furthering his agenda while in office.

Yes, I agree that he used his experience well for many things (and had competent staff he could trust to get things done) but I will say he made a huge mistake continuing to back Israel's actions in Gaza to an extent which I don't think someone too young to remember the Six Days War would have done. I think you could also make a solid argument that earlier in his career he probably would have had more energy to put into getting a few of the close votes in Congress over the line.

But dude was 86, how many people in nursing homes would you trust to run a country?

Probably one in a thousand.

But as one whom the Ayatollah has sworn to eliminate, I can still state that man was sharp and brilliant and extremely well spoken. His worldview was internally consistent. He had vision and experience and knew how to motivate people. He was a one in ten million leader.

I give him that praise and more, even recognising that his stated mission was to exterminate myself and my children.


> But as one whom the Ayatollah has sworn to eliminate

What does this mean — did you stick him with the bill at all restaurant or something?


Even If you don't recognize the last name you can just click on the user info and make 2 + 2.

He's doing what's called "Hasbara". Regular people call it "lying".

I love this basically pointing out that racists call it "Hasbara" and regular people call it "lying".

Don't agree it applies in this situation, but it's nice to see someone break down regular people don't give a special jewish name to something that already has a common name/definition, and that the common name better communicates the intended concept so the purpose of using the word is to convey something different than basic understanding.


Please quote which part of my comment you feel is a lie.

It's.. an amusing exchange, especially as a response to the actual aknowledgement of the other party - the thing which people there nor have nor want.

And as we can see with Biden and Trump, 86 is past the the optimal compromise between experience and cognition.

Tell that to the US regime, too?

Many do!

Because he would be senile.

Being of an advanced age does not necessitate becoming senile. Do you have evidence that the Ayatollah was senile or trending in that direction?

I'd say, too, that judging by the current President's speeches, there's probably good evidence towards him being or becoming senile/demented.

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