It must have improved considerably since I tried the "3.5-flash-preview" a couple of months ago if all these claims in the presentations are true. Because it couldn't even make changes in a 200 line Python script without doing major mistakes (like messing up argument order when calling functions) when I tried it.
If you taxed the rich and corporations like Europe does you could easily have social security. The rich in the US love making Europe the boogeyman that stole your social security, while they laugh all the way to the bank.
It doesn't take much for somebody to seem like a more reliable party to make a deal with than Trump. Trump has already made direct threats of military action against Europe. Making a deal together with China might be the better option.
Also, Trump asking the EU and other allies to contribute seems much more to be about shifting blame and cost. Participating in the quagmire he created, with such an unreliable partner seems like a terrible idea.
Except ... look at the map. If Iran wins they (and 10 other parties) control Bab-El-Mandeb and Hormuz. Indonesia has already announced they'll close Malacca if Iran wins.
That means that for Europe to trade with Asia, it has to either pay tax to 10 different countries ... or to the US.
In other words, it gives the US the ability to apply import tariffs the way the UK famously did: if France or any EU country wants to trade with China, or any Asian country they'll have to pay tariffs ... to the US. The American revolution coming full circle.
Obviously words cannot describe what a disaster this would be for the EU.
Indonesia did not announce they would close down the strait of Malacca. Someone made an offhand comment that they would consider tolls if Iran could get away with it, and then the government announced as a response they would never do that.
Why don't you ask the EU how well making deals with Iran went so far? Hell, why not ask Israel? (they've been making deals with Iran for 47 years and saved their bacon, espeically in the Iran-Iraq war, multiple times. The sad truth is that half the Iranian regime, both the regime itself and the individuals involved owe Israel their lives. Most owe both the Mossad and the IDF their lives)
Here's how politico describes the EU's relation with the Iranian regime in one article: "Iran continues to hold and execute European Union citizens, using capital punishment for accused spies or dissidents, leading to severe diplomatic tension and EU condemnation of 'hostage diplomacy'"
You think Trump is untrustworthy? When is the last time Trump invited someone for diplomacy ... then had that person executed?
I mean, I get why people make the point that Trump is the worst US president ever to deal with. That's politics, and there's an election coming up... what I don't understand is why people get confused about that still making him 1000x better than a lot of other parties.
>I mean, I get why people make the point that Trump is the worst US president ever to deal with. That's politics, and there's an election coming up... what I don't understand is why people get confused about that still making him 1000x better than a lot of other parties.
You answered your own question - that’s politics. It doesn’t need to make sense to you.
And in the olden times, people got nightmares from reading books, or by hearing a horror story around a campfire. Banning everything that is scary or can cause nightmares or trauma would be a very difficult effort, and deciding a boundary of what is too traumatic and what is not would be very arbitrary.
Can we agree that there's a difference between banning things and making things difficult to access?
I'm an extremely liberal-libertarian free speech and free information advocate. I grew up in a world where as a 12 year old, on IRC, in 1992, I had people sending me fetish porn and child porn, and I developed the belief at that age that that was fine, if you were 12, you had the right to see anything you could, including other 12 year olds naked. But this was not something most 12 year olds were exposed to, and by the time I was 14 I was pretty clear on why they shouldn't be.
We live in a world where there is no such thing as a "ban". Oh, I know, I hated bans and railed against bans, and I don't think the government has any right to ban anything. But a ban is just an obstacle to people who want to violate the norm. A ban is only a way for societies to set up barriers between people and bad shit which is bad for society, and sometimes it's okay for there to be barriers. In 1992, the reason most kids were basically incredibly innocent and had never seen any porn at all at 12 years old, was that the barriers to it were reasonably high. If you were some kind of command line warrior child who could figure out IRC over dialup, then yeah, people would literally mail you brown paper boxes with porn tapes on VHS.
There are, actually, boundaries on what is too traumatic to show someone. Personally, I'd like to obliterate the behavior that fuels those things, rather than need to address the downstream issues of people seeing them. But there are things that are poisonous to society because they poison individuals, and there's a role for society and government to play in prohibiting those things, or at least preventing their spread as much as possible.
There is evil in the world, and it is sometimes necessary to stop it. Free information is not an unalloyed good.
