If I vet Al Qaida members on my platform, provide them services, continue to do it after several bombings, and keep their unencrypted mails and host their websites, I'm quite sure that I can be considered as an accomplice.
Facebook was funded by Thiel, launched the day after DARPA shut down digital LifeLog and has long standing connections to intelligence agencies. Twitter is owned by the world's largest defense contractor.
These are government agencies acting as private entities.
Copy-pasting my comment to the other poster making the same point:
"Antifa" is not being presented as an ideology, it is being portrayed as a global terror cell. The specific purpose for this is to be able criminalize leftist politics, since the state has many more tools to prevent association with foreign groups.
"Nazi" does not have a leader, but the Nazi party had a leader. Atomwaffen had a leader. Various III% groups have leaders. Strangely, these groups are not being linked to foreign right-wing groups in an attempt to make them illegal.
With respect, this is false. JDL members were certainly charged with crimes. They were not charged with belongimg to the JDL, since that would be a first amendment violation.
There are interesting reports on state.gov describing the difficulties the JDL caused with the Soviet Union, eg.:
Ok maybe I'm wrong or there is some subtle legalese but the wikipedia page states that "it was described as a "right-wing terrorist group" by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in 2001".
Being part of a domestic terrorist group is protected by the first amendment in the United States. Being part of a foreign terrorist group is not. You can pay dues to the KKK, you cannot donate to Hezbollah.
"Antifa" is not being presented as an ideology, it is being portrayed as a global terror cell. The specific purpose for this is to be able criminalize leftist politics, since the state has many more tools to prevent association with foreign groups.
"Nazi" does not have a leader, but the Nazi party had a leader. Atomwaffen had a leader. Various III% groups have leaders. Strangely, these groups are not being linked to foreign right-wing groups in an attempt to make them illegal.
You're not wrong about smoke always being bad--there's a reason American Spirits have to have a disclaimer about "additive-free" not meaning healthier. Tobacco takes up alpha emitters from the soil and leaves them in your body--never good.
Pipe and cigar smokers are much less likely to smoke a pack's worth of tobacco a day. You also don't inhale them into your lungs, you hold the smoke in your mouth.
Smoking cigarettes is less about getting nicotine and more about having something to do when you are stressed etc.
Fun fact: the stress that smoking cigarettes relieves is only the stress caused by the addiction/relapse from nicotine. Surely, there might be some placebo effects going on, but nicotine is not a stress relieving chemical.
So really it is just about getting nicotine, but over time the ritual around the addiction adds to the addiction.
Zyn is freebase nicotine which does show some signs of being performance enhancing; mostly around focus. There are a lot of people with unmedicated ADHD self-medicating with Zyn, or vapes, or smoking due to the this.
GOS is broadly compatible with most phone use cases out of the box--chat, mail, browsing. A Google Play profile lets me use almost all apps (including my bank apps, but I understand that's not true for everyone).
In principle I agree about a Linux phone, but the gaps are much greater. I am also sympathetic to the GOS team's arguments that sandboxing on Android is better, and important on a device that allows control of essentially my whole life (2FA apps etc.)
AOSP even without the GrapheneOS improvements has drastically better privacy and security than a traditional desktop distribution. A mobile Linux distribution with a much better privacy and security model than traditional desktop Linux is still Linux. A similar approach can also be used on a laptop or desktop too.
Cheers, thanks for all the work you do on the project.
There is still a philosophical reason for supporting a version of Linux for mobile devices that is not dependent on Google, but is community-driven, for users with different priorities.
That is not really relevant to the GOS project though, and the fact that GOS is probably the easiest way to get a Play Services-free mobile device kind of drags it into discussions that it doesn't necessarily belong in.
Again, thanks for your work, and I appreciate your team's focus on your goal of the best security possible.
I'm a hobbyist IT enthusiast, not a professional computer guy, but from my point of view there's a big difference between a bunch of servers hosting something people want, like Netflix, and a warehouse full of GPUs running around the clock to make Lobster Jesus or whatever.
