Interested in the intersections between policy, law and technology. Programmer, lawyer, civil servant, orthodox Marxist. Blind.


Interesado en la intersección entre la política, el derecho y la tecnología. Programador, abogado, funcionario, marxista ortodoxo. Ciego.

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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 5th, 2023

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  • I’m also not thrilled about the obsession with copyright. I was against copyright in the 90s. I was against copyright in the 2000s. I was against copyright in the 2010s. And now these people want to call integrity lack of ethics just because I’m not willing to endorse yet another extension to a legal monopoly forbidding me from running arbitrary algorithms on data supposedly owned by someone else?

    I’m sympathetic to the environmental arguments. Though I also would point out there are much greater areas of marginal waste to cut on. Online advertising uses more energy than AI. I look forward to the day it’s banned.

    But the whole “we’re going to play pretend that I can ban you from transposing text I wrote through a matrix” thing? Absolutely not. Nothing good comes out of that.



  • Good news on nuclear, awful news on gas, but considering the German fake energy transition is powered by it, it’s perhaps inevitable.

    Also this just annoyed me more than it should:

    Nuclear power is a carbon-free source of electricity but it is not typically labeled as green energy, like solar, wind and other renewables. Generating power this way requires mining and processing uranium to create nuclear fuel, an energy-intensive process that produces emissions.

    Unlike wind turbines and solar panels, which are made from butterfly shine and faery sighs.









  • Interesting article, and I definitely agree I prefer clear instructions when those are possible.

    I only have an objection. When it’s said that no matter how well chatbots behave, it’s bad design, and that they’re being used to substitute expensive people; well, expensive people’s interface is chatting too. So in that regard I’m not sure there’s a meaningful difference. Obviously there is if the chatbot is badly behaved, but the article says that it’s a problem even setting that aside.










  • Mmm, China perfidiously stealing the hard-earned talent of Western engineers? I know just the solution! They should build an anti-communist self-defence wall:

    We no longer wanted to stand by passively and see how doctors, engineers, and skilled workers were induced by refined methods unworthy of the dignity of man to give up their secure existence in the GDR and work in West Germany or West Berlin. These and other manipulations cost the GDR annual losses amounting to 3.5 thousand million marks.

    Some fine historical irony. Of course, given the way the university system works in places like the US, there’s not even a good argument that this imposes costs on the public, who trains personnel only for them to leave and benefit some other state.

    Maybe this is what Trump’s wall is for.