Or will they ban you from using something like https://github.com/filosottile/age to encrypt and armor text encode things you send inside of the non-encrypted chat?
echo "Am I doing something illegal, France?" | age -e -r age1ql3z7hjy54pw3hyww5ayyfg7zqgvc7w3j2elw8zmrj2kg5sfn9aqmcac8p -a -
-----BEGIN AGE ENCRYPTED FILE-----
YWdlLWVuY3J5cHRpb24ub3JnL3YxCi0+IFgyNTUxOSBjTVQ5VTdMaTlnRkEyT1BY
MHZPc0lncHFvbS9FMTlDa2FkK3JQZy9sQnprClRFN3lNQUtnNzJWK0RxQVlYNE1q
NCtlNFJTUWpwZExJSDMvSGlRL2VHc1EKLS0tIC95bEErRU9NNERJRVVuYlMwUFg4
WUx1R0IyTHd1d2dxQTdqU0NJWlF0MXMKL1x9fz+ZVObYrn3bY/IdVBsd4KYxn78P
aWePVjaRUityGTkndNSy6gg1meVky22iv4rxd9MZ4XYnsGJDfRUmkVZhQcCxag==
-----END AGE ENCRYPTED FILE-----
Well, you can still run unsigned software (by clicking through to a bit of a hidden option in the popup dialog), and they also even remove that through "reputation" if enough people approve said binary (exact bitwise binary, so every new version released will go through the same issue).
Sourceforge died in a very different way though. Bundling spyware/crapware in install packages for open source software was a serious breach of trust, and was pretty much the direct reason for mass migration to Github. Github is failing on the technical side, but they at least mostly have their brand value intact. I think it will still take quite a lot for a mass migration of the same scale to happen.
Microsoft specializes in taking successful products and pumping them full of malware, spyware, bloatware, and adware once they have a critical mass of users. It is often preceded by quality dropping significantly due to under investment and McKinsey being brought in to find a way to prop up declining revenues - of course the answer is never to invest in making it a superior product again, but monetization strategies.
I think it has more to do with digital verification for social media in a hope of killing bot accounts that are interfering in the public debate. Some of the biggest social media influencer accounts turns out to be Chinese/Russian bots trying to fuel hate/division our democracies, and with LLMs it is only getting worse. Some form of digital ID to verify social media account identities is probably the only hope left of having a real public debate.
The bot problem is solvable by using a web of trust system. You don't need a digital ID for that (i.e. you don't need to tie your digital world identity to a real world identity, nor you need a central agency to manage these).
In web of trust, anyone could publicly certify who they know is a real person (i.e. validate a link from their id to another id). Then, if you received a message from someone, the system would find the path in the graph of real people you trust, to determine the trustworthiness of the source. So if the account is a bot, there would be no path from it to you in the trust graph.
The advantage is that everyone could supply their own subjective trustworthiness score, altering the graph. They could even publish it, so that other people could use trustworthiness assesment of accounts they personally trust.
The big issue with a system of web of trust is that it is too efficient, and just kills commercial advertising (and also propaganda). Because that is all about overcoming the natural web of trust that humans have.
That's actually great for social media companies to create a profile on you and feed you ads. They don't care about the bots or denocracy. The only hope for a real public debate is to show up in person at the debate.
Then the politicians should be honest about this goal. The best way to solve a problem requires understanding what the problem is. If we pretend to solve another problem, the solution for the actual will be less than ideal.
>Some of the biggest social media influencer accounts turns out to be Chinese/Russian bots trying to fuel hate/division our democracies
This is propaganda, none of those supposed networks exists or were successful in anything and when the media do show some supposed accounts they don't have a lot of views. Please stop falling for this, your democracy sucks because the politicians suck and the people want change so they turn to extremist parties.
Yes, obviously, the Romanian supreme court having to overturn and annul a presidential election due to Russian social media inference is entirely made up propaganda.
Countries have been interfering in the internal workings of other countries for centuries, if not millennia. If you want to read up on more recent accounts of this, many of which predate social media, the book Active Measures by Thomas Rid is a good place to start.
Or you can continue to think that this is all just made up "propaganda" and we're all fools, but you alone have seen the light.
Russian "bot farms" are investigated quite well. Usually they operate in Russian-speaking sides of platforms but sometimes they go "foreign". I agree that impact of those might be exaggerated but it's hard to measure in the first place.
I agree.. Maybe parts of the cache contents are business secrets.. But then store a server side encrypted version on the users disk so that it can be resumed without wasting 900k tokens?
With the help of coding agents it's easier than ever. Just get Claude/Codex to create Helm Charts / Docker Compose files for you. Struggle with some command line juggling to fix some obscure error? An agent can mostly help you in no-time.
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