It's also a proxy for people's feelings on AI--essentially the only way people have to fight back against the new technology that makes eternal garbage and is supposedly coming for their jobs is to push for banning "data centers."
Totally agree that it's just a proxy for people's feelings on AI, but my Lobster Jesus is much more important to me than a Netflix show! All of the datacenter usage (for inference) is just serving something people want. Time has already shown that the datacenter for training is also just creating something people want.
> All of the datacenter usage (for inference) is just serving something people want.
I agree with this in principle, but I wonder how asymmetric the usage is. When I hear about developers dropping $200/mo (subsidized!) on AI coding, and having multiple agents on supergigaultramax effort churning on stuff for hours... Versus your average person maybe asking a few chatgpt questions every day or week... IDK.
Like others have said, yes, OpenAI probably isn't literally going to sell you more than $200 of electricity for $200/mo. But data centers get industrial rates, and $200 of power is still a decent bit of power just to be churning out slop! (It's about a monthly home bill and EV charging cost combined) And some companies spend way more than that on API pricing for tokens... It's just hard to get a handle on where the usage is actually going.
I just wish we could pass a common sense law to require them all to build renewables. It's literally electricity, it's the easiest energy to decarbonize.
i think this sentiment comes from a deep misunderstanding of how our modern society is the product of transitive satisfaction of wants. the developers churning out agent work on supergigaultramax effort are fulfilling the transitive preferences of people like supply chain managers, etc. who are in turn fulfilling the transitive preferences of a school teacher for cheap groceries, who are in turn....
This is how economies work and the alternative strategy of enumerating morally correct wants/needs and assigning the correct price from on-high has been a demonstrable failure. It is a cognitive failure of humanity that this strategy is so intuitively appealing to us.
> the developers churning out agent work on supergigaultramax effort are fulfilling the transitive preferences of people like supply chain managers, etc.
Sure, but that's the crux of it all, isn't it. Are they? And are they doing it that much better than before?
I'm far from an AI coding skeptic at this point, the stuff works, and I use it, but I think it's fair to ask whether it's worth burning a middle class home's amount of electricity to spit out CRUD apps and web frontends a bit faster. As many have pointed out, we've still yet to see some kind of huge productivity increase in society at large, or even some particularly revolutionary new app or whatever.
On some level it's people's money and they can spend it how they want, but people get criticized for unnecessary waste of resources all the time.
I think people should be allowed to do things, generally. If it's not worth it, the people doing it will go out of business (and quickly, at these prices). I think it is likely more worth it than you realize.
We're not talking about criticizing, we're talking about bans.
> If it's not worth it, the people doing it will go out of business
In general I agree (and many environmentalists and such undervalue the fact that environmental waste often correlates with wasted money), but I don't think this is a reliable principle. You can always brute force your way though problems, sometimes it's cheaper that way, doesn't mean it's not wasteful.
We are also assuming that economic value means something is good for society. A lot of money is made off of social media, ads, gambling apps, clearly there's demand for it. I don't think that means we can say all those things are good, just off demand alone.
I'm not really talking about banning anything, I just think it should be asked whether this stuff is worth it. We're just two guys on the Internet, it doesn't really matter at the end of the day.
I think that low externality things people are willing to pay for should be presumptively allowed unless there is strong reason otherwise. We are much too involved in the 'legislating individual activities' and not nearly enough in the 'tax wealth and redistribute' side of things.
> We're just two guys on the Internet, it doesn't really matter at the end of the day.
Post-2020, the internet is real life. Internet native thought has proven to be a powerful force in the physical world. I remember laughing at the absurdity of 4chan posters in high school. I will not make the mistake of taking internet ideology lightly again.
It's also a cognitive failure of humanity to assume the free market is only guided by the invisible hand of demand and supply, if only government and moralists would get out of the way.
