I find it telling that AGI people seem to assume that AGI will spontaneously appear as a distinct entity with its own agency rather than being a product that will be owned and sold.

People who have hundreds of billions of dollars can get mid-single-digit percent ROI by making very safe investments with that money, but instead they are pouring it into relatively risky AI investments. What do you think that says about their expectations of returns?

Check them into Git, but be cautious about credentials that might live in the env files that you don’t want to expose if you end up making the repo publicly available.

Damn, toner is running out

… so I shouldn’t use the CEOs history of bankruptcy and failed a Kickstarter when judging if I think it is going to succeed or not?

The irony of being asked to sign up to a website to be able to read an article about opsec failures

My concern isn’t that things will get delayed, it’s that I’ll give them my money and get nothing in return

I’m pretty excited about this; my Pebble Time was the best watch I’ve even owned - smart or otherwise.

That said, I don’t think I’m going to be preordering this given how badly the last Pebble Kickstarter went. For those who weren’t around at the time, Pebble (whose CEO is behind this venture) built his whole business around Kickstarter. The first 2 generations were wildly successful, but for the third generation they massively overextended themselves trying to get hardware into mainstream retailers, prioritised building stock for retail channels (because contracts) and ran out of cash before shipping for the majority of backers who had bankrolled this whole thing. Eventually everyone who hadn’t had their orders fulfilled got a refund, but that was only because FitBit decided to buy them. Eric seems like a nice guy and great at the technology - and I’m not saying that I could run a business any better - but I think I’ll wait until there is stock on hand for me to buy outright before I hand over my cash

NZ parliament recently passed an act clarifying that wage theft is theft and that individuals may be criminally liable if they commit it: https://www.legislation.govt.nz/bill/member/2023/0245/4.0/whole.html

They talk about AGI like it’s some kind of intrinsically benevolent messiah that is going to come along and free humanity of limitations rather than a product that is going to be monetised to make a few very rich people even richer

This is exactly the sort of argument I was talking about

• The forth amendment counts for less than the paper it is written on outside the bounds of the US
• Most of the rest of the world has laws requiring companies that operate in their jurisdiction - even if they aren’t based in that country - to prove access to law enforcement if requested
• If complying with the law is truly actually impossible, then don’t be surprised if a country turns around and says “ok, you can’t operate here”. Just because you are based in the US and have a different set of cultural values, doesn’t mean you get to ignore laws you don’t like

To illustrate the sort of compromise that could have been possible, imagine if Apple and Google had got together and proposed a scheme where, if presented with:

• A physical device
• An arrest warrant aledging involvement in one of a list of specific serious crimes (rape, murder, csam etc)

They would sign an update for that specific handset that provided access for law enforcement, so long as the nations pass and maintain laws that forbid it’s use outside of a prosecution. It’s not perfect for anyone - law enforcement would want more access, and it does compromise some people privacy - but it’s probably better than “no encryption for anyone”.

So I’m going to get down voted to hell for this, but: this kind of legislation is a response to US tech companies absolutely refusing to compromise and meet non-US governments half-way.

The belief in an absolute, involute right to privacy at all costs is a very US ideal. In the rest of the world - and in Europe especially - this belief is tempered by a belief that law enforcement is critical to a just society, and that sometimes individual rights must be suspended for the good of society as a whole.

What Europe has been asking for is a mechanism to allow law enforcement to carry out lawful investigation of electronic communications in the same way they have been able to do with paper, bank records, and phone calls for a century. The idea that a tech company might get in the way of prosecuting someone for a serious crime is simply incompatible with law in a lot of places.

The rest of the world has been trying to find a solution to the for a while that respects the privacy of the general public but which doesn’t allow people to hide from the law. Tech has been refusing to compromise or even engage in this discussion, so now everyone is worse off.

Yeah, that was the general point I was trying to gesture to without being too hamfisted about it; people can escape crappy situations and generational trauma with some outside help, either on the small, personal level or the larger structural level

I’ve been looking at getting solar installed, and been talking to a few different companies for quotes. One place only supplies PowerWall batteries, and I said to the sales rep that I wasn’t really interested in buying anything from Tesla and his face made it pretty clear that that was the answer he’d been getting a lot recently

Please tell me they struck a deal with Zack

I mean, if he also wants to take on the costs of doing all the remediation work and ongoing maintenance and surveillance for the rest of time that’s probably a good deal for the city

What’s the bet those filters never get changed either?

“I didn’t think the leopards would eat my face!”, said a voter for the “leopards eating people’s faces party”

… My first thought was “is this loss?”. I’m probably too online.

I’ve seen people with “I brought this before I knew Elon was an asshole” bumper stickers, I’d imagine there are updated ones kicking around

That’s what I mean - only doing DEI things only when there is a profit motive isn’t ideal, but it’s better than not doing DEI at all.

In an ideal world, doing the right thing would either always be the profitable thing to do (either because customers are smart, or because laws punish you if you don’t), or companies would do the right thing regardless of profit simply because it’s the right thing, but clearly we don’t live in an ideal world.