> the developers churning out agent work on supergigaultramax effort are fulfilling the transitive preferences of people like supply chain managers, etc. who are in turn fulfilling the transitive preferences of a school teacher for cheap groceries, who are in turn....
This ceased to be true lomg time ago. AI datacenters are not related to that chain.
For that matter, tech is not about satisfying a bunch of small customers either. Enshittification would not be a thing if it was.
>the developers churning out agent work on supergigaultramax effort are fulfilling the transitive preferences of people like supply chain managers, etc.
Some of them are doing this at their jobs, but there are also tons of people pushing slop to open-source projects, vibe coding useless or redundant apps, etc.
> there's a big difference between a bunch of servers hosting something people want, like Netflix, and a warehouse full of GPUs running around the clock to make Lobster Jesus or whatever.
ChatGPT has been the most downloaded app every month for a year and a half.
That doesn't mean people want LLMs to replace their jobs so they can (hopefully) go on welfare, and to have ever more data enters built with that goal in mind.
Do most people buy their airplane tickets at a physical travel agent? Do they do most of their shopping at physical stores? Do they send paper mail instead of email or messages? Do they worry about buying from assembly lines that are least mechanized? Do they buy a car or take a horse carriage?
It isn't about hurting others, it's about convenience and price.
This is literally what was said. There was nothing about "convenience", but there were words about "wanting others to loose the jobs".
On the other hand, AI people cheer when someone looses their job. They use it as brag point. Very literally. And "obsolete humans" and "permanent underclass" are selling points of AI.
In reality, in cases you write about, people did changed jobs. These techs did not caused mass unemployemnt.
There's also different building pressures. Before, companies would want to build / power / maintain the smallest amount of data center hardware they could while still serving their needs. Overprovisioning just meant worse opex number.
Now, because supply is so constrained relative to demand, there's no limit. More is always better, which leads to a crazy amount of construction (as its negative effects).
How is there a big difference between those two things? People want Netflix, people also want the output of AI whether that is lobster Jesus or something else. This seems more like substituting what people want, which clearly includes AI, for what some people think others should want. I can guarantee you there are people who don’t want Netflix and think it’s a waste of resources that encourage people to binge TV, become a couch potato, and end up being drags on the healthcare system. Should their preferences override those who do want it?
Democracy, even at its most ideal, is often about overriding preferences. Netflix helps to float an entire industry of creators and a tangible pop culture. It's not entirely clear (or softened, maybe not clear to communities) what AI build out floats currently except AI companies and the tangible negatives of generative AI.
Look, I'm not entirely convinced AI will be as revolutionary as some believe but it's still pretty clear it's able to provide capabilities we've never had before.
I think that potentially the difference is that, while people do in some sense want AI, they don't want it in the same way that they want Netflix. I'd compare it to Amazon: it perfectly possible for people to like the ability to like 2 day shipping while also liking that the site is flooded in cheap crap.
So maybe it is that people like AI in certain domains but HATE the way that it is being used overall?
The specific examples are not the point. Obviously some people hate Netflix and some people love Lobster Jesus. There is a rising sentiment against AI:
>Should their preferences override those who do want it?
This is rather the point of government, balancing the competing amd incompatible desires of different groups of people for the benefit of everyone. Yes, if a community decides they don't want a GPU warehouse, using whatever means that community uses to make decisions (referenda, petitioning representatives, etc.), their desire should overrule the desire of people to have one. That's what society is!
> How is there a big difference between those two things?
Netflix just serves existing data so their biggest need is data storage ala CDN for closer retrieval to the user. Very low requirements. Creating sweet baby lobster jesus requires incredible amounts of computer/power/cooling. The requirements are totally different. Yes, both ultimately deliver pixels to consumer's eyeballs, but how they get there are so different that it's laughable that people cannot see the difference.
The conflating of a data center and an AI/GPU farm is disingenuous at best, and the AI people know what they are doing. None of the "traditional" data centers are being powered on site with gas turbine generators. New GPU farms are also being designed with much larger footprints with much more needs from the public utilities